Taking life one century at a time

I really do have designs in the pipeline that aren't colour wheels, but rainbows and blackwork gradients make me happy. Blackwork embroidery on 14-count black Aida cloth.

This one is a companion piece to the Penrose Wheel. Same seven thread colours (six for the fills, plus white for outlines), same size (120 x 120 stitches).

Pattern here (my site) or here (Etsy). Patterns for the set here or here.

I don't tend to use a lot of orange or yellow unless they're part of a colour wheel, but wanted something fire-inspired for this. It's another big one, about 43cm (17") across. Blackwork embroidery on 14-count Aida cloth.

Pattern here (my site) or here (Etsy).

An older one, because I'm not a hot-weather person and am very much looking forward to autumn.

Pattern here My Etsy shop

wait do people read first person stories and think they're the ones in the story???

Saw people talking about not liking first person, which is fair, but their reasoning was like "I would not do that" and I don't understand that mindset.

First person stories are still about a character. A character making their own decisions. First person isn't about you???? At least I thought it wasn't. What am I missing? I've always seen first person as just a more in-depth look into a character's mind and stricter POV. Not as a reader stand-in.

I see first person stories like I'm sitting down across from the narrator getting the wildest tea imaginable

Most accurate way to read a first person story

I occasionally don't like *second* person stories for that reason. Usually the person being spoken to has enough traits that it's clear I'm watching one guy talk to another guy but sometimes it reads like the narrator is actually making assertions about me the person reading this book (e.g. when they say stuff like "you are reading this" and treat them like a placeholder). And THEN I get all "I would not fucking say that".

elf yuri except one of them is high fantasy and the other is one of santa's

9'6" forest guardian and her 4'5" toymaker gf

sorry for hijacking your post again op but after posting the initial elves i had ideas for more doodles i wanted to do so. elf yuri (but i elaborate)

He has been imprisoned for impersonating a single grain of rice

there is a lot to critique about later HPMoR, but the first couple chapters are to me badly written enough to be hard to read, and i'm pretty tolerant about that sort of stuff

i should do a review through like the physicist puppeteer since i have an overall positive impression of it while the specifics i can think of are mostly negative

Hpmor was methamphetamine for people whose other fantasy reading during the release period of Harry Potter was Artemis Fowl.

If you have scurvy, it's very reasonable to just pick up a lemon and start chomping on it without even bothering to peel it first. If you don't have scurvy or know what it is, you have no reason to do that and plenty of reason to be surprised by people who do. Also, some people just really like sour and will eat lemons like apples on no provocation.

That's how HPMOR works.

anyone here know what a fractal is?

A manatee rescue that I follow responded to a call about a female manatee with two calves because one of her babies had been injured by a boat strike. The entire family was temporarily relocated from the wild into a wildlife rehab facility for the injured male calf to undergo treatment. While there, vets noted the female calf was significantly larger than the little injured male. They did genetic testing and determined that big sister calf actually wasn’t related to the other two manatees at all! She was in fact an orphan calf that the adult manatee had found and taken in to care for right alongside her own little one.

Wild to think this manatee calf was literally adopted and nobody would have ever known if it weren’t for random coincidence and human curiosity. Every animal that you cross paths with in life has a fascinating personal story that you’ll only ever catch a glimpse of (if you’re lucky).

Family photo 💕

I'm gonna put a positive spin on this:

Before the modern age, ten guys had 99% of the wealth on the planet (almost every society pre-French Revolution, more or less). Ten guys having 90% of the wealth is a vast improvement over the thousands of years before now, which is in turn an improvement over the millenia before then, where all wealth was basically equally spread because it consisted solely of like, a stone speartip, a polished rock pendant hanging on a rope, and a fur cloak.

We didn't get here by shooting the ten guys in charge of 99% of the wealth. That never works - at best you get a different ten guys and at worst the wealth will just evaporate in the ensuing civil wars and power struggles.

We got here by increasing the total wealth, by inventing technologies that let everyone else produce and use the wealth much faster than those ten guys can consume it. We start social movements that demand the end of exploitation.

We are moving, agonisingly slowly, in the right direction. And I think we can keep it moving!

This applies everywhere! Say, clothes:

The activists demand fair pay and decent working conditions for garment workers. They force sellers to make the production process transparent.

The artists question the role clothes play in society. Why are some people enticed to buy such large quantities of poor quality clothes? What is the 'correct' value for clothes, what is the minimum quality we should accept? How can we shape our norms around clothes - how we buy them, treat them, dispose of them - how we live with them?

The lawmakers look at regulating the industry with labour, consumer and environmental protections.

The technical people develop better, more functional materials, that are cheaper to produce with less environmental impact. They develop better workflows and patterns.

The craftspeople create designs and pieces which are good in some way - more beautiful, more functional, more economical.

The philanthropists fund or support one or more of the above.

Idk, I'm just sick of framing the world's problems like it's immutable, like it's not already changed massively over the last few centuries.

