#if you don't like pictures of bugs

[patchworkmelody]

No reason to not- here are some buggies I found today! Excuse the shit phone camera <3

Very shiny fly! Let me get so close. Didn't move 'til I poked em.

Runny lil beetle! Very skittish. I think it flew at one point.

Beautiful cicada molt. SUCH a photogenic specimen.

There was also an Actual Cicada but there was a giant hole in his abdomen. When I picked him up to figure out why, I saw motion and Very Quickly Put Him Down (i dropped him, startled). Turns out, ants love to eat ass. Good for them. I left them to their snack. No pic, sadly. It started raining.

[adiradirim]

one of the funniest/saddest things about having a jewish post breach containment is you'll read tags that are super loudly excited about how much they just looooove judaism and the jews (tm) and you'll be like "oh?" and click on their blog to see what else they've been saying and reblogging and be like oh

[nonuggetshere]

They're like a barbie doll to me

[mantisgodsdomain]

More notes for Roach conlanging. Roach has grammatical gender, in which only Male, Female, and Object are grammatical genders, whereas Worker uses feminine grammar, Queen and King use a slight variant on feminine grammar, and Drone, and Queen-Alate use masculine grammar. This is because King is derived from Queen, due to their similar positions in a colony, and Queen-Alate is derived from Drone, as both are forms of alate.

Queen is an alteration of feminine grammar that functionally just adds a handful of extra syllables to it, and King is an offsprout of Queen that uses the same grammar with different pronouns. Queen-Alate, despite the name, is derived from Drone, as they are both for referring to different types of alate ant.

Most Roach dialects are intelligible to speakers of Snakemouth Den Cordyceps Roach, but Snakemouth Den Cordyceps Roach is not entirely intelligable to speakers of Roach dialects due to a mix of the excessively specialized vocabulary caused by the specific needs of its speakers, the fact that its speakers do not necessarily have Roach mouthparts and thus may not pronounce syllables in a similar way, and due to the fact that Inanimate Object is a full grammatical gender that does not exist in any other dialect of roach and replaces a decent chunk of terminology for things that previously had Other Words For Them.

[write-it-motherfuckers]

I almost forgot to update you all, sorry Darlings, it's been a very long day.

Thankfully I do have some good news! Both Bug and Bunny are doing surprisingly well, though they are both noticeably anxious still. They will be on some medication for a few weeks that I have to give them at set intervals, and I will have to take them back in for a check up a couple of times too, but other than that, they are both doing shockingly well all things considered.

The vet staff was even kind enough to give them both a bath and help remove some of the mats I was unable to remove myself, as well as handle the injuries to their paws and mouths from the neglect they dealt with in their former home.

It took a while to get them to come out of their new carrier, but once they did, they pretty much went into hiding immediately. I was eventually able to lure them out with a promise of treats and an old documentary about birds so that I could give them more meds, and thankfully they both stayed in view long enough for me to get a photo of the two of them watching it together to share with you all! (Please forgive the mess, they think they're smaller than they are, so playtime clearly results in a lot more chaos than I was really prepared for.)

(Bug is the chonkiest boy, holy shit. Him Round.)

Once again, I'm incredibly grateful for the support and understanding from all of you, it really does mean a lot to me. I don't know if I'll be able to jump right back into posting just yet, but I will do my best to get back to it again soon.

Please stay safe Darling ones, and try to be kind to yourselves 🖤

[thecultoflove]

i actually cant draw stages i did that once and instantly DIED (my body turned to dust and i was dead for a whole day)

[dw-flagler]

gross thought but like what do you think would happen if taylor got a parasite. like a tapeworm. one of the ones that hatches in the human body. cause her power doesn't detect larvae or eggs i don't think so she wouldn't know about it if she drank dirty water or something.

again gross thought but i'm thinking about her like detecting through her power a tapeworm hatching in her own stomach. or intestines. wherever tapeworms live. what would you do about having a tapeworm in your stomach and knowing about it from the moment it hatches from its egg. like do you let it die? cause she controls it so she can just make it so it doesn't eat any food and it starves to death. does that make it worse does that kill you

