#LONG POST!!!!!!

[paxcallow]

Do you think you could tell us about your The Sight ocs? I met them from your t-word art and they seem soooo cute

OH FUCK YEAH! what do you wanna know about 'em??? there are a LOT of main characters in the sight (like uhhh ten or so in the central cast which is pretty big compared to most of my universes) but you probably just know about rose and dirk!

Dirconius Talwar and Rosemary Valdis are 14 year old Seers who begin their story on opposite sides of a conflict they admittedly don't care that much about once they start getting closer.

the conflict is over an incredibly powerful artifact called The Book of Dircon. (<- did you know? part of dirk's name is in this) dirk is recruited by an unnamed team composed of Eleanora Eldottir, Xander Schmittlot and Vicky Chang, whose mission is to find and protect the Book from a fractured group named The Sight, (<- did you know? this is the title of the series) who seek to destroy it because despite the fact that it's enabled seers and spirits to interact and coexist and has changed the world for the better in several ways, it's apparently too powerful to exist.

rose is a member of the sight, and has been fairly dedicated to the cause until meeting dirk, who is actually very lovely <3 after getting own'd a couple times. they're friendly enemies for a while, and as they slowly grow annoyed by their respective teams' baggage/incompetence, and MOSTLY just want to spend more time together...

they decide to work together to find the Book of Dircon on their own before the full moon of december, the Cold Moon, a time when the layers of physical and spiritual reality are the least separated and the Book will be the strongest, but the most vulnerable to destruction.

... and... it's kind of hard to fully talk about the sight without spoilers because there's a pretty big... event like a quarter(?) through the whole story that changes everyone's dynamics at once. i've danced around it a lot on this blog but fuck it i wanna talk about it.

BIG SPOILERS follow for something that won't be released for probably a long time.

at the end of the first season, on the cold moon itself, dirk and rose find the Book. after going through so much together, dirk has earned rose's trust, and she decides to let dirk take it back to nora.

the reason the Book of Dircon is so powerful- so powerful the Sight wants to destroy it- is that anything writ in its pages becomes reality.

and more than just keeping it safe, nora has very badly been wanting to use it.

secretly, this entire time, nora has believed that dirk is the reincarnation of a very powerful spirit, and that by splitting open his soul, the spirit will reawaken and bring the world into an era of peace and harmony.

when he brings her the Book on that night, when the barrier between human and spirit is at its thinnest, she takes it as a sign.

what nora does to dirk on the cold moon is supernaturally tantamount to One Of The Worst Fucking Things You Can Possibly Do To Another Person. especially a child.

and it almost kills him. but gwen friede, the leader of the sight and a woman who has seemed like Bad News, Super Bad, Really Grimdark Mean Lady No Compassion for the entire first season, saves him in the nick of time and wallops the shit out of nora before escaping without the Book, but with a shocked dirk.

and dirk is in shock, and basically everyone is really, for the first half of the second season. the sight has to reckon with the fact that they have not been much of a team at all and their dysfunction lost them the Book of Dircon and almost caused Something Catastrophic to happen.

in the first season, dirk is a kind of standoffish boy who is quickly befriended and encouraged by nora, xander and vicky. so nora's betrayal (and by extension, knowing* what she had planned, xander and vicky's) rocks him to his core and he backslides hard. and rose, who over the course of the first season slowly grew apart from gwen, someone she has always deeply respected, and feels like she horribly betrayed her by handing the book over to nora.

both of these things make the prospect of unifying The Sight into something resembling a group of friends rather than a bunch of distrusting or self-important people vaguely working toward the same goal more daunting than any of the other challenges they face. but the silver lining has always been and still is dirk and rose's friendship (romance), and it slowly infects the rest of the team until they begin to have a fighting chance.

and that's what the sight is really about.

ALSO!

because you are here from my t-word art and i feel called out by absolutely no one except myself: okay listen dirk has been the target of tickling and will probably continue to be just because he is the OC who likes it the most. dirk craves attention and physical affection and he likes roughhousing and laughing. (my man laughs in basically every situation)

but he is terrified of choosing to be vulnerable because rejection hurts worse than physical pain. it stands to reason he loves being tickled. he can believe that someone is tickling him because it's funny or because he (intentionally) annoyed them, and not because he's letting them do something nice for him, or he looked like he needed a hug, or his hair pet, or to be doted on. even though basically everyone catches on that he likes this.

also it's just fun for grumpy/rude/sassy characters to get tickled stupid.

... i've been sitting on a tickle fic for a while because it refers indirectly to these BIG SPOILERS, but now that this post exists i could probably post it. i might post it soon.

