How Much Is Too Much Detail To Get Into For The Sake Of A Fanfic? Asking For A Friend. (Please Note,

[Image description: A reindeer at nighttime, in the snow, with glowing antlers. Caption reads, In northern Finland, reindeer's horns are painted with reflective paint in order to avoid car accidents. End image description.]

Alex Schaefer on instagram

Painter Alex Schaefer paints banks on fire using a “plein air” technique. Plein Air is the act of painting outdoors in the open air, and in Alex’s case, he paints directly across the banks.

I'm too stoked. I can't focus, can't work, I can't think about anything else right now. Here is some stoked music:

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Things like this make me feel weirdly hopeful bc this is a fixable problem. A hard-to-fix problem but still a fixable one.

this chart is what haunts me. there is a massive amount of misinformation driving people to think that the problems Trump talks about solving even exist. without a functioning press, how do you campaign effectively against someone whose voters aren't even living in reality in three months

Fossilas: crinoid stems and stars including a 6 pointed pentacrites and a pyritised ammonte

Main character very much baffled by the fact that, while she's actively doing drama, everybody else in the same show is doing comedy.

OMG. Lighting strike videos have always reminded me of something and I could never figure out what. Today I realized: it's slime molds!!

I just really really love this post, y'all. Like, so much. <3

Wait, so you said that you can learn to trust others by building friendships, but how does one go about doing that? Wouldn't someone I don't know be creeped out or annoyed if I suddenly walked up and started talking to them?

Friendships are built of repeated low-stakes interactions and returned bids for attention with slowly increasing intimacy over time.

It takes a long time to make friends as an adult. People will probably think you're weird if you just walk up and start talking to them as though you are already their friend (people think it's weird when I do this, I try not to do this) but people won't think it's weird if you're someone they've seen a few times who says "hey" and then gradually has more conversations (consisting of more words) with them.

I cheat at forming adult friendships by joining groups where people meet regularly. If you're part of a radio club that meets once a week and you just join up to talk about radios, eventually those will be your radio friends.

If there's a hiking meetup near you and you go regularly, you will eventually have hiking friends.

Deeper friendships are formed with people from those kinds of groups when you do things with them outside of the context of the original interaction; if you go camping with your radio friend, that person is probably more friend than acquaintance. If you go to the movies with a hiking friend who likes the same horror movies as you do, that is deepening the friendship.

In, like 2011 Large Bastard decided he wanted more friends to do stuff with so he started a local radio meetup. These people started as strangers who shared an interest. Now they are people who give each other rides after surgery and help each other move and have started businesses together and have gone on many radio-based camping trips and have worked on each other's cars.

Finding a meetup or starting a meetup is genuinely the cheat-code for making friends.

This is also how making friendships at schools works - you're around a group of people very regularly and eventually you get to know them better and you start figuring out who you get along with and you start spending more time with those people.

If you want to do this in the most fast and dramatic way possible, join a band.

In 2020 I wrote something of a primer on how to turn low-stakes interactions with neighbors and acquaintances into more meaningful relationships; check the notes of this post over the next couple days, I'll dig up the link and share it in a reblog.

reblog if you have skilled writer friends and you're damn proud of them

Incredible video captures humpback whales swimming underneath the northern lights in Norway.