I can feel The dryness of those markers in my bones
Fun fact those dry markers were supposed to have water put into them to make them work. You take off the bottom thing and pour water in and bam, instant marker success. Only learned about this four years after I’d lost my set 🙃
WHAT
WHAT
WHAT
Hey. Reblog to save some poor kid lots of grief.
Fucking what?!
Every ‘90s child on Tumblr raises their head in outrage.
I just stood up so fast and snatched mine out of my closet brb going to the sink
they probably cant love me back in a human or even mammalian sense, but my goldfish with their smooth pea-sized brain have learned to trust that i will make them better when they are sick. i feel like crying about this often
Maybe Princess the tarantula never had anything resembling what we as humans know as emotions, but she still came out of her burrow and up to the glass when we’d talk to her and used to stare at the drawing I’d tape to her terrarium. Maybe she couldn’t even comprehend what we were, but she knew we were there to take care of her. And even if she never showed that sort of curiosity or trust we’d still love her.
Idk if Munchie the praying mantis felt love for me, but I do know he trusted me enough to climb onto my hand when offered and was comfortable with allowing me to carry him places despite me being absolutely massive in comparison to him. So that’s close enough in my book.
This also applies to wild animals/birds you might encounter in your garden. The feral city pigeon with the distinct white spot on his head will never love me, and will probably never be brave enough to eat from my hand. But I don’t feed him in the hope of making him love me. I feed him because I love seeing him, doing his little spiny walks on my balcony, cooing up a storm, and not flying away immediately when I open the balcony door to bring him some seed. His presence brings joy to my heart, and I’m blessed to see him every day.
I’m not naïve enough to believe an animal can love me the same way a human can, but to know it trusts me enough to feel safe in my presence is an honour I strive to maintain as a sentient human.
My tortoise who is older than me just ran up to me when I was bringing her lettuce. Head and forelegs as high off the ground as possible looking at me like :-} I don’t know if she loves me but she recognizes me as the source of food and she lets me scratch her head
People fail to understand the degree of insane bloodthirst and dehumanization taught to ‘israelis’ like the one in front of this image. She genuinely sees the woman in the back as vermin and finds fun in tormenting her. This is a core tenet of their culture. They will humiliate Palestinians in whichever way they can on any given day ranging from petty to lethal. Their textbooks have caricatures. They draw unibrows on themselves and dream about Disneyland in Gaza on TikTok. They make fun of dead babies by comparing them to food.
This photo is 'israel’. There is no peaceful conversation with people whose heart’s desire is to do this. There is no peace or dignity while the occupation lasts.
you ever have 8,045 bad mental health days in a row
you ever have 8,046 bad mental health days in a row
thats 22 years of bad mental health are you okay
you ever have 8,050 bad mental health days in a row
They’re deactivated now and I really hope they are okay, but my nihilism is telling me something else. :(
nah i just changed urls a few times. i came out and transitioned, graduated college, and got an amazing girlfriend who lights up my life. i had to delete the queued update to this post that said 8400 days for my 23rd birthday because i’m in a really good place right now.
to everyone struggling: it really does get better.
“you would do numbers on tumblr” is something you can say to real life acquaintances without them knowing you are threatening them with Bodily Violence
“you would do numbers on tumblr” is something you can say to real life acquaintances without them knowing you are threatening them with Bodily Violence
why are people so aesthetically pleasing, like I don’t want to date you but can I trap you in a jar because you are looking good and I think that’s just neat
being younger than everyone else on this site is so funny because someone will be like “anyone remember the glinky glork” and i look up the glinky glork and it happened when i was 2
gonna start making snopes-style responses to urban legends about tumblr
“this how we lost post editing and it was still worth it”
❌ False
The John Green Cock Monologue, while one of the most egregious examples of post editing, was not why the ability to edit posts was taken away. This feature was removed because scammers would edit posts with huge note counts to try to make their scams look legit.
me every five minutes: if I built another weird electronic contraption I think it would fix me
folks you don’t understand. I have a tinkering compulsion. last week I was bored one afternoon so I built a rechargeable electronic D&D dice set that seeds its random number generator by measuring the ambient electromagnetic field. it took four hours and I didn’t need any parts that weren’t already in my house.
in case you’re wondering what that looks like
i bestow upon you the title of Master of Doohickeys
somewhere out there someone has probably used AI to write their wedding vows. someone out there is probably loading their hinge profile with AI quippy responses. when i close my eyes i picture a man hunting through chatGPT prompts, trying to get someone else to love him. maybe she sends him back chatGPT too, and two robots fall in love.
