#a pandemic creation

[i-still-mask-because]

Let's talk about masking! 😷✨

The image description is in the alt text!

I'm hoping this flyer would help those that didn't already know the difference between masks, quality masks, and respirators, as well as some of the variety of options out there for quality, comfortable, breathable, snug-fitting masks & respirators!

Reblogs are tremendously appreciated, and please feel free to share this wherever you can! Print this, hang this up in your school, hang this up in your neighborhood, hang this up in public transportation, repost this, etc., etc., etc.!!!

[tomorrowusa]

« I belong to neither party and have voted for both Democrats and Republicans — but because I believe him to be a defender of the Constitution and a public servant of honor and of grace at a time when extreme forces threaten the nation. I do not agree with everything he has done or wanted to do in terms of policy. But I know him to be a good man, a patriot and a president who has met challenges all too similar to those Abraham Lincoln faced.

Here is the story I believe history will tell of Joe Biden. With American democracy in an hour of maximum danger in Donald Trump’s presidency, Mr. Biden stepped in the breach. He staved off an authoritarian threat at home, rallied the world against autocrats abroad, laid the foundations for decades of prosperity, managed the end of a once-in-a-century pandemic, successfully legislated on vital issues of climate and infrastructure and has conducted a presidency worthy of the greatest of his predecessors. History and fate brought him to the pinnacle in a late season in his life, and in the end, he respected fate — and he respected the American people. »

— Historian Jon Meacham in a guest column at the New York Times on the legacy of President Joe Biden.

Biden restored calm, stability, and sanity to the federal government after a coup attempt and the horribly botched Trump response to the COVID-19 pandemic. He did more than anybody else outside Ukraine to keep it from falling into the kleptocratic totalitarian hands of imperialist Vladimir Putin. And Biden's infrastructure and stimulus programs have restored American manufacturing jobs which Trump's empty bombastic promises failed to do.

Historically, imagine combining Gerald Ford's modesty, John F. Kennedy's determination to prevent the spread of totalitarianism, FDR's efforts to create jobs, with Barack Obama's inclusiveness and you come close to defining the Biden presidency.

Of course Biden still has six months to go. He can now concentrate on governance without the distraction of an election campaign.

[uncanny-tranny]

By implying that children are too stupid and rude to learn about the world and learn how the world works and how to interact with others, you are casting responsibility away from the people who are responsible for that child's upbringing and placing the blame on the children (who don't have the autonomy given to them to be allowed to decide what they want) who can't help what they do and do not learn, often.

If the children aren't okay, then investigate why before turning to thought-terminating clichés of, "Well, the kids are just stupid and dumb and aren't even worth the effort because they're lazy!"

[aq2003]

taliesin definitely deserved an emmy for s1 of tlovm btw

[izvmimi]

it's a good thing i just post whatever i feel like and move on

[janedroid]

Gold leaves and chill

Sunday. It’s cooler than it has been. As is our Mother’s habit at the time of the Autumn Equinox, anticipating the breath of Winter in the distance. I pull a shawl over my knees. The cats are taking turns cuddling with me now. We’re looking forward to cocooning. Dog walkers are breaking out the layers, Melbourne black representing for the bottom half of the year. Trees of resistance scattering…

[probablyasocialecologist]

