@etlu-yume / etlu-yume.tumblr.com
We're on a new platform with a totally different audience...we have to prove ourselves all over again...convince a totally new group of people to think we're funny and worth your attention....so allow me to drop some of my "A" material....the funniest thing I got.......here goes....... jeef berky
Micro carving of a Ganesh of nice quality Sugilite. 6.6 carat. https://goldenhourminerals.etsy.com/listing/1699933532
Amazingly fun and unusual commission for @solidagold of a goldenrod plant, also known as solidago.
Something that literally changed my life was working with a friend on a coding thing. He was helping me create an auto rig script and was trying to explain something to me but his words were just turning into static in my brain. I was tired and confused and there was so many new concepts happening.
I could feel myself working toward a crying meltdown and was getting preemptively ashamed of what was about to happen when he said, “Hey, are you someone who benefits from breaks?”
It broke me.
Did I benefit from breaks? I didn’t know. I’d never taken them.
When a problem frustrated or upset me I just gritted my teeth and plowed through the emotional distress because eventually if you batter and flail at something long enough you figure it out. So what if you get bruised on the way.
I viscerally remembered in that moment being forced to sit at the table late into the night with my dad screaming at me, trying to understand math. I remembered taking that with me into adulthood and having breakdowns every week trying to understand coding. I could have taken a break? Would it help? I didn’t know! I’d never taken one!
“Yes,” I told him. We paused our call. I ate lunch. I focused on other stuff for half an hour. I came back in a significantly better state of mind, and the thing he’d been trying to explain had been gently cooking in the back of my head and seemed easier to understand.
Now when I find myself gritting my teeth at problems I can hear his gentle voice asking if I benefit from breaks. Yes, dear god, yes why did I never get taught breaks? Why was the only way I knew to keep suffering until something worked?
I was relating to this same friend recently my roadtrip to the redwoods with my wife. “We stopped every hour or so to get out and stretch our legs and switch drivers. It was really nice. When I was a kid we’d just drive twelve hours straight and not stop for anything, just gas. We’d eat in the car and power through.”
He gave a wry smile, immediately connecting the mindset of my parents on a road trip to what they’d instilled in me about brute forcing through discomfort. “Do you benefit from breaks?” he echoed, drawing my attention to it, making me smile with the same sad acknowledgement.
Take breaks. You’re allowed. You don’t have to slam into problems over and over and over, let yourself rest. It will get easier. Take. Breaks.
Also wanna add that you don't have to run headfirst into problems either. If you're looking at the next task and know it's going to be a pain or super long or *any of that*, take a break while you've got a moment between projects.
The number of times I've taken one look at a menu or a catalogue and gone "you know what, this calls for tea. <disappears>" has been so very very high.
"AO3 doesn't need a "dislike" button"
Um, actually, it already has one. Depending on your specs, it might look a little different but over all it looks kinda like this:
You can find it at the corner of your screen, which corner is dependent on your layout.
Anyway, if you dislike a fic, you can hit this Dislike Button until the fic goes away. It really is pretty amazing actually.
Please take care of your self.
Varda redraw
This little comic changed my life forever and also made me a better friend, sibling, daughter, and coworker, and hopefully me quoting/referencing it all the time is helping people around me, too. 💕
Certain words can change your brain forever and ever so you do have to be very careful about it.
There should be a fanfic writing game called the showrunners challenge where someone writes a story and partway through someone else can play things like “actor leaves after 4000 more words” or “topic now too politically sensitive due to unforeseen world events” or “lost rights to that reference”
I need this to be a real game right the hell now
Enough people have said this that I’m musing on logistics, here’s what I’ve come up with:
I like the idea of a Google doc you can use for the last two options, because then you could also make yourself a deck of cards from those to draw from if you wanted to play alone. You could also play it in a realtime chat – have the “show runner” start with a pitch for a story, and say every (designated time period) they are given a new challenge to incorporate into the description of the story they would be telling. Winner is the person who finally makes them admit defeat, which they do by saying, “and then we do the clip show episode”.
(for those raised in the Netflix era of two-season cancellations, a clip show is where the show has run for so long that they do an episode where the characters do nothing but reminisce, interspersed with clips from previous episodes, giving the crew a break from filming.)
Google doc! I added suggestions from the notes.
And AO3 collection, if anyone actually goes for it
Oh, awesome! Great work, you should be very proud of compiling all this. I may attempt a story or two in this fashion at some point relatively soon….
I'm on a duet kick and I'm marvelling about what an amazing song Somebody That I Used to Know is from a narrative perspective. We're told this sad tale about love and we're all sympathizing with this poor man:
And then the girl shows up shouts, "UNRELIABLE NARRATOR!"
The guy tries to get us back, "No wait! This is my pity party! Hear my sad tale again." But he's lost us, we can't see him in the same way again. The spell is broken. And the spell remains broken, you cannot hear the first verse in the same way ever again.
The acting in the music video too, the way he silently accepts her words. The way he flinches as she talks. He was trying to write his own narrative but he can't stand hearing the truth. And he has no new rebuttal, he can't refute her.
And she hasn’t said a word since. Rowling could take some pointers
Yeah but in Collins defense, her book was really good. She perfectly showed PTSD, Katnis trauma from when her mom mentally “abandoned” her when her dad died and the parallel with Katnis depression at the end of the series, perfectly depicted the society and its inherent problems, Finick’s back story, socio-economic disparities based on skin colour, Rue and the 11th district, President Coin and how she was as bad as Snow but in an other angle, distrinct 13 and the capitol trying to use her image for the war even though she did want to, and way more stuff I can’t think of right now.
I mean the following Y/A distopian books were mostly bad knock off who thought that the reason the HG had such success was because of the love triangle, but in reality Collins created such a complexe yet very realistic world that makes a parallel to our society of entretainment and war
The Hunger Games was baby’s first intro to social justice for a lot of kids back in the early 2010s. They were brilliant books that introduced a lot of complicated concepts in a way teens could understand and enjoy - plus, addictive, well-plotted adventure stories with A+ characterization and worldbuilding. But all the general public seems to remember about them is the love triangle, and I will always be salty about that.
The irony of the Hunger Games is that the media in the book and the media in the real world both chose to focus on the love story instead of the rebellion.
One of my favorite aspects of the book series was the way it dissected the art/science of propaganda/media and the often stark differences in popular figures’ public and private personas. The movies also got that frighteningly correct. Propaganda to oppress and propaganda to uplift were laid side-by-side and used as foils to show how the techniques work to achieve the desired purpose. The direct invocation of “panem et circenses” (”bread and circuses,” keeping a population docile by controlling/bestowing distractions regarding food and entertainment) made the point all the clearer. “Look. This is what is being done to distract you.”
Having Katniss– the symbol of The Common Person at the bottom of the societal hierarchy who most heavily bears the brunt of oppression– be stiff and awful at scripted propos but a fucking goddess at unscripted, passionately angry speeches and stoking reflection and resistance and rebellion was very deliberate. It is a call to be genuine, to question media narratives and seek facts, to take a long, hard, honest look beyond the sparkling lights and glamor projected by the media to really see and take the downtrodden seriously before their collective patience wears thin enough to snap and they bring out the bombs. Or guillotines, if you want to look at IRL history.
One of my favorite scenes in the series is in Catching Fire: the interviews with the Victors being forced to take part in the Quarter Quell. Especially with the visuals of the movie. The entire thing builds up to when Peeta “drops the baby bomb” and the audience breaks into dismayed/horrified pandemonium and there are calls by the privileged to stop the injustice; it is an escalating series of oppressed, re-victimized individuals turning their glamorized re-victimization into a platform to scream their humanity at the citizens of the Capitol until it seems to finally start seeping in. Stanley Tucci play’s Caesar Flickerman’s growing discomfort perfectly; IIRC, his calling for the lights and cameras to be cut when the Victors show unity is to use the gesture of slitting a throat. It’s a common gesture, but in this case it has a greater weight: “Cut this, kill it, don’t let people see it, these people we’ve set up to hate each other joining hands in united defiance is dangerous.”
That also veers off into an extended lesson in “the powers that be seek to divide you and turn you against each other to keep you weak.” In modern terms, you can see it in such things as “wow why should burger-flippers get raises to earn more than the legit heroes who fight crime and save lives and defend our country?” to turn those groups against each other on the basis of accepted social hierarchy instead of talking together and coming to a consensus of, “You know, we’re ALL getting screwed and should ALL make more money; let’s work together to achieve that.”
It is highly relevant to this period of civilization. It resonates with the masses. That resonance is amorphous; allowing it to gel into something more solid could erode media/propagandist influence. Thus, whether conscious or just the nature of the beast,
“LOOK AT THE LOVE TRIANGLE! ROMANCE! FOCUS ON THE ROMANCE! ISN’T IT ROMANTIC?! THINKING ABOUT THE DEEPER STUFF IS UNCOMFORTABLE, SO LOOK AT THE BEAUTIFUL WOMAN AND HANDSOME MEN AND CHOOSE A SIDE AND FIGHT FOR IT! R-O-M-A-N-C-E-!”
In other words, “Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain!”
In other words, “Let’s play up the circus part of panem et circenses.”
It’s like a social ourobouros. I observe it with a sort of morbid fascination.
Just FYI, Suzanne Collins was pressured by her editor to make a love triangle, and decided to make President Snow be the one pushing the Peeta romance to show that it was forced.
Suzanne Collins is a fucking boss
Tagged by @helloparzival13 to make a little guy with this picrew
I want to state for the record that I do own this literal exact outfit & wear it often.
No-pressure tagging: @laurenthemself, @adhdedrn, @keyrousse, @andordean & anyone else who wants to make a lil guy :D
this is reminding me I need to comb and wash my extensions again so I stop procrastinating/putting off wearing them (the rose pinks were SO NICE :sob: )
I keep seeing people recommending Open Office as an alternative to Word, and uh... look, it is, technically, an open source alternative to Word. And it can do a lot of what Word can, genuinely! But it is also an abandoned project that hasn't been updated in nine years, and there's an active fork of it which is still receiving updates, and that fork is called LibreOffice, and it's fantastic.
Seriously, if you think that your choices are either "grit your teeth and pay Microsoft for a subscription" or "support free software but have a kind of subpar office suite experience", I guarantee that it's because you're working with outdated information, or outdated software. Most people I know who have used the latest version of LibreOffice prefer it to Word. I even know a handful of people who prefer it to Scrivener.
Open Office was the original project, and so it has the most name recognition, and as far as I can tell, that's really the only reason people are still recommending it. It's kind of like if people were saying "hey, the iPhone 14 isn't your only smart phone option!" but then were only ever recommending the Samsung Galaxy S5 as an alternative. LibreOffice is literally a version of the same exact program as Open Office that's just newer and better – please don't get locked into using a worse tool just because the updated version of the program has a different name!
I use LibreOffice. It's wonderful.
This is part of my ongoing Discworld jacket embroidery project. Of course Great A'Tuin has to be on there. And of course it has to be the biggest one of them all.
I’m going to put the finished product in my masterpost, but I’m so proud of the thing that I have to put it in an extra post beforehand. Enjoy!
Update!!!
Behold: the elephants! 😁
The turtle moves! Now it’s just the “cargo” left. And the universe. Well.
Update 3: Why did I have to try single thread for the disc. Why. How did I ever think that was a good idea. This is taking aaaages.
I’d say never again, but I know myself too well…
Still trying to decide whether to outline the landmass with darker thread or not. It would make the lands more distinct - but it might also make it look more like a comic. If you have any thoughts on it, let me know. I’ll only decide once I’ve finished the rest of the disc and that’ll be at least a week, if I had to guess.
I finally had some time to continue and the disc is done! Now just some stars, planets, etc…
My estimate is that this took about 150 hours. About half of that went into the disc because I discovered single thread embroidery.
And because I always think it’s really interesting to see the back of the embroidery - bonus:
On to the next one! Maybe I’ll do the luggage now.
Wow..!
Fuckin HELL, bud. You’re an embroidery 🪡 HERO. SPECTACULAR!!!
It has apparently been ten years since the time one of my professors pulled me aside to tell me I had to clean up after making out before going to class because my lipstick was everywhere and I realized "actually my tapdancing group decided we all had to dress like the Joker for our performance" was an infinitely worse explanation so I just said I was sorry
