I will never be famous, but I've got a big heart, I'm awesome and fun and caring and smart. I'm likely to reblog cats and kittens, even silly adorable ones named mittens. I guess I'm a poet and a writer, and sometimes a social justice fighter. I also like space, Legos, asexuality, and art, so if you want to get to know me, that might be a place to start. Then there's also King's Quest, animation, movies, and puns, but I'm sure my sense of humor isn't one of the more common ones. I'm kind of a hopeless romantic that still believes in love, so please forgive my sappiness and all of the above :-)
Apparently some people still need to hear this so: using an 'ai checker' is still using ai. If you are feeding someone's fic to one of these checkers, you will still not be sure their fic is ai because they are not 100% accurate, but you can be 100% sure that you are using ai. For fic. Furthermore you are doing the work of an ai scraper for them. You are, personally, feeding the machine. There is no actual excuse for using an ai checker on fanfic as a hobby. YOU are the problem.
If you think a fic is ai, mute it and move on. That's it. That's all you do.
"#incredibly relevant for academic work too!! #apparently a friend of a friend almost didn't graduate because she ran her thesis through an ai/plagiarism checker #which then scraped her entire paper and added it to its 'database' #so when she submitted it and they ran it through an ai/plagiarism checker #it marked as 100% AI #i can't imagine how devastating that would be"
when I was first teaching at the university, the English department required us to use Turnitin to check for plagiarism
they weren't calling it "AI" back then, but even in the early days it was clear the corporation was stealing student work to build its database - plus stealing published work, else how would that sort of plagiarism-detection tool work?
required or not, I refused to use that software, and I'd like to believe my vocal opposition encouraged others to resist feeding their students' work into the plagiarism machine
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[Image description: Post by marlin.lyle.77 of a picture of a political cartoon of a blonde white woman inside a house, saying "Fun fact: 100% of people who stay home and don't obstruct law enforcement don't get shot."
Reply by qasimrashid reads: Police killed Breonna Taylor in her home. Police killed Aiyana Jones in her home. Police killed Sonya Massey in her home. Police killed Gregory Hill Jr. in his home. Police killed Daniel Shaver in his hotel. Actual Fact: You're ignorantly bootlicking state violence against innocent people because you think you'll be spared. You forget - they don't care about you either. End ID]
And one more bookbinding post! A shorter one. For my brother's wedding, he requested lotr. And I also have another cousin who is recently married and was supposed to he holding a wedding this year, but he and his wife were in a bad car accident that wasn't remotely their fault (rear-ended into incoming traffic), and recovery has been pretty long and gnarly, but I wanted to give them something nice as well. So! Double lotr, all the way across the sky.
I originally planned to mix it up more on the vibes between the two editions (partly so I myself could keep them straight and didn't gift the couples copies with the wrong names), but.... these marble print fabrics are just too powerful, I couldn't say no. I did enough differentiating with the titling and endpapers, it all worked out!
And, naturally, they both needed some edge illustration to take it to the next level!!
So, the green set. I found this gorgeous black and white paper a couple weeks ago at my local art store, and it was SO striking that I grabbed a couple sheets. I was worried at first that it was going to be too busy with the marbled fabric on the cover, but couldn't find anything else that sparked joy, and... i shouldn't have stressed so much, the combo is fantastic. I should trust the maximalist voices in my head! For this one I drew the scene from osgiliath, looking out at minas tirith
After THAT, i was looking to draw something that specifically wasn't More Buildings 😂 I had a pretty magenta paper I've been sitting on that harmonized surprisingly well with the minor colors in the blue fabric. I originally had my eye on a matching leather, but backed away to the same warm navy hide I used for the guestbook, which really gave the whole thing some nice dignity. And the opposite of drawing buildings is drawing CREATURES, so i went absolutely ham on balrog cross-hatching
Both these sets were a ton of fun and came out deliciously! And finished drying two whole days before the wedding! I got PLANY of time 🤣 But truly, I'm not very good at repeating myself, so it means a lot to me that I can be this many lords of the rings deep and still be finding new ways to delight myself. I had a lot of fun with these sets!!