[front-facing-pokemon]

Hi! You mentioned in your Vibrava tags that you didn't understand the Trapinch > Vibrava evo and I wanted to let you know that it's because they're based on the lacewing lifecycle. Larval lacewings are antlions (which are known for making sand traps) before they pupate and become lacewings.

i did see a comment about this on one of the posts, but this was my excuse to actually look them up! i can definitely see the resemblance of the lacewing to vibrava—though the antlion is still a little bit off from trapinch, but that might just be trapinch's overstylization with its huge mouth. i'll take it

makes me wonder where flygon comes from. whether it's just a pokémon thing or if it's based off another bug…

[delphi-star]

Matt said they only saw what happened once the gods got to Aeor. Does this mean they also didn't see Hawk's Hill?

[loki-zen]

a better articulation of something i had a kinda confused conversation around the other week:

one of the negative effects, for me, of the way that media/literature in aggregate tends to ignore and sideline women is that it can make it hard for me to get into genuinely good stuff just because it is (or superficially appears to be) part of a trend that I am ground down by and fed up of.

this isn't the same as saying that each individual piece of media is Bad or unwatchable/unreadable for not bucking the trend - that isn't how it works! - it's just a flaw that's hard for me to ignore for reasons that aren't the fault of this particular work, but which result from the prevalence of that particular flaw in other works.

I wish I didn't feel like this! but I do.

[charliethemanticore]

please tell me about sayer and bernard roth, and do not pretend to be normal about it 🩷

okay okay okay, anon I am giving you a little kiss on the forehead. I am gonna be going back through my notes so if this takes a hot minute, that’s why.

Update: This is… getting very long so I’m going to do this in sections. Your introduction lies below the readmore. Because I’ve hit 850 words. It really needs an edit. I am not doing that. Have fun. There will be another installment later.

So. Corsets (and Why We're So Weird About Them)

So, a few things need to be established here to understand the roots of modern anti-corset rhetoric. I will be dealing with sexism, ableism, and likely touching on racism within the medical field during the 19th century. If you’re anything like me, you will be angry by the end of this, just hopefully at some guys who have been dead a really long time, and not me. I’m just some guy who is three arbitrary credits off having a degree in History (with High Distinctions, btw. I’m very proud of my disabled ass for my current 6.0 on our 7-point scale)

France, America, and the UK in the 19th century were very Christian in the 19th century. The research I’ve done mostly focused on these countries, however I did briefly dabble in German history because the medical dress reform movement more or less started there, but more on that later.

As many of you know, it is a fairly standard belief in (many denominations of) Christianity* that if you do something Wrong™ then you will be Punished™ with misfortune. During this period, if someone was ill then they had Done Something To Deserve It™. This meant that, often, your physical condition was treated as a shorthand for your moral standing.

* For the purposes of this discussion, Catholicism is included under the “Christianity” blanket, I know many Catholics disagree with that categorization, but I am not writing “Christians and Catholics” fifty times

The medical field was professionalized to a recognizable degree in the 19th century. A lot of that professionalization resulted in super fucked up ideas about gender, race, and disability. The professionalization of medicine was parallel to the rise in global eugenics movement. This will probably surprise no-one but needs to be stated, nonetheless.

Many disabilities are more frequently observed in Women* than Men*. Scoliosis, which was the focus of my research for my major work, was one of these conditions. It followed, therefore, that women were doing something Bad™ that men weren’t** and the easiest options were exercise and corsetry. Now, doctors genuinely believed that women were more delicate and susceptible to disease and injury (both to the physical and spiritual being). For the most part, many doctors did NOT want women to be doing as much exercise as they were recommending for men. So corsets were Public Enemy #1

* I’m nonbinary, I know that the binary is bullshit and biology is weird soup, but I am using the terms applicable to the medical understanding and discussion of the period, it’s just easier when referring to primary texts.

