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if i look back, i am lost
taylor price
"I'm Dorothy Gale from Kansas"

Janaina Medeiros
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Cosmic Funnies
Cosimo Galluzzi
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TVSTRANGERTHINGS
$LAYYYTER
tumblr dot com

shark vs the universe
Stranger Things

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Show & Tell
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Lorenzo!

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Three years ago today. I love this bit of video. Not sure why.
Because this looks like a Monet painting or an old watercolour anime background come to life?! I was in utter disbelief until it started moving.
More than just a Monet painting, one of the ones just after he started going blind! When things started getting brighter, more colorful, and soft around the edges! A true living masterpiece!
The Winter Maw, 2026
a totally handmade, fully-functional marionette created for the annual "Winter Exquisite" gallery show (this year's chosen medium was puppetry) at the Forbes Library in Northampton, MA - if you're local, you can visit anytime between the 7th & the end of the month!
for the winter theme, i designed a monster that blends my appreciation of this season's beauty with a more sinister, predatory element representing struggles against seasonal depression. bringing her to life was a huge learning experience & i got to try out a lot of new materials/techniques - i'd never made a marionette before! she took me all January but i'm very pleased with the result.
One of my favorite golden hour moments I’ve ever caught on camera. A great 13 seconds of calm and relaxation that I love coming back to
Mountain shepherds by Ivan Yakushev

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I think it's hilarious that hands down the worst way to learn magic is the actual rulebook. Please do not read that. It's just there for reference when something weird happens
posts that i know are about magic the gathering but i have to check to make sure op isn't just living in a way doper world than me
The Bird of A Thousand Voices, installation by Boris Acket at the Vilnius Light Festival in the St. Catherine Church, 𝟤𝟢𝟤𝟨
You have now traveled back to 315 BCE in China, during the Warring States period, and have become the Governor of Shu(Sichuan) Commandery. The King of Qin has ordered you to harness the Min River—a tributary of the Yangtze that poses a flooding threat to the Chengdu Plain. What would you do?(cr 扇子有画)
Dujiangyan is considered one of the greatest hydraulic engineering projects in human history. Constructed during the Warring States period under the direction of Li Bing, the Governor of Shu Commandery, and his son, it has spanned over 2,300 years and remains fully operational today. Water conservancy experts from around the world frequently visit the site. In 2000, UNESCO inscribed Dujiangyan as a World Heritage Site, recognizing it as "a living heritage of water management" and "the oldest and only surviving large-scale hydraulic project in the world that operates without a dam." It stands as an outstanding example of global water conservancy culture. The design of Dujiangyan is remarkably ingenious, adhering to the principle of minimal intervention. It works in complete harmony with nature, causing no ecological disruption. For over 2,300 years, it has had no negative environmental impact, embodying the Daoist philosophy of "harmony between humanity and nature" to the fullest extent.
The water of Dujiangyan is very clear, appearing green when sediment levels are low. The surrounding ecology is also thriving, with people often spotting otters—an indicator species highly sensitive to water quality—frequenting the area. A netizen from northern China visited Dujiangyan and was deeply moved by its grandeur. She later posted a question online: "I love Dujiangyan so much—would the people of Dujiangyan mind if I had my ashes scattered here after I die?" This sparked lively discussions, with the top-voted comment as follows:
Jokes aside, Cnetizens genuinely love Dujiangyan. Mount Qingcheng, where Dujiangyan is located, is one of the important birthplaces of Daoism. During the Eastern Han Dynasty(25–220 CE), Zhang Daoling cultivated his practice and founded a Daoist sect here. Mount Qingcheng is renowned for its "ethereal seclusion under heaven." Especially on overcast days, the mountain brims with a profound spiritual energy—a presence that photos cannot convey. One must experience it in person to feel as if stumbling into a realm of cultivation, akin to the world of an xianxia novel.
Here are some scientific facts about blood loss for all you psychopaths writers out there.
This is actually very nice. I like the soda bottles as reference. (I remember when I was writing ‘Wizards of Ceres’ how I had to do a similar soda-bottle conversion to try to work out how much blood Fai could drink from Kurogane without killing him.)
On the topic of vampires incidentally, this basically means that there is no reason why feeding from someone should necessitate killing them, unless the vamp can chug two soda bottles worth of liquid in one go or carelessly leaves the bottle open when they’re done
@fieldofclover thought this might come in handy for, you know, vampirey things
Ooh, I like this! The bottles as a reference makes it quite easy to picture mentally - especially since, having previously experienced just how much mess a litre-bottle spilt on the floor actually makes, it gives a better idea of volume etc.
