Pinned
Acer as in the genus (maples), Yiran as in highly flammable. The Maybe-Maidens is a fictional band. I make album art for them.
I reblog random shit. Memes, mental health stuff, thoughts on humans’ role in ecology, worldbuilding tips, disability justice, youthlib, horses, chinese culture related stuff, politics, sex ed, building a better society. Grew up multicultural but US based for foreseeable future.
problematic rage gap. one partner tries to bring nuance and understanding to a tough situation. the other wants to blow up the earth about it.
phallus
this doesn't render on windows unless next to a non-phallus hieroglyph so here is a version for windows users:
Prev: mobile user here! theres fucking nothing here
It's supposed to look like this:
Prev: How did someone make this??
Unicode, the technical standard describing what text symbols exist in computers¹ and how they are encoded², has a block containing Egyptian Hieroglyphs. And since there exists an Egyptian Hieroglyph depicting a penis³, they included it in the standard. And since most computers follow that standard, they can display a penis.
You can check out unicode characters for example here:
1) There do actually exist different standards describing which characters computers should use and how they should be encoded. These days pretty much everyone uses UTF-8 (Unicode Transformation Format) because when exchanging data between computers or programs everyone must use the same encoding to get readable results.
This also means that unicode must (try to) support pretty much everything any human could ever want to write, which means it includes many things like mathematical symbols, special symbols for just about every language, emoji, combining characters that modify other characters, a variety of spaces, box drawing symbols, control characters for eg. text direction, ...
2) Which is actually somewhat complicated. Unicode assigns each symbol a number, but then the text (sequence of symbols) needs to be converted into a sequence of bytes. This is done via the Unicode Transformation Format, which actually results in different characters needing differently many bytes to store.
Also, certain emoji (flags, anything with skin colors or gender, emoji depicting multiple people) are actually multiple characters that get squished into one symbol when rendered.
3) There actually exist three. The above, a version with cloth (𓂹) and one with emission (𓂺).
Also the unicode standard defines words like character, symbol, glyph, ... to have exact meanings, I used the interchangeably here.
this made me have a complete meltdown with delight as I went from "bwahahaha penis sign lol lmao" to "wait if hieroglyphs are unicode there must be an oryx one" and THERE IS!
look at it! 𓃲
𓃲𓃲𓃲𓃲 <- herd!
and the newborn hartebeest!!! 𓃛
frog! horned viper! CREATURES! I'm so happy! I'm gonna be so insufferable with this!
it's kinda crazy. you can use these like more detailed emojis, or even make whole stories without using a single letter. here's an example:
Good news: if you’re currently laying around and not producing anything, you are a credit to your species.
It’s recently been found that even hive insects rest. Bees will play with colorful toys. Ants sleep for about 1 minute but they do it so frequently it amounts to a few hours per day. Even trees take breaks.
The only things that work without rest are machines; literally everything that lives requires rest.
EVERYTHING THAT LIVES REQUIRES REST. STOP JUDGING YOURSELF FOR NOT BEING A ROBOT.
robots require very frequent breaks! welding machines generally have it programmed in that they can’t run so long they melt themselves. ive overseen two different manufacturing robots now and each of them were fragile, finicky idiots that require constant maintenance and repair. they pause in between moves, in between jobs. you’re always keeping an eye on programming errors, on coolant levels, on heat. you’re always pulling bits of scrap out of joints, sweeping up debris, washing off nozzles and untangling hoses. and even then it snaps a chain and takes a whole morning’s vacation.
even robots need downtime.
White Feminism
I wish more white people - and white women especially - would get over their white fragility and truly understand how words and actions like these do more harm than good to women of color. They need to stop making everything about themselves and catering to other whites women like women of color don’t exist.
Mark Rothko Untitled (Grays in yellow), 1960 Oil on watercolor paper mounted on linen 1960 23 5/8 x 18 5/8 in. (60 x 47.3 cm) Verso in black ink: Mark Rothko 1960 Private Collection. © Kate Rothko Prizel and Christopher Rothko
One of the white participants left the session and went back to her desk, upset at receiving (what appeared to the training team as) sensitive and diplomatic feedback on how some of her statements had impacted several of the people of color in the room. […] [Later] her friends wanted to alert us to the fact that she was in poor health and “might be having a heart attack.” Upon questioning from us, they clarified that they meant this literally. These co-workers were sincere in their fear that the young woman might actually die as a result of the feedback.