[hydrattan]

I was feeling agitated and artblocked yesterday so I decided to give my brain a rest by watching TV and then the next thing I knew these were in front of me

[climbingthefloors]

obsessed with this baby hippo from thailand's khao khew zoo.. she has been so utterly betrayed by the world

[sleeplessv0id]

what doesn't kill you makes you weird at intimacy

[bigskycastle]

school project, some drawings for my pretend game about a housefly girl called musca and her adventures in some creepy&wet place

[yumenikkii]

just another average day in gravity falls

[whiteshipnightjar]

Zoozve, my beloved

[valdotpng]

an accomplice turned victim his apology, long overdue

[nondivisable]

I need to say something and I need y'all to be calm

if it isn't actively bad or harmful, no representation should be called "too simple" or "too surface level"

I have a whole argument for this about the barbie movie but today I wanna talk about a show called "the babysitters club" on Netflix

(obligatory disclaimer that I watched only two episodes of this show so if it's super problematic I'm sorry) (yes. I know it's based on a book, this is about the show)

this is a silly 8+ show that my 9 year old sister is watching and it manages to tackle so many complex topics in such an easy way. basic premise is these 13 year old girls have a babysitting agency.

in one episode, a girl babysits this transfem kid. the approach is super simple, with the kid saying stuff like "oh no, those are my old boy clothes, these are my girl clothes". they have to go to the doctor and everyone is calling the kid by her dead name and using he/him and this 13 year old snaps at like a group of doctors and they all listen to her. it's pure fantasy and any person versed in trans theory would point out a bunch of mistakes.

but after watching this episode, my little sister started switching to my name instead of my dead name and intercalating he/him pronouns when talking about me.

one of the 13 years old is a diabetic and sometimes her whole personality is taken over by that. but she has this episode where she pushes herself to her limit and passes out and talks about being in a coma for a while because of not recognizing the limits of her disability.

and this allowed my 9 year old sister to understand me better when I say "I really want to play with you but right now my body physically can't do that" (I'm disabled). she has even asked me why I'm pushing myself, why I'm not using my crutches when I complain about pain.

my mom is 50 years old and watching this show with my sister. she said the episode about the diabetic girl helped her understand me and my disability better. she grew up disabled as well, but she was taught to shut up and power through.

yes, silly simple representation can annoy you if you've read thousands of pages about queer liberation or disability radical thought, but sometimes things are not for you.

[fishfingersandscarves]

they've never had sex

[thankstothe]

folk hero really

[artsymeeshee]

Haven’t collabed with @renconner in a long while for a mini comic (minus our big one, Instinct). We were talking about one of Stan’s lowest moments involving being outside with that damn sign, so we decided to make a comic with Stan remembering it. I’ve also kinda of assumed Filbrick would lie to Ford about what’s going on with Stan (Stan probably did too to some extent).

[sirfrogsworth]

The short answer is... a tilt-shift lens.

The slightly more complicated answer is... Mister Rogers.

Depth of field is the area in front and behind your chosen focus point that remains in focus and then slowly gets blurry as you get farther away.

Shallow depth of field only has a narrow slice of the image in focus and gets blurry super quick. This is caused by a large lens aperture and being close to the subject.

Deep depth of field can extend through the entire picture if your aperture is small and you are super far away.

Usually the depth of field lines up with the image sensor of your camera. So if it is tilted forward, the plane of focus matches.

The stuff outside the green area would be blurry. The edges of the green would be slightly blurry. And the dashed green line would be the sharpest area of the photo.

But the tilt-shift lens allows you to create chaos with your plane of focus. In most cases, you would use this to flatten the depth of field so you can get a 2D plane entirely in focus.

If you were to use a normal lens, the bottom left and top right would be blurry.

But with a tilt-shift lens you can do this.

The green area is taking a little nap on the floor.

However, there is an unintended side effect created by this lens. (The "Scheimpflug intersection" if you want to go down the rabbit hole.) You can choose absolutely wacky planes of focus that create a very narrow depth of field over a geographically large area.

Believe it or not, this is when psychology comes into play.

And possibly Mister Rogers.

Our only reference for such a large area having a shallow depth of field is our memories of miniatures on TV. So Mister Rogers and Thomas the Tank Engine trained our brains to see this effect as... small.

Depth of field shrinks the closer you are to something. And when filming miniatures, you are placing the lens close to the scene. But the scene represents something big in our minds. We buy the effect, but not 100%. That blurriness wouldn't be there at a regular scale. So our subconscious remembers we are watching small things pretending to be big. It just files that away in the back of our mind.

And then when we see something like this...

Our brain is all, "Look at all that tiny shit!"

Without Mister Rogers, our brains may have never made these connections and tilt-shift photography may just make us wonder why everything is all blurry. That connection to past experience is vital for this effect to be convincing.

Brains are neat.

