this blog is a blend of things; unironically: art, some mine, mostly others, thoughts i vibe with, and whatever's rattling around my head.
finding stuff around here:
#blueblend post = catch all for any posts of mine
#blueblend art = finished pieces
#blueblend thoughts = personal takes
#blueblend wip = works in progress
#blueblend writes = fan fiction
some answers up front:
i'm down to talk anytime; just send a message. No, you won't bother me. Yeah, i'm slow at responding.
no commissions right now; my style's too inconsistent
reblogging and liking a bunch does NOT bother me. i don't understand why anyone wouldn't be flattered, honestly. go feral.
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Considering a big purchase? Competitive bargain hunter? Just trying to save money? Here's everything you need to know about buying stuff.
MASTERPOST: Everything You Need To Know About Buying Stuff for Cheap
How to pay for stuff
Buy Now Pay Later Apps: That Old Predatory Lending by a Crappy New Name
Businesses Will Happily Give You HUGE Discounts if You Ask This Magic Question
Dafuq Is a Down Payment? And Why Do You Need One to Buy Stuff?
Ask the Bitches: Should I Get a Loan Even Though I Can Afford To Pay Cash?
Season 2, Episode 10: “Which Is Smarter: Getting a Loan? or Saving up to Pay Cash?”
How to pay less for stuff
Why Name Brand Products Are Beneath You: The Honor and Glory of Buying Generic
How To Save Money With Affordable Car Repairs
How to Save Money on Your Beloved Pets
How to Get DIRT CHEAP Pet Medication, Without a Prescription
The Pink Tax, or: How I Learned To Love Smelling Like Bearglove
Blood Money: Menstrual Products for Surviving Your Period While Poor
Understand the Hidden Costs of Travel and Avoid Them Like the Plague
7 Totally Reasonable Ways To Save Money on Cheap Entertainment
How to buy stuff ethically
Ethical Consumption: How to Pollute the Planet and Exploit Labor Slightly Less
Ask the Bitches: “How Do I Consume Ethically AND Frugally Under the Trump Tariffs?”
21 Ideas for Sustainable Swaps That Aren’t Shitty, Expensive, Greenwashed Garbage
Fast Fashion: Why It’s Fucking up the World and How To Avoid It
You Are Above Bottled Water, You Elegant Land Mermaid
Kara Perez’s Debut Book “Green Money”: How To Use Your Money To Save the Planet
Wallet Activism: Using Your Money for Good with Author Tanja Hester
How Can I Justify This Deeply Unethical Purchase?
How to buy stuff secondhand
Almost Everything Can Be Purchased Secondhand
Our 5 Best Secrets for Secondhand Shopping Like a Frugal Warrior
The Library Is a Magical Place and You Should Fucking Go There
Your Library Lets You Stream Audiobooks and eBooks FOR FREEEEEEE!
How to buy big ticket items
Bullshit Reasons Not to Buy a House: Refuted
Season 2, Episode 2: “I’m Not Ready to Buy a House—But How Do I *Get Ready* to Get Ready?”
How to Pay Hospital Bills When You’re Flat Broke
Our (Ridiculously Simple) Method for Choosing the Right Healthcare Plan For You
Buying a Car with the Bitches, Part 1: How to Choose Your Car
Buying a Car with the Bitches, Part 2: How to Pay for Your Car
The Only Advice You’ll Ever Need for a Cheap-Ass Wedding
You Deserve Cheap, Fake Jewelry… Just Like Coco Chanel
How To Pay for College Without Selling Your Soul to the Devil
Splurging on Kids: When It Works, and When It Doesn’t
How to buy gifts
The Anti-Consumerist Gift Guide: I Have No Gift to Bring, Pa Rum Pa Pum Pum
How Can I Tame My Family’s Crazy Gift-giving Expectations?