Incidentally, as a frequent blood donor myself (thank you, haemochromatosis), and thus being more aware of the volume of blood donated at each session (the average appears to be 450ml, or 0.45 litres per blood bag filled) and needing to know how long it takes red blood cells and plasma to recover after donation–
about 24 hours for plasma, and up to 8 weeks for red blood cells themselves, which is why the average length between donations is 12 weeks, to ensure the body is well recovered by the next donation (which is also why I was so fucking tired after having to donate once a month for the first three months of my treatment)
– I ended up doing a bit of reading re: blood loss, but this really is the best imagery for it I’ve seen without bogging down into too much science stuff.
Other crucially important facts relevant to vampire porn I have learned:
yes, you can get an erection after donating blood, as the body generally maintains blood pressure equilibrium even if the volume of red blood cells per liquid ml is lower, though if you lose anything more than half a litre you’re probably gonna find it a bit difficult;
erythropoietin is a funky chemical involved in converting stem cells to red blood cells which your body produces when you need more of ‘em, so if we’re going with the standard ‘vampire saliva is an anticoagulant and narcotic stimulant, and/or induces arousal’ conceit, it probably makes sense that said saliva introduces a similar compound into the human blood stream in the post-feeding stage to encourage their food to recover quickly for a repeat feeding, usually while licking the wounds left behind;
your vamp is probably gonna have a really full belly if they try and drink more than the average 450ml or so in one sitting. Blood is quite a bit thicker than water or soft drink; it’s more like drinking a hearty broth or soup. Can you imagine attempting to chug a litre of pressurised soup as it squirts into your mouth with considerable force? No thanks!
tl;dr the science behind blood loss is fascinating, especially in a vampire context, and the government agencies monitoring my search history probably think I’m a serial killer
And in case you aren’t writing about vampires, here’s a page with a neat video of visual rep of blood loss, liter by liter.
AND while I was trying to find that video, I also came across these visual aids:
And this shirt, which only has 250ml (¼th a liter) of fake blood on it:
They also say that even paramedics have a difficult time guessing how much blood was lost, and many of them will say they probably got it wrong. For people used to having our blood be on the inside, it can be startling to see so much of it on the outside- even when ‘so much’ turns out to be actually not as much as we thought.
I’m reblogging this just so I don’t lose it becuz info that I somehow have but also desperetly need. I mena. I know how to write how it FEELS. But that’s depressinf so bleh
One of my big breaks with star wars canon is that I fully think that, even with hyperlanes, they should need several weeks to get from the outer rim to Coruscant. I will write that trip as taking Forever unless people are using restricted tech (military) or breaking the law (Han Solo).
I can accept a midpoint btw. The military can take a few days but the freight travel should be weeks.
But like... it should take as long to get a superfreighter from Tatooine to Coruscant as it does to get a container ship from Japan to Ireland (48 days).
I want to imagine that they (the cargo ships) are also more dangerous at FTL speeds so they have dedicated slow lanes. Extra wide for safety, with really long "exit ramps" so they can accel/decel out without hitting anyone. We want to avoid an accidental Holdo Maneuver.
There are also emergency lanes that are kept clear for, well, emergencies. It's not like you can DODGE in a hyperlane. You can't pull over to let the emergency ships speed past you.
So. Service lanes.
So you have the extra slow lanes for freight/cargo/other huge liners.
"Normal" lanes for personal or small group transports.
And emergency lanes for the military, relief aid, political officials, etc.
So the military gets there in two days (ftl equivalent of Mach speeds), solo travelers get there in anywhere from one to three weeks (you can pay for the faster lanes, but it's restricted for safety; bounty hunters usually pay for the faster lane).
And the giant cargo ship is going to take two months. Because fuck you, transportation is such a crucial element of SO MANY TRADE ISSUES, you can't just whittle it down. It needs to be a pain in the ass. You gotta make it suck.
#I totally agree #the interesting thing about galactic level trade is its sheer scale too #hyperlanes don’t connect every single planet- it’s totally feasible that to get from planet A to planet B #you’ll have to drop out of hyperspace like 4 times to pick up another lane #like how you have to change highways to get from city A to city B #I like to think that each time the freighters drop out of hyperspace they have to go through planetary customs too #like how trucks on the road have to periodically pull over for weigh in stations #so a trip you could make in a week gets an extra day and a half worth of time #spent waiting in lines for customs and whatnot (via @katrina-loves-birds)
You get it!
In this vein... who here has spent hours upon hours watching logistics videos by Wendover Productions?

