Ask me anything
late 20s, they/thon. Just a pansexual/polyamorous, nerdy, genderqueer who reblogs just about anything.
icon by @whencartoonsruletheworld
(image description: a digital painting in shades of red and orange, depicting a humanoid man covered in soft feathers. Below his feet, the name “Morianon” is written. He has large striped wings and a matching tail, with two long curling feathers extending from his tail and a tall feather fan standing over his head. He is posing as if he just finished a dance and is waiting for applause. end description.)
Usually his front feathers are light blue and his back feathers are dark green, but I was doing a little color palette challenge so now here he is in orange monochrome instead lol. Morianon, my protagonist. This is a nude portrait, but he’s so feathery I don’t think it matters.
Being a tropical bird, Morianon grows this fancy courting plumage for half the year, corresponding with summer time where he currently lives. Two long feathers on his tail, and a soft gold fan of feathers on his back that he can raise up for display. He also has an instinctive urge to dance when the courting season hormones hit. His wife Evarin enjoys watching him dance.
I have been improving the anatomy of my winged humanoids. Not that you can see much of it with all those feathers in the way lol
u guys know sexuality gender and the way u feel attraction can change right. u know you can put labels on and off right. nothing is solid swim a little if you like etc
normalize saying “it was a phase, mom”. in a way that doesn’t take away that it was real.
watch people not getting the point by saying “that’s why i choose this umbrella term instead”. it’s about not being ashamed to change your what you thought was a fixed label.
The Born This Way era has run its course. On to the “queerness is not harmful and therefore it doesn’t matter where it comes from, biological, mental, or lifestyle, it’s unimpeachable” phase.
I get that we did BTW to fight institutions like conversion camps. It was a triage solution, but I think it misses big important parts of the queer community and also presents several debate fallacies, so I think leaving it behind and moving to a more pragmatic discourse is the right call.
if you guys thought you had a weird middle school experience my whole grade was convinced I was an actual literal werewolf for 3 years to the point where people were afraid of me so come 8th grade the popular girl had a huge Halloween party on her farm that everyone went to that just happened to coincide with the full moon so I staged a whole elaborate ‘transformation’ at the end of the night and scared the shit out of all of them. I don’t think I’ll ever top that
the prisoner of azkaban had just come out. we were a bunch of bored idiot kids in the boonies. everyone thought they could identify a werewolf and I just happened to have illnesses that often took me out of school around the time of the full moon every month. it didn’t help that I had been the ‘wolf kid’ since elementary. and I’m not saying I didn’t play into it when I found out the rumor — teen wolf (1985) was one of my favorite movies so of course I wanted to pretend I was living it.
but this went on for years. I had kids showing up behind my house on the full moon hoping to catch me changing. people were afraid to invite me to sleepovers. so when I finally got invited to a party, on that full moon no less, I went all out. I waited for the moon to rise. I hid a costume werewolf head and clawed gloves in the woods, snuck out there mid-party while 30-something kids were gathered around a bonfire, changed, ripped my clothes and started howling from the trees. some brave souls started to investigate and that’s when I started to chase them. pandemonium broke out. and oh, did I have the time of my life, because I hated most of these kids. revenge of the nerds, and all that. they’d teased me for years for things I couldn’t help like being sickly or having too much hair on my body.
I made my getaway with a friend at the end, and left the rest to wonder. most of them realized the prank and later laughed it off with me. but there was one kid who, senior year of high school, admitted I intimidated him because he still believed I was a werewolf. I put my arm around his shoulder, told him, “Between you and me, I am,” and gave him a wink. even after graduation, that guy looked at me like I would eat him alive.
