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[your-dearest-aunt]

[your-dearest-aunt]

remedy!! for a stye!!! and it's a 1000 yrs old!!! and it works!!!!!

just to add something:

in my country, one of the traditional remedies for this is putting an old, hollow key over the stye. the emphasis is in old (it has to be heavy and made of a metal like iron, brass, or copper).

in my experience, this works, actually! the chunky metal is cold, which helps with inflammation. if it's hollow, it will take longer for it to absorb the heat from your skin. and just like @elfpen says, copper salts absolutely slaughter bacteria! old keys are often made of some kind of brass that contains copper: and while you don't have to keep the key over your eye for nine days, or wait for it to make salt, keeping it on for several minutes/an hour will definitely help more than if you didn't (and it will keep sweat or your hands away from the injury)!

Fun little thing about medieval medicine.

So there’s this old German remedy for getting rid of boils. A mix of eggshells, egg whites, and sulfur rubbed into the boil while reciting the incantation and saying five Paternosters. And according to my prof’s friend (a doctor), it’s all very sensible. The eggshells abrade the skin so the sulfur can sink in and fry the boil. The egg white forms a flexible protective barrier. The incantation and prayers are important because you need to rub it in for a certain amount of time.

It’s easy to take the magic words as superstition, but they’re important.

[your-dearest-aunt]

your eye is drawn to the window bc who wouldn't wanna jump during a disney remake

Everyone to Disney rn:

[your-dearest-aunt]

big shout-out to tumblr as tonight's understudy for My Therapist in the 3am panic attack! brilliant work

[your-dearest-aunt]

you see, for me the worst part of having a panic or anxiety attack in the middle of the night is after some time, when you have gotten better, and there's a whole support system you can rely on and then sike! you can't get support from your support system because it's 3am and you don't want to wake them up to bother them with everything you have going on and that just fuels the anxiety and now it's. now it's like panic: the sequel.

[your-dearest-aunt]

my favourite thing today

Due to a lull at work, I found myself with some free time.

So I decided to 3d model a furby because I couldn’t find a decent one online.

It came out ok in the end. But the process came with quite a bit of nightmare fuel.

I first did as much as I could without having to touch the hair sim. I had no idea how to do hair sim.

But I “luckily” found a quick hair sim button in blender. So that was looking quite nice. However I was a fool. I hadn’t yet touched any sliders on the hair particle system. And i still needed to add colour.

This should have been my first warning. I had to hide the face plate, so i could remove some of the hair bits that were clipping it. I wasn’t prepared.

Then I decided I wanted to have another bit of light hair on top. simply add a square under the hair and press the hair sim button.

simple.

right?

I don’t know exactly how I managed this, but somehow i had made the particle system use the data from the gravity sim to generate more hair.

I made the mistake of zooming out.

…

and zooming out more

My computer didn’t like that. The hair, It just kept going, but the more I zoomed out the more my computer slowed down. So this is as far as i was willing to push it.

After fixing that issue I put a bit more effort prettying the model up. First I added colour to the faceplate and its different parts, then I cooked up a quick and dirty procedural texture for the eyes.

finally I made a front hair sim for the white belly, this led to another problem. at some point the baked physics started getting…

weird.

no mater what I did the hair would just start growing a few frames in.

I tried everything I could! I scrapped the physics bake, I trawled through all the particle systems sliders. I changed numbers randomly. I even did a full uv unwrap, which I had been avoiding. nothing fixed it.

I really didn’t want to end up with something not a furby at the end of all this work. so i kept looking for a solution.

Then i found out it animated.

In the end I just saved the file (I’d realized I hadn’t saved once up until that point. almost had heart attack when it froze for a few seconds while saving), then closed and reopened blender. Of course the old, “turn it off then on again” worked perfectly.

So there you go, I now have a slightly cursed furby 3d model.

[your-dearest-aunt]

what are YOU lookin at

[your-dearest-aunt]

the lifestyle

this is so stupid but i felt extremely inspired by those felt banners @middlenamemothman made

[your-dearest-aunt]

help

*says ‘I’m so fucking sick of this pandemic shit’ in a distinctly vaccinated, pro mask, pro lockdown, pro taking all the necessary safety measures way*

[your-dearest-aunt]

i’m thinking tonight about masterpieces. michelangelo looked at the sixtine chapel and saw; nothing to preserve. virgil wanted his aenid burned and forgotten; only to be saved at the behest of an emperor who thought it flattery. kafka instructed his friend to burn everything he’d ever written - too personal was it, too unfinished.

they were ignored.