is this our new lives, then? is love scripted? i have a dandelion heart and some part of me wants to believe that AI will not obtain self-reliance by evil but instead by discovering the single perfect shape of love - the one thing humanity (in all our time and force) could never quite nail down. maybe it will be a string of numbers. the imprint of static, the universe’s thumbprint. maybe it will just be a single long mirror, and jam dripping down your hands.
i know there are “good” reasons. i was nervous! or i was unsure how to say it! but - i want your nervous words. i want your unsure words. i want you to strike entire pages of work for me. i want you to gesture vaguely, to ransack your mind for ways to instead-of-saying just show me. i want to find where your words fail you and where the summer of your longing blazes out of you, infinite, resisting the capture of definition.
and i want to do the same for you. isn’t any love worth a little bit of struggle? i want to shiver with the movie-ripe sense my friends are lovely and i am so tender towards them - i want to never quite be able to explain what it means to spend my life with them. i want to draw shapes on your skin that exit the geometric and fade into the same, wordless pattern. it is still love if silent. you know - i rarely, if ever, actually tell my siblings i love them? i just show up often, and hope the action does the talking.
i know AI is “easier”. of course. buttoned up and seamlessly corporate. but i do not want to love you through a film. i do not want to love you with your edges sanded down. i cannot recognize myself in you if you are unmarred and glistening. something about how, with the crystal-clear mp3 files of the present, we ache for the scratch of vinyl. the flaws are what make love worth it. i want the raw and the windbeaten and the unkempt.
something tender, then. i love you because you’re real, which means that you cannot be perfect.
cat laziness is so contagious. you’ll see your cat flopped on its back in your bed a completely comfy cozy baby and you’ll be like. you’re right. you make a compelling argument.
you ever have 8,045 bad mental health days in a row
you ever have 8,046 bad mental health days in a row
thats 22 years of bad mental health are you okay
you ever have 8,050 bad mental health days in a row
They’re deactivated now and I really hope they are okay, but my nihilism is telling me something else. :(
nah i just changed urls a few times. i came out and transitioned, graduated college, and got an amazing girlfriend who lights up my life. i had to delete the queued update to this post that said 8400 days for my 23rd birthday because i’m in a really good place right now.
to everyone struggling: it really does get better.
A Workshop for Creating Magical/ Fictional Crystals: A Guide from a Geologist
Hi folks, its me, here to talk about fictional writing again! Today I’m just tackling the idea of magical stones/mana stones by looking at existing minerals today and some neat properties that they have, and how you can apply these things to a fictional world. The goal is mainly to help you if you are stuck trying to come up with a unique magic system, or a unique identification/characteristic of your mineral.
First Things First: Mineral Shapes
I am exhausted, petered out, down-right fatigued by seeing every mineral depicted with having the crystal structure of calcite and quartz. There are soooooo many cooler, more interesting crystal structures, don’t you think you would stop and take a look at a perfect cube in nature? It is completely unsettling.
Second: Color
Color within minerals can either be really important, or not important at all! It is your choice to decide if color is going to be something that means something to your mineral. But what are some times when the color is important? Well…. there are some elements that are called chromophores, this classification just indicates that these elements, when present, will determine the color of whatever they are in. So, if you wanted to treat mana like a chromophore, you could say, “Oh everything that contains mana turns green!” This could mean that regardless of the mineral, if that mineral is a specific color, it means it contains mana. This concept is exciting because you can just stop here and use minerals that already exist! You can also use it as an indicator for a magical ore! Chromophores are typically metals, so if you are making a new metal weapon, making the ore of that metal a unique color would make a lot of sense!
However, your mineral can also just be every color of the rainbow like quartz and perhaps that’s what makes identifying your mana stones elusive and create an illusion of scarcity that your character can solve.
There are other things that can change the colors of minerals, like radiation damage, and electron exchange, but I think that is beyond what would be helpful! So lets talk about some unique color properties that happen in nature that seem magical in the first place! Maybe you don’t need to design a mana stone, but you want a unique gemstone that only the royal family passes down or something (IDK).
The first one is the alexandrite effect! This is where a mineral can change color in natural light vs. incandescent light. (the mineral itself is not changing, but the lights contain different amounts of different colors that then get absorbed by the stone). Even if you don’t use electricity in your fictional world, you could have the colors change in the presence of light magic. This could create fun misunderstandings about what the mineral is reacting to!
