preetkiran1016

[preetkiran1016]

Lupine Bond (oil pastel painting)

Wolf pack behaviour among Arctic lupines. Ray is very soon going to be licked directly on the mouth. Who gets there first, Dief or Fraser?

Notes under the cut (they're long; I can't write anything short!)

Another day, another finished WIP - or rather, a new piece reworked from a nearly abandoned digital WIP. This idea had sat in the "rough photomanip" phase of my digital painting process for two or three years and was going to stay there because I was unable to find a usable reference photo for Ray (the one I had was blurry and entirely differently lit than everything else in the picture). There wasn't much else in the manip than the character references plopped on a stock photo of two guys sitting in a random field, and then I had a bunch of separate photos of Arctic lupines.

After drawing Dief admiring cherry blossoms with oil pastels earlier this year, I knew I wanted to paint the field of Arctic lupines with oil pastels, too, and of course I also wanted to see how these rough manips would work as references for oil pastel paitings, and how easily I could combine stuff from other reference pics on the spot. I'm happy to say it worked pretty well - this only took me three hours and didn't feel very hard - not that I was being very careful with their arms etc. I did suspect working like this was going to mean compromises in character likeness, and I wasn't wrong. :D Their faces are an inch and a half high on the A4 page, so not much room to fiddle with the blunt pastel sticks there ("CKR without a map" was a phrase that I repeated in my mind while I was working on Ray's face, wiping everything away and trying again - then I decided to keep everything really vague). But the lupines were just as pleasant to draw as I thought they would be! And the lupine creature in the middle, of course. 

You won't get through these notes without some speculation why lupines are called lupines. What do they have to do with wolves? There seems to be two theories. Some sources say Romans thought the plant was toxic to wolves, and that's it. The other theory is that lupines were considered predator-like because they can grow in very poor soil where other plants can't: people assumed they had robbed the soil of whatever other plants would need for growing. Sadly, where I live (Finland) lupines are just like that: they spread from gardens into wild nature decades ago and have now invaded huge areas, replacing many native plants. I think lupines are really beautiful in bloom - they are an essential part of early summer landscapes for me; the best time is right now! - but hardly anything else grows where they have taken root, and they're also very harmful to bumblebees. I was relieved that I could put my aesthetic love of lupines into this picture with a good conscience, because Arctic lupine is native to Canada - it is actually considered to enrich the soil and recommended as a garden plant, too. 

[preetkiran1016]

decentralize and clean up your life!!!

use overdrive, libby, hoopla, cloudlibrary, and kanopy instead of amazon and audible.

use firefox instead of chrome or opera (both are made with chromium, which blocks functionality for ad-blockers. firefox isn't based on chromium).

use mega or proton drive instead of google drive.

get rid of bloatware

use libreoffice instead of microsoft office suite

use vetted sites on r/FREEMEDIAHECKYEAH for free movies, books, games, etc.

use trakt or letterboxd instead of imdb.

use storygraph instead of goodreads.

use darkpatterns to find mobile game with no ads or microtransactions

use ground news to read unbiased news and find blind spots in news stories.

use mediahuman or cobalt to download music, or support your favorite artists directly through bandcamp

make youtube bearable by using mtube, newpipe, or the unhook extension on chrome, firefox, or microsoft edge

use search for a cause or ecosia to support the environment instead of google

use thriftbooks to buy new or used books (they also have manga, textbooks, home goods, CDs, DVDs, and blurays)

use flashpoint to play archived online flash games

find books, movies, games, etc. on the internet archive! for starters, here's a bunch of David Attenborough documentaries and all of the Animorphs books

burn your music onto cds

use pdf24 (available online or as a desktop app) instead of adobe

use unroll.me to clean your email inboxes

use thunderbird, mailfence, countermail, edison mail, tuta, or proton mail instead of gmail

remove bloatware on windows PC, macOS, and iOS X

remove bloatware on samsung X

use pixelfed instead of instagram or meta

use NCH suite for free software like a file converter, image editor, video editors, pdf editor, etc.

feel free to add more alternatives, resources or advice in the reblogs or replies, and i'll add them to the main post <3

last updated: march 18th 2025

[preetkiran1016]