[climbingthefloors]

moo deng vs the world

[asgardian--angels]

Planet's Fucked: What Can You Do To Help? (Long Post)

Since nobody is talking about the existential threat to the climate and the environment a second Trump term/Republican government control will cause, which to me supersedes literally every other issue, I wanted to just say my two cents, and some things you can do to help. I am a conservation biologist, whose field was hit substantially by the first Trump presidency. I study wild bees, birds, and plants.

In case anyone forgot what he did last time, he gagged scientists' ability to talk about climate change, he tried zeroing budgets for agencies like the NOAA, he attempted to gut protections in the Endangered Species Act (mainly by redefining 'take' in a way that would allow corporations to destroy habitat of imperiled species with no ramifications), he tried to do the same for the Migratory Bird Treaty Act (the law that offers official protection for native non-game birds), he sought to expand oil and coal extraction from federal protected lands, he shrunk the size of multiple national preserves, HE PULLED US OUT OF THE PARIS CLIMATE AGREEMENT, and more.

We are at a crucial tipping point in being able to slow the pace of climate change, where we decide what emissions scenario we will operate at, with existential consequences for both the environment and people. We are also in the middle of the Sixth Mass Extinction, with the rate of species extinctions far surpassing background rates due completely to human actions. What we do now will determine the fate of the environment for hundreds or thousands of years - from our ability to grow key food crops (goodbye corn belt! I hated you anyway but), to the pressure on coastal communities that will face the brunt of sea level rise and intensifying extreme weather events, to desertification, ocean acidification, wildfires, melting permafrost (yay, outbreaks of deadly frozen viruses!), and a breaking down of ecosystems and ecosystem services due to continued habitat loss and species declines, especially insect declines. The fact that the environment is clearly a low priority issue despite the very real existential threat to so many people, is beyond my ability to understand. I do partly blame the public education system for offering no mandatory environmental science curriculum or any at all in most places. What it means is that it will take the support of everyone who does care to make any amount of difference in this steeply uphill battle.

There are not enough environmental scientists to solve these issues, not if public support is not on our side and the majority of the general public is either uninformed or actively hostile towards climate science (or any conservation science).

So what can you, my fellow Americans, do to help mitigate and minimize the inevitable damage that lay ahead?

I'm not going to tell you to recycle more or take shorter showers. I'll be honest, that stuff is a drop in the bucket. What does matter on the individual level is restoring and protecting habitat, reducing threats to at-risk species, reducing pesticide use, improving agricultural practices, and pushing for policy changes. Restoring CONNECTIVITY to our landscape - corridors of contiguous habitat - will make all the difference for wildlife to be able to survive a changing climate and continued human population expansion.

**Caveat that I work in the northeast with pollinators and birds so I cannot provide specific organizations for some topics, including climate change focused NGOs. Scientists on tumblr who specialize in other fields, please add your own recommended resources. **

We need two things: FUNDING and MANPOWER.

You may surprised to find that an insane amount of conservation work is carried out by volunteers. We don't ever have the funds to pay most of the people who want to help. If you really really care, consider going into a conservation-related field as a career. It's rewarding, passionate work.

At the national level, please support:

The Nature Conservancy

Xerces Society for Invertebrate Conservation

Cornell Lab of Ornithology (including eBird)

National Audubon Society

Federal Duck Stamps (you don't need to be a hunter to buy one!)

These first four work to acquire and restore critical habitat, change environmental policy, and educate the public. There is almost certainly a Nature Conservancy-owned property within driving distance of you. Xerces plays a very large role in pollinator conservation, including sustainable agriculture, native bee monitoring programs, and the Bee City/Bee Campus USA programs. The Lab of O is one of the world's leaders in bird research and conservation. Audubon focuses on bird conservation. You can get annual memberships to these organizations and receive cool swag and/or a subscription to their publications which are well worth it. You can also volunteer your time; we need thousands of volunteers to do everything from conducting wildlife surveys, invasive species removal, providing outreach programming, managing habitat/clearing trails, planting trees, you name it. Federal Duck Stamps are the major revenue for wetland conservation; hunters need to buy them to hunt waterfowl but anyone can get them to collect!

THERE ARE DEFINITELY MORE, but these are a start.

Additionally, any federal or local organizations that seek to provide support and relief to those affected by hurricanes, sea level rise, any form of coastal climate change...

At the regional level:

These are a list of topics that affect major regions of the United States. Since I do not work in most of these areas I don't feel confident recommending specific organizations, but please seek resources relating to these as they are likely major conservation issues near you.

PRAIRIE CONSERVATION & PRAIRIE POTHOLE WETLANDS

DRYING OF THE COLORADO RIVER (good overview video linked)

PROTECTION OF ESTUARIES AND SALTMARSH, ESPECIALLY IN THE DELAWARE BAY AND LONG ISLAND (and mangroves further south, everglades etc; this includes restoring LIVING SHORELINES instead of concrete storm walls; also check out the likely-soon extinction of saltmarsh sparrows)

UNDAMMING MAJOR RIVERS (not just the Colorado; restoring salmon runs, restoring historic floodplains)

NATIVE POLLINATOR DECLINES (NOT honeybees. for fuck's sake. honeybees are non-native domesticated animals. don't you DARE get honeybee hives to 'save the bees')

WILDLIFE ALONG THE SOUTHERN BORDER (support the Mission Butterfly Center!)

