obviously "man who 'pretends' to be a woman so he can sneak into women's spaces and have sex w all of them" is a horribly transphobic thing ppl say but i think it's rly funny that it's an actual thing among cuttlefish with the addition of "and also the ladies are rly into it bc his amazing disguise skills and tenacity (sneaking into a much larger male's territory, willingness to bottom to keep up the disguise) show that he's a genetically superior mate" like there are many things humans can learn from the animal kingdom. i think Shapeshift/Crossdress Cuckolding is one of the things we should be looking into
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i struggle to talk about this sometimes cause i feel like i sound like an entitled and spoiled piece of shit, but i think these are real problems that happen when ur life stops being a dumpster fire and its important to talk about how to navigate them
because my life right now is extreamly stable. i have a home i dont have to worry about ever being evicted from, i dont have to work in order to affort to live, i have the time, space, freedom, and support to do absolutely anything i want right now
and yet i find myself doing absolutely nothing. im so used to using stress and external threats, the threat of starvation, homelessness, abuse, being kicked out or fired or flunking, to motivate me that now that those things are gone and im in a safe environment that asks nothing of me, im just at a loss. i struggle to even wake up everyday without some kind of big consiquence as a motivater
and even when i do have ideas or inspiration as to what i want to do with my now endless hours of the day, i just. dont really know how to execute them. i dont know how to do things if its not in a crunch time manic haze.
i think my big goal this year is going to be to try and figure out how to navigate that and retrain my brain to be able to set more long term objectives and then follow through on accomplishing them. because i can feel myself becoming a more flakey and unreliable person who gets nothing done and just kind of Exists with no real reason or purpose and i reallyreally hate that
i finally have a life i dont want to kill myself to escape from and i just feel like im wasting it by not actually being present in it, u know?
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Cover construction for The silent isle imbowers, July-Aug 2023.
Finished binding here.
Materials shown: metallic gold and matte black heat transfer vinyl with cricut-cut designs, cricut-cut paper stencil, acrylic paint, bookcloth made of cotton + drawing paper backing + Lineco PVA glue. Calligraphy by quillingwords, flower art and cover construction by me.
————-General tips on how to make smth like this:
Steps in order were (1) have bookcloth, (2) cut and paint stencil, (3) cut and weed both HTV layers, (4) apply black HTV, (5) apply gold HTV, (6) add paint detail with paintbrush over the vinyl, (7) apply bookcloth to cover board.
This is not a beginner-friendly design LOL. Be like me and try most of the steps by themselves on other projects first.
I drew this design knowing how the sections would be layered, and which materials (and therefore colors) would go with each layer. Achieving a similar result with a premade design will likely require editing in a digital art program.
Test how your materials will layer before committing to a complex design. In this case I discovered that the type of bookcloth I made actually helps conceal the adhesive spread under the black HTV.
Layering HTV over small sections of acrylic paint works! Cannot confirm the result if you were to use large painted sections.
PSA This black layer with many very small pointy bits is at the extreme limit of what I think is possible to weed from machine-cut HTV. A different material might work better, and I got a lot faster at weeding the second copy than the first one, but some of this is just a technical limit. The gold section worked great but I would not recommend this for the black.
Layering HTV is much easier to do uniformly with a heat press! Check if your local library or maybe an art class studio has one you can use before doing smth like this with your iron.
Paper stencils are easy to make with the cricut but don’t try to use them for anything with small details. The above example is pushing it despite being very simple shapes. Stick-on stencils are better.
Tiny HTV design tip: designs with jagged sections and very thin lines are hardest to weed successfully. Smooth curves are much easier.
Scale all pieces of a stacked design on the same drawing program and within the same canvas in cricut so they layer precisely.
Cut tiny HTV designs with the washi paper setting on a cricut. I did not find this out myself but I can confirm the results! Using the HTV setting will cause the blade to catch on and pull up small sections of the design while cutting, ruining parts of the design.
—————-Tiny HTV design weeding tips:
For the love of cheese do not try anything this complicated the first time you use a cricut. or the second. you will cry
Seriously consider trying both HTV and cricut stencils before doing anything complicated like this. I wish I had at least attempted the black layer as a stick-on stencil.
This isn't a weeding tip but again you better cut this with a washi setting.
Use a very sharp weeding tool, good lighting, and consider a magnifying glass
Be prepared for this to take several hours, especially if you have never done a tiny piece before.
Important! The cricut does not perfectly cut out designs, leaving very small connected sections around the design at various locations. This is almost unnoticeable on large designs but can ruin tiny designs very easily. Be prepared to hold down the “keep” sections of the design with tweezers or a fingertip while pulling or trimming off some of the “remove” negative space.
Do NOT attempt to pull off all the negative space in a single piece. Either add dividing lines to your design for the machine to cut, or use a sharp tool to scrape them yourself. You are much less likely to accidentally remove part of your design if you weed the design in distinct sections.
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you put into words my same thoughts on the subject of aaron bushnell really well, thank you - its something i was struggling to conceptualise, as im both of the opinion that suicide is never a good thing and shouldnt be glorified, and that this is another life lost and is something tragic, whilst also not wanting imply that what he did was wrong or meaningless or to take away from his own autonomy, so i appreciate the way you went about explaining your thoughts on the matter
thank you so much for this ask! yeah it's something that's very painful imo, and i don't find it encouraging that so many people are cheering this on. what does that say to people like who i was, who felt like the only good they could do in the world would be after they die? i think instead of celebrating this tragic death, we should talk about hopelessness and regret, how people fall for propaganda that valorizes state violence or are forced by their material conditions into doing things that are against their morals, and what we as leftists can do to support those people. i think we also need to look at how death has (understandably) become the driving force of most leftist movements and uprisings in modern history, and that's not without merit of course, but we need to have a conversation about the effects of the fact that we only "say their names" after they've died or have otherwise had their autonomy stripped away. i think we need to talk about living people more, rather than only (mostly, you know what i mean) talking about palestinians, black people, jews, queer people, disabled people, poor people when they've become bodies to prop up, to add weight to our slogans
i was gonna put more here but i realized this is something that i could genuinely write a paper about, so i'll just sum it up like this: i believe it's the same obsession and valorization of martyrs and martyrdom that makes people doomscroll and traumatize themselves thinking they're doing good that also leads to self harm and suicide being used as protest tactics, and it's the same reason why so many people only know how to be politically active in reaction to a murder that made them learn racism still exists or a large-scale slaughter of civilians that made them learn that colonialism still exists, and then they burn themselves out and abandon long-term projects until the next visible tragedy. judaism states that we are to live by the torah, not die by it, and in my mind that applies here: live to fight another day
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Hi Pia!
You’ve probably had to explain this a hundred times already, but I’m new to your fandom so I’ve likely missed previous explanations. I was just wondering when will you be posting Underline the Silver?
I haven't needed to explain this much at all! But you also might not like the answer I'm afraid, because it's: 'I have no idea' but also 'really not very soon at all.'
It will likely start around the time that Underline the Blue or Underline the Gold come close to finishing, or Underline the Black finishes, which almost certainly puts it into early or mid 2024 at the earliest.
Underline the Red and Underline the Silver will both kick back off around the same time.
I currently have an extremely full slate which is nuts even by my standards. I wrote it out for a friend tonight and:
Underline the Black - 4-5 chapters a month (every Thursday)
A Stain that Won't Dissolve - 2-3 chapters a month (every second Sunday)
The Nascent Diplomat - 1 chapter a month
Constellations - 1 chapter a month (will eventually replace The Nascent Diplomat)
Palmarosa - (god help me) 3-4 chapters a month (this is so unsustainable, this is my fault for wanting to write a BG3 fic)
Underline the Blue - 2 chapters every few months
Underline the Red - as above (but on hiatus for my sanity)
Underline the Gold - as above (they all just cycle with each other)
I don't know how to tell you how incredibly nuts this is, but I think I can sum it up as '2-3 stories at the same time used to be where I was most comfortable.'
And this is not 2-3 stories.
I am really really just not going to be able to write anything outside of this, at least until some of these stories finish (and some of THESE stories are on hiatus or minimalistic schedules already), because like...
as much as I like to treat myself like a words machine, I am unfortunately a human person, and I've reached the point of thinking about crying when it comes to keeping even this up.
So yeah Underline the Silver can wait for when I'm excited about new stories again and not dreading them because my current writing slate is 'oh god oh god WHY IS EVERYTHING BURNING' dsakljfdsa
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literally just stop a tes fan lmao...there are other fantasy games out there, or like. literally just make your own world, it's really easy if you hate the games so much (I say this as an ex-tes fan)
HA. this is the first time I've gotten an ask like this... I feel Important. thanks lmao
as a serious answer - less for whoever asked this and more for anyone else who doesn't understand the way I interact with the media but whose lack of understanding is actually in good faith - if I hated the games and everything about them, I wouldn't have continued to play them, much less made a blog about them and dedicated so much of my creative energy to fan content. We both know that I don't view this franchise as in all ways awful and irredeemable; we both know that there are things about it I like. I would not be here if there weren't.
However - and again, I dearly hope that we both know this - deriving enjoyment from a piece of media does not make it flawless. This is the case for everything, from the works of Shakespeare or Austen to the D&D web show I've watched religiously since I was fourteen. Consuming media critically - learning to recognise the flaws of something you enjoy and accept that those flaws and your enjoyment can coexist - rather than simply receiving its messages unquestioningly and refusing to consider nuance is so crucial, especially when fictional media is so central to how people interact with one another.
There is a lot I dislike about TES. Its handling of sensitive topics is often hamfisted at best and feeding heavily into dangerous narratives at worst, and refusing to acknowledge that would be irresponsible and cowardly. But at the same time, I derive a lot of joy from this world, its stories and lore, and most especially the pockets of genuinely lovely communities that have sprung up around it. I've met some very cool people through being active in this fandom space. I've seen some absolutely incredible ideas and fan creations working to refute the bigoted undertones (or just blatant overtones, as the case may be) in canon. I've written pieces that aimed to provide a counter-narrative to the harmful ones presented by the games' reductive portrayals and been told that they really touched people (which was so deeply heartening to hear). It isn't that I believe my amusement is more important than the bigotry its source upholds and perpetuates, but that I believe that by acknowledging that bigotry and working constructively and in tandem with the beautiful fan community to rectify it in our own space, maybe I can produce more caring, sensitive narratives and offset the harm a little bit.
(Also, I don't know you and I can play video games however the fuck I want.)
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