193 posts
Latest Posts by alianora-of-toure-on-marsh - Page 3
The other day I got a bug up my ass about lake Natron, because I’ve seen the photos of the calcified remains of animals that died on the lake (contrary to popular rumor, the lake doesn’t outright kill them as soon as they touch it but it probably doesn’t help), but I’ve only seen those photos in black and white. I’m sure you’ve seen them.
This particular photographer posed them for the photos, but I thought, you know, calcified remains should be really interesting to see in color, so I tried to find some that had been taken by others, in color. It was not nearly as visual stunning, they were just white rotting remains.
But what caught my eye wasn’t the dead. It was the fucking lake.
It’s BLOOD fucking RED.
It’s super alkaline (typically 10, but can get up 12, and just so we’re clear, pH13 melts skin, go look up Lye), blood fucking red (terrifying), and oh, it gets to be 106F/41C in the water (which is not scalding but still unreasonable for a LAKE). Red spirulina cyanobacteria (toxic!) thrives here and provides food for the main denizen of the lake…. fucking lesser flamingos.
Look at their fucking mud nests! They have to build nests out of mud because there’s nothing else and the water is caustic enough to kill their babies before those babies are tall enough to stand out of the water! The parents are feeding them crop milk that contains BLOOD.
Additionally!! The chicks often get soda anklets from soda and other minerals collecting and hardening around their feet and legs, which is the major killer of lesser flamingo chicks! They’re so hard that they would need to be hammered off! Like with a hammer or a smashy rock!! Humans had to do this for thousands of babies one year just to keep them from all dying off after we screwed with the balance of minerals in one of their lakes!
Look at this place! What is that black void!!
You need to leave!! You have found flamingo Silent Hill!! What are you still doing here!! I’ll tell you!! They’re still doing there because literally the death lake protects them from predators, nothing big enough to be a threat to them gets across the lake to get them. There are millions of them living there safely.
What the fuck. what the FUCK nature. This is some of the most amazing shit you’ve ever pulled and hardly anyone knows about it. I’m on to you. I see your blood lake with your pink goth bird decorations. I see you.
OK to make a font out of your own writing
go here
http://www.myscriptfont.com/
instead of printing it off just use this blank thing that way you dont have to scan it or anything
so fill that out by pasting it in any art program and whatnot
then save it and upload it to that site
and itll give you an option to download it
so do that and then install it BAM
In the 1960′s Legally a woman couldn’t
Open a bank account or get a credit card without signed permission from her father or hr husband.
Serve on a jury - because it might inconvenience the family not to have the woman at home being her husband’s helpmate.
Obtain any form of birth control without her husband’s permission. You had to be married, and your hub and had to agree to postpone having children.
Get an Ivy League education. Ivy League schools were men’s colleges ntil the 70′s and 80′s. When they opened their doors to women it was agree that women went there for their MRS. Degee.
Experience equality in the workplace: Kennedy’s Commission on the Status of Women produced a report in 1963 that revealed, among other things, that women earned 59 cents for every dollar that men earned and were kept out of the more lucrative professional positions.
Keep her job if she was pregnant.Until the Pregnancy Discrimination Act in 1978, women were regularly fired from their workplace for being pregnant.
Refuse to have sex with her husband.The mid 70s saw most states recognize marital rape and in 1993 it became criminalized in all 50 states. Nevertheless, marital rape is still often treated differently to other forms of rape in some states even today.
Get a divorce with some degree of ease.Before the No Fault Divorce law in 1969, spouses had to show the faults of the other party, such as adultery, and could easily be overturned by recrimination.
Have a legal abortion in most states.The Roe v. Wade case in 1973 protected a woman’s right to abortion until viability.
Take legal action against workplace sexual harassment. According to The Week, the first time a court recognized office sexual harassment as grounds for legal action was in 1977.
Play college sports Title IX of the Education Amendments of protects people from discrimination based on sex in education programs or activities that receive Federal financial assistance It was nt until this statute that colleges had teams for women’s sports
Apply for men’s Jobs The EEOC rules that sex-segregated help wanted ads in newspapers are illegal. This ruling is upheld in 1973 by the Supreme Court, opening the way for women to apply for higher-paying jobs hitherto open only to men.
