Anyone interested in (joining me in?) a rant about “the utterly uncanny valley and terrifying physics of paranormal occurrences” or am I the only one that uses that one as an earmark of When Shit Is Actually Going down?
I went digging through my own blog for this, just to say: I just watched a piece of unfired clay jiggle around wildly and then drop through the concrete sidewalk and my dudes… WTF.
What makes this DOUBLE freaky is the thing I read about how the human brain will just strait up composite stuff and whole-cloth make up visuals to explain seeing (or not seeing) something.
Somehow that piece of greenware that should’ve fallen and shattered was not there anymore… so my Game Dev brain went: Someone turned on noclip and since it’s a physics object it went fucky before dropping through the world model.
I will NEVER actually know where that greenware went. It’s nowhere to be found. Not in the shop, not anywhere else, not in the dozens of bits it should’ve shattered into. It’s not in the grass. It’s not in my hands. It’s not where it was. My brain, however, supplies the happy answer: It’s fine. It just glitched out. Don’t worry about it.
Maybe that’s why paranormal occurrence vocabulary changes over time. Once, it was Fairies and Demons… now it’s video game glitches and signal degradation. Not because it ACTUALLY looks like that, but simply because that’s as close as we can get to something we have zero native ability to process or explain.
Full body shudder.
Full-throated roar of YOU GET IT, YES, IT HAS UPDATED WITH THE TIMES.
BUT THEN SO WTF DID I ACTUALLY SEE?
This is the Lovecraftian stuff – what could I have observed that was so incomprehensible that THAT was the thing my brain covers it with? Should I be grateful my bowl Bethesda’d instead of me actually catching a glimpse of what occurred?
Devil’s advocate: Let’s say I had a little absence seizure or something. Let’s say that stress made me WILDLY hallucinate. Okay. Cool. I’d be behind that 100% AND… not but… AND where the shimmering fuck is my bowl?
This day is fired.
I’m not saying that the Goodly Neighbors made off with a pot that is both an incomplete spell and in a state of transition of it’s own between Formless and Immortal….
……but it’ll show up on your doorstep in approximately three days with a new design addition.
my young padawans, i have a secret to impart: when you stop trying to fit in, and just do your thing with verve and confidence, it transcends social awkwardness and becomes the new normal. when you present your ways as How Things Are and your needs as Commands, rather than begging the indulgence of their accomodation, people fall right in line.
you don’t do eye contact? gaze at the horizon like an old sailor recalling the adventures of times past. let them admire your profile.
you don’t know when to stop doing eye contact? stare into their souls.
somebody’s ‘joke’ is too plausible and they get on your case for taking it seriously? tell them to google poe’s law. tell them you’re sure they’ll be funnier next time. tell them to Git Gud.
someone’s noise level is threatening your sanity? tell them to quit that damn racket!
flickering fluorescents in your office keep making your eyes reboot? put up a beach umbrella over your cubicle. don’t say “i can’t handle the flickery lights,” say, “the flickery lights are unacceptable and i refuse to deal with them.”
take control. you deserve to be in charge of your environment and interactions as much as anyone else does. you don’t have to ask for accomodations like they’re charity. you don’t have to be a beggar. you don’t have to Make Nice. some people will dislike you for it, but so what? the world is full of people who hate us for existing, and we have the advantage that we genuinely won’t notice cheryl from accounting giving us the lemonface because we didn’t like the battery powered dancing flower on her desk that played ‘happy birthday’ every twelve minutes and fifteen seconds.
If you are in grade school, in special ed, do not stare into the soul of someone who has threatened to beat you up though. Also don’t do this when you’re in highschool, or possibly college or even work because you might make a paranoid person even more paranoid and they will beat you up or threaten to do so if you are not built like a brick wall.
well, it might make them more violent or it might make them back down. it depends. for me, it more often made them back down, but i’ve always been a concentrated package of controlled violence even when i was fun sized. if you don’t want to fight, yeah, go the ancient mariner route.
Leveraged an inventory of established fictional character and setting elements to generate a disruptive custom-curated narrative entertainment asset.
I worked in HR, handling applications and interviews, and if someone turned in that string of techno babble nonsense, I would have rejected them out of hand.
A resume doesn’t need to sound fancy or overly technical, it needs to tell us why we should hire you.
“Independent novelist/writer” is more than sufficient here. If you want to express the skills that fan fiction taught you, something like, “creative writing, editing, and publication,” will get you a lot further than… Whatever that just was.
A resume should be tailored to the position, if you can afford the time and energy for that. But if not, then just think about what writing got fandom taught you. How to respond to criticism, how to present a professional pubic face, how to correct punished mistakes, creative thinking, project planning, persuasion via emotional leverage, html formatting, office suite fluency.
