nuttysaladtree

[nuttysaladtree]

I thought today - the TV show I'd really like to see is one about a medieval monastery.

You could have all kinds of characters: the pious guy who joined because he wanted to serve God, the son born out of wedlock sent there to cover up his parents' shame, the geek who wanted to study Latin but couldn't afford to go into university, the former knight sick of violence and afraid for his soul... Plus monasteries were centres of pilgrimage and places where criminals could take refuge, so we can have a lot of characters who crop up for a few episodes and leave.

Some plotlines I thought of:

Our relics aren't bringing in the pilgrims the way they used to - what do we do?

A women fleeing an abusive marriage has taken shelter in the monastery - how will the brothers respond to having a women in their midst?

One of the monks wants to leave - will the abbot accept or not?

A murderer has taken refuge in the abbey, and the abbot decides to try and save his soul - what will happen?

People are coming to the monastery for food during the famine, but the monastery is itself short of food - how will this be dealt with?

War has broken out between two local lords, and the monks attempt to broker a treaty - will it work?

I've already mentioned some reasons why I think this setting would lend itself to television, but I'd also love to make it for two other reasons:

Get people to understand how weird medieval religion could get, but also that, within its own frame of reference, it was a reasonable and consistent belief system.

Show people that the Middle Ages consisted of more than just muddy people stabbing each other and burning scientists at the stake.

[nuttysaladtree]

Are you looking for something like Miraheze.org or another Mediawiki hosting service <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Hosting_services>?

I wish i could make a wikipedia with every one of my ideas and OC's and shit.

Like, links to eachother

and all the information is in there

and all that shit

any tips?

[nuttysaladtree]

Some of the men yall tag as dilfs are SHAMEFUL. I was looking for dilf memes (it is not important why) and all I see is a parade of rosy-cheeked unblemished dandy men. Slapping a beard on a 26 year old in a suit is not a dilf, you are besmirching the title. There is a recipe, a Dilf Recipe. You do not need all these ingredients but you must have AT LEAST three: a child/ward/apprentice of some sort, crows feet, laugh lines/frown lines, sun damage, gray hairs, dark circles, Depression, intriguing battle scars/injuries/missing limb, Divorced, body hair, a look in the eyes that screams for A Moment of Relief, etc etc. Like the bar is low. Ben Barnes is not a Dilf. Harry Styles with 5 o’clock shadow is not a dilf. TIMMY CHARDONNAY IS NOT A DILF. You are all WEAK your blood is WEAK put that man BACK IN THE OVEN UNTIL HES DONE THESE DUDES ARENT AL DENTE THEY ARE CRUNCHY AND DUNKED IN WATER PUT THEM BACK LET THEM COOK

[nuttysaladtree]

Additional image details: the animal, possibly a weasel or a stoat, is looking toward the right, as if into the distance now illuminated by the lantern in their hand. Their suit jacket is almost as long as they are tall, so they are dressed warmly for the fall weather, indicated by the colorful leaves at their feet.

Hey you.

[nuttysaladtree]

"One very common way that jealousy appears for me is when I have had or wanted a relationship with someone and that person now has a relationship with someone else. Someone who isn’t me. The biggest lesson I’ve learned from these kinds of situations is that the jealousy that I’m feeling is basically never about the new person. Much as I might like to believe that that person is awful, or that I am not as pretty/smart/sexy/likable as they are? None of this is really true. All these things are a matter of perspective and dwelling on them has never ever lead me to feel happier in the long run.

It’s important to remember, too, that women are taught to compete with each other when it comes to sex and romance. We are taught that our self worth is tied to how men and boys see and value us. Think about it: it’s the plot to basically every Hollywood movie ever made. Competing with each other serves as a distraction from learning to support and uplift each other. Imagine what the world could look like if we could drop all our petty jealousies and work together to fight the systems of power that oppress us.

Always remember: your self worth is not determined by who loves you nor by how many people besides you they may love or have an interest in. You get to decide what makes you a valuable person and, much as the world may try, nothing gets to take that away from you."