Progress will happen when we focus on enriching the world's poorest people, and stop worrying about how to impoverish the world's richest people.

Thinking this is real and, more importantly, thinking that this is a problem with capitalism, reveals a stunning lack of historical insight.

How to get ultra rich:

Production and trade is the only way to create wealth, and Capitalism is the only system we have ever had that could harness ambition into pro-social behavior on a massive scale. The only system. Every other system has been zero-sum at best but much more commonly, intensely negative-sum.

Elon Musk has all the money in the world because people give it to him. Now it's not all voluntary in its entirety, some of that is money the government stole from people in the first place, but OP tweet clearly has zero problem with the government stealing from people so for OP's purposes, Elon is a fucking saint.

"xyz DNI" blocking people is YOUR job, sorry. You cannot ask the world to simply move around you, you have to take control of your online experience or you will be fucking miserable forever. Most people don't read your bio/pinned/carrd before touching the posts that cross their dash anyways.

Also maybe worry less about if someone who likes something you hate clicks on your tumblr post. I promise it is not that fucking serious.

Also-also if you have this DNI because your friends/moots said or implied you have to otherwise you're somehow Bad and/or will be punished by them if you don't, that's kind of fucked and maybe you need less controlling friends.

I know you feel ethically helpless on this bitch of an earth but I promise you, telling people with certain fetishes or god forbid media interests not to interact with your posts is doing less than nothing to make the world any different, but it IS stressing you the fuck out to be worried about if the clicks you get on the internet are coming from someone who likes to imagine The Wrong Fictional Characters kissing.

For the love of god, shipping is not that fucking important. I promise you, whatever the fuck you think you know about someone based on what they ship can be determined by the shit they actually do in the real world about real things that actually happen.

Media consumption is not activism and fandom is not the battleground upon which Ethics And Morals will live or die. It is playing pretend. Please please please get some perspective

The midjourney stuff just reminds of when we were trying to find a new platform to host the ao3 donation form, and companies kept trying to tell me about all their "ai" features that would track donor engagement, and figure out the optimal pattern to email individual donors asking for follow up donations, and all the ways they suggest we manipulate people into staying on our websites. It was a great way to filter out who either wasn't listening to us when we described our ethics and donor base, or just didn't believe us.

Now granted ao3 is a unique case based on a) the amount of page views we get in any given time period and b) the fact that most donors absolutely do Not want to be identified as such anywhere, (the default "list of recent donors" module got nuked Immediately) but it surprised me some that the concept of "donors who value their privacy and would be furious at even the whiff of AI" is unique. Some of us really are just existing in different worlds.

Op's tags

#I just started dropping '2.5 Billion page views a month'#into conversations as early as possible bc they would Not believe me otherwise#it was right up there with having to say 'csam attacks' to get them to take my compartmentalization of information concerns seriously#turns out those are the magic words#otw#op

The last part was kind of insane, honestly. When we started changing platforms for the donor database, I kept telling them that yes I was aware we already had an account for the volunteer database, and no that could not be connected to the donor database. And they said yes fine sure and then connected them anyway. And I called them back and said, excuse me, I'm confused, I can see both databases. And they said, well, yeah, but it's only you, someone has to be able to see both databases to give other users access. The other users can't see both. And I said, no, we have been asking for a completely separate database. I should not be able to see both. And they said, you are one organization, one organization can't have two databases. And I said, last year someone used our volunteer email list to commit approximately one thousand felonies. Please feel free to imagine how much worse it could have been had they had a way to use volunteers' email addresses to get their legal names. We do not want this to be something anyone can do no matter how much we trust them. Let me describe those felonies to you in more detail. And they emailed me two hours later and said, you can have two separate databases.

This post feels like watching an iceberg go by in clear water. The amount of stuff going on beneath the surface of AO3 just astonishes.

(ID in alt)

Approximately one THOUSAND felonies

if somebody you knew for a year said "listen. im just gonna be honest here. i know ive known you too long to not know your name. but i simply do not. i dont know how this happened. im reasonably confident you told me your name at some point. could you remind me please" how would you react

explain to them that I also don't know which name they should know me by, because I have, like, eight names depending on the context in which we met?

I would take the opportunity to ask them their name.

Read enough stories featuring characters who very notably wear glasses, and you start to notice certain trends in romantic scenes.

I voted for the second option but first, second and fourth are all equally accurate - no loved-ones do that without asking first.

This is like asking how you feel about people sticking their fingers in your orifices without further context. Like, it REALLY depends on how much I like and trust them and the context, obviously!

My husband is allowed to take my glasses off during sex and would never do it in other circumstances. My son is not allowed to take my glasses off but he's fourteen months old so he does it anyway. (The consequence of this is that I stop cuddling him long enough to grab them back from wherever he threw them.)

Did Biden start any wars? I don't remember Biden starting any wars.

Weird to have two US presidential terms in a row that didn't start wars. Here's hoping for a third one.

It also really really doesn't count

Did Bush start any wars in his second term? Did Obama start any wars? If not, that's five terms and four presidents.