Higher Up & Further In

The Amur Leopard and Clouded Leopard (which recently celebrated its 50th cub born at the zoo!)

The Sumatran Tiger

The Red Ruffed Lemur and Ring-Tailed Lemur

The Cotton-Top Tamarin and White-Cheeked Gibbon

The Colobus Monkey and De Brazza’s Monkey

And the Mexican Spider Monkey!

AI is dubious at best in terms of its actual benefit to humanity as a whole. Chatbots are dangerously affirming and often factually incorrect. GenAI is rotting our brains with slop content and emboldening scammers and criminals. Memory and graphic cards manufacturers have abandoned the consumer markets, wildly driving up prices for basic home computers in the name of line-go-up profit. All because a handful of people unleashed AI onto the world without anyone's consent, ushering in an age of digital theft, the devaluation of human skill, and allowing corps to kick people to the curb even more than they already do.

And at the foundation of it all are datacenters. If we can stop these, we can at slow AI and maybe give ourselves enough time to at least regulate it.

Tilney: a yapper. Hot! Likes reading and discussing novels. Hot. Openly expresses his interest in Catherine from day one. Very Hot.

Wentworth: Lifts that child off Anne without speaking. Extremely hot made me talk a walk around the room first time I read it. Notices her tiredness when no one else does. Writes letters. All very hot.

Brandon: Loyal and true - raises Eliza's daughter as a ward. Hot. Fought a duel??? Technically hot. However too broody for me. Only halfway hot.

Darcy: was rude and then stopped being rude honestly not hot to me personally but I respect those of you for whom it is hot. Cares for his sister: technically hot but loses points because I prefer the relation the Tilneys have as siblings go. Generally would piss me off I think. I know why 'treats his servants well and looks after his estate' is hot for the time period but I am not of the time period and honestly not hot to me.

Edward: Don't flirt with a woman if you're already engaged to another woman even if you don't love her anymore! Boooooooooo! Not Hot.

Come build a world with me! 😄 This Saturday I'll be joining The Story Engine Deck team for a fun worldbuilding session celebrating their Deck of Worlds— a unique deck of cards that can be used to create locations for fantasy/sci-fi writers, settings for DnD or other roleplaying games, and more.

For those saying it’s fake, idk what to tell you except it’s not and I promise I have much better and more efficient ways of getting attention on the internet than making fake childhood art. I’m a little honored you think I could come up with something so whimsical at age 29 though

Details about the items below:

A silver pen: An old-fashioned quill made entirely of silver, etched with strange markings all over. There is no ink, but as soon as you press the nib to paper, your ideas flow across the page. They are exactly as you envision them, without any flaw.

A mysterious watch: A gold pocket watch whose face bears many hands and no numbers. Pressing the fob causes time to instantly stop. Pressing the fob a second time causes time to return to normal. You can only use it once every 24 hours, but there is no limit to how long the pause is.

An antique key: It looks like the kind of key that would open a treasure chest or a castle door. You can use it anywhere to open a door to a pocket dimension. The dimension changes every visit , but you always find what you need—rest, inspiration, materials, etc.

A USB drive: It looks and operates like a normal thumb drive. But you soon realize that it has infinite storage capacity. You also realize that it is indestructible and impossible to loose.

A ring: It appears to be made of some sort of stone or metal, black and polished to a mirror finish. Once on your finger (any finger, for it fits all of them perfectly), you find that all attempt to steal your work fail, and everyone that uses an AI algorithm within your immediate vicinity finds their data has become corrupted.

The pegasus figurines are complete!!

These were sculpted by the talented Carla Avallone at my request for the Greenhorn Trail Kickstarter $10k stretch goal!! All physical backers get a full set of these resin printed bad boys shipped with their books if we hit that last goal :D There's only a week left and less than $1k to go to hit it!!

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Discord | Artbook | Web Comic | Patreon

Someone's story involved Character A believing Character B was terminally ill. In their initial draft, Character B deceived Character A – but that results in Character B coming across as super twisted, which doesn't really fit the vibe of the story. We discussed alternate possibilities and I said "You know, it's actually plausible that Character A could think that Character B was terminally ill without any deception required. In fact, my fiance thought I was terminally ill for several weeks at the beginning of our relationship."

