Age of the geek, baby.

do you see the vision

A blazing bright summer!

Itty Bitty Summer Dragon stickers ♡

I'm OFFICIALLY DONE with all the itty bitty seasonal dragons :") thanks everyone for checking them out!! It was such a fun little project to do! All the seasons here:

Like their tension is absolutely insane, me and my friend were geeking bad.

I used to use Google docs, but the white mode only was really annoying me (tires my eyes), so I swapped to Ellipsus (which I genuinely love and recommend), but it was bothering me a bit that I need wifi in order to use it, so now I switched to LibreOffice Writer, which I do like.

It very much has a Microsoft Word feel, but is open source and you need no accounts to use it. It's local on your device, so no AI can scan it, and no wifi is needed.

That’s not problem solving. It’s barely catharsis, in practice. It doesn’t just create more problems than it solves, it destroys more solutions than it creates.

Put the apocalypse down, and back away slowly.

Voting as Fire Extinguisher

When the haunted house catches fire: a moment of indecision.

The house was, after all, built on bones, and blood, and bad intentions.

Everyone who enters the house feels that overwhelming dread, the evil that perhaps only fire can purge.

It’s tempting to just let it burn.

And then I remember:

there are children inside.

TO THROW A WRENCH IN THE BLOOD MACHINE: Five (Season-Appropriate) Metaphors for Voting

by Kyle “Guante” Tran Myhre

VOTING AS PRESSURE ON THE WOUND: After the battle against the killer robots, I become aware that my leg is bleeding. And I know that applying pressure does not, on its own, heal the wound, but it will buy time for the medic to arrive, for the healing to begin.

VOTING AS FIRE EXTINGUISHER When the haunted house catches fire: a moment of indecision. The house was, after all, built on bones, and blood, and bad intentions. Everyone who enters the house feels that overwhelming dread, the evil that perhaps only fire can purge. It’s tempting to just let it burn. And then I remember that there are children inside. 

VOTING AS THIS ONE SMALL THING I’ve tracked the werewolf to its lair, deep in the basement of the old doll factory just outside town. Upon entering, I have the option of flipping the light switch from off to on. Either way, the battle will be difficult. Either way, victory is not guaranteed. But the werewolf can see in the dark, and I can’t. So I will do this one small thing. I will summon what light I can. And I will keep going.

VOTING AS HIGH GROUND, CLEAR SIGHT LINES, AND MULTIPLE ESCAPE ROUTES It’s been said that during the zombie apocalypse, the undead are not the biggest threat, that the real monsters are the human survivors who will hoard resources, betray one another, and fight endlessly amongst ourselves. And it’s true: survival is about so much more than just not getting eaten by zombies. But not getting eaten by zombies is still an important part of the plan.

VOTING AS WRENCH IN THE BLOOD MACHINE Our village has existed in the shadow of Dracula’s castle for years, and has been the site of many battles against him. Now, he’s running for mayor. His platform: rather than turning into a giant bat to hunt his victims one-by-one, he will take control of the village’s resources, its watchmen and bureaucratic machinery, creating a system that will more efficiently identify victims and supply him with fresh blood.

Will defeating Dracula at the polls end his reign of terror? No. But what it will do is deprive him of one specific set of tools that he will otherwise use to hurt people. It will allow us to think offensively rather than defensively, because when the forces of darkness are not knocking on our doors, it frees us up to go knock on theirs.

And yes: there is always more work to be done. There is always more horror beyond that which is right in front of us.

And those who study monsters are right: if we only think short-term, we lose.

But those who fight monsters have taught me: short-term and long-term thinking are not mutually exclusive. We use every tool we have access to, every opportunity to shape the terrain of battle, every advantage we can seize. We don’t split up. We don’t leave anyone behind. We don’t wait for some hero to save us, whether a knight in shining armor or an opposition politician. We fight the monsters. And when the sun rises, we do the work of creating a world in which there are no monsters.

For example, we see the horrific and sympathetic circumstances that lead Magneto to decide to turn against humans in "X-Men 1", but we don't necessarily see a corresponding moment where Charles Xavier his nemesis(/friend/lover) decided to take action to become a good guy in that film (in part because the film is focused on Wolverine's hero's journey where he decides by the end to become a hero). This leads to many finding Magneto more understandable as a heroic figure and lends a lot of (possibly unintentional) sympathetic weight to his motives over that of the heroes, even when the outcomes are reckless or horrifying and meant as an (often clumsy) cautionary tale.

Whereas if you focus, in theory, on the first time a villain realized they could do bad things and get away with it, that it helped them achieve their goals, versus just that they have a goal after something bad happened to them.

And this post made me realize how by contrast we don't always get the hero's "that time a bad thing happened to me and I decided to do a good thing" - perhaps because the hero's journey towards doing good is often the point of the whole plot, whereas the villain gets the succinct flashback or monologue.