In Defense of Shameless Regifting
Traditional Wedding Gifts Can Burn in Hell Where They Belong
Other People’s Weddings Don’t Have to Make You Broke
How to buy food
To Hell and Back for Cheap Groceries: The Epic Investigation (and Shocking Results) of My Grocery Store Price Comparison Quest
How to Shop for Groceries like a Boss
Cosmic Truths of Cheap Grocery Shopping: 12 Universal Rules to Save Money on Food, No Matter What You Buy or Where You Shop
The Ultimate Showdown: Cheese Crackers, Ranked
If You Can’t Afford to Tip 20%, You Can’t Afford To Dine Out
We Ranked Chocolate Sandwich Cookies by Taste and Price So You Don’t Have To
Confessions of a Thanksgiving Lunatic: Why I Spend $500 Hosting Every Year
How to avoid buying stuff
How to Avoid Lifestyle Inflation … and When to Embrace It
The Magically Frugal Power of Patience
Don’t Spend Money on Shit You Don’t Like, Fool
Status Symbols Are Pointless and Dumb
Here’s What to Do With Those Credit Card Pre-approval Offers You Get in the Mail
Your Yearly Free Medical Care Checklist
How to COMPLETELY Insulate Yourself From Advertisements
6 Proven Tactics for Avoiding Emotional Impulse Spending
The Subscription Box Craze and the Mindlessness of Wasteful Spending
Everything I Know About Minimalism I Learned from the Zombie Apocalypse
That’s all for now, bitchlings! We’ll periodically update this list as we post new content. In the meantime, if you’d like to support our mission of [checks notes] scathing reportage and dank memes, donate to Bitches Get Riches on Patreon or PayPal with the buttons below!
the annoying thing about weightlifting is that you have to lift weights that are a little too heavy for you if you want to get stronger. and you have to push yourself outside of your comfort zone in order to keep building muscle. fucked up.
If you're writing anything involving cons, scams, heists, or morally questionable characters who are very good at lying, here are some free resources I've been using for research. Saving you the "why is this in my search history" anxiety.
1. The FBI's Famous Cases & Criminals archive (fbi.gov/history/famous-cases) has detailed breakdowns of real fraud cases, Ponzi schemes, and confidence operations. The language they use is clinical and precise, which is perfect for getting the procedural details right.
2. The FTC Consumer Sentinel Network publishes annual reports on the most common fraud tactics in the US. Great for understanding how modern scams actually work and what makes people fall for them.
3. The Smithsonian's American Art Museum has a free digital collection of forgery case studies. If your character forges documents or art, this is gold.
4. Court Listener (courtlistener.com) is a free legal database where you can read actual court transcripts from fraud trials. Want to know how a real con artist talks under oath? This is where you find out.
5. The Internet Archive's collection of old newspaper crime sections. Search for "confidence man" or "swindle" in papers from the 1920s through 1960s and you'll find incredible real stories that would feel too dramatic for fiction.
Bonus: The Psychology of Fraud section on the Association for Psychological Science website has accessible articles about why people trust, how deception works cognitively, and what makes someone a convincing liar. Essential reading if you want your con artist characters to feel psychologically real.
Reblog to save for later. Your WIP will thank you.
just like, if there's a history at your institution of disabled kids not being able to make it you realise that's your fault right. like why don't you fucking do something about it. i guess they tried to do something about it with me and it failed so they let me go. crazy. nice work. why should we try to do any better.
only 5% of people with adhd who go to college finish a degree. FUCKING. FIVE!!! PERCENT!!!!!!!!!!!
that should disgust and enrage you.
if any other demographic of students had a 95% failure rate, we would be demanding reform and studies to understand why that’s happening
when i was at my first university, trying to get accommodations for my ADHD, they just kept asking me what accommodations i wanted, and refused to answer when i would ask what was available to me. how the Hell am i supposed to know what i can have? what’s available???? also, i don’t know!!!! i’m an adhd sufferer, not a fucking disability expert for the fucking college, unlike you, DISABILITY EXPERT WHO WORKS FOR THE COLLEGE.
but because the us is OBSESSED with making sure no one gets anything “”for free””, she literally would not tell me what my options were until i broke down in tears and asked her why she was refusing to help me. and then she did a big sigh, like i was fucking up her entire career by *checks notes* asking the disability center in my university to help me, a disabled student
at the second uni i went to, i tried to explain to a dean that i was literally two gen eds that had nothing to do with my degree away from graduating and that i was burnt out and broke and exhausted and suicidal and i just needed to be able to finish my degree without the gen eds. and this. fucking. guy. looked me right in my face and said in the most patronizing tone he could muster “if you can’t handle it, then maybe college just isn’t for you.” keep in mind that up until that semester, i had been an honor student who made Dean’s List every semester and didn’t get below Bs. if it hadn’t been for my mental breakdown, i would have graduated cum laude, maybe even summa cum laude.
but this dean of students looked a disabled person right in the face and said well i guess you just can’t do it, short bus
Pulled these from a couple articles really quick but yeah the statistics are not kind. I remember writing a scathing essay about my issues with ADHD and college as part of an assignment for academic probation. I got back an email calling me entitled and lazy. Somehow, this thread helps me feel a lot better. I still have about a semester of school unfinished that I’m unsure if I’ll finish but… yeah. Makes me feel better to know it’s not just me.