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I love that Jules Verne asked the question "What kind of person could circumnavigate the world in 80 days?" and decided that the answer was not a groundbreaking explorer or genius inventor, but a guy who's really, really, really obsessed with train and boat schedules.
my final paper for my CS degree was literally "how can we algorithmically optimise for the fastest possible circumnavigation route on commercial flights?", which incidentally required me to adopt a very good working knowledge of what flight options are available at what times (and also led to me accidentally memorising several hundred airport codes)
incidentally the fastest possible route seems to be about 51 hours, if you're working from 2022 schedules like i was. if you use current schedules and are very optimistic about how quickly you can transfer between flights, you can maybe get it down to around 48 hours (also known as 25 millivernes).
The very best thing about tumblr is that you can make a post about a 154-year-old novel and get responses like this.
honestly we should really remake that whole "you're doing multiple rows of teeth Extremely Noticeably Wrong" post that we made once and got deleted (it was technically a reblog of someone else's post and it must've been deleted). it's still happening and it's still so prominent every time it happens.
okay this has annoyed me enough that i'm making this full post again
so, basic physics.
if you are exerting force down onto an object, then it is spread out along the contacting surface area. this is how a knife or a sword works — you are putting force down onto a long, thin line, and thus, all that force is focused down onto that long, thin line. if you have something like, say, a bat or a club, then you are putting that force down along the rounder and wider edge of that object, making it a blunt force object, yeah?
the same applies if you have multiple edges. for instance, this is how a bed of nails works. sure, if you step on a single nail, then all of your weight is pushing down onto that point. but, if you lay on many nails, maybe even fairly close together, then each one takes your weight equally, and they don't have that same ability to puncture the skin. you're putting the same force down onto multiple points, but even though there's space between the surface of each point, that force is getting divided between all of them like it's all just one surface.
this is pretty bad if we're talking about weapons. for example, if you put too many nails into a spiked bat, then you may as well have basically added none. it might inflict some scrapes and surface wounds, but you won't do any more damage than the bat itself would do.
here's a pretty good video for a demonstration, and you can see how, by spreading out that force exerted, you can even restrict your own ability to pierce.
(behold, an image that looks like someone being injured, but, by definition, is someone showing how uninjured they are)
the same applies for teeth.
if you have multiple rows of teeth, and you exert force down onto them to bite, that force is being spread out and divided over every point of every tooth.
this is not a very good setup if, say, you are a macropredator trying to eat large prey. you require teeth that can shear into and cut flesh, even break bone, and adding additional rows means that you no longer have a cutting edge through which to push through flesh or bone, but instead, many objects forming one larger surface to push through flesh or bone together, something which requires exponentially more force for much worse results, and is likely to instead end up breaking your own teeth.
think about knives for a moment. the reason a knife is good at cutting is because that force is being exerted down onto a very thin edge, making it hard to resist. knives get dull when they lose this thin edge, and have to have the thinness of that edge restored in order to regain cutting ability.
adding multiple points is, effectively, intentionally dulling this edge. to add a point of comparison, seeing multiple tooth rows in designs intended to have high bite force or ability to cut through flesh, is a lot like seeing overdesigned anime swords. animals have one, shearing edge to their teeth for the same reason that, on the surface, all real swords tend to look the same (with similar vast differences in the details).
"but!" you may say, "sharks have multiple rows of teeth! and they bite hard!"
which is where i point to how white sharks' (and other, similar macropredatory sharks') dentition actually works.
this is the lower jaw of a white shark. you can see that they do have multiple rows of teeth — but only the frontmost row is actually being used. you might see doubles, like in the front, but they occur when the shark is actively in the process of replacing that tooth with another (the same reason that humans might appear to have a double tooth, when a baby tooth is being lost and the adult replacement is coming up underneath). the other rows are pressed flat towards the back of the mouth, like a switchblade, ready to spring up and replace that outermost tooth.
although these sharks might have multiple rows of teeth, only one row is actually being used at any given time.
you can also see how this functions in another known bone-crusher, the spotted hyena. the teeth are very thick and massive, but each individual tooth still comes up to a point after the previous tooth's point, forming a singular shearing edge, the carnassial, that pushes down on bone in a singular, cutting edge.
so, what good are multiple rows of teeth? why do animals have them?
well, one, because they can operate more like barbed wire.
caecilians are one group of animals with well-developed multiple rows of teeth, and this is because they are primarily insectivores. they are very good at gripping onto soft bodied prey, much like barbed wire or burrs catching onto exposed flesh, and shredding it. these teeth would not survive contact with plentiful resistance, so mostly, they don't.
