Ansellia africana (Leopard Orchid)

[Image ID: Tweet from pea poopingirl @/PoopingIRL on 8/14/23 - i think the idea of a shady dwarven salesman selling "cheap" stuff to humans and laughing to himself like "heh it will only last one generation, those stupid idiots, how will they even pass it down to their kids" forgetting that one dwarf generation is like 4 human ones is funny. There's a black bar at the bottom with an iFunny watermark in the corner. End ID.]

Elf ea-nasir selling mithril armor that will last no more than 1,000 years getting death threats from his fellow elves but doing numbers w/humans

Actually, I really like this idea as why elven and dwarven crafts are so good. Something that’s merely acceptable is meant to last most of one of their lifetimes. So even a mediocre dwarven craftsman will make something a human can pass down.

And you can always sell what the apprentice makes while still learning to a human, letting them know it will merely last for the rest of their life.

The elven version of IKEA could be a human family heirloom.

'Good enough for humans' becomes an expression for 'you're getting there' for an apprentice.

A commission I did for my moot 💙🩵

If any part of your plan involves the words "nobody could be that stupid", please be prepared to be proven wrong at any minute at a moment's notice. Pay in mind that the person determined to prove you wrong may already be aware of this assumption, and is already approaching your current location at an alarming speed.

"it will be fine if people just"

people will not just

In 2011 I attended an event called Bmore Fail, in which entrepreneurs in Baltimore talked about their failures and what they learned from them.

What I learned is that there is an inflexible rule about how people interact with systems. If your system would work perfectly if people Just Would, and yet they Don't, then your system is bad and you should feel bad. Systems must be built with an eye toward "will people actually do this"?

Recycling was a thing when I was a child. (The 70's.) In my home in New York State, you could carry recyclables to a recycling center. Nobody did. Now in 2024 Baltimore there is a trash truck that comes every week to pick up my recyclables, and I and my neighbors fill our cans with objects that can be recycled, because a system was developed that was easy for busy people to do, and there's a lot of social pressure to do it -- but the social pressure wouldn't exist if it wasn't easy to do. Only the most crunchy granola people bitched at you if you didn't recycle in 1979, when it required a lot of effort. Now it is considered kind of on par with spitting in the street or leaving a dirty diaper on the diaper changing table in the bathroom instead of throwing it out, if you don't recycle.

Your job as the system creator is to make it as easy as possible for people to do the right thing, and as hard as possible to do the wrong thing. This is why web forms have data validation (but too much data validation actually makes the forms harder, so hit the spot in the middle.) And if you want people to adopt social change, whether it's environmentalism, accepting gay people, or whatever, make it as easy as possible. And don't guilt people about not doing it until it's as easy as possible; instead phrase things more like "wouldn't it be cool if". It's not the fault of the individual that they can't get things done in a bad system. Fix the system.

if users regularly fuck up using a tool you made, and your answer is "you're holding it wrong", the next question you should ask is "why did i make this tool so it's easy to hold it wrong?"

Dude this person's thoughts are inherently evil let's fucking kill them

Man this person has not committed one material offense but the way their brain works gives me an icky feeling, let's make sure it never comes crawling back online this time

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Jiminy Cricket! Meet the Pinocchio anole (Anolis proboscis). For decades, this rarely-seen species was thought to be extinct, until an individual was spotted crossing the road by a group of birdwatchers in 2005! Growing about 3.3 in (8.4 cm) long, this slow-moving lizard inhabits forests throughout parts of Ecuador, climbing trees to escape predators. Only males of this species sport long proboscises. Scientists think these fleshy appendages help them to attract mates.

Photo: John Sullivan, CC BY-NC 4.0, iNaturalist

his soft gullet…..

you don't need to say things like that

probably no one else finds this funny and I’m driving away my friends a fraction of a percent at a time every time I do it, but I think the height of comedy is when you react to an emoji with the same emoji in a chat medium that permits this

literally

to escalate this, react with multiple versions of the same emote because nine different servers all have it available:

This might be unpopular but I’m not going to use simpler vocabulary in my writing if it’s out of character for the narrator. If my POV character is a botanist, he’s going to call a plant by its name. If you don’t know what it is you can either Google it or move on just knowing it’s a plant of some sort.

I don’t like this trend of readers being angry that not everything is 100% understandable for them. I want my characters to be believable as people and sometimes people use words people outside of their field will not understand. That’s not a bad thing.

You don’t have to understand every word to get the gist of what’s happening. I’m not going to slow down an action scene to describe every weapon because someone might not know them by name. They can just assume it’s a weapon because that makes sense in the context of the scene.

I just had a debate with myself over using the word mezzanine, wondering if I should describe it instead. Ultimately I decided the character would call it a mezzanine, and therefore readers could look up a new word if they didn't know.

It's how I learned words like myriad as a seven year old reading Lord of the Rings for the first time, why would I steal that experiance from someone else by simplifying language?

I don't know about y'all, but books are how i know my vocabulary in the first place

You've heard of multi-shipper now get ready for multi-headcanoner: where multiple interpretations of the same character coexist in your head and they are all great.

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Rainbow x Lionfish