Sun eating celestial crocodile from African tribal belief. It causes sun eclipse 🐊

ECLIPSE CELEBRATION

Digital Illustration by Christina Bencina

If people are sad about The Wizard Facism game coming from someone you used to look up to and admire, may I suggest an author whose books are filled with nuanced characters and strong, dynamic women?

Tamora Pierce has been writing since the 80’s and has two worlds of magic and fantasy and bonus!!! Isn’t a transphobic POS.

I have met the woman and she is delightful. She rescues cats.

And when you're done with her books, or perhaps while you're reading her books, Diane Duane! Who has also been writing door decades and has excellent portrayals of all manner of diverse characters!

Tamora's readerships and mine cross over in whole a lot of places, and I'm delighted by the connection. And proud to stand with her.

Waterfall amidst a mountain covered in ash after a volcano eruption.

Taken in Iceland. One of the most unique landscape photos I’ve ever seen.

This is how well-fitted corsets look on large bodies! No one’s tits are getting crushed.

‘But, Pancake!’ you ask, ‘Aren’t stays supposed to squish the tits?’

No. That’s a myth, probably started by either the Victorians or Hollywood (or both, as these things go).

Stays have never been about squishing your tits to your chest. They provide support for your chest and back, and structure for your outer clothes. That’s it.

why have I never seen plus size corsets so stunning before

Fondly remembering the time that a cat owner casually entered their calico Maine Coon in a cat fancier’s competition and the judges lost their minds because the cat was 1) male and 2) able to bear children

Anyway here’s Dawntreader Texas Calboy as a silly lil kitten

Here’s an excerpt from one of the articles about the drama his entry caused among the Cat Fanciers that I thought was very earnest and sweet <3

And also some of Calboy’s children!

@pangur-and-grim

He is fearfully and wonderfully made!

ALT

I was about to say he would technically be an intersex king (not because I dislike the concept of trans cats, just bc intersex rep is sorely needed too) but I did some more reading on this icon and actually found the article OP referenced.

ALT

He’s not your usual male calico kitty as it turns out. That’s already cool and rare, but he’s even cooler and rarer than that!

ALT

ALT

Calboy is a chimera!! Which is really fucking cool of you ask me. The chances of having a male calico this way are slim to none, but the mad lad still exists! What an icon. I would die for Calboy.

Everyone in the tags of this post @ cat show judges

Originally I was looking for an adult picture of Calboy

(He’s so pretty 🥰)

But I also found a source for the article screenshotted above! And folks it’s WILD. It’s an incredibly interesting read if you happen to love hearing about niche hobby drama. It’s also just a fantastically written article!

The parts I find the most interesting are about how conservative the cat fanciers association is. This isn’t even all of the parts that talk about that.

People are so mad about this cat spefically because he has female colors. An animal who couldn’t choose how it was born. This is happening in Texas by the way. Hm. I wonder how they treat trans people over there?

Reblogging again for this crucial addition

wait i’m sorry

people are being transphobic. towards a cat.

what the actual fuck.

normalise being bad at roofs in minecraft. normalise not being able to make an aesthetically pleasing roof to save your life in minecraft.

Normalize just digging into the side of a mountain to avoid making roofs in Minecraft

yall need me to tap the sign?

here’s a roof guide that i use because i used to be shit

i dont remember the source, b/c ive had this for like years, but i suggest messing around with these roofs with different shapes/sizes of buildings

in fact, you can mix and match and have one roof with a side room with a different roof on it

honestly, have fun

I’ve had these saved for a long time and unfortunately don’t know the source either, but here are the other tutorials from this artist if anybody is interested!

Oh! These are super cool!

Gamer cats

https://twitter.com/archeometrie/status/1170031822614474752?s=12

Classic rock

BTW I saw this and immediately thought “what if that’s what Stonehenge was for” and then I looked it up and apparently it’s an actual theory that holds up, they sound like massive dull bells that carry for a few miles.

GET BOOKT

A guide of books to gift the people in your life and yourself!

For the person who made a 200+ slide powerpoint about Neon Genesis Evangelion for a presentation party… Also for those who attend presentation parties…

The Archive Undying by @emcandon

For all former and current theater kids (affectionate)...