I gotta say, there are worse things to be than a teenage werewolf
When September and October are nearing and you’re planning an event: google “Rosh Hashanah *year*” and *Yom Kippur *year*” and then, and I cannot stress this enough, don’t plan your event on those days. In fact, don’t plan any events starting sundown the night before. Those are the three most important days of the Jewish calendar, and, once again, I cannot stress enough how much this little bit of forethought and kindness will make every Jew you know cry tears of joy.
in 2023, the night before Rosh Hashanah is Thursday evening, September 14.
no offense to anyone personally but I think we are way too used to and comfortable with weekly releases and if that wasn’t already bad enough, it seems like most of you aren’t even patient enough to wait for the official release date my point is this industry moves way too quickly
The way that people treat with the medium of manga is interesting and sad because a lot of mangaka are disabled and becoming disabled because of the intense workload. The grace extended to legendary author-artists like Togashi should be how all these artists are treated, and more. Your favorite artists are destroying themselves to create the pages you consume and make judgments on and they deserve to take the time their bodies need to recover from these efforts. The weekly release schedule is literally hurting artists.
What’s worse is how they’re expected to do extra work unpaid like exclusive bonus illustrations for retailers and are expected to pay for assistants themselves. Licensing deals with adaptions are fucked up Gureishi is not the only one who has said an anime adaption did nothing for them financially Hideaki Sorachi of Gintama fame has also been open about how little money he has made from the hugely successful Gintama live action projects. Its so fucked up out there for them with no safeguards when their health fails them aside from living off of royalties, and this is an “improvement” from when publishers were fully okay roping manga artists into doing more than one serial at a time or lock them up in hotels with no sleep until they completed their manuscripts
99.9999% you don’t even have to forcefem eggs. when they’re ready they flock to trans girls like we’re corrupted amulets emitting feminization auras and crack themselves wide open
i attract eggs like a magnet and let them crack themselves on the wall of my feminity
imagine opening the newspaper over your morning coffee and the first article is a piece by your wife about how much she fucking hates you
My favorite thing about this post is that the actual article and everything about it are worse than it sounds, so much worse.
Cis Straights: Not Okay since forever.
So I tracked down this article and its summary is:
My husband is useless and smelly and the living embodiment of a pile of dirty laundry
He’s an academic which sometimes seems charming and dashing but usually he’s a useless font of jargon who does nothing but grooms kids to become academics themselves
He sneezes loud and has congestion problems
His snoring is oppressive
If you think you’re in a healthy, loving relationship you’re lying to yourself
How dare he try to have fun on a vacation to Australia to visit his family
How dare he let his kids also have fun on said vacation
I can’t even summarize this, I’ll copy-paste it directly: “But I don’t say a word about how bad I feel. You don’t believe me, but it’s true! Thanks to writing an advice column for years. I have evolved, unlike my spouse. I am so good, so thoughtful, so generous.”
She seems to also despise her children, who committed the horrific sins of: getting seasick while snorkeling, being upset that they got a rash, and complaining about it being too hot
She is a fucking saint for finding it within herself to forgive them
And she’s better than everyone else because she writes an advice column which I’m sure is well-reasoned and helpful
When I look at her advice column, almost all of the entries are locked behind a paywall, but every publicly-available one I can find has this weird habit of her turning the correspondent’s story into being all about her, and about how awful everyone else has always treated her.
Last week I accidentally took an edible at 10x my usual dose. I say “accidentally” but it was really more of a “my friend held it out to my face and I impulsively swallowed it like a python”, which was technically on purpose but still an accident in that my squamate instincts acted faster than my ability to assess the situation and ask myself if I really wanted to get Atreides high or not.
Anyway. I was painting the wall when it hit. My friend heard me make a noise and asked what was wrong—I explained that I had just fallen through several portals. I realized that painting the wall fulfilled my entire hierarchy of needs, and was absolutely sure that I was on track to escaping the cycle of samsara if I just kept at it a little longer. I was thwarted on my journey towards nirvana only by the fact that I ran out of paint.
Seeking a surrogate act of humble service through which I might be redeemed and made human, I turned to unwashed dishes in the sink and took up the holy weapon of the sponge. I was partway through cleaning the blender when it REALLY hit.
