Suz the Lizard

The psychic horse can take over his body and control his movements and has total power over him in terms of introducing him to the culture and explaining how things work and which people to trust—but this is fine because the horse is Nice

Not only that horse, but all horses: they’re fundamentally Good, therefore we have to trust them

The Valdemar series kinda plays with morality and what counts for good or evil, who is on what side. What the motives are, and what makes control over a person or destiny okay.

The horses are avatars of a god, and are in fact challenged in some books, and admit they make mistakes, and they are not always right.

Like yeah it’s 80s-90s fantasy tropes, it’s chock full of “cringe,” and the writing quality varies from book to book. It’s not High Literature, but it is interesting and fun. There’s gay and trans and ace characters, there’s arguments over whether being raised by “evil” people makes you evil, there’s discussions over religious freedom, over children’s rights, over war, over magic and power and what it means to have power. There’s murder plots and spy plots and save-the-day adventures. There’s stories about what you do after you survive the adventure and are left permanently disabled and not even magic healing or divine intervention can fix you.

There is very much an awareness of the genre Mercedes Lackey is writing in, and the tropes thereof. Yes, we do suffer a bit from those tropes sometimes, but it’s much less tiresome than most of the male authors from that time period. They’re weird little books, but they’re fun, and know they’re written for fun.

#my old phone looks like this on my shelf lmao #im too scared to touch it to throw it away #idk what trash this even goes into when its at this point

The pillow-shaped object here used to be the phone’s battery. It’s not a battery anymore. Now it’s a balloon full of corrosive, pyrophoric chemicals and hydrogen gas and it’s one puncture away from burning your house down. I am 100% serious. You should be scared to touch it.

But you gotta touch it, because you gotta get it out of your house before the pressure builds up to the point where the balloon pops. This isn’t going to happen soon – there is no need to panic – but it will happen eventually.

And, indeed, it doesn’t go in the ordinary trash. You put this in the ordinary trash and you’re gonna set the garbage truck on fire. Don’t do that to the garbage collectors, their job is hard enough already.

The first thing you need to do is get a fireproof container. The most common household item that qualifies as a fireproof container is a cast-iron cookpot with a cast-iron lid – often sold as a “Dutch oven.” Any other cooking container that’s unreactive, has a very high melting point, and has a lid made of the same materials will also work: enameled or stainless steel, Pyrex with glass lid, etc.

However: Do not use a pot with a PTFE-based non-stick coating. If the battery does explode, the fire will probably be hot enough to degrade a PTFE coating, producing toxic smoke. (Not that you should breathe the smoke from the battery fire either, but PTFE breakdown products are worse.) Do not use a pot made of aluminium or copper. The fire might even get hot enough to melt those.

Whatever container you use, you might have to throw away along with the phone, so don’t use your good Dutch oven for this. Go to a thrift store and buy a cheap one.

Once you have the fireproof container:

Gently pick up the phone and put it in the fireproof container. If possible, gently tape the phone to the bottom of the container to prevent it from bouncing around. Don’t put any padding in there, that’ll just make a fire worse if it does happen. Put the lid on and tape it shut.

Put a label on the container, something like “DEFECTIVE LI-ION BATTERY – FIRE HAZARD”.

It is now reasonably safe to move the container around. However, if the battery does explode, the container is very likely to leak smoke and get hot, so keep it in a well-ventilated area and away from things that will be damaged by heat. Don’t leave it exposed to the weather, either.

You need to find either a hazardous waste disposal site, or an e-waste recycler that will accept defective Li-ion batteries. I can’t help with that because I have no idea where you live.

However, your local fire department, if you have one, will probably be happy to help. Call their non-emergency number. Nothing is on fire yet, so this isn’t an emergency, but things that can easily start a fire are still within the fire department’s responsibilities. Tell them you have a phone with a bulging lithium-ion battery, you put it in a fireproof container, and you want to know how to dispose of it safely.

If the fire department tries to tell you this isn’t dangerous or it’s okay to throw it out in the regular trash (with or without fireproof container), hang up on them and write a cranky letter to your local government representatives, then keep looking for a proper disposal site.

Don't tell me to remove distractions, make time, set up a space. Tell me what "study" MEANS. Because otherwise I just sit there reading the book over and over and stressing out because I don't know what the hell I should be doing.

It's so frustrating that people listen to me talk and think I'm "smart" and don't need help. I WAS NEVER TAUGHT ANYTHING!! Learning things in a classroom is literally a fucking nightmare and the only reason I APPEARED to learn anything at all was because I'm a chatterbox that grasped reading early. But that's ALL I learned. I never learned how to study or how to learn something when it was hard. And nobody helps me even when I tell them very clearly that I need help and what I need help with, because they assume self-awareness = being able to do it on my own. NO! Stop abandoning me because I speak well!