instead, their work was taken and held and published and thrown to be gawked at. instead, an emperor, a pope, a friend, took from within the cavities of them their choices; their art.

tumblr rolls out post+. twitter rolls out tip jars. youtube takes half of what creators earn. on social media, there is a ko-fi or a patreon and a polished face in every bio. i show my poems to my mother and she asks if I will publish them before she says anything else. emily dickinson instructed her sister to burn her poetry.

her sister did not listen.

we are a community, says tumblr, we should give back to creators. my last poem had 50 notes. six of those were reblogs that weren’t mine. i lie in bed at 2am and stare at my bright phone screen and the way netflix’s library grows thinner and thinner. the first ad on tumblr that i can reblog is for amazon. amazon takes more than half of what authors earn.

kafka’s friend took barely finished work and hammered it into structure. he is the only reason we know of him.

my father wrote a book and a play when I was barely big enough to reach his knees. when i try to talk to him about writing, he shrugs.

no one wanted to publish it, he says. so i don’t write anymore.

i am filled with poems I have never published, books I haven’t written. There are little snippets of them scattered throughout my life. I link to my ko-fi on my tumblr.

-

asked capitalism of the artist: what is art, if not for consumption? who does art benefit, if it is not consumed? why create at all if you do not market it? who are you, frothing at the mouth about someone publishing someone else’s poems? who are you to hate your magnum opus? what is art, if not in relation to its reception? if no one sees it, how is it art?

said the artist, baring their teeth: it’s mine.

[your-dearest-aunt]

July Prompts 🪴

Word prompts to use for doodling or writing

summer kiss

cocktail

pineapple

vacation

camera

message in a bottle

lemonade stand

summer dress

beach

road trip

football game

airy

lifeguard

childhood

ice tea

sun screen

treasure hunt

pool party

fireflies

concert

succulents

pink skies

underwater

bubbles

flower field

hurricane

cherries

dancing in the rain

sun burn

rooftop

camping

[your-dearest-aunt]

Good Omens fandom moodboard 6/29/21

[your-dearest-aunt]

who even are you. like what did you write

I have no idea. Let me see if anyone else in this ask place knows.

[your-dearest-aunt]

So let's talk about the Lost Generation.

This is the generation that came of age during WWI and the 1918 flu pandemic. They witnessed their world collapse in the first war that spread around the globe, and they -- in retrospect, optimistically -- called it the "war to end all wars". And that war was a quagmire. The trenches on the Western Front were notoriously awful, unsanitary and cold and wet and teeming with sickness, and bloody battles were fought to gain or lose a few feet of territory, and all because a series of alliances caused one assassination in one unstable area to spiral into a brutal large-scale war fought on the ground by people who mostly had no personal stake in the outcomes and gained nothing from winning.

On some of the worst-hit battlefields, the land is still too toxic for plant growth.

And on the heels of this horrific war, a pandemic struck. It's often referred to as "the Spanish flu" because Spain was neutral in the war, and so was the first country to admit that their people were dropping like flies. By the time the warring countries were willing to face the disease, it was far too late to contain it.

Anywhere from 50 to 100 million people worldwide would die from it. 675,000 were in the US.

But once it was finally contained -- anywhere from a year to a year and a half later -- the 20s had begun, and they began roaring.

Hedonism abounded. Alcohol flowed like water in spite of Prohibition. Music and dance and art fluorished. It was the age of Dadaism, an artistic movement of surrealism, absurdism, and abstraction. Women's skirts rose and haircuts shortened in a flamboyant rejection of the social norms of the previous decades. It was a time of glitter and glamour and jazz and flash, and (save for the art that was made) it was mostly skin deep.

Everyone stumbled out of the war and pandemic desperate to forget the horrific things they'd seen and done and all that they'd lost, and lost for nothing.

Reality seemed so pointless. It's not a coincidence that the two codifiers of the fantasy genre -- J.R.R. Tolkein and C.S. Lewis -- both fought in WWI. In fact, they were school friends before the war, and were the only two of their group to return home. Tolkein wanted to rewrite the history of Europe, while Lewis wanted to rebuild faith in the escape from the world.

(There's a reason Frodo goes into the West: physically, he returned to the Shire, but mentally, he never came back from Mordor, and he couldn't live his whole life there. There's a reason three of the Pevensies can never let go of Narnia: in Narnia, unlike reality, the things they did and fought for and believed in actually mattered, were actually worth the price they paid.)

It's also no coincidence that many of the famous artists of the time either killed themselves outright or let their vices do them in. The 20s roared both in spite of and because of the despair of the Lost Generation.