Let’s say you wanted to glue fabric to wood, but what do you use? What about glass to paper? This to That lets you choose two things you want to glue and lists what types of glue is best. (Because people have a need to glue things to other things!)
This is one of the first websites I was told about in props. It also has information about the toxicity, adhere time, price, and other stuff about the glues.
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publisher: I've been looking into tumblr, have you thought of using Blaze to promote your book?
me: NO
publisher: But it seems like an efficient way to get this in front of more eyes-
me: people on tumblr hate Blaze.
publisher: There is no algorithm and you can't pay to promote a post? I don't understand how anyone advertises anything on tumblr.
me: That's the best part. They don't. They can't.
(trying to make him understand that we do not control the attention. We just have to show something shiny and gay enough and if people are interested, they'll reblog.)
(Mrs. Victoria buys a brothel, a deconstruction of the colonialist cowboy mythos dressed up as a sapphic romance.)
if you are going to do historical inaccuracy, then go big. Just take it to a whole ‘nother level.
I mean like Knight’s Tale “chanting Queen at the jousting tournament ‘foxy lady’” levels of anachronism. Hansel and Gretel: Witch Hunters with Hansel injecting himself with insulin and Gretel wielding a multiple-shot crossbow levels of anachronism. Go for Blazing Saddles, Blackadder, Jack of All Trades, Connecticut Yankee levels of anachronism
you either have to play by the rules or throw out the book.
Go full on Xena. All of history happened at the same time. Get your legs broken by Caesar and find out Lao Tzu didn’t write that book, his wife did, and she hitting on you…all 10 years before you go meet up with Helen at Troy. Fight with Beowulf and commission Sappho within a few months of each other. Abraham and Issac? Only like 2 years before Jesus. Invent CPR and the kite during the bronze age. Watch your gal pal teach Homer how to be a better bard. Have a fucking battle of the bands in Ancient Greece. TIME IS MEANINGLESS.
It's absolutely crazy that intellectual labor can wipe you out. It seems like it shouldn't be a thing, like your stores of brain juice shouldn't be able to be depleted in that way.
I feel like a wizard that's out of spell slots, and to me that's a hackish mechanical limitation put in place to try to balance the classes.
#it's fucked and it's bad design
#i should be able to write and edit for 20 hours a day
#i'm just sitting there how are we even using energy
#feels made up (via @softest-punk, emphasis mine)
Your brain is an incredibly energy-intensive organ. It makes up approximately 2% of your total body mass, but at rest it's using 22% of your total energy intake. The only thing that uses the same percentage of energy is all of your skeletal muscle (which is about 40% of your total body mass), with the liver (about 2.6% of your total mass) close behind at 21% (Aragon et al, 2017).
And that's how much energy it's using at rest.
That's the baseline.
So if you're doing lots of intellectual labour, your brain - which already has disproportionately huge energy demand - is going to use even more energy to keep up with the work. That's why you feel so wiped/drained/like you're out of spell slots after high intellectual demand - because your brain is an organ, and you've just done a lot of high-energy work with a high-energy organ.
Something about the bastardization of the story time and time again proves that nobody in power really cares about the people who would resonate with King’s Carrie White. A girl so ugly and repulsive she’s been removed from her own story. The societal need for women and girls to be constantly perceived as attractive is what fuels a fair amount of her torment in the book, but that person isn’t even allowed to exist on the screen. We cannot empathize with her; it isn’t allowed. It’s fascinating to me.
everything is getting worse and thats why it's SO so important that we have fun and hang out and play and im being serious im being unimaginable amounts of serious
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I, a hearing person who likes subtitles just as a preference, shouldn't have to read a subtitle that's obvious nonsense, go back a couple seconds, and listen again in order to figure out what's going on. An accessibility feature should not be the most half-assed part of a professionally made production. Scripted media has absolutely no excuse for not having subtitles or having subtitles that aren't perfectly verbatim. Professional captioning services should be ashamed of the shoddy work that they put out. Captions should be treated as a part of the production, just like filming, editing, audio balancing, etc - and anything that releases with missing or bad captions should be seen as unfinished
missing someone is crazy because you’ll have dreams that r like “we went on a nice walk together :)” and you’ll wake up feeling like you’re gonna throw up
why be radically exclusionary abt queerness when you could be radically inclusionary instead. let's inflate the numbers. let's become the majority. the sky's the limit
"we can't let just ANYONE call themselves queer!!" what are you talking about. I'm steepling my fingers and gleefully cackling every time we Get Another One and you should be too. lock in.