Andi MacDonald, Jealousy: Making Friends With a Green-Eyed Monster

[nuttysaladtree]

a moment to check the gears and cogs

feel like i want to talk a little on the message of a recent post because i think it is an important point. when i say that you do not need to QUALIFY OR DEFEND your love of tinglers or my work in general, i am pointing out an interesting social anomaly that happens with my art and with queer art.

as an autistic buckaroo i notice patterns, and on social media i see them a lot. little phrases that come up again and again with my art. ‘yes THAT chuck tingle’ ‘its ACTUALLY good’ ’my favorite author i have never read’ ‘so bad its good’. these are always added after a POSITIVE comment about me

they also all have something in common. they are trying to distance the posters SINCERE JOY and give them an out socially. it is very very very subtle, but they are all saying ‘yes i like this but here is a sliver of acknowledgment that it is also weird or bad or ironic. in not REALLY fully in'

essentially these are added because it means the poster can escape their very real joy if needed. try applying these phrases to any other popular author. its much more subtle with the first two: ‘i liked all fours by miranda july, yes THAT miranda july. its ACTUALLY good’. what does this imply?

the other examples are a little more blatant but lets try them with other authors anyway. imagine saying ‘youre my favorite author i have never read’ to stephen king. would you EVER say that to someone? what does that imply? how about 'i love your books theyre so bad theyre good'. horrifyingly rude

lets dive into saying 'CHUCK TINGLE is my favorite author i have never read’ sounds unusual when substituting other authors because theyre usually not queer or autistic or making outsider art. to be blunt, why CHUCK gets it all the time is because it really means 'i like chuck tingle but im not gay’

while we have mostly culturally evolved past the idea that saying ‘no homo’ is some kind of joke, that FEELING is still around. it has just burrowed a little deeper. honestly it might never go away, or at least take centuries. remember these people GENUINELY LIKE MY BOOKS but feel they MUST qualify

should also be pointed out that LEFT and LIBERAL people are the ones who say this stuff to chuck. they do not MEAN to harm, and if you ask them directly how they feel about queer or neurodivergent people they would not express the same opinion as their subliminal comments might imply

the final elephant trotting by is while some of this is homophobia and fear of a neurodivergent other, it is also just plain old IRONY POISONING. its conditioning from being raised on an internet where sincerity was ‘cringe' and loving something was a weakness or joke. these problems work in tandem

so whats the point? what can we do? first of all, just recognizing these patterns is a start. i didnt HAVE to write all of this today but i think its important to be aware and to look inward and think about the gears and cogs that churn behind the things we say. NEXT step is trying to push past it

if you have done these things in the past, i want you to know i am NOT AT ALL UPSET. i am not mad or hurt and i do not think any less of you. you can trot by my side any day and you are trying your best to prove love. we are ALL just tryin our best, just consider this a friendly chat between buds

proving love can happen in BIG WAYS and it can happen in SMALL WAYS that we barely see. just take a moment and think ‘WHY am i saying this? WHY am i in this pattern to distance myself from outsider or queer art?’ a little moment of consideration goes a LONG way buckaroos. LOVE IS REAL

[nuttysaladtree]

My face is having uncontrollable spasms. Great. It hurts really, really, really bad.

I think part of why I have trouble explaining pain to the doctor is when they ask about the pain scale I always think “Well, if someone threw me down a flight of stairs right now or punched me a few times, it would definitely hurt a lot more” so I end up saying a low number. I was reading an article that said that “10” is the most commonly reported number and that is baffling to me. When I woke up from surgery with an 8" incision in my body and I could hardly even speak, I was in the most horrific pain of my life but I said “6” because I thought “Well, if you hit me in the stomach, it would be worse.”

[nuttysaladtree]

Happy 10 year anniversary of the completion of Detective Pony by @sonnetstuck!!! Big fan of this ending (and the entire thing lol), I can’t believe it’s been 10 years!!

And a massive shoutout to the movie adaptation by @naked-bee that got me back into my Homestuck phase 4 years ago :)

[nuttysaladtree]

The Gallery of Presidents and the Table of Contents; widely known as the two most valuable parts of any book

[nuttysaladtree]

Drew some horses this weekend

I’m obviously not an artist but they get the job done (if the job in question was looking vaguely like a shitty horse drawing)

[nuttysaladtree]

You know this actually might take longer than I anticipated…

[nuttysaladtree]

Insane thrift store find, obviously I couldn’t not buy it.

Obviously I’m going to have to make some alterations, so I thought I’d document my process of turning this into an irl version of @sonnetstuck‘s amazing fanfic on this blog!!

[nuttysaladtree]

a very dear and indispensable friend

[nuttysaladtree]

[nuttysaladtree]

Have you ever written a letter to a president and got a response?

