Where did I leave my "reader's tears" mug again...

Yesterday I almost cried because my baby cousin ran up to my grandmother and was like. “Ha! Buhbuh ba ha.” And she said okay you want to show me something? And he led her over to the garden patch and crouched down and pointed at rocks and plants and was like. “Ah. Habah ba ah” as she listened attentively.

And I was like that happened 1,000 years ago. Probably 10,000 years ago. Maybe 100,000. The youngest human in a group went to the oldest one and said to the best of their ability “come see.” And the adult went.

this is such a beautiful post it doesn't need my dumb addition, but i can't fit this in the tags. at the archaeological site Dolni Vestonice in the Czech Republic there are a bunch of really really fascinating finds and I'm only going to tell you about one tiny detail of one of the most interesting sites in the world.

at this settlement 20-30,000 years ago there lived a person who appears to have been a sort of sorcerer-grandmother-ceramics artist and her workshop was preserved very well in the sedimentary layers. her hut where she had her kilns was full of little sculptures of animals and people that seem to have been made to explode in the kiln on purpose, we're not sure why but nevermind. the relevant detail is that when you sculpt something with your hands and then fire it, your fingerprints can be preserved in the surface of the clay forever, so we have fingerprints of ancient ceramics artists that have survived for tens of thousands of years. and one of the major artifacts from Dolni Vestonice has a fingerprint on it that is so small it could only have belonged to a child

so this shaman-grandmother-sculptor, who was buried with her pet fox by the way, had children running through her workshop and touching everything she made while she was at her mysterious work of creating the world's oldest ceramics, none of which appear to be bowls, bottles, pots, or any "useful" items at all, but rather a collection of animal and human and sometimes anthropomorphic figures, some of which appear to be self portraits. exactly the same as sandersstudios' grandmother being led to the garden by an excited baby. we've all been the same for 30,000 years.

Good news to get you through August 2026.

I don't usually post fundraising type stuff here, but Little Miss Flint, who does a lot of community fundraising work in Flint, Michigan, runs an annual school supply drive to get kids in her community outfitted with everything they need for back-to-school, from clothes to school supplies and everything.

Her storage unit was just robbed and vandalized, and they lost almost everything, right before the back-to-school rush. So they're starting from scratch, with less than two weeks to go.

Flint is one of the poorest cities in the US and a lot of these kids depend on the clothes and supplies they receive through programs like these.

I know money is super tight all around right now, but if anyone has a few extra bucks they wanna kick in, Little Miss Flint's GoFundMe is here.

btw i added a few new cross stitch patterns to my shop!~ check them out on my shop: 8pxl

Current mood

mood. and alternatively: 

a crude summary of one of my favorite musicals

One thing I've been thinking about recently with regards to the pseudo-medieval stasis of most DnD settings is that it actually makes a lot of sense when you consider that it is in the best interest of the Gods and other divine beings to have large scale mortal societies, but it's not in their interest to let those societies get too advanced.

Think about it. Gods are fueled in part by mortal belief and prayer so Gods need to cultivate widespread mortal civilizations to maximize their following and thus their power. But the longer a mortal civilization goes on and the more advanced it gets the greater the possibility that one or more mortals will catch a case of the Old Hubris Shudders and take a swing at usurping the Gods, dethroning the Gods, banishing the Gods and cutting off their access to the Prime Material, or otherwise table flipping the divine balance of power.

If you're a divine being that's bad, so what do you do? You employ the good old Tower of Babble strat. Frequently.

Mortal societies getting the magic-tech version industrialized and starting to question the infallibility of their agricultural pastroalist deities? Wide spread famine will fix that right up. Elves building a continent spanning empire and the Emperor starting to crave immortality and worship like a god? Smiting the Emperor is a Standard Action and toppling his Empire with a rain of jaguars is a Bonus Action. A particularly rowdy group of wizards start planning to raise their city into the heavens where they might potentially be a threat? Turning all the wizards into undead and punting the tower into the Underdark for good measure nips that problem right in the bud AND creates a fun dungeon location for some mid level adventurers in a few centuries.

