magical aza-chan

You can still join the Yuri Shipping Olympics if you want to! @yuriolympics has a link to their discord here, and you can just pop in directly, join the team you want and start creating!

I'm in Team DCMK and we are still a relatively small but enthusiastic yet chill bunch :} You can come join us if you like DCMK! Don't worry about not being too active!

What do you do?

Honestly, just create a lot of yuri.

It can be fic, art, or other things - i've seen a friendship bracelet be submitted

You get points for your team for creations you submit and more, but it's a very chill competition (at least that's how I've felt it so far). Even if it's chill, you get to create and contribute to a team's result, so there is a nice little boost of team spirit joy there!

Some little perks (from my perspective):

In some rounds called "minirounds", you create pieces based on prompts, and are allowed to create for fandoms outside of your team while still getting points for it! I get stuck in a rut easily, and it has been immensely fun to be able to create for Ace Attorney, RGU, my niche lil books... while knowing that it still contributes to my team <3 If you are like me and have niche little fandoms you want to create for, but need prompting, why not join and create in minirounds?

From what I see, not everyone is submitting full-lineart / colored pieces or longfic. I've seen quite a lot of sketches. I see people using this just to break out of artblock too. If that's you, well, this could be a nice way to get yourself into or back into creating in a low-pressure way.

there's quite a vast array of yuri, so you could potentially discover some new yuri along the way

transfem headcanons are allowed so while it's not actively encouraged, you can yuri beam your ship if that's what you really want to create for. dcmk is lucky to count a huge array of super interesting yuri ships already, but we've also had really cool, beautiful genderbend pieces created

It goes without saying but like everywhere, if you don't like it half-way through you can always hit the bricks. Just leave the server, it's okay! You can play around for a bit if you want and leave when you want out.

Water is way more hydrating than soda, but soda is more hydrating than nothing. A balanced meal is way more nutritious than ice cream, but ice cream is more nutritious than nothing.

Something is better than nothing. Some hydration is better than no hydration. Some nutrients are better than no nutrients. Some produce is better than no produce.

Traditional hairstyles of the Fula people (or Fulani or Fulɓe) 

1, 2: Guinea

4: 1959 Burkina Faso

6: c. 1920

7: Burkina Faso

8. Central Guinea

9. Dalaba, French Guinea (now Guinea)

Like this!

Wooden headrests elevate the neck and head to ensure elaborate braids, beads, and cowrie shells remain pristine and protected from dust and the ground. Elevating the head off the ground in semi-arid Sahel regions also helps improve airflow and keeps the sleeper cooler during the night.

Headrests are apparently used in a lot of regions of Africa. Here’s a Mwila woman demonstrating hers:

There are a ton of quick and cheap electrolyte drink recipes that you can find online. Tea, coffee, cocount water, milk, milk substitutes, juice, etc are all hydrating despite extremely persistent myths. Many fruits and veggies like cucumbers, watermelon, strawberries, bell peppers, etc have high water content and are a great way to hydrate while also getting vital nutrients. Popsicles are also a good way to stay cool and hydrated and you can buy them or make your own with whatever ingredients you want; there are recipes online, including ones for electrolyte popsicles, but you can also just do basic ones with your choice of fruit juice and whatever you want to add, like chunks of fresh or frozen fruit.

The local Malagasy people are dealing with extreme poverty and food insecurity, with nearly half of children under five years old suffering from chronic malnutrition. The local people have always subsisted on hunting wildlife for food, and as Madagascar’s wildlife population declines, the people who rely on so-called bushmeat to survive are struggling more and more. People are literally starving.

Our conservation team thought about this a lot. They had initially intended to focus efforts on education but came to understand that this is not an issue arising from a lack of knowledge. For these people it is a question of survival. It doesn’t matter how many times a foreigner tells you not to eat an animal you’ve hunted your entire life, if your child is starving you are going to do everything in your power to keep your family alive.

So the vets changed course. Rather than focus efforts on simply teaching people about lemurs, they decided to try and use veterinary medicine to reduce the underlying issue of food insecurity. They supposed that if a reliable protein source could be introduced for the people who needed it, the dependence on meat from wildlife would greatly decrease. So they got to work establishing new flocks of chickens in the most at-risk communities, and also initiated an aggressive vaccination program for Newcastle disease (an infectious illness of poultry that is of particular concern in this area). They worked with over 600 households to ensure appropriate husbandry and vaccination for every flock, and soon found these communities were being transformed by the introduction of a steady protein source. Families with a healthy flock of chickens were far less likely to hunt wild animals like lemurs, and fewer kids went hungry. Thats what we call a win-win situation.

This chicken vaccine program became just one small part of an amazing conservation outreach initiative in Madagascar that puts local people at the center of everything they do. Helping these vulnerable communities of people helps similarly vulnerable wildlife, always. If we go into a country guns-blazing with that fire for conservation in our hearts and a plan to save native animals, we simply cannot ignore the humans who live around them. Doing so is counterintuitive to creating an effective plan because whether we recognize it or not, humans and animals are inextricably linked in many ways. A true conservation success story is one that doesn’t leave needy humans in its wake, and that is why I think this particular story has stuck with me for so long.