In this book you focus on the idea of gender as a global ‘phantasm’ – this charged, overdetermined, anxiety- and fear-inducing cluster of fantasies that is being weaponised by the right. How did you go about starting to investigate that? Judith Butler: When I was burned in effigy in Brazil in 2017, I could see people screaming about gender, and they understood ‘gender’ to mean ‘paedophilia.’ And then I heard people in France describing gender as a Jewish intellectual movement imported from the US. This book started because I had to figure out what gender had become. I was naïve. I was stupid. I had no idea that it had become this flash point for right-wing movements throughout the world. So I started doing the work to reconstruct why I was being called a paedophile, and why that woman in the airport wanted to kill me with the trolley. I’m not offering a new theory of gender here; I’m tracking this phantasm’s formation and circulation and how it’s linked to emerging authoritarianism, how it stokes fear to expand state powers. Luckily, I was able to contact a lot of people who translated Gender Trouble in different parts of the world, who were often gender activists and scholars in their own right. They told me about what’s happening in Serbia, what’s happening in Brazil, Chile, Argentina, Russia. So I became a student of gender again. I’ve been out of the field for a while. I stay relatively literate, of course, but I’ve written on war, on ethics, on violence, on nonviolence, on the pandemic… I’m not in gender studies all the time. I had to do a lot of reading.  There’s a lot of focus in the book on how the anti-gender movement has moved across the world in the past few decades, and how it’s inextricable from Catholic doctrine. It was clarifying for me; domestic anti-trans movements in the UK mostly self-identify as secular.  Judith Butler: In the UK, and even in the US, people don’t realise that this anti-gender ideology movement has been going on for some time in the Americas, in central Europe, to a certain degree in Africa, and that it’s arrived in the US by different routes, but it’s arrived without announcing its history. It became clear to me that a lot of the trans-exclusionary feminists didn’t realise where their discourse was coming from. Some of them do; some people who call themselves feminists are aligned with right-wing positions, and it’s confusing, but there it is. There’s an uncomfortable history of fascist feminism in movements like British suffragism, for instance. Judith Butler: Yes, and of racism. But when Putin made clear that he agreed with JK Rowling, she was probably surprised, and she rightly said, ‘no, I don’t want your alliance’, but it was an occasion for her to think about who she’s allying herself with, unwittingly or not. The anti-gender movement was first and foremost a defence of Biblical scripture, and of the idea that God created man and woman, and that the human form exists only in this duality and that without it, the human is destroyed – God’s creation is destroyed. So that morphed, as the Vatican’s doctrine moved into Latin America, into the idea that people who advocate ‘gender’ are forces of destruction who seek to destroy man, woman, the human, civilisation and culture. 

[firstumcschenectady]

“What To Do With Creation Stories” Based on Psalm 104:1-4, 10-15, 27-30 and Genesis 2:7-9, 15-25

I was really excited about the idea of starting Lent with Creation. After all, Lent is a season of preparation, a time when we are reflective and attending to the needs of our faith, and what better way to start that work than with the beginning of our shared story?

That excitement lasted until I sat down to reread the texts. At which point I began to question my sanity itself, and why I would set myself up to try to make meaning out of the Adam and Eve story. After all this story has been one of the primary ones used to subjugate women, not to mention queer and trans people AND has a bonus narrative of over emphasizing a duality of gender. My concerns about preaching about this led me down a line of thinking where I started to wonder if Creation itself really matters to Christianity and if perhaps we would be better off just ignoring all stories of Creation so I don't have to preach on Adam and Eve.

That should count as a red flag in my thinking processes, because my faith is at the root a Creation-based faith. Creation is how I make sense of EVERYTHING. The Bible starts and ends with creation. We as people are co-creators with God, working towards the world as God would have it be (“the kindom”). Creation is sacred. The natural world is one of my best teachers. All of creation sings praises to the Creator. There is wisdom in every rock and stream and leaf. This is how I think. This is how I am!

I myself learned how deeply all of this is engrained when my beloved 2 year old spent last summer curiously pulling leaves and flowers off of living things, while I found myself assessing the health of the plants and inserting myself between him and any plant I deemed likely to be hurt by the loss of a single leaf. The lectures that came out of my mouth about respecting all of living creation were an excellent clue as to what I believe, although – as you might expect – not terribly convincing to the one who heard them.

So, what to do with creation stories?

And, before anyone gets too concerned listening to me, this seems like a prime time to talk about science and how great it is. To take a creation story seriously is not to assume it is factual about history and science, it is to consider it as a meaning making narrative and look for the clues of what it was trying to explain and why. I am DEEPLY committed to understanding God as Creator, it is inseparable from my faith as well as my world view, but I believe God created through the big bang and continued to create through evolution and continues to create today, along with us and beyond us.

For me, to claim God as creator isn't about denying science. It is about believing there is sacredness in all that is, and that goodness is possible because God is the root of all being.

But, still, what are we to do with creation stories?