The thing about gay sailors in the Victorian era is that England and America had totally different takes on it. In the british navy they could, and did, literally kill men for having consensual relationships with other men. But in the US navy, even tho John Adams literally copied England's naval regulations when making America's version, he chose to leave out every proscription against sodomy. And no one knows why!!! England was like hmm yes the death penalty and America was like i dont really see how thats my business. And like gay American sailors could still be charged with things like "uncleanliness" or "indecency" (charges that were vague enough to cover a lot of different things) but bc it wasnt specifically forbidden in the regulations "the commanding officers [were given] wide discretion to prosecute, punish, or ignore."*

And by and large US officers seem to have ignored it. We literally have the records of every flogging (the most extreme form of punishment allowed during these specific years) onboard a naval vessel for the years of 1846-1848 and almost all of the cases that involved homosexual activity "unambiguously refer to male/male homosexual activity involving attempted assaults on children, not consensual couplings between adults."* There are also multiple recorded instances throughout the Victorian Era of an American sailor coming forward with a charge of sexual assault and pulling in other sailors or even officers as witnesses who tell their captain yeah i totally saw them and didn't say anything until this sailor told me it was nonconsensual. There are even records recorded by naval recruitment officers of men with extremely explicit gay tattoos being allowed to join the navy. Why did the US navy not care enough to even include it in the regulations while the British navy literally hanged men for it??? Were we so hard up for sailors that John Adams was like bitch we need every gay sailor we can get????

And weirdly enough this was true on American Whaling ships too! In the recorded cases where homosexual activity led to sailors being disciplined (in some cases punishment so mild as just being dropped off their ship at the next port) it was usually in situations where rape was involved and/or there was a high degree of ship disruption related to it (guys getting into a public knife fight for example). Idk I just think thats so interesting especially when America and England were so similar to be so different in this particular area is fascinating

*quotes from Unruly Desires: American Sailors and Homosexualities in the Age of Sail by William Benemann

[preetkiran1016]

I wish kinky sex ed wasn't so stigmatized even among left-leaning "sex positive" circles. Everyone's all "uwu I'm a sub I'll do anything you ask" okay mommy wants you to read The New Bottoming Book so you learn how to sub without hurting yourself since your sex ed up to this point is porn and your ex boyfriend Jared who liked to choke you incorrectly

[preetkiran1016]

"Where were transmascs during Stonewall?" Across the street throwing lit mattresses at cops and chanting "gay rights, gay rights, gay rights!" from the windows of the Women's House of Detention, asshole.

[preetkiran1016]

i love my therapist but i hate being in therapy. 10 minutes before my appointment, i'm in a meeting with my boss - we discuss my artistic choices; my boss recommends i artistically choose less. 10 minutes after therapy, i wash my hair and think about everything that was said, and then i have to switch it off, like a lamp, and go back to work again.

i was on a walk the other day and someone had the perfect combination of his cologne and whatever-else. it was almost exactly his scent. i fucking hate that. after all these years, i remember that? i tell my therapist - i feel like a fucking wolf. try telling a middle-aged blonde lady. oh i scented him on the air. i'm 30, and i'm having a panic attack over something that would be a plotline in the omegaverse.

what they don't tell you about mental illness is that if you are lucky enough to survive it into adulthood; it becomes a weird slice of your life. because you do, eventually, have to build a life. i realized in a panic somewhere around 22 - oh. i don't know what i'm fucking doing, because i always assumed i'd just go ahead and die. i didn't die, and i'm grateful for that, and i'm very happy about that choice. but it does mean that i am an adult in an apartment, living with my conditions side-by-side like. oh, that's my roommate, adhd. ignore the glass, bytheway, that's ocd.

so you pick your stupid life up by the scruff of the neck and you're, like glad for it (so much laughter and light and friends you would have never thought possible, when you were in the worst of it). but it feels so strange to be dancing around these odd little microcosms, these patchwork moments of your symptoms. if you have a panic attack at night, you still need to wake up and walk the dog in the morning. if your depression is making everything boring, well, you don't have any sick days left, and a job's not really supposed to be that exciting anyway. your ocd tears out each individual leg hair, and then, an hour later, you sigh, patch up the bloody bits, and go get dinner with friends. and the life is kitten-quiet, mewling and pathetic, but it's also like - it's yours, so you're fond of it.

