Unmute !
IT IS VITALLY IMPORTANT THAT YOU UNMUTE!!!!
I mean I think people should curate their own fandom experience and whatnot and it's perfectly fair to just avoid things one is uncomfortable with...
That being said. From personal experience? Immunizing myself to all my discomforts by browsing through pixiv and kink memes with raised eyebrows while searching for things I am interested in back when tagging was non-existent has really made my fandom experience much more pleasant nowadays.
I have preferences, for sure. But I have no fear. I have no cringe. The filthiest, grossest fanwork holds no powers over me. I am a god.
Like honestly dl;dr and block on sight is respectable and all but I genuinely think everyone could just benefit from purposefully exposing yourself to your nOTP and non-triggering squicks sometimes? (And obviously don't go bother the creators for it.) If only so that it makes it easier/safer to search for content you like without living in fear of accidentally glimpsing something you hate and having that ruin your day.
Training oneself to be comfortable with mild discomfort is a highly under-rated skill in this day and age
I think its interesting that "desensitized" is a dirty word now. Like...when I did my therapy, being desensitized was the GOAL. It was the fucking dream.
But also, desensitization essentially gives you the agency to say, "okay so that felt bad, now I can either put it away, really explore and understand what that discomfort is trying to tell me, or discard it." Idk...some of yall are so fucking distressed all the time and you call it "being normal" or "being a decent human being" but...it isn't normal to be distressed all the time. It isn't decent to be distressed all the time. And like...I have disords and chemical shit going on in my brain but if you don't have all that....I think you need to look at your distress and ask why it is actually enduring and who benefits from you being distressed (lessons from a pre-bush era american).
Glasses Review - Firmoo
Hello vision impaired friends, I bring you the gospel of Ordering Your Damn Glasses Online
I have previously ordered from EyeBuyDirect (luxotica/lenscrafters'/America's Best in disguise, sorry.) and Zenni Optical ( most well known online provider, A+ would recommend) and have seen lots of ads for free pairs from a competitor, Firmoo. I have too much prescription for the free pair offers to ever work out from ANY provider, but their fun designs put them on my list.
When my current glasses broke, I was dinking around and saw their current promotion is Buy One Get One Free PLUS 20% off lenses and as lenses are the real $$$ I jumped on that like tigger on crack. I am VERY nearsighted with astigmatism and the average pair of glasses from lenscrafters used to cost me $300 minimum.
After much deliberation with a million tabs open and a poll I ignored the results of for Reasons, I ordered a pair of clear frames and a pair of purple steampunk-y wireframes . Two pairs of HIGH PRESCRIPTION glasses for $87 shipped. I could cry, y'all.
Note: I have an up to date prescription and a nifty app that measures Pupillary Distance or 'PD'. you will need both these things accurate to have the best experience buying your glasses online.
I ordered them 9/22, they shipped 9/25, I received them 9/29 with regular shipping. They came well packed - each pair was in a bag made of cleaning cloth material inside a sturdy plastic case and they come in a foil bubble mailer.
Both pairs feel well made, with lots of attention to detail-
however I did not pay attention to detail or pay extra money for the Re-he-heaaallly thin lenses. So the clear ones are slightly too big and I hate the way the nose pieces sit, while the purple ones are a wee bit small across the temple and heavy to boot. I haven't had dents in my nose like this since I was 12.
the website lists their exchange policy as 30 days, the pamphlet that came with the glasses says 60. Either way it was pretty painless to go into my order history and select "exchange". The form I filled out with my reasons for dissatisfaction promised me I would be contacted within 24 hours.
My 'personal Firmoo consultant', 'Karen', emailed me with a code for the full price before discount of both pairs + standard shipping, as well as the usual customer service canned answers about checking the sizing information and did I know I could upgrade the lenses?
Also I could keep the failed pairs 'FOR NOW', here are some places that accept glasses as donations. (mixed messages, Karen, but sweet!)
New friends are April006, round anodized wireframes with a cute dingly gem thing, and Sandy020 , literal tortoiseshell cat eye frames.
This time I used the site's search terms to cut the temple width and earpiece length options down and double checked the weight of the base frames. (14g vs 24g for the round wireframes before my coke-bottle lenses. RIP my nose. )
New order was placed 10/5 and they arrived 10/17 . (last time I checked the tracking estimated arrival had creeped from the 19th up to the 23rd so grain of salt. This may be a tactic to make the order feel like it got here faster or legit delays. In my case there was a federal holiday involved.)