(Source 1)

(Source 2- cool video exploring this initiative from some folks involved)

But on top of that, you know who the most ardent conservationists are once security has been achieved? The people who had once been forced to poach or slash-and-burn to survive. You know who’s great at tracking down gorilla poachers? Ex-poachers. Who’s good at understanding and advocating for people forced to do these things to survive? Ex-poachers. Who can convince others to take a chance on finding a better way to survive? Same answer.

The former illegal fishers are now sought-after experts, because they know how to spot the arapaima and tell juveniles apart from adults. They get to keep practicing the fishing skills that were passed down to them. The actual process of fishing is easier because they can work together and don't have to sneak around. The profits are higher because they can sell the fish openly to restaurants and to the public. The fishing organization members make sure that other people in their communities don't fish illegally. And the numbers of arapaima keep going up and up, so there's plenty to go around even as more people join the fishing organizations.

If you click all the way through to the report from the conservation org that started the fishing organizations project, there are quotes from fishing organization members:

"We built a second house and I'm putting my oldest two kids through college on the money we get from fishing."

"Nowadays you have young people walking around with pockets full of cash saying "I got 6,000 from fishing this year!" It used to be you wouldn't even get 50 reais of pocket money."

Collection of Antagonists

All the kind asks I received for the fic ask game and all the artfight profiles I saw lately, made me think about my own OCs too. I realize I accumulated a good dozen just through writing plotfics (which required OCs to move the plot) and other wips, but I almost never draw them. I don't plan on participating in artfight, but still thought it'd be fun to illustrate them for once. Here is a small collection of my antagonist OCs. My OCs tend to be visually a bit plain, I think. I try to make them more or less distinctive in personality but not too weird in appearance.

Side-note: karinpots is just my pseud on ao3!

look up recipes (especially snack recipes) that are child/toddler/baby-friendly

-ancient roman posca: water, red or white wine vinegar, honey, salt, herbs (coriander, mint, thyme)

-switchel: water, ginger, vinegar, sweetener, lemon, salt

-ayran: yogurt, water, salt, mint

-sees the reports of the heatwave in Europe-

What a red flag actually means: something here is an indicator of a potential problem (but might be fine with a reasonable explanation)

What people have now decided it means: abuse

I've lost count of the number of times I've now had to read variants of "My partner takes all my money and gives me back an allowance because he says it's a man's job to control finances, but he's racking up gambling debts" being met with "Wow this man is a walking red flag" no Becky that is abuse. That is not an indicator. He is an abuser. Call the police. We have lost the concept of a proxy: a thing that indicates a more important thing. And it's relevant to this conversation because I'm actually going to go out on a limb here:

With the obvious exception of paedophilia, age gaps themselves aren't a problem at all - they are a proxy for the actual harmful phenomenon. Hea me out, let me explain

The reason we don't like age gaps is because of the implied power dynamic. If one partner, usually male, is older than other - particularly if the other is still quite young - the risk is that what we're seeing is a worldly wise predator who is exploiting the lack of life experience of a young beautiful woman by mentally abusing her until she's no longer young and pretty enough to satisfy, at which point he'll move on to the next. There have been enough examples of this in human history. It's unfortunately not an uncommon pattern. Genders can also be diverse in this scenario

We can't necessarily see that dynamic from the outside. But we CAN see an inherent element of it: the ages of the people involved. So age becomes a proxy for the abuse. And, hey, it's often correct.

But here's the thing: the ages themselves are not causing harm.

The power dynamic is. The abuse is.

Plenty of age gap relationships are loving, healthy and steadfast. Two people met and genuinely fell in love regardless of the outer packaging, and have a relationship with all the highs and lows and challenges and rewards as any more traditional pairing. This happens all the time

Is the age gap a red flag? Sure! It indicates a potential issue.

Is it inherently abusive? Absolutely fucking not.

OP is right - we need to stop focusing just on the numbers and twisting the facts to fit by infantilising the younger partners, and start focusing on the actual harms. The DiCaprio Pattern of only dating under 24s repeatedly is itself a proxy, too, actually - but a much stronger one than the simple presence of an age gap.

(Even so, in DiCaprio's case, until any of his former partners come forward and describe him as abusive, actually, even that is up in the air - my personal interpretation, given how strong a pattern it is, is that he's a loser who views women as trophies (consciously or not). If any have come forward and I don't know about it, of course, fair enough. But those women were adults capable of making their own decisions, even if they might later come to regret it. And regretting poor decisions is part of life! That's how it goes, particularly with relationships. As long as they weren't abused, there's no biggie. And just as he was looking for young-and-beautiful, there's no way they weren't, on some level, looking for rich-and-famous; it goes both ways.)

Also, another element of this: I think a lot of modern extreme puritan discourse on this is actually ironically down to the age of those taking part. Up until your late 20s, ten years is actually a huge span of time to you, because in your own life you were in a completely different developmental phase ten years ago (teenager), and a completely different phase again ten years before that (child). That skews your sense of what a ten-year gap means. Whereas once you're in your 30s and beyond, ten years is like. Yeah I was an adult ten years ago, and I still am now. That's two adults. Who cares.

direct orders of "you really really need to kill this guy" ignored: 1