#posting this in case anyone else wonders

[dollsahoy]

I just read your post on how your new exercise routine is going and was wondering if you would share what you used to get started. I definitely am at the stage where seated exercises are a must and getting up from the floor is... a challenge.

I looked around YouTube at exercises for people over 50 and settled on a channel called fabulous50s; that channel has a hand-full of seated exercise videos. At least one does involve standing up from being seated, but she emphasizes in other videos that it's OK to do what you can, and if you can't quite do one move, just keep moving in any way until it's time for the next move.

The lady is annoyingly perky and does emphasize losing weight as much as she talks about exercising to get fit or feel better--and does sometimes say decent things like "Exercise is not punishment for what you ate" and "This is your exercise, you're not competing with anyone" and "Allow yourself to feel good"--but I generally ignore what she says, or reply snarkily when she asks us to say three positive things, or make horrible faces when she says exercising goes better when you smile.

The music she uses is mostly generic pop stock music, not too annoying. I ignore all of her lifestyle videos. I figure it's better to settle for someone OK and actually do the exercises than keep looking for Something Perfect, and I understand if other people don't want to tolerate/ignore the personality and patter like I do.

And there is always a big disclaimer that it's all presented for entertainment, because otherwise it's medical advice from a non-doctor, which is frowned upon.

(She also has a little brown mop of a dog who sometimes wanders around and plays while she's exercising. I did watch her video about getting the dog, and she does acknowledge that she and the dog have the same hair.)

[legionofpotatoes]

I was recently invited to EA's Support a Creator program, which basically means you can uhhh support? Me I guess. If you're planning on buying a Dragon Age on the EA App or through the website itself (dragonage.com), that is.

And yup that's any Dragon Age PC game (including veilguard) with no restrictions on country or preorders or what have you. You can simply punch in LAZARART in the promo box at checkout and it'll kick a small commission fee my way.

I honestly wish it was a discount of some sort, but really nothing changes on your end except for fiddling with a code. I don't have a good pitch for this. So feel free to ignore it! I was surprised to be included in this at all seeing as I'm not really a "content creator" in the space as such, I'm just some art guy.

But hey, I'm still grateful as hell and in case someone's buying a dragon age at one of those spots and feels like giving me a supportive shoulder squeeze, here's a way to do it!

[lgbtlunaverse]

Thinking of the Nie disciple that told Nie Mingjue it was Meng Yao who stayed behind to clean up corpses on the battlefield today.

Nie Mingjue didn't just randomly stumble upon poor lil meowyao eating bread in the novel, he was already looking for him to thank and reward him for his work.

That's what makes it so fun that nieyao's first conflict will end up being about someone else taking credit for Meng Yao's work.

And I'm sure that Nie Mingjue's actual opinions on plagiarism are a lot more nuanced, all we really get from him in this scene is "well you shouldn't kill someone over it!" which leaves a lot of room for what punishments he thinks are appropiate. But I bet that it isn't occuring to him in this moment that the only reason he knows Meng Yao at all, the only reason he got such a capable deputy, is that he noticed someone was taking care of the dead and cared enough to want to know their name. And then the Nie disciples didn't lie to him. The disciple he asked could have said "it was me, Zongzhu" to rise in the ranks himself, but he didn't. He went and asked others, who all also could have taken the credit, but they didn't. Someone saw Meng Yao working and decided to be honest about it and that simple decision is the catalyst for Meng Yao becoming Nie Mingjue's deputy.

Meng Yao can't just work hard to get results, others have to acknowledge that work. If they don't, it's as if he didn't do anything at all.

[wonder-worker]

"Administratively, too, [...] queens were considered the legal lords of their landholdings. [...] Grants noted that the queen's officials had administrative autonomy without being subject to the king or anyone else, and evidence of the same assumption can be gleaned from court rolls that were recorded with headings indicating the lord of the manor whose court proceedings were being enrolled. As an example, some court rolls for the manor of Haveringatte-Bower specified that it was the court of [Margaret of Anjou] that was in session, while later rolls recorded Elizabeth Woodville as the lord of the manor court."

-Michele Seah, 'My Lady Queen, the Lord of the Manor': The Economic Roles of Late Medieval Queens", Parergon, Volume 37, Number 2, 2020.

[purpurussy]

what part(s) offended people?

imo this isn't a spoiler since he removed it from the script but here's a quick warning that this post discusses tit content anyway

sdjsfhggdl i dont wanna keep addressing it bc the more i talk about it the more it looks like i was really offended by it which i wasn't 😭 but

in the phantwerp show dan made a comment along the lines of "we're not normative. i mean not mainstream, we're not autistic" and then he said something like "well everyone's a little bit on the spectrum" which may have been sarcastic but i couldnt tell lmao it wasn't like obviously sarcastic (also im heavily paraphrasing here). he obviously didn't mean anything upsetting by it, but the way he worded it sounded a bit clumsy and did not work with the show imo. and could definitely be taken the wrong way out of context. and yeah i felt like the audience (at least the people around me) were also just like "?? huh wtf is he trying to say" lmao it wasn't offensive as much as it just didn't make a lot of sense?? and it was an odd way for him to address a potentially sensitive topic. im personally glad he removed it, it's clear that he didn't mean any harm by it but imo the show is better without it.

i just hope he doesnt feel bad about it bc like he didn't say anything heinous or whatever dsdlfsjlfjl 😭 it was just kinda odd

[befuddled-calico-whump]

A Dryad shifts into their tree form to hide from humans, and is too afraid to come out, even when a well-meaning gardener starts to cut away at their branches

(colored dryad below the cut, cw for slight gore)

whump art tag:

@kira-the-whump-enthusiast , @whumpsday , @regrets-realization-acceptance , @kixngiggles

[hellsite-detective]

Hello there,

Not a post request, but an… idea

I don’t know how much you like doing when it comes to the story text of it, but do you think you could make some of your sources have their own personas? The main one I think of is Google, being a wirey bookkeeper/librarian that has the different posts in a booklet or newsletters depending on the type of post.

Would this be something that’s worth time for this blog?

funny you should mention that! because in the 28th, i’ve got a little bit of some world building coming in the form of actual characterization of Google!! its not quite a bookkeeper, but i think they’re super interesting!! plus they fit with the whole noir aesthetic! i really hope everyone likes what i’ve done with them!

[werewolfest]

Help Support an Urban Community Farm ♥️

I’ve never really spoken about my work on here before, but I wanted to throw this out there for anyone who has something to spare and would be interested in helping out.

I’m an Intern at Montclair Community Farms, a non profit in NJ that focuses on fresh food access and education. We do a lot of work in the community to get people access to healthy food by accepting SNAP and taking our little farmstand out to the public library and senior housing, and we run a lot of education programs for kids and offer paid internships for youth and students like me. We’re a really small organization with only three paid staff members, one of whom is our amazing Director Lana Mustafa who happens to be Palestinian.

Lana is an activist who’s been really outspoken about the genocide against Palestinians in her personal life. Unfortunately, because she’s very well known in the community through her work with MCF, her activism has led to two of the organizations we partner with to imply that if she continues to speak up we may see them pull their support. On top of that, we rely heavily on donations and are in the middle of our big fundraiser. Usually, we’d be nearing our goal through many small donations from the community, but that hasn’t been the case this year, and we feel it’s likely that Lana’s activism has been controversial enough to dissuade people from donating.

I really love the farm and everything we do, but I don’t think that Lana should have to choose between the farm and her people. If you have anything to spare, you can consider donating here. Thank you ♥️

And while you’re here, please check out these organizations and call or fax your local representative! I believe that I will live to see a free Palestine, but we have to keep being loud and helping where we can.

Doctors Without Borders

Medical Aid for Palestinians

Palestinians Children’s Relief Fund

[ilovedthestars]

fic writer ask game: 20 and 23?

Thanks for sending in an ask, bardic! (This one is for this ask game)

20. What’s a favorite title for a fic you’ve written?

A lot of my titles are either super generic (i.e. "Deployment Center," my first fic on ao3, which is just a pre-canon missing scene which takes place in the deployment center) or they're a thematically relevant phrase or word from the fic itself that i thought summed it up well enough to be used as a title. The latter ones are more interesting, although I think often people don't notice (or at least don't comment on it) when the phrase comes up in the story.

Acceptable Mission Cost is probably other people's favorite of my titles! In fact i think i chose that as the title because when i shared the first chapter on discord, that was the phrase people picked out and had Emotions about. The title gets called out in comments pretty often, which i think is a sign that it's working well with the fic. I'm happy with that.

I think my secret favorite, underdog answer for this is what happens to rogue secunits. It's a really short snip that i archived from a discord conversation, and i didn't have a title so i just pulled a line from the fic, but i think I picked a good one. I think it's clever the impression the title gives you vs. the impact when that phrase actually appears in the fic. No one has ever commented on this, so i don't know if it's actually clever, but i like it XD

23. How do you choose where to end a chapter (if you have multi-chapter works)?

I really like dramatic chapter endings! Cliffhangers, twists, or just a cool sounding line of dialogue right at the end. (This is probably apparent for anyone who's read the most recent few chapters of Old Unit, Young Unit, where i just kept doing dramatic twist ending after dramatic twist ending lol.) I've mentioned before that I'm not great at dramatic beginnings, and most of my first lines are pretty boring, but I like to stick the landing, so to speak.

Idk, I think i just have a chapter length that generally feels good to me (somewhere in the ballpark of 1-5k words, often around 2-3k). When I hit that wordcount I'm usually ready for either a natural end to a scene (when i'll try to end it on some kind of engaging emotion or tense moment of reflection from the narrator or something) or a dramatic moment that makes for a good cliffhanger. (My chapters do tend to get longer and longer as multi-chap works go on, lol. I haven't figured out a way to keep them more consistent.)

[scarecrowbutch]

if you'll allow me to be sappy on here for a moment, i want to say how happy it's made me to see more art of people/characters with cleft lips that aren't demonized or gross the past few years

i'd only begun drawing characters with cleft lips a few years ago and ever since then, drawing that and seeing others draw characters with it has helped my self image immensely, and i encourage anyone who has anything similar to draw their features more on ocs or faves and seeking out others who do similar 🧡🧡

[torchickentacos]

[feather-bone]

Can I steal borrow your “make a creature with me” idea?

Hi, yes, please feel free! It was fun :-) ✨

[reallydumbdannyphantomaus]

Whats going on in peru??

ok so let me preface this by saying that i'm far from an expert in peruvian politics, but i've been in cusco for the past two months as this all unfolded. i'm avoiding giving my own opinion in favor of relaying the opinions of actual peruvians who i have talked to about this.

so, last presidential election there were two candidates who were in the running: Pedro Castillo and Keiko Fujimori. you may have heard some about this, as Castillo was the left candidate backed largely by rural communities and poor people while Fujimori was the daughter of a previous president/dictator (depending on who you ask) Alberto Fujimori. Fujimori the elder is both beloved and reviled here: beloved by people who say that he helped end the reign of terror of The Shining Path, a terrorist organization that operated here in the 80s and 90s (and still does in a couple isolated pockets but is mostly done now), and reviled by people who say "yeah but he also committed a bunch of political murders himself and was corrupt and sentenced to prison for a reason." his daughter running for president as a far right candidate was complicated here, to say the least.

but she did lose to Castillo, in the end. it was a tremendously close election, though, and Castillo was embattled from the moment he took office. he never got along with his congress, which kept trying to impeach him. he was repeatedly accused of corruption and the like, but his supporters insist that these were lies intended to silence him and force him out. truthfully, i have no idea whether or not that's true.

what is true is that Castillo, staring down the barrel of yet another attempted impeachment, made the decision to dissolve congress instead. this is widely regarded as a bad move on his part, because this is what set this whole crisis off. the military and congress and pretty much everybody else was like "hey dude you can't do that" and congress voted to impeach him, his own government officials resigned en masse, and his VP Dina Boluarte was sworn in. Castillo attempted to flee but has been arrested and is awaiting trial.

so now we get to the protests. there are a number of disparate groups within the protestors themselves, but the protests were ultimately sparked by this event. most of the protestors are Castillo's supporters, who think that he is the rightful president, and that his attempted dissolution of congress was less a coup attempt and more an attempt to stop a legislative coup. there has long been dissatisfaction with congress here, with an abiding belief that is it full of corruption and focused on the needs of the rich and people in lima as opposed to the more rural areas, like ayacucho and urubamba in the cusco region. their demands center around three things: dissolve congress, have new elections, and release Castillo from prison.

so the protests have been going on since earlier this week, though things have calmed down in cusco proper now. but still, i think 12 people have died at my last check of the news. there's also been some looting and such going on, leading Boluarte to declare a state of emergency for the entire country. she's also set a curfew for much of the cusco area, so we aren't allowed out from 8pm-4am. the military has gotten involved in quelling the protests, which some people feel is excessive. the buses are also on strike in cusco, though i think that may be slowly coming to an end.

as for the protestors demands, the dissolution of congress isn't exactly likely and Castillo was just sentenced to wait in prison for 18 months pending his trial, so those demands aren't likely to be met. however, Boluarte has submitted a bill to move elections up to 2024 instead of 2025. the protestors were asking for 2023, so we'll see how they push back on that. but the government wants to open everything up as soon as possible because so much of the peruvian economy runs on tourism, so there's definitely a push to get the protestors to shut up.

as for if they will? who knows. because they are mostly poor, they unfortunately cant afford to keep striking and protesting indefinitely. i don't think it will last much longer, but it probably won't be fully resolved any time soon.

[min-min-minnie]

hiiii!! this is probably a question you've received a lot of maybe you've answered it already but are you still updating beginning the next dream?

also congrats on btnd being one of the most kudosed one piece fics on ao3!! no matter if you continue it or not, I wanted to say thank you so much for sharing your brilliant story, reading it was such an experience and your writing style is amazing!! <3

hi! i'm not very into one piece at the moment but i do plan on returning to btnd whenever the one piece bug bites me again lol. it's like my fav fic i've ever written and i have the whole plotline figured out, it's just a matter of getting my writing muse back :'D thank you so much for reading it, it's the fic of my heart and i'm so glad others enjoy it as much as i do <3 <3 <3

[that-foul-legacy-lover]

oh my god what happened?? are you alright? do you need any help?

alright i will preface this by saying that physically, i am COMPLETELY FINE. please don't worry about me too much, i promise i'm physically okay and it's not that bad

the rest is under the cut not for length but in case people want to skip past it (warning for people being unpleasant)

so the short story is that someone i thought was an online friend suddenly sent me a pretty awful DM before blocking me. they said a lot of genuinely hurtful things which wasn't really good for my mental state since they preyed on a bunch of my insecurities, and i thought that i could trust this person. i'm doing better now thanks to my irl friends, but recovery is a process as usual. i'm not sure if you can really help apart from being emotional support, but your concern is appreciated nonetheless <3

[trollbriidge]

Hey, if I were to maybe... Buy the terraria inspired fantroll, would I be allowed to make a pngtuber rig with it? Or use it in a fancomic, at least? I RLY love the design and someone might buy it first but I would ADORE doing smth w it

oh absolutely! my designs are completely free use for anything :3