There are a lot of actual, marketable skills that go into fan fiction.
honestly, i’m really tired of telling clients, “yeah, your cat isn’t ‘acting weird’ because of a behavioral issue. You’re seeing an actual neurological problem because the essential oils you’re feeding it are literally killing it. Please stop and go to the vet right now.”
this is your Nth reminder that essential oils can kill your pet. (particularly cats and birds.)
even if you’re smart enough to avoid actually dosing up your pet with peppermint oil or something, just using essential oils around them can still be dangerous.
don’t diffuse oils if you have a bird (unless you have a damn mansion and they’re on the other side of it). if you have a cat, use a very low dilution and don’t allow them into the room where you’re diffusing the oils.
only use products with high oil concentrations on areas your pet won’t lick. be careful with hand creams and body lotions.
keep your oils somewhere your pets can’t get them. I’m not talking about ‘a box on a shelf’, I’m talking ‘back of a latching cupboard you’ve never seen your cat even look at, in a solid box that won’t open if it falls on the ground’.
your pet is more important than things smelling nice.
Lavender in all its forms, including in a live plant growing out of the ground, is toxic to cats.
pharmacys that accept it include- walgreens, CVS, Walmart, kroger, hy vee and a couple others.
please share to help others out!
A LOT of pharmacies take goodrx and if yours tries to refuse it? You can actually give them a number to call GoodRX and a rep will talk to your pharmacist for you.
That part in Fellowship of the Ring where the nazgul asks a random hobbit about baggings of the shire
And the Hobbit, shaking from head to toe, just goes like “UH NO THERE’S NO BAGGINGS HERE THEY’RE IN HOBBITSVILLE” or something and points the way
Honestly, I don’t even think that hobbit was being a snitch and dooming the Baggings by answering the Nazgul. I legit think he was trying to be helpful.
Like, he saw that big threatening shadowy man stop by his house and whisper two words and he was like, fucking terrified but “oh well the creepy thing is asking for directions, I should give the damn directions”
Like, that hobbit would invite him for some tea if the nazgul hadn’t left in a hurry I’m positive
So I just recently completed my first ever vivarium from scratch and I decided to document it here ( just in case anyone was interested in the process) so heres the steps i took along the way!
1.
I started with a 10 gal fish tank that I had found in my basement then painted part of it with black silicon sealant, once that had dried I used spray foam to create the background, sealed that with more silicon and put peat moss on the wet sealant.
2.
Once the background had been completed i filled it with the substrate and such:
drainage, mesh, abg, leaf litter,decorations
(the mister is running in the photo hence the fog)
After that the longest wait was for my plants I waited a bit to order them all , I had to do quite a bit of research to find how to do it all, NEHerp is where I got everything that made this posible and I recommended them highly to anyone trying to get into the hobby
3.
Once you get your plants you cant just put them into the viv right off the bat, you first have to process them you can do this with a bleach soultion (haha fuck no) Or with distilled water, bareroot the plants and let them sit in the water (or bleach) for an hour or several to hidrate them and get rid of any gnats or bugs they might have
Tillandsia (5 assorted), N. Lady Luck, Korean rock fern(blurry), Orchid (not pictured)
4.
After the processing ( and adding springs ) You’re ready to plant! Use floral wire to put the tillandsia into the foam background, moss goes on rocks, and everything else (should) plant as normal
~🌱happy planting🌱
That’s a moth orchid in the left. They are NOT terrestrial orchids! Like most orchids, they grow attached to trees. If they’re in pots, the pots should be full of a loose bark/moss mix, their roots will quickly suffocate and rot if planted in soil.
Also, nepenthes (pitcher plants) are carnivorous plants. Carnivorous plants cannot be planted in soil, it’ll kill them. They can’t stand the minerals in the soil, or in tap water. They need to be planted in peat or sphagnum moss and given rainwater, distilled, or RO water only. Venus flytraps aren’t mentioned here, but are bad for terrariums because they need a ton of drainage and a cold winter dormancy, in addition to the specific substrate and water.
Distilled water won’t kill pests. A mild bleach solution can be used in place of a quarantine, and can be totally removed by time and soaking.
Other than that, this is good. You can also tilt an aquarium onto its end, putting it up longways, and rig or buy a lid to attach to make a vertical terrarium.
@bettsplendens Thank you for your concern however, I did do my research and I did not use soil or tap water for these reasons, I used ABG mix for all of my plants here wich is a rather lose mix good for orchids, and my nepenthes’ roots are in some moist sphagnum as well so worry not! And in my mister I only use distilled water for these exact reasons.
~happy planting 🌱
Ah, cool, that’d work.
Personally, I wouldn’t plant a moth orchid in substrate in a terrarium. They need a lot of drainage and like to have their roots dry out a bit between waterings. That could potentially work, though, and kudos if it does.
I’d keep an eye on the Nepenthes for signs of mineral issues. I’m not sure what all is in ABG mix, but if it can grow regular plants it might be too rich for carnivorous plants. Nepenthes are way more tolerant of minerals and nutrients than most other CPs, and from the look of your other recent posts it’s doing well, but the mineral thing may be worth keeping in mind just in case.
If you want to add something in future, I like white rabbit’s foot fern. It can grow planted in substrate or creeping along solid surfaces, as long as it stays damp. It’s a pretty small fern, too, the fronds are only about 5 inches tall. I have one growing wrapped around a piece of driftwood with its roots tucked into some sphagnum, and it’s very happy. The newly growing fronds are brown for some reason, but turn green as they get bigger.
The Dendroboard forum is mostly dart frog vivariums, but they have good terrarium advice as well, and will happily give it if asked. Good resource for terrariums in general. Orchidboard is about 90% orchids, but some of them have general terrarium plant advice.
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