Well, I guess, we take them as they are: stories to help us understand the challenges of life, and we listen for their wisdom. Of course, the Bible has a multitude of creation stories because the Bible is working to make meaning and creation stories are particularly good at that. Phyllis Trible, starts the book God and the Rhetoric of Sexuality with the words “The Bible is a pilgrim wandering through history to merge past and present.”1 Looking at creation stories is the same as looking at the rest of the Bible. To make sense of it for the present requires some sense of what it may have meant in the past, but also a firm grounding in the present to see what it means now.

Now, as creation narratives go, Psalm 104 is one of my favorites. It seems to focus on the goodness and majesty of creation, and I like that theme. It also focuses on God's presence within creation, another one I really like. Best of all, Psalm 104 presents God as active in caring for creation for the goodness of creation itself – us included. It serves as a reminder to be grateful for water, which brings life, and for grass which sustains cattle, for edible plants we get to eat and wine and water and bread to satisfy people. If Psalm 104 does all this while having some weird conceptions about what the sky is and some odd ideas about punishment, I can let it be, because I need the reminders of awe and care and hope that I hear in the text.

However, as creation narratives go, Genesis 2 is probably my least favorite. To be fair though, I dislike the text because of what others have done with it more than because of the text itself. So I forced myself to actually listen to it, and it turns out to be WAY more interesting and life giving than I expected.

Dr. Gafney says the first created human in this story is an “entity that will be divided into equal halves to form two human persons, yielding different theological implications than turning a man's rib into a woman.”2 She is working on the interpretation from Phyllis Trible, which I'd like to point out was published in 1978 and continues to be one of the best texts on the subject.

In Trible's translation of this Genesis creation story we start with, “And YHWH God formed hā-'ādām [of] dust from hā'adāmâ and breathed into its nostrils the breath of life and hā-'ādām became a living nephesh.”3 From the beginning, Trible says, “Hā-'ādām is the focus of God's pleasure.”4 She translates hā-'ādām as “earth creature” as it is a pun on the word for earth, and points out that the earth creature is NOT identified sexually. Rather the earth creatures is “precisely and only the human being so far sexually undifferentiated.”5 Further, “only two ingredients constitute its life, and both are tenuous: dusty earth and divine breath. One from above, one from below. One is visible, the other invisible.”6

And here I start to get a sense of the meaning the early story tellers were trying to get to. They wondered about this fragile reality called life, they noticed that we are interrelated with earth, but also more, at least while we are alive. These metaphors for what we “are” make a lot of sense if you are thinking meaning making and not science, right? Also, if you are listening to what the text says and not assuming that “earth creature” is “man.”

Now, if I were to pick one point from this story as the key thing that I think should be taken from it, I would pick the line “it is not good for the earth creature to be alone” which, as Trible says, “contrasts wholeness with isolation.”7 Please note that this is said while the earth creature is still... one. So I don't think this is actually about romantic or sexual love, but rather the need for companionship and RELATIONSHIP. Further, God has been quite present with the earth-creature to this point, and it seems that God rather LIKES the earth-creature, but God still senses that the earth-creature is MADE FOR RELATIONSHIP with other earth creatures TOO.

And that, dear ones, I think holds throughout time. Trible says, “Since the earth-creature is not only part of the earth but also other than the earth, it needs fulfillment from that which is other than in the earth.”8 And, I've got to say, that feels right. And she points out that the ACTUAL phrase attributed to God says, “I will make a companion corresponding to it.” If you have a word other than companion, particularly one with a hierarchical basis in your mind, know that it is not fair to the Hebrew the story is told in. Trible explains, “According to Yahweh God, what the earth creature needs is a companion, one who is neither subordinate nor superior, one who alleviates isolation through identity.”9 Then God makes the animals, and they don't fit. This reflects a God who is flexible, and working out with the earth creature looking for what that one needs, right? I like that metaphor too!

