#talking about words

[baronetcoins]

current wip moodboard

Slaughtering a Pig on the Farm, Just a Few Acres Farm//Corpse Decomposition, Wikipedia//Tumblr Post, Ecologues//Tumblr Post, Scissorsisters//Tumblr Post, Ordr//Tumblr Post, NHO-jungle//Direct Messages

[butchfalin]

the funniest meltdown ive ever had was in college when i got so overstimulated that i could Not speak, including over text. one of my friends was trying to talk me through it but i was solely using emojis because they were easier than trying to come up with words so he started using primarily emojis as well just to make things feel balanced. this was not the Most effective strategy... until. he tried to ask me "you okay?" but the way he chose to do that was by sending "👉🏼👌🏼❓" and i was so shocked by suddenly being asked if i was dtf that i was like WHAT???? WHAT DID YOU JUST SAY TO ME?????????? and thus was verbal again

[lazylittledragon]

can't believe we're all adults being forced into the club penguin level of censorship in 2024

[baronetcoins]

[toss-a-coin-to-your-stan-account]

being a student during peak pandemic was so fucking surreal like. "it's not an excuse to fall behind" I cannot stress enough to you how much A Worldwide Plague Upending Life As We Know It is literally one of The Top Three Reasons to fall behind

[krysmcscience]

I have some questions about karaoke night, Alex Hirsch. Very Important Questions. Which I will happily scream at a poor hapless baby triangle who can have no answers for me, and possibly also does not have object permanence yet.

Follow-up that is I guess suggestive, but let's be real here, Bill's a fucking triangle:

Dude slipped right into his birthday suit, lmao

this is so stupid :D

Anyway, I don't care what anyone says, this brilliant individual knows what's up - Bill is absolutely way more of a monsterfucker than Ford could or ever will be, full stop.

[marklikely]

how it feels to use the word diegetic

[slayfk]

posting here because this just doesn’t feel right to talk about in the horseimagebarn voice but this is extremely important to talk about.

my partner and i have returned to our hometown to stay with her family and my own has gotten a hotel here too (they moved to the town we currently live in after we did) so we are all safe and out of the thick of it

however there are tens of thousands of people who are not both in my own town and in the many surrounding it. appalachia will take an extremely long time to recover from this and there are more storms on the way. all i see on social media right now is people asking for shelter because their homes have been destroyed, or people asking for help searching for family members who are missing. hundreds of trees have fallen. hundreds of homes have flooded. roads are literally falling apart. preexisting sinkholes due to shitty pipes are opening up and consuming land. dams are on the verge of bursting and the only way to stop it is to release water so quickly it floods whole towns. all but one of our cell towers are down, so only people with at&t have service and the rest can’t contact anyone. over half the town still doesn’t have power. a major water supply issue occurred and the entire town is on a water boil order with no electricity to boil with. people are trapped in their homes and workplaces or out on the street because they have nowhere to go. law enforcement is blocking off roads but trapping people in the process. people have to be rescued by helicopter. our animal shelter has no water or power and boarding facilities have been flooded. entire villages like chimney rock nc are gone, and entire cities like asheville are cut off from the rest of the state and are completely inaccessible. ALL OF THE ROADS IN WESTERN NORTH CAROLINA ARE CLOSED. 400+ roads are closed because they are unsafe . that is INSANE!!!

when people say that climate change isn’t real, they don’t know what they’re talking about. climate change and its father capitalism are only going to continue to worsen lives in every way possible. i live in the mountains and our infrastructure is completely unprepared to handle hurricanes and it’s only going to get worse. it’s such a strange and eye-opening experience to live something like this when you think that it could never happen to you because that type of weather shouldn’t reach you in your environment. climate change doesn’t care where you live. it’s real.

western north carolina and the rest of the southeast that has been hit by helene need help. more people need to be talking about this so that the government DOES SOMETHING because the government historically fucking hates appalachia and it still does!!! the major state institution near me took DAYS to respond despite being the only place in town with power and wifi connection because they had to wait for the state to approve their response—they could have allowed thousands of people to evacuate days prior to the hurricane hitting us but they didn’t do anything before or after until it was too late!!! it’s bullshit!!! PLEASE get talking about this because something has to be done. climate change is going to continue happening and our mountains and the people in them are going to suffer immensely. hundreds if not thousands are now homeless. please talk about this look at the footage online of the wreckage and look how quickly our infrastructure crumbled. we need better. the people of appalachia deserve better.

i’ll get back to posting horses soon. but for now this is a lot. my friends are homeless and my family had to get off the mountain or be trapped there without power and water for days. we’re all safe but exhausted. i hope everyone who has been affected by this is staying safe. if you are in western nc, dm me. when i come back, if you’re in my area, im happy to bring supplies. stay safe everyone

[liloinkoink]

i don’t have memes or art the way the rest of the trivia team does but here are a few of my favroite messages about making this trivia game

[bunnieswithknives]

As much as I love angst I think it would be funny if he just didnt give af

[baronetcoins]

I feel like I win when I lose—Director's Commentary

In what is rapidly becoming a tradition of mine, I went on a research Bender for my Yuletide fic and there are so many details I want to point out and discuss—so I will. This year I wrote I feel like I win when I lose for @avengingmariner and I did loose my mind over it, but in a fun way. Join me in my descent into madness below the cut.

My brief was "you must put my man laurence in A Situation" and I somehow landed on the core nugget of "Napoleon finds Laurence in his darkest hour, instead of Tharkay"—mostly because NGL I haven't read further in this series than Victory of Eagles. I'm working on it, just not there yet.

From that point I just sort of... started writing and felt out where the story wanted to go, and then I kept falling into research holes. Here are some of the fun pieces of information I learned in rough order of where they popped up in the fic.

There was chicken set aside from the dinner he was supposed to have had hours ago, before an urgent missive had pulled him away—a simple roast bird, born out from what local provisions had been found

The WEEK I was working on this, Max Miller of Tasting History put out a video on Napoleon. I wasn't able to work in a lot of detail about the food here just because I couldn't make it flow into what I was writing, but there's so much I wish I could have talked about. The weird thing with chicken! Apocryphal stories about how dishes got their names! His drinking habits! The inherent whatever of breaking bread with somebody who's supposed to be your enemy! Now that I'm writing this paragraph I feel like I need to write another fic about food.

And then I Made chicken marengo the week after because I was curious. It was fine?

le mistral noir

Now this bit owes its thanks to Kangoo, my resident French correspondent. I was talking to him about what could be a nickname the French soldiers used for Temeraire, and he suggested "le mistral" which he described as "(very cold and often violent wind that blows into france from great britain, known for cleaning the sky of clouds and also wrecking your shit) (also the name of a fighter plane)" and I went "oh, that's Perfect". And I wanted to be able to explain that reference. Because it's So Good.

He blinked around at the courtyard of brick building before being hurried just as swiftly into a fine bedchamber where he was given a cold supper and the opportunity to wash himself. With little else to do, he fell into another restless sleep.

This was a fun bit of gamesmanship to think out—where would Napoleon want to set the treaty signing in order to send a message? And in order to think about that, I had to learn more about how the government of Britain worked in this timeframe (polisci major hat incoming).

In the US, authority to make treaties is vested in the executive branch, but the legislative branch has to ratify them. I did not know how that worked for the British, because their system mystefies me to this day. Luckily, I found this paper which explains how it worked in 1938, and there isn't much reason to expect it to have changed in that period, so the answer is "at least in theory, the authority rests with the Crown".

Based on that, I figured he'd want to make a point by holding it in a royal building as opposed to Westminster, so I went with St. James' palace which has been used for state stuff forever. Unfortunately, the details for the interior of St. James' are scarce. I was looking at 1860s watercolors to try and squint out a layout.

It was a dress uniform of aviator green, with gold braid and buttons as well as twin epaulettes. He dropped it as if it were a hot coal.

This was perhaps my longest diversion. I'm not intimately familiar with the internal culture of the military <understatement, but I knew having Laurence be present in any form would be read as a huge statement. So what kind of statement would you want to make? Ultimately I went with "the biggest 'fuck you' possible", so Laurence in a British aviator's uniform.

Then there was the question of fringe or no fringe. Which didn't even make it into the fic, but was an interesting diversion. You see, "captain" is a term that connotes a different level of authority in the Army vs the Navy. NATO has a standard rank scale I was able to squint at here, as it tries to standardize across branches and countries. Captain in the British Army is an OF-2 rank, but Captain in the British Navy is an OF-5 rank. What does it represent in those terms in the Arial Corps? I have no idea! This impacts nothing here other than if one or both epaulettes would have fringe on them.

He wandered the hallways, passing French soldiers who saluted him and English dignitaries who ignored him or glared at him in turn. In desperation he returned to seek refuge in the room he’d been left last.

The medal Laurence gets is that of the Légion d'honneur, and nominally military personnel in uniform are supposed to salute other uniformed personnel wearing it, regardless of ranks involved. That was too good of a detail not to gesture at.

The Wikipedia article

I picked Jacques-Louis David entirely because he's my favorite artist of this time period and location, though the fact he did official work for Napoleon was a bonus. I'm very interested in the uses of these really formalized displays of image-crafting as used for propaganda, and also it's just fun to think about. Spent ages looking at Wikipedia too to get the formatting and the style of writing right, which I think I did.

The Title

Really, it just made me laugh, so it had to stay. I mean the song is also fitting and I think it's the sentiment I wanted to gesture at emotionally, but it is also funny,

[oobbbear]

I want to post this here too because I’ve seen it happen a few times

Please understand that there are cultural differences and language differences, if you see this happening let the person clarify what they meant, that person might just not be familiar with words the western side of the internet use

[morganbritton132]

Continuing on a bit from this post:

Tim, complaining about Bruce grounding him again: It doesn’t even make sense! It’s like everything I do is a problem now but I’m not doing anything different!

Kon, who thinks a grounding is when you get sent outside to do yard work: Have you tried digging a hole? Like a lot of holes.

Bart, whose punishments are typically doing chores without powers: Or raking leaves?

Cassie, who knows exactly why Tim keeps getting in trouble: … Does Bruce know you’re at Titan Tower?

Tim: No, why?

Cassie: No reason.

***Later that day***

Jason: Why is Tim digging a grave in the front yard?

Dick: He got grounded again.

Jason: So… is it for him or Bruce?

Dick: Not sure yet.

[sixth-light]

Not adding this onto the post that keeps crossing my dash because it's not really relevant to that discussion, but: anytime the phrase 'nobody was living there' comes up as a form of justification for something or other, it is worth keeping in mind that in literally the last ten thousand years or so the only major areas of the world to have been settled by humans for the first time are Greenland, Iceland, Aotearoa New Zealand, and Madagascar. (We shall not count Antarctica on the grounds that nobody lives there permanently or is ever likely to.) Everywhere else has been inhabited by humans for tens of thousands of years. Even when Homo sapiens left Africa our ancestors were encountering (checks notes) our other ancestors, Neanderthals and Denisovans, not to mention other human species now extinct.

The myth of the unpopulated frontier, open for expansion, is just that: a myth, and one that generally serves a specific purpose in terms of justifying settler-colonialism. The question the phrase 'nobody was living there' demands is - who are you calling 'nobody'?

[makesomethingawfuleveryday]

Austin Kleon's newsletter recently shared a clip of an Alan Moore interview where he advocated for writers to read terrible books. Check it out, but it sent me down a short rabbit hole of Kleon's other posts about making bad art (terrible idea, I know) from art critic David Sylvester saying artists must be allowed to go through bad periods to the original post about making bad art during the start of the pandemic that referenced a speech Neil Gaiman gave called "Make Good Art."

On a whim I bought a copy of the speech in artbook form as I've been feeling reflective about the make something awful every day project after talking about it in an alumni panel at my university last week (more on that... someday).

It feels very full circle since the book was designed by Chip Kidd who I saw speak as part of the series I was speaking in back when I was still in school and had been thinking a lot about Kidd's speech while preparing my own. Gaiman also cites Amanda Palmer and her "Fraud Police" speech in the same week I went to Riot Fest and saw the Dresden Dolls perform for the first time since seeing them many times while in college. Circles within circles. To me. Personally. Something something the Art of Asking TED talk -> my fake MSAED talk.

Anyway, here are some pieces from the #msaed archives! Somehow have never done anything Chip Kidd related, so need to fix that.

[demaparbat-hp]

*pats Zuko's head* This bad boy can fit so many near-death experiences.

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Read For the Spirits Chapter VIII here!