#<- there you go

[aphelea]

so what are the odds we get a look at tiergan

[justablah56]

glark au auddhhdudhdjd 1920’s dresses and Lark (sorry for appearing in your inbox all the timeee)

htnvkkxlss real ,,,, dude if you send me some outfits I will draw lark and/or grant in them I am 1000% serious .

[justsomeoneunordinary]

that new what if episode wasn't really good tbh but at least i got a glimpse of team as family and ballerina natasha, so i'll take it

[trenchcrows]

[antikittysocial]

[ID]

screenshot of a website hyperlink with the display text 'Scientists Have Grown a Human Spine In a Lab'. the text above it, the name of the website, is 'Popular Mechanics', with a small blue square the same height as the text with white letters reading 'PM' to the left of it. the photo to the right shows a transluscent blue human spine cut off by the frame, and the text below the hyperlink says '6 days ago'. this was also screenshotted on dark mode.

[END OF ID]

Hope for the democratic party?

[time-to-leave-machine]

people will say "why cant the eldritch gods just be nice to humans :((" and then kill a bug for existing near them

[valtsv]

been thinking about fantasy/scifi rule systems and free will

[bixels]

As gen-AI becomes more normalized (Chappell Roan encouraging it, grifters on the rise, young artists using it), I wanna express how I will never turn to it because it fundamentally bores me to my core. There is no reason for me to want to use gen-AI because I will never want to give up my autonomy in creating art. I never want to become reliant on an inhuman object for expression, least of all if that object is created and controlled by tech companies. I draw not because I want a drawing but because I love the process of drawing. So even in a future where everyone’s accepted it, I’m never gonna sway on this.

[always-a-mad-comet]

[gongyussy]

good thing from jp twitter this week is queen of old man yaoi michiru sonoo discovering the term old man yaoi

update: somehow it got impossibly more wholesome

quick translation: おかえり: welcome home あ 終わった 終わった: ahhh, it's over! it's done! コーヒー? お茶?: coffee? tea? コ~ヒ~ ありがと: coffee, thank you~ ���クタイレア★★ ネクタイ取るレア★★★★: seeing him with a tie on, rarity level ★★, seeing him take a tie off, rarity level ★★★★ にあうな~: it suits him~

also please do follow: AraigumaSha: sensei's twitter account marureviere: maru, who does such valuable work highlighting bl manga for an international audience

[loycos]

"You're the only one I have left..."

[twinliches]

nearly had a medical emergency today because - and i cannot stress enough how little i am making this up - a helicopter landed in front of an open grain silo while i was getting off my ship and i am deathly allergic to the wheat that said helicopters rotor blades proceeded to blast in my face at full force. the cosmic forces are plotting against me ass situation to be in

[inbabylontheywept]

so once me and my wife were watching a documentary where a snake ate like a million eggs. that snake just went to fucking town on eggs. and the snake made the eggs look so good that i kept thinking about it, and thinking about it, and thinking about it, and eventually it was 11pm and i ran out of willpower and decided to eat one (1) singular raw egg just to prove to myself that the snake was surely a liar.

the snake was not a liar. texture is like, super important to me and raw eggs are very Texture so i had another one, and then another one, and then another one, and eventually i ran out of eggs.

i had like, fifteen raw eggs.

i didnt really know how to explain this momentary madness to my wife, so my Plan was to put all the eggshells into a grocey bag, and then throw that grocery bag in the dumpster, and if she never noticed that would be Excellent and if she noticed immediately i could lie and say that the eggs went bad.

except i cant lie very good, and of course with murphys law being such, i got salmonella.

so i threw up a lot and my wife asked me what poisoned me so and i tried very hard to dodge the question but i was oozing shame like oil from a room temperature cheese and eventaully i gave in and told her everything and to her enormous credit she was more flabbergasted than actually upset. she did make me promise to not eat any more raw eggs, which i have stuck to, and she gives me weird looks during nature documentaries now as if desire was the only thing keeping me from eating thousands of pounds of krill anyway i made a joke earlier about being able to eat my age in eggs and my sister in law in law made a drawing to comemorate the moment and also because it was my birthday. she's excellent. thank you 10000000% @cintailed. you should all visit her page and admire her work.