And then, God tries something else. Trible says, “In becoming material for creation, the earth creature changes character. Whereas the making of the plants and animals were divine acts extrinsic to the earth creature itself, the making of the sexes is intrinsic. Indeed, this act has altered the very flesh of the creature: from one come two. After this intrinsic division, hā-'ādām is no longer identical with its past, so that when next it speaks a different creature is speaking.”10

“And hā-'ādām said,

This, finally, bone of my bones

and flesh of my flesh

This shall be called woman ['iŝŝâ]

because from man ['îš] was taken this.”11

Trible again, “the female pronoun this (zō't) unmistakably emphasizes the woman whose creation has made the earth creature different. Only after surgery does this creature, for the very first time, identify itself as male.” “No ambiguity clouds the words used 'iŝŝâ and îš. One is female, the other male. Their creation is simultaneous, not sequential. … Moreover, one is not opposite of the other. In the very act of distinguishing female from male, the earth creature describes her as “bone of my bone and flesh of my flesh.” These words speak unity, solidarity, mutuality, and equality. Accordingly, in this poem the man does not depict himself as either prior to or superior to the woman. … For both of them sexuality oringinates in the one flesh of humanity.” I'm going to take this a step further and say that if this story claims the first earth creature was not gendered (non-binary perhaps?) and that humanity comes before gender, sex, or sexuality. The human experience is primary. The human need for relationship is primary.

This story seems to be trying to figure out not just where we came from, but what relationships we are supposed to have with God, with earth, with plants, with animals, and with each other. While it is at it, it is trying to figure out the pull of sexuality and the power of new love, the form of families, the role of gender, and what makes humans unique. That's a lot to try to answer for one story. It is a lot more than the Big Bang Theory is able to offer too.

The Bible gives us multiple creation stories. I think that means we are to take seriously the sacredness of creation, but not fuss over the facts presented in each one. But we do have these stories to help us make sense of the big questions of life. Some of the answers will work for us, some won't. It is OK to take what brings life and leave the rest.

For me, today, I like the idea of being an earth creature with Divine breath, I appreciate the reminders of awe and beauty, and the ones that say that I was MADE for relationships and that's why they matter so much to me. What will I do with creation stories? Fight with them and savor them. Thank God. Amen

1Phyllis Trible, God and the Rhetoric of Sexuality (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1978) page 1.

2Wilda Gafney, A Women's Lectionary for the Whole Church (New York, NY: Church Publishing, 2021), p. 78.

3Trible, 79.

4Trible, 80.

5Trible, 80.

6Trible, 80.

7Trible, 89.

8Trible, 90.

9Trible, 90.

10Trible, 97.

11Trible, 97.

Rev. Sara E. Baron  First United Methodist Church of Schenectady  603 State St. Schenectady, NY 12305  Pronouns: she/her/hers  http://fumcschenectady.org/  https://www.facebook.com/FUMCSchenectady

February 26, 2023

[neospacegov]

I wish 10ver.exe was more well known so I could tell everybody how much I admire Duck and how joyful and talented Bea and Pollux are like RAGHHH I just feel so lucky to have been able to sit in on the script readings and help out with the show T-T

[nasa]

NASA Inspires Your Crafty Creations for World Embroidery Day

It’s amazing what you can do with a little needle and thread! For #WorldEmbroideryDay, we asked what NASA imagery inspired you. You responded with a variety of embroidered creations, highlighting our different areas of study.

Here’s what we found:

Webb’s Carina Nebula

Wendy Edwards, a project coordinator with Earth Science Data Systems at NASA, created this embroidered piece inspired by Webb’s Carina Nebula image. Captured in infrared light, this image revealed for the first time previously invisible areas of star birth. Credit: Wendy Edwards, NASA. Pattern credit: Clare Bray, Climbing Goat Designs

Wendy Edwards, a project coordinator with Earth Science Data Systems at NASA, first learned cross stitch in middle school where she had to pick rotating electives and cross stitch/embroidery was one of the options.  “When I look up to the stars and think about how incredibly, incomprehensibly big it is out there in the universe, I’m reminded that the universe isn’t ‘out there’ at all. We’re in it,” she said. Her latest piece focused on Webb’s image release of the Carina Nebula. The image showcased the telescope’s ability to peer through cosmic dust, shedding new light on how stars form.

