#the whole of life is a learning process

[pratchettquotes]

"What's a tuppeny upright, Sarge?"

"It's a kind of jam doughnut, lad. Did your mum ever make 'em?"

"Yes, Sarge. Sarge?"

"Yes lad?"

"I think it probably means something else as well, Sarge," said Sam, sniggering. "Something a bit...rude..."

"The whole of life is a learning process, Lance Constable."

Terry Pratchett, Night Watch

[essektheylyss]

re: the fiction/nonfiction kinsey scale poll. just know that I am barely restraining myself from giving nonfiction book recs at all times. there is SO MUCH FUN NONFICTION THAT IS SUPER READABLE AND INTERESTING take my hand we can go pick out some books together

[handweavers]

Everyday I see looms for sale on facebook marketplace and everyday I yearn so so deeply, but I have no weaving experience beyond some very basic tablet bracelet kids stuff. Is there a good "beginners" loom that I might look out for if one pops up in my area?

a rigid heddle loom is a wonderful introduction to weaving that will allow you to get familiar with the basics of setting up a loom, woven structure, finishing, etc. while being more affordable than a multishaft table or floor loom as well as involving less moving parts. it depends on where you live, but generally the most common rigid heddle loom you'll find on secondhand sites is by ashford, a company from nz/aotearoa. any manufacturer is fine, just make sure the listing comes with all parts, ie. the heddle, warping peg, shuttles, etc. there are tons of free resources online from the manufacturers sites as well as youtube tutorials and books that can teach you every step of the process of using a rigid heddle loom

[zeebreezin]

I think one of the funniest (Editor’s note: should be read as horrifying) implications of developing OC relationships not necessarily in chronological order, and retroactively adding context as needed has gotta come from Bev’s motivations for blackmailing @viric-dreams ‘s Lt. Roberts.

In every timeline he’s motivated by losing his spot on the job to blow up a little section of Benthic College, right. However depending on the continually, there’s two different reasons why this pushes him over the edge. Why losing this job is what finally makes him say fuck the protocol, I need to get some control over this situation now.

Either he decides to go for blackmail because he’s bitter he didn’t get a chance to test out his inventions, and is generally motivated by somewhat petty frustration & a more reasonable concern that his own work is consistently being put on the back burner (considering he’s actively hunting down a missing bomb…)

Or! His choice is motivated by fear, and resentment of being taken off the lead role… because without him at the helm, Bev had no control over who or what got hurt, or who might get caught in the crossfire. Including his professor and only friend at the time, @thedeafprophet ‘s Josephine. And with no idea how to process that grief and terror (he’s not supposed to be caring about these people! There’s Work to be done!), Bev interpreted his doubts towards the New Sequence’s actions as hatred of his commanding officer.

Both timelines end up the same - with him taking a fire poker to the head and potentially never going back to the university again. But they paint two very different sides of the same guy, huh?

[eggsistential-basket]

oho! found a new enemy! pymetrics!!! Jesus Christ using digit span and reaction time to judge whether a candidate would be a good hire is straight up discriminatory and would not tell you shit about whether or not they're a good candidate. none of these tasks are anything like something you'd see in real life unless a client was throwing balls at you or some shit. legitimately awful. will probably not get the job for this. honestly probably because the "hard" version of the spacebar task was easy as shit. also requiring me to stare at a screen at red and green dots meant the color negative cancelled the colors out and I couldn't see the colors as it went on. absolute dogshit.

[cryptidfuckery]

Actually my favorite thing about being a queer hairdresser and having been queer for like over a decade is that I've gotten to have so many convos with so many different people with different journeys through queerness and getting to be a conduit to share them

Notably today I was talking with a client about their hesitation to go on t, and one of their main worries is about being able to have children later on. And I got to tell them about another client I have, a 40-some-odd trans nonbinary person who, within their t4t relationship, was the one to bear children years after having been on t. I got to explain what that could look like, but their best bet is that if they ever do decide to pursue it, it's something they should bring up with their doctor/endocrinologist or seek our trans forums etc

And the joy I get from it is from getting someone to realize that it isn't some stupid set in stone trajectory, the whole process is supposed to be about what you, you specifically, need from your body. No one else!