this is also why other species of sharks, like sand tiger sharks (or ragged tooth sharks), do have multiple rows of teeth — they are much more useful for holding onto slippery prey, like fish or cephalopods, and shredding flesh. these teeth are much thinner, so that they can fit more into the mouth, and each one has a longer profile than the nearly square frame of a white shark's tooth. they might not be hunting marine mammals, but this is quite handy as a generalist in the ocean.
alternatively, if multiple teeth are spreading out that force anyways and working as blunt force weapons, then you could lean into it. you could make your teeth massive and thick, to sustain such forces, but flatten them, and turn them into a crushing battery like these stingrays, better for cracking apart hard-shelled animals like crustaceans and mollusks. in our metaphor, this might be closer to a nutcracker, or a hydraulic press. not very useful at cutting flesh, but good at getting through objects that no one else can.
so, yes. please consider this at least a little, before i start thinking your cool monster design has teeth that don't work.
Omg manticores are fish-eaters :o
They should add "On Horseback" option to Google Maps. For writers.
"Hevoslinja" (Trans-Horse) is a European art project started in 2014 by Finnish artist Eero Yli-Vakkuri - according to his own words 'skilless in riding and afraid of animals' at the start.
The aim of the project was to travel 270 km / 168 miles between Helsinki and Turku in Finland, and to highlight the possibility of horse travel in modern society. Since then they've took to promoting horseback efforts in urban landscapes with several European collaborators and artists.
Yli-Vakkuri and collaborators first spent eight months practicing riding to become safely self-sufficient in saddle, and bought a Finnhorse gelding Toivottu Poika ('Awaited Son'). The route followed, as closely as possible, the old coastal royal country road of the premodern era, Kuninkaantie/Suuri Rantatie, and took 9 days.
Toivottu Poika is a very average example of his breed, standing at some 155 cm / 15.1 hh tall. The Finnhorse is a relative of for example the North-Norwegian Lyngshest breed, the Icelandic horse, the Swedish Gotlandsruss pony and the Estonian landrace horse and Tori horse breed. It is a mid-sized light draught and trotter, a sensibly realistic mediaeval country travel horse equivalent.
For more hardcore short-term treks, looking into competitive endurance riding can be helpful. Mongol Derby might be one of the most intense races, as it recreates the Chinggis Khan era postal system of swapping horses continuously over a 1000 km / 620 mile route.
By only including skilled endurance riders, keeping up a constant fast speed and swapping horses every 40 km / 25 mil, the Mongol Derby route only takes 10 days even though it's several times the length of the Trans-Horse project. This is the speed of highly organised imperial messengers with the supporting cultural infrastructure, professional marathon runners where Yli-Vakkuri and Toivottu poika were leisure hikers.
The Mongolian landrace horse is a very distant relative of the breeds above, but much lighter and smaller than the agriculturally focused modern Finnhorse - typicaly standing at 142 cm / 14 hh at most. (This would've also been common for Finnhorses before the 19th century.) What really differentiates them from Western breeds, however, is the way they're trained and raised in semi-feral herds, and it's said that while the rider may decide where the pair is headed, the horse is the one to decide how to get there.
also it's not quite google maps, but there is a lovely site called Viabundus!
the last i checked, the map of roads stretches from Calais, France to Moscow, Russia west to east and from Košice, Slovakia to Tornio, Finland south to north. it doesn't cover all of Europe, for example Sweden and Norway are empty at the moment, but it is quite extensive and still being worked on! in addition to showing the old roads, you can calculate the distance and travel time from one city to another, and there are a lot of options:
and that's not all! here's a description from the site itself (emphasis mine):
"Viabundus is a freely accessible online street map of late medieval and early modern northern Europe (1350-1650). Originally conceived as the digitisation of Friedrich Bruns and Hugo Weczerka's Hansische Handelsstraßen (1962) atlas of land roads in the Hanseatic area, the Viabundus map moves beyond that. It includes among others: a database with information about settlements, towns, tolls, staple markets and other information relevant for the pre-modern traveller; a route calculator; a calendar of fairs; and additional land routes as well as water ways."
