Look i dont wanna sound like a Fandom Mom or whatever but what do you think women over 25 or so are supposed to do? Do u really think theyre supposed to drop all their interests and just talk about taxes and marriage or whatever? It seems like 25+ year old fanboys do not receive this kind of “ooh cringe” reaction either. There are guys in their 40s with comic book collections and shit and people might think theyre a nerd at worst, not a freak who shouldnt be trusted
Thank you.Because, here’s the thing, I literally tried that. And this sounds really dramatic but it kind of ruined my life for a long time.
Once I got out of grad-school and started working, at exactly age 25, I figured it was time to get serious because I was “too old for this stuff” and frankly I was afraid of being judged.
I sold all my comics, I stopped reading fanfiction, I stopped playing video games. All of it. It’s not that I never, ever watched anything “geeky” or spent a weekend binge-reading a kink-meme, but when I did, it was rare and I’d feel guilty about it like it was time wasted. I’d keep it all to myself, you know? And without any kind of inspiration, I eventually stopped drawing. After all, I didn’t need it for my “serious job,” so why bother? Unfortunately, my former skill is so atrophied now it’s nearly lost, but worse than that, it’s stressful now instead of the thing I loved to do for most of my life.
What was I doing instead? Well, I’d work my miserable, toxic job, come home and worry about how far behind everyone else I was, and how weird I was compared to all my colleagues. I’d go out with people and do the things they liked doing, but I only pretended to. But I’m not great at that and pretending to be someone else ate me alive. Unsurprisingly, by 31, my anxiety and depression was not in a great place, and I fuckin’ snapped. Not just because of this stuff, of course, but it honestly contributed. I quit my job and left town.
Suddenly I was completely alone, no job, no friends, and no reason to pretend to be someone else. So, I started doing all the things I’d given up. I read all the fanfiction I wanted, I bought a Playstation and an SNES and played them for hours. I bought back every comic book I loved, watched every Marvel movie I missed, and caught up on my favorite characters. I started traveling around just going to cons for the first time (NYCC, GeekGirlCon, DragonCon, etc). In fact, at @geekgirlcon and DragonCon especially, I saw groups of women who were 60+, just fucking enjoying things, and it made me feel so much better about my future. I’m not even joking, I literally cry every time I think about it, because I never realized how scared I was about aging in a world that thinks I’m already a decade too old for the things I love. Suddenly, that wasn’t so scary.
And then I just stopped pretending that I wasn’t into this stuff. I mean all of it, even the stuff no one understand, even the stuff people openly make fun of, even smutty fanfiction.
And look, I’m not saying this cured my depression, or that everything is perfect. For one, I picked a city that’s awful for geeks and I’m trying to figure out where to move and how. For another, I lost six years of making like-minded friends, and it’s hard to find them now because we’re all so worried about being judged and online – the space that was always a refuge for me as a loner weirdo growing up – is now apparently a Children of the Corn. But I’m happier here, actually fucking liking things, than being the unobjectionable robot woman I’m apparently supposed to be.
I don’t expect anyone to actually be interested in this, or have gotten this far, but because I’m having feelings about turning 36 on Monday, I just want to tell anyone who is about to turn 25 that you should just tell people to go fuck themselves. It’s your life. You’re going to offend people no matter what you do, at least choose the direction that makes you happiest, because those people certainly aren’t going to pay for your fucking therapist bills, are they?🦖
This is gonna sound weird to you guys, but when I first started writing fanfic and sending stories to fanzines to be published back in 1991, in my first fandom all of the fans and writers and editors and readers I met were shocked that I was 17 because they were all in their 30s, 40s, and 50s. I was the outlier. I was an aberration.
Wanna know when young people started discovering fandom en masse? In the mid 1990s, when AOL got their internet gateway.
All the folks who ran fannish mailing lists and conventions and published ‘zines and posted fanfic online were over 18, because email and IRC and Usenet and FTP sites and listservs were primarily used by adults because they were almost exclusively college students, government employees, and academics. And the users of gated communities like BBS, GEnie, Compuserv, and AOL all skewed older. Only Prodigy was actually aimed at kids, because prior to the mid-to-late 1990s, children weren’t getting online until they went to university.
And what kids found was the fandom that adults had built online, after being a part of it offline for decades.
Even when FFN was launched, the people who initially posted there were the same people who had been posting fanfic to the internet for a decade: THE GROWN-UPS.
So the idea that we’re meant to put away childish things is hilarious, cos for most of our lives, fandom was not a part of our childhoods. It was a part of our everyday adult lives.
