cycas
This is the painting I ended up making for my lovely bidder in @sunflower-auction for Ukraine : a beloved cat on an adventure with his sparrow buddy though the grass and wildflowers of a meadow, meeting with a terrible rabbit, mounted on a snail!
The watercolour was a little draft version that I worked up into the full A3 acrylic version, which looks worse as a thumbnail: I hope and believe it looks better full size, and better still in real life.
piosplayhouse
This is perhaps too much of an academic opinion but it's become clearer to me over the years that many people on social media see racism as a permanent scarlet letter on someone's record rather than an underlying ideology that anyone can recite and perpetuate unknowingly. These words from How To Be An Anti-Racist have always stuck with me
mikkeneko
[Image ID: Two passages clipped out of a textbook. Text reads:
"MY RACIST INTRODUCTION * 11
"racist itself back to its proper usage. "Racist" is not -- as Richard Spencer argues -- a pejorative. It is not the worst word in the English language; it is not the equivalent of a "slur." It is descriptive, and the only way to undo what is racist is to consistently identify and describe it -- and then dismantle it. The attempt to turn this usefully descriptive term into an almost unusable slur is, of course, designed to do the opposite: to freeze us into inaction.
THE GOOD NEWS is that racist and antiracist are not fixed identifies. We can be a racist one minute and an antiracist the next. What we say about race, what we do about race, in each moment, determines what -- not who -- we are."
End ID.]
awalkonthelightside
A little tummy action. OK so it's a slight cheat as I'm leaning back which emphasises certain muscles (don't believe everything you see online people!)
Apparently even this is deemed unsuitable "community" viewing now. I mean come on tumblr. Its a tummy?
eleneressea
…did the elves at Cuiviénen use sidereal time? it would make sense, given that they don't have any other celestial objects to track time with. and given how important stars are to the elves I think they should have sidereal time. I'm sure that they're very disconcerted when they get to Valinor that the cycle of the Trees and the cycle of the stars result in dramatically different day lengths. also, elf astronomers can have a little axial precession. as a treat.
wait, do Varda's stars even rise and set? Arda is flat at this point. but surely the proto-Noldor would want a calendar, they seem like the sorts of elves to want something like that. you can have calendars that aren't based on celestial bodies, but they're rare, and day length is, uh, pretty much always based on celestial bodies, yeah. and a calendar is just a fancy way to count days.
thank you @shrikeseams for pointing out that the moon, sun, and Eärendil all rise and set even before the Roundening, the Ensphericulation, so the stars probably do rise and set too. I am Much Relieved by this and can get back to the celestial mechanics and, more importantly, the ~*calendar*~
so you can measure the days by the falling and rising of the stars, and it's just a little shorter than the solar day. assuming a spinning planet (or Varda spinning the heavens, let's not think too much about the astrophysics) this does not, technically, require a sun. a year could be calculated based on heliacal rising—that's when a star is first visible above the horizon. (also a little shorter than a solar year—just a few minutes, but those add up if you wait long enough.) historically, Sirius was favored for this as it's quite bright; this was the basis for the Sothic year. this does depend on latitude, though, as if you go far enough north (or south) you'll run into too many circumpolar stars that never appear to rise and set. I'm sure the Noldor were very discombobulated by this on the Helcaraxë.
So imagine. you are an elf astronomer and calendar-keeper. you decide to go to Valinor with Ingwë and Finwë and Olwë, and discover that your carefully-tracked motions of the stars do not, at all, match with the glowing trees they've made. what is this. why couldn't you be consistent, @ the Valar, we had a perfectly lovely system for keeping track of time and now look what you've done, you've gone and put trees in it
petsincollections
Bellflower, Illinois guinea pig breeders, 1938
some more death note tarot cards i’m proud of. you can get the set here
stamp-it-to-me
three 2022 Japanese stamps from a series on flowers in daily life
[id: three long rectangular postage stamps with softly stylized illustrations of flowers. the left depicts lilies of the valley, the middle depicts a chameleon plant, and the right depicts a rose. end id]