kindness is strategic and necessary

It's now been a bit more than a year for me on this webbed site, so let me make a little introductory post to pin:

Hi, I'm Purlturtle (Purl, Jana, she/her)!

I'm shamelessly and endlessly obsessed with Bering and Wells (Warehouse 13) - this is them, my beloveds:

I will reblog pretty much anything to do with them. 90% of what you'll get here is gonna be Bering and Wells. The rest is usually feel-good/affirmation stuff, queer stuff, cute stuff or historical stuff (bonus if a post meets two or more of those criteria). Also language stuff and writerly stuff, because (drumroll) I am a writer. Find my stuff over on AO3 (and sometimes here too).

Other media that I love include Star Trek and Discworld (my first loves), and more recently Legends of Tomorrow and Wheel of Time. I'm nowhere near as obsessed with any of those other ships than I am with my OTP, though.

I'm old (40+) but a baby in fandom spaces, having only really found my way there in 2020. Before that, I was mostly muddling along on my own. So I'm extra grateful to have found so many friends here!

I love asks, be they from memes or just randomly dropped in my inbox, so if you're curious about something, just go ahead and ask! I'll never mind that (just as I'll never mind comments on any of my fics!), and you won't ever be a bother to me.

Thank you for your attention, and have a wonderful day!

Have an updated gpoy!

It's my three year Tumblr-versary!

I wanna post another selfie to celebrate, and I also want to boost awareness of mental health issues like sensory or emotional overwhelm, and therefore my selfie this year is this:

This is me crying and shaking after getting home from a situation that was just too much. I barely made it inside our front door; I'm sitting right on the inside stairs, coat still in my arms (hugging it, in fact, because I needed to hold on to something).

Some days I look like this. And that's okay.

Tumblr continues to be my happy place. 2025 was hard; I spent all of it too sick to work, and a lot of it on the couch or in bed. Here is a little pic, not of myself but of Lyra curled up in a snuggly warm cave on the couch - might not be me in actuality, but is extremely emblematic.

I still have no idea what I have; signs are getting clearer that it might be Chronic Fatigue and/or something about my mast cells, though apparently not MCAS? There isn't a lot I can do about it except pacing, which in way too many cases means I can't do this and I can't do that; it fucking sucks. Can't even go on a stupid mental health walk without being bedbound for most of two days (extreme example, but a taste of what my life has become these past few years).

Tumblr, hellsite and friends' living rooms, continues to be my happy place. I honestly wouldn't know what I'd do without all y'all here, and on Discord as well. If we're connected, here or there, please know that you've played a part in keeping me sane.

All of the otters/ Lutrinae !

Had a lot of fun doing this one, probably because there are only 13 lol

It’s so funny how like. Spock is queer bc of the subtext, the Otherness inextricable from his character, meanwhile William Shatner was handed the straightest man of all time on paper and fumbled the bag bc he couldn’t stop giving Leonard Nimoy fuck-me eyes and now he lives in a bi Kirk hell of his own devising, forever enduring the conshatquences of his shactions

He's not even standing on the keg of rum his anymore... it's a just treasure chest. That's not Captain Morgan, that's generic pirate man.

I don't alcohol and I'm pissed.

two characters who absolutely Will Not say "i love you" trying to tell each other that they love one another is so good actually. more of that please

been looking at a lot of orpheus surrounded by animals mosaics and i love them all for various reasons but i have to give a special shoutout to this floor mosaic in palermo entirely for this silly little lizard and turtle combo

Omg Ride or Die was brilliant!

I thought it was gonna be some cheesy chick flick, a female version of those cheesy buddy cop shows (think Kevin Hart and the Rock or something) - B grade and good for some laughs. (I actually didn't know at first it was gonna be a series. I was just looking for some easy laughs!!)

But omg. It did start off like that initially, but became something so beautiful and heartfelt, exciting, tragic, and so, so heartwarming.

These two brilliant women, finding who they really are and finding each other as they truly can be - blossoming as people in their middle age. Both Octavia Spencer and Hannah Waddingham acted SO WELL.

And all this in the midst of a really good assassin plot!!! The villain was truly someone to be contended with - complex, skilled and very obsessively poisonous! The stakes were truly high. Some deaths were as cruel as they were understated, to drive home the impact of them. And even the side characters could have had pretty dramatic tales spun off of their side quests. (I hope we get to see Queenie's personal mission play out in S2!!)

I cried a few times - because the friendship between Judith and Debbie was written to be so real and sincere (despite the very wild circumstances), and because both women were written like real human beings. They cry, they laugh, they bleed, they feel, they try. Both of them with their very different lives, still were able to stand with each other as equals. And Judith's character, being so, so alone - and so, so effed up by the attachments she grew with... That also really got me. This friendship was beautiful to watch (amidst again, all the wild circumstances!).

This was no "buddy cop" show. It was a fake pass in the first few eps that led to something truly epic and deep.

I have no idea how they may surpass this season in season 2, because it looks like John Wick's world now... But with two wonderful women characters who have matured into their genuine selves?

Hell yeah, sign me up!!

Calico cat in a calico coat!