[chompe-diem]

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[thewatercolours]

Podfic: "Captive Crown" by GerbilofTriumph

A shabby narration of GerbilofTriumph's excellent King's Quest fanfiction, "Captive Crown," complete with outrageous attempts at accents and enough bloopers to start a drinking game (with um, raisin juice. There are too many goofs for the real stuff.) This wonderful fiction, full of courage, nightmares, and healing, is gratefully recorded and shared with permission of the author, @gerbiloftriumph. Go check out her awesome creative blog.

All seven chapters are available at the link above, but if you just feel like listening to the first chapter while you scroll, voila:

Original text here:

[medi-bee]

making a two minute animatic for a podcast 99% of my followers have never heard of well that’s just how it goes sometimes

[bogkeep]

the way the most recent pokemon games don't let you turn off the exp share or the affection mechanic bonuses is nothing short of maddening. i think they make great accessibility features If Only They Were Optional and the flavour text is cute, but i want to have a fun casual playthrough that's at least mildly challenging without having to make it a nuzlocke or something. i don't want to feed my starter bitter medicines to make her hate me :(

[essektheylyss]

me last week: I should really go back to using perspective lines. I've known how to do this since the age of 4. so many art projects I want to do would actually be way more manageable with perspective lines, but ugh they're such a pain to actually measure out, especially on a fucking computer. but I'll do one for practice.

me: [hand draws out a whole bunch of perspective lines in csp]

me, just now: wait surely there's a tool to do that for you.

[lem-argentum]

playing ff.xiv blind as a th.ancred fan from the beginning is so funny. “hmm i wonder where than is- WHAT DO YOU MEAN HE WAS POSSESSED BY ONE OF THE MOST POWERFUL BEINGS IN THE UNIVERSE….....” “hmm i wonder what happened to than after he was teleported from the- HIS ABILITY TO INTERACT WITH THE NATURAL ENERGY OF THE WORLD WAS SEVERED AND HE HAD TO FEND FOR HIMSELF FOR MONTHS IN THE MIDDLE OF NOWHERE????” “yaay than gets to help us with planning our defenses :D- DID HE JUST DIEoh he’s not dead his soul was just RIPPED AWAY TO ANOTJEJR WORLD????!?!?” “ohh he gets to fight r.yne’s awful guardian figure i wonder what he’s gonna- DID HE JUST DIEoh he’s fine nevermind he gets to have resolved character development now :)” “aww okay we get to go to the end of the universe together, and he’s already gone through so much so clearly nothing bad will happen to hDID HE J

[jacarandaaaas]

Love reading your opinions on the characters and movie, it's refreshing to not see that repetitive hate and you make some good points

The discussions and others adding to that is also interesting

aww thank u anon! I just think these characters are so 3 dimensional it’s impossible to boil them down to one thing! isabela is the prissy oldest sister until you realize actually she’s not! luisa is the strong confident one until you realize no she’s not! These characters are so complex I just want to appreciate all of them!

I also love partaking in discussions and find your guys perspective interesting! It’s fun to dissect these characters and this story!

[toastsnaffler]

weekend melancholy is starting to kick in >~<

[compacflt]

pre-publishing notes for slider (actually i meant to poast this yesterday i just forgor 💀), just to put them out there

as per usual i peddle an extreme amount of mis- and straight up disinformation about the aerospace & defense industries in this one. as a general rule of thumb if it sounds like i researched it poorly and/or made it up, that’s because i researched it poorly and/or made it up. like every scene i was like ‘that wouldn’t happen :D’ and wrote it anyway

