Peter Falk in his home art studio.

#noted he him lesbian#peter falk(via @sashayed) XD

One last talent show to save the rec center

Ok everybody here's the deal.

My science education nonprofit, Skype a Scientist (you might know her, creator of the squid facts hotline and matcher of classrooms + scientists) has secured absolutely no grants to support general operations for 2025. But! We're selling advent calendars to fund our program! They absolutely rule. They can save our nonprofit asses. If we sell 5000, which I realize, is so many, we can fund our program for 2025. Then I can offer a bunch of programming for free. Running a nonprofit is a weird job.

Every day, counting down to frankly whatever you want (it's usually Christmas, but man, maybe you want to count down to Halloween, that's fine by me) scratch off the sparkly sparkly iridescence and reveal a fact about frogs! We have 24 top-notch frog facts here.

You should get one for every kid in your life, then get one for all the adults who still let themselves access joy in critters.

Get 'em here: https://squidfacts.bigcartel.com/

Hey, @sarahmackattack is awesome and so is Skype a Scientist. Supporting them *and* getting 24 frog facts to scratch off like an advent calendar seems like an incredible win-win to me. So if you can, I emphatically encourage you to do the thing.

I have it from Sarah herself that the Crab Facts calendar has sold over nine hundred copies (though it has been around substantially longer), and the Frog Facts just over two hundred. We need to get those numbers up to prove once and for all that Tumblr’s true passion is frogs, not the crabs that they have foisted on us.

Current numbers for your edification as of 1:28pm Eastern Standard Time

Crabs: 973

Frogs: 342

Want to juke the stats? Get a calendar here.

The second batch of calendars were shipped today!

Thank you to everyone who got a calendar, I'm so lucky to have you all!

Also huge thank you to the folks who have blazed this post, @thingsonmydragon @foxysrevenge @edderkopper @saiyanitloudandclear 😭😭😭

For those who enjoy a little friendly competition (@markscherz)

Crabs: 1040

Frogs: 562

You can get one at Squidfacts.bigcartel.com

@sarahmackattack what number are you at now?

Thank you for asking @ospreyonthemoon!

Crabs: 1094 (of those, 286 sold in 2024)

Frogs: 731

Total calendars sold in 2024: 1017

THANK YOU to everyone who has bought an advent calendar so far!! We're doing it!!!

Want one?? You should get one. Squidfacts.bigcartel.com

This has been going VERY WELL, but we still have a long way to go!

Here's an update on what we've sold:

Crabs: 1,170 (of those, 362 sold in 2024)

Frogs: 1,071

(Hey @markscherz, the frogs are catching up!)

Total calendars sold in 2024: 1433!!

Now... obviously that's way short of 5000... but advent doesn't start for another 54 days so... Let's do this!

Get a calendar (or other merch that supports Skype a Scientist) HERE!

We’re almost beating crab calendar all time sales!!! Yesssss!

Ansonia spinulifer wants you to know how he feels about you not having bought a frog calendar yet:

If you can, support this awesome outreach effort! It is making a difference!

"other merch" really undersells the Save Our Freaks t-shirt imo

parents please check your kids' halloween candy. just found hieronymus bosch’s garden of earthly delights inside of a peanut butter cup.

ok i'm sorry but this is a classic reactionary urban legend meant to demonize adults who enjoy the occasional recreational bosch and im frankly sick of it

You really think someone who has acquired The Colossal Earknives or The Great Gut Trumpet is just going to give them away to some kid? for FREE?

Nobody wants to waste their beautiful pig nun or squatting armorcreature on little Jimmy. Have some common sense. satanic panic all over again smh

And speaking of Sophia Tolstoy, her diaries are just so depressing. 

“I am to gratify his pleasure and nurse his child, I am a piece of household furniture, I am a woman. I try to suppress all human feelings. When the machine is working properly it heats the milk, knits a blanket, makes little requests and bustles about trying not to think […].“

She wrote this when she was 19, one year into her marriage to Leo and as she was pregnant with the first of his 13 children.

A few years later, when she was 25 or so:

“I am so often alone with my thoughts that the need to write in my diary comes quite naturally … Now I am well again and not pregnant—it terrifies me how often I have been in that condition. He said that for him being young meant “I can achieve anything”. For me […] reason tells me that there is nothing I either want or can do beyond nursing, eating, drinking, sleeping, and loving and caring for my husband and babies, all of which I know is happiness of a kind, but why do I feel so woeful all the time, and weep as I did yesterday? I am writing this now with the pleasantly exciting sense that nobody will ever read it, so I can be quite frank with myself […].“

During her 12th pregnancy she wrote about taking scalding baths and jumping from high pieces of furniture to try and miscarry.  And at one point while reading her husband’s diary (which he told her to read) she found the sentence “There is no such thing as love, only the physical need for intercourse and the practical need for a life companion.” In her own diary she wrote “They ebb and flow like waves, these times when I realise how lonely I am and want only to cry…”

A few years before her husband’s death, she published a cycle of prose poems titled “Groans”, under the pseudonym “A Tired Woman”.

the most depressing quote from her diaries:

“I have served a genius for almost forty years. Hundreds of times I have felt my intellectual energy stir within me and all sorts of desires - a longing for education, a love of music and the arts… And time and again I have crushed and smothered these longings… Everyone asks, “But why should a worthless woman like you need an intellectual or artistic life?” To this question I can only reply: “I don’t know, but eternally suppressing it to serve a genius is a great misfortune.”