The way most DnD settings structure their cosmology the Gods are incentivized to wreck civilization on the regular for their own safety, but too always make sure it comes back. The layers upon layers of lost ancient civilizations are just what piles up as a side effect of that process, as is the fact that DnD constantly seems to peak out around roughly the medieval era in terms of tech and society. From a divine perspective medieval realms are probably nice and manageable to keep track of, but anything past that gets unwieldy and dangerous. It's like tending an ant farm that you don't want to become to big both because it gets harder to take care of, and because there is a small but never zero chance one of the ants might find a magic sword that will let them murder you.

Joy Sullivan, from Instructions for Traveling West: Poems; “Of Wildflowers”

“Girls gays and theys” <- uninclusive while trying to be inclusive. Bad. Makes me uncomfortable.

“Ladies, gentlemen, and other distinguished guests” <- inclusive but far, far too formal

“Alrighty gamers” <- Incisive of everyone, informal, and fun to say.

“Everypony” <== pisses everyone off.  flawless

"Friends, enemies, and those still under review"

“OI! THE LOT OF YOU.” <—succinct, to the point, effective. 

"Attention K-Mart Shoppers" <- qualifies as vintage

"Team:" <- probably TOO inclusive

I don’t mean to be rude; but I don’t think I’ve ever seen this, does anyone have any examples?

If we broaden it outside of television…I think Star Wars falls into this, at least the sequel trilogy. Maybe the MCU as well. And I can’t help but think of every band that’s ever complained that their fanbase is mostly women. 5 Seconds of Summer comes immediately to mind.

In general, most white male creators seem to have this massively entitled mindset where they want–and think they deserve–the time, attention, and enthusiasm that creative fandom (i.e. the side of fandom more dominated by women) is known for.

They want our eyes for ratings, our word-of-mouth for free publicity, our metas for social media buzz, and our spending power for merch and cons. But they don’t want us. And they don’t really want the responsibility of telling a story to a thoughtful, engaged audience, regardless of that audience’s demographic makeup. They just want to be praised for whatever schlock they cough up.

And like any other spoiled brat, they will break their toys before they share them.

It goes all the way to the top for kids shows. Toy sales will crash a show. Makes sense, but if those toys are gendered for boys instead of the female viewers, they won’t usually switch up the marketing and move them to the girl aisle. They cancel the show outright.

Mind you it is perfectly possible to make the switch in marketing, but execs would rather throw it all out than have something that doesn’t perform well with male viewers. For example the Rey merch was not expected to be popular, for some reason, there had to be public outcry to get merch of one of the main 3 protagonists. A PROTAGONIST. The fact that she wasn’t a huge part of the 1st launch says a lot already.

And what happened when female fans got too invested in the Sequel Trilogy? The entire writers room didn’t necessarily lash out, but they sure forgot how to behave.

Young Justice

Paul Dini: Superhero cartoon execs don’t want largely female audiences

#WhereIsRey (initial)

#WhereIsRey (ongoing)

Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker was designed to be the opposite of The Last Jedi

You’re all sitting on the hot take of the decade tbh

And yet when they fond out that boys were watching MLP:FIM in droves, they had NO PROBLEM with it.

#SONS OF ANARCHY!!!!!!!!!!!!!#LITERALLY SONS OF ANARCHY IS THE BIGGEST EXAMPLE OF THIS LIKE EVER#kurt sutter wrote that show for MEN and ended up with an overwhelmingly female audience#because he’s actually a good writer and knows how to develop characters well and wrote excellent female characters#but once he realized that his audience was almost entirely women he literally took it out on tara and gemma in the show#but like tara specifically#he resented her character for being a huge draw for female viewers so he tore her development to shreds and killed her#in the most brutal gut wrenching way possible#kurt sutter you will pay for your crimes#i actually wrote a manifesto about this on one of my old blogs i should try to find it sldkjsldfjsdljf#long post (via@m-oonknight)

OMG YES. I LOVED Sons of Anarchy, especially the women and then I got to season 6 and it was like - everything was just tossed in the trash? And like, why did Sutter hate that Tara drew tons of attention? That should have been a good thing! He should have been like “Hey folks, this girl’s getting us more viewers, let’s put her in more scenes!” It just doesn’t make sense to me. MEN don’t make sense to me.

