I Do Feel Bad For Plants In General. Like, I Know They Are Often As Vicious As Animals In Many Ways,

anyone who says “the bible is clear” about an issue, is 100% of the time wrong. the bible wasnt clear once. the bible couldnt be clear about how to make a table if it came in an ikea box

I’d really like structural critiques to move away from using words like “scum” in general. Individualist moralizing doesn’t belong in discussion of systemic forces; in fact, the two are directly at odds. And it’s a mindfuck of a double-bind for people who are prone to taking ideas seriously: “this issue is very large and touches many aspects of society, and you personally are directly responsible for it.” Structural problems will not be solved by obsessively purifying your own heart. 

FUCK YES

Hmm, I rather think that the central question - whether there's a moral difference between action and inaction - is in fact very relevant, certainly in my life and probably in a lot of people’s. Like, I'm really great at negative morality, avoiding doing bad things by simply not doing anything. Which would correspond to someone who feels that they can avoid any involvement or blame by never moving the lever. But intellectually I don’t actually endorse that: I believe that inaction is a type of action, which implies that I should be more active in life despite the risk of inadvertently hurting someone and getting cancelled. Writing this rather than using my tumblr exclusively to reblog others’ posts isn’t much, but it’s a start.

my issue with the trolley problem is, and still will be, for the vast majority of people on the planet, the trolley problem is not, like, relevant

not in the sense that “OH YOU’LL NEVER BE IN THE SITUATION WHERE YOU HAVE TO PULL A LEVER TO STOP A TROLLEY FROM HITTING FOUR PEOPLE THAT A MANIAC HAS TIED TO RAILROAD TRACKS”, but in the sense that when you’re in scary and dangerous situations, you are not as in control of yourself as you think you are.

in a situation like the trolley problem, outside of like… first responders, soldiers, maybe ER nurses? … I doubt most people would be able to react to a situation like that in anything approaching the way that they would game it out from ethical principles. you’d fight, flee, or freeze, and it’d have less to do with “what you strongly believe in as a person” and more to do with “what your hindbrain has learnt is effective to get you to survive emergencies in the past”. 

i think that’s what a lot of discussion about “maybe the person to blame is the one tying people to the train tracks?” is trying and failing to get at.

As recently as three weeks ago Google had an image search function that let you search by type of Creative Commons license, so finding free to use/no attribution required images was so easy. Now it looks like they’ve sabotaged that function and limited it to just Creative Commons/Commercial and my job has suddenly become exponentially harder.

your personal post just now about your genetics exam is a whole fucking mood. I have incourse exams this week and I know nothing. I am nothing. I am ready for the vast void to consume me. I am ready for the brambles to grow over me and snuff my light out. My bio exam on bacteria, algae, and bryophytes got pushed back due to severe flooding in my country but she included ferns now too and now i gotta learn about ferns and i dont know ferns, van i dont. i dont even know what i know im ready 2 cry

dude ferns be like ‘hi my name is Eboness 173’mentia raven woodwardia and im a 3n sporophyte with 173 chromosomes (thats how i got my name) and 14 rachi on each petiole spiraling into a double whirl with jet black leaflet tips and a lot of people tell me i look like Cyathea medullaris (AN: if u dont know who she is get da hell out of here!). i’m not related to the Woodwardia genus but i wish i was bc theyre major fucking hotties. i have deep green leaves but my petioles and older structures are dark black. im also a perennial, and i live in a deep costal forest in oregon where ive put up 33 reproductive fronds so far. im a double triple allopolypoloid (in case u couldnt tell) and i mostly give birth to sexually recombinant quadruple polyploids. i love dark green and blue light for my photosynthesis and i get all my light from my position on the forest floor. for example today i was absorbing some photons in the 500 wavelength with three new jet black fronds i just put up around my outer basal growth formation. almost all their leaflets were unfurled from the main fiddlehead and the bottoms were covered in two parallel rows of bright red sporangia with 7000 spores in each. i was sitting under the tree where i live. it was raining and foggy so my absorption rate was low, which i was very happy about. a lot of angiosperms stared at me. i put my middle leaflet up at them’

"may this great plague pass by me and my friends, and restore us once more to joy and gladness"

Feeling a powerful kinship with this scribe from 1350 today.

if you look at that one article about the first Ainu resturaunt in Tokyo you’ll see that it mentions how members of the Ainu community support this cultural sharing as a means to de-Otherize Ainu culture especially since there’s Japanese nationalists who say “Ainu” is a made up thing and like one of the big things wrong with cultural appropriation discourse is this whole thing where it fails to understand that cultural sharing isn’t just some “yeah let’s make a few bucks why not” but is literally a strategy used by marginalized cultures as a means to allow traditions to continue to survive

I FOUND IT GUYS I SPENT HALF AN HOUR LOOKING FOR THIS VIDEO AND ITS HERE

For anyone who wants a free pose-able human reference for drawing

The other day I came across this awesome program by accident (I don’t even remember what I was actually searching for, but on the several times I’ve looked for a program like this I’ve had no luck). It’s cool enough that I wanted to share it.

It’s called DesignDoll (website here) and it’s a program that lets you shape and pose a human figure pretty much however you want.

There’s a trial version with no expiration date that can be downloaded for free, as well as the “pro license” version priced at $79. I’ve only had the free version for two days so far, so I’m not an expert and I haven’t figured out all of the features yet, but I’ve got the basics down. The website’s tutorials are actually pretty helpful for the basics, as well. 

Here’s the page for download, which has a list of the features available in both versions.

There are three features the free version doesn’t have:

Can’t save OBJ files for export

Can’t download models and poses from Doll Atelier (a sharing site for users; note that the site is in Japanese, though)

It can’t load saved files

The third one means that if you make a pose, save it, and close the program, you can’t load that pose/modified model later. You have to start with the default model. I found that out when I tried to load a file from the day before (this is why reading is important…). Whether saving your modifications (and downloading models and poses) is worth $80 is up to you. 

But, the default model is pretty nice and honestly if all you’re looking for is a basic pose reference it should work fairly well as it is. Here’s what it looks like:

There’s a pose tag that lets you drag each joint into place and rotate body parts. The torso and waist can be twisted separately, and it seems like everything pretty much follows the range of movement it would have on an actual human.

Even the entire shoulder area is actually movable along with the joint! See, like how the scapular area of the back raises with the arm:

The morphing tag is one of the coolest features, in my opinion. It lets you pick and choose from a library of pre-set forms for the head, chest, arms, legs, etc. It has some more realistic body shapes in addition to more anime-like ones. Don’t like the options there? Mix a few to get what you want! Each option has a slider that lets you blend as much or as little as you want into the design. 

So you, too, can create beautiful things like kawaii Muscle-chan!!

The scale tag lets you mess with the proportions and connection points of different joints. This feature combined with the morphing feature not only allows more body shape variations, but it also means that you can do things like make a more digitigrade model if you want. (The feet only have an ankle joint, but for regular human poses that’s all that you really need, so whatever.)

Or you can make a weird chubby alien-like thing with giant hands and balloon tiddies if that’s more your thing.

The ability to pose hands to the extent it allows is far more than I could have hoped for from a free program. Seriously, you can change the position of each finger joint individually, as well as how spread out the fingers are from each other. Each crease on the diagram below is a point of movement, and the circles are for spread between fingers. 

And to make it a bit more convenient, there’s a library of pre-set hand poses you can pick from as well, and then change the pose from that if you like. 

In both versions, you can also import OBJ files from other places for the model to hold, like if you wanted to have them hold a sword or something.

Basically, this program is awesome and free and you should totally check it out if you want a good program for creating pose references.