I have struggled with “the Calendar of Wisdom” all year (when i remember to read it. so maybe not “all year” but at least “several days a month every couple of months.”) because of the way it veers between real hard-won insight and stupid bullshit, clearly posited to self-justify to this specific person the way he treated his specific wife.

imagine being real rashid and you work for these weird gay vampires and one day they come to you like hey rashid we're gonna give you a little holiday! armand will take over your duties for the time being, for a cool disguise during my interview, not a kink thing :) and you're like okay these are my weird gay vampire bosses so it probably is a kink thing but who am i to judge. and then you find out they are roleplaying this weird exhibitionist slash master/servant scene with your own real actual government name. fuck interview with the vampire, interview with rashid WHEN??

#hr exit interview with rashid(via @sashayed) XD PERFECT Fic concept :3 :3

i've been making a lot of bad art lately which is one of the world's most healing activities but if you have perfectionist tendencies you really have to commit to volume (if you make ONE bad painting it's just a bad painting whereas if you make 20 it's a meditative practice!). unfortunately we live in a one bedroom apartment and now we have to commit a significant portion of our storage to bad paintings. i would recycle them but unfortunately i need spare bad paintings to weave together into bad papercraft!!

anyway so i decided to move my bad artmaking into a new, smaller sphere and make bad linocuts. and let me tell you. if you are trying to get past thinking "my art should be good," linocut is a wonderful teacher. everything can be going great and then you exert slightly too much palm pressure and WHOOPS! sliced the face off. luckily the craft is so niche that negative self-talk can't really stick to it. i'll think something like "everybody else's linocuts are perfect. nobody else fucked up their linocut of a hot lady sphinx." and this is such a patently bananas sentence that i can simply laugh fondly at it and continue hacking away at my little rubber square. recommend

hot sphinx advice. i inked this bad on purpose actually

Feeling a need to clarify that there is no such thing as Bad Art! I think what i mean is uncareful art, quickfire art, art to which I bring as little judgment as I can manage during the process or after and which i try not to revise at all. (this is very hard for me, i love revising, i have opened and edited THIS VERY POST about 14 times, including to add this sentence right now.) People are being very nice about this imperfectly inked piece with lots of scrungliness and wack cuts and an anatomically questionable/weirdly unclothed Oedipal left leg, which is so kind, but it is also unnecessary because I like this little piece too! I don't actually think it's Bad (although of course i now realize that there is no way for anyone to know this. I forget that this blog is not actually a psychic medium through which u receive my full cognitive & emotional Umwelt with each post).

Honestly I just say Bad Art because I love the phrase itself. It is short and it is fun to say and you can imagine staring your meanest and most pretentious teacher or acquaintance directly in the eye when you say it. Mechanically it is also pleasing because when you say it you make a kind of careless open-and-close Muppet mouth, Baa Baa, which is exactly the kind of approach that i am trying to take to these pieces. Baa Baa pbbbthhhh here it is, fart. Volume Artmaking would maybe have been more accurate, but Bad Art is more fun to me. In fact overexplaining my posts is another form of Bad Art that i love. Also just taking this opportunity to amplify, as several in the notes have pointed out, that a fun and cheap entry point is to do linocut stamps on erasers

#we used to be a society. book covers used to do something(via @sashayed)

Escape from New York - 1981

Deleted scene

#john carpenter knew how bad we would all want to top this guy right? like thats part of the Whole Thing#to be clear thats a rhetorical question i know he did. i know john carpenter knows everything.#escape from new york#movies#kurt russell(via @sashayed) the 8EST and MOST CORRECT Tags uwu uwu

randall flagg after putting his whole Antichrussy into torturing thousands of desperate followers in vegas just for some swagless YouTube dweeb to do the same thing for Amazon Prime content

#if ur gonna call urself Mr Beast at least have some style about it.#the merest crumb of cunt? no? only evildoing? classic american devilry(via @sashayed)

me watching it all unfold, oil on canvas paper, 2024

I was able to buy this painting from restacks' etsy store which also has many other wonderful paintings AND a commission option. I hung it over my desk where I do my stupid job that I hate and I hate it so much less now that I can look up and watch this little man* (*gendie neutch) watch it all unfold.

Money is stupid and I am so relentlessly bad with it that it sometimes feels like my incompetence must be purposeful [my therapist stares directly into the camera for 30 full seconds], but as I age I increasingly think the only thing that reconciles me to the use of money is spending it on other people and other people's art. I feel so fortunate to have been able to exchange money for Me Watching It All Unfold (Oil on canvas paper, 2024) and if I could I would hang it outside so you could all come look at it any time you want.