You ever clean a blender? It’s a shockingly intimate act. They are complex tools. One of the most complicated denizens of the kitchen. Glass and steel and rubber and plastic. Fuck! They’ve got gaskets. You can’t just scrub ‘em and rinse them down like any other piece of shit dish. You’ve got to dissemble them piece by piece, groove by sensitive groove, taking care to lavish the spinning blades with cautious attention. There’s something sensual about it. Something strangely vulnerable.
As I stood there, turning the pieces over in my hands, I thought about all the things we ask of blenders. They don’t have an easy job. They are hard laborers taking on a thankless task. I have used them so roughly in my haste for high-density smoothies, pushing them to their limits and occasionally breaking them. I remembered the smell of acrid smoke and decaying rubber that filled the kitchen in the break room the last time I tried to make a smoothie at work—the motor overtaxed and melted, the gasket cracked and brittle. Strawberry slurry leaked out of it like the blood of a slain animal.
Was this blender built to last? Or was it doomed to an early grave in some distant landfill by the genetic disorder of planned obsolescence? I didn’t know, and was far too high to make an educated guess. But I knew that whatever care and tenderness and empathy I put into it, the more respect for the partnership of man and machine, the better it would perform for me.
This thought filled me with a surge of affection. However long its lifespan, I wanted it to be filled with dignity and love and understanding. I thought: I bet no one has hugged this blender before. And so I lifted it from its base.
A blender is roughly the size and shape of a human baby. Cradling one in your arms satisfies a primal need. A month ago I was permitted to hold an infant for the first time in my life, an experience which was physically and psychologically healing. I felt an echo of that satisfaction holding my friend the blender, and the thought of parting with it felt even more ridiculous than bringing it with me to hang out on my friend’s bed.
I feel that my readership is an especially appropriate audience for this. :D
[ID: A sheet of paper with a decorative illumination on it; the illumination shows a stylized Excel spreadsheet with a green menu bar across the top. The menu bar reads “Needs more” in a gothic-style font, and the spreadsheet itself has the word “Spreadsheets” inked across it, with an illuminated “S” and decorative calligraphic lettering on the rest. It’s sexy as hell.]
In a statement to The Post, a spokesperson for NBCUniversal claimed the tree work is simply an annual ritual at this time of year. “We understand that the safety tree trimming of the Ficus trees we did on Barham Blvd. has created unintended challenges for demonstrators, that was not our intention. In partnership with licensed arborists, we have pruned these trees annually at this time of year to ensure that the canopies are light ahead of the high wind season,” they wrote. “We support the WGA and SAG’s right to demonstrate and are working to provide some shade coverage. We continue to openly communicate with the labor leaders on-site to work together during this time.”
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If those trees were pollarded annually, the cut areas would NOT look like that. There would be big knobs of old growth at the trimming sites. Not seeing any of that here. The way those trees were topped (not pollarded, which is a very careful process that has to begin when the tree is immature) is excellent way to kill them due to loss of hydration, open sites to infection and parasitism during the best time of year for both, lack of nutrition due to so little greenery and new budding growth being left, sunburn and other exposure damage, and a myriad of other possibilities. Plus, if they were topped annually, they would not have the lovely drooping branches seen in the other picture but would have tons of vertical suckers instead.
This is what an annually pollarded mature tree should look like:
If this was done by the city, the public works arborists should be protesting in front of city hall and screaming their heads off right now. I’m not hearing about that, so… Tree law!
The Studios: *speak*
Botanists and other Tree Experts:
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My mom said when she used to go to business meetings at GM in Detroit in the 1980’s, they would close the sidewalks to “repave” them whenever the unions were preparing to strike, making it more difficult or impossible for them to protest outside. This is a thing, this has been happening for decades. They know what they’re doing.
I think one of the reasons why tree law is so popular and people are so enthusiastic about it is because a big, old tree being killed feels so awful. You’ve got something that took years or decades to get that big, that provides so many benefits, and then it’s just…gone and irreplaceable. Of course people are like oh boy, you didn’t think that thing was valuable and now the law is gonna come for you and you’re gonna regret it.