Fuck yeah, let's make this little raft we're surviving on big as hell. If I bring my bit of driftwood and you bring yours and we let as many people join in as want to, we might end up with a functional boat.
Back when I was active on AVEN (I have no idea what it's like now), we had two definitions of asexual -- an external definition and an internal definition. The external definition, the one that's on the wiki and the press material and that everyone uses when talking about asexuality, was of course "an asexual is someone who does not experience sexual attraction". The internal definition, the one we kept in mind when talking to each other, was "an asexual is someone who calls themself asexual".
The reason for this was very simple and very practical. In the very early AVEN and immediately pre-AVEN days, back before my time when the disparate ace communities were first finding each other and creating a public online network, there was a fair lot of exclusionist discourse. There are a lot of ways to be asexual, and the early community of course fell prey to the usual infighting about whether someone with a libido counts as asexual, whether someone who chooses to have sex can be asexual (usual tiring Purity Brigade Bullshit), whether someone without a libido counts as asexual (after all, if you have no sex drive, are you sure it's a matter of sexual orientation?), whether ace people count as lgbtq, all the usual nonsense. This worked out the way it pretty much always does -- the inclusionists "win", because exclusionists always break off into smaller and smaller communities so the largest group is, of course, the one where all different kinds of people stick together and welcome each other. And that was AVEN.
And when you're trying to have a strong community and somebody shows up at the gates saying, "hi, I think I'm asexual", it's a fucking horrible idea to start doubting their credentials. They saw the public definition and started calling themselves asexual; they're here, and now they're under the internal definition. An asexual is somebody who calls themself asexual. Sometimes, these people would be frustrated allosexuals, or people choosing to swear off sex, who might not fit the external definition of the term. We made sure that everyone knew the external definition, and there were always conversations about asexuality and how it affected our lives, if they asked us directly what we thought then we'd say "only you can know for sure" and then give our thoughts on the matter for as long as they asked for them, and other than that it wasn't anyone else's fucking business or anyone's place to judge. If people weren't nasty and didn't create problems, they could stay and call themselves whatever they wanted.
Many of these people who didn't fit the strict definition eventually left after receiving support and discovering more about themselves. Some stopped IDing as ace but became allies to the community. Some people who came in with the most "I'm a heterosexual girl who is angry at my boyfriend" intro posts you've ever seen in your life discovered that they were in fact ace and that the messages that society had taught them about sex and romance were simply not for them -- these are people who, in a gatekept community, would have been incorrectly ousted immediately.
And then there were people -- a LOT of people -- who found themselves in grey areas. People who said "okay, this community makes sense to me and is useful to me and I have so much in common with a lot of you, but not EXACTLY like you. However, what I experience may not be the strict default definition but it's an awful lot like these other members on the forum." And they formed sub-communities. The grey aces. The demisexuals. The aromantics and greyromantics. Through these dialogues, between subgroups who in a more exclusionary community would be arguing about who the "real" asexuals are and splintering off into their own communities away from all those stupid cishet fakers, we developed language to describe our similarities and differences. The sexual/romantic/aesthetic attraction model came out of these dialogues and it became so massively important to our understanding of asexuality that basically everyone in the ace/aro community describes themselves by it, as do a large number of people outside the community. The community made massive leaps ahead in just a decade or two by, well, being a community. By being a place where anybody who called the place home, and didn't bully other people in the home, was right. By being somewhere where anybody who saw "asexual: someone who doesn't experience sexual attraction" and thought "that sounds like a term with some use for me" was allowed to use it.
An asexual is somebody who does not experience sexual attraction.
An asexual is somebody who calls themselves asexual.
These definitions are not in conflict -- they are both, in concert, fundamentally necessary for a safe and vibrant community where we can protect, support, and learn about each other and ourselves.