This is why we needed feminism - this is why we know that feminism works
The sun is probably the closest thing we’ll ever have to a true Eldritch Abomination. Hear me out here-
Older than recorded history; was here longer than any of us and will be here long after we leave. Has a finite beginning and end but is still incomprehensibly ancient
Burns itself into your vision instantly and can blind you if you look for too long
Further prolonged exposure can cause cancerous growths
Non-humanoid shape floating through space; colossal flaming tentacles angrily lash out on occasion
Sort of just appeared one day and is now surrounded by the corpses of its stillborn children
People used to sacrifice other people to appease it
Pretty sure it screams at us sometimes
im putting together a couple of scottish folk mixes bc that’s what i do and im honestly curious if anyone in my country has ever been unequivocally happy about anything ever
Some day I’m going to have to come up with a crack headcanon about what exactly is up with the body types in Hyrule’s royal family.
I mean, yeah, it’s probably just dramatic license, but if you take it as fully diegetic, King Hyrule is a straight up beast of a man.
Ganondorf is Gerudo, so there’s at least some textual justification for him being a lanky ogre-man, but what’s King Hyrule’s excuse?
He’s like eight feet tall, and about three feet broad at the shoulder; his fist is the size of an ordinary man’s head!
And yet his daughter consistently has totally average proportions.
There’s something funny going on with the royal bloodline, is what I’m saying.
When you are writing a story and refer to a character by a physical trait, occupation, age, or any other attribute, rather than that character’s name, you are bringing the reader’s attention to that particular attribute. That can be used quite effectively to help your reader to focus on key details with just a few words. However, if the fact that the character is “the blond,” “the magician,” “the older woman,” etc. is not relevant to that moment in the story, this will only distract the reader from the purpose of the scene.
If your only reason for referring to a character this way is to avoid using his or her name or a pronoun too much, don’t do it. You’re fixing a problem that actually isn’t one. Just go ahead and use the name or pronoun again. It’ll be good.
if two people sleep in a bunk bed do they have to share a monster
Apparently my director went to see a production of West Side Story a few years ago, and the guy playing Chino forgot his gun before coming out for his final scene. Once it got to the big scene where he is supposed to shoot Tony, he screeched “Poison Boots” and kicked the actor playing Tony until he went down. The girl playing Maria then had to jerk the shoe off of Chino’s foot, and had to do the gunshot scene asking “How many kicks Chino? How many kicks, and one kick left for me”.
the things i would imagine running alongside the car when i was a kid
Being a nature photographer seems great, maybe I should try…
also you know what
you know what really fucking pisses me off about the whole “GASP ADULTS WRITING ABOUT KIDS” discourse
you know what really fucking pisses me off?
hi. i grew up in the bible belt of the midwest. as a young queer slowly coming to terms with being Super Not Straight, I grew up a town where there was one grocery store and eleven churches. on nice sunny days, before real summer heat set in, the chances of well-dressed smiling proselytizing boys with free copies of their holy books showing up at your door approached 100 percent. in my high school, there were to my knowledge about four queer kids, myself included in that number, and one of them was terrified to come out or even be seen with other boys because he grew up in the kind of household where you would absofuckinglutely be thrown out for being gay.
i did not have a queer childhood. this was just as the proliferation of the internet was starting to become a thing, but your best bet to get on a computer would be to go to the local library. the librarian, btw, was a devout christian and was part of the baptist church across the street. so the idea of using free resources to reach out or research what the fuck it meant to be queer was literally not an option.
i did not get queer literature. i did not get queer media. i subsisted on fandom, because it was the only type of content i knew that talked about being queer, that was positive about it, and was often created by adults who would point you to resources to help. this was before scarleteen and teen vogue and other sites.
fandom was my queer community, because i had zero alternatives. society gave me no alternatives.
and now I am looking at all these fearmongering puritanical moralizing shitheels go on and on about how any adult who writes about younger people is a predatory pedo
I did not get a fucking queer childhood. And if I want to sit down and write or read a story about queer teens who get a better shot, who do find love and feel comfortable experimenting with their sexuality instead of treating it like a potential death sentence,
you do not get to sit there and tell me what a fucking terrible human I am. I was a fucking kid too, and these are my stories too. they, in fact, are the stories fucking owed to me by a world that taught me to be afraid. and that part of my history as a human did not get erased when i passed some arbitrary milestone of time.