Ocean Color Imagery: Exploring the North Caspian Sea

Danielle Currie of Satellite Stitches created a piece inspired by the Caspian Sea, taken by NASA’s ocean color satellites. Credit: Danielle Currie/Satellite Stitches

Danielle Currie is an environmental professional who resides in New Brunswick, Canada. She began embroidering at the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic as a hobby to take her mind off the stress of the unknown. Danielle’s piece is titled “46.69, 50.43,” named after the coordinates of the area of the northern Caspian Sea captured by LandSat8 in 2019.

An image of the Caspian Sea captured by Landsat 8 in 2019. Credit: NASA

Two Hubble Images of the Pillars of Creation, 1995 and 2015

Melissa Cole of Star Stuff Stitching created an embroidery piece based on the Hubble image Pillars of Creation released in 1995. Credit: Melissa Cole, Star Stuff Stitching

Melissa Cole is an award-winning fiber artist from Philadelphia, PA, USA, inspired by the beauty and vastness of the universe. They began creating their own cross stitch patterns at 14, while living with their grandparents in rural Michigan, using colored pencils and graph paper.  The Pillars of Creation (Eagle Nebula, M16), released by the Hubble Telescope in 1995 when Melissa was just 11 years old, captured the imagination of a young person in a rural, religious setting, with limited access to science education.

Lauren Wright Vartanian of the shop Neurons and Nebulas created this piece inspired by the Hubble Space Telescope’s 2015 25th anniversary re-capture of the Pillars of Creation. Credit:  Lauren Wright Vartanian, Neurons and Nebulas

Lauren Wright Vartanian of Guelph, Ontario Canada considers herself a huge space nerd. She’s a multidisciplinary artist who took up hand sewing after the birth of her daughter. She’s currently working on the illustrations for a science themed alphabet book, made entirely out of textile art. It is being published by Firefly Books and comes out in the fall of 2024. Lauren said she was enamored by the original Pillars image released by Hubble in 1995. When Hubble released a higher resolution capture in 2015, she fell in love even further! This is her tribute to those well-known images.

James Webb Telescope Captures Pillars of Creation

Darci Lenker of Darci Lenker Art, created a rectangular version of Webb’s Pillars of Creation. Credit:  Darci Lenker of Darci Lenker Art

Darci Lenker of Norman, Oklahoma started embroidery in college more than 20 years ago, but mainly only used it as an embellishment for her other fiber works. In 2015, she started a daily embroidery project where she planned to do one one-inch circle of embroidery every day for a year.  She did a collection of miniature thread painted galaxies and nebulas for Science Museum Oklahoma in 2019. Lenker said she had previously embroidered the Hubble Telescope’s image of Pillars of Creation and was excited to see the new Webb Telescope image of the same thing. Lenker could not wait to stitch the same piece with bolder, more vivid colors.

Milky Way

Darci Lenker of Darci Lenker Art was inspired by NASA’s imaging of the Milky Way Galaxy. Credit: Darci Lenker

In this piece, Lenker became inspired by the Milky Way Galaxy, which is organized into spiral arms of giant stars that illuminate interstellar gas and dust. The Sun is in a finger called the Orion Spur.

The Cosmic Microwave Background

This image shows an embroidery design based on the cosmic microwave background, created by Jessica Campbell, who runs Astrostitches. Inside a tan wooden frame, a colorful oval is stitched onto a black background in shades of blue, green, yellow, and a little bit of red. Credit: Jessica Campbell/ Astrostitches

Jessica Campbell obtained her PhD in astrophysics from the University of Toronto studying interstellar dust and magnetic fields in the Milky Way Galaxy. Jessica promptly taught herself how to cross-stitch in March 2020 and has since enjoyed turning astronomical observations into realistic cross-stitches. Her piece was inspired by the cosmic microwave background, which displays the oldest light in the universe.

The full-sky image of the temperature fluctuations (shown as color differences) in the cosmic microwave background, made from nine years of WMAP observations. These are the seeds of galaxies, from a time when the universe was under 400,000 years old. Credit: NASA/WMAP Science Team

GISSTEMP: NASA’s Yearly Temperature Release

Katy Mersmann, a NASA social media specialist, created this embroidered piece based on NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) global annual temperature record. Earth’s average surface temperature in 2020 tied with 2016 as the warmest year on record. Credit: Katy Mersmann, NASA

Katy Mersmann is a social media specialist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. She started embroidering when she was in graduate school. Many of her pieces are inspired by her work as a communicator. With climate data in particular, she was inspired by the researchers who are doing the work to understand how the planet is changing. The GISTEMP piece above is based on a data visualization of 2020 global temperature anomalies, still currently tied for the warmest year on record.

