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A different perspective

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All the torso animated studies.

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every time i see someone call kirk and spock the oldest ship, i'm filled with the urge to go "hmm actually the holmes and watson girlies have been here for a hundred years now", and i refrain because i know the natural conclusion of this game is gilgamesh and enkidu

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Vermilion Cliffs (gouache)

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Siobhán Hapaska, Robot, 2001 // Pang Maokun, Destiny 命运; Hand in Hand 牵手, 2019 // Shorra, Death of a Cyborg (after The First Mourning by William-Adolphe Bouguereau), 2015

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Laine Bachman, “Fernal Newtron”, 2023, acrylic. Columbus, Ohio.

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It’s time for a longer post dedicated to dresses.

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happy 10th anniversary

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Here's a legal PSA:

If you've committed a crime and a detective gathers everyone involved in the room, especially if he's not actually a detective and is instead a novelist, puzzle-setter, psychic, fake psychic, dog, chess grandmaster, etc. ...

YOU SHOULD NOT CONFESS.

Every year, hundreds of people are put away by non-traditional "detectives" who have either inserted themselves into the case or are working with the police in a dubiously legal capacity as advisor. In 99% of these cases, the murderer gives a full confession even though the evidence against them is circumstantial at best and often requires a long just-so story which can only guess at motive.

If this happens to you, stay quiet, do not attempt to defend yourself or talk your way out of it, only say "I want a lawyer".

Now if you find yourself being investigated by a boy genius, magician's assistant, anthropologist, classics scholar, or philosopher, it's likely that refusing to talk to the police (or investigator with no legal authority) is merely the end of the second act, and by the end of the third act they will have you dead to rights.

YOU SHOULD STILL NOT CONFESS.

Make them take it to court. Force the eccentric detective and his straight-laced police partner to take the stand and explain their methods to a jury of your peers. Have your lawyer look at the chain of custody on the evidence, especially if you believe it to have been handled by someone who has only bumbled into detective work through their natural charm and/or unique set of skills and outsider perspective that come in handy more often than they should.

Know your rights. Don't let eccentric detectives put you away.

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I just realized that apparently I never shared this series here on Tumblr??  

I call it Living Paintings, as they are recreations of extinct animals that some artists actually saw and painted from memory, a long time ago.

Patreon • Ko-fi • Facebook  • Twitter • Prints & Merch      

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New to Tumblr, going to start dumping some of the stone carving that I've done here.

This big slate carving is based on a design from the Book of Kells, all hand carved with hammer and chisels.

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American Alligator (Alligator mississippiensis), showing its distinct orange eye shine, family Alligatoridae, Myakka River State Park, Florida, USA

photographs by Larry Lynch

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I saw the post about respecting it/its pronouns users and I wanted to ask a question. I am genuinely curious and want to understand better so I’m sorry if I miss the mark. Personally my discomfort with referring to someone with it/its isn’t from the idea that I don’t personally want to be referred to that way, but from feeling like even though it is being specifically requested, it feels dehumanizing. I think it would be a similar feeling if someone named themselves something that is typically a slur or hate speech. I wouldn’t call them the wrong name but I don’t think I would be able to use their name if that makes sense? It deeply uncomfortable to refer to someone in a way that I see as dehumanizing. I don't know how to get over this thought process. Do you have any suggestions? I want to be able to fully respect people’s choices and pronouns properly and understand.

hello thanks for stopping by!

since i get this exact question constantly, let me phrase it like this:

this is hypothetical, i don't know your real pronouns. but let's say you started telling people "my pronouns are they/them, please use those for me, i only use they/them." and everyone around you went:

"i can't use they/them for you. i won't do that, that feels dehumanizing to me. it makes me uncomfortable."

are those people justified in misgendering you because they are uncomfortable?

all of those things you said:

all of these things are about you. you are are thinking about yourself and your own feelings here, not someone else's.

you cannot project your own personal discomfort on to a total stranger like that. they asked you to be referred to by it/its. you are misgendering them if you refer to them by any other pronouns. that is dehumanizing. instead of getting caught up in how you feel about being referred to as it/its, think about how you're dehumanizing someone else by misgendering them instead!

it's never okay to misgender someone because of how you feel about a pronoun set that genuinely is harming no one. it doesn't matter how you feel about those pronouns as you are not the one being referred to by them. the thing is, you are not being called it/its in this scenario. it is the other person who you are calling that. they told you and asked you to do it first. it's not a bait and switch, you're not getting baited into misgendering someone. it is misgendering when one refuses to use that set of pronouns

my suggestion is question why you felt it was appropriate to consider your comfort over someone else's. do you approach people who use they, he, and she this way? if so, that's something you must address, as those pronouns are also used to dehumanize intersex and trans people every day. every day trans women are dehumanized with he and trans men are dehumanized with she. those can also be deeply dehumanizing pronouns, the focus shouldn't be on it/its

the more you use them for people who want them used for them, the more comfortable it becomes. also, it might be good to just.. ask that person how those pronouns make them feel, what they like about them. it might give you a better perspective on it as opposed to a negative assumption

hope that helps! feel free to ask any more questions you may have. all in all, don't make someone else's queer identity about you. that's the best way to approach any identity that someone asks you to be called that isn't outright appropriative or actually harmful or dangerous.

