The-antihero-of-the-story - 「ᴀɴᴛɪʜᴇʀø」

I may be swinging a fruit bat in a room full of hornet's nests here, but do americans know that most of the world doesn't look the way the US does? Like, specifically concerning ethnic diversity.

Coming from Europe, the fist time I went to the US, I was shocked by it, not in a negative way but in the same "wow, that's a real thing?" sort of way as western people finding out that there actually are that kind of pillar mountains in China, or americans who had never seen Fjord Horses in anything but the movie Frozen finding out that those fantastical yellow ponies are actually real.

And it wasn't some "backcountry rural hick sees Different Colour Person for the first time and dies of shock" sort of a thing. I had travelled before, and at 19 I considered myself quite worldly enough to go to a different continent I had never been on to go meet up a man from the internet, all by myself. I had been all over Europe from Iceland to St. Petersburg and from Norway to France, I have travelled. It was a slow realisation that it's turtles all the way down, that actually got me.

Being in an airport, going from one airport to another, I wasn't surprised by the sheer range of different kinds of people I saw. Airports just look like that, all over the world. Taking one flight after another, I didn't pay much attention to that, because airports just look like that. The "wait, holy shit" didn't hit me until I was already in rural Kentucky, in a fucking Wal-Mart. And if you're an american and the thought of a late teens nordic kid stepping foot into a Wal-Mart for the frist time and thinking "wow, this is actually what America looks like, all the time" makes you want to get defensive, it was by no means a negative feeling.

It was like looking into a bag of M&Ms. That's the only way I could describe it. Every single fucking person, group or family that I saw was apparently different colour and creed than the last ones who passed by. I had never seen black women with styled hair before because in Finland almost every single black woman you see is muslim and their hair is covered. I was used to the concept of large cities being more diverse, in FInland larger cities are the places where you're most likely to see people who aren't white. And I was stunned by just how colourful the population was in goddamn Beaver Dam, Kentucky.

I'm not trying to make any kind of a political point here. I'm just talking from my own experience as a Chronically Online European who has actually been abroad: City streets that look the way they do in the US are completely foreign to most people who are not american. And every time you people start complaining about why a game that's set in Poland, made by polish creators who have never been outside of Poland, only has polish people in it, they genuinely do not know what the hell you're talking about.

I love this fuckin' site.

Wavy diamond

Tried making some cherry pie. It's not the best, but it's definitely better than my pumpkin pie from yesterday, so that's still a win. The more I look at this, the more I feel that something is missing... 🤔

Feuer & feu

The German word Feuer looks a bit like French feu and both mean 'fire'. That's a coincidence, because they're not etymologically related in any way. Feuer, like English fire, comes from West Germanic *fuir, while feu stems from the unrelated Latin word focus, 'hearth', which only later came to mean 'fire'. Focus was borrowed into English and many other languages as focus, its meaning 'focus (of a lens; of an ellipse)' created by Johannes Kepler. My new infographic tells you all about these words.

Was originally going to draw a tennis ball... that ended up becoming a tennis ball in space... then it turned into a tennis ball in space that has water on it in such a way that it might harbor life. The creative process is something else I guess...

Simple cloudscape tutorial!

There no shame in never becoming fluent in your target language(s). Learning a new language even a little bit is great. Having the ability to communicate even a little bit is great. Learning about the culture(s) is great. You're doing great. Enjoy the experience.