With great excitement I can finally unveil: Glass Roses!

This is my year long student film, with Echo the Dragon and Harper the glassblower learning to communicate and get along.

The story concept was mine and I got to be the art director and story lead on it. I did most of the animation on this, I designed Echo the dragon, and gave feedback and direction on color palettes, layouts, and VFX. My awesome team pulled out some awesome work and overall I think our final film is absolutely stellar.

Please feel free to reblog this! I spent so much pouring time and love into this! If you want you can leave me a tip on Ko-fi, and I have an Echo design up on Redbubble if you like my little dragon!

Well, this is all I'm going to talk about for the next few years.

Courtesy of @nerdynarratives

@amtrak-official

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YES YES YES

just fucking with some dinosaurs. some raw forces of nature

i am begging you all to stop treating this site like instagram if you dont want it to be content free by next year

actually i'm reblogging this again with commentary, fuck it.

There's people in the notes talking about "not basing your worth off numbers", and like. that isn't what this post is about. It's not a threat, either, it's a comment on how this site works, at a mechanical level.

Likes are worthless. Let me say that again.

Likes. Are. Worthless.

They don't do anything. They're a bookmark. They were never part of how tumblr works - in the early days we didn't even have a like button, and the site still more or less acts as though we don't. They're personal bookmarks and the only people who "get" anything from them are you (you bookmark the post) and the OP (maybe a very slight serotonin boost), but they don't keep the post in circulation, they don't keep it alive.

Without reblogs, a post will be dead in the water within an hour. No matter how good it is, no matter how many hours of painstaking love and attention its creator put into it, it will be dead within an hour and never seen again. It gets pushed down the dashboard and nobody aside from the followers who were online when it was posted will see it. And there's a huge difference in engagement on posts that get even one lucky reblog from someone with wider reach - that one reblog shows your post to five, ten, fifteen other people, and if one of those people also reblogs it, and so on and so forth, that's how posts stay alive and in circulation. It's like a contagion, but we're sharing creativity instead of disease.

And that matters. That "lifespan" of the post matters, artists and writers give up on this site and go to sites where posts have longer lifespans because it sucks to spend hours of your life, maybe even days, to get two notes and some fucking pocket lint for your efforts. We create for ourselves, but we share because we want people to see it, because that engagement offers positive feedback and encouragement to continue. But more than that, if every post (whether art, fic, gifset, whatever) is dying within an hour or a day of being posted, that means it's not making it onto your dashboard. And if it's not on your dashboard, you won't see it. This kills the site, after a while. You stop seeing the posts, because nobody is putting them on your dashboard, because this site doesn't have an algorithm like twitter and insta's and it shouldn't, it's the last bastion of chronological timelines.

Forgive my giant fucking rant I am so tired right now and full of the plague but like stop acting like artists and writers are just being whiny little babies, or "threatening" to withhold our fucking work (you're not entitled to it! it's ours! if we get nothing out of sharing it we're well within our rights to keep it private!) when we say this site will dry up without reblogs. We're just stating facts.

also I’ve seen some people in the tags say ‘oh there have always been more likes on posts’ no there haven’t ???? 

these are posts from 2013, look at the ratio

not to sound like a nursing home resident but back then people know that the point of this site was to reblog things and share them, not to bury them away among your other 23k liked posts

Y’all I can’t believe the “whistleblower assassination” and “literally falling apart in the sky” company is being represented by a man named Rich White

You could not call a character this in a movie because everyone would say “that’s not realistic” and yet!

And you know he's a rich white man.

Ok so I was curious about that fucking deathtrap and I noticed a couple... oddities.

Alright so this thing is pretty stupid; I'm not at all familiar with submersible vessels, But it activated a sleeper gene in my skull from my time being obsessed with a certain video game.

So I decided to check the promotional page for the contraption.

(I'm going to put aside the second image, where they state the previous shit they hammered out had a 500 meter depth limit tops (i.e. that they, at best, made something that could get to 500 meters then decided that meant they could handle making something that could handle 8 times that). Thinking about the fact they brag about this so brazenly hurts my head. Back to the topic at hand.)

Ok so google shows "cyclops class" is not. a thing that exists. But it sure is funny they keep saying that word. Again maybe it's just my stupid video game brain but that doesn't seem to be used in this context anywhere else. Then I saw the renders.

Ok the newer one on the left really loves that "single eye" thing and looks silly enough, but the older one is.... ok. I give up. That's Subnautica. That's Subnautica For Real.

They built their goddamn suicide death trap based on a submarine in a videoed game.

Actually went the other way.

Subnautica had to license the appearance of the Cyclops submarine from Ocean gate.

Redraws my wof oc from 2019

Damn man, your art is way too good to have so few notes. Take some of these: 🎶🎵🎵🎶

Subnautica post in 2024 no way

Can I buy a print?

[sea emperor sketches] / x

why is she so

THAT'S MY WIFE!!!!!!!!!

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA

I love my Sea Emperor Lewifethan.

I went to the local aviary today and they had some really mean things to say about owls.

I can confirm that most birds have a detectable amount of wiring behind the eyes - blinking lights and buttons and sliders and frizzy things that spark and chirp and beep. They also have a lot of soul that can communicate with ours because the programming is fairly compatible. Vultures are clever and curious, swans are clear and lawful, chickens have a lot of personality, caged parrots are dissociated and disinherited and frankly worrying, falconry-trained birds of prey are tremendously businesslike.

And owls are absolutely lovely beasts with their own irreplaceable validity. but they are basically stuffed with polyester fiberfill. They have one button, like a child's toy dinosaur that opens and closes its mouth when you press the back of its head. And it isn't even a sophisticated electronic button it's just a lever that rocks back and forth to make the claws open and close. I think they may have actually evolved independently from sponges. Their skulls simply exist to create holes that funnel sound and light, and as a place to hang a giant hinged beak. An owl is just an empty tube like a windchime that the wind whistles through, and you can drop meat down it. They use the meat to generate feathers, and then emit the bones in pressed little packages like those machines that flatten a penny and stamp it with the logo of a theme park. I think that's the gist of it - most birds are electronics of varying levels of sophistication, but owls are just a system of levers and pulleys. No elevator music in those skulls, just the wind echoing through empty caverns of slightly irritating design. Absolutely fantastic.

Fun fact, when the animal trainers for HP heard they had to use owls, they asked JK if they could use ravens instead, to which she said “no”.

Cue years of torment.

Hedwig had to be played by multiple different birds, as each could only learn one (1) trick.

They somehow, after months of training, taught some owls to fly from one end of the Great Hall to another. They did not succeed in teaching them to drop what they were holding. The tech team had to create lightweight harnesses (owls aren’t strong birds) that could be used to mechanically hold and drop letters/parcels for the scenes.

The good news was that once an owl learns a trick, it doesn’t forget it, so they could reuse the same birds over the years of filming.

It still took about 6 months to teach all the owls tricks where it would have only taken a few weeks with ravens.

I just love the phrasing on the sign at the top because it’s worded not like humans started to think owls were wise because of mythological associations with a deity, but rather like Athena herself started the rumor because she just really liked owls.

@sephet

Athena: look at this

Athena: look at this brainless ball of fluff

Athena: It's so dumb I love it

I was chatting to a falconer once who said that humans never really get to see owls at their best because they hate daylight, hate large groups of people, and hate being perceived. I for one find that very relatable, and probably Athena did too.

I sent a letter today - something I haven’t done for years

It’s full of plastic bread clips

It’s for Science

At the risk of loosing some mystery, I think I should add some context:

There’s this website-I mean, scientific organization called the Holotypic Occlupanid Reasurch Group.

They are a group of abiologists who study and classify Bread clips.

I found a species that has not yet been described:

Yay for citizen science 👍

wtf?

Apparently HORG is widely appreciated by pediatricians since knowing exactly what kind of Occlupanid a child may have swallowed makes removing it safely much easier

IIRC this is actually part of the reason HORG was started. A man swallowed a breadclip and the clip closed around part of his tissue linings (in his intestines I think?). The specific shape and flexibility of the clip were significant determining factors in the removal process, as some bread clips have spikes and prongs that would have made extraction more complicated. They started the taxonomy so they could work out extraction techniques for each type.

are you fucking kidding me occlu like oculus or close and panid like bread. its a fancy word for breadcloser

happy very specific archive thursday, everyone

it’s funny because yes, you CAN disable right click save, but it takes like an extra two seconds to get around it because of how images are displayed on websites. (technically you could also just screenshot but this gets you a real jpg)

for example, instagram has disabled right click save. here I am trying to save a picture of this girl with a pumpkin sweater, but I am thwarted by the lack of right click save!

to get around it, right click and go to “inspect” or “inspect element” (it’s called different things depending on what computer you’re using)

shimmy around the webpage code until you find the “src” bit. It will helpfully tell you when you’ve found it because the image, and only the image, will light up as if you selected it.

that source is the link to where the image is hosted on the website. click the link.

find the actual hosted image. right click on that.

check and mate.

reblogging this version so people can piss off the NFT bros better

This is basically how to save videos from tumblr too

ok!!

There are also Firefox extensions that do this for you automatically. For video and image.

Oh wow

Wait... Wait wait wait, let me understand something.

So for this cisgender woman with naturally high testosterone (and/or an intersex condition, I do not know her specific condition and it's honestly none of my business) has to be be forced to take the same testosterone suppressing medications that these same competitive regulatory committee said wasn't good enough to suppress trans women's testosterone to allow them to compete in women's sports.

If she has naturally high testosterone, similar to that that trans women experience in their lives pre-transition then wouldn't she have the same advantages that a trans woman supposedly inherently has and can not be corrected with said testosterone suppression?

Like, no one should have to undergo forced medical treatment to be able to compete or to make it "fair" for their competition. Other athletes have all kinds of natural advantages, like Michael Phelps having an abnormal wingspan and larger lungs and heart. In fact, every high level athlete has some kind of physical advantage, that's how they're such high level athletes. You think the people they beat out for their spots just, what, didn't work as hard? Didn't grab those bootstraps tight enough? Fuck no.

Racism, intersexism, and transphobia are all linked, and this case is maybe the most glaringly obvious one.

Made this a while ago, it remains a relevant image time and time again

Fucking rodeo. The Olympics is supposed to be full of freaks of nature. These are supposed to be the most inhuman humans on Earth. These people are supposed to be so good they are basically gods.

The Olympics is not supposed to be a fair competition. Ultimately, is a competition of which country has the most highly skilled and trained weirdos. Seriously. No one sends an average person to the Olympics. Maybe Denmark. Running? You send the person with the longest legs and fastest twitch muscles. Luge? You send the smallest person with the fastest twitch muscles. Pole vaulting? Come on, we all know those people are not human. Have you seen them? Gymnasts? Half the time I don't even know what I'm looking at.

Discrimination based on natural features, in the Olympics, is fundamentally conflicted with what the Olympics is about. Freaks of Nature in Friendly Competition for Metal Discs.

this site has one setting

I’m laughing, but there’s a super useful corollary, which my husband calls “the Red Balloon.” He was a defense lawyer and had a fair number of drug addicts come through, and there is a thing where if you’re like, on your first offense, they’ll do a thing where you can go to treatment and if you complete it they’ll take the conviction off your record.  And he would tell his clients, “Look, everyone’s going to tell you not to do drugs. They’re going to say it over and over again. And it’s like, if people tell you not to think of a white elephant, you’re going to think of a white elephant. But the trick to not thinking about a white elephant is to think of a red balloon. So you need to find your red balloon. For some people it’s yoga. For others it’s woodworking. For some people it’s scrapbooking or gardening or any of a long list of things to do. They focus on that, it’s a lot easier to succeed in ignoring the white elephant.” So yeah, “watch yourself” is one thing… but the better idea is to watch something else. (Even if it’s fanfic about werewolves fucking.)

It’s a form of productive dissociation, and is super, super helpful. It’s easy for me to get bogged down in how much pain I’m in… but some of the most painful periods of my life have also been the most productive, writing-wise, because writing is one of my red balloons. 

There is a phrase I use A LOT in my parenting and my son gets very sick of it, but it’s true:

The thing you practise is the thing you get good at.

You may not intentionally be practicing “being grumpy” but if you don’t put effort into practicing “not being grumpy” then I’m afraid that’s what you’re doing. It’s hard! It’s really hard! Sometimes, for some things, it’s pretty much impossible and that sucks!

But being carefully aware that you are going to get good at the things you do most of is a good way to be more careful of what those things are. If that makes sense.

You gotta appreciate sometimes how tumblr works in such a way that everyone who wants to reblog this interesting or useful psychological advice is also forced to reblog the thing about werewolf fucking

This is also called sampling bias.

"oh so you're spiritual but not religious" no actually I am deeply religious in alarmingly carnal and esoteric ways. If you even care.

Finally someone has summed it up.