it’ll never fail to amaze me that chessex, the game dice company - like if you bought your first dice set from a game store/comic shop/card shop you most certainly bought a chessex set - has such an ugly and poorly designed website. it looks like they went out of business 15 years ago.
i don’t know what’s better, the fact that they only sell five different things and felt like they needed a site map, the single uk location with the giant union jack, or simply the times new roman header which reads:
“The coolest dice on the planet.”
™
THEY HAVEN’T UPDATED THEIR WEBSITE IN TEN YEARS????
my mistake, literally every single page you click on has a different copyright date. so far I’ve seen 2001, 2005, 2007, 2008, 2009, 2011, and most recently 2012. amazing. well done chessex.
BUT LANA
HAVE YOU SEEN WHAT HAPPENS WHEN YOU TRY TO ORDER DICE?????
you….you have to email them your order form. oh, gods. you…have to type your credit card information. into an email. so they can charge you seven dollars in shipping or 7% of the total order cost if it’s over $100. fuck. if you have questions about the cost of air shipping, you can fax them anytime. jesus christ. oh gods. fuck. fuck me up. chessex. the coolest dice on the planet. ™
this is another reason why I let my friendly local store make my chessex orders for me
Me: The Chessex website isn’t real and can’t hurt me:
The Chessex website:
oh my god
These are the only people doing internet sales correctly
I feel the chessex website qualifies for weird dice wednesday
ALTStop helping Stuart fucking Semple advance a racist and antisemitic narrative and build his brand on a pile of fucking lies.
Thank you @gehe-lihiyot-androgynos-varda for putting this so clearly and succinctly.
Thanks a lot! I saw the second post but not the first so I was missing a lot of the important context (notably the fact that Kapoor was selected by the company who developed Vantablack, rather than decide to "greedily keep it for itself" as the narrative goes)
Also, it's not a pigment or a paint. He can't "greedily keep it to himself" because you physically cannot use it. It's an application of carbon nanotubes. It has to be done in a lab under extremely controlled conditions. It's also not actually made for art but for industrial applications. The company that developed it decided they wanted to show off their neat new process, so they decided to pick one artist to work with.
The company's CEO stated that they picked Kapoor specifically because of his previous work, namely stuff like The Bean. So, again, they were never going to pick Semple or any of the other white dudes who whined really loudly in the press, and why? Because they don't do art like that at all.
So yeah.
People with low spoons, someone just recommended this cookbook to me, so I thought I'd pass it on.
I always look at cookbooks for people who have no energy/time to do elaborate meal preparations, and roll my eyes. Like, you want me to stay on my feet for long enough to prepare 15 different ingredients from scratch, and use 5 different pots and pans, when I have chronic fatigue and no dishwasher?
These people seem to get it, though. It's very simple in places. It's basically the cookbook for people who think, 'I'm really bored of those same five low-spoons meals I eat, but I can't think of anything else to cook that won't exhaust me'. And it's free!
I kind of suck at tagging, so I made this infographic to help make it easier.
Hey, thanks for making this! I’ve never struggled with what to put in tags on my fic, but I’ve never been systematic about it, either–I just kind of put whatever.
The categories seem like a really useful way to think about it–not every fic will necessarily have something for each category, but it’s a good framework for either thinking of things to put, or making sure you don’t skip things that would be good to put.
The black areas represent the remaining natural dark skies in the United States
I’ve been in the middle of the ocean at night and now live in texas and it is so hard to explain to people that no, they have not ever seen the night sky. It is so hard to explain to people that what they think is a proper night sky is fucking pathetic. A disgrace.
People talk about how you can’t see stars in the city and yeah, that’s true, but their concept of “seeing stars” is being able to make out orion’s belt.
So, so few people have see the sky in all its glory and it’s not sad. It’s a fucking crime. Seeing a perfectly dark night, no clouds, not a hint of light pollution? That’s a fucking religious experience.
The sky the vast vast majority of us grew up with is not the sky that inspired us to look up. It is not the sky that inspired constellations. You can’t even see most constellations.
Your ancestors looked at the night sky and said “surely, that is where the gods must live.” And you might be lucky if you can see hardly more than a handful of stars.
The sky is full, fucking FULL, of stars, and you’ve never seen them.
I remember the first time I saw a properly dark sky and was like ‘oh that’s why it’s called the milky way’ and promptly started to cry
When we were on a field trip to the middle of the red sea, I remember us all crowding at the end of the boat that didn’t have lights and just lying on our backs and staring
When you see a properly dark starscape
You understand why people wrote poems and made up legends and built rockets and said heaven’s in the sky
The universe is infinite. So are the stars
I’m trying to find a picture on google images to show you what I mean and I can’t find any
You think of the night sky like fairy lights on black velvet, but it’s not it’s not it’s like, like, dust in sunlight, like - I can’t find the words.