** Many men did actually wear corsets. I want one of the advertisements as a tattoo. They’re great.

Right. So now that we have the basic facts outlined, onward. I will include a reference list below. I might put some of my recommended reading in a google drive or smth if anyone wants that.

So. First of all we should probably talk about what a corset is. “Oh by Charlie I know what a corset is” shush. Maybe you do. Maybe you know what a modern corset is. This is my ted talk and I will be as obsessive about my definitions as I like.

For the purposes of SEO algorithms, a corset is a generic term that could refer to bodies, stays, corselets, true corsets, and anything you can find on google when searching for a fast fashion corset top. A generic term that can be applied wantonly for a thousand different garments from the 16th century to today is not very helpful.

When I say “Corset” I mean a garment that began to evolve from stays in the 1820s and had established itself as the popular foundational garment by the 1840s and remained so until the 1920s. For simplicities sake, a corset is a “rigid bodice” supported by vertical boning (Usually baleen/whalebone. Sometimes steel, sometimes reed, sometimes cording)(1). Its primary function was to support the bust, but they also formed the foundation of popular fashions (2).

Corsets work by distributing weight of the bust (and also clothing) across the entire torso, supported by resting on the hips (think of the difference between cradling a toddler – or a heavy box - and sitting them on your hip)(2). They also formed a smooth surface so that clothing could be tight to the body while limiting wrinkling but, more importantly, IT STOPPED WAISTBANDS NEEDING TO DIG INTO THE BODY TO STAY UP. They could be tight to the body, but the corset would not allow them to dig into the body. They were (USUALLY) custom made to the individual and (USUALLY) only worn to the tightness comfortable for the level of activity for the individual. (I will talk about exceptions later). Tight lacing wasn’t hugely common. Usually the drastic shape was achieved through optical illusion and padding (Bust improvers, bustles, bum pads) (3)(4). If you make the hips and bust appear larger, the waist will naturally appear smaller, regardless of actual measurements.

God this is going to be so long I haven’t even got to the Bernards. Okay so this might have to be in installments.

REFERENCES

1 Steele, Valerie. Encyclopedia of Clothing and Fashion. Kindle ed. Charles Schribner’s Sons, 2005, p. 290

2 Waugh, Norah, and Judith Dolan. Corsets and Crinolines. Abingdon, Oxon; New York, Ny, Routledge, 2018, p. 75.

3 Kunzle, David. Fashion and Fetishism: Corsets, Tight-Lacing and Other Forms of Body Sculpture. Sutton Publishing, 2004, p. 89.

4 Steele, Valerie. Fashion and Eroticism: Ideals of Feminine Beauty from the Victorian Era to the Jazz Age. Oxford University Press, 1985, pp. 62-63

[monty-glasses-roxy]

Also, fun fact: my mum said we don't need to feed the insects we feed the gecko. You just don't need to! Wow wish I'd realised that sooner!

[eldrichfuck666]

Blocking the tag entomology and some other insect-related tags is the best thing I've ever done. :') I just wish people considered that a tw for insects is needed, but oh well... It's so rare to see something being tagged that can indeed cause a lot for entomophobic person. Or at least cw or something? It'll so much helpful

[fuckwhoeverpickedallthefunnyurls]

Why does it feel like they don't really want to talk to me? I mean, not exactly that, but like...a talking slump. Idk how to explain it? I kind of want to talk about it but I feel like it's too soon and I don't want to come across as accusatory? It feels like there's something going on but idk how to help them. I want to.

[coquelicoq]

the tumblr vernacular holds such a privileged position in my psyche. all day long tiny bugs have been feasting on me and

BITING YOU BITING YOU BITING YOU

and

i literally have a bug infestation and i'm being so brave about it

are just cycling through my head on repeat. but like. they are biting me biting me biting me. and i am actually being so brave about it. so shoutout to tumblr for giving me the language i need to make it through this experience i guess.

[throwing-roses-into-the-abyss]

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