It was also the era of the Harlem Renaissance, which came to the feelings of alienation and disillusionment from a different direction: there was a large migration of Black people from the South, many of whom moved to the Harlem neighborhood of New York City. Obviously, the sense of alienation wasn't new to Black people in America, but the cultural shift allowed for them to publicly express it in the arts and literature in ways that hadn't been open to them before.

There was also horrific -- and state-sanctioned -- violence perpetrated against Black communities in this time, furthering the anger and despair and sense that society had not only failed them but had never even given them a chance. The term at the time was shell-shock, but now we know it as PTSD, and the vast majority of the people who came of age between 1910 and 1920 suffered from it, from one source or another.

It was an entire generation of trauma, and then the stock market crashed in 1929. Helpless, angry, impotent in the face of all that had seemingly destroyed the world for them, on the verge of utter despair, it was also a generation vulnerable to despotism. In the wake of all this chaos -- god, please, someone just take control of all this mess and set it right.

Sometimes the person who took over was decent and played by the rules and at least attempted to do the right thing. Other times, they were self-serving and hateful and committed to subjugating anyone who didn't fit their mold.

There are a lot of parallels to now, but we have something they didn't, and that's the fact that they did it first.

We know what their mistakes and sins were. We have the gift of history to see the whole picture and what worked and what failed. We as a species have walked this road before, and we weren't any happier or stronger or smarter about it the first time.

I think I want to reiterate that point: the Lost Generation were no stronger or weaker than Millennials and Gen Z are today. Plenty of both have risen up and fought back, and plenty have stumbled and been crushed under the weight. Plenty have been horribly abused by the people who were supposed to lead them, and plenty have done the abusing. Plenty of great art has been made by both, and plenty of it is escapist fantasy or scathing criticism or inspiring optimism or despairing pessimism.

We find humor in much the same things, because when reality is a mess, both the absurd and the self-deprecating become hilarious in comparison. There's a reason modern audiences don't find Seinfeld as funny as Gen X does, and many older audiences find modern comedy impenetrable and baffling -- they're different kinds of humor from different realities.

I think my point accumulates into this: in spite of how awful and hopeless and pointless everything feels, we do have a guide. We've been through this before, as a culture, and even though all of them are gone now, we have their words and art and memory to help us. We know now what they didn't then: there is a future.

The path forward is a hard one, and the only thing that makes it easier is human connection. Art -- in the most base sense, anything that is an expression of emotion and thought into a medium that allows it to be shared -- is the best and most enduring vehicle for that connection, to reach not just loved ones but people a thousand miles or a hundred years away.

So don't bottle it up. Don't pretend to be okay when you're not. Paint it, sculpt it, write it, play it, sing it, scream it, hell, you can even meme it out into the void. Whatever it takes to reach someone else -- not just for yourself but for others, both present and future.

Because, to quote the inimitable Terry Pratchett, "in a hundred years we'll all be dead, but here and now, we are alive."

[your-dearest-aunt]

Oh worm? It’s him! A long boy who wants to wiggle his way into your heart.

[your-dearest-aunt]

Long furby Species guide

I keep seeing a bunch of different types of long furbies, and I started categorizing them in my head-

So since I’m bored, I thought I’d make a post for it.

EDIT: I made a part 2, which can be found here

Each species has subspecies including

Spine or spineless

Material type

Etc.

But Without further ado...

Classic Long

common

Body is like a tube, with feet at the bottom

Greatest length variety

Examples: Original long furby from @furbyfuzz and Thursday Boy Porridge from @strange-aeons

Caterpillar

Very rare

Typically around 3ft

Multiple pairs of feet going down the belly section

Example is from boots-with-the-furb on Instagram

Centipede

Very rare

Have pairs of legs going down the sides of the body

Often no feet

Body tapers at end

Examples: from @lumeneas and me bc I can’t find very many different examples o o f

Humanoid/long legged

Uncommon

Have human like hands or other other body parts

May have pair of long legs as well

Examples: Buttered Noodle from @buttered-noodles and Handsome Ryan from @well-i-guess-i-own-a-furby-now

Mobius/double headed

Extremely rare

Have 2 heads, one on either side of a tube-like body

Example: from @furbyrights

Wide

Legendary, possibly a myth

Long furby, but wide instead of long

Artist’s depiction by @par-vollen

And there we go! Please tell me if I missed anything, or if you find credit for me to add. I know there’s more, however these are the species I could come out with-

I hope this helps you all make the right choice if considering summoning a long furby

[your-dearest-aunt]

So I made my son, Mushroom man

Yep there he is! He's saying he needs... accessories?

Ok here's a bag!

And a cape!

And a very dashing Mushroom Man!