The stars are everywhere, like sugar, like glitter, like dust. You can’t find the constellations at first, not because you can’t recognise them, but because there’s so many stars you can’t pick out the familiar line of Orion’s belt. The North star has gone from bright familiarity to almost vanishing among a thousand, a hundred thousand, a million other lights. The milky way is a line of light arcing across the sky like a moon-trail on water only infinitely, infinitely bigger.
And for the first time in your life you’ll understand why people call it a dome, because it is, it’s three dimensional in exactly the way a city skyscape isn’t.
You’ll understand why Luthien Tinúviel danced under starlight, not moonlight, why people in a time before we knew the earth was round still looked up and wondered and built telescopes and dreamed about the stars.
The stars are endless and ancient and infinite and you will stand with your head craned back and your rucksack forgotten at your feet and you’ll feel like you’re falling upwards into that great bright sky like it’s calling you home and you’ll wonder how you ever thought the stars were beautiful before tonight when all you’d ever seen were the naked empty skyscapes of your home. And you’ll cry and you’ll spend the rest of your time there gazing up and wondering and imagining what it would be like to stand among those bright silver flecks
And then you’ll come home, and look up, and fall in a different kind of love with that handful of blazing stars to stubborn to be outdone by the whole of human invention, leading you home despite the light pollution and the clouds and the endless bustle of this shrinking planet.
If you have writer’s block because of a certain idea or passage in your story, one thing I suggest is to work with a second document for discards. Every substantial story I write is written across at least 2 documents - one “main” story, and one for notes.
The notes document contains everything not in the main document. That’s where I throw things like deleted passages, even if it’s just half a sentence because I may figure out later that I actually said it better the first time. I also put notes or even whole scenes for later plot points there, basically ideas as they come to my head that I might want to add. It takes the pressure off the main document to know nothing gets permanently thrown away.
It’s also a place where I can free-write if I haven’t quite come up with the right wording for something, and then I can take out the best parts and put them in the main doc. It’s a document that allows me to make mistakes without wasting my effort or time, or permanently altering the pristine “real” manuscript with a random idea that ends up not really working out.
This is pretty common writing advice but I thought I’d throw it out there for anyone who feels stuck.
this shit works i do it all the time now; btds has a notes document with my outline and deleted snippets and links to picture references and then the actual fic is in another document, 10/10 would recommend
Amazing advice!!
I refer to this as my Graveyard of Cut Scenes. Pretty much everything I’ve ever written has waaaaaaaaaaaaaaay more than one.
In highschool I wrote a story about a middle-generation of stellar travelers. Their parents were born on earth and left as children, and the middle generation will not live long enough to see their destination. They live their entire lives on the ship and I wrote about them trying to find their place in everything. They will never know blue skies and warm beaches and open fields with warm breezes. They’ll never know birdsong or crickets or frogs. They’ll never hear the rain on the roof of a dreary day. I never could find the right way to end the story. I wanted it to be a happy ending, but I didn’t know how to do it.
I realize now that it was a book about me dealing with depression before I even knew it. Looking back at how blatant the projecting was, it’s obvious now. It wasn’t then.
In the story, the middle-generation people are lost. They’re apathetic. They’re just a placeholder. The only job they have is to keep the ship running, have kids, and die. As the middle generation of people began becoming adults, suicide rates were skyrocketing. Crime and drug rates were jumping. This generation was completely apathetic because they felt that they had no use.
In the story, a small group of people in the middle-generation create the Weather Project. They turn the ship into a terrarium. They make magnificent gardens and take the DNA of animals they took with them and recreate them and they make this cold, metal spaceship that they have to live their entire lives on into a home. They take what little they have and they break it and rearrange it into something beautiful. They take this radical idea and turn the ship into a wonderful jungle of trees and birds and sunshine.
And I realize now how much it reflects my state of mind as I transitioned from a child into an adult while dealing with depression. You always hear “it gets better” and “when you’re older things will be easier” and I was so sick of waiting for it to get better. I was in the middle-generation stage. And I was sick of it. I was so sick of waiting.
When I was in highschool I didn’t know how to end the story. I didn’t know how to have a happy ending. I didn’t have the life experience then to finish the story in a meaningful way. I didn’t know how to make it better for these middle-generation characters.
But now that I’m older, I’m learning. That if you sit and wait for things to get better, it never will. You have to take your life and break it apart and rearrange it into something beautiful. You have to make the cold metal ship into the garden that you deserve. You have to make your own meaning. You have to plant your own garden.
You have to teach yourself that being happy is not a radical idea.
God you guys I never thought this would become so popular 😱 I was gonna name it The Weather Project after the art installment that inspired it
By Olafur Eliasson
This is the most important post that I’ve ever made. Its for screaming out with every fiber of your being that you’re worth something. You’re worth everything.