Half Moon Workshop, 2026. Painting and mezuzah case inspired by the Duke of Sussex Pentateuch (an illuminated manuscript from medieval Ashkenaz) and featuring Scottish and Jewish symbolism. Both available on Etsy. Hand-painted by Half Moon.

if you’re not paying attention to trees and how they sway in the wind then what are you even doing

this video has been the last hinge holding me together for weeks now. I need to watch it once a day or I'll start disintegrating

heres the translation I found online for fellow enjoyers

fun fact about character development by the way. you can make them develop worse.

like I mean this very seriously as writing advice. the character should experience events and make decisions that make them different at the end of the story. they should be changed. they do not have to be improved.

they can get worse. they can make decisions of an increasingly terrible nature. they can stop taking risks on kindness. they can discover how much they can get away with. they can find religion, or abandon it, with negative effects on their moral creed. the character has to develop. the character does not have to grow.

why be radically exclusionary abt queerness when you could be radically inclusionary instead. let's inflate the numbers. let's become the majority. the sky's the limit

"we can't let just ANYONE call themselves queer!!" what are you talking about. I'm steepling my fingers and gleefully cackling every time we Get Another One and you should be too. lock in.

Fuck yeah, let's make this little raft we're surviving on big as hell. If I bring my bit of driftwood and you bring yours and we let as many people join in as want to, we might end up with a functional boat.

I heard someone say 'queer is that which accepts queerness' a few weeks ago and I've been thinking about it ever since.

Back when I was active on AVEN (I have no idea what it's like now), we had two definitions of asexual -- an external definition and an internal definition. The external definition, the one that's on the wiki and the press material and that everyone uses when talking about asexuality, was of course "an asexual is someone who does not experience sexual attraction". The internal definition, the one we kept in mind when talking to each other, was "an asexual is someone who calls themself asexual".

The reason for this was very simple and very practical. In the very early AVEN and immediately pre-AVEN days, back before my time when the disparate ace communities were first finding each other and creating a public online network, there was a fair lot of exclusionist discourse. There are a lot of ways to be asexual, and the early community of course fell prey to the usual infighting about whether someone with a libido counts as asexual, whether someone who chooses to have sex can be asexual (usual tiring Purity Brigade Bullshit), whether someone without a libido counts as asexual (after all, if you have no sex drive, are you sure it's a matter of sexual orientation?), whether ace people count as lgbtq, all the usual nonsense. This worked out the way it pretty much always does -- the inclusionists "win", because exclusionists always break off into smaller and smaller communities so the largest group is, of course, the one where all different kinds of people stick together and welcome each other. And that was AVEN.

And when you're trying to have a strong community and somebody shows up at the gates saying, "hi, I think I'm asexual", it's a fucking horrible idea to start doubting their credentials. They saw the public definition and started calling themselves asexual; they're here, and now they're under the internal definition. An asexual is somebody who calls themself asexual. Sometimes, these people would be frustrated allosexuals, or people choosing to swear off sex, who might not fit the external definition of the term. We made sure that everyone knew the external definition, and there were always conversations about asexuality and how it affected our lives, if they asked us directly what we thought then we'd say "only you can know for sure" and then give our thoughts on the matter for as long as they asked for them, and other than that it wasn't anyone else's fucking business or anyone's place to judge. If people weren't nasty and didn't create problems, they could stay and call themselves whatever they wanted.

Many of these people who didn't fit the strict definition eventually left after receiving support and discovering more about themselves. Some stopped IDing as ace but became allies to the community. Some people who came in with the most "I'm a heterosexual girl who is angry at my boyfriend" intro posts you've ever seen in your life discovered that they were in fact ace and that the messages that society had taught them about sex and romance were simply not for them -- these are people who, in a gatekept community, would have been incorrectly ousted immediately.

And then there were people -- a LOT of people -- who found themselves in grey areas. People who said "okay, this community makes sense to me and is useful to me and I have so much in common with a lot of you, but not EXACTLY like you. However, what I experience may not be the strict default definition but it's an awful lot like these other members on the forum." And they formed sub-communities. The grey aces. The demisexuals. The aromantics and greyromantics. Through these dialogues, between subgroups who in a more exclusionary community would be arguing about who the "real" asexuals are and splintering off into their own communities away from all those stupid cishet fakers, we developed language to describe our similarities and differences. The sexual/romantic/aesthetic attraction model came out of these dialogues and it became so massively important to our understanding of asexuality that basically everyone in the ace/aro community describes themselves by it, as do a large number of people outside the community. The community made massive leaps ahead in just a decade or two by, well, being a community. By being a place where anybody who called the place home, and didn't bully other people in the home, was right. By being somewhere where anybody who saw "asexual: someone who doesn't experience sexual attraction" and thought "that sounds like a term with some use for me" was allowed to use it.

An asexual is somebody who does not experience sexual attraction.

An asexual is somebody who calls themselves asexual.

These definitions are not in conflict -- they are both, in concert, fundamentally necessary for a safe and vibrant community where we can protect, support, and learn about each other and ourselves.

And that is absolutely not exclusive to asexual communities.

 The Moeraki boulders present a curious spectacle for inhabitants and tourists alike. Stretched across the sands of Koekohe Beach on the New Zealand coast, they stand isolated and sometimes scattered in clusters. It is believed that they are formed by wave erosion on local mudstone, honing them into a spherical shape. 

Local Māori legend posits that stones are the remnants of eel baskets, water gourds, and kumara that washed ashore when Āraiteuru - the canoe that originally bore the Māori ancestors to New Zealand - was overturned.

(Source)

nobody:

public bathroom stalls:

ocd stands for “oh CMON dude” which is what you say to your brain when you catch it spinning a complex web of the stupidest shit imaginable that it has never the less managed to completely entrap you within