And it feels like one of the few cases where the rich (not the mega rich, but the regular rich) actually get held to account for their crimes, because the punishment is designed to match the actual damage they do. You cut down a bunch of your neighbor’s trees to make your property more valuable? The punishment is basically the cost of your property.
In a statement to The Post, a spokesperson for NBCUniversal claimed the tree work is simply an annual ritual at this time of year. “We understand that the safety tree trimming of the Ficus trees we did on Barham Blvd. has created unintended challenges for demonstrators, that was not our intention. In partnership with licensed arborists, we have pruned these trees annually at this time of year to ensure that the canopies are light ahead of the high wind season,” they wrote. “We support the WGA and SAG’s right to demonstrate and are working to provide some shade coverage. We continue to openly communicate with the labor leaders on-site to work together during this time.”
ALT
If those trees were pollarded annually, the cut areas would NOT look like that. There would be big knobs of old growth at the trimming sites. Not seeing any of that here. The way those trees were topped (not pollarded, which is a very careful process that has to begin when the tree is immature) is excellent way to kill them due to loss of hydration, open sites to infection and parasitism during the best time of year for both, lack of nutrition due to so little greenery and new budding growth being left, sunburn and other exposure damage, and a myriad of other possibilities. Plus, if they were topped annually, they would not have the lovely drooping branches seen in the other picture but would have tons of vertical suckers instead.
This is what an annually pollarded mature tree should look like:
If this was done by the city, the public works arborists should be protesting in front of city hall and screaming their heads off right now. I’m not hearing about that, so… Tree law!
The Studios: *speak*
Botanists and other Tree Experts:
ALT
Update and confirmation of Imminent Tree Law:
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He mentions later in the thread that not only do they not trim the trees annually, they’re trimmed at best once every 18 years. Supposed to be every five, and only in dormancy, which even my layman’s ass knows about tree trimming.
And yes, Universal can probably eat the fine. But it’s gonna be a whopper even if the trees survive (which is as mentioned kinda unlikely), California is a triple damage state for tree law, and it may increase dramatically if there were nesting birds in the trees.
All this to be a Captain Planet filler villain to some writers. And yes, it’s currently just the writers officially picketing there; SAG-AFTRA recommended against it for petty bullshit like this and the suddenly necessary sidewalk construction.
I asked my dad— a retired arborist—about TREE LAW and he just kinda blinked and said (i paraphrase because Dad Tangents, amirite?):
“Worst and best case I ever saw was a guy who was caught in the act of cutting down a C&C tree by two Department of Urban Forestry supervisors while they were randomly driving around on a Saturday. Not only did he have to deal with the cops showing up and months of paperwork and bureaucracy, but he also had to pay the fines AND cover the cost of the tree removal + stumping + buying a new tree + planting the new tree + wages for the regular crew plus the extra workers they needed to get the jobs done. That tree ended up costing him upwards of $35K, and that was over 20 years ago.”
So yeah, respect Tree Law or pay out the bootyhole.
Antarctica, which is in the dead of winter, has unexpectedly failed to reform its winter sea ice. This is an exceptional deviation from the norm that has left scientists dumbfounded.
In the Caribbean Sea and Gulf of Mexico, sea surface temperatures are extremely high. Water temperatures are in the *90s* by the Florida coast, Miami keeps breaking daily record heat index values, and a major coral bleaching event will soon be underway.
The Canadian 2023 Wildfire Season will not let up, with nearly all annual records falling before we even reach the midpoint of the season. No Canadian wildfire season had ever produced 12 terawatts (TW) of fire radiative power. 2023 has produced 18TW.
Dramatic flood events have begun striking various countries around the world simultaneously this week.
El Niño has rapidly developed in recent months as sea surface temperatures across the equatorial east Pacific skyrocket. As of yet, El Niño has not impacted global weather conditions. That will change in a few months.
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