👑👑 Double King cast, human versions! This took waaaay longer than it should have, but I finally finished! I’m absolutely enamored with Double King (the animation by @felixcolgrave), so I did some fanart by personifying all the main monarch characters in the series. These are all totally random headcanons, and some don’t match up with the names given in the credits, oops … but nonetheless, they’re finally done! My personal favorites are the caterpillar and butterfly monarchs, they’re so adorable. But, of course, the Double King himself also holds a special place in my heart…
i think an important thing to learn, especially if you start out with drawing anime, is that faces don’t necessarily have to narrow from top to bottom
i like to think of wide top, wide middle, wide bottom, and rectangle-like as the 4 main face shapes
what you should keep in mind about them:
you’re only halfway done: the jawlines, the width-length ratio, the amount of fat in the cheeks, the intensity or subtlety of the face’s curves are all important components you still have to decide on after choosing the shape itself
none of these shapes are exclusively feminine or masculine, don’t hesitate drawing them on any gender
most people in real life have some variation of the wide middle type
if you are trying to draw real people, getting the shape of their face down is the first step
i’ve seen tutorials say the shape of the face can tell a lot of the character’s personality – you don’t necessarily have to live by that rule. as long as you aren’t unrealistically drastic about their proportions, their face shape determines their inner qualities as much as it would in real life (not at all)
Controversial Truths About Ancient Egypt Masterpost
The pyramids were built by contemporary workers who received wages and were fed and taken care of during construction
The Dendera “lightbulb” is a representation of the creation myth and has nothing to do with electricity
We didn’t find “““copper wiring””” in the great pyramid either
Hatshepsut wasn’t transgender
The gods didn’t actually have animal heads
Hieroglyphs aren’t mysteriously magical; they’re just a language (seriously we have shopping lists and work rosters and even ancient erotica)
The ancient Egyptian ethnicity wasn’t homogeneous
Noses (and ears, and arms) broke off statues and reliefs for a variety of reasons, none of which are “there is a widespread archaeological conspiracy to hide the Egyptian ethnicity”
The carvings at Abydos aren’t modern machines but recarvings over old carvings. Sure they look like them but if you can read hieroglyphs and know that Ramesses II will even usurp the carvings of his own father just to be a little shit
‘No soot on the ceilings and walls of the Dendera temple!’ is actually because of extensive restoration works and not because Egyptians were in on shit like Baghdad “batteries”
While the Egyptians were fine-ass astronomers they didn’t align any of their enormous and/or important buildings to modern star constellations, because constellations look very different now than they did ~5000 years ago
The pyramid is the simplest, sturdiest shape with which to build and many different cultures discovered this in their own time. There were never any weird fish humans/aliens involved
The sphinx of Gizah is only an approximate 5000 years old; the 10,000 year/rain erosion nonsense is proven hokum
Speaking of that particular sphinx, the Napoleonic expedition is not responsible for its missing nose
Akhenaten was not a “heretic” by contemporary standards
Ramses II appropriated a lot of his predecessors’ buildings/reliefs and isn’t really deserving of the epithet “the Great”
The Battle of Kadesh ended in a stalemate (twice)
While they had feline deities throughout their history, Egyptians didn’t actually worship cats themselves. This was a later Greek/Ptolemaeic addition
It was not, in fact, practice to shave off eyebrows after cats died; Herodotus lied about that
Herodotus lied about a lot of things and many misconceptions about ancient Egypt can be traced back to his Greek ass
I can’t believe I forgot my favourite Hill to Die On
Seth was not the god of “evil”, and despite his chaos providing a foil to order, he wasn’t completely villified until very late in Egyptian history, when he became associated with despised foreign enemies
Hats off to the few of you who’re reblogging this with tags saying you’re going to check my claims later. You make me not entirely despair of this hellhole.
Here are some vetted Egyptological books/sources (that are by and large appropriate for a lay-audience) you can find most, if not all of the above:
Lehner, M., The Complete Pyramids
Wilkinson, R. H., The Complete Temples of Ancient Egypt
Hornung, E., The One and the Many: Conceptions of God in Ancient Egypt
Dunand, F. & Zivie-Coche, C., Gods and Men in Egypt
Kemp, B., Ancient Egypt: Anatomy of a Civilization
Bard, K., An Introduction to the Archaeology of Ancient Egypt
Stevenson Smith, W., The Art and Architecture of Ancient Egypt
Kitchen, K. A., The Life and Times of Ramesses II, King of Egypt
Sweeney, D., Sex and Gender (in Ancient Egypt)
McDowell, A. G., Village Life in Ancient Egypt:
Laundry Lists and Love Songs
Te Velde, H., Seth, God of Confusion
Yes, the bust of Nefertiti is genuine and was not a 19th century German hoax. It’s real. That’s her face.
The Egyptians didn’t miraculously build the great pyramids out of no where- there are a whole bunch of failed shitty pyramids that came first and collapsed or fell apart still around. It took them generations of experimentation to get it right, and the Giza Pyramids are the high point of the art.
Lord Kib 