Complete disclosure I'm gonna grab a pair of pliers and take the little dangly off the wireframes. It makes a noise when I move my head and if I don't fold the frames in the right order when I take them off it'll scratch up the lenses. I ain't gonna remember to avoid that, so off it goes.
The Good:
- Large selection, Good Quality, Good Communication. Lots of Off the Beaten Path options for internet weirdos. Firmoo p much always has a promotion going.
- My wallet is so happy. SO HAPPY. Frames run $20-30ish to start. lenses will vary with your prescription and options.
- If y'all want 50% off your first frames and to give me a $10 credit they have a referral program and my code is T4Z8I2. BOGO20 is a better value but it expires 11/01/23.
The Bad:
- Not flexible about lens options- you go down one track and pick your options within that. If there was a way to put tinting on a pair of glasses other than blue light blocking I couldn't find it. (in contrast I believe Zenni lets you choose a range of colors and tint depth on any pair, designed as sunnies or not)
- You Will Get Emails. Firmoo REALLY wants you to buy more glasses and post about it and tell your friends and HERE THIS CODE IS ONLY GOOD FOR 3 DAYS, GO BUY NEW GLASSES. They are marketing themselves to fashionable young influencers who change styles every month. Unsubscribe with impunity.
- like Zenni, this is a company with the majority of it's functionality based overseas. It's cheaper because you're ordering directly from a factory and not paying Luxotica's markups to itself. Customer service is mostly English as Second Language speakers and there may be delays.
- Not For Emergencies. I was able to coast on a pair of glasses from a prescription or 2 ago but it's gonna take time for your order to be made and shipped.
Overall I'm very happy with them and will probably order again.
Next time I have spare money I'm aiming at Wherelight because y'all. they are next down on the list of reputable to shady AF but they have the most amazing WTF designs.
A nonhuman character in heavy makeup: *is very long*
Me: is that you, Doug
The credits: Freaky Creature played by Doug Jones
Me: YEAHHHH
When it’s Doug
My new favorite thing: People making their reusable elastomeric respirators beautiful! (Usually the Dentec P100 or the Dentec N95, which are NIOSH-certified and reusable.)
(Above is the artist @nickelpin)
I've been collecting as many of these customizations as I can find, and I think they fall into a few categories:
- The first is the colorful distraction, where it seems like the aim is to make the mask colorful and cheerful — less scary — which distracts from the apocalyptic / gas mask vibes, while still being simple enough for everyday wear.
2. The second is make it fashion, where the aim is to just make something that looks so incredibly cool that you feel beautiful wearing it, and it feels like a stylish accessory. These use lots of shiny elements and swirling patterns (all of the below by @nickelpin)
3. And the third is punk where the mask customization embraces and enhances its non-conforming / resistance undertones. My favorite in this category is by @andrewshumate, who installed a CO2 monitor and set it up so the filters change color based on the CO2 levels in the space.
ALT
Talking about materials: @nickelpin has mentioned that she uses Angelus 2-Hard or Angelus leather paint.
A lot of others are using Posca paint markers.
I have been daydreaming a lot about designs for a customized Dentec P100 or N95!
(my daily masks are either my Dentec P100 or the comfy 3M Aura N95, and I'd like to have a reusable respirator that looks less intimidating for everyday walks etc.)
First, some cheerful patterns. I actually like the cloud one a lot, I might do it. I think the high-contrast sunflower design is super effective at distracting the eye from the respirator shape.
I’m also really into this night sky version. Feels more beautiful / mysterious / subtle.
These are not my style, but I'm reeeeeally into the idea of bootleg Louis Vuitton designer masks. (This is like, the opposite of punk, lol)
Just thinking about how wearing a respirator (like KN95, N95, or the pictured elastomeric N95s and P100s) is very cool and my personal experience is that everyone thinks you're cool and attractive when you do it.
Project N95 is a nonprofit that sells these and other respirators for relatively cheap, you can find them here: link .
crashional-thinker asked:
Do you ever have a passive gripe with the way trade is represented in medieval/sci-fi/post-apocalyptic fiction? I can't shake the feeling that those are societies that have moved beyond the need for abstract currency - that such forms of trade are more a concession for the viewer to analogize trade to our world instead of offering some kind of unique barter for a world.
A medieval peasant isn't gonna want gold coins for jack because the next trade caravan is two seasons away, they'd much rather a useful tool or some extra fertilizer. Credits in science fiction universes can become worthless due to Future™️ hackers setting their bank accounts to extraordinarily high values, so extra parts for firearms and spaceships are much more useful. Caps in Fallout just make no sense in a world where food and water are few and far between!