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I know it's unfair vilification and stuff but it's also a lot of fun to see old media and stuff where people were SO scared of big animals like lions, sharks, crocodiles and wolves were fully expected to just come and eat you the moment you stepped into their territory. In older media we also made that assumption about gorillas and in still older we thought it'd be whales. But some animals that will actually fuck you up got left behind. Boars will kill you and eat you. They're way more likely to do so than any of those other things actually. Hippos, obviously, got off like bandits always being depicted as cute and dopey. And then there's the squids. Not giant kraken size squids. The eight foot squids that hunt in packs and will fuck you up if you fall in the water at night. I can't BELIEVE people slept on that. It's like all they cared about were the huge deep sea ones we never see. The medium size wolf pack squids were right there.

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my part of a trade with @bingobongobonko 🥀🧚‍♂️

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It's almost thanksgiving, and I want to talk about dogs and bones.

It took me forever to understand why I couldn't give bones to our dogs because no one ever explained it, and i was like "but wolves and coyotes and foxes and things totally eat bones all the time, i've seen tons of footage of wild canines eating bones" and it never made sense. But now it does and i want to help anyone who is where i was with this

There are 3 reasons not to give your dog bones

First mother canines (and any other relatives present) typically do actually demonstrate for puppies the proper way to eat bones, which can vary from prey type to prey type. For example, bird bones can be tricky and dangerous, even the raw ones splinter more easily because of the way they are structured to be semi-hollow. Wild canines get shown how to eat these things. You can't really do that for your dog.

Second bones can have unknown microbes and parasites, and between that and bone ingestion being a skill check, now and then wild canines do actually die of complications from either eating the wrong bone, or eating a bone wrong.

But the MAIN reason is - if the bones are cooked it changes them.

see, most raw bones tend to break the same way safety glass breaks, into crumbly chunks, like so

but COOKING the bones changes their physical composition

so after you cook a bone, if you break it, it's much more likely to give you long sharp shapes like this

So a wolf, or your dog, munching happily on whatever, a deer bone, is getting crumbly chunks of bone kibble. But if you cook that same bone they're going to be swallowing thin sharp splinters of deadly bone instead.

Yes, a lot of dogs can slowly digest bone material, but if a single sharp shard pierces your dog's stomach, or gods forbid their intestine! before the bone starts to melt enough... then their digestive enzymes and waste material (basically acid sewage) can get into the rest of their body. This can cause lots of bad problems right up to causing terminal sepsis -- which is where your body tries so hard to kill a bad infection that it kills your own organs. Like if those bees in Japan were trying to kill a hornet so hard they made it too hot for the bees to live either.

Even the surgery to fix it is sometimes the cause of death for a dog; it's invasive surgery, no matter how careful they are it's still another opportunity for infection to get a direct line into the core of your dog. They use anesthesia to keep the dog asleep during surgery and the chances of the dog straight up dying from the anesthesia itself are low... but they aren't zero. And it's not like an anatomy book in there, it's a messy difficult thing to do, cutting and stitching around in there.

Your dog can eat a cooked bone and be fine 19 times and die on the 20th. Or 8th. Or 37th. Or your dog could die on the first one.

It's a total roll of the dice on their life.

Now, if you really really want to give your dog bones for reasons that aren't because you made a dinner that has bones (I did-- when Badger was a puppy I tried to give him all the parts of animals I could to make sure he was getting access to the same nutrients a wild canine would get and have all the taste and chew experiences a wild canine would have, as much as possible) that's fine.

Just do good research and either work with a butcher to get fresh good quality bones or buy bones that are meant for dogs by companies who have to worry about being sued if they sell dangerous bones. I used to get Badger these, uh, i think they were sheep kneecaps, and also some kind of rib bones, idk it was 10 years ago, but i got them from pet supply companies for dogs. Oxtails and deer trachea too. If you want to give your dog bones and animal parts, there are hundreds of ways to do that safely.

Don't give them random raw bones from preparing your dinner unless you've researched it heavily and are being specific and careful - remember, you can't demonstrate the best way to eat those bones they way momma wolf could. If giving the dog the bones from making your dinner is important to you for some reason (i could understand a life bonding thing or something, honoring the ancient pact between our kinds or whatever) then just make sure you're choosing the right dinners for that to be okay for your dog. I would say even do home experiments and crush the kind of raw bones you want to feed to your dog with shears and hammers and things to see what you're letting your dog swallow.

And don't forget you're cooking away any microbes that might be on it when you eat it, but all your dog gets is its own immune system. It is in some ways better at raw food than yours, but it's still just one lone immune system in a world full of mites and bacteria and viruses and little eggs that hatch inside your body. Cooking kills all those things, but makes the bones dangerous for dogs. So, make sure you're getting high quality bones, like from a place you'd feel safe eating the meat from raw, we're talking sushi quality meat. Don't just give your dog random raw bones from your dinner, unless you have done the work to make sure you're doing it safely

BUT ESPECIALLY DO NOT GIVE YOUR DOG COOKED BONES

this has been a PSA, thank you