I've been a Presidential history nerd since I was a little kid. I don't know when I first became interested in the Presidents or what specifically piqued that interest, but I know that I can't remember a time where it wasn't something I wanted to learn everything I could possible learn about it. So when we'd go to the school library in elementary school, my friends would check out age-appropriate kids books and I would check out full-fledged Presidential biographies.

So, yes, I absolutely wrote letters to Presidents and I still have some of the responses I received. As a kid, I sent a letter to the White House whenever there was a new President because I never forgot what happened the first time I wrote to a President. I was probably 7 or 8 years old and back when the phone companies would publish yellow pages and white pages, they would have sections with contact information for government officials. I saw that there was an address for the White House (1600 Pennsylvania Ave NW), so I wrote a letter to President Reagan. I have no idea what I wrote at the time, but I remember that I got a big envelope from the White House with a little note written on fancy paper with the Presidential seal and a signed photo of the President, as well as a little booklet about the White House. I don't have that first letter from Reagan, but after he left office, I had learned about the Presidential Libraries and the fact that former Presidents had post-Presidential offices. I wrote to former President Reagan at his office in Los Angeles and received pretty much the same thing I had been sent while he was still in office. I do still have that:

I wrote to President George H.W. Bush and President Clinton when they were in the White House, too. President Bush sent a letter and photo and President Clinton sent a photo:

Those were the last incumbent Presidents that I wrote to while they were in the White House. I turned 13 years old when President Clinton took office in 1993 (and I mean that literally -- believe it or not, my birthday is Inauguration Day) and while I was still interested in Presidential history, I was also interested in girls, so I kind of grew out of the letter-writing. But when I was a teenager, I did also write to former Presidents Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter at their post-Presidential offices. Sadly, I didn't get around to writing to former President Nixon before he died in 1994, so I never received anything from him. I regret that I didn't write to him in time because that's around the time I wrote to former Presidents Ford and Carter.

But President Ford and President Carter really made my nerdy letter writing all worthwhile. The letters and photos I received from President Reagan, President Bush, and President Clinton were all signed by an auto-pen, as you would expect for someone responding to as much mail as the President of the United States does.

However, President Ford and President Carter sent me photos with their actual autographs! I remember Ford sent some packets of information about himself and a copy of an interview where he answered a bunch of questions about stuff that kids might be interested in. Carter also sent something like that, as well as a folder with information about the Carter Center and the work it does around the world. But the coolest thing to receive were the photos with their genuine autographs on them. I took advantage of that and actually wrote to President Ford several times when I was a teenager (I don't know why I seem to have written to President Carter only once) in hopes that his office would send me more autographs and they did!

Looking back, I wish I never would have grown out of writing letters to Presidents because those are all really cool little souvenirs, especially for a Presidential history fanatic. It would have been fun to have similar things from other Presidents. But if you have a kid or if you are a kid (if you are a kid, I sure hope you have parental permission to read my blog because I say bad words sometimes) with interest in the Presidents/Presidential history, it's really fun to write to the President or former President and get something back. At one point, you could just drop a letter in the mail addressed to "THE PRESIDENT, Washington, D.C.) and it would be delivered to the incumbent in the White House, but I'm not sure if they do that anymore. But it's super easy to find the mailing address to the White House or to the post-Presidential offices of former Presidents online. Presidents and former Presidents have franking privileges, so it's also cool to get a big envelope with a President's signature in the place of stamps. If you're a teacher of younger kids who are learning about the Presidents or Presidency, it's also a cool little project to do. When I was running afterschool programs many (way too many) years ago, I did that with my students and they all received photos from the President at the time (George W. Bush), along with a letter that was addressed to the entire group as a whole.

[nuttysaladtree]

The use of the twilight aesthetic in Ace Attorney

This somehow started with me thinking about Miles and Phoenix being THE star crossed lovers, but now here we are with a whole essay (with actual citations. You're welcome.). TLDR: Miles and Phoenix pined so hard for each other that their spirits have broken through the veil of space and time. One of my favourite additions to the Ace Attorney 'lore' made by the anime comes in Season 2, Episode 6. The episode is Miles Edgeworth centric, showing how he first 'became a Von Karma' (in a sense), and Phoenix's attempts to contact him when they were both in middle school. The ending of the episode in particular has always stuck out to me.