In addition to embroidery, NASA continues to inspire art in all forms. Check out other creative takes with Landsat Crafts and the James Webb Space telescope public art gallery.

Make sure to follow us on Tumblr for your regular dose of space!

[sabertoothwalrus]

so I’ve been gaining a lot of insight into the animation industry recently, especially in regards to pitching & the creation of new shows. There’s a few ways to go about it.

First, there’s pitching to a studio. When you pitch, it has to be SHORT and CONCISE. You may write a lovingly detailed pitch bible that perfectly breaks down episodes and characterizations, and it might barely even get read. First impressions, first impressions, first impressions!

Most peoples’ first projects don’t get picked up. I’ve heard a few stories from directors that said they tried pitching a story they’d had for years, which got rejected, to then spend a week or even several hours in their car coming up with a new idea, only for that to get greenlit.

But that’s not the end of it. Just because a show gets greenlit, doesn’t mean it will ever get finished. There’s lots of things that can happen. Sometimes, unexpected major world events (like… a global pandemic) can cause projects to get chopped. Sometimes, a CEO change or studio merge means a single person can decide a project “no longer fits with the company’s brand.” Sometimes, the one producer that was rooting for your project gets laid off, and no one else cares enough, so it gets shelved. Sometimes, a streaming service decides to create an animation department, and then they decide they don’t want it anymore. Sometimes, the studio will be simultaneously be developing another project that was too similar to yours and they just didn’t think to tell you until they decide yours is the one with less potential.

On top of that, almost everyone in the industry is saying that “studios just don’t pick up original content anymore.” Studios want something they can franchise, something that will bring in money. New content is risky. Established fanbases are safer.

However! Studios can still be a very good thing. They can be unionized. They can provide better benefits and resources. They can have connections and infrastructure and a larger volume of workers. At a studio, you can divide the labor and produce more in less time. Longer episodes, longer seasons, more consistency in quality.

But this comes with all of the disadvantages of having more in the kitchen.

The alternative is indie animation.

With indie animation, you have total freedom. Full artistic control. It doesn’t even matter if your idea sucks ass, because there’s no one to tell you you can’t make it. You could make it anyway, and you can make it whatever you wanted.

The thing is, making animation is hard. In my production class last semester, the average maximum animation one person could make in that timeframe was 30-60 seconds, and that’s not even counting background design, sound design, or cleanup/color. To make a 5 minute animated short, you should probably have at least 5 people.

And it is CRUCIAL you have a production manager. Ideally someone who’s not already doing art for the project. Most projects without a production manager will fall apart pretty quickly. Once the adrenaline and impulse-fueled motivation wears off, you need someone to hold you accountable and enforce deadlines and proper time management.

Speaking of time, that’s also hard to get. The more people you have, the more likely schedules won’t line up. Most people will have school, or other jobs.

And it costs MONEY!!!!!! You either have everyone work for free and volunteer their time & energy, or you establish a business as a proper indie studio, with people who may or may not have experience on how to handle paying someone else’s salary. And the money has to come from somewhere, so you have to rely on crowdfunding like patreon or kickstarter. (This, by the way, is why I could never fault an indie animation for releasing merch with their pilot.)

And like, maybe you wanna do a series, and all your friends agree to volunteer their labor and time to make the first episode, but it was unanimously not sustainable. Deciding not to produce a second episode until you can raise enough money is not being suddenly greedy, it’s attempting to compensate people rather than expecting them to be continuously taken advantage of.

You have to consider your output as well. There are some outliers like Worthikids, who afaik does all his animation himself, and afaik can work on it full-time thanks to his patreon subscribers. And he still has only produced a total of 30 minutes of animation (for Big Top Burger specifically) in the past 4 years. This is an IMPRESSIVE feat and this is with using a lot of 3D as part of his pipeline!!