PSA: The Job Accommodation Network maintains a searchable database of accommodation suggestions for a wide variety of disabilities.
The full database can be accessed here and the ADHD page is here. The full database can be filtered by disability, by limitation, by work-related function, by topic, and by accommodation. Many of these accommodations are applicable to academic settings as well as the workplace.
Here are the section headers for ADHD accommodations ideas to give an overview of what the page contains - this post would become Do You Love the Color of the Accommodation if I attempted to list them all here
The ADHD page linked above also includes case examples and strategies for determining what sort of accommodations might be necessary. More broadly, the JAN website as a whole is a treasure trove of information related to the Americans with Disabilities Act and resources for both individuals and employers.
The head of disability accommodations at my college just kept ablesplaining to me that “accommodations are to level the playing field, not give you an advantage,” and that her job is to “protect the school’s rights” rather than help disabled students. The only accommodations they would offer me were 1. extra time on tests, and 2. an alternative test-taking location - neither of which I needed. I ended up getting (most of) what I actually needed by unofficially asking the individual professors, but it should have been legally protected.
Dang. I feel better about spending 9 years knocking about college. Admittedly, I emerged with many degrees instead of just one, but the one I needed for later work life was the one that I struggled to get.
I wish there was something like this when I was at uni. Even knowing that I *could* ask for help wasn't something I knew when I was 18.
I got the idea that the struggle was the point but ☝️ looking at that list, I was rawdogging the "executive functioning deficits" with panic and anxiety.
Fuck me. Help with Managing my Time, help with Organizing/Planning/Prioritizing (exactly what I never learned to to at school or home)?
I grieve our misused, misdirected, underutilized potential.
What we coulda done with just a little goddamm help.
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It lets people access scientific articles for free. This is dangerous. It helps the free flow of knowledge and reduces the competitive edge of all the people who worked really hard to have been born into a wealth.
Like, it’s literally a website where you can type in the DOI of an article and read it, without ever having to pay the publisher who exploited the author.
So, again, do not, under any circumstance, use Sci-Hub. I mean, can you imagine a world where knowledge is free and easily accessible to everyone? Even, y'know, poor people?
Libgen also has many books online, including textbooks, searchable by name, author, and ISBN. Can you imagine textbook companies not getting their hard-earned income from poor college students? Here is the link just so you make sure that you never accidentally stumble across this horrible, unethical website.
Oh, and while we’re talking about books, if you’ve managed to stay clear from Libgen, definitely don’t go to zlibrary, where you can also find a lot of textbooks, but unfortunately they’re completely free.
Another inside tip from academia: Those papers in really expensive journals that are effectively inaccessible to anyone not in a university network? Depending on the discipline it’s very likely that same paper is on a “preprint” server somewhere, with no access restrictions.
Like if you want to read basically any physics, math, or CS paper, arXiv.org will have you covered, because everyone uploads their papers there before submitting to a journal (and generally updates it after peer review). I know all of my papers are on there. This is such common practice that journals have it baked into their licensing agreements that authors retain the right to upload their work to these places.
So the next time you get hit with that paywall, you may not even need sci-hub, just click the arxiv link on google scholar instead.
if for some reason none of this works, the old “send a email nicely asking for the paper to the author” is always a good trick. remember most scientists hate the commercialisation of scientific knowledge
Many authors of papers are on ResearchGate! You can ask for papers there, if they don’t just post a copy to download. If they’re associated with a college, you can usually find their email addresses in the department directory, also.
If you live in the US it’s fairly common for public libraries to have agreements to let you get cards with other (major) libraries in the state for free, IDK how common it is outside of the US. For instance, I (Pittsburgh) have a Free Library of Philadelphia card, and there’s also a statewide system (the POWER library).
(Ohio, which has strangely well-funded libraries, had a possibly even better system, but according to relatives in Ohio as of when I last checked it was undergoing maintenance that it had been doing for. like. a year. it was supposed to be a few months or something. ANYWAY.) Some other ones (NOT complete):
Anyone in the state of California can get free library cards at the LAPL (must visit in-person), San Diego County (in-person), California’s Bookshelf (anyone with a library card or an internet connection in the state), LA county library (in-person), and probably others
Library of Congress (in-person, must be 16 and up, basically no benefits if you don’t live near DC)
Georgia Public Library: Georgia
Public Library Access Card – let you get things from any public library in Indiana. Important note: $70/year.