this one-shot renders my third one-shot (about ice & hangman) entirely obsolete, as if the rooster one-shot didn’t already do that. so just ignore the hangman one. (i only wrote that one cause i felt bad about tagging my fics hangster when they’re barely in it.) Also, this one-shot kind of directly contradicts the end scene of “debriefing” in pretty much every way. i don’t really care, because this is a much stronger ending, but just throwing that out there—this one-shot doesn’t really jive with my other writing for plot/character arc reasons & im too lazy/sick and tired of my other writing to go back and retcon any of it

i only research things i am mandated to by school/a job/journalistic code of ethics, or that i think are interesting, or that i know will not depress me. divorce depresses me so i did not research divorce. Also im pretty sure marriage doesn’t work the way i described it “sign the papers & that’s it” but idgaf . shrug. im having fun

something i Didn’t make up, though: the thesis that iraq/afghanistan went so poorly in the long term partly because our armed services & especially that generation of commanding officers were prepared for total warfare with a near-peer (like the ussr) instead of counterinsurgency tactics against mountain-based guerrilla warfare-stratted forces (like Al-q*eda etc). that’s a very real thesis that ive read in multiple mil history books (“the generals,” ricks; “mil history for the modern strategist,” ohanlon) & co-opted because it’s kind of, in a fucked up way, a good metaphor for ice’s whole deal—he’d been expecting a traditional officer’s life with a woman etc (aka traditional warfare against the ussr, the us’ sworn enemy) and instead found happiness in the weirdest of places, another dude (aka guerrilla warfare) and no one taught him the right strategy for dealing with that; so, pigheadedly, like some US commands in the Middle East for a decade, he just dug in his heels & refused to budge/change his "total traditional war/heteronormative"-based strategy even if it obviously wasn’t working.

In a similar vein just so i can beat the allegations that im strategically dumb, the “strategies” against the ussr the boys are playing with in the usna section are intentionally the most dogshit strategies on earth. do not invade russia in a land war. especially not when nukes are on the table. the point is they’re ALL bad at strategy (strat as a metaphor for interpersonal communication).

i get the words “moderate” and “modulate” confused a lot. there’s a couple times in this one when I use moderate and mean modulate. Now it’s too late to edit it. by which i mean i am too lazy. editing anything on ao3 is a Sisyphean task. not worth it.

there's a lot to be said about my ice & maverick's respectability, which is to say, as slider points out, their life together is incredibly normie and boring and regular, except that they're two guys. like there's nothing super subversive going on here. "in the grand scheme of things is this really so bad?" is the question. politically this is a little funky. for metatextual character-arc reasons ice has to agree to an official marriage to prove that by the end he's not afraid to legally legitimize their relationship, but the heteroflexible/straight-passing/socially conservative ice & mav that I have written also probably aren't the kind of guys to acknowledge the struggle & strife & subversiveness of the queer community before them that fought for them to have that right. to quote from an essay by Lauren berlant & Michael Warner ("Sex in public"): "Respectable gays [ice & mav, distancing themselves from other gays] like to think that they owe nothing to the sexual subculture they think of as sleazy. But their success, their way of living, their political rights, and their very identities would never have been possible but for the existence of the public [visibly queer] sexual culture they now despise." just throwing that out there as something that is weighing on my mind having now finished writing this. I think that issue (ice & mav's relationship with/debt to the lgbt community) could be explored with a character like rooster, who might be much more a part of that struggle (especially pre-dadt-repeal)...but idk where or how I would write about it. just something to chew on. I keep finding different ways to politically interpret what I myself have already written which then keeps leading to more fucking one-shots. This slider one for instance was a reinterpretation from the 1980s Cold War politics lens of nuclear doomsday & how that affected a generation of men making shitty/suicidal decisions about their lives. an endless cycle for me. "just one more interpretation...i swear just one more..."

[termagax]

for all his misery and mopey nature i do think he likes and prefers being roadhog and wouldnt go back for anything. i think "feeling like mako" means feeling small and ashamed and weak in his mind and he hates it.