Spring of 2023, my fiance and I were going on super casual dates. Emphasis on super casual, because most of the time they were like grocery store trips with dinner attached, and I thought they were platonic hangouts. I hadn't had so much as a crush by that point, so I was pretty clueless.

He was totally in love with me though and just playing it cool, because the guys at our school have an unfortunate reputation of practically proposing marriage on the first date (which kills the chance to organically get to know a person) and because he knew I would be easily spooked (unfortunately true).

After we went on a hike together (I invited the whole friend group, but only he came), I realized we were becoming good friends. On the ride back, right as he was dropping me off in front of my dorm, I told something that I told my good friends: I have a chronic illness called fibromyalgia. He was very quiet. I said goodbye and got out of the car and we didn't speak of it again.

From then on, I was pretty open about my chronic illness. I made a billion jokes about it and such. He always got weird and quiet when I did. I was sad about that. "Great," I thought, "yet another person who is weirded out by my health issues. I hoped he would be better than that."

Once I started suspecting that he was in love with me, I used that as evidence to gaslight myself into believing that we were just friends, because clearly he was too freaked out by my crazy illness to be in love with me, right?

But then he started hardcore pursuing me and asking me to hang out with him in some small way every single day, and in general being very kind and thoughtful and caring for me in every mundane way he could.

Then, several weeks later, he confessed his love. The story of the events leading up to that love confession are also very funny (involving migraines and an impassioned rant about Sheldon Vanauken's A Severe Mercy) but I will not bog this narrative down with the details. The next day, we had a good old-fashioned DTR. I told him I reciprocated his feelings and then, because I was still bothered by how weird he got whenever I brought up my chronic illness, I said "Oh, by the way, I'm super open with talking about my fibromyalgia, so feel free to ask me any questions if you're curious about how it works!"

He said, very earnestly, "Are you dying?".

Rewind to the day we went on that hike. I say I have a chronic illness. He completely misses what it's called (I guess "fibromyalgia" doesn't stick in the brain) and just hears chronic illness. I was the first chronically ill person he had met before and the wires got crossed in his mind and he mistook it for terminal illness. He didn't want to ask, though, because he assumed it was a very sensitive matter.

A couple days later, he overheard me have a conversation with another chronically ill friend about death and suffering and Christian hope. In that conversation, I said (quoting Sarah Sparks) "you know, with this chronic illness, every day I'm learning how to die."

He took that as confirmation of his suspicions: I was dying. He told no one. He just bore that silently for weeks. When I made jokes about my terminal illness, he thought I was being very brave, but did not have the heart to joke along with me.

Fast forward back to the DTR conversation. After I find this out, I laugh in his face for like ten minutes (poor guy). I ask follow-up questions, like

Q: How did you cope with the fact I was dying?

A: I just decided I wanted to spend as much time with you as I can, for the time I had left, and then when the time came I'd cross that bridge when I get there.

Q: When did you think I was dying?

A: Well, I figured there was no way you would move to [UNGLAMOROUS COLLEGE TOWN] in your last year of life, so I figured you had like...five years, maybe?

He was so matter-of-fact about it. After I stopped laughing, I was deeply moved. Here I was, thinking that this guy was freaked out by my chronic illness, when all along he was quietly preparing to weather my terminal illness with me for the rest of my life.

A week later, in a follow-up conversation, I asked, "So is the reason why you've been so kind to me was because you thought I was dying?" and he replied, "Nope! My behavior was not conditional. I wasn't kind to you because you could die. I was kind to you because I could die at any time, and I want to be like Jesus in whatever time I have left."

the Ahsoka drops the bombshell of “I wouldn’t have if Ezra didn’t reach through Time and Space to save me”

Cal and Luke: “HUH???”

the comparison of how they survived their respective vader fights is so fun

Genesis 3:

And they heard the sound of the LORD God walking in the garden in the cool of the day, and the man and his wife hid themselves from the presence of the LORD God among the trees of the garden. But the LORD God called to the man and said to him, “Where are you?”And he said, “I heard the sound of you in the garden, and I was afraid, because I was naked, and I hid myself."

John 20: