#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.)

[xxplastic-cubexx]

auction results done for @ouchpotatoex as a part of the 2024 @marveltrumpshate charity event: thank you so much for your generosity and donations !!!!

[suratan-zir]

Do you mind me asking how the electricity situation is? I understand it's probably awful to put it lightly. But Russia is targeting electrical infrastructure now

Hi. I can only talk about my area, which is in central Ukraine, the situation is different for each region. We have schedules for hourly blackouts. Sounds scary, but it's just so people can be prepared to be without electricity for two or more hours and know when it happens, then another two hours with power, and so on. Each address has a queue number corresponding to a particular blackout schedule, so it’s not only different between regions but even within one city.

After the most recent mass attack, some people in my town were without power for many hours, while others, like my lucky self, experienced only "regular" blackouts. Now we typically have 2-4 hours without power - sometimes less, sometimes more. Other queues have it worse than we do, it depends. We've been lucky lately. On weekends, we almost don’t have blackouts. Overall, it’s been much better than this summer when we sometimes had just 1–2 hours with electricity a day, nonconsecutive. It was hell. For the past two days, it’s been completely normal for us. Almost no outages!

Again, this is my small town in the center of Ukraine. People closer to the frontlines have it much, much worse. If a city is within the range of Russian artillery, they target infrastructure day and night, deliberately attacking and killing workers who arrive to fix it.

In the rest of Ukraine, people have adapted to the blackouts. Those with money and private houses have diesel generators and/or solar panels. People in flats, like us, rely on charging stations, power banks, etc. Most of the stores have generators. We have two large charging stations: one for our heater/boiler (which can run for about a day or more) and one for our laptops and fiber-optic internet, which works even during power outages. One day, when we had no power for a long time, we went outside and smelled gas - turns out our downstairs neighbor put a generator right below his flat’s window. (that’s gotta be illegal, though, lol)

Of course, all these measures are expensive, and not everyone can afford them. But the situation could've been way worse.

Sorry if this reply is too long.

[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.

[princesscharlesofmonaco]

.

[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

[sarahlancashire]

made a new goodreads account bc i read we have always lived in the castle last night & i need to talk about it and also i want to get Better About Reading so anyway i figured now is a good time to share my external links, if anyone cares you can find me on:

goodreads: lisaswain

letterboxd: rosmullens

spotify

steam: bitchofthewilds

pinterest: withintheshadows

evil elon musk platform (twitter/ x/ whatever the fuck): sapphicpsych

[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 :-) ✨

[flabbergastedpigeon]

Hello! I saw your commissions are open and would love to discuss commissioning you, what’s the best way to contact you? Thank you so much in advance!

Hi! Usually I just work via dms on here but here's my email address if you'd prefer that: pigeonfluffs@gmail.com

Thanks for the interest! :>

[darling-gemini]

If Escape Room (2019) and Escape Room 2: Tournament of Champions (2021) has a hundred fans I'm one of them. If they have fifty fans I'm one of them. If they have 10 fans I'm one of them. If there's one fan it's me, and if there's none then baby I'm 6ft under.