Interview with Bramble the Mountain King

Super Dungeon Meshi RPG, the Legend of the Seven Meals

Pit bulls and parolees in Skyrim

Starcard Fox Captor

Dungeon (Meshi) of Warcraft

Wipeout x a true crime documentary.

Yeah I don't know how that works but. Like. That could be really cool.

If we count the last thing that was on the TV, then it's going to be my 4yo's favorite YouTube channel that has a probably-Mormon lady who makes cute bentos for her children.

Combined, of course, with my current obsession game featuring the princess of the underworld taking on the titan of time to save her family.

I think the best name I can come up with for it is:

Bunches of Pomegranates

If we're going with things I've actually, actively wanted to watch recently, though... LOL. At least I'm consistent in my theming.

I'll call it:

Killing Time: Percy and Melinoë's Awesome Adventure

I have no idea what you'd get by combining Revolutionary Girl Utena with Eiyuden Chronicle: Hundred Heroes, but I am absolutely here for whatever it is.

I’m surprised Sabin didn’t get swept away by the ocean and end up on the other side of the world, knowing him.

Here's a website where Palestine GoFundMes are vetted and shared that you can send out to people. The url is gazafunds.com

Easy to use and simple. Just share the site whenever someone asks for GFMs for Palestine.

The 2024 Gender Census is now open!

[ Link to survey ]

The 11th annual international gender census, collecting information about the language we use to refer to ourselves and each other, is now open until 13th June 2024.

It’s short and easy, about 5 minutes probably.

After the survey is closed I’ll process the results and publish a spreadsheet of the data and a report summarising the main findings. Then anyone can use them for academic or business purposes, self-advocacy, tracking the popularity of language over time, and just feeling like we’re part of a huge and diverse community.

If you think you might have friends and followers who’d be interested, please do reblog this blog post, and share the survey URL by email or at AFK social groups or on other social networks. Every share is extremely helpful - it’s what helped us get 40,000 responses last year.

Survey URL: https://survey.gendercensus.com

The survey is open to anyone anywhere who speaks English and feels that the gender binary doesn’t fully describe their experience of themselves and their gender(s) or lack thereof.

For the curious, you can also spy on some graphs and demographic data for the incoming responses here.

Thank you so much!

[ Link to survey ]

Image credit: Malachite and rhodochrosite.

Wanted to say Glaze 2.0 is AMAZING.

What took 30 mins+ before, took me THREE MINUTES last night. WITH my other programs still running.

For folks who tried Glaze but haven't been using it due to glazing time, give 2.0 a chance!

I've heard that other folks have had it taking the same time/longer, but the quality is so much better. Your settings will determine the outcome, but it's definitely a huge improvement over the initial release version.

This update was super sexy of the Glaze Project. You can download the updated version from their site HERE!

(You should also use in conjunction with Nightshade!)

Some verified Gaza GFMs on Tumblr!

These gfms belong to organizers who have reached out to me and all of them are nowhere near their goals, there are a few more I'm going through right now but these are all verified. Please share and donate to help these families.

For a longer list of GFMs that have been individually verified, @el-shab-hussein has a huge masterlist of GFMs to check out and support

A general reminder—periodic cicadas pose no threat to anyone and their plant damage is limited to nipping off the ends of twigs. Please do not hose them with pesticide. They are slow and clumsy and confused and only want to make friends with other cicadas and eventually die of sexual exhaustion.

Yes, the screaming is a lot, but they’ve been extremely quiet neighbors for thirteen years, cut them some slack as they go through the most fraught time of their lives.

let this little man fuck!

25.04.2024 📖 today's anthy!

[ID by @fagofgod: three versions of a drawing of anthy from revolutionary girl utena. she is wearing a pink and white jacket and a pair of frayed jeans. she is sitting on the floor outside, leaning against a tree, holding up a book next to her face. she is looking up to the side with wide eyes and raised eyebrows, lips parted. the book she is holding is gideon the ninth by tamsyn muir. there is a colourful charm hanging from the book, presumably acting as a bookmark.

the first version of the drawing shows it in full. the second version zooms in to show the frayed end of anthy's pants as well as the book she is holding. the third version zooms in to show the book and anthy's face. end ID.]

