sigilsandmotifs

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if the satanic panic was happening now a lot of you guys would be like “DNI if you don’t believe survivors of satanic ritual abuse at daycare”

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the only reliable, effective way of "protecting children" is education. but people don't want to hear that because they don't actually care about protecting children, they care about protecting a mythologised ideal of innocence

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“Ugh this prominent women in the Lesbian movement turned out to be a bisexual” “ugh this famous lesbian transitioned into a man” “ugh this queer romance writer turns out to be ace” “ugh this cis feminist author ended up being nonbinary” “ugh this writer on masculinity transitioned into a woman”

Oh no! We might have to recognize liberation as an interconnected intersectional struggle! Ahhh!!! >.<

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Are lace-makers ever struck by the realisation that all the holes were already there before they started?

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Juvenile Mexican free-tailed bat, via

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if you wiped every ICE agent off the face of the earth, a hundred million people would become safer overnight. if you wiped every furry off the face of the earth, the entire internet would collapse for good in a matter of hours. i know where my allegiances lie.

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Today's Fur Seal Is: Woolly Caterpillar

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the only “ai” i respect is genly ai, first mobile on gethen/winter, hainish cycle 93, ekumenical year 1490-97

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“If you give a man a fish, he will eat for a day; if you teach a man to fish, he will eat for a lifetime,” but you have done neither. You have stood before us and eaten fish after fish, and chided us for our greed as you have done so. You have cast aside their offal and simultaneously chided us for our waste. You then told us that, coincidentally, you owned the river, and our parents should have gotten us the same if we wanted fish. You gave a man a fish to murder us if we step too close to the river, or speak too loud, or eat a fish from another river. You’ve copyrighted the fishing net. It costs us fish to leave.

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There used to be a lot of activities that took place around a populated area like a village or town, which you would encounter before you reached the town itself. Most of those crafts have either been eliminated in the developed world or now take place out of view on private land, and so modern authors don't think of them when creating fantasy worlds or writing historical fiction. I think that sprinkling those in could both enrich the worlds you're writing in and, potentially, add useful plot devices.

For example, your travelers might know that they're near civilization when they start finding trees in the woods that have been tapped, for pitch or for sap. They might find a forester's trap line and trace it back to his hut to get medical care. Maybe they retrace the passage of a peasant and his pig out hunting for truffles. If they're coming along a coast, maybe your travelers come across the pools where sea water is dried down to salt, or the furnaces where bog iron ore is smelted.

Maybe they see a column of smoke and follow it to the house-sized kilns of a potter's yard where men work making bricks or roof tiles. From miles away they could smell the unmistakeable odor of pine sap being rendered down into pitch, and follow that to a village. Or they hear the flute playing of a shepherd boy whiling away the hours in the high pasture.

They could find the clearing where the charcoal burners recently broke down an earth kiln, and follow the hoof prints and drag marks of their horse and sledge as they hauled the charcoal back to civilization. Or follow the sound of metal on stone to a quarry or gravel pit. Maybe they know they're nearly to town when they come across a clay bank with signs of recent clay gathering.

Of course around every town and city there will be farms, more densely packed the closer you are. But don't just think of fields of grains or vegetables. Think of managed woodlands, like maybe trees coppiced-- cut and then regrown--to customize the shape or size of the branches. Cows being grazed in a communal green. Waiting as a huge flock of ducks is driven across the road. Orchards in bloom.

If they're approaching by road, there will be things best done out of town. The threshing floor where grain is beaten with flails or run through crushing wheels to separate the grain from its casing, and then winnowed, using the wind to carry away the chaff. Laundresses working in the river, their linens bleaching on the grass at the drying yard. The stench of the tanners, barred from town for stinking so badly. The rushing wheel-race and great creaking wheel of the flour mill.

If it's a larger town, there might be a livestock market outside the gates, with goats milling in woven willow pens or chickens in wooden cages. Or a line of horses for the wealthier buyer or your desperate travelers. There might be a red light district, escaping the regulations of the city proper, or plain old slums. More industrial yards, like the yards where fabric is dyed (these might also smell quite bad, like rotting plant material, or urine).

There are so many things that preindustrial people did and would find familiar that we just don't know about now. So much of life was lived out in the open for anyone to see. Make your world busy and loud and colorful!

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it’s fucking wild because one day you’re like i guess i’m not dying tragically young and you go to the store and you buy dental floss, ingredients for soup, and a bath mat

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yeah im into bdsm Be Dozing So Much

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a bottom-tier autistic experience is being told throughout your entire childhood that you are just an overthinker when it comes to social situations and later finding out that your friends did, in fact, hate being around you and tried to communicate that through weird little hints

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Joy Sullivan, from Instructions for Traveling West, “All Day Long There Is a Bursting"

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STOP. moment of gratitude for those precious times of breathing from your nostrils when you don't have a stuffy nose

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they should make a version of socializing that doesn’t make you feel like you’re still the weird 12 year old kid that doesn’t know why she’s not normal like the other kids