Indie animation also has the complication of being more accessible for fandoms. When you’re posting your Official Canon Content on youtube, it doesn’t look a lot different than the fandom-created video essay in the sidebar next to it. What’s canon vs what’s fanon becomes less distinguishable. The boundaries are blurrier. When the creator is just some guy you follow on twitter, it’s easier to prod them for info regarding ships and theories and word-of-god confirmation. They don’t have a PR team or entire international tv networks to appeal to. And this is when creators get frustrated that their fans snowball and turn their creation into something they don’t recognize (and no longer enjoy) anymore.

So it’s tricky.

Thankfully, the threshold to learn animation is fairly low nowadays!! There are TONS of resources online to learn it on your own without forking over a couple hundred thousand to a private art college. There are conventions and discord servers and events where you can network, if you know where to look.

I know it can seem discouraging in the face of capitalism, but I think that’s all the more reason why it’s so important to BE DETERMINED about animation!! We’re already starting to see the beginning of an indie animation boom, and I think it’s a testament to humanity’s desire to tell stories and create art. Even if there’s no financial gain, we do whatever it takes to tell our stories anyway.

[dollydharma]

[reasonsforhope]

"Despite the Central Appalachia ecosystem being historically famous as coal country, under this diverse broadleaf canopy lies a rich, biodiverse world of native plants helping to fill North America’s medicinal herb cabinet.

And it turns out that the very communities once reliant on the coalfields are now bringing this botanical diversity to the country.

“Many different Appalachian people, stretching from pre-colonization to today, have tended, harvested, sold, and used a vast number of forest botanicals like American ginseng, ramps, black cohosh, and goldenseal,” said Shannon Bell, Virginia Tech professor in the Dept. of Sociology. “These plants have long been integral to many Appalachians’ livelihoods and traditions.”

50% of the medicinal herbs, roots, and barks in the North American herbal supply chain are native to the Appalachian Mountains, and the bulk of these species are harvested or grown in Central Appalachia, which includes southern West Virginia, eastern Kentucky, far-southwest Virginia, and east Tennessee.

The United Plant Savers, a nonprofit with a focus on native medicinal plants and their habitats, has identified many of the most popular forest medicinals as species of concern due to their declining populations.

Along with the herbal supply chain being largely native to Appalachia, the herb gatherers themselves are also native [to Appalachia, not Native American specifically], but because processing into medicine and seasonings takes place outside the region, the majority of the profits from the industry do too.

In a press release on Bell’s superb research and advocacy work within Appalachia’s botanical communities, she refers back to the moment that her interest in the industry and the region sprouted; when like many of us, she was out in a nearby woods waiting out the pandemic.

“My family and I spent a lot of time in the woods behind our house during quarantine,” Bell said. “We observed the emergence of all the spring ephemerals in the forest understory – hepatica, spring beauty, bloodroot, trillium, mayapple. I came to appreciate the importance of the region’s botanical biodiversity more than ever, and realized I wanted to incorporate this new part of my life into my research.”

With co-investigator, John Munsell at VA Tech’s College of Natural Resources and Environment, Bell’s project sought to identify ways that Central Appalachian communities could retain more of the profits from the herbal industry while simultaneously ensuring that populations of at-risk forest botanicals not only survive, but thrive and expand in the region.

Bell conducted participant observation and interviews with wild harvesters and is currently working on a mail survey with local herb buyers. She also piloted a ginseng seed distribution program, and helped a wild harvester write a grant proposal to start a forest farm.

“Economic development in post-coal communities often focuses on other types of energy development, like fracking and natural gas pipelines, or on building prisons and landfills. Central Appalachia is one of the most biodiverse places on the planet. I think that placing a greater value on this biodiversity is key to promoting a more sustainable future for the region,” Bell told VA Tech press.

Armed with a planning grant of nearly half a million dollars, Bell and collaborators are specifically targeting forest farming as a way to achieve that sustainable future.

Finally, enlisting support from the nonprofit organization Appalachian Sustainable Development, Virginia Tech, the City of Norton, a sculpture artist team, and various forest botanicals practitioners in her rolodex, Bell organized the creation of a ‘living monument’ along Flag Rock Recreation Area in Norton, Virginia.

