As always, my word count stats are artificially inflated from adding to ongoing fics and also co-writing a lot of stuff.
I wrote in the following fandoms this year: Our Flag Means Death, Roswell New Mexico, Silver Under Nightfall, Sinners, Stargate Atlantis, Tolkien, Wednesday, and What We Do In the Shadows.
I loved writing with @haloud (Dangerous, an otherwise abandoned WIP) and @lizzy-leo (My pretty wax doll--also featuring art by @fidisart, In a Rose Tattoo, and I'll tell you a tale of the bottomless blue) this year!
I completed my Birthday Gift Ficlets by the end of the year, though I'm still working on the February Ficlet Challenge: an OFMD/20k Leagues Under the Sea fusion which I should have made into a single story but instead made into a series so it's hard for folks to follow...anyway I'm finding it compelling.
I received gift fics With Distinction from @tasyfa and Quantum Entanglement from @ajna-eye-cogitations â¤
My favorite tag I used this year was "does it pass the bechdel test if they are planning a man's murder?"
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All gifs are from Heated Rivalry and are of Ilya and/or Shane. Ilya is an early-mid 20s white man with short, light brown curly hair. Shane is an early-mid 20s half Asian man with short black hair. Both Ilya and Shane are clean shaven. All gifs involve Shane moving or positioning Ilya, often during sex while one or both of them is nude.
Gif 1: Ilya is standing in a hotel room, shirtless, facing the door with one hand on the wall, and one hand in Shane's hair. Only the top of Shane's head is visible at Ilya's waist as he crouches in front of him. Ilya sways slightly, looking down at Shane, before he is visibly pulled forward by Shane to enable a blowjob.
Gif 2: Shane and Ilya are on an outdoor balcony on a high rise wearing suits and bowties. Ilya has Shane pushed up against a wall and is leaning close. He goes in for a kiss and Shane flinches back while pushing Ilya away with a hand on his chest. Looking angry, Shane grabs Ilya by his shirt and spins them around so that Ilya is pushed against the wall.
Gif 3: In a back stairwell, Ilya and Shane both wearing casual clothing. Shane has a fist in Ilya's shirt and pushes him roughly by the shoulder into the wall. Ilya looks surprised and Shane looks angry.
Gif 4: Shane and Ilya naked on a bed in a bedroom, Shane on his back under Ilya and rocking from his thrusts. Shane moves his hand from Ilya's side to his neck and pulls him down for an open-mouthed kiss.
Gif 5: Shane and Ilya are both wearing casual clothing in a living room at night. They are kissing, and Shane pushes Ilya backwards until he's up against the wall of windows behind him.
Gif 6: Shane and Ilya are sitting on the end of a hotel bed, wearing casual summer clothing, Shane straddling Ilya's lap. Their foreheads are pressed together before Shane tucks his chin over Ilya's shoulder and pulls his head to his chest to cradle him in a hug.
Gif 7: In a sunlit living room, Shane and Ilya are wearing casual summer clothing and kissing. Shane is backing Ilya up slowly until Ilya bumps against the end of the couch and falls onto it, Shane following him down.
Gif 8: At a dining table wearing casual summer clothes, Shane and Ilya sit side-by-side. Ilya raises a forkful of pasta towards his mouth but Shane stops him with a hand on his wrist, gesturing for him to wait.
Gif 9: Shane is wearing an oversized t-shirt and sweatpants and Ilya is wearing only joggers while they sit on a couch in a living room. Shane lifts his head up from Ilya's lap, cut to a profile shot of Shane swinging his leg over to straddle Ilya and sit in his lap.
Gif 10: In casual summer clothing sitting on the end of a hotel bed. Shane stands from where he is sitting beside Ilya to face him and straddle his lap, cupping his face in his hands.
Gif 11: In casual clothing in a sunlit living room, Ilya lounges on a couch while Shane sits up on the back. Shane leans forward until he can swing a leg over Ilya's hips and straddle his lap.
ICE is attacking immigrants for now, but their goal is to subjugate all of us. Fighting for our neighbors today is a way of fighting for ourselves tomorrow.
Map the infrastructure that ICE depends on. Publicize their vulnerabilities. Popularize simple, reproducible ways to impose consequences every time that ICE inflicts harm on a community. Don't just react to their attacksâchoose the time and place of confrontations. Take the initiative.
"If we know, and do nothing, we are worse than the murderers hired in our name.
"If we know, then we must fight for your life as though it were our ownâwhich it isâand render impassable with our bodies the corridor to the gas chamber. For, if they take you in the morning, they will be coming for us that night."
-James Baldwin, writing to Angela Davis while she was in captivity, November 19, 1970
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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.
