whetstonefires
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A tutorial on a (bit cheating) way of creating fictional maps.
Open your editing software (RECOMMENDING Krita, since it's free and it's very good).
Step 1: Google "X country silhouette" and copy it.
Paste it onto the canvas.
Step 2:
Separate the silhouette from the background you copied with it! You can do that by using magic wand selection tool or by making a gradient map with black on 49,9% and transparent on 50% on the slider.
Step 3: Repeat several times with numerous countries and/or islands, cities, municipalities, communes, continents et cetera.
Step 4: Combine, mesh, stretch, rotate, mirror - go ham, make it work.
Step 5: Erase and add.
Step 6: Have your map outline ready, copy/paste it several times in the same doc on different layers and edit in different ways like biomes, kingdoms, mountains and other.
Step Mountains+: To figure out mountains, make another layer on the doc and do something like this:
-and then in every polygon you add an arrow.
Where arrows meet or transfer onto continents, add mountains.
Color the sea with a couple layers of depth and you're done :D
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He was dead from 1989 to the end of 2004, which doesn't seem all that long looking back, now that he's been alive again longer, but at the time it was permanent and perpetual.
In 2005-6 the Infinite Crisis brought back the multiverse, which had died two years before Jason.
In 2006, in response to reader opinion that death was growing cheap, DC did a Teen Titans storyline where Kid Eternity was found chained in the door between life and death, holding it open. There were many Titan zombies, it was a whole thing.
(The Titans have long been notorious for resurrections as well as killing off cast like midges, because in the 80s they started getting lots of characters who only existed for that book to round out a large cast, so the writers could kill them at will, with impunity, which most major comics could not.)
In 2009 Final Crisis supposedly patched the continuity problems created by Final Crisis. It did not achieve this even a little. Killed Batman though.
In 2010 when DC did the Blackest Night massive crossover event, which was similar to the Titans zombie thing but bigger, and announced it had changed how death worked For Everyone Forever and cheap resurrection was off the table now for real guys, most people did not believe them.
For one thing, it ended by resurrecting several dead people and setting hooks for Batman never having actually died at all.
In 2011 when DC announced a full reboot of the entire universe it seemed like maybe this intensive intervention could actually reset all the storylines and the escalation creep and restore the stakes of dying and the drama of Going Through Things to characters who had done every kind of trauma thrice.
This failed comprehensively on all levels. Among many other failures of cohesion and nerve, they killed Robin again almost immediately. He was back within the year.
The fact that Alfred is still not back from his latest death is being treated more as DC being a pack of petty, contrary brats than as death having any meaningful hold on these characters that anyone ought to respect.
One thing DC has gone wrong with batfamily comics is the fact that basically everyone has died. It makes it so when the person dies, there's no more shock or sadness because we all know that they're going to be resurrected.
When Jason died, it was a BIG DEAL. Because nobody thought that ROBIN would die. And die so violently. And he was a kid. It shook the comic world and changed Bruce. And then he stayed dead for like idk 10-15 years. Nobody thought he was coming back. And his death was something special. He was batmans biggest failure. That was the vibe and the reason for his resurrection.
But now, basically everyone has died and come back to life. It's no big deal and if I was in the comic universe and I heard a robin died, i would probably brush it off since they'll probably be alive again in like 3 weeks. It no longer provides the utter shock and suspense that Death in the Family did.
Anyway, DC has been too loose and repetitive with death and resurrection and that has basically made them lose edge and shock value in that arena
#it's a definite problem lmao#tbh the fact that DC has given up on fixing it via in-universe retcon event is for the best#that BARELY worked the first time and only because you guys were pretty brutally thorough with it#even Zero Hour was a shitshow
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honestly kinda unfortunate that the only spooky library aesthetic is the victorian fancy bookshelves dark academia one bcos like. ok here's some library stories.
while i was at the university the library was undergoing a major refurbishment so for a little while the print journals were being stored temporarily down in the basement.
basically nobody ever consulted the print journals bcos 99% of stuff undergrads would be looking up is online these days so every time i went down there it was dead fucking silent & empty. you had to walk through what felt like several miles of empty basement to reach the collection, which was in a room w a photocopier shoved in the corner and a bunch of these:
u turn the handles to move these around (saves space) and every time you had to go and check the aisles first on the offchance that someone was in there so they wouldn't get u know. Compacted.
many years ago i did a week's work experience with the National Library of Scotland. here it is:
but that's just the tip of the iceberg. it keeps going down the side of the bridge, like so:
i got a tour of the stacks while i was there. it's floor after floor of this:
the bookshelves are made of metal & i was treated to the 'fun fact' that the shelves are, bizarrely, load bearing. for this reason they have to be constantly vigilant about fire hazards because even a relatively small fire could cause a bookcase to buckle from the heat, which in turn could cause the whole building to collapse in on itself like a house of cards.
this has haunted me ever since!! thank you.