#computers appear to have a sense of beauty#many people have witnessed computers in the wild staring at scenic vistas such as sunsets.(via @sashayed)

what insanely good fortune to live on earth in an epoch with strawberries

every prehistoric human reconstruction has me thinking “I want to smoke weed with this bitch”

she looks like she would have been an awesome neighbor, like she would have loved menthols and called me baby

“a Cheeto could have killed a Victorian child” but the opposite. Neanderthals would have loved to go to Hardee’s and get a burger with me.

neanderthals would have walked hand in hand with me into hell (buccees opening day)

When I saw this article two years ago and found out Neanderthals were seasoning their food 70,000 years ago, I teared up thinking about how they never got to try things like beef jerky and Doritos.

Corn was domesticated around 9,000 years ago and cheese was invented around 7,000 years ago. Her entire species went extinct before the basic ingredients to create cheese flavored corn snacks were a twinkle in humanity’s eye. That’s part of the reason finding out Neanderthals and early modern humans were creating complex dishes to maximize flavor and texture 70,000 years ago is so wild to me. 

#yeah but every time YOU eat u can always invite the neanderthals in your bloodline to share ur tongue.#opening a bag of takis? ask the ghost of great(x1500) grandma if she wants to get her taste buds blown out of the water.#she does. she will.#humans(via @sashayed)

Excellent Tags are Excellent u_u u_u u_u

Microsoft Office XP assistants

#lost familiars(via @sashayed)

sometimes I wish I had ed sheeran’s phone number just so I could call him up and say SIMILES ARE GENERALLY ONLY WORTHWHILE IF THEY ADD SOMETHING TO AN IDEA. RECOGNISING THAT 2 THINGS CAN HAVE A COMMONALITY IN A VERY VAGUE WAY DOES NOT MEAN IT’S USEFUL TO REFERENCE IT. SEE: FACES CRUMBLING LIKE PASTRIES. IS SHE A BAKER? DOES SHE ENJOY A GOOD CROISSANT? IS THIS REFERENCED ANYWHERE ELSE IN THE PIECE? IF YOU ANSWER ‘NO’ TO ONE OR ALL OF THE ABOVE, DO NOT PASS GO, DO NOT COLLECT $200 OR A BRIT AWARD.

ok so i thought i put this in DRAFTS not QUEUE, and let’s pretend I did because i have so much more to add. So many thoughts. One thing I was really lucky to have, as a writer, was one teacher who took everything I wrote very literally – not as a reader, he was a very smart reader, but as an editor, just to make me question whether the language was any good. So if I said someone’s face was crumbling like pastries, he would go: like, breaking in half? How do pastries crumble? What does that look like? How does a face crumble? What does that look like? Is it the same verb? And I would go, Not Really, my face crumbling like the face of a person who has just been called out by her thesis advisor. And then I would use a different word. (I would use completely different words, every word in that line would be different because it’s a shitty line.) MY POINT IS, WORDS MEAN THINGS. I see this in a lot of bad poetry that is going for a Siken vibe. If you say something like “I wanted to use him like the blood under my nails,” that’s fine if you’re 14 because it’s important to have a phase where you just put words in rows because they sound cool. But at some point, as an adult who wants to make words, you gotta stop and think: WHAT ARE THESE WORDS!!! WHAT DO THEY MEAN! How does one “use” the blood under their nails? Use it as what? As paint? As cuticle cream? As a snack? There’s a reason your deep weirdo creative brain put those words together, and if you can figure out what the reason is, then you can figure out what words you ACTUALLY MEAN with your, you know, language centers. Your deep weirdo brain is a wonderful gift and you couldn’t create without it, but half the time it just barfs out stuff that makes no sense, even to you. That’s why you need to LOOK AT IT and SEE IF IT’S INTELLIGIBLE.

So that’s my #hotwritertip for today. Take everything you’ve written very literally and see if it becomes super dissonant/distracting, and if it does, then find some words that don’t. GET IT TOGETHER, FANCY NERDS!!!!!

it drives me quietly nuts when writers use figurative language that their audience understands but their subjects wouldn’t. horse archers probably have a different concept of ‘brand new’. a rural commune might not think of anything as 'trademark’. a sunny disposition might mean something bad for vampires or cave salamanders. and while it’s charming for space cowboys to do something lickedy-split, doing it post-haste raises the question of what kind of mail you get roping asteroids in the kuiper belt.

Imagine u are the planet earth and u have sprouted all these little hominids to give u information about yourself* (*none of my business why we exist but i assume it's something along these lines) and it was going great for a while but now every time u ask them telepathically MONKEYS WHAT AM I? WHAT IS THE PLANET EARTH RIGHT NOW? all the monkeys think of the same very good photo of u taken in 1972

i'd be like girl thank you but that is a PHOTOGRAPH. i am asking what is the PLACE IN FRONT OF YOUR EYES