it's quite neat and also free! i hope someone else finds it as fascinating and cool as i did :)
Somebody at work keeps adjusting one of the perimeter cameras to have this beautiful artistic angle on the museum in a historical building across the way. The sun sets just behind it and the whole sky turns golden-blue, clouds streaked across the sky above. The lush tree line beneath the museum is perfectly lined up along the rule of thirds and the building itself towers above, almost mythical in its evening glory. Like damn, take a still from this camera and send it to the museum to frame and hang on their wall. I do need the camera to be pointing at the parking lot. Tho
The setting sun bounces off the skyscrapers downtown and hits the museum's windows and every one of them turns the same golden hue as the sky behind, reflected in the trees just starting to turn golden-orange beneath. The bottoms of the clouds take on the slightest tinge of purple and birds circle above, speckling the evening sky as they call autumn's last farewell. Someone's car got broken into in the parking lot last week, Tammy, point the damn camera at the cars

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Dissociative Defense / Mogens Jacobsen 2006-11-03
biological, galvanic battery consisting of several hundred potatoes. When the exhibition starts, the electrical power of the potatoes drives a text censoring software system… As the potatoes begin to dry out, the suppressed words and censored sentences will gradually reappear in the text.
There is a really frustrating thing where some kinds of speculative story are hard to write because they will be assumed to be bad (clumsy, harmful, regressive) metaphors for real-world events or people, rather than exploring completely speculative ideas. Like:
"What if a small group of religious extremists, persecuted in their own country, moved to an inhospitable uninhabited island and had to rebuild society there?" - But the Americas and Australia weren't inhospitable and were full of Native nations, why are you perpetuating the idea of Terra Nullius and manifest destiny? - Yes, that's because this isn't a metaphor for the British invading other countries, it's a metaphor for finding out how much of a person's religious practise is rooted in worldly concerns, vs how much they will really stymie themselves for the sake of God.
"What if 1/100 children born was a werewolf?" - But queer people are no danger to straight people, and disabled people don't have predictable patterns to their illnesses, and most people who have uncontrollable rages really CAN control them and are just lying, and no minority group has superpowers... - Yes, but that's all immaterial, because I wanted to talk about a load of other metaphors about the passage of time and responsibility and the relationship between humans and wildlife.
It almost feels like death of the author, like "Death of the most obvious metaphor" - If you couldn't reach for the (tormented) parallel between being an alien species and being stateless, what stories could someone tell? If your changeling-baby was neither disabled nor adopted, what would the story be about? Etc.
I was literally just thinking about this yesterday! It's a trend I've seen a LOT in recent years in lit crit, particularly when discussing fantasy.
I think it particularly comes up the moment an author includes any sort of marginalisation/oppression for their fictional/fantasy world. I've lost count of the times now where I've seen people read a book on, say, the terrible oppression of the Gwyllion, and immediately gone "Oh, so the Gwyllion are a metaphor for the real world X people, either deliberately or accidentally through the author's inherent racism. This is therefore super problematic because the Gwyllion are also described as Y, which means the author is also saying that about X people."
There will always be real world parallels when discussing oppression. Always. But that's because oppression is oppression - precise details may vary, but it follows the same pathways the world over, and that will naturally be copied into fiction as well. This does not mean the author is intentionally telling the exact allegory that you've projected onto it. If that's how you read everything, then yeah, everything becomes super problematic, but also, why are you reading any fiction that isn't solely about real world historical events? It's clearly not for you
And, you know, obviously there are works that are racist/misogynistic/etc, including deliberately so. But I really don't like the way people have started going "I have spotted a PROBLEMATIC ALLEGORY here, I'm ever so smart" and acting like they're the cleverest little critic that ever lived. You have to meet a work on its own terms. Lovecraft was a big ole racist, sure. Someone who has written a book about the oppression of magic users in their fantasy world, however, is rarely writing a story about how queerness lurks in family lines and must be controlled; they are way more commonly writing a story about a world with magic that they then wanted to take seriously, and while there might well be elements of queerness there, those magic users are not a 1:1 replacement.
Sometimes these lines are blurry! But we're going way too far to one end of that spectrum
The post that got me thinking about this yesterday was someone talking about how they'd love to write a vampire story exploring vampirism as a disability (dependence on a substance to manage the condition, blindness/weakness in daytime, can't enter buildings without accommodation, etc). But, they said, they can't, because they don't want to be making the point that disabled people are parasites, and vampires are generally considered parasitic.
And like. What an incredible shame. That we'll lose that, because they're already afraid of the "I have spotted a PROBLEMATIC ALLEGORY" crowd. That would be a great story for exploring disability themes, OR just a great new take on vampires, and either of those things would be so good to read. But there would be so many people who would jump in with "So you think disabled people are draining the life force of the ableds around them?", never stopping to actually think "Vampires are not a 1:1 stand in for real world disability because they are fictional and do not exist."
Anyway sorry I've rambled here, not sure how coherent I'm being. But yes, I was thinking about this just yesterday! Wild.