Society already stole the upbringing I should have had and locked me in a fucking closet until i was in my mid 20s, and you puritanical myopic shits have the fucking audacity to say me reaching back to try and remember something better makes me a pedophile, you dogwhistling dumbfucks.
you are literally on the same side as the people who made my best friend afraid his dad would beat him to death for coming out. that is where you stand. you use the same tactics and the same scripts. “oh if you are interested in these things…… that means you’re Wrong and will probably go to Hell :( why do you want to be such a bad person when you can be Straight And Pure?”
fuck off
i walk into starbucks and order a pumpkin spice latte with 13 shots of espresso. i tell the barista that i intend to transcend humanity and become a god. i ask for no whip cream
i was talking with my brothers yesterday and we decided the best way to own a guy who takes off his shirt to fight you is to pick his shirt up and put it on
reunited with Macayo, one of my oldest and wisest friends. he says 2018 is going to be a perfect year and that my hair still smells like crayons. (p.s macaws can live to be 90! that’s straight up the same bird in both pics. whaaaaat?)
one thing i think is interesting, as someone who basically grew up playing video games non-stop, is how some types of video game just don’t gel with people
like, it’s easy to forget that, even though i’m pretty bad at most games, that my skill at handling video games is definitely “above average.” as much as i hate to put it like this, i’d say my experience level is at “expert” solely because I can pick up any game controller and understand how to use it with no additional training.
a friend of mine on twitter posted a video of him stuck on a part of samus returns. the tutorial area where it teaches you how to ledge-grab. the video is of him jumping against the wall, doing everything but grabbing the ledge, and him getting frustrated
i’ve been playing games all my life, so i’d naturally intuit that i should jump towards the ledge to see what happens
but he doesn’t do that.
it’s kinda making me realize that as games are becoming more complex and controllers are getting more buttons, games are being designed more and more for people who already know how to play them and not people with little to no base understanding of the types of games they’re playing
so that’s got me thinking: should video games assume that you have zero base knowledge of video games and try to teach you from there? should Metroid: Samus Returns assume that you already know how to play a Metroid game and base its tutorial around that, or should it assume that you’ve never even played Mario before?
it’s got me thinking about that Cuphead video again. you know the one. to anyone with a lot of experience with video games, especially 2D ones, we would naturally intuit that one part of the tutorial to require a jump and a dash at the same time.
but most people lack that experience and that learned intuition and might struggle with that, and that’s something a lot of people forget to consider.
it reminds me a bit of the “land of Punt” that I read about in this Tumblr post. Egypt had this big trading partner back in the day called Punt and they wrote down everything about it except where it was, because who doesn’t know where Punt is? and now, we have no idea where it was, because everyone in Egypt assumed everyone else knew.
take that same line of thinking with games: “who doesn’t know how to play a 2D platform game?” nobody takes in to consideration the fact that somebody might not know how to play a 2D game on a base level, because that style of gameplay is thoroughly ingrained in to the minds of the majority of gamers. and then the Cuphead situation happens.
the point of this post isn’t to make fun of anybody, but to ask everyone to step back for a second and consider that things that they might not normally consider. as weird as it is to think about for people that grew up playing video games, anyone who can pick up a controller with thirty buttons on it and not get intimidated is actually operating at an expert level. if you pick up a playstation or an Xbox controller and your thumbs naturally land on the face buttons and the analog stick and your index fingers naturally land on the trigger buttons, that is because you are an expert at operating a complex piece of machinery. you have a lifetime of experience using this piece of equipment, and assuming that your skill level is the base line is a problem.
that assumption is rapidly becoming a problem as games become more complex. it’s something that should be considered when talking about games going forward. games should be accessible, but it’s reaching a point where even Nintendo games are assuming certain levels of skill without teaching the player the absolute basics. basics like “what is an analog stick” and “where should my fingers even be on this controller right now.”
basically what i’m saying is that games are becoming too complex for new players to reasonably get in to and are starting to assume skill levels higher than what should be considered the base line. it’s becoming a legitimate problem that shouldn’t be laughed at and disregarded. it’s very easy to forget that thing things YOU know aren’t known by everyone and that idea should be taken in to consideration when talking about video games.
But if you’re not alone in the booth, is it really a date?
TBH, people should be lining up to date me for my ability to get a booth in the dining hall
alone.
I’ve had this post saved up for days, waiting to release it when I ran out of other posts, because this is easily the greatest thing I have ever voiced, and I don’t think I’ll ever be able to top it
but people keep sending me stuff, and I keep finding stuff on my own, so here it is! based on this hilarious comic by @liberlibelulaart
please do keep sending me stuff! I’ve really enjoyed doing this the last couple of months, and even though there’s still more to come, it’s mostly down to dumb luck, and the well is going to dry up real soon
a villain who unintentionally always does helpful things