And that is absolutely not exclusive to asexual communities.
“In reading a novel, any novel, we have to know perfectly well that the whole thing is nonsense, and then, while reading, believe every word of it. Finally, when we’re done with it, we may find — if it’s a good novel — that we’re a bit different from what we were before we read it, that we have been changed a little, as if by having met a new face, crossed a street we never crossed before. But it’s very hard to say just what we learned, how we were changed.”
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A question I get asked a lot while working at a public library is "how do you deal with homeless people?"
And the answer is, we don't.
The unhoused people who come here seeking refuge 99% of the time understand that they will be kicked out if they misbehave.
The people you have to watch out for are Jessica, who only came because the kid she didn't want had to visit for a homework assignment and she just *needs* to yell at her child for asking to borrow two books or stay an extra five minutes, or Michael, who came in to look at porn on our computers for whatever fucking reason, or Karen who just wanted to come by to throw a fit that the particular book she wanted was checked out and harrass our staff about our collection being too limited.
99% of the time, the people we need to ban are middle to upper-middle class white people while the homeless and mentally ill/disabled people mind their own damn business and are honestly some of the best patrons we have.
I bring this up because today we had a man come in. He stopped at the desk, pulled up a chair and said "I'm newly homeless and was living in my car. I'm disabled. It was impounded. It's raining. I don't have a phone and I don't know where to go tonight."
And we did what we could to help. He was incredibly kind and patient despite his obvious anxiety and stress, more than most able bodied, housed patrons are to us under much less dire conditions. I liked knowing that we were the first place he came.
We have so many people like this who come in everyday. Many are quiet and keep to themselves, but sometimes they talk to us.
They tell us about how they're taking a few courses on a scholarship they applied for from our library's computer at the local community college to get their diploma. Or ask about a manga or dvd or book we might have to help them pass the time.
One woman, who comes in daily with her tattered walker always says hello to me and likes to work on the new jigsaw puzzle with me when we set one out.
So like, treat unhoused people like people. Treat disabled people like people. I don't want my library to feel like the only safe space in the world, but I'm glad it can be one of them.
I'm so sick of hearing about how "the homeless are ruining everything" when they are some of the kindest, most respectful people here. Sometimes they mutter, might not have had a place to shower, and might need a little extra space for their backpacks but that's FINE. It Doesn't Matter Actually. None of that is a problem or any of my business to care about (unless they request help/services), and I also don't think it's any of yours.
libraries provide vital and lifesaving services and i will die on the hill you have to let people who are mentally ill and disabled and homeless and politically disagreeable to you still access those rescourses. its simply too important to society
Hey friends! If you get diagnosed with sleep apnea and you have health insurance (even shitty health insurance) don't worry! It's a condition that's relatively easy to manage, even if you're poor, and I'll walk you through it.
Pre diagnosis: if you have a neck circumference greater than 16-17 inches, it raises your chances of being diagnosed with obstructive sleep apnea. This means that you stop breathing for periods of time during your sleep, resulting in poor sleep quality and over time has the potential for more serious issues. Obesity is a risk factor, but you don't have to be heavy to have sleep apnea. If you sleep with someone, they probably already know if you have sleep apnea (it sounds like snoring with periods of not breathing, and then coughing/choking). If you sleep alone, there are recording apps you can use overnight that highlight any instances of sound for you to listen to in the morning.
Diagnosis: Once you suspect sleep apnea, you can bring it up to your PCP as a concern. They'll refer you to a sleep specialist, and they'll conduct a sleep study. Depending on your insurance, this can be at home or in a lab. If they conduct it at home, they'll send you a small machine attached to two pads that will go on your chest and a finger pulse oximeter. This will collect your data throughout the night about your REM cycle, your heart rate, and your oxygen. (I can't speak for the lab sleep study, but I had no copay for the machine) The specialists will examine the results and then send you a prescription for a CPAP machine, mask, and tubing.
