KHIRSAH

I’m glad that Indiana finally has its first national park and that it’s the one mostly known for having sand dunes that eat children.

how, pray tell, does a dune eat A Child

Imagine that you’re a big pile of sand by the shore of Lake Michigan, between Gary and Michigan City. Your name is Mount Baldy, and you’re a popular tourist destination at what is now Indiana Dunes National Park.

For a huge pile of tiny rocks, you live a surprisingly nomadic lifestyle. More than a hundred years of tourism and foot traffic has destroyed much of the native grass that kept you stationary. You are now what they call a “wandering dune”, as wind off the lake slowly but steadily pushes your tremendous bulk a little further inland every year.

As you move, you gradually engulf everything in your path—trees, buildings, rocks, hills, your own parking lot—everything. You are an unstoppable force, like some kind of gigantic gelatinous cube, but you’re still very popular with visitors.

In 2013, you suddenly eat a child. It’s a surprising move on your part—dry quicksand isn’t supposed to be a real natural phenomenon. I mean, what is this, a 1960’s action movie?

One moment, a family from Illinois is cheerfully climbing your slopes. The next, the 6 year old boy suddenly vanishes without warning, leaving no trace. Would-be rescuers dig in the sand where he disappeared until their hands are bleeding. Geologists insist that he must have wandered off, because enormous piles sand physically cannot form hollows or pockets within themselves—but three hours later, he is found, unconscious but alive, buried almost twelve feet deep in the sand.

The current leading geological theory as to how this happened is that the organic material you engulf, like trees, slowly decompose beneath your slopes, leaving behind unstable voids held together only by the fragile remains of the decayed material. When these voids are walked over, they collapse, forming sudden sinkholes that can swallow visitors whole. The rules that typically govern stationary dunes, or wandering dunes in areas that are not forested, no longer apply to you. You are unpredictable and dangerous and have remained closed to visitors except on guided hikes ever since.

Did that really need to be in second person and fuck me up like that? No. But I’m not mad.

in retrospect I have no idea what possessed me to write this in second person

anyway devil’s stovepipes/decomp chimneys are cool as shit

Hang in there, Geralt–

More of this, please, lots more exactly like this, yes, thank you

The trailer was really intriguing, but I have to admit that I’m actually looking forward to new fans more than I am to new material. WandaVision’s concept looks like it could be done amazingly well by people who know what they’re doing, but Disney hasn’t shown a whole lot of interest in chasing storyline complexity or character depth in its properties. Add on the once and future whitewashing and straightwashing, and I remain cautious about what we’re actually going to get, as YA fans. 

BUT you know who does storyline complexity and character depth really fucking well? FANDOM. And I, for one, am really looking forward to a resurgence in the Young Avengers fandom and what I hope will be a pile of new faces and voices joining us in the pit. New stories and fix-it fic for all!

[throws confetti] 

Yaaaay, agreed!

The fucking mobile game ad. the burn. im crying

imagine if the oceans were replaced by forests and if you went into the forest the trees would get taller the deeper you went and there’d be thousands of undiscovered species and you could effectively walk across the ocean but the deeper you went, the darker it would be and the animals would get progressively scarier and more dangerous and instead of whales there’d be giant deer and just wow

you have a beautiful imagination

this gave me chills

HOLY SHIT

first of all ^^^ I love this^^^

secondly, I’ve said it before, but 

this is exactly what the Old World was. Off shore there was Ocean, and inland there was Forrest

Here’s an Old World tree still surviving in a modern forrest of “large” trees

That’s just what trees used to be like.

And wandering among those trees, one might have encountered, yes, deer larger than a modern moose, but also, depending on what year, pigs bigger than grizzly bears, beavers the size of modern wolves, ground sloths the size of modern elephants, and bears nearly that big. Not to mention the insects and snakes and shit.

I could keep going, like, you might have crossed paths with a whole herd of these

or a family of these.

Like, 29,000 years ago, the last of the Neanderthal had just died out. Humans and this thing definitely lived at the same time.