INVASIVE PLANT AND ANIMAL SPECIES (this is everywhere but the specifics will differ regionally, dear lord please help Hawaii)

LOSS OF WETLANDS NATIONWIDE (some states have lost over 90% of their wetlands, I'm looking at you California, Ohio, Illinois)

INDUSTRIAL AGRICULTURE, esp in the CORN BELT and CALIFORNIA - this is an issue much bigger than each of us, but we can work incrementally to promote sustainable practices and create habitat in farmland-dominated areas. Support small, local farms, especially those that use soil regenerative practices, no-till agriculture, no pesticides/Integrated Pest Management/no neonicotinoids/at least non-persistent pesticides. We need more farmers enrolling in NRCS programs to put farmland in temporary or permanent wetland easements, or to rent the land for a 30-year solar farm cycle. We've lost over 99% of our prairies to corn and soybeans. Let's not make it 100%.

INDIGENOUS LAND-BACK EFFORTS/INDIGENOUS LAND MANAGEMENT/TEK (adding this because there have been increasing efforts not just for reparations but to also allow indigenous communities to steward and manage lands either fully independently or alongside western science, and it would have great benefits for both people and the land; I know others on here could speak much more on this. Please platform indigenous voices)

HARMFUL ALGAL BLOOMS (get your neighbors to stop dumping fertilizers on their lawn next to lakes, reduce agricultural runoff)

OCEAN PLASTIC (it's not straws, it's mostly commercial fishing line/trawling equipment and microplastics)

A lot of these are interconnected. And of course not a complete list.

At the state and local level:

You probably have the most power to make change at the local level!

Support or volunteer at your local nature centers, local/state land conservancy non-profits (find out who owns&manages the preserves you like to hike at!), state fish & game dept/non-game program, local Audubon chapters (they do a LOT). Participate in a Christmas Bird Count!

Join local garden clubs, which install and maintain town plantings - encourage them to use NATIVE plants. Join a community garden!

Get your college campus or city/town certified in the Bee Campus USA/Bee City USA programs from the Xerces Society

Check out your state's official plant nursery, forest society, natural heritage program, anything that you could become a member of, get plants from, or volunteer at.

Volunteer to be part of your town's conservation commission, which makes decisions about land management and funding

Attend classes or volunteer with your land grant university's cooperative extension (including master gardener programs)

Literally any volunteer effort aimed at improving the local environment, whether that's picking up litter, pulling invasive plants, installing a local garden, planting trees in a city park, ANYTHING. make a positive change in your own sphere. learn the local issues affecting your nearby ecosystems. I guarantee some lake or river nearby is polluted

MAKE HABITAT IN YOUR COMMUNITY. Biggest thing you can do. Use plants native to your area in your yard or garden. Ditch your lawn. Don't use pesticides (including mosquito spraying, tick spraying, Roundup, etc). Don't use fertilizers that will run off into drinking water. Leave the leaves in your yard. Get your school/college to plant native gardens. Plant native trees (most trees planted in yards are not native). Remove invasive plants in your yard.

On this last point, HERE ARE EASY ONLINE RESOURCES TO FIND NATIVE PLANTS and LEARN ABOUT NATIVE GARDENING:

Xerces Society Pollinator Conservation Resource Center

Pollinator Pathway

Audubon Native Plant Finder

Homegrown National Park (and Doug Tallamy's other books)

National Wildlife Federation Native Plant Finder (clunky but somewhat helpful)

Heather Holm (for prairie/midwest/northeast)

MonarchGard w/ Benjamin Vogt (for prairie/midwest)

Native Plant Trust (northeast & mid-atlantic)

Grow Native Massachusetts (northeast)

Habitat Gardening in Central New York (northeast)

There are many more - I'm not familiar with resources for western states. Print books are your biggest friend. Happy to provide a list of those.

Lastly, you can help scientists monitor species using citizen science. Contribute to iNaturalist, eBird, Bumblebee Watch, or any number of more geographically or taxonomically targeted programs (for instance, our state has a butterfly census carried out by citizen volunteers).

In short? Get curious, get educated, get involved. Notice your local nature, find out how it's threatened, and find out who's working to protect it that you can help with. The health of the planet, including our resilience to climate change, is determined by small local efforts to maintain and restore habitat. That is how we survive this. When government funding won't come, when we're beat back at every turn trying to get policy changed, it comes down to each individual person creating a safe refuge for nature.

Thanks for reading this far. Please feel free to add your own credible resources and organizations.