1929 C. Beaded Silk Dress By New York City Designer Sadie Nemser. From Awesome Attic, FB.

Rick Owens Fall 2025 Ready-To-Wear

she always called me a princess, but i became a queen.

STORM // ORORO MUNROE

source → storm (2024) #5, written by murewa ayodele and drawn by lucas werneck.

You reblogged a post about the negative impacts of harvesting mosses and lichens from the wild which made me wonder about my own relationship with (and use of) wild mosses. I enjoy creating terrariums (for my isopod colonies for example) and tend to harvest wild moss to propagate in these. I dry it out in the sun (and make sure to remove any insects) before cooking it to remove bacteria. I then rehydrate it once I've found a place for it. I take moss from areas that are already thick with it and treat collecting it as I would any other wild plant - making sure I take as little as possible so as to have the smallest impact on the ecosystem. Despite this, I don't think I had realised the frailty of this flora and am now worried that I might have had a much more negative impact than I'd originally believed. Do you have any tips/information on how to harvest moss in a way that causes the minimum amount of impact (such as places to harvest from and techniques to employ while harvesting). If the solution is that doing so is just inherently inexcusable, could you give me tips on how to propagate the moss I already have as efficiently as possible, so that I may have enough for bigger projects (like a bioactive vivarium for my snake)? Thank you very much for your time, - A worried moss enjoyer

I’m so glad you’re thinking about this and what actions you can take! It sounds like you’re being thoughtful and intentional about your harvesting practice and not harvesting for commercial use or profit. I recommend identifying the kinds of moss you’re harvesting and doing research on their growth and vulnerability. It’s also not legal to collect moss in many areas, so be mindful of the law and local cultural practices — it’s important to be respectful to the plants and the people who care for them. You also have to consider the environment they grow in — can you replicate it well? What substrates can you provide?

Try not to take from the same place if you can avoid it — give the moss a chance to recover. Monitoring their growth after harvesting can give you an idea of how much you affect them.

Mosses are diverse and their needs and growing speeds are different. My personal recommendation is to harvest a very small amount (and maybe some of the substrate, to make sure you don’t damage the underlying structures) and attempt to grow it at home. If you can’t support it, I would choose a different moss. I would try to find a moss that you can grow so you can harvest a small amount and let it spread naturally over time.

For propagation, my mosses live with my carnivorous plants so they have high humidity and light. Not all mosses want light though, so really check where they grow.

Thanks so much for writing in and being environmentally conscious! I hope you can keep enjoying moss for many years to come.

@madgrad

Another stone/creature.

I made a small series of these, I'm pretty sure I've posted these before - but I'm looking at them again because I like it when the edge becomes so important in a piece, and want to capture that in some new work.

The thing that gets me the most about critics of Terry Pratchett’s novels who say they’re not important or “literature” because they’re “not realistic” is this:  

By what yardstick are we supposed to be measuring “realism”?

See, I’m willing to bet that the yardstick these critics use is that oh so popular model of “the real world is really a terrible place, so the world of this piece of media is full of barbarism and grotesque cruelty.”*  And Terry Pratchett never, ever fell into that dismal trope.  He didn’t hunt his characters for sport.  There’s no gratuitous sexual violence (no sexual violence at all, that I can think of).  Even if a death or an act of evil is senseless from an in-world point of view, it isn’t random and senseless from a narrative perspective, thrown in to shock or to remind readers/viewers that “that’s reality.”  The Discworld isn’t a happy rainbow place all the time.  But it’s not a bleak pit of despair, either.  There are bad people of all stripes, from literal torturers and megalomaniacs to regular folk who perpetuate the kind of small mundane badness pretty much every human is guilty of at one time or another.  But there are good people too.  And sometimes some of them die along the way, but ultimately the good people win and the world is changed for the better or at least doesn’t get any worse.  Is that really “unrealistic”?

Terry Pratchett didn’t write a bunch of books about people being brutal to each other because “that’s human nature.”  Terry Pratchett acknowledged–often, even–that humanity is prone to base acts.  But what his books are really about, is humanity’s ability to rise above that.  Terry Pratchett wrote about protagonists who are imperfect, doing good in the world often against their first instincts.  He wrote about situations where it is hard to be good, but where his protagonists choose it anyway.

Rincewind is a coward who craves only boredom, but he steps up to the plate and saves the world whenever it turns out no one else can.  

Sam Vimes is a bitter, cynical recovering alcoholic who is desperate to be a better man and to do what’s just for everyone.

Granny Weatherwax is an aloof, blunt loner who finds “being the good one” a burden, but she works tirelessly to protect and serve her steading, just so everyone else can be free to go about their normal little everyday lives.

Brutha starts off blindly believing that “purifying” sinners is necessary, but he learns to think for himself and when later on he has the chance to kill the worst of the Quisition’s torturers?  He carries him through a desert, instead, and ends up reforming a religion.

These are just a few of so many examples.  And are they “unrealistic”?  Is the idea that imperfect beings can choose to do good even if it is difficult “fantasy”?  Is it really too hard to believe that maybe even if the nature of humanity inclines toward selfishness and greed and all that terrible stuff, humanity can also do better than that, if individuals choose to?

Because, wow, to me that’s an awfully uninspiring view of “reality”.  It’s kind of a boring one, too, when it comes to media.  If all you’re going to show me is a series of escalating cruelty for shock value, because “in the real world good people suffer” or whatever edgy thing you think is “realistic”, I’m not interested, sorry.

Give me Terry Pratchett’s world, where readers can think that if a screwup like Rincewind or someone as bad-tempered as Granny can do good maybe they, the readers, can do good too.  That if Vimes can turn his life around and work for justice, and if Brutha can question authority and stand up to oppression, maybe they could help change things, too.  Give me that “fantasy” any day.

That’s the kind of “literature” I want.

*Either that or they just see books where magic is real and immediately put on their “I’m a grown up, grown ups don’t believe in magic” hats and roll their eyes, sure in the knowledge of their superiority, because what value could there ever be in having a little imagination, right?

Has there ever been an anti-anti pope (not the pope, not an anti pope but a secret third thing)

You mean the Pisan popes?

So we had the pope in Rome and the antipope in Avignon. This whole thing was called the Western Schism.

There was a council and a conclave, with cardinals from both sides that attended a council and appointed a THIRD pope in Pisa in the hopes that it would end the Western Schism (spoiler alert, it did not).

See it was kind of difficult to determine if it was valid because only one cardinal that attended was appointed BEFORE the schism. The others had all been appointed by either the popes or the antipopes and so they were evidently biased.

They did try to agree to abdicate at the same time at one point but then they both went back on it...

There was also discussion about wether they could even call for a council because the pope is the one who is supposed to do that. So both Pisan popes are largely considered as antipopes and the roman line is considered the 'true' line of popes.

So eventually the Roman pope agreed to resign, the Pisan pope was removed. The Avignon pope was not co-operating so he was excommunicated and a whole new pope was elected.

The Avignon popes kind of kept going for a little bit longer but eventually the next Avignon pope resigned too and recognised the Roman pope as the true pope

Steel and silver axe head, Scandinavian, 11th-12th Century

From the Met Museum

GOd okay I went to my neighbor’s housewarming, and don’t get me wrong, I love parties (if everybody doesn’t give me  all of their attention all the time and tell me that i’m smart and funny and pretty I’ll DIE), but I forget how stressful it is to introduce yourself to new people when you work in a politically charged field.  The whole evening was this:

Party Guest:  So, have you lived in the area long?

[Okay, let’s think. White male, thirties, tall, muscle tee, sandals, wedding ring, but here without a partner.  I just overheard him complaining about tariffs, so he’s either left-leaning or a disillusioned republican.  Good sign, definitely not MAGA.  Ah, that’s right, he brought his daughters – ages 5 and 7, well-behaved in a crowd – and they’re wearing princess dresses… doting father with an active role in raising his kids, lets them choose their own outfits… my gut is telling me heterosexual male feminist.  That could be good or bad – statistically speaking, he believes in climate change… but that means 50/50 odds of anti-nuclear sentiment.  I need more information, but I must answer carefully.  We’re rapidly approaching the Question.]

Me: Not long!  I just moved down from Boston a few months ago –

[Ball is in his court.  Boston has been in the news lately for being an immigrant sanctuary city, but that’s mostly local news – I’ll get information based on body language.  Oh, I may have made a tactical error.  This is an opportunity for sports rivalry to come up, and I am ill-educated on the subject.  Quick, I need a counter maneuver.] 

Me: – but I actually grew up in the area.

[Good save, and a decent delaying action.  If he takes the bait, I can redirect the conversation to local childhood reminiscence.  He’s had two margaritas, and they’re starting to affect him – talking a bit too loud, and his expansive hand gestures bespeak more than typical New Jerseyan gregariousness.  That could be to my advantage… unless it makes him too bold].

Party Guest:  Coming back home for family, or is it a work thing?

[Shit, okay, he asked about work.  This could be the endgame… but he’s foolishly thrown me a lifeline.  I can’t lie, the hosts already know the real answer, but I can dissemble by playing to his fatherly conversational weak spots.]

Me:  I moved for work, but my family does live nearby, so that’s a nice perk as well.  I get to see my nephews a lot more often!  The eldest just turned five.

[That should do it.  My nephews are about the same age as his kids, which will build a rapport and redirect the conversation back to himself.  It should be easy to get him talking about his daughters.  Unless… oh no.  He’s two drinks in on a Sunday night and working on a third in front of his children, while his wife stays home.  She wakes up earlier than him, potentially much earlier.  He’s been talking about the economy a lot.  Damn, recently laid off?  He’s going to focus on work.]

Party Guest: That’s awesome.  What sort of job?

[The brilliant bastard.  He’s good, he’s very good.  Truly a worthy opponent.  Pierced right through every single gambit and went straight to the Question. Have I met my match? Will I finally be humbled?  It’s do or die.]

Me:  I’m an engineer at an energy company.

[Alea iacta est.]

Party Guest:  Energy?

[Last chance.  He's intelligent and fiendishly clever, but hope against hope that he’s more well-read in Aristotle than Rutherford.  This should dead-end him]

Me:  Nuclear, kind of. Fusion, not fission.

Party Guest:  Oh, that sounds cool.

Me:  Mhm.  So, how do you know Bill and Stephanie?

Party Guest:  I was in film school with Bill.  Have you seen his documentary?

[Ha. Another victory, all the sweeter for having been hard-fought. Time for a celebratory cornichon, maybe some crackers]

Janelle Monae at Met Gala 2025, in custom Thom Browne

Janelle Monae at the Afterparty