Rick

Will I constantly post this image because I want to support trans people? Yes.

A lot of y'all are just good people and ain't sinning.

Summary - Hell's Heart by Alexis Hall is a sci-fi rendition of Moby Dick set in the space around Jupiter. The book's narrator goes simply by I, and she tells the tale of how she once joined a ship that intended to hunt the legendary Mobius Beast. Surrounded by several interesting, mainly nameless, characters including the captain of the ship, A, and I's friend/lover from Earth, Q.

Before I get to my actual review, I just want to mention that I've never read the original Moby Dick, but I've been told that this book captures the spirit of the original.

Thoughts - So, the tagline of this book is 'Sapphic Moby Dick in Space' which caught my attention, because of course it did, that's the whole point of a tagline. I was not prepared for how immensely depressing this book is.

The main character, I, from the very beginning, tells you everyone on her ship dies. It doesn't shy away from that fact and tries to remind you of it every third chapter or so. In saying that, it's not why I find it so depressing.

Hell's heart takes place in the far future, pretty much everyone has left Earth and taken to the stars. Capitalism has also advanced so far that it has gone uber dystopia to the point where no one really sees anything wrong with it. One of the three main 'religions' in the book is a perversion of Catholicism that measures faith in how much money you can pay the church.

And, like I said, no one sees anything wrong with it. They feel conflicted about their faiths, but not in a way where they see a big issue with the faith itself, if that makes sense.

Now, despite all the depressing stuff, I think this is a remarkably well-written book.

All the stuff I mentioned is intentional. It's meant to be this insane dystopia that is disturbing to modern readers (in the way that it's a snapshot of modern happenings dialed to 11). It does its job and it does it well.

As you read through the pages, you watch as the MC constantly decides to be the most self-destructive person she can possibly be. Most of which are tied to her libido and the fact that she's attracted to people who could ruin her, and I mean that in every conceivable meaning of the word.

Character-wise, it's pretty neat. There are few proper names in the book, focusing more on titles (for characters the MC can't remember properly) and initials (for characters whose names are too important to share). Each one is living their own lives and by that I mean, they feel like their own people separate from the MC.

Setting-wise, it is incredibly well thought-out. There is an insane amount of detail put into the world and the way it works. From the religions to the science to the monsters, all of it feels like a real account of a real place.

Plot-wise, dipping back into the depressing side of things, you can feel the impending doom growing with every chapter that passes. There is a sword hanging above their heads that only you can see and every chapter, every plot point just drops it another inch. It is both definitions of awful; both bad and full of awe.

One last thing to note is that there is so much sex in this book. No super detailed sex scenes, but at least half-detailed ones, and they seem to pop up every other chapter. They think about, like, three things in this book: Monsters, Money, and Sex. All in equal measure.

And for anyone expecting a saucy book of sexy times (and you just didn't comprehend the rest of my review), a lot of those sex scenes directly tie into the MC's lack of self-preservation and deep desire to be self-destructive. You have been warned.

Overall - This is an incredible book, super well written and well thought-out. In saying that, it is at times one of the most upsetting things I've ever read. To the point where I had to read a Cozy Fantasy novel at the same time as this to sort of balance things out.

If you've got a taste for toxic/doomed yuri, then this is absolutely the book for you. Also for fans of Moby Dick and dystopian Sci-Fi novels.

So, I've only done like 5 of these reviews so far, but this book is kinda forcing me to do something different from what I normally do. In that, I have to divide the score into "Personal" and "Objective". Because, once again, this is an amazing book, but it's also so not my preference.

I travel to 17 different elementary schools with an after-school program. I have consistently seen horrible mistreatment of autistic children, Black children, visibly queer children, ANY kind of children.

Black boys especially are labeled at troublemakers from the get go, and are treated vastly differently. I will never forget going to one particular school for the first time, and gaining rapport with a young Black boy. He was a joy! Playful and ornery, but well-behaved. I later learned that his teachers "had" to walk him down the hallway to "keep him in line". He is in third grade, showed me NONE of these "behaviors" outside of just being playful. Black boys are punished and treated like shit for things white kids get away with all the time. Hell, I WAS the white kid who got away with everything. I watched Black classmates get suspended for being half the nightmare I was.

I've seen first-hand a "low-functioning" 6 year old boy (autism, ADHD, and cerebral palsy) be treated like shit for stimming. Yelled at, written up, everything. This was the base I started at before my promotion--Our director told him to sit in the corner on his iPad for the whole 4 hours we had him. I had this same "troublemaker" over the summer program. Away from his usual director, I encouraged him to stim and sing and run around, no iPad allowed. I got him headphones and took him out in the hallway to give him the extra care he needed, and he was infinitely better "behaved". He shined so bright that summer, made friends, and was the happiest I'd ever seen him. I ache to think that he's back at my original base. The following school year, I was promoted to a traveling position, so I seldom get to see him. But he, too, is a prime example of children thriving regardless of the labels placed on them.