The 100 too. I’ll never forget how Jason Rothenberg would attacked female fans on Twitter and mock them in interviews, and then post links to male fan discussions on Reddit to praise and thank them. In his goodbye letter to the show he SPECIFICALLY thanked Reddit and it was so disgusting.

Star Trek from TNG on was also a boy’s club, even though the TOS fans were mostly women. Women, in fact, who literally created modern fandom with their zines. But after TNG it was all, “Women don’t understand Star Trek, only smart men hur dur.”

I think it would be harder for us to find examples of when this DIDNT happen than when it did. It happens all the time.

Doesn’t stop it from boggling the mind

(though it could probably start to make some sense if you follow the money past audience bases to maybe a couple of investors or like a rich patron … 🤔)

Stooooop I just wrote a masters thesis on this shit. Media creation and distribution is a means by which dominant power structures consolidate their hegemony. Dominantly situated creators get upset when the audience they attract isn’t the audience they wanted, because they view the whole creation and sharing of the fiction as an exercise to sustain kyriarchal conditions that benefit themselves. When the audience is Other, they see it as a failure of those efforts and lash out.

Simply, they’re trying to assert a particular worldview via fiction, and upon getting confronted with something else, begin foot stamping. It’s not just men wanting male attention and gatekeeping. It’s that the fiction in the first place was an attempt to curate dominance and whoopsie! they miscalculated.

(anyway if anyone wants to read 35k words of philosophy about this, hmu)

I think a lot about an interview I heard with Bo Burnham a few years ago, where he talks about this phenomenon with his own work. He gained a large audience of teenage girls, and people in comedy spaces would look down on him for that or say what a shame it was, but he responded differently:

“The real truth is, I would perform my show and I would meet kids after and young girls would come up to me and they understood what I was expressing in that bit onstage way more than guys my own age. Way more. So if there was a bridge between us that I had to cross to write the movie [Eighth Grade], it was built to me by them. I felt understood by them before I presumed to understand them.”

Instead of trying to change his comedy, he decided to lean into and celebrate the audience that he actually had by making a movie specifically about the experiences of a teenage girl. It’s fascinating to hear him talk about how he got there, but also to acknowledge how rare that reaction is.

This is all true but help-help-i-need-an-adult asked if there are any examples where this didn’t happen. And I literally only know of ONE.

Behold! The ONE thing that bothered to relate its female audience with positivity:

Source: June 1998 issue of Newtype, in a special supplement/booklet titled 「まるごと富野」 (“Marugoto Tomino” / “All About Tomino”)

Clip from the NHK documentary where Tomino says this AGAIN and continues on to say that if they wanted a movie he knew they had to hold on to this part of the fandom. https://x.com/tayuta0079/status/1577387893135384577

Shout out to Gundam creator Yoshiyuki Tomino for being a real one.

Per my last email and per my last fucking straw

That's the lasting cultural legacy of Sherlock, it's everyone going fuck you Sherlock I'm not drunk the charging cable hole on my cellphone is just VERY SMALL

The anti-vax and anti-science propaganda is very real - and also, frankly I think doctors and nurses would've had an easier time getting people not to fall for it if they spent less time treating people like fucking shit

This post is about a lot of things but it is especially about racism, medical abuse, and eugenics

This is the most powerful call to ratio I've ever seen. It's like she's performing an incantation.

“NO!….RATIO!!!”

Honestly obsessed with her

Absolutely based

always reblog bonnie

I'm not even sure if they do still make tumblr