And they didn’t live in the Forest, but there is one ice age creature that’s still alive, if you want to see what life was like back in the day. We used to think the Musk Ox was a type of bovine, or cow, which is how it got it’s name. BUT. See this?

that, my friends, is an ice age GOAT. That’s right, that’s a 900 pound GOAT. Here, take another look

anyway, yeah, the wild used to be a lot more Wild. Old Forest was definitely the inland equivalent of Ocean, and everything back in the day was turnt the fuck UP

Henry Cavill reading thirst tweets.

BONUS

The Mandalorian / Star Wars Celebration 2019

netflix’s witcher with game-style choices.

toss a coin to your witcher

donate to your witcher on ko-fi

support your witcher on patreon

like, comment, and subscribe to your witcher

And if you sign up today at audible-dot-com-slash-witcher, you get your first month of audiobooks for free

hey guys it’s your witcher, before we get back into it I just wanted to take a minute to tell you all about Blue Apron

good show~ [the witcher (netflix)]

Okay who’s writing the fanfic

For anyone who might be writing fic in order to raise money/donations for a cause, please remember not to mention that anywhere on AO3. It is against the Terms of Service to charge money for fic, even if that money is not going to you, personally. Please don’t mention commissions or donations or fundraising or patreon or kofi etc etc in a fic or on your profile. ❤

I will boost this signal, mostly for myself because my brain is apparently a fucking colander and I can’t remember shit sometimes; and also add, if you’re the one who commissioned a fic, don’t mention that on ao3 either. Not even in your bookmarks! I forget other people can see my notes there. Please don’t get your writing friends in trouble, like I almost did a couple of times :( 

Just say ‘i asked for this pairing/trope/continuation/whatever’ Don’t say ‘i commissioned this’.

i’ve had “if you enjoy my writing, click here” with a link to my kofi in all of my end notes for a couple years and nothing’s happened, so maybe try that

Nope. You’re still breaking their TOS by having a site like ko-fi directly linked, and if anyone finds that out or someone reports you, you can lose your entire account. They have to enforce these rules in order to protect us from copyright laws. It’s why for decades individual fandom creators used to put “I do not own this work or profit from it” at the start of every fic/chapter.

What you can do, is say “follow me on tumblr” and promote your ko-fi on your tumblr. But I’ve seen people do the link to their ko-fi/patreon without explicitly mentioning them and still losing their accounts or getting hit by warnings cause someone reported them. (The one person I knew who outright lost their account just kept doing it repeatedly despite multiple warnings, like a doofus, so that was on them.)

(I think there may be exceptions for certain charity drives, but I don’t think ko-fi and patreon are protected by that)

Hi! Former AO3 Abuse team member here! It’s been a bit, so I’ll admit that my knowledge may be slightly out of date. But generally speaking you cannot:

Link Directly to:

If you link and are reported your work is in danger of being deleted, but you will be given a warning and time to fix any issues.

You also cannot mention that a work was directly commissioned with $$, hide the rest of your work/novel/chapter/ or in any way paywall the remainder of your work. Things like “support my writing here!!” are usually no go.

General phrasings like trade, requested, asked for, etc are OK.

Joy is correct in saying linking to your tumblr which advertises your kofi or fundraiser is ok.

If you are reported, the AO3 team will do their best to let you know EXACTLY what works and what phrasing is not allowed. They do issue a blanket “responsible for the rest of your works” statement so be thorough.

AO3 WILL NOT DELETE YOUR WORK, BAN YOU, OR IN ANY WAY REMOVE ITEMS WITHOUT WARNING. IF YOUR WORK IS DELETED YOU WILL RECEIVE AN EMAIL CONTAINING THE DELETED WORK. KEEP YOUR EMAIL ADDRESS CURRENT. NEVER USE A STUDENT EMAIL ACCOUNT.

Thank you for that 💖

GO ZEUS

My favorite thing to do when someone asks me to perform a simple task is to say “No” while doing it

Someone: Hey, can I borrow a pen?

Me, getting a bag of pens out: Absolutely not, perish.

Star Wars + ways of saying “I love you”

give this man a regency romance dammit