Here we have Miles thinking about Phoenix, who had 'helped him' earlier by delivering a message to him through a radio show song dedication. The song ultimately gave Miles the evidence he needed to win an argument with a woman at the mall (and saved a dog in the process). As we can see, the scene is set at dusk, or twilight.

Although this is also a really beautiful image, 'twilight' is an incredibly profound and intentional choice.

Now, I will spare you an entire ramble about wabi-sabi as a Japanese aesthetic (you can use here as a starting point though). Basically all you need to know is that it is arguably the most important cultural aesthetic, and means something like the beauty of transience and imperfection.

Twilight, or tasokare (誰そ彼), can be seen through these transient aesthetics. It's something you see a lot in traditional waka poetry, but permeates today through literature and cinema.

"About dusk, we can say that the main feeling is that of the colour of darkness and night. However, twilight is not merely the colour of darkness nor the colour night. That said it is not only the colour of day, nor the colour of light…The world that exists in the instant where it turns from day into night, the boundary of the instant where it enters darkness from light, isn’t there that the twilight world is? …Entering darkness from light, night from day, during that instant there is a world with a peculiar essence and subtle colours, which is what I think is the twilight world."

Izumi Kyouka, 1996. Tasogare no Aji. In Izumi Kyouka, ed. Tomomi Matsumura, 243-44. Tokyo: Center for the Japanese books.

Basically, twilight is all about that transient moment where boundaries drop. Relatedly, there's a supernatural association with it, like the crossing of a veil where the restrictions of 'space' and 'time' can be lifted. Most famously, in terms of modern example of this, take the scene in Your Name.

Admittedly, Your Name is where I was able to find the most analysis. To be fair, it really is a beautiful scene.

In classical Japanese tasokare does not simply indicate the dusk as an in-between period transitioning from day to night, but also a hybrid moment in which visible entities become invisible and hidden presences momentarily reveal themselves. The anxiety of the encounters that take place during this liminal time is emphasised by the expression of surprise - "who is that!" (dare da, are ha 誰だ、あれは) - which constitutes the origin of this term. Therefore, in kimi no na ha, the transfers between the human spirits take place at night during the oneiric activities of the protagonists, but the possibility of a real encounter is limited to the ephemeral time of dusk.

Andrea Castiglioni, 2019. From Your Name to Shin-Gojira. In Spirits and Animism in Contemporary Japan: The Invisible Empire, ed. Fabio Rambelli, 173.

"Tasokare” means “Who’s in the gloom,” and it’s where the word “gloaming” comes from. You know what “the gloaming” is, right? It’s twilight, when it’s neither day nor night. When the world blurs and you might encounter something not quite human.

Your Name, 2016.

Now, I don't believe you can call this a trope that's exclusively romantic. Though, clearly, it lends itself to that. It certainly conjures the feeling of profound pining, with just a moment of relief (after all, stories of tragic love stories between manifestations of the day and night are common across the entire planet).

Anyway, I hope this explains why, in the Ace Attorney anime, Phoenix turns around and stares, bewildered, as if he actually heard Miles call out to him despite their physical distance.

Funnily enough, they're even under the polaris star, which is also a theme in Your Name. But anyway, yes indeed I think this scene can be taken as Miles and Phoenix pining so hard for each other that their spirits have broken through the veil of space and time.

It's also just really beautiful symbolism, even if it's not 'canon' to the games. Considering the anime also gave them the whole 'gold chains of fate' aesthetic.

[nuttysaladtree]

The Tiger Poem in Classical Maya!

The Tiger He has destroyed his cage Yes Yes The tiger is out By Nael, Age 6

Literal translation:

he-destroyed his-captive-place the-jaguar yes-yes he-came.out the-jaguar his-writing master-Na'el man[of]-6-years

Transliteration:

ʔu-jomow ʔu-baaknal ʔu-balahm xt xt Joyoy ʔu-balahm ʔu-tz'ibaal Aj-Naʔel Aj-6-habiy

Character Transliteration (ALL CAPS are characters that stand for full words, lower case are syllabic):

ʔu-jo-mo-wa ʔu-ba-ki-NAL ʔu-BALAM-la-ma xa-ta-xa-ta jo-JOY-yi ʔu-BALAM-ma ʔu-tz'i-ba-li AJ-na-ʔe-le AJ-6-HAB-bi-ya

[Image shows the poem written in 2 columns of Maya glyph blocks. A diagram shows the reading order (which is complex). All the posts text is also included on the image.

End ID.]