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proud victim of the tumblr accent. it's fading out of public consciousness as the tik tok accent takes precedence; a linguistic evolution that makes the tumblr accent 85% funnier to unsuspecting civilians. it's like releasing a disease on a non-inoculated population. coughing baby versus hydrogen bomb.
anyway sound off. at what stage do ppl think Han figured out the Force was real. the boring answer is after seeing Obi-wan vanish but i think he could rationalise that away as his eyes playing tricks on him. what do we think.
that's so funny. that means he accepted Vader deflecting a blaster bolt with his hand as just something freaky government cyborgs can do, and stuck by Luke for multiple years as he tried to figure this Force stuff out, and just treated it like your friend getting really really into neopaganism to cope with a loss.
like yeah kid good job with the witching. i'm certain it will be more useful against your enemies than your sharpshooting. no i do not think your witchcraft is supplementing your aim but i'm not gonna argue about it.
yeah Luke was like 'I heard Ben Kenobi's voice in my head telling me how to blow up the Death Star :)' and Han was like 'kind of an unusual coping mechanism but I'm not gonna argue with him'
thanks to carbonite han not only misses learning about luke's training montage on dagobah, he's also half-blind during their whole escape on tatooine. luke's out there force-kicking henchmen with his gucci boots and doing flips and shit and han can't see a goddamn thing. now on endor luke's yeeting threepio with the power of his mind and han's just like 'the last time we hung out i had to stuff him in a tauntaun sleeping bag'.
[Image 1: Still frame from Star Wars: Return of the Jedi of containing (from left to right) Han Solo, Luke Skywalker, Leia Organa, and Chewbacca. They are surrounded by Ewoks. Han looks shocked, Luke appears to be in the middle of speaking, Leia is relieved, and Chewy has a hand on Leia's shoulder.]
[Image 2: Tags that say: it was lukewarm in there]
Private buyers are increasingly outbidding museums for fossils. Thatâs making it difficultâor even impossibleâfor researchers to improve our
Forget the sale of the century. The auction house Sothebyâs is gearing up for the sale of the epoch. On July 14 it will open live bidding on assorted fossils, but the pièce de rĂŠsistance is lot 20, a rare 67-million-year-old Tyrannosaurus rex skeleton.
The specimenâdubbed Gusâis billed as one of the largest, most complete T. rexes ever found. Gus is expected to fetch up to $30 million and will go to the highest bidder, whether public museum or private collector. The latter have played an increasingly prominent role in buying fossils, with auction houses, according to paleontologists, contributing to the trend by building hype. But when private collectors swoop in and buy fossils at auction as luxury assets, those pieces of history are effectively lost to science.
By nearly all accounts, Gus is a big deal. In its description, Sothebyâs boasts that the specimen, which was discovered on a ranch in South Dakota, comprises âan incredible 183 fossil bone elementsâ making it âapproximately 61% complete by bone count.â The fossil remains have been mounted in a custom steel armature along with replicas of the missing bones. The result is a reconstructed skeleton posed as if in hot pursuit, its mouth full of dagger teeth ready to tear into prey.
âIt does seem to be a spectacular specimen,â says Thomas Holtz, a tyrannosaur specialist at the University of Maryland. The completeness of the skeleton and the high quality of the bone make Gus âscientifically significant,â he says.
Gus is the latest major dinosaur fossil to go up for sale at auction in the US. That trend began in earnest in 1997 when Sothebyâs auctioned Sue, the most complete T. rex on record. That specimen sold for roughly $8.4 millionâthe most money ever paid for a fossil at auction at the time.
âBefore Sue was sold, there were no laws about who owned fossils. There was no value truly ascribed to them,â says Cassandra Hatton, vice chairman and head of the science and natural history department at Sothebyâs. In many other countries the state owns the fossils. But court cases around Sue clarified that in the US, whoever owns the land also owns whatever fossils are on it, Hatton explains. The market has been booming ever since.
But whereas Sue went to a scientific institutionâthe Field Museum in Chicagoâin recent years ultrarich individuals have been snapping up dinosaur fossils at auctions for their private collections, prompting paleontologists to be concerned about the fate of rare specimens. Tech entrepreneur Dan OâDowd owns a T. rex called Samson. And heâs not the only private collector to own a tyrant lizard king. A study published in 2025 found that there are more fossils of T. rex in private collections than there are in public trusts.
Itâs not just T. rex thatâs ending up in personal coffers. In 2024, Sothebyâs sold a Stegosaurus named Apex to hedge fund billionaire Ken Griffin for the record-setting sum of $44.6 million. And last year the auction house sold the only known juvenile Ceratosaurus in the world to an anonymous buyer for $30.5 million. These examples highlight another trend: As prices soar, museums simply cannot compete at auction.
Auction houses say the sales help science by rescuing fossils from the erosion that occurs when they are exposed to the elements, and by helping to get them expertly excavated, prepared, and assessed.
