My collection of inspiration, thoughts, quotes, and most things nerdy. fair warning, I don't censor myself and I'm the worst at remembering to tag. you've been warned.
fiber related anything is put over on @floofdreamsoffiber and history/museum work is over at @historyinbitsandpieces
Love how tumblr has its own folk stories. Yeah the God of Arepo we’ve all heard the story and we all still cry about it. Yeah that one about the woman locked up for centuries finally getting free. That one about the witch who would marry anyone who could get her house key from her cat and it’s revealed she IS the cat after the narrator befriends the cat.
Might I add:
The defeat of the wizard who made people choose how they’d be to be executed
The woman who raised the changeling alongside her biological child
The human who died of radiation poisoning after repairing the spaceship
The adventures of a space roomba
Cinderella finding Araura (and falling in love)
I don’t know a snappy description but the my nemesis cynthia story certainly lives in my head
hilariously, these are almost all in my fic tag. so, a compiled list from the notes (and some extras):
Does anyone know where to find the one with the Antichrist raised by loving mother and their family has been raising antichrists so they turn out good for generations?
Okay, the one about raising the Antichrist and a bunch more, because tumblr storytime is brilliant:
I’ve been looking for more fun collections like this, had trouble finding any, and then realized I could just make a blog for it. There’s nothing stopping me. Weird.
You ever see something innocuous, minding its own business on the clearance shelf at Michael’s and before you know it, it takes over your life for a few weeks?
So it was with this desktop greenhouse.
I took it home and after taking an appropriate time to “season” my idea in my mind (read: a month or two) I set to make my vision of a mini botanical garden a reality.
I started by removing the heavy glass panels and building a raised floor above the latch. I wanted to use the base as a foundation on the building.
I wrapped the foundation in plastic stone textured flooring (meant for Christmas villages) and built a pond at one end of the same. I then gave it a more realistic paint job and designed a rough layout for my plants and displays.
I also knew I wanted to make the ironwork significantly more intricate, but I wasn’t sure how just yet…
Up next - PLANTS! I went wild making all kinds of plants. Some were specific species and some were more conceptual.
I made several trees with polymer clay and moss, cacti out of beads and flocking, cattails out of raffia, hot glue and coffee grounds, and giant monstera leaves out of paper and wire.
This part should have taken me a long time, but it really came together fast. I loved finding ways to replicate natural shapes and patterns using bits of this and that.
I did make adjustments to my plans as I went like eliminating benches in favor of a simpler overall design.
Then I needed to fill my pond with water. For this I used resin. Lily pads were added to the top layer, and I wired in simple LED fairy lights. The batteries are kept in the box under the foundation.
In a weekend frenzy I added more plants, metal (paper) steps, new (plexi)glass windows, a roof, wrought-iron vines (paper again), doors that open, and a hose reel disguising the latch. Suddenly, a project I thought would take months was finished…
I love my desktop botanical garden. Right now it sits on a simple lazy Susan in my office. But I’d love to get it a proper display box to protect from dust.
Thank you for coming on this little journey with me. This piece packs a lot of joy into a tiny space. I always love building miniatures, and I’ll be doing more in the future I’m sure.
Marie Curie’s notebooks are crazy once you think about it. They’re so radioactive they have to be sealed in a lead box. Imagine a world where atomic theory is forgotten and a dude just goes “yea there’s a book that details the secrets of the universe, the machinations of the creation of existence down to its barest essentials, but if you get close to it you fucking die. The more you read it the more your body slowly disassembles into mush.” like wat excuse me
ok maybe now is a good time to remind everyone that you need to court military members for your anti-war activism for it to mean any amount of a good goddamn. like. that was a really, really, indispensably important aspect of the anti-war movement during the Vietnam war. That’s how you get mutinies to happen. Do not be stupid about this.
Benefits of allying military members: potential to disrupt function, chance to foment mutiny, ability to attain crucial information needed to attain our goals, ability for friendly connections within the force to propagate ideology and give good optics, exciting potential of saboteurs, just having some kind of in with the guys who will be asked to kill you during states of unrest, long-established historic precedent of successful revolutionaries utilizing connections within the armed forces, you might stop the guys from doing the war stuff you don’t like
Benefits of ostracizing military members: asserts morally upright character
The thing is I don’t want to be needed and I don’t need to be fixed
there’s a pretty high chance this is a CPTSD thing overlapping with the AroAce thing but if I could just indulge that a moment anyways:
I met a fellow once who I fell into a debate with- whether it was preferable, in an intimate relationship, to be Needed or to be Wanted.
His perspective was that he wanted to be a half of a whole- Needed, in order to make a single unit. To Complete someone, and have them Complete him. He said the ideal place to be in such a relationship would be to feel Needed. Like a Provider, Protector, Supporter, like he had something in himself that others lacked.
I can sort of see the appeal, if I squint and tilt my head a little. Like an optical illusion.