Your insurance will rent out the machine to you for a premium every month. The machine will monitor the amount of time you wear it and send this information back to the specialists and the insurance. You are required to wear it for a minimum amount of time every night and a minimum amount of nights each week. If you fail to meet these requirements, your insurance can deny coverage for the machine, which for most people means they won't be able to afford it and they'll be charged for the full price. If you go on vacation, have an irregular sleep schedule, or have a difficult time adjusting to wearing a mask, these can all contribute to not meeting the minimum hours. The amount that my insurance quoted me for the first 6 months was $1200, and after that amount of the minimum requirements of 6 hours 5 nights a week were met, I would then own the machine.
Don't freak out! You don't have to do all that.
Call the sleep specialist and ask them to send you a hard copy of the prescription for the CPAP machine. They will try to get out of this. My office told me twice that if they sent me the prescription then the insurance wouldn't cover all the supplies I need. I had to be persistent and call back and ask for them to send it again. Once they email you the prescription, buy a second-hand machine off Facebook marketplace or craiglist (you might even be able to find someone offering one for free on a Facebook buy nothing group, or you can make a group post searching for one). It took me a few months of searching to find one I could afford, but there's a good market for them, either from people passing away or upgrading. They retail new for 400-1200, so people can get away selling them for a couple hundred bucks. I lucked out and found an excellent bipap machine, but you don't need a fancy, modern Bluetooth CPAP. Any old working machine will do.
Do not use second hand masks or tubes. These can have gross bacteria. Clean the entire machine with disinfectant, inside and out. Consider replacing the water chamber if it came with one. I bought all of my masks and tubing new on a CPAP supply website, which cost about $100, but they're mine forever. You can find people selling sealed, unused bulk supplies on FB, etc.
CPAP vs BIPAP: a BIPAP is just a slightly fancier version of a CPAP that offers two different air pressures for both inhalation and exhalation. It's okay to wait a little while after getting the prescription until you can find a machine you can afford (you've had untreated sleep apnea this long, you can wait a little longer), but after you get a junker, you can always upgrade to a better one in the future and treat your condition.
Using the machine: look up a manual online for your specific model. Look up a YouTube video for how to plug in your prescription. There's a whole bunch of settings, and options to store the data it collects in a USB/SD card.
Buy distilled water. Don't use tap, bottled, mineral, or spring water.
Different types of masks: there are masks that cover your nose and mouth, masks that cover only your nostrils; different types of headgear that go around your whole head or just your ears, and you might find different types more or less comfortable. The tubing is universal.
It's less loud and less uncomfortable than you think to adjust to. I suggest taking some Benadryl the first night just to get used to sleeping with something on your face. The quality improvement might be so significant that you won't mind the lifestyle adjustments. You can even buy small models of cpaps that are meant for travel. If you don't have hundreds of dollars to throw at insurance, it's better to buy one outright so you own it and no one can take it. You're supposed to replace your tubing/masks every 3 months, but if you take care of your equipment and clean it, you can probably stretch it a little longer.
Feel free to ask/dm/reply if you have any questions! Go forth and sleep better!
This is a really good guide, the only thing I'd add is that you are supposed to replace the water chamber every six months as well, just because over time it becomes harder to get bacteria out of the chamber, and it can get tiny cracks and so on. As with everything else, if you take care of it, you can make it last longer.
Also, the reason that it's important to use distilled water is that it is completely clean. You are not going to stick a brain-eating amoeba up your nose, and you're not going to have as many problems with things growing in the tubes. Do not fuck around with this. At all.
The disinfectant which was recommended for me was simply vinegar -- the acid in the vinegar will kill pretty much anything if you dilute it in some very hot water and soak your tubes, masks, water chamber in it. Then wash it with a plain soap - I use regular-degular blue Dawn - and set it out to air dry on a towel. I hang my tubing over the shower curtain rod so it drains. If you do it when you get up, most everything will be dry by bedtime.
I fucking hated most of the masks until I found the memory foam ones, but there have been recalls on some brands of those, so make sure you are checking recall lists if you're buying bulk stuff so you are sure you're not getting crap offloaded on you that'll have you inhaling memory foam bits. Yikes.
Okay, I guess I had a couple of things to say. But yeah, this is a good guide.
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