At this original base, we had one young Black boy who was ALSO labeled a trouble maker, had some ODD tendencies and did show some of the bad behavior. He was so, SO smart. Too smart for his own good to be in fifth grade, which is why I acted up, too. When he got in trouble, he refused to go to time out when anyone but me would try. My coworkers would yell and command him, pushing him further into the "trouble maker" label. Instead of yelling at him, I would sit down with him, explain why what he did was wrong and that he needed to sit down for a minute. I talked to him like a person and not a problem, and he was infinitely better behaved. This boy would make me bracelets, joke with me, be my little buddy. He hated all the other teachers because they treated him like a problem that couldn't be solved. I treated him like a little brother. I became friends with his older sister (who volunteered with us) and saw him and his sister get baptized. I'm happy to say I still see them from time to time, and that this boy is doing well in middle school.

All this to say--adults should know better. Parents and teachers alike need to really examine how to treat and label kids. If a kid has behaviors, there's a reason for it, and not always a reason they can fix. Adults want to bring the hammer down on trouble makers, and only pushes them further away from growing and reaching their full potential. All children are people; All people need to be treated with respect AND according to their needs.

If you were a young Black person who was treated like shit at school over your race, you didn't deserve that.

If you were a young neurodiverse person who was treated like shit over being neurodiverse, you didn't deserve that.

If you were ANY kind of child who was treated like shit for ANY reason--you didn't deserve that.

But one little girl was like “oh, it’s a musical about ME you say” and the character list was all the other girls in the class cast as her body parts, and a story about how her body works.

“Kaylee is nice so she will be the heart. Lily is my kidneys. Sapphire is the lungs.”

I’m also in art college. And even if I wasn’t, I’ve been doing art for almost a decade now. I’ve been disabled the whole bloody time.

AI, isn’t art.

There are many disabled artists and we have adapted our own ways of dealing with how we create. Fuck you, we have been doing this forever.

Vincent Van Gogh had temporal lobe epilepsy; Henri Matisse became a wheelchair user after surgery for cancer; Michelangelo had osteoarthritis, limiting mobility and causing pain in his hands and feet.

Paul Smith had a severe case of cerebral palsy and created art using typewriters.

Peter Longstaff has no arms due to Thalidomide, and paints with his feet.

Frida Kahlo not only had polio that disabled her as a child, but of course as we all know was injured in a bus accident at the age of 18, which caused her lifelong pain and medical problems.

Fuck, you want a personal annecdote? I knew a girl (we have lost touch since) who was paralysed from the neck down and she painted with her mouth and there are other artists who do so too! And with eye tracking technology I’m sure disabled artists will be getting more and more tools as the years pass. But we do NOT condone AI art. All that does is put us, real disabled artists, who exist and need support, out of jobs and commissions.

hi, another disabled person here for more personal anecdotes! here is an art piece i made entirely with my non dominant hand 1 week before my most recent shoulder surgery on that same arm. i also wear splint rings to keep my fingers from dislocating while painting (or playing bass guitar cause i do that too). i make most of my income off hand painted art despite having hand tremors, frequent wrist dislocations/subluxations, and migraines.

my friend and her wife also make their incomes off wig making, leatherwork, and digital collage prints. both have chronic pain as well.

Mine isn't as drastic (yet) but I've been having to wear wrist braces and finger splints since childhood off and on because using my hands in a repetitive motions causes them to be in pretty excruciating pain.

What is my art medium of choice? Knitting. You know, that thing where you have to do a repetitive motion over and over again. I hold my needles a bit strange, I knit through the pain, I sometimes have to give up working on it for weeks at a time. But I will not stop because it's what makes my heart sing.

Disabled artists don't need your pity, we've been getting by, doing what makes us happy despite the pain and hardships for thousands of years, probably longer, I bet there were neolithic disabled artists.

No actual real artist wants or uses AI, including disabled artists. AI is for losers who are scared of the extremely important phase in art where you suck and want to skip it by stealing and not even in a cool "I'm emulating your style because I wanna learn from it" way.

