“Yeah, Wilson played first table on the chess team, Chester used to start crying every time he heard a sad song, Dan can really rock a cocktail dress and six-inch heels, and I wasn’t going to let anyone give them any shit for any of that. So I had to learn to beat up people bigger than me pretty early on.”
This is my new favourite post. Whenever there’s a female character who fights, it’s always because she’s learned from older male relatives. I’m gonna print this post and put it on my wall bc it gave me new hope for humanity.
Tried for a twist on the classic art history trope of the bather :)
wow this is SO GOOD
I thought this was Aveline at first
I’ve never heard anything scream “I don’t know what fat women’s bodies look like” louder than this
Her ribs are literally still showing through her fat and skin somehow
She has skinny girl breasts and nipples angled upwards
The bottom of her stomach is somehow defying gravity and angled upwards as well instead of sagging above her crotch
Probably because it’s a painting of a stocky, muscular woman, not a “fat” one.
Those are serratus muscles, not ribs. You can see them because she’s stretching her body up, the skin on the front is pulled tight while the fleshy masses in the back bunch up (if she was bending forward it would be the opposite, with folds on the stomach and back muscles pulled tight)
The breasts are fine, that’s a pretty common look when someone has average sized breasts hanging from muscular pectorals. Nipples angle upwards sometimes, especially when people raise their arms, and not all heavyset women have large breasts.
the bottom of her stomach is a little more planar than you’d typically expect to see with this kind of rendering, but again, she’s thick and muscular, the mass of her abdomen is pulled up with the pose and doesn’t have “sagging” fat. Even on heavyset women who AREN’T muscular, that look of fat sagging on the lower abdomen is not ubiquitous. What you’re describing is a very specific type of body as though it’s the only way fat deposits build on heavier set female-assigned bodies.
Man I hate it when people use the pronoun “you” as a singular pronoun in an informal setting. “You” is plural, unless thou dost speak to an unfamiliar person. The correct singular second person pronoun is “thou” in most cases. Grammar never changes. Pronouns must always stay one way until the end of time. Learn thy proper English. *sigh* Kids these days.
If thou this mistake shouldst make on thine own blog, then know, villain, that thou art a dirty descriptivist, and no friend of mine. Ne'er should language itself alter, it doth remain fixèd as such, untouch’d by change. Wouldst thou, vile descriptivist, that we forget the heritage of our great tongue? Nay, say I. Thou art but a dickhead who sayest so.
stynt ðy clappe! beoð ðo writerris be wetleas knafen. ðy langag o engelond diffoulened be, ille usenid bi sclaundrous novelri.
Oh! Oh! Sandra and Micheline!! Totes Promoted!!! :D
Tried to sketch this last weekend with minimal success. Truffles didn’t really work, despite taking two… well, maybe 5 hours in I started to actually feel something but by then it was 1am and my delightful perception warping was not enough to withstand the need for sleep.
I need to get back in the habit of my morning warmup sketches…
You are lucky to be an Agent of the TA. The Transit Authority cares about you. Trust the Transit Authority. Respect the sanctity and safety of Transit Major. The Trains must always run on time.
My favorite thing about Thomas the Tank Engine is that it canonically takes place in a train post-apocalypse where the Island of Sodor is the only safe zone in a totalitarian dystopia in which steam trains are routinely killed and their body parts are sold or cannibalized for repair
If you think I’m kidding you need to read the original books
could you please direct me to a source? i would feel much better if this was validated.
It took me so long to find this quote online but I did it because it’s so much darker than one might expect from Thomas the Tank Engine:
“…Engines on the Other Railway aren’t safe now. Their controllers are cruel. They don’t like engines any more. They put them on cold damp sidings, and then,” Percy nearly sobbed, “they…they c-c-cut them up.” -”The Bluebells of England.” Stepney the Bluebell Engine. Rev. Awdry, Wilbert. London: Egmont Publishing, 1963.
This illustration, by Gunvor and Peter Edwards, accompanied the above text in the original book, and depicts a pair of unfortunate Other Railway engines moments before being disassembled with a blowtorch.
HOLY FUCK LOOK AT THE ONE IN THE BACKGROUND THEY TOOK ITS FUCKING FACE OMG
the early thomas the tank engine books are pretty standard stuff. saccharine bubblegum type stories and illustrations. if you watched the show, it’s like that in book form.
the second half of the railway series are so fucking dark and surreal i’m convinced they were a result of reverend wilbur awdry doing copious amounts of lsd and having hallucinations of his own death.