I feel unreasonably grumpy about this and I wanted to know if you have any kind of insight to this kind of thing.
prokopetz answered:
There are a couple of only partly related problems here:
1. The idea that the economies of most sci-fi and fantasy settings, as depicted, don’t make any sense. This is absolutely true, because most science fiction and fantasy authors don’t really think about that sort of thing – their settings only have economies to the extent that the details of those economies are relevant to the plot, which they usually aren’t.
2. The idea that it doesn’t make sense for currency to exist in these settings because most of them logically ought to have barter economies. The trouble with this assertion is that there’s no such thing as a barter economy. Yes, you can describe what one would look like, but no civilisation which has ever actually existed has operated in this fashion. It’s a made-up idea – at best, a spherical-cow approximation of how the exchange of goods and services operates in a stateless society, and at worst, complete bullshit.
Consequently, whether or not it makes sense for anything like currency to exist is going to depend on the particulars of how the setting’s economy operates (i.e., all the details that that are getting glossed over in point 1, above). About the most we can say in nearly all cases is that we simply don’t have enough information about a given fantasy or sci-fi setting’s economic structure to know whether it makes sense to have currency or not; we can’t simply assume in the absence of further details that things will default to a barter economy, because – again – there’s no such animal.
To build on this, where the hell do these medieval peasants live? Medieval Greenland had more active commerce than a single caravan every few seasons and that's a thinly populated tundra island at the extreme edge of the Atlantic from Europe. Most medieval peasants would have had a town with a weekly market a couple of hours walk from their home. They would go there regularly to sell products and to buy things they or the village smith couldn't make themselves.
Also, money has a very big utility in that it keeps. You can stick it in a box or bury it and then you'll have it if you need it years later. It's convenient that way, in addition to the convenience of being something to exchange for any product that anybody is willing to sell.
The money wouldn't be gold coins, at least. Gold is too damn rare for gold coins to be more than occasional things done by overambitious lords, mercantile associations or similar. Money that actually gets used and circulate has always used less valuable, more plentiful metals. You just can't build a commercial system of a material that has, so far, only had an amount similar to a couple of Olympic swimming pools extracted.
In early medieval England, when Rome was gone and they hadn’t started minting their own coinage (England was lots of different countries then), they used Arabic coins! https://www.jstor.org/stable/42667284 (this is on coins found from around the 1100s in England!)
And here’s an excerpt from Wikipedia showing how widespread using Arabic coins was, reaching across Europe- “It is now generally accepted that mancus derives from the Arabic word منقوش manqūsh (from the triliteral verbal root n-q-sh 'to sculpt, engrave, inscribe')” Mancus was a widespread European word for money from the late 700s to 1300s.
Basically, even in medieval Europe, people latched onto the nearest legal tender they could use, even if it was from as far away as the Abbasid Caliphate!
okay but it would be very cool and fun if the military generated its own revenue
I think the Roman Empire showed this creates bigger problems than it solves
In the spirit of encouraging people to comment on fanfics while also making it easier to do so, I feel obliged to share a browser extension for ao3 that has quite literally revolutionized the comment game for me.
I present to you: the floating ao3 comment box!
From what I've seen, a big problem for many people is that once you reach the comments at the bottom of a fic, your memory of it miraculously disappears. Anything you wanted to say is stuck ten paragraphs ago, and you barely remember what you thought while reading. This fixes that!
I'll give a little explanation on the features and how it works, but if you want to skip all that, here's the link.
The extension is visible as a small blue box in the upper left corner.
(Side note: The green colouring is not from the extension, that's me.)
If you click on it, you open a comment box window at the bottom of your screen but not at the bottom of the fic. I opened my own fic for demonstrative purposes.
The website also gives explanations on how exactly it functions, but I'll summarize regardless.
- insert selection -> if you highlight a sentence in the fic it will be added in italics to the comment box
- add to comment box -> once you're done writing your comment, you click this button and the entire thing will automatically copied to the ao3 comment box
- delete -> self explanatory
- on mulitchapter fics, you will be given the option to either add the comment to just the current chapter or the entire fic
The best part? You can simply close the window the same way you opened it and your progress will automatically be saved. So you can open it, comment on a paragraph, and then close it and keep reading without having the box in your face.
Comments are what keep writers going, and as both a writer and a reader, I think it's such an easy way of showing support and enthusiasm.
