#but you never know!

[frogayyyy]

Guess Who: Star Trek Edition

t'pring and surak have been eliminated!

Time for the FINAL ROUND... Did you choose wisely? Will your character be the last one standing?

A TRIBBLE vs QUARK

Tune in tomorrow to find out who's the winner! :D

[monstersandmaw]

My beloved, by leaving this tag on a reblog, you have already gone way above and beyond what 99% of the people who read stories on here do!!!

No writer could ask for more, and you're already doing so so much by reblogging it, hence sharing it, and then by leaving a tag that is genuinely SOOOOO encouraging all on its own, you're a hero!!!!!!! Especially when your energy was already so low. I cannot stress how awesome you are and how kind this was of you.

[this-love-is-delicate]

one thing about me, I love lingering for the possibility that Something might happen

[pudding-parade]

More Planet Zoo! :D (Sorry not sorry. LOL)

This is a WIP entry gate/area that I built for the sandbox-mode zoo that I'm starting that will be dedicated (mostly) to endangered and critically-endangered animals from around the world, including the modded animals I've downloaded that can't be used in franchise mode.

More babble and a couple more pictures behind the cut...

I want this zoo to be primarily a breeding-program zoo for releasing animals to the wild. I want to really focus on the genetics aspect of the game to breed the best animals possible to release to the wild, starting with the sort of lousy animals you get from the sandbox-mode "market."

I also want the habitats to have barriers that are as natural-looking (or actually natural; i.e., water barriers) as possible. And I want to have as many cohabitating animals as I can manage, to make habitats that are more realistic. But of course it will have to have visitors, too, so it will have stuff for them. (Gotta make the monies somehow! :D ) That's the plan. We'll see how well I can execute it. LOL

The zoo itself is going to be located in a grassland biome located either in North America or Australia. I haven't decided yet. I'm sort of leaning toward Australia mostly because it's warmer than the North American grassland location would be, and that just makes things easier for most of the animals I want to use...except that I want a herd of bison and also some animals that live in the Himalayas (like snow leopards), so it might end up in North America, anyway, and I'll just have to make accommodations for the warmer-climate animals. But, I built this in a temperate European biome because that's what I thought I was going to do at first. LOL (It's OK, though; I can just save it as a blueprint and then plop it in any zoo I want.)

This will eventually have guest spawners (in the form of buses in a parking lot, I think), so I'll delete the standard entry building that every zoo comes with by default and use this instead.

Initially, I was going to make the glass-enclosed part larger and a habitat, (for lemurs), but then I realized that the guests would stand inside the entry where there's a big window like so...

...to gawp at whatever animal I put in it and thus clog up the entry. So I scrapped that I idea. I might get rid of that interior window and rework things a bit, though. Maybe keep it small and put tamarins (modded animals) in it instead, since they're small, and then add an outdoor area with maybe overhead tunneling they can climb around in and that are integrated with arbors over the paths, and...Well, we'll see. LOL

Anyway, I also built "covers" with path lights and planters to go over the plain small gravel paths I'm going to use, so that they'll look more interesting. They look like this:

I made them in 4m, 6m, and 8m widths -- the path widths that I always use -- with and without planters, and saved each kind as blueprints. I'm going to keep all the main outdoor paths in this zoo squared-off with right-angle intersections, no winding paths, so I can just plop these on top of the paths as I build the actual zoo. I think they look pretty nice, if I do say so myself. LOL

[puzzlebean]

I might just skip quali tomorrow morning. I wanna actually enjoy myself at comic con and not have a panic attack and be super exhausted like last year.

[rocketbirdie]

Hey op what happens if it ties???

Good question! Your guess is as good as mine lol. I'll probably make a sudden death tiebreaker poll in that case.

[monster-noises]

Consumed suddenly by the need to go to niagra falls.....

Anyoooooone wanna make a weekend trip sometime this summer? Maybe? Should costs be reasonable....

[museenkuss]

By the way, Terracotta arrived yesterday. To make sure I wouldn’t repeat my Lust for Sun mistake, I only used a tiny bit today (two sprays) and I regret it a little because it’s HEAVENLY.

[fourteenfandomfan]

Daily goal reached: the spinal fluid is Contained

[tempertyzias]

I am Very tired so im risking taking a nap and setting a billion alarms so hopefully ill wake up in time for the sahcon showcase

[twelvedaysinaugust]

Haha, all I thought of the new tattoos were how they reminded me of Eleanor’s. Very delicate of Louis.

I also saw a man in a very redneck area of the southern US today (I’m from here but I got out lol) sporting a tattoo of a dagger through a rose on his neck and a butterfly on his tricep and immediately thought of..well…you know. That man prob doesn’t even know who Harry Styles is beyond maybe the dude in the dress.

Admittedly, I thought the same thing about Louis’ new tattoos.

[starbuck]

“…to me” is one of the most powerful disclaimers we have on here… is this character analysis accurate? debatable. but it’s real… to me.

[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~ ネクタイレア★★ 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

[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.