and it's like - you're real. so you still enjoy pushing the shopping cart really fast and then riding on the back of it down an empty aisle. and you're not, like, so sick anymore that when you accidentally drop a mug you burst into tears (except for the days you do that. which are bad). and no, you're not allowed around certain items anymore. oops! but you've learned to be good about brushing your teeth most days of the week. and you sometimes in the middle of the day you have a little freak-out about how fucking unfair it all is, how fucking hard, how other people can just do this without having to fucking hurt the whole time. and then you sigh and force yourself to sit down and fucking journal about it so you can tell the nice middle-aged blonde woman yeah i had a hard day but i practiced grounding. you still sometimes want to burst out of your own skin, but you force yourself to eat kind-of healthy and to take your vitamins. you let yourself chop off all your hair in the sink in a dramatic poetry of control and relief - and you also have developed good hobbies that help you move your body more frequently. you feel helplessly behind, lost in the shuffle - but you also practice gratitude, taking stock of what you have garnered. because you're trying. even if you're never gonna be normal, you have something... close enough.

and the little kitten of your life, this mangy, starlit tigercub, this thing you expected to rot so young: in your arms, it turns itself over, belly-up. exposing this new soft part, all the organs and guts. like it's saying i trust you now. you won't give me up.

[preetkiran1016]

cell bio professor closed out today's lecture on free-radical oxidation in mitochondria and programmed cell death by saying "you've probably all seen those commercials for fruit juice that says it's got antioxidants, which are said to prevent this sort of thing from happening, or at least slow it down. well, they don't work. this is an inevitable fact of life— this process that lets us live is also the thing that kills us, and it's why all of us will die someday. there's no escaping that. it's been with us since the dawn of eukaryotic cells; our pact with mitochondria is to the death. anyway, enjoy the rest of your friday, and remember, exam four is next week!"

[preetkiran1016]

[preetkiran1016]

Why aren't we talking about the real reason male college enrollment is dropping? (Celeste Davis, Oct 6 2024)

"White flight is a term that describes how white people move out of neighborhoods when more people of color move in.

White flight is especially common when minority populations become the majority. That neighborhood then declines in value.

Male flight describes a similar phenomenon when large numbers of females enter a profession, group, hobby or industry—the men leave. That industry is then devalued.

Take veterinary school for example:

In 1969 almost all veterinary students were male at 89%.

By 1987, male enrollment was equal to female at 50%.

By 2009, male enrollment in veterinary schools had plummeted to 22.4%

A sociologist studying gender in veterinary schools, Dr. Anne Lincoln says that in an attempt to describe this drastic drop in male enrollment, many keep pointing to financial reasons like the debt-to-income ratio or the high cost of schooling.

But Lincoln’s research found that “men and women are equally affected by tuition and salaries.”

Her research shows that the reason fewer men are enrolling in veterinary school boils down to one factor: the number of women in the classroom.

For every 1% increase in the proportion of women in the student body, 1.7 fewer men applied.

One more woman applying was a greater deterrent than $1000 in extra tuition! (…)

Since males had dominated these professions for centuries, you would think they would leave slowly, hesitantly or maybe linger at 40%, 35%, 30%, but that’s not what happens.

Once the tipping point reaches majority female- the men flee. And boy do they flee!

It’s a slippery slope. When the number of women hits 60% the men who are there make a swift exit and other men stop joining.

Morty Schapiro, economist and former president of Northwestern University has noticed this trend when studying college enrollment numbers across universities:

“There’s a cliff you fall off once you become 60/40 female/male. It then becomes exponentially more difficult to recruit men.”

Now we’ve reached that 60% point of no return for colleges.

As we’ve seen with teachers, nurses and interior design, once an institution is majority female, the public perception of its value plummets.

Scanning through Reddit and Quora threads, many men seem to be in agreement - college is stupid and unnecessary.

A waste of time and money. You’re much better off going into the trades, a tech boot camp or becoming an entrepreneur. No need for college. (…)

When mostly men went to college? Prestigious. Aspirational. Important.

Now that mostly women go to college? Unnecessary. De-valued. A bad choice. (…)

School is now feminine. College is feminine. And rule #1 if you want to safely navigate this world as a man? Avoid the feminine.

But we don’t seem to want to talk about that."

[preetkiran1016]

wait, im going back to a favourite theme of mine (aspec benton fraser, shocker) but i think of it as like. the thing is. he's got a weird sexuality and he's got a weird attitude towards romance. and by that i mean, obvs, non-normative, that's what weird is when you're not using polite terminology. people look at how he is in his interpersonal handlings and go "what a weirdo"

his way of approaching sex/romance -- even, tbh, his way of looking at friendship, now we're talking about it -- can be headcanoned under whatever lens, gay, bi, straight, (lesbian if we're talking about ms fraser) or some fun mix of several, but the thing about aspec is that it's not about what specific sort of relationships you're looking for or sex you're having, that's just the individual level of it, the personal identity part, if you will

it's quite simply that you're approaching these things in a fundamentally non-normative weird way. whether it's because you're demiromantic and only think of romance off the back of deep deep friendships, whether it's because you struggle to see the difference between the two in the first place, whether it's that you only have sex because you're into being close with your partner and the sex itself is whatever (different to being coerced, i mean in the sense that you enjoy a partner activity and sex is a partner activity, similar to, say, watching due south with your partner), or that sex is incidental to kink, or, yes, that there's a repulsion to one or several or all of these (and there's interesting narrative to explore there as well, considering how lack of language may make someone pursue them regardless, because of societal force)

or whether it's some other way that you don't conceptualise of and build relationships (romantic, platonic, sexual, familial even) in ways that you're expected to/are normative

when i say benton fraser is weird and when i say he's aspec, there's an overlap between those two, and that's something you see in the show as well. he doesn't conceptualise of and build relationships like other people do/is expected of him (as a traditionally good-looking, interesting, charming in his own way, young man -- surely a romantic and sexual relationship should be one of his main drivers, but it is not and never is in the story)

he met a woman he was chasing for a bank robbery and was dying of hypothermia with her and thought "is this romance???" he knew a guy as a thirteen-year-old for a year and told people that was his best friend, even though by all accounts they mostly "just" played hockey together (also, whatever that past with innuseq was which is Free Real Estate). he and ray vecchio went from strangers to ride-or-die on an outrageous scale within a couple of days of knowing one another, he and meg thatcher will never ever define whatever the hell is going on between them only that it's Going On and always will, and he and ray kowalski are best defined as partners who go on an adventure together at the end of the story (the most defined of all the relationships in many ways, but "partners" is in and of itself a deliberately vague term, that's why queers and many others enjoy it!) (actually the best defined relationship he has is with maggie, because "sibling" is an easy one in theory, but i want to read/write some fic that goes into that, considering their shared past but also not-knowing-one-another-until-adulthood-ness)

benton fraser is inherently a-spectrum to me in that his relationship building -- regardless of personal identity markers one may put on him/imagine him to have -- is non-normative and difficult to define using more traditional terminology. he builds connections that are vague/fluid, but no-less important just because it's hard to find a language for them

that's aspec

(do i have favourite versions of that aspecness? sure. do i think all versions of it make sense? yes. but fundamentally, for him to make sense to me, He's Got To Be Weird)

[preetkiran1016]

also think it's interesting that in terms of sexual writing on the show, benton fraser has only had experiences ranging from harassment (being pursued/commented on without his consent) to lowkey sexual assault (being touched in a sexual way without his consent), and various iterations of similar, with the two most obvious being a situation in which he's emotionally blackmailed and manipulated in the lead up to having sex (victoria) and where it's canonically stated that he's being taken advantage of while in a vulnerable state and shouldn't have sex (janet) (EDIT: also ladyshoes, which is interesting in its own right, but i think needs a whole other post, because he's learned from being taken advantage of and plays her game and it kinda hurts to watch)

the only person where it's more complicated is meg, and the more i read into it, the more i think there's a lot to be said for her taking a big step back because she's his superior and has power over him (ofc, i also enjoy the read that she's aromantic, but that also carries a feeling to it that she has some complicated feelings for him that she doesn't necessarily want to ruin by entering into a sexual relationship with him, regardless of how attracted to him she is, and the fact that he would allow it... it probably would end up hurting him, if not gone about carefully)

point being, there's a whole depth of thought id like to explore on fraser and sex that relates to him not only not having language for what he maybe does want (whether or not that involves sex and/or kink) but he's also not been given the opportunity to learn/verbalise what he doesn't want

his whole relationship with sex and relationships, to me, is wrapped up in so many layers of messy experiences and lack of respect for his bodily autonomy that he'd have to unlearn all kinds of things before one could even know under what precepts he'd consent to something on, and potentially that might never even happen, because he doesn't exactly end the show having learned to enforce boundaries (or even, maybe, that he's allowed to have them)

[preetkiran1016]

NOTICE: As more and more fanfic writers are using generative AI for their works (you uncreative dweebs), I hereby swear on everything I hold dear that I have not and will NEVER use generative AI in ANY of my written work. Everything I post will be organically and creatively my own.

[preetkiran1016]

Can I just say, uh, I’m pretty sure noticing you’re asexual is harder than noticing you’re gay, straight, pan or otherwise. Like, I just read someone’s desciption of hitting puberty and, like, there’s nothing like that. There’s no sudden ‘boob’ moment, no sudden ‘fuck, I’d fuck that’ moment, not sudden anything. You just, like, plod on through life as usual going ‘oooh, that’s pretty, I’d like that hair’ or ‘oooooh, they’re nice, I’d like to be close to them’ but there’s no like, ‘oh, someone would want to fuck that but I don’t’, you know? You just- you don’t notice, you don’t realise everyone else has ‘had a moment’ but you haven’t, you just- keep going as you always have.

And then, much much later, you start to wonder why people are getting so caught up in drama for romance or sex, like, why bother? It’s not worth it, they’re not worth it, why are you doing stupid things for something that’s so- and then you wonder if there’s something wrong with you, start mentally over compensating. Like ‘uh, okay, um, who should I date? Who can I stand to date? Who could I stand to fuck?’ like- it’s not, it’s not something you want, but you want to fit in, to be normal.

Sometimes you don’t even know that you’re doing it.

Sometimes you don’t even know asexual’s a thing.

I dunno, I guess, I just feel like, uh, people should understand more?

idk sorry thank you for listening to me

[preetkiran1016]

Due South Fraser/RayK Soulmate AU

Okay, hear me out.

Soulmate AU verse of the 'First Sight' variety: First time you see your soulmate, you KNOW.

So Burning down the House episode continues as normal, Fraser's back in Chicago, he's giving gifts to people as he tries to find his best friend Ray Vecchio. He finally sees him at his desk but the man turns around and it is NOT Ray Vecchio...

But he is the most beautiful person he's ever seen and oh, why does his chest feel funny and oh...

OH...

That's his soulmate. He found his soulmate...

And here lies the problem: See, everyone KNOWS Ray Vecchio is not Benton Fraser's soulmate... but the guy going undercover as Ray Vecchio is... and to keep that undercover job going then Fraser and this new Ray can't be soulmates either - or at least not yet.

By some fate, they've found their soulmates and they can't act on it - can't so much as kiss or celebrate it or even acknowledge it while still having to work closely together.

All to keep Ray Vecchio safe.

And they're trying so damn hard to wait it out but it's something (at least Ray, maybe?) has wanted for such a long time and the urge to get closer is almost too painful to ignore.

And like... there's got to be a breaking point eventually, right?

Look, I'm probably not going to write this as I have far too many things to work one as is but I'm hoping this catches someone's attention and tickles that little writing urge.

[preetkiran1016]

matt just fired half the remaining tumblr support staff lmao

[preetkiran1016]

saw someone say "an 11-year-old isn't even supposed to know what sex is and if you do something horrible must be happening to you and you need to get out of there" like can we be for real for a moment. have some people honest to god never heard 11-year-olds making sex jokes in their life

[preetkiran1016]

1930s news about a trans woman: Well I'll be curfuffled young Corlotta Jhonson has transformed herself from a dandy into a dame and what a Bombshell she's become. And How!

1930s news about trans men: Wanted dead or alive this young lady who started wearing trousers, the tomboy terror known only as The Crust is wanted for snorting the President's personal stash of opium and has slain nearly every senate member in a pistol duel.