Yes geologists! Doing the important work 💖

Credit to: The Sedgwick Museum of Earth Sciences

Isn't it funny how this is almost canon?

Inspired by this post.

does it indicate anything about me that I immediately recognized what paper this figure is from

so I had to immediately go and pull this other amazing figure from the paper, which is "THE HEXAGON" a device with six rooms for fruit flies to have sex in and a central room for a fruit fly to observe six couples having sex at once

Is the goal to see if being able to observe multiple options simultaneously effects the watching flies' choices?

hello, thank you for asking, I was basically sitting over here vibrating hoping for the opportunity to infodump more

so the things about making decisions is that it takes a bunch of time and energy and brain power to gather and assess information, and it is evolutionarily advantageous to cheat and offload as much of the work as possible onto other people. thus, there is natural selection for observing other people's decisions and mimicking them.

in a lot of critters, this means it is advantageous to watch who someone else picks for sex so you can copy what they decided was sexy when you select your own partner

the simplest version of the fly sex panopticon is basically just a 2-chamber tube where scientists can orchestrate sex shows for fruit flies.

("watch a demonstration" is scientist code for watch anorthern pair of fruit flies have sex)

you can very quickly instill a preference: cover male fruit flies with pink or green fluorescent powder, and then let a female fly observe another female fly having sex with a pink male. the observer will conclude that pink is extremely sexy and be much more likely to select a hot pink male herself. by switching the colors and the learned preference to green, you can demonstrate that this is indeed learned behavior, and not some kind of pre-existing genetic preference.

the 6-way "sexagon" was invented for this paper to test how seeing different ratios of pink vs. green males being chosen would affect the development of preference.

the cool thing about this graph is it shows it didn't matter if there were only slightly more of the the females picking pink or green males, the observer would still develop a preference for whatever the majority were choosing.

the whole paper is very cool, and absolutely worth a read:

it argues (and supports experimentally) that since preferences can be learned and passed on, fruit flies have an actual culture that can vary among populations and be transmitted to youngsters across generations.

this is super cool, because most studies proposing or examining the existence of culture in animals have been focused on higher level stuff like monkeys. if something as simple as a fruit fly can have a culture, this suggests that animal culture could have had huge effects on evolution from the ground up.

so yes, animal culture! fruit fly culture! very cool

but also an excellent evolutionary argument for voyeurism

PLEASE for the love of the universe read anti-colonial science fiction and fantasy written from marginalized perspectives. Y’all (you know who you are) are killing me. To see people praise books about empire written exclusively by white women and then turn around and say you don’t know who Octavia Butler is or that you haven’t read any NK Jemisin or that Babel was too heavy-handed just kills me! I’m not saying you HAVE to enjoy specific books but there is such an obvious pattern here

Some of y’all love marginalized stories but you don’t give a fuck about marginalized creators and characters, and it shows. Like damn

If anyone has any recommendations give them to me please!

Gladly! The pieces on this list aren’t limited to specifically anti-colonial science fiction and fantasy, but they do center related and relevant topics, themes, etc.

Severely underhyped books of assorted speculative genres:

Read widely. Read diversely. People of the Caucasian persuasion need to stop getting pissy when the story doesn’t immediately center them and they don’t automatically relate to everything the character says and does and is. Just let yourself get swept in the story—even if it touches on (gasp!) racism—and maybe, just maybe, it’ll reveal something to you.

Or maybe not! Marginalized sff authors do not have to and should not have to educate their readers. But if I see one more white person complain about how Black characters are fundamentally annoying because they complain too much I’m going to fling myself into the sun

Thanks for coming to my ted talk I didn’t want to do it but here I am

Don't forget Aliette de Bodard! Especially her Xuya and Dominion of the Fallen series.

Zen Cho is my other favorite - Sorcerer to the Crown and The True Queen, and also Black Water Sister.

Also there's C. L. Polk's "Kingston Cycle" books! Cozy fantasy romance that veers hard into radical politics in ways that seriously took me by surprise.

Lyctorhood ✨

love a canon (?) coffee shop AU