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May I please request a breakdown of "diesel", "electric", and "diesel electric" engines I have no fucking idea how a "diesel electric" anything would work
Diesel train - a train powered by a diesel internal combustion engine
Electric train - a train powered by electricity, usually from either over head wires or a 3rd rail
Diesel Electric - a train that can switch between both being a diesel and an electric train, useful for routes where a train goes between electrified tracks and non electric tracks
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Literally what did olivia laing say about loneliness leading to more loneliness. Loneliness being so repulsive that people sense it from you and stay away. Crazy crazy
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A commonly overlooked symptom of depression is anhedonia, the inability to feel joy or pleasure. The reason that it's easy to overlook is that it's easier to miss the absence of something that's not around all the time than it is to miss a symptom that causes active distress, such as feeling tired and miserable all the time.
Anhedonia is good at being a persistent undercurrent to your life. My aunt, who has major depressive disorder, related to me that she figured out that something was wrong when she looked at the daffodils she had planted blooming, and couldn't recognize the emotion that she felt when she looked at them. It had been long enough since she had felt happy that she lost the ability to recognize the emotion.
It's a particularly dangerous depressive symptom, because it robs you of the ability to feel those little spots of joy that keep a lot of people going, while not doing anything to impair your ability to function. If you don't know that this is a treatable symptom of depression, it's easy to assume that your ability to feel good is permanently broken, and decide to commit suicide because you don't want to live like that. It's not an irrational conclusion, but it is an uninformed one, and everyone deserves to have all the information when making a major decision.
This is what a lot of questionnaires are trying to look for when they ask about "loss of enjoyment". If you can't remember a loss of enjoyment because you can't remember enjoyment, then you probably have anhedonia. If you struggle to define how it is to feel "happy", "content", or "good", or how it feels when you feel those emotions, you probably have anhedonia. If you can't remember feeling any of those emotions for a week or more, you probably have anhedonia.
Symptoms commonly co-occurring with anhedonia are fatigue (often the cause), clear and thoughtful consideration of suicide, loss of desire to socialize or do activities that used to make you happy, and weight loss (due to lack of enjoyment of food).
This section is anecdotal. In what I have observed, anhedonia due to fatigue rarely responds well to depression treatment unless depression was causing the fatigue. If fatigue and anhedonia are co-occurring and are not both alleviated by depression treatment, consider other causes for the fatigue.
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Hey, happy Earth Day! Who wants to talk about climate change?
Yeah, okay, fair, I kinda figured the answer to that would be "ugh do we have to?" What if I told you I have good news though? Good news with caveats, but still good news.
What if I told you that since the Paris Agreement in 2015, we've avoided a whole degree celsius of global warming by 2100, or maybe more?
Current projections are 2.7C, which is way better than the 3-5C (with a median of 3.7C) we were expecting in 2015. It's not where we want to be - 1.5C - but it is big, noticeable progress!
And it's not like we either hit 1.5C and avoid all the big scary consequences or fail to hit 1.5C and get all of them - every tenth of a degree of warming we avoid is going to prevent more severe problems like extreme weather, sea level rise, etc.
This means that climate change mitigation efforts are having a noticeable impact! This means a dramatically better, safer future - and if we keep pushing, we could lower the amount of global warming we end up with even further. This is huge progress, and we need to celebrate it, even though the fight isn't over.
It's working. Keep going.
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I gotta say, one of the greatest achievements of my 20s was that I learned (mostly) to differentiate between:
"I truly do not want to go" and
"I'm just feeling the Demand Avoidance, and I will like it once I get there."
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There's this undercurrent of 'might makes right' to Cassandra's worldview that I've always been interested in. I don't think she's really consciously aware of it but she was raised in such a way that her strength is literally what dictated her value as a person and it's reflected a lot in how she understands problems.