An interpretive trail, the monument tells the story of the historic uses that these wild botanicals had for the various societies that have inhabited Appalachia, and the contemporary value they still hold for people today."

-via Good News Network, September 12, 2024

[nekohooch]

Otakon was amazing. Finally getting to wear my Azem summoning circle gown in person was so much fun. I had multiple people stopping me to gush over my costume and people from HERE telling me they saw it online and were so excited to see it in person. I haven’t been to a con since right before the pandemic and it was so nice to come back to a space I love so much. My goal of someone knowing what I was without me explaining was reached (thanks to the ffxiv photoshoot)! And I can’t wait to see the pictures of the group photo shoot. I added more details to the costume and (minus the stars which were my nemesis falling off the whole day) everything was perfect.

The gown itself took about 100 hours total. 85 originally and 15 to add finishing touches. The top is gold lamé and the chiffon overlay was ripping so I removed it. I have a whole costume breakdown under the tag for the original dress creation.

The necklace has an Azem summoning stone that my fantastic friends brought me from Fanfest which I repurposed. The most added details are the stars. I felt the black spots between the p design and the beams was a bit too big and wanted something to bridge the gap. I also considered adding my statics job symbols in the circles but they keep changing jobs XD

I added some more filigree details to the main Azem design in the front of the gown and individual rhinestones to each of the right angle v filigree and each of the small mirrored circles that make up the big circles because I’m extra along with a gold ribbon for the hem

Then I decided to add lights

Again because I’m extra

I don’t have skill with LEDs so I used individual 6ft fairy lights with tiny battery packs. I painted each battery pack black because the white shows through the skirt especially when lit up. There are about 75-90 battery packs I lost count at 2 am on Wednesday honestly ahaha. I looped them twice up and down so the effect would be less spaced out but I might edit that in the future if I figure LEDs and how to get more powerful ones because they weren’t really strong enough for 10 hours (you can faintly see them in the pictures above) and I kept turning them off when I sat. I used the same petticoat but added a hoop skirt because I was wearing tennis shoes (sadly sensible instead of fashionable) instead of my platform boots.

When people complimented me I would ask if they wanted to see my favorite part (which is spinning) and the laughs and gasps of delight were fantastic. Overall I’m so fucking proud of this costume. Thank you to all of you fab people from the FFXIV coordination who said such kind things I’m so flattered and lovingly overwhelmed. It was an amazing return to cosplay.

[wszczebrzyszynie]

one of the things that used to annoy me a bit back durning the pandemic when i got very popular on instagram very quickly (my posts got 20k-40k likes on average at that time so you can imagine it got very weird quick) and so naturally lots of people started suddenly taking inspiration from me (all from simple inspiration to just tracing over my work), and part of that inspiration was the general... rise of interest in poland and polish culture? which is fascinating because i am not nor ever have i considered myself patriotic and i dont really "love" poland. Its a complicated thing but its also a feeling i treasure to an extent; i understand why people think that, considering that my work is very clearly polish, and i am very clearly polish, but its more the case of creation based on familiarity mixed with my interest in history and folk costumes than creation based on the "love for my country". Its kind of funny that i had to ever explain that, because its not something usually assumed about american works set in america, or japanese works set in japan, even when they include traditional/cultural elements of those countries. Well Either Way a lot of people (majority of which were not polish; only 8% of my total following was based in poland, so in numbers around 8 thousand people; there was probably some polonia, but i base it on ig statistics) who followed me started drawing pseudo-folk costumes after that claiming them to be polish or polish-inspired based on the "aesthetic" (so, objectively drawn incorrectly) and it was always just such a werid thing for me to copy for yourself, especially with no connection to the country. Its not a crime to just draw a pretty dress with a lot of colours and embroidery on it, but to then claim its actually polish because an artist you like does the same thing was in retrospect so weird and funny. Even then i thought it was funny but in broad concept of how people treated my art it got annoying sometimes. im glad i didnt do anything stupid and public then to regret now. god bless. Either way all of this is to say i think at some point in 2021 i created some of the first ever polandboos or how would you call them. lore exposition post. im going back to studying