Pleochroism
Pleochroism is something that most minerals have, it is frequently used to help identify minerals in thin sections, however minerals are usually not pleochroic enough for it to be visible to the naked eye! Pleochroism is just a fancy name to describe the change in how light is absorbed based on the angle of the mineral! So if you scroll up to the first image where I showed a lot of crystal shapes, most of them have angles where they are longer and shorter! This will effect the way light travels in the crystal. Tanzanite is a popular mineral that does this.
Photochromism
This is when a mineral will change color (in a reversible way) when exposed to UV light (or sunlight), I am not going to go too into the details of why this is happening because it would require me to read some research papers and I just don’t feel like it. The mineral that is best known for this is Hackmanite!
Alright! These are all the really cool color effects that might inspire you or maybe not, but now I am going to talk about how you might find your minerals within a rock!
When I see a lot of magical caves/mines, typically I see them with some variation of a geode honestly, but most minerals are not found like that! Now I am sure most of you guys have seen a geode, so I will not really talk about those, but I will talk briefly about porphyroblasts which is when the mineral grows larger than the minerals around it, this happens in metamorphic minerals!
sorry random stranger, but this is an image of garnets inside a finer-grained rock at gore mountain in New York!
Another way you might find minerals is in a pegmatite! This is when all minerals are really large! This is a formed from really slow crystalizing magma!
But something else to think about is that your mineral might just be massive, it doesn’t have to have distinct crystals, it may be similar to jadeite where small grains grow together which leaves it looking smooth and seamless! A note about all of these is that you would have to mine into the rock to find these, there would not be any natural caves in these rocks! Caves are only ever really formed in limestones and maybe marbles (rocks that react with acid).
How can your characters identify these minerals?
Typically when you are out in the field you will look to see what type of rocks the minerals are found in (The overall texture of the rock will tell you how it formed). If you know how the rock formed, it will narrow down the amount of minerals you need to think about by quite a bit! Next, you are going to look closely at it and observe its crystal structure, does it have an obvious crystal? if so what is the general shape? If it is broken, how did it break? Did it fracture like glass or did it break along uniform planes. Some minerals have a thing called cleavage (breaks along planes of weakness). If a mineral exhibits this habit, it will again help narrow this down. Next we can look at color. Color can be misleading, because minerals like quartz can be any color imaginable, but minerals like olivine will always be green! The next thing your character can do is test for hardness, minerals all have a specific hardness that can help identify it as well.
After you go through all of this, your mineral might have some special property! This could be magnetism, fluorescence, reactions to acid, or any of the color changing effects I mentioned above! Other than that, your character can take it back to a lab and do a number of things to identify it, but the most typical thing would be for them to make a thin section (very thin piece of the rock) and observe it under a cross polarized microscope!
On that note folks! I hope this helped in some way in thinking of new magic mineral properties! I have other guides that explore some different fictional worldbuilding issues you might run into, but if you have any topics you would like me to cover please that I haven’t mentioned already, let me know!
I genuinely believe that some people could encounter a button that says “if you push this button everyone in the world has the opportunity to live a better life and your life remains exactly the same” and they would not push it.
They’d be like “well that button’s not fair to me, though,” even though there’s literally no other buttons around and nothing newly bad would happen to them if the button was pushed.
i really hate ‘power of love’ stories not because i’m a jaded cynic or whatever but because i always find something deeply offputting and misanthropic in how they are almost always set up in a way that implies that the protagonist is the only person in the world capable of love
for your story to hinge on “our protagonist’s love is powerful enough to conquer all the evils of the world” you kind of have to implicitly make the backdrop “everyone else’s love is garbage, just trash, philosophical zombies the lot of them”
like harry potter is the big modern pop culture template for “the power of love” and even seitting aside yknow any of the modern stuff about jkr i have always found “oh his mother’s love protected him from the killing curse” to be kind of deeply repulsive as a plot point. like oh well i guess the moms all those other kids who died just didnt love them enough, guess it was a skill issue
everyone coming onto this post to argue the technicalities of harry potter lore with me is being sent to the forever gulag
tumblr is so funny within my mutual circle ppl will be like cannibalism as a metaphor for sex is honestly so overdone 🙄 like it’s not even transgressive anymore it’s just vanilla atp 🙄 and then you go a little too far outside that circle and people are trigger tagging memes about infidelity
