Some Pen Sketches/bird Studies From A Couple Weeks Ago (except That Little Griffin Critter On The First)

kinda funny that my body hair is just like every other aspect of me in being poised precisely between 'will get funny looks' by hegemonic standards and 'pfft, you think that invisible shit counts?' by counterculture ones

baby's first attempt at mending sox any other way than by needle felting¹! as with all my very amateur attempts at mending we'll see how they hold up going forward,² but i had fun experimenting and so far they seem comfy?

⸻ ¹ an approach which ime works pretty okay on thick hiking sox, ftr, but which didn't seem likely to be well-suited to thinner ones like these :) ² i imagine that if i'd, say, used one long strand boustrophedon-style, that probably would have had a little more structural integrity than this more piecemeal approach. next time maybe!

i was like well i could ""compose a post"" or i could just. mine the way i explained this in chat the other day for parts—

anyway all this [trying to work out a congenial set of blogs to follow] has me thinking back to when i made a friend in my german reading class and was like 'oh right actually sometimes you meet people and it immediately feels good and easy and safe and fun. forgot that was how it was supposed to work!' bc unfortunately the reality is that as a now–chronically isolated misfit i'm strongly motivated to try and convince myself i could like people even when. we aren't actually compatible.

bc the thing is, it turns out that not feeling like you're part of either mainstream gender club is: really fucking lonely! bc you just feel constantly like. wow insane gender coercion is happening all around me constantly and it makes me angry and scared and i don’t know how not to vent incredulously about it but i'm also acutely aware that becoming someone who can't shut up abt their gender alienation is a great way to come off as a bore and (pun not intended) a drag…

not to mention that like. people are basically only nice to me when they girlbox me so like. i need it and hate it and feel guilty abt it!

[h/t @‍elodieunderglass]

Maxfield Parrish, The Young King of the Black Isles, 1906. Reproduced as a frontispiece in Collier's: The National Weekly, vol. 39, no. 8, 1907, p. 8, and as a full-page illustration in The Arabian Nights: Their Best-Known Tales, edited by Kate Douglas Wiggin and Nora A. Smith, Charles Scribner's Sons, 1909, between pp. 74 and 75.

The image above was sourced from the latter publication and has been straightened.

art by tracy walker; preorder here :)

get ready to see these guys on every envelope i ever mail until i die

A Brazilian opossum being presented to Queen Isabella of Spain in the year 1500 from The Zoogoer v.15:no.1 (1986).

Full text here.

the Guardian

Trump signs executive order on water pressure to ‘restore shower freedom’

White House says order will ‘make America’s showers great again’ and ‘end the Obama-Biden war on water pressure’

somehow this is not an onion article.

Eurasian Red Squirrels/ekorrar photographed in Värmland, Sweden (April 18-20, 2025).

went 4 a run / saw a snail & a red-winged blackbird & a tufted titmouse / cut off some more hair / showered / am now back in my trusty armchair flopping the flop of the virtuous, with a Beverage on one side & a Cat on the other (well ok technically she's up behind my shoulder lounging on the increasingly-squashed back of the chair, like a very lazy angel or parrot).

wild 2 be a sack of meat whose most morose electrical impulses r fully redirectable via extremely basic interventions!