My take was that it would be far better to be Wanted. To be superfluous, but Desired. To fulfill no special purpose except to be Present and Delighted in.
He couldn’t seem to find the appeal in this concept, the same as I couldn’t find the appeal in his, and I find it a little baffling.
I’ve experienced being Needed. People have Needed me for all kinds of things: safety, strength, security, support, reassurance, advice, a spare set of hands. When I was new to being Needed, it made me feel special, like I was Stronger, Better, Chosen. Then it became a task to Stay Needed, because if my own needs ever outweighed my usefulness, I was no longer desirable to have around.
Being loved, in my experience, has almost always been in some way tied to Need more than Desire, and as such I find myself honestly a bit lost and scared of loving or being loved- because the only way I know how to Love is to Give, and Give, and Give, and when I Give too much to the wrong person then they’ll just leave when there’s nothing else to Take. Or when they Want something I don’t know how to provide.
I don’t know if I will ever feel romantic love, and I think I’m scared of it, because it feels as though the love I’ve known the most has been the kind that’s more like ownership. Like putting a leash around your neck and letting someone take it. And I’m not sure if I’m capable of anything else.
I don’t mind being the way I am- I don’t need anyone to change me, and the thing I am isn’t a raw and open wound that needs healed so much as a tree that’s grown around a fence.
There’s no correcting that, no way of separating the natural from the foreign, not without carving pieces out and destroying what’s alive and thriving- and it’s a healthy tree, despite the shape of it, capable of flowering and putting down roots.
I’m fascinated by the idea of love, I think. A bit like how a sailor might be fascinated by stories of men going mad and tossing themselves to the sea.
It could happen to me, is the thought that grips him. I hope it doesn’t.
But what is it like?
Here’s my perspective as someone who is decidedly not aroace…
Nature is dynamic and fluid, ever-changing yet stable. Rigidity is not strength; flexibility is.
Creating a need is a dependence. Dependences are fragile. As an engineer, I try to minimize dependencies because they introduce weakness in designs.
It’s not a given that strong dependencies inexorably lead to failure, but that is the predominant trend.
Relationships based on need are difficult. They have less resiliency. They are susceptible to fractures.
Relationships based on want or desire are often more flexible and can adapt more easily to stresses and the inevitable changes that come from simply living. I am not the same person I was a decade ago. Or two decades ago. Or four decades ago. Or however long ago. Neither are you. Neither is anyone. Can anyone really claim that your needs haven’t changed over time? What does that mean for a partner that was chosen to complete a whole whose halves have changed… diverged… fulfilling needs that may no longer be valid?
I’m fortune enough to have a long term relationship with someone I absolutely love and adore, with all my heart and soul. She probably wouldn’t put that in the same terms, but I know she loves me as well. And I think a major factor in the reason we still work out as a couple is that, well… we WANT to be together.
Like, we benefit from each other, but that’s not the same as a need. I was pretty put together when we met, as was she. When we’re apart, I miss her - she misses me - but we do just fine on our own. Neither of us is crying, sobbing, throwing up at the thought of not being together. If something were to happen to end our relationship, it’d be tough. I would be incredibly hurt for probably a long time - but I think I’d survive. So would she. And I’m sure that, in time, we’d each find someone to love again - but only because we wanted it.
This all to say that I think Teaboot understands where the strength of relationships lies. Romantic or platonic, people seem to benefit the most from a mutually desired arrangement. It can still be powerful. Strong. Resilient. Deep and meaningful. These aren’t contradictions.
I have been needed and I have needed. I found both to be fragile, delicate, and fearful states full of anxiety, jealousy, paranoia, and manipulation. I hated it. Every relationship that followed the traditional romance path was this way and I thought I was broken for not being happy in them.
The relationships I’ve had that worked, felt healthy, happy, stable, joyful, supportive, and flexible have all been with people I enjoy, trust, want to be around, and they feel the same about me. We start as friends and then pick and choose what that friendship means to us and what it can contain.
I built a life with my best friend and leaving him after over 15 years to follow my stars was the hardest thing I’ve ever done but we both were changed by those years in ways that made our next adventures even sweeter. The commitment-proof perpetual bachelor learned that he really wanted a live-in partner and I was finally emotionally healthy enough to walk away from a potential relationship with a charismatic manipulative asshole and choose the incredible AuDHD partner I have today. We are both so much happier now though I still wish there was portal technology so we could see each other more often.
Needing is conditional and hollow; wanting is waking up every day and choosing that person because life just feels better with them in it. Need is transactional and breaks down when the giver can’t give; wanting is the ebb and flow of give and take with a satisfying reciprocity.
Possibly mindblowing thought, this is also why I tell people not to monetize their hobbies. Underwater basket weaving as a passion is fucking awesome, doing it for someone else to spec and on deadline for money makes that joy shrivel and die. Grind mindset is a killer.
ALT
ALT
ALT