HERE'S THAT BITCH IVE BEEN LOOKING FOR
This one that puts the little O in the corner glitches on my computer/browser and will mess up my stories when I go to edit them. I'm not sure if it's bc I'm a Mac or because I'm a Firefox, BUT -
Here's another version if anyone else needs it bc that above version doesn't work for them. Pastebin link. You'll have to "create new script" on tampermonkey/greasemonkey/whatever and paste it in.
In this one, instead of the little O, you get a gray "floaty review box" button amongst the other buttons at the top of the story (bookmarks, mark for later, share, etc.)
This also adds some first/last chapter shortcuts on applicable stories, which I don't personally use much but there ya go.
some clowns really read all of Iron Widow and cheered on the girlbossery without picking up on how the demonization of racialized men was part of the callout
I’ve been in such a funk since the concert. I’m not even sure I enjoyed myself that much. maybe I did. I don’t know
Hey hi hello!
I got a potential answer for you.
After ANY thrilling and/or happy experience, it's very possible for your brain to quite literally run out of the proteins and vitamins you need to make more happy chemical. People get dopamine crashes anywhere from a couple hours to a couple weeks after abormal but exciting events - whether it's a really good day, they did a lot of socializing, had a lot of fun hyperfocusing on a project, had an intense sexy time experience, a huge performance they were excited for, a date, a day at a theme part, etc etc etc.
Your brain goes into overdrive coming up with !!!!!!!! chemicals to keep up with your environment, then -especially if that was an abnormal experience or if you don't have the !!!!!! chemicals in excess very often- then you just run out for a while.
You can remedy this by finding other things that will be good, but not expect the !!!!! along with it. Instead of something you really really like doing, find something simple and calm and comforting. Snuggle with a friend and watch a movie, pet a cat, write a letter, etc.
Definitely get some vitamin d, chocolate if you can / like it, and take a multivitamin. Protein is important for regrowth and restocking, so get plenty of that too to bounce back quickly!
Love you much, I hope this passes very soon 🫂
WAIT WAIT THATS A THING???
LIKE….
THATS WHY AFTER THE EXCITEMENT WEARS OFF FROM ME DOING LITERALLY ANYTHING THAT MAGKES ME “!!!!” I JUST FEEL BLEH AND IMMEDIATELY CRAVE *THING* AGAIN
SO IM NOT JUST BROKEN
ME AFTER MY FRICKING GAY BOOKCLUB WHERE I SEE ALL MY FRIENDS ONCE A MONTH
OR AFTER WATCHING AN EPISODE OF THE SHOW IM HYPERFIXATED ON
WHAT
Yes!! It can also be extra bad for different types of neurospicy bitches. My adhd brain has directly proportional drops every day. If I had a meh morning I’ll have a good evening (if no other factors interfere). If I have a FANTASTIC morning I’m sure to have a mental breakdown that night. I don’t regulate those chemicals well at ALL, and have extremely predictable emotional crashes as a result of that.
I see and experience this phenomenon often when I actually do things. First hear about it in a LARP group - they called it drop, and I hear that term in theatre sometimes too. (This is why everyone goes to eat at a restaurant right after the event is over.) Point is, I'm glad there's like Science Reason backing up that emotional dead zone after an event. And now I'm gonna start meal planning for events.
There's a fandom term called Post-Con Depression for the emotional slump (and sometimes physical exhaustion) you feel after getting home from a fun convention. After squeezing out all the happiness you can produce for several days straight, you run out of happiness for a few days. This is a known phenomenon!
*blinks slowly in BDSM*
I'm really glad to see some spread of the idea of drop and aftercare into other spaces, I guess? I forget there are people who don't know these things. I didn't know these things once. Welcome to today's 10,000!
This shit is true and caring for yourself works!
Anonymous asked:
Can I ask you something? It might sound like I'm trying to pick a fight but I'm asking in good faith. Is it true that Mohammed married an underage girl and "consummated the marriage" when she was still underage?
politicsofcanada answered:
yes he did, and that’s a huge point of contention among Muslims
because some defend it as something that was common at the time
but she was very young, even for the time (some sources say 9 years old though no exact age is confirmed), so many (myself included) hold that we do not need to be okay with everything he did. Allah spoke through him, but we don’t need to accept the things that he did when he was not speaking for Allah
it is possible to believe someone was a prophet and still think that they did bad things in their personal life. no fucking way am I going to defend marrying a 9 year old
Your best is what you can do without harming your mental and physical health, not what you can accomplish when you disregard it.
kawuli