Will Do Magic for Small Change by Andrea Hairston

For the reader who prefers their off-the-wall science fiction tempered with social commentary, or enjoys social commentary in a space opera font…

The Jinn-Bot of Shantiport by Samit Basu

━ ˖°˖ ☾☆☽ ˖°˖ ━

For the friend with the SHUDDER account…

Piñata: A Novel by Leopoldo Gout

For the burned-out chosen one who’s so, so tired…

The Saint of Bright Doors by @adamantine

For the tumblr mutual that fell down the wuxia cdrama hole…

The Water Outlaws by S. L. Huang

━ ˖°˖ ☾☆☽ ˖°˖ ━

For the gamer who fondly remembers their confrontation with Rayquaza atop the Sky Pillar…

Untethered Sky by Fonda Lee

For the “smash first, questions later” friend in your life…

Ebony Gate by Julia Vee & Ken Bebelle

For a tragic superwholockian in dire need of restorative sapphic fiction…

The Mimicking of Known Successes by Malka Older

━ ˖°˖ ☾☆☽ ˖°˖ ━

For the reader who wished Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell was actually Jonathan Strange/Mr Norrell…

The Last Binding trilogy by @fahye, including: 

● A Marvellous Light

● A Restless Truth

● A Power Unbound

━ ˖°˖ ☾☆☽ ˖°˖ ━

Not enough books? We agree. Check out our other GET BOOKT guide.

Fantasy stories should have more "what do you mean you don't do X" things in compare and contrast of cultures. Like the differences between peoples aren't the stuff they show off as "These Are Our Culture :)" things, fucking everyone has food and music and folk tales, but the things they've always assumed that everyone has, and are baffled to discover that they don't.

The people who are always barefoot are baffled that humans don't have a wash basin at their front door where people can wash their feet before stepping inside?? Do they just walk in with their dirty feet? The fuck do you mean you take your shoes off?

Humans don't have small baby-sized spellbooks for toddlers who just learned to read, so they can safely learn to practice tiny cute and harmless, age-appropriate magic spells before progressing to more mature and demanding spells? What, do they just throw teenagers completely unprepared into the arcane - hold the fuck up, is that why human sorceror mortality is so fucking high?

Dwarves who have always wondered why the entrance to human residences is so fucking big, why do you need to take up such a large area for a door that's just there to lead downstairs to the underground halls? Are the timber walls really as thick as a human is tall? What for? And once one of them gets invited to a human house to stay and rest, nobody ever fucking believes her: That's not the entrance, that's the whole fucking house. 100% of the human house is aboveground, there is no tunnel to the underground levels. They might have a single storage room down there, but the aboveground section is so fucking big because that's the whole house.

This post was brought to you by: People who butter their bread and who had no idea that there are people who put mayonnaise on their bread, and people who put mayo on their bread and had no idea about people who put butter on their bread discovering that the other kind of people exist.

“Doors!”

“Beg pardon?”  I had half expected Elunis to react to Port Johar with politely concealed disgust.  It was, after all, a human city.  And Elunis was a Silver Elf—they didn’t live in tree cities like most elves, but in palatial crystal cities that few ever see.

Elunis kept surprising me.  “Doors!” she said excitedly.  “I never knew so much could be done with doors!”

I looked around.  We were in Temple Square.  Granted, the temple’s doors were bronze, decorated with a relief of the gods doing various godly things (with “godly” definitely not meaning good, wise, or chaste) and the bank’s doors were high and forbidding, but still—”What do you mean?”

Elunis blinked at me with enormous gold-tinted eyes.  Her skin was the color of old bronze and her clothes were green silk and her eyes were that completely unhuman color, and sooner or later someone was going to dip into her pockets just out of curiosity, because she stood out.  A lot.  “Well.  Um.  In Tir Celes the builders try to conceal the doors.  They’re considered, I don’t know, gauche.  A flaw in the clean line of the structure.  But here, the doors are decorative, they’re an integral part of the design, they’re—”  She twirled.  “They’re beautiful!  I have to tell the people back home all about doors.”

I looked at her.  “Wait . . . is that why you keep finding secret doors and passages, when we get into a dungeon?  Because your culture just bloody hides them all?”i

Elunis blinked again.  “Those were supposed to be secret?”

I teach a lot of undergrads these days. About 3 years ago, I started dedicating a full two hours early every semester to a lecture and discussion about the history of the concept of plagiarism, because I was so annoyed that my students were walking into my classroom with the ironclad belief that they weren't plagiarizing when they were. Sure, the university had some official plagiarism guidelines that they could hypothetically read in a code of conduct somewhere, but they didn't. All they had was a vague memory of some teacher in Grade 8 telling them 'don't copy and paste from wikipedia' and a little learning from experience afterwards.

My hypothesis (which I was delighted to find is shared by Brian Deer, the journalist who broke the Wakefield story and who was the source Illuminaughti plagiarized in the hbomberguy video) is that the rise of automatic plagiarism checkers meant that, in the minds of many students, the formerly more abstract concept of plagiarism ('passing someone else's work off as your own') became a more concrete concept operationalized by the plagiarism checker. Under this concept, a text is plagiarized if (and, implicitly, only if) it is detected as plagiarism by the plagiarism checker. I have spent many hours with students sobbing in my office after I told them that their essays were plagiarized, and they all say that they thought changing the words around was sufficient to make it not plagiarized. Maybe some of them were lying for sympathy, maybe they all were, but I see no reason to not take them at their word. They think that what they're doing is dubious (hence the shame) but they don't think it falls under what they take to be the definition of plagiarism - the thing they can face sanction from the university for. They need to have it pointed out to them that there has been plagiarism for a lot longer than there have been automatic 'plagiarism checkers' and that as their professor, I'm the only plagiarism checker they really need to be concerned about.

It's really easy for me to get frustrated about this. It's frustrating to me that the American public high school system (the source of the majority of my students) has failed to prepare them to think about information, facts, and where they come from. It's frustrating that students can't be arsed to read the university's code of conduct and that the only way I know they have is if I read it straight to their faces. It's very frustrating to see the written scholarly word, a medium to which I have dedicated no small part of my life, treated like it's not worth anything. I'm frustrated to know that most students are not in my class, or in the class of someone else prepared to teach this lesson, so they'll go through their whole lives thinking that an uncited light paraphrase is enough to be worthy of credit. I'm frustrated that people with such a lax attitude towards information are my fellow voters. I once read a real fucking academic essay that was submitted for grades that cited a long quote from Arthur Conan Doyle that, when I traced it, was actually a quote from a fucking TJLC blog. That one isn't frustrating, I guess, that's just funny. It's not all bad.

I'm glad for the hbomberguy video. I hope it will make it easier to convince my students in future. It's too bad he didn't go into the academic context, but it's not like he was short on things to talk about already.

But this is a more general problem than just the video essay context shows. If we're not careful, the very concept of plagiarism can get eroded. I'm not a linguistic prescriptivist, either! If enough people start taking this new concept as plagiarism, that will be what it becomes. I think a world in which that notion of plagiarism is the relevant one would be a worse world. Don't let people erode the idea of credit. You're going to want it later.

@venus-light I hope you don't mind me responding to you here. I have no intention of killing you! And if I went around killing people for this kind of misunderstanding, I'd have to kill a lot of my students, which I suspect my employer would not like. This is a really common problem. I'm glad the video helped, and I too hope you're not the only person it helps.

It sounds like you have a much better grasp on this now, but I want to take this opportunity to expand on the point a bit. I'm home sick from work today and not in a position to do anything but read and write, so I'm going to write a bit about plagiarism in university essays, and what I think is the best way for an undergraduate to avoid it. I've addressed it to you, because you're the one who replied, but this is really for any undergraduate who happens to be reading it.

The common pitfall that people fall into when thinking of plagiarism is thinking of it as the violation of some discrete set of rules. Thou shalt cite thy sources. Thou shalt not copy and paste. Thou shalt format thy citations according to the divine command of the Chicago Manual of Style (17th Edition). Rules like that. Trouble is, that approach can only ever be so useful. There's a lot of contextual variation when it comes to the question of how much paraphrasing is appropriate - for instance, an assignment that's just asking you to summarize a particular text will have a lot of paraphrasing from one source in it, and that's not a problem. What will serve you better than specific rules is a more general heuristic.

Let's zoom out a bit and ask a larger question: what's the point of a college humanities essay? Why do we professors make students do them? It's certainly not for our benefit - they're difficult and time-consuming to grade - and we certainly know that students don't like them. It's not because we want to be informed of facts, or even because we want to make sure you have command of facts. In-class testing is a way more effective way to establish whether or not you have command of relevant facts, and it's also a much easier method to grade. So, an essay is doing something different.

The point of a college essay is to give you an opportunity to practice joining a scholarly discussion. We don't just want to see that you've read parts of the existing discussion, we want you to try to add your own voice to it. That's why professors will often ask for a minimum number of different sources in an essay - if you have to synthesize many voices and build them into a coherent body of text, you'll probably end up offering some authorial insight of your own along the way (in a way, this is what Somerton could have been doing, had he been less lazy. There is a real skill in synthesizing and comparing disparate sources!). Your job in an essay is not merely to use sources, but to judge them. If you find two sources that conflict, you get to explain which you think is in the right (if either). If you think two seemingly different perspectives can be put into productive dialogue with each other, you get to say so. And if you think that everyone you've read is wrong, actually, you absolutely get to say so. That's how academics treat each other, and that's the point of an essay. We want you to try to be a historian or a philosopher or a literary critic for a few days (yes, a few. I know you think you can do it in one. Everyone thinks that and everyone's wrong).

Often when I tell students this they respond with a kind of deference - after all, they're not experts, but the people they're reading presumably are. Who are they to judge? And that's true! Students are definitionally not experts. We're not expecting you to be. If you miss something that anyone who's gone through grad school would know about, that's fine. We know that's going to happen. It takes years in grad school to achieve mastery of the canon. It's okay to not already have expertise when we're trying to help you achieve it! Deference to expertise makes sense in other contexts, like when you're writing for the public, but it's not what is being asked of you in a university essay. Gaining expertise requires you to practice thinking like an expert - not just learning, but judging. Reading broadly in the relevant subject is vital, of course, but it's only half the battle. The other half comes from you. The university essay is a safe space to try to figure out what the part that comes from you sounds like.

This may be a surprise to hear, but I actually still remember quite a lot of specific student papers years after I graded them. And that's because I remember what specific students brought to their papers. I got to see them learning that they could intervene in a discussion - that they could bring their own judgement to the table. That their voice could matter. This is one of the great privileges of teaching.

It may feel like we've come a long way from plagiarism, but we haven't. Because this is why plagiarism in education actually matters. In assigning you an essay, I am handing you a microphone and asking what you want to say. I'm not interested in hearing what someone else has said. If you only give me a bunch of stuff paraphrased from elsewhere, there's a real sense in which you just haven't done the assignment, because you haven't said anything. That's the same problem that the youtube plagiarists have - in their rush to talk as much as possible, they say nothing. What does Illuminaughti actually think about Wakefield? What insight does a self-proclaimed Internet Historian have about the tragic tale of Floyd Collins? Somerton mashes up a tonne of different people's writing, but the different people think different things - who does he think is right? We don't know. They said nothing, and then deceived us into watching them say nothing. What a waste of time.

That's the heuristic. That's the thing that will help you avoid plagiarism in the future. Be proud of what you have to say, and don't miss the opportunity to say it! Indicate clearly where you're drawing on other people, not just for their benefit, but for yours - so that it's absolutely clear that your words are your own. You have thoughts worth hearing about, and this is one of the few times in life where you can be sure that at least one person is going to hear about them. And if you can look at your essay and know that it says what you wanted to say, then you don't need to worry about plagiarism anymore. You'll know it's yours.

If you've read this far, thank you for indulging me in my little speech. I hope the end of the semester treats you well, and good luck with your future studies.

Stella Lunardy

Blue Tube Quilt - optical Illusion 

Montse Forcadell Biasco

Cambrils Tarragona Spain

Spanish Patchwork Association Show.

Pitlochry by Kyle Bonallo (ig: @kylebonallo)

🌫️🌌𝐭𝐡𝐨𝐬𝐞 𝐟𝐨𝐠𝐠𝐲 𝐧𝐢𝐠𝐡𝐭𝐬 𝐢𝐧 𝐚𝐮𝐭𝐮𝐦𝐧