Chuck Close

Chuck Close was a painter and photographer who specialized in ENORMOUS portraiture. If you've never been in the same room as one of his works, try to remedy that if you can, because it is an awesome experience. Close had a number of mental and physical conditions as a child, but in 1988, in his 40s and already a celebrated artist, he suffered a blood clot that left him paralyzed from the neck down. After intensive physical therapy, he was able to regain enough control to move his arms (more his upper arms than forearms), enabling him to paint with a brush strapped to his wrist. He adapted his painting style for his disability... and he continued painting enormous, hyper realistic portraits.

Close with self-portraits before (left) and after (right) his paralysis:

we have for years. Theft will not

stop humanity.

go to About:config find media.mediasource.enabled and toggle it to false find media.cache_readahead_limit and change it to 9999 find media.cache_resume_threshold and change it to 9999

additionally if you'd prefer mp4 to webm

also in about:config, find: media.encoder.webm.enabled media.mediasource.webm.audio.enabled media.mediasource.webm.enabled media.webm.enabled and toggle them all to false

note! this will limit video to 1080p

Zamada lived in our backyard in our falling-apart house where we struggled to pay rent and utilities. He was useful because we couldn't always pay to keep the family car working so Mum could ride him to her job at the racecourse, where (if my memory serves) her boss let her exercise him for free off the clock. Her job was exercising the race horses.

When I was in preschool, I came home and proudly told my mother that I had learned the name of the whale that ate Jonah in school, and that his name was "Hoonda". When she asked me how I learned that, I proceeded to sing the song I had learned that day - which was "Who did, who did, who did, who did, who did swallow Jo-Jo-Jonah..." I had scarred eardrums and had misheard it as "Hoonda."

My brother and his best friend, when they were very small, observed that the man who had played Judas in Thursday night's production of The Last Supper was the same man dressed up as the Easter Bunny on Sunday morning, and after discussing this with each other, very seriously asked our pastor at the time if Judas' punishment for betraying Jesus was that he had to bring eggs to children on Easter every year. (As I recall, the pastor's response to my brother's friend was something along the lines of "yeah, okay, if it stops your mother from complaining about the secularization of Easter, sure, we can integrate that into our belief system".)

The first year my mom taught preschool full time, they had a class pet for the first half of the year whose name, dubbed by the children, was Heidi. Heidi was an invisible fish. Where did Heidi come from? The upper grade teacher was planning an experiment with her class, phone rang, she set the clear bowl of water and rocks down on the table in the preschool classroom while the kids were playing in the other room and forgot about it. Kids came in from morning assembly and asked what was in the bowl. Mom sarcastically said "oh, that's our invisible fish". She quickly discovered, from seeing seven small children peering closely at the bowl and demanding to know where because they couldn't see it, that 1) they had no concept of sarcasm and 2) none of them knew what "invisible" meant. The kids dubbed the fish Heidi because "he hides from us". Mom eventually just rolled with it, added "zookeeper" to the list of daily tasks, and used an empty spice bottle to make a jar of "Invisible Fish Food". The kids took taking care of Heidi VERY seriously. (Mom also had a sign on her door that said "Have You Seen Our Invisible Fish?")

Another year she told a student she knew what he was doing even though she wasn't looking at him because she had eyes in the back of her head (she had good peripheral vision, there was a mirror in the hallway directly the open door of the classroom, and she could hear the sound of the toys she'd specifically told the kid not to touch rattling on the shelves). Next thing she knew she felt two little hands rooting through her hair looking for the eyes.

My brother stopped by to visit one day and Mom told the student who asked that he was her son. The kid kept asking when he was going to come back to visit, but Mom didn't know that until he stopped by the next time and the kid enthusiastically greeted him because he kept asking how "Myson" was and it never occurred to her that the kid thought that was my brother's name.

And here's the thing. All of this is perfectly normal.

The specific examples are going to differ from kid to kid, but trust me, if you ever sit down and spend time around a child in an environment that isn't tightly controlled, you will come up with multiple incidents like this. And the best thing about it is that you can never guess what the child is going to believe.

So I went to Oregon because of the rains that just happened, because it felt like the only chance in a long while after not going this winter (it’s a long drive ou north), considering the passing rains.

On our way up we didn’t quite make it up to Oregon so we checked into a hotel and went looking for a road to cruise and some culverts to look for stuff in. Walking up one of those I spotted it and it got away from me (slippery little bastard) and I was so bummed. on our way down like 3-4 days latter I insisted we went back to that spot and I RELOCATED IT LIKE 4 FEET FROM WHERE IT GOT AWAY . This time I had a tupperware ready for it to drop into instead of relying solely on my hands

The only other two I’ve seen of this genus (California giant Sal is the one in hand (dicamptodon enastus)) (the other is the same species as the rest of the post) (both about the same size of eachother)