Excuse me but the very first story in the Railway Series is about an engine who hides in a tunnel and refuses to run because he doesn’t want to get his paint job ruined in the rain, so railway management seals off the tunnel.
They eventually let him out because another engine breaks down or something, but the original plan was to just leave him in there forever.
On the show, didn’t they also hook up one engine to a generator, so he’d never move again? That was literally one of the lines, I think. It’s on some other post on here. It was chilling.
Yes! This also happened in the books, to an engine referred to only as “No. 2″, but the television series applied the same scenario to an invented character named “Smudger”, in the episode “Granpuff”.
“Smudger,” said Duke. “Was a show-off. He rode roughly and often came off the rails. I warned him to be careful, but he took no notice.” “Listen, Dukie” he snared. “Who worries about a few spills?” “We do here! I said, but Smudger just laughed.” “Hahaha!” “Until one day, Manager said he was going to make him useful at last. Smudger stopped laughing then!” “W-w-why? What did he do?!” “He turned him into a generator. He’s still there behind our shed. He’ll never move again.”
This is so fucked up
No, listen.
Okay, so we see Railway Management doing all this shit, right, but supposedly it’s so much worse in the Other Railways? I mean, sure, you might get turned into a generator or bricked into a tunnel for not doing as you’re told, but at least you’re not cut up and sold for parts, right? It’s not so bad on the island of Sodor, right?
Or maybe that’s just what Railway Management wants the engines to think.
Maybe the island of Sodor is the real totalitarian regime, and the engine citizens (slaves) are fed propaganda, illustrated in hellish grays and sulfuric yellows, about how bad it is everywhere else, at all the Other Railways.
omg this is straight up fanfic material. Justin and Barack just look so ~cozy and Cameron is just sitting there like “i thought you were *my* bae” and it’s hilarious
Suzanne Sadedin, Ph.D. in evolutionary biology from Monash University
I’m so glad you asked. Seriously. The answer to this question is one of the most illuminating and disturbing stories in human evolutionary biology, and almost nobody knows about it. And so, O my friends, gather close, and hear the extraordinary tale of:
HOW THE WOMAN GOT HER PERIOD
Contrary to popular belief, most mammals do not menstruate. In fact, it’s a feature exclusive to the higher primates and certain bats*. What’s more, modern women menstruate vastly more than any other animal. And it’s bloody stupid (sorry). A shameful waste of nutrients, disabling, and a dead giveaway to any nearby predators. To understand why we do it, you must first understand that you have been lied to, throughout your life, about the most intimate relationship you will ever experience: the mother-fetus bond.
Isn’t pregnancy beautiful? Look at any book about it. There’s the future mother, one hand resting gently on her belly. Her eyes misty with love and wonder. You sense she will do anything to nurture and protect this baby. And when you flip open the book, you read about more about this glorious symbiosis, the absolute altruism of female physiology designing a perfect environment for the growth of her child.
If you’ve actually been pregnant, you might know that the real story has some wrinkles. Those moments of sheer unadulterated altruism exist, but they’re interspersed with weeks or months of overwhelming nausea, exhaustion, crippling backache, incontinence, blood pressure issues and anxiety that you’ll be among the 15% of women who experience life-threatening complications.
From the perspective of most mammals, this is just crazy. Most mammals sail through pregnancy quite cheerfully, dodging predators and catching prey, even if they’re delivering litters of 12. So what makes us so special? The answer lies in our bizarre placenta. In most mammals, the placenta, which is part of the fetus, just interfaces with the surface of the mother’s blood vessels, allowing nutrients to cross to the little darling. Marsupials don’t even let their fetuses get to the blood: they merely secrete a sort of milk through the uterine wall. Only a few mammalian groups, including primates and mice, have evolved what is known as a “hemochorial” placenta, and ours is possibly the nastiest of all.
Inside the uterus we have a thick layer of endometrial tissue, which contains only tiny blood vessels. The endometrium seals off our main blood supply from the newly implanted embryo. The growing placenta literally burrows through this layer, rips into arterial walls and re-wires them to channel blood straight to the hungry embryo. It delves deep into the surrounding tissues, razes them and pumps the arteries full of hormones so they expand into the space created. It paralyzes these arteries so the mother cannot even constrict them.
What this means is that the growing fetus now has direct, unrestricted access to its mother’s blood supply. It can manufacture hormones and use them to manipulate her. It can, for instance, increase her blood sugar, dilate her arteries, and inflate her blood pressure to provide itself with more nutrients. And it does. Some fetal cells find their way through the placenta and into the mother’s bloodstream. They will grow in her blood and organs, and even in her brain, for the rest of her life, making her a genetic chimera**.
This might seem rather disrespectful. In fact, it’s sibling rivalry at its evolutionary best. You see, mother and fetus have quite distinct evolutionary interests. The mother ‘wants’ to dedicate approximately equal resources to all her surviving children, including possible future children, and none to those who will die. The fetus ‘wants’ to survive, and take as much as it can get. (The quotes are to indicate that this isn’t about what they consciously want, but about what evolution tends to optimize.)
There’s also a third player here – the father, whose interests align still less with the mother’s because her other offspring may not be his. Through a process called genomic imprinting, certain fetal genes inherited from the father can activate in the placenta. These genes ruthlessly promote the welfare of the offspring at the mother’s expense.
How did we come to acquire this ravenous hemochorial placenta which gives our fetuses and their fathers such unusual power? Whilst we can see some trend toward increasingly invasive placentae within primates, the full answer is lost in the mists of time. Uteri do not fossilize well.
The consequences, however, are clear. Normal mammalian pregnancy is a well-ordered affair because the mother is a despot. Her offspring live or die at her will; she controls their nutrient supply, and she can expel or reabsorb them any time. Human pregnancy, on the other hand, is run by committee – and not just any committee, but one whose members often have very different, competing interests and share only partial information. It’s a tug-of-war that not infrequently deteriorates to a tussle and, occasionally, to outright warfare. Many potentially lethal disorders, such as ectopic pregnancy, gestational diabetes, and pre-eclampsia can be traced to mis-steps in this intimate game.
What does all this have to do with menstruation? We’re getting there.
From a female perspective, pregnancy is always a huge investment. Even more so if her species has a hemochorial placenta. Once that placenta is in place, she not only loses full control of her own hormones, she also risks hemorrhage when it comes out. So it makes sense that females want to screen embryos very, very carefully. Going through pregnancy with a weak, inviable or even sub-par fetus isn’t worth it.
That’s where the endometrium comes in. You’ve probably read about how the endometrium is this snuggly, welcoming environment just waiting to enfold the delicate young embryo in its nurturing embrace. In fact, it’s quite the reverse. Researchers, bless their curious little hearts, have tried to implant embryos all over the bodies of mice. The single most difficult place for them to grow was – the endometrium.
Far from offering a nurturing embrace, the endometrium is a lethal testing-ground which only the toughest embryos survive. The longer the female can delay that placenta reaching her bloodstream, the longer she has to decide if she wants to dispose of this embryo without significant cost. The embryo, in contrast, wants to implant its placenta as quickly as possible, both to obtain access to its mother’s rich blood, and to increase her stake in its survival. For this reason, the endometrium got thicker and tougher – and the fetal placenta got correspondingly more aggressive.
But this development posed a further problem: what to do when the embryo died or was stuck half-alive in the uterus? The blood supply to the endometrial surface must be restricted, or the embryo would simply attach the placenta there. But restricting the blood supply makes the tissue weakly responsive to hormonal signals from the mother – and potentially more responsive to signals from nearby embryos, who naturally would like to persuade the endometrium to be more friendly. In addition, this makes it vulnerable to infection, especially when it already contains dead and dying tissues.
The solution, for higher primates, was to slough off the whole superficial endometrium – dying embryos and all – after every ovulation that didn’t result in a healthy pregnancy. It’s not exactly brilliant, but it works, and most importantly, it’s easily achieved by making some alterations to a chemical pathway normally used by the fetus during pregnancy. In other words, it’s just the kind of effect natural selection is renowned for: odd, hackish solutions that work to solve proximate problems. It’s not quite as bad as it seems, because in nature, women would experience periods quite rarely – probably no more than a few tens of times in their lives between lactational amenorrhea and pregnancies***.
We don’t really know how our hyper-aggressive placenta is linked to the other traits that combine to make humanity unique. But these traits did emerge together somehow, and that means in some sense the ancients were perhaps right. When we metaphorically ‘ate the fruit of knowledge’ – when we began our journey toward science and technology that would separate us from innocent animals and also lead to our peculiar sense of sexual morality – perhaps that was the same time the unique suffering of menstruation, pregnancy and childbirth was inflicted on women. All thanks to the evolution of the hemochorial placenta.
arthur weasley, aka the world’s biggest muggleboo who probably larps as an office worker on the weekends
officemaster: you have… *rolls dice* successfully transferred the call to your boss’ voicemail! you hear the distant ringing of the fellytone from the inner office for a moment before the machine picks up, securely delivering the regional manager’s message to its intended recipient.
arthur weasley: *pumps fist in air, high-fives xenophilius lovegood*
sirius black: is it my turn yet?
officemaster: no.
xenophilius lovegood: i search the supply closet for binder clips.
officemaster: *rolls dice* you find a small cardboard box with three binder clips in it, but in the process of retrieving it from the high shelf, you knock a bottle of toner off. it hits your left pinky toe. *rolls dice* you lose 1 HP.
xenophilius lovegood: best fetch quest EVER.
sirius black: so is it my turn now?
officemaster: no, shut up. remus?
remus lupin: wait, is arthur still at the front desk?
arthur weasley: yeah
remus lupin: i approach the front desk. *clears throat* “Hello, Shirley. Were there any messages for me while I was out?”
arthur weasley: “Yes, Mr. Crumplebottom. Phillip Smythe from home office called about your business trip. I put him through to your voicemail.”
remus lupin: “Good work! Thank you very much. I shall remeber this come time for your Christmas bonus.”
sirius black: is it my turn yettt???
officemaster: merlin’s balls man, yes, it’s your turn
sirius black: i attempt to seduce the visiting sales representative
remus lupin: what? you can’t do that
sirius black: sure i can, i have like 25 charisma points
remus lupin: but we’ve all got the casual friday modifier right now, and if you get a sexual harassment lawsuit we can’t advance to the next meeting until the litigation phase is over
sirius black: i’m chaotic neutral, what were you expecting?
remus lupin: besides, arthur’s receptionist character found out she was married in the last session, remember? you would have to roll a natural 20
arthur weasley: hey, no metagaming–sirius’ character wasn’t there at the time, he was trapped in the fax machine
xenophilius lovegood: i still don’t think that’s how fax machines actually work
officemaster: sirius?
sirius black: yeah, arthur’s right, i couldn’t have known about that. *shrugs* i attempt to seduce her.
remus lupin: oh my god i hate you so much right now
Do you ever think about how different your view of everything would be if you thought in a numerical system that wasn’t base 10
“Wow, 823543. What a nice, round number!”
This is an interesting knob to twist in speculative fiction, because like, we think it’s perfectly obvious that “10 digits (fingers) = 10 digits (numerals)” but that doesn’t need to be true. Like it could be as trivial as if we had just picked up the habit of counting a finger by touching it to our thumb instead of sticking it out. That’d mean we’d work in base 8. (Which would have been an unexpected blessing when we invented computers.) Or if we came up with the notion of place values *and then assigned them to our fingers* we’d be counting to 255 on our hands, in base 2. (This is a neat trick to learn, by the way.)
Plus there are actual historical peoples who count in bases that have nothing to do with their total inventory of fingers, like the Mayan (5)20 system. (Their system is based on grouping things into fives, and it transitions from counting into multiplication at 20.) Or 60, which the Babylonians used because it has lots of whole divisors, and they hadn’t really worked out fractions very nicely. (This survives as our weird base 60 time system, which is BTW another thing specficcers often forget civilizations do: Inconsistency and legacy systems!)
Yes, yes, yes to all of this, but especially inconsistency and legacy systems. Give me more worlds that make as little sense when viewed in snapshot as ours does.
Other fun numeral systems:
Unary (base one) is simply tally marks
Base 20 has a minute presence in English with the word ‘score’, which might owe some of its survival to the Gettysburg Address (”Four score and seven years ago” = 87 years ago)
Base 12 survives with “dozen” (10 in base 12, which is 12 in decimal) and “gross” (100 in base 12, which is 144 in decimal). There are modern groups of “dozenists” who wish to actually move to a duodecimal system due to mathematical simplicity in some cases (0.6, 0.4, 0.3, and 0.2 being perfectly precise duodecimal representations of the fractions ½, 1/3, ¼, and 1/6, respectively, whereas 1/3 and 1/6 in decimal produce infinitely repeating digits)
Binary, Octal, and Hexadecimal are obviously used in computers, and knowledge of the last of these three is common as RGB colors are written that way. (ie, most computer-savvy people would know #FFFFFF indicates white, and might even know FF = 255 in decimal, and on a scale of 0 to 255, FF FF FF means there are 255 of each red, green, and blue.)
You mentioned our base 60 time system, but it’s important to point out that degrees (of a circle, not temperature) are also base 60! A circle has 360º, each degree is 60′ (minutes) and each minute is 60′′ (seconds).
Depending on how you want to talk about bases, measuring systems get VERY complicated. Metrics, are, of course all base-10 based, but look at the imperial system. Measuring has a mixed system so 1;14;2;11.5 as the numbers representing the ridiculously precise “1 mile, 14 yards, 2 feet, and 11.5 inches” (no one would measure like this and the notation doesn’t exist, but still, it’s feasibly understandable) has each unit with a different conversion: fractions of inches are decimal, 12 inches to a foot, 3 feet to a yard, and 1,760 yards in a mile. The imperial system is rife with hard-to-remember conversions: 3 teaspoons to a tablespoon, 16 tablespoons to a cup (also 8 fluid ounces to a cup), 2 cups to a pint, 2 pints to a quart, 4 quarts to a gallon. Some people would consider these mixed-base systems.
If you leave the realm of English, you get much more interesting combinations in normal speech. French is notorious for its counting system: the ‘teens’ start at 17, dix-sept, instead of thirteen, with the word for ten first. 20-60 have unique tens words but 70-90 is soixante-dix, sixty-ten, quatre-vingts, four twenties, and quatre-vingt-dix, four-twenties-ten. the french grading system is also base twenty, in a way, as they grade out of 20. (well, for many subjects they really grade out of 19 because a 20 is nearly impossible in, say, history, but I digress)
Danish counting is even more bizarre, with words like ‘halvtreds’ meaning fifty, from halvtredsindstyve, half from three times twenty, that is 2.5*20. So ninety-nine in Danish is ‘nioghalvfems’, or nine more than the half from five of twenty.
You may see a pattern in the prevalence of base-twenty, often due to body parts (ten fingers and ten toes). Other languages use body-part systems that don’t rely on ten or twenty, though. Base-four has come about in some areas where many farm animals are counted or traded. Oksapmin is another oft-quoted language numeral system. Some people call it “base-twenty-seven” but I’d say it’s kind of baseless. The idea is to assign numbers to body parts, counting from the thumb and fingers up the wrist, forearm, elbow, etc. across the shoulders and down the other side. By assigning body parts these numbers, they can reference those body parts instead of numerals. So “pinky on the other side” would be 27. Different groups have different ways of counting past 27, some by going back across and others by doing groups of 27, the latter of which could be base 27.
It’s so weird that Daisy Ridley is eyeballing that Lara Croft role in the Tomb Raider reboot, like, sure Star Wars was really big but you can’t just be a beloved space hero in one franchise and also be a big name as some kind of combat archeologist. Who’s ever doubled up like that?
"Cozy Mysteries Where Someone Dies Horribly in a 'Cozy' Way" "“The sort of books that are a little bit sexy but mainly they are just ridiculous”" "Reasonably Sexy Suspense"
This would probably look pretty silly on anyone, but I do like the idea of dragonflies being the spirits of the rice.
(Photo: Minneapolis Institute of Arts)
In the battlefields of Edo Japan, it was necessary for warlords to mark their identity so that their troops would be able to locate them. Elaborate helmets were often the solution to this problem. One particularly fancy example of this fashion trend was this dragonfly helmet, which is now owned by the Minneapolis Institute of Arts. Dr. Matthew Welch of the museum describes it:
Craftsmen covered the underlying iron bowl with papier-mâché over a wooden framework to form the body of the insect, and covered it with lacquer. Wooden wings flare to the sides, while the insect’s eyes are rendered as large golden orbs. In Japan, the dragonfly symbolizes focused endeavor and vigilance because of its manner of moving up, down, and sideways while continuing to face forward. Ancient texts refer to Japan as Akitsushima (Island of the Dragonflies), because of their abundance. They were thought to be the spirits of rice, because they were often seen hovering above the flooded rice fields.
