#in the queue of things

[dessertgeek]

Something I wish someone had told me sooner: if a recipe you're reading is confusing or weird or anything you don't like, try reading another for the same dish.

Because even if you hate the second one more, it gets you in the practice of both looking for a version you like instead of sticking to the top/first search, and reading the recipes to look over the techniques. The second version might have clearer instructions, or be horrible but one photo is enlightening, or maybe you really grok what's going on best with recipe #4, and taken all together you can likely cobble yourself enough understanding to Do The Thing.

This is how I went from 'cream puffs are the scariest recipe of my life' to making cream puffs all the dang time because they are actually pretty easy once you understand what they need - and what you need to make them. And what I needed was an overly complex version going over every last detail and then it clicked, and now I no longer need that version.

[wishfulsketching]

Silco and his terror of a daughter

[wardensantoineandevka]

is that piece of media actually bad, or is it just not following the blueprint you projected onto it? is that work actually not good, or are you just demanding something from it that is absolutely antithetical to its themes, genre, tone, and narrative goal? is that story actually poorly written, or do you just dislike that it is not the specific things you wanted from it that it never set out to be, never was, and never is going to become? is it actually bad, or is it actually well-executed and you just dislike the story it chose to be because it isn't catering to your specific desires and expectations?

[rockspider556]

Authors who post like this are so deliciously unhinged. At this point it’s not even a fic- it’s a literary hostage situation, and i am ✨sat✨ ☕️

[artsymeeshee]

(After some time)

Been wanting to do a comic on Wendy finding out she’s on the aromantic spectrum, specifically Lithromantic, after really liking the idea of her being Lithro. Included Stan as well since I headcanon him as Lithro as well so Wendy has someone who understands.

[rainbowpopeworld]

This is a big thing that I continue to work on unlearning/relearning

[artaintfart]

Oops I meant to post this a while ago. In celebration of Warriors' first CANON gay couple!!! Finally!!!

[dessertgeek]

I think it's so hard to remember when the world is literally and figuratively burning that everything we're fighting for, in some way, is a marathon. And that includes and requires rest.

How do I politely tell people that they need hobbies that don't involve the internet or activism?

Start a garden. Get into birdwatching. Join a diamond painting group. Join a book club. Learn how to embroider. Take a pottery class.

Just. Anything that doesn't involve constant arguments about theory and praxis. Interact with people who are outside of your immediate friend group. Shove your hands into some dirt. Create something just for yourself.

[dessertgeek]

All I want to do on here is eat and talk about chocolate, but we've got elections to crash and hope to rebuild dangit

[katebeckets]

how to say "I love you" in x-files [105/?] ⤷ 6.04 — “Dreamland”

[dessertgeek]

This just reminds me that I have a book on propagation in my collection and I want to go reread it and see if more grafting horrors (affectionate) are in it.

There’s a plant called the “TomTato” which is a cherry tomato plant with potatoes as roots. It yields large quantities of both tomatoes and spuds.

[wishfulsketching]

Some not so serious doodles about the idea where Silco survived and Warwrick!Vander found him. I did these as fanservice for ME! Especially the clothes thing

(have fun trying to figure out the reading order of the third sketch dump)

[fear-is-truth]

[heynhay]

say cheese 🧀

[elodieunderglass]

And one amang, an Iyrysch man,

Uppone his hoby swyftly ran…

WAIT HANG ON - slamming the brakes on drawing this stupid picture - do you nerds even KNOW the etymology of the word “hobby”? The thing you do for pleasure? The thing you have too many of? The thing you spend too much money on and share with your friends? The thing tumblr probably is to you? Those hobbies?

It comes from a now-kind-of-extinct breed of Irish pony-horse. It was called the Irish Hobby. Supposedly the hobby got its name from the Gaelic word obann, or swift. They definitely were. They’d obann your pants clean off.

Fast tough little bastards, built for rough terrain and renowned for their speed and stamina, hobby horses belonged to the Celts, and their highly annoying style of mounted warfare. but their conquerors liked hobby horses a lot, kept them, used them for themselves, and found them useful enough, despite the fact that they also had famously useful things like mounted knights or horse archers. A lightweight Irish warrior, mounted on a hobby horse, was called a hobelar.

Reportedly and in depictions, hobelars rode without stirrups. Or saddles. Or bridles. Or - well - this is all sounding very improbable, because the hobelars COULDNT have just been charging around basically bare-assed on naked ponies, screaming, and somehow in the process undoing the composure of actual mounted armoured knights. Knights who, I remind you, had stirrups. Stirrups are useful! It’s quite likely the hobelars had some gear. And clothes. and weapons. And the ponies probably had some tack - I am picturing a bellyband that you could at least hang a saddlebag on, and a neck rope for catching the bloody thing, even if not a saddle. But the overall impression, somehow created by people on darling little ponies, was apparently quite striking and fearful.

I mean. God Forbid People Have Hobbies.

Anyway after a while, whatever people became the British had eventually conquered all of the rough terrain that hobbies were best at, and horse archers just got sexier, and mounted knights became aristos, and all the bog and forest people had been subdued, so it was time to sunset the hobelars. but WAIT! Hobby horses are still tremendously fun and appealing! They’re so fast! and you can ride them without a saddle! Sure, they’re not up to the weight of a mounted knight, or indeed a lot of guys… but surely we can still find a use for a hobby or two? In the back garden? Somewhere?

At which point an English king decided to keep hobby horses just for fun. No military application. No further development of the technology. Not for fun. Just as expensive, pleasurable, pets. Just for the joy of the thing.

And that is how hobby (activity done purely for pleasure) comes from hobby horse (small horse) possibly from obann (swift.) they’re very interesting and you should look all this up for yourself! because it sure sounds like Elodie doing a bit, doesn’t it?

Today, Irish Hobbies are functionally nonexistent. References for drawing include the Kerry Bog Pony, the Connemara, and (I personally think) Dartmoors and Exmoors. They’re said to have lent their speed to the Irish Hunter/Sport Horse and from there to the Thoroughbred, but every damn horse in the world claims relation to the Thoroughbred, and they can’t be THAT thoroughly bred.

At any rate - you can never have enough hobbies. Just be glad that yours aren’t expensive beasts with minds of their own, eating their heads off in the pasture! …Unless they are. In which case, you’re part of a proud tradition.

[hatsbuckets]

He does NOT like to talk about it.

The weeks—months—spent between pain meds and recovery after he came back from the dead.

Barely lucid for the first few weeks, and a hollowed-out man after he finally switched to lower-dose pain meds.

He remembers when they told him he was “lucky to be alive.”

Except Simon Riley has never been lucky.

Luck would’ve given him a home. Luck would’ve