All of this is going to feel very familiar to anyone who’s blogged about racism in fandom.
“White fragility functions as a form of bullying: ‘I am going to make it so miserable for you to confront me — no matter how diplomatically you try to do so — that you will simply back off, give up, and never raise the issue again.’ White fragility keeps people of color in line and “in their place.” In this way, it is a powerful form of white racial control. Social power is not fixed; it is constantly challenged and needs to be maintained.”
Unpaywalled article link here
Say hello to a 2002 Gaming list, a lot of games came out in that year and some you'll most likely recognise but i believe in you. I just know you've played some of these.
my comic for the fairy anthology we made over in webcomics garden discord! Wretched work to make a comic that's only 8 pages..
“We chose the term “asexual” to describe ourselves because both “celibate” and “anti-sexual” have connotations we wished to avoid: the first implies that one has sacrificed sexuality for some higher good, the second that sexuality is degrading or somehow inherently bad. “Asexual”, as we use it, does not mean “without sex” but “relating sexually to no one”. This does not, of course, exclude masturbation but implies that if one has sexual feelings they do not require another person for their expression. Asexuality is, simply, self-contained sexuality.”
Note the date, people:
29 years before AVEN was started online,
and 47 years before the present.
And that’s only the date that Manifesto was written, so asexuals as members of a community must have existed at least some time before that.
So, no: we are not just Tumblr trenders. Get out of here with that.
supporting my asexual friends and foes by rebbloging this
It’s 50 years this month since the first version of the Asexual Manifesto was written. Aces have been writing about our experiences under this name for at least half a century. We are not an internet fad.
harry potter fans in 2025
people DESPERATE in the notes to explain why the way THEY engage with harry potter is morally pure. It's like white people talking about rap music in there! Libraries buy the books! Fanfiction maintains a conversation around the IP! There is NO WAY to enjoy harry potter in 2025 without publicly supporting JK Rowling!
Please stop fucking reading it so the library doesn't have to pay her money. I am a transgender librarian and I am not allowed to not replace old damaged HP books, people read them so we need to have them on our shelves, and what she does with the money doesn't factor into it.
STOP READING HARRY FUCKING POTTER.
I used to be into it! In-depth character analysis, wizard rock, irl quidditch, but when she outed herself as a piece of shit, I couldn't support it anymore!
ASK YOUR LIBRARY FOR OTHER BOOKS TO READ AND STOP READING HARRY FUCKING POTTER.
Call now to recieve help with the inability to make phone calls!
Fill out this forum to receive assistance with your difficulty filling out forms
Come on down to our center thats two hours away so we can give assistance with your inability to walk or drive
There's help out there! You're just not trying hard enough!
@thebibliosphere I have a Mop story to share… okay bear with the seemingly non-sequitur opening… some family members and I were recently doing a mental health/metaphysical exercise where you imagine a symbol for infinite, undiminishable worth, and imagine being conceived and born with that symbol duplicating through every cell of your being.
We ran into the complication that, in our family culture, "being worthy" is inextricably tied to suffering and struggling. Like, if you're worthy, you should demonstrate that worth in the trenches of struggle, and if you're suffering, that makes you more worthy than the not-suffering. We decided to do the exercise again, with a symbol that made it clear that worth was unrelated to struggle and suffering--that those don't increase or diminish it.
But we were stuck, the idea that suffering brings worth, was lodged too deeply. One of us asked "does the same rule apply to animals?" and that broke the spell - "There's this dog on tumblr," I said, struck by sudden inspiration. I gave Holly Mop's backstory, and present story, and said, "So she's been through years of suffering--and that suffering is to be respected, but it's so obvious that has nothing to do with her worth. She has intrinsic worth, as a being; she has social worth, by her very presence--and she has contributory worth, from her competence as a self-trained service dog. None of that is because of her years in a cage, or even really in spite of it--it's just a completely distinct attribute."
We all agreed that what was so hard to grasp about ourselves was made glaringly obvious in Holly Mop. And so, as our vision of infinite and absolute worth, I present, as created by @nightmare-from-heaven:
I am torn between delighted laughter and absolutely crying my eyes out. This is simultaneously the sweetest, most funniest but also absolutely mind-resetting and validating thing I’ve heard in a long time. I think I actually needed to hear it myself today.
Thank you for including my beautiful girl in your journey. And for the image above because when I first saw this I thought it was going to be a DnD story and someone had made a dice out of her 😂