Boston Public Library: MA
Houston Library (texas)
If you can, check out your state’s State Library – they frequently have information on these sorts of things
ALSO! If you still can’t find something, but live near a university, many university libraries are open to the public! You generally can’t check things out, but you can browse! I live in Pittsburgh, and could thus access the libraries of the University of Pittsburgh and Carnegie Mellon University (which also includes access to electronic databases on-site). Both of those are free!
ALSO ALSO! There might still be other libraries! I know that in Pittsburgh, there’s one? two? Jewish libraries that are open to the public (the synagogues are merging? have merged? I don’t know), and I’d assume church libraries are also on the basis of “fewer security concerns”.
All this to say: even if your public library sucks, you can still look around
Anyway, for those of you who live elsewhere or can’t find the resource…
oops i stumbled and dropped a link to FMHY, a massive directory of sites like this. this is the page for books:
Books, Comics, Magazines, Newspapers
maybe look at it, but only so you know what to avoid!
Please return us to a world where Notp and squick are used for a ship you don’t like instead of just making up a load of bullshit about how immoral it is or w/e lol
a short selection of concepts and phrases that used to be commonplace in fandom and we’d really benefit from making that a thing again:
NOTP: the opposite of an OTP (One True Pairing). It is a ship a fan strongly dislikes. The word is a portmanteau of ‘no’ and ‘OTP’ and thus is not a contraction of any particular phrase.
Squick: anything that is a deep-seated, visceral turn-off. Squicks may be shared by many fans or be specific to one; one person’s kink may be another person’s squick.
YKINMKATO, or kink-tomato: Your Kink Is Not My Kink, And That’s Okay: used to indicate support for fannish diversity and to distinguish between disapproval or kink shaming and simply having different taste.
DLDR: Don’t Like, Don’t Read: a phrase used to warn against complaints about an aspect of fic or meta. A “live and let live” philosophy of fandom, which places the responsability for avoiding content one doesn’t want to see on the side of the fanwork consumer, rather that on the creator’s.
SALS: Ship And Let Ship: similar to the above specifically about shipping tastes.
YMMV: Your Mileage May Vary: a phrase used to acknowledge that any given individual’s personal opinion on the topic at hand may differ due to their own tastes, standards, values, experiences, etc.
As the OP points out, all of these crucially imply no moral judgment of what they’re designing.
(definitions lifted more or less wholesale from fanlore’s relevant pages)
girl who sat next to me at the coffee shop had that Tortured By Computer Work look in her eye so i turned to her and was like Are u doing research? and it turns out she (white) just started working as an indigenous liaison for an ecological wellness surveying company (hired bc she worked with the local nation for a year) so i was like OMG can i share resources with you. and whipped out my 1 million notes and academic papers on ethical Indigenous-settler relations/research and Indigenous perspectives on ecological restoration. she was like omg are u sure this is basically a whole course for free and i wanted to tear my shirt off liek YES!!!! I WANT TO PROMOTE LOW BARRIER EDUCATION TO ADVANCE DECOLONIZATION AND RECONCILIATION!!!!!!!!!!! STEP IN2 MY GOOGLE DOC !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
here's a googoodrive folder containing learnings on Experiential Learning in Ecological Restoration annnddd Research Practice in Indigenous Contexts. each course folder contains a "![Course number] Notes" document as well as PDFs of all the text-based readings that the notes draw from :-)
i plan 2 make accessible the learnings from my other classes too but i think ill only have time to do all that anonymizing & reformatting once i graduate in a few months lol
If you're writing 18th century dialogue, this website lets you search words and phrases to double-check whether they were in use & meant what you intend. It doesn't include every period-accurate use of a word/phrase, but it certainly helped me separate genuine 18th century grammar from the vague tangle of 💬old-fashioned fancy-speak💬 I've internalized from TV and video games.
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I'm just gonna slide this on in here for anyone that is interested in preserving old games. They take it very seriously too, they want an archive of every single game. Like, they have lists of every game ever released for a system, and once that system gets old enough, they add it to their archive and start collecting. Their latest addition was the Xbox 360, they opened that vault up in September 2022, and proudly announced they'd finished their collection of games for it back in April.
Also, while their game archives are almost entirely complete, they've got another project of archiving the manuals that came with those games, and that is... considerably less well filled out. Their collection of Xbox 360 manuals is especially rough, they've only gotten manuals for three games. So if you've got some Xbox 360 games kicking around, and the manual's still with them, please consider scanning them and submitting them to the site!