Number one problem I have in adult learning classrooms is that they expect you to WRITE while LISTENING. I can only do one of those at a time! Number two problem is NO TEXTBOOK. The textbook for college classes is often so fucking different and unhelpful compared to secondary and primary school, where the textbook is divided into sections with questions and so on. In college I got assigned books that were NOT textbooks at all, because I was supposed to treat the lecture like the textbook. Well write it down then if it's so important! Let me READ it. How the hell are hard of hearing students supposed to learn anything like this! (answer: we're not, I know we're not because exclusion is what this system is fucking built on)

Accomodation is a joke. You need a note from a doctor so you need health insurance and time and a car to go to a doctor and then you need to FIND a doctor that actually can PROVE you are disabled, which is hard because well 99% of your body is inside you where nobody can see it. You can't PROVE I'm hard of hearing with a hearing test, because it's not that kind of hard of hearing. It's a processing problem. I do ONE thing at a time and I don't think that should be a disability but it IS when you're in school so here we are. And even WITH the school's idea of "reasonable accomodation" it's a crock of shit. They don't accomodate you. They have ONE thing they decide they are going to do for all students and that's IT.

And that's why I hate school but seem so "smart". I'm not smart. I'm good at reading and writing. Not listening. Can't listen for shit. Not if you want me to remember it or write it down while I'm listening. Give me a fucking book to read.

I'm just. I'm so restless and BORED and want to learn new things but that is locked away from me by HOW you are forced to learn them. And that doesn't even get into the problems I have with other students, who are disruptive, stupid, and abusive. Fucking loathe other students.

God I wish someone had taught me even a hint of the law school outline method of studying. In law school, when you hit the end of a course and you’re prepping for an exam, you outline the whole fuckin thing — topics, legal principles under those topics, definitions under those legal principles, and case law under those definitions (with variation in this related to how the legal subject itself is organized). This was a way of processing and interacting with the material that put it together into one coherent whole, and it felt So Good.

I do not process audio infornation very well at all. Telling me something just slides right off my brain. Reading it or writing it down or doing a physical action is what cements it down.

So, bored because I got in trouble for drawing or knitting in class (“that’s disruptive, you’re distracting other students!” look the teachers are the only ones who complained) I taught myself to write with my left hand and wrote down the highlights of the slides.

Because of my high visual recall, “studying” for me was glancing over those written highlights of the slides about 10 min before each test.

All this to say, studying will look different for everyone, based on how your brain works. For me it was speed-reading through enormous textbooks and copying slides with my left hand to improve my handwriting while bored out of my mind. For some people it’s highlighting lines or info in their textbook. For some it’s copying info onto notecards and reviewing it. For some it’s getting a friend or classmate to quiz them on lecture points. For some it’s using an audio recorder to record the lecture and play back later.

Have you ever seen a violinist going APESHIT?!

Obviously there are black string players. We just don’t see them because they “don’t look like” string players.

I've been resource gathering for YEARS so now I am going to share my dragons hoard

Floorplanner. Design and furnish a house for you to use for having a consistent background in your comic or anything! Free, you need an account, easy to use, and you can save multiple houses.

Comparing Heights. Input the heights of characters to see what the different is between them. Great for keeping consistency. Free.

Magma. Draw online with friends in real time. Great for practice or hanging out. Free, paid plan available, account preferred.

Smithsonian Open Access. Loads of free images. Free.

SketchDaily. Lots of pose references, massive library, is set on a timer so you can practice quick figure drawing. Free.

SculptGL. A sculpting tool which I am yet to master, but you should be able to make whatever 3d object you like with it. free.

Pexels. Free stock images. And the search engine is actually pretty good at pulling up what you want.

Figurosity. Great pose references, diverse body types, lots of "how to draw" videos directly on the site, the models are 3d and you can rotate the angle, but you can't make custom poses or edit body proportions. Free, account option, paid plans available.

Line of Action. More drawing references, this one also has a focus on expressions, hands/feet, animals, landscapes. Free.

Animal Photo. You pose a 3d skull model and select an animal species, and they give you a bunch of photo references for that animal at that angle. Super handy. Free.

I used to work at a TV station in Ohio. On weekends, we only had an 11pm news broadcast. Not much happened on weekends, ya know? I worked Monday-Friday 9-5, but someone on the weekend shift quit, so I also had to come in at 9pm on Sat/Sun to work the 11pm news. It was brutal. I worked seven days a week, even if two of them were ~3hrs.

This was a particularly bad winter. One Saturday, we had a level 2 snow emergency: That means you should only travel if you absolutely must. Like, it's not uncommon for cops to pull you over in level 2 emergencies to ask where you're going and why. It is genuinely dangerous to drive in that much snow.

I told my boss as much, how I almost crashed on the way home at 12:30am after a news broadcast. I told him I would need to call off if there were a snow emergency again during a night snow.

He told me, point blank, "If you ever call me about the goddamn snow, I will take it as a call of resignation."

And that was that! The very next Saturday, snow fell again. It was a level 2, but would become level 3 by sunup. Level 3 means driving is literally illegal except for ambulances and snow plows. I stared out the window, watching the snow, and I had to make a choice.

"Will I die for this? Will I kill myself to keep this job?" I made $11/hr.

He maketh me to lie down in green pastures; he leadeth me beside the still waters.