'Stephanie can't be a superhero because she's weak and therefore must be protected.'
'I have to shoulder the responsibility of the world because I am the only one strong enough.'
'If others want me to stop they'll have to stop me and they can't.'
It comes with being a character who lives her life solely based on instinct. She's really bad at examining her own preconceived notions about the world and well, her dad was David Cain which left her with some pretty bad ones.
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and just think, one of the people who's chronically on tumblr enough to think 'none earth with south new zealand' is funny may be a kiwi scientist who is super mad about global warming and will still think it's funny in ten thousand years
The Pacific Ocean is huge.
#normally i do not turn unrelated posts into fandom posts#but locked tomb has a man from new zealand#who makes a none pizza joke#for the benefit of no one but himself#because everyone else who would get it has been dead for twice the length of recorded human history
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I moral lesson I wish literally everybody would learn is this: the very same actions that keep you safe when you are powerless can be abusive when you hold power over someone. The difference between resisting subjugation and subjugating others is often more a matter of context than anything else. And when context changes, it can be hard to relearn one's behavior—it requires an active effort. Probably all of us have hurt others needlessly, in some way or another, by doing things out of a reactive instinct for self-preservation. Probably all of us have been hurt by others, sometimes very deeply, when they were acting out of the same instinct.
I don't like speaking about ethics in the language of blame, but insofar as blame is a coherent notion to begin with, I'll say this: neither is anyone evil for the failure to fully rework themselves and free themselves of bad habit after struggle, nor does the difficulty of reworking oneself excuse the abuse of others. Nor, though we may wish otherwise, is it always epistemically possible to our own actions with confidence in one camp or the other. We can only do our best to treat others well and at the same time ourselves, though it is often not clear how.
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2/12 Today Soup-Nose The Goat attempted to climb through the new gate into the sheep pasture. Her escape attempt was foiled by the devastatingly brilliant scheme of The Gate Is Open, Soup-Nose.
When she tried to back out of the gate, she kept catching it on her horns and pulling it toward herself, until eventually she pressed herself tightly between the gate and the fence and had to be rescued.
The center cannot hold. One day the sun will swell and devour the earth, and there will be no sea. One day, there will be nobody left who remembers the taste of noodles. One day entropy will squeeze out the stars and all will be still and lukewarm. The bells can never be unrung. But remember this: once, just once, a goat was prevented from escaping a fence. And nothing will have been in vain.
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Many books of the Bible that didn't make it to the official canon(s) and other incredibly important pieces of scripture and literature are only known today because they were preserved in the Ge'ez script in Ethiopia. It is very likely that there are lots of other texts dating to the earliest days of Christianity that are still to be "found", only because there aren't enough international scholars who know the Ge'ez script or work in Ethiopia. There are many, but not as much as it deserves. (Important note is that Ge'ez is both a liturgical language, like Latin, and also is a script, much like Latin or Chinese characters, used by many Ethiopian languages, but others can be written and indeed are written in Ge'ez script, this is why it has preserved such a range of literature)
Ge'ez looks like this:
ሀሎ! ይህ በአማርኛ ቋንቋ እና በግእዝ ፊደል የተጻፈ ነው! ለእርስዎ እና ለቤተሰብዎ በረከቶች!
There was briefly a very bad taste meme calling it a "demon language", with people even copypasting random religious literature in Ge'ez thus making it seem more "sinister". I won't comment on how ignorant and offensive that is.
Ge'ez is an important script and language, much like Greek or Latin, because of its connection to major religions like Christianity, Judaism and Islam. Ethiopia is a wonderful country with a deep, rich history, and is an example of how Africa has always been part of world history. But like all languages, it's also a cultural heritage on its own, worth cherising, preserving, and learning about, regardless of its importance to the rest of the world. Instead of being ignorant for a racist joke, we could always take our time and learn and appreciate such things.
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"under the present brutal and primitive conditions on this planet, every moose you meet should be regarded as one of the walking wounded. we have never seen a moose not slightly deranged by either anxiety or grief. we have never seen a totally sane moose"
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i thought it was in a 'i suck pls don't get bad habits' way at first
We ask your questions so you don’t have to! Submit your questions to have them posted anonymously as polls.
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