âIf a fossil is not excavated, itâs lost to everyone,â Hatton says.
Paleontologists counter that the incentive to sell specimens to the highest bidder and appeal to high-net-worth collectors actively undermines science every step of the way. That begins at excavation, with commercial outfits that take the fossils out of the ground but fail to exhaustively document the geological context in which a fossil was found, which is essential for understanding the age of the organism, how it died, and the ecosystem it inhabited. Mounting the bones for artistic display makes them impossible to study using modern techniques such as computed tomographic imaging, which can reveal hidden features of fossils noninvasively.
Paleontologists also argue that the auction firms play it fast and loose with science to market the fossils in a way that may make them more appealing to untrained buyers. In the case of Gus, Sothebyâs describes holes in the jaw and elsewhere on the specimen as tyrannosaurid bite marksâsigns that Gus might have battled with or been scavenged by his own kind. The description does not offer any evidence to support this interpretation of the holes, nor does it mention alternative explanations for such damage.
Itâs a dramatic story, but itâs probably wrong, according to Stuart Sumida, a paleontologist at California State University, San Bernardino. Puncture marks are irregularly shaped and have splintered fractures around the edges. The holes on Gusâ bones, in contrast, are perfectly round and smooth-edged. Holes like these are common on tyrannosaur bones and have been previously hypothesized to be the result of infections. âItâs much sexier to say theyâre puncture wounds, but this isnât how puncture wounds look,â Sumida says of the hole in Gusâ jaw. âT. rex probably just had really bad breath.â
When asked by WIRED about the origin of the bite-mark claim, Hatton replied, âThe bite marks are very clear, and are not all straight punctures but lateral bites where you can clearly see the shape of the tooth. You can also tell from the edges of the hole whether the break is clean, or if the hole is gradual (which would be more likely the result of a parasitic or other infection that gradually and evenly eats the bone)." She did not indicate where this analysis came from.
But the central issue with auctioning fossils, researchers contend, is that when specimens end up in private hands, they become unavailable for scientific study. Even if a private collector loans a fossil out for display or study at a museum, as happened last year when the American Museum of Natural History in New York City secured a four-year loan of Griffinâs Stegosaurus, such an arrangement violates a central tenet of paleontology: Scientific reproducibility requires that researchers other than those conducting the original examination have access to those same fossils in perpetuity.
That approach allows paleontologists to validate findings, test new hypotheses, and build knowledge of the past. To ensure access, fossils must be held in public repositories on a permanent basis. So vital is this covenant that established scientific journals wonât publish a study on a specimen that isnât in the custody of a publicly accessible museum, Sumida explains.
Everything scientists have been able to piece together from fossils about prehistoryâfrom the origin of multicellular life to the dawn of humankindârests on this system.
âA scientifically important fossil isn't just a static object; it's a permanent source of data that future generations of scientists will study with tools that haven't even been invented yetâbut only if the fossil remains in the public trust,â says Kristi Curry Rogers, a paleontologist at Macalester College. âThink about all the cool discoveries that have been made in the last 50 years about dinosaur diets, body temperatures, coloration, reproduction, vocalization, neurobiologyânone of these discoveries would have been possible if the fossils had disappeared into private collections."
Sales of fossils to private individuals in the US wonât stop, Sumida acknowledges. So he and Rogers are taking a different tack to help keep important fossils in scienceâs fold. In their respective roles as president and vice president of the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology, they are working to set up the society to act as a liaison between private collectors and museums. Their goal is to persuade private collectors to donate the fossils they buy to science museums right after the gavel falls rather than keeping them as trophy acquisitions.
âWhen it comes to these public auctions of our shared history, the best outcome is when those with the means to acquire an extraordinary fossil choose to immediately place it in the public trust, where everyone benefits," Rogers says.
Private buyers can avoid the bad PR that comes from opposition to these sales by making their purchase anonymously, which could hinder efforts to persuade them to engage in philanthropy. But the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology is hoping that if it can convince even just a few known individuals to donate their fossils to science, they, in turn, will influence others to do the same.
The society is in talks with some collectors and museums, though Sumida declined to share specific details. It doesnât have a plan in place to approach Gusâ buyer, but it might develop one depending on who purchases the fossil.
âA specimen of this quality deserves to be in a museum collection so that not merely the current generation but future researchers (to say nothing of museum-goers) would be able to study and admire it far into the future,â Holtz says of Gus. âLet us hope that whoever acquires it keeps this in mind.â
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the first tumblr post i read about "you're looking for someone it's ok to be cruel to" honestly rewired my brain.
tumblr is full of dimwitted reactionaries but ive also read a lot of things that have fundamentally changed how i think about justice, mental health, etc.
despite the best efforts of the site's staff and its manbaby ceo, there continues to be a contingent of people here who are committed to understanding things better, to doing better, and to changing the world for the better.