[bookwyrminspiration]

I can behave normally around books

[shadesofmauve]

I want to step away from the art-vs-artist side of the Gaiman issue for a bit, and talk about, well, the rest of it. Because those emotions you're feeling would be the same without the art; the art just adds another layer.

Source: I worked with a guy who turned out to be heavily involved in an international, multi-state sex-slavery/trafficking ring.

He was really nice.

Yeah.

It hits like a dumptruck of shit. You don't feel stable in your world anymore. How could someone you interacted with, liked, also be a truly horrible person? How could your judgement be that bad? How can real people, not stylized cartoon bogeymen, be actually doing this shit?

You have to sit with the fact that you couldn't, or probably couldn't, have known. You should have no guilt as part of this horror — but guilt is almost certainly part of that mess you're feeling, because our brains do this associative thing, and somehow "I liked [the version of] the guy [that I knew]", or his creations, becomes "I made a horrible mistake and should feel guilty."

You didn't, loves, you didn't.

We're human, and we can only go by the information we have. And the information we have is only the smallest glimpse into someone else's life.

I didn't work closely with the guy I knew at work, but we chatted. He wasn't just nice; he was one of the only people outside my tiny department who seemed genuinely nice in a workplace that was rapidly becoming incredibly toxic. He loaned me a bike trainer. Occasionally he'd see me at the bus stop and give me a lift home.

Yup. I was a young woman in my twenties and rode in this guy's car. More than once.

When I tell this story that part usually makes people gasp. "You must feel so scared about what could have happened to you!" "You're so lucky nothing happened!"

No, that's not how it worked. I was never in danger. This guy targeted Korean women with little-to-no English who were coerced and powerless. A white, fluent, US citizen coworker wasn't a potential victim. I got to be a person, not prey.

Y'know that little warning bell that goes off, when you're around someone who might be a danger to you? That animal sense that says "Something is off here, watch out"?

Yeah, that doesn't ping if the preferred prey isn't around.

That's what rattled me the most about this. I liked to think of myself as willing to stand up for people with less power than me. I worked with Japanese exchange students in college and put myself bodily between them and creeps, and I sure as hell got that little alarm when some asian-schoolgirl fetishist schmoozed on them. But we were all there.

I had to learn that the alarm won't go off when the hunter isn't hunting. That it's not the solid indicator I might've thought it was. That sometimes this is what the privilege of not being prey does; it completely masks your ability to detect the horrors that are going on.

A lot of people point out that 'people like that' have amazing charisma and ability to lie and manipulate, and that's true. Anyone who's gotten away with this shit for decades is going to be way smoother than the pathetic little hangers-on I dealt with in university. But it's not just that. I seriously, deeply believe that he saw me as a person, and he did not extend personhood to his victims. We didn't have a fake coworker relationship. We had a real one. And just like I don't know the ins-and-outs of most of my coworkers lives, I had no idea that what he did on his down time was perpetrate horrors.

I know this is getting off the topic, but it's so very important. Especially as a message to cis guys: please understand that you won't recognize a creep the way you might think you will. If you're not the preferred prey, the hind-brain alarm won't go off. You have to listen to victims, not your gut feeling that the person seems perfectly nice and normal. It doesn't mean there's never a false accusation, but face the fact that it's usually real, and you don't have enough information to say otherwise.

So, yeah. It fucking sucks. Writing about this twists my insides into tense knots, and it was almost a decade ago. I was never in danger. No one I knew was hurt!

Just countless, powerless women, horrifically abused by someone who was nice to me.

You don't trust your own judgement quite the same way, after. And as utterly shitty as it is, as twisted up and unstead-in-the-world as I felt the day I found out — I don't actually think that's a bad thing.

I think we all need to question our own judgement. It makes us better people.

I don't see villains around every corner just because I knew one, once. But I do own the fact that I can't know, really know, about anyone except those closest to me. They have their own full lives. They'll go from the pinnacles of kindness to the depths of depravity — and I won't know.

It's not a failing. It's just being human. Something to remember before you slap labels on people, before you condemn them or idolize them. Think about how much you can't know, and how flawed our judgement always is.

Grieve for victims, and the feeling of betrayal. But maybe let yourself off the hook, and be a bit slower to skewer others on it.