Game preservation is important, but people rarely consider preserving the manuals as well; I really respect Vimm's Lair for being so thorough in their archival work.
I've been using Vimm's Lair for years, I have yet to see a single bad link or virus on the entire site. It's arguably the safest and most comprehensive archive of video games in existence. Preserved history
I'm just gonna slide this on in here for anyone that is interested in preserving old games. They take it very seriously too, they want an archive of every single game. Like, they have lists of every game ever released for a system, and once that system gets old enough, they add it to their archive and start collecting. Their latest addition was the Xbox 360, they opened that vault up in September 2022, and proudly announced they'd finished their collection of games for it back in April.
Also, while their game archives are almost entirely complete, they've got another project of archiving the manuals that came with those games, and that is... considerably less well filled out. Their collection of Xbox 360 manuals is especially rough, they've only gotten manuals for three games. So if you've got some Xbox 360 games kicking around, and the manual's still with them, please consider scanning them and submitting them to the site!
Game preservation is important, but people rarely consider preserving the manuals as well; I really respect Vimm's Lair for being so thorough in their archival work.
I've been using Vimm's Lair for years, I have yet to see a single bad link or virus on the entire site. It's arguably the safest and most comprehensive archive of video games in existence. Preserved history
it’s not weird to find fanfiction from 2021, or 2017, or 2014 that you’ve never read and actually taking your time to read it.
it’s not weird to love it and comment and leave kudos because the author will probably still see it someday and it will make them happy.
it’s not weird to like said author’s work so much that you want to go look for other fics from them.
it’s not weird to go through the authors profile and look for other fics from the ships you like (or maybe some that you’ll give a chance because you liked the author) and maybe bookmark them for later.
it’s not weird to read these other fics and like them too and comment on them because you actually like them and you want to let the author know.
it’s not weird to read fanfiction from 5, or 8, or 10 years ago and actually enjoy and engage with it because it’s perfectly normal to relate to something that’s less than a decade old!
let’s stop treating fanfiction like they’re instagram posts that stop being interesting in 24 hours! fanfiction is NOT social media, fanfiction is art!!! and art doesn’t get old in one day, one year, or even a decade!
read fanfiction! write fanfiction! comment on fanfiction! let’s not let fanculture die people!!!!!
Not only is it not weird, it is ACTIVELY ENCOURAGED. Authors LOVE IT when people do this!!! Its not "weird" and its not "neutral" -- its a fucking DELIGHT. Feel very absolutely free to read though an author's entire back catalogue, leaving kudos and/or comments along the way; we absolutely freaking love when someone does this. There is nothing more joyful than getting a comment notification for an old fic. It will make our day, I promise.
There needs to be a special word for the warm, gratifying feeling that you get when you watch someone kudos everything you've ever written in a specific fandom in backwards order over 3 days. and that word needs a modifier to express the inexpressible joy when they start leaving comments on every story no matter how old it is.
a ton of people have unexpectedly followed me over the last 2 days so here is my rent-lowering gunshot:
the american south is the most racially diverse and poorest region of the united states, and any political sentiment that treats the south is stupid or expendable is inherently racist and classist. a lot of y'all are racist and classist. the south is also the heart of american culture. argue with a wall. you cannot deny that everybody in the entire world does not emulate artists from atlanta. there is vested interest in keeping the south poor and uneducated BECAUSE this is the most racially diverse region in this country. if you actually give a fuck about progress, you would fight for the south, not mock us.
Digitized a teeny drawing of mine into something slightly less teeny. I've a doll of them in the works. I love them very much.
They're based off of a cat of mine; however, I'm unsure if I want to make all the kitties into one or not -- Drawing wise at least. My fingers can't handle making that many more physical versions.
Anya is live and ready to show you everything. Watch her strip, dance, and perform exclusive shows just for you. Interact in real-time and make your fantasies come true.
✓ Live Streaming✓ Interactive Chat✓ Private Shows✓ HD Quality✓ Free Actions
Free to watch • No registration required • HD streaming
Regardless of this year's Tumblr Sexyman vote outcome, I will know In My Heart and Soul that enough of Tumblr were sensible enough to look at the options of an anthropomorphic television, a regular guy, and a sexy hunk of a dwarf who just wants everyone to be well fed, and choose the dwarf over the regular guy 😌
The complete triforce of the zonai/dragon armor sets. I love all three of them but the ember set is my favorite one because of the horns and also because Dinraal is my favorite of the dragons 🔥
