mayli-e

[mayli-e]

it is 2015. phineas and ferb, the amazing world of gumball, and steven universe are on the air. you are currently playing undertale

it is 2025. phineas and ferb, the amazing world of gumball and steven universe are back on the air. you are currently playing undertale

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drawing people i see in the city (50/?)

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[mayli-e]

i say this in all seriousness, a great way to resist the broad cultural shift of devaluing curiosity and critical thinking is to play my favorite game, Hey What Is That Thing

you play it while walking around with friends and if you see something and don't know what it is or wonder why its there, you stop and point and say Hey What Is That Thing. and everyone speculates about it. googling it is allowed but preferably after spending several minutes guessing or asking a passerby about it

weird structures, ambiguous signs, unfamiliar car modifications, anything that you can't immediately understand its function. eight times out of ten, someone in the group actually knows, and now you know!

a few examples from me and my friends the past few weeks: "why is there a piece of plywood sticking out of that pond in a way that looks intentional?" (its a ramp so squirrels that fall in to the pond can climb out) • "my boss keeps insisting i take a vacation of nine days or more, thats so specific" (you work at a bank, banks make employees take vacation in long chunks so if youre stealing or committing fraud, itll be more obvious) • "why does this brick wall have random wooden blocks in it" (theres actually several reasons why this could be but we asked and it was so you could nail stuff to the wall) • "most of these old factories we drive past have tinted windows, was that just for style?" (fun fact the factory owners realized that blue light keeps people awake, much like screen light does now, so they tinted the windows blue to keep workers alert and make them work longer hours)

been playing this game for a long time and ive learned (and taught) a fuckton about zoning laws, local history, utilities (did you know you can just go to your local water treatment plant and ask for a tour and if they have a spare intern theyll just give you a tour!!!) and a whole lot of fun trivia. and now suddenly you're paying more attention when youre walking around, thinking about the reasons behind every design choice in the place you live that used to just be background noise. and it fuckin rules.

[mayli-e]

[mayli-e]

Spent my weekend Caveman Hiking with a friend. Which is exactly the same as regular hiking, except you imagine you're an explorer from the paleolithic and every single thing you encounter is new and strange to you. No matter how much you think you know about the things you're observing, you have to react to them by saying stuff like "wow, tall tree no leaf ... many caterpillar ... sad no fruit or shade here for Grug. Maybe caterpillar tasty?" As someone who often feels a compulsion to identify and explain things on hikes, this is quickly becoming my new favorite way to relax outdoors.

[mayli-e]

i ❤️ my phone so i made it a bedroom to go to sleep in when i want to reduce my screen time

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dont @ me about dandelions not being native to north america either cause like man, you are NOT going to like how i feel about kudzu these days

but yea after studying it a lot and observing plants in their environments, ive become less and less enthusiastic about "invasive plants hate die kill auughauhghgua" messages, because with most invasive plants the problem is like 10% the plant itself and 90% landscape level problems with how we manage land

treating natural spaces as "leftover" scraps surrounding built things and abandoning/not interacting with them except for occasional violent episodes of "management" with chainsaws and roundup

[mayli-e]

75% decrease in insect biomass within my lifetime and I'm supposed to care about cover letters

[mayli-e]

The Meaning of Bunny's Dream (Animated Short)

...please enjoy these two gay little animals in HD! :)

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some cool stuff i saw in the forest last sunday!!

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About ten years ago I decided that the next step I needed to take in my life was to accept and explore what it meant to be a failure and to have failed. This infuriated almost everybody in my life and clearly terrified a lot of people. People do not want you to accept failure. They dont want you to like... Sit with and think about it and pick it up and turn it arpund in your hands and really examine it. They want you to keep throwing yourself against the impossible walls until your body explodes! They do not want you to say "alright then, I've failed. What does that mean for me? Im still here. What does the life of someone who has failed look like?"

This makes people very angry and panicky.

My mental health improved in ways it had not in the previous DECADE once I stopped. And. Sat. With failure. And thought about what my failure ... Was. And looked at the structures that produced it and examined them critically.

It is so taboo to fail and admit it openly and talk about it. It is so taboo to talk about or think about failure in an accepting way rather than hiding it shamefully until you experience a degree of success in some area which allows you to present the past failure as "a stepping stone" to your current situation. Fuck that. We are put in positions of guaranteed failure by society every day and then punished and shamed for it. Lets fucking talk about failure

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Anaïs Mitchell performing "Why do we build the wall" in her farm. Saw the video on youtube and immediately felt the urge to draw it. I genuinely think she's one of the best contemporary songwriters and she deserves so much more recognition

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so many of the best foods in the world are created by leaving some shit in a jar and letting mysterious and terrible things happen to it

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My favourites from this semester's figure drawing class

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bitches hate me for my earnest whimsy and my pathological degree of avoidant behavior