*types a word and then sees that it has the notorious red squiggly line* you wanna fight Google Docs I know I spelled that shit right"
*types a word and it turns out it is not an actual word* WELL THAT SHOULD BE A WORD"
“I wrote the word ‘said’ in my work 124 times FUCK”
*makes inhumane screeching noise when someone interrupts my typing midsentence*
The blinking cursor of a blank word document
*spills beverage on notes*
*cat sits on laptop*
‘I’m in the middle of writing a good chapter and my laptop is about to die and the charger is on the other side of the room, why is my suffering so real’
*stares off into space for upwards of five minutes*
‘Am I characterizing a character so well because I know the character or am I writing them as I would write myself’
A WILD WRITER’S BLOCK APPEARED
“lol who needs sustenance when I’m IN THE Z O N E
Feeling like you will never be able to write well again
Feeling relief when you get inspired and write like crazy
That feeling of inspiration that makes you shiver and makes your nerves buzz
oneshot? more like ‘oh-shit-this-morphed-into-a-thirty-chapter-novel'shot
*more staring into space*
lol what’s dialogue
having to pee but can’t because I’m IN THE Z O N E
being IN THE Z O N E
Being OUT OF THE Z O N E and crying about it
comparing myself to other writers (never do OK)
switching POV accidentally
BLANK WORD DOCUMENT
Tenses
*stares more intensely into space*
*computer starts whirring like crazy* babe I know this writing’s fire but you need to calm down
*looks into empty beverage mug* why
*sees a cliché* *cringes*
will the reader understand what I’m saying here lol I hope so
sleep? what’s that lol
*thinks about writing while at social events*
*gets inspired to write at the most inconvenient of times, such as at the dentist’s or in the shower*
*gets zero inspiration when actually has time to write*
WRITER’S BLOCK
B L A N K W O R D D O C U M E N T
*stares into space forevermore*
I fucking love this.
oneshot? more like ‘oh-shit-this-morphed-into-a-thirty-chapter-novel'shot
That one is so me right now.
*stares into space forevermore*
I’m starting to think I’m incapable of writing while not starting into space
LITERALLY EVERY. SINGLE. ONE. OF. THESE.
even the fucking dentist one. the whole idea for Tumbling Together is because of a visit to the dentist, goddammit. And one-shots spiralling out of control? Story of my friggen life.
I showed this post to my boyfriend and he tried to take his shirt off like a girl and
uh
yeah
Out of the 82k notes my post got this is by far the best comment holy shit thank u for being u
So i tried it both ways and uh
i mean how do you do the first one without pulling out all your hair?
this made me laugh really hard….
and it made me realize that girls and boys pull their shirt off differently. /amazed
but seriously I think girls just do the cross arm thing because of HAIR like demonstrated
So one year, one URL change, and a hair cut later, I decide to try again… FOR SCIENCE!
Its not science unless you write it down so
First method:
Well done, i guess…
Second:
I fucked up
Girls… how?
I DON’T UNDERSTAND HOW WE CAN HAVE SUCH DIFFERENT WAYS OF TAKING OFF SHIRTS AND SO MUCH DIFFICULTY DOING IT THE OTHER WAY
I FIGURED IT OUT!!!!!
It’s all in the way that girl/boys shirts are made.
Girls shirts have less armpit room then boy’s do and are generally shorter so pulling it off over your head is more practical because by lifting your arms all the way up you make enough room for the sleeves to just slip off.
Boys shirts have more room and are generally longer so it is easy to slip them off over your head.
but if you take a girls shirt off like a boys shirt you will get your arms caught because there isn’t much armpit space.
and if you take a boys shirt off like a girls shit you will still have your head in it when you’ve lifted your arms all the way up because of the shirt’s length.
It has nothing to do with us. It is entirely to do with how our shirts are made. I figured it out for you. YOU’RE WELCOME!
bless you
look what is back on my dash. Jesus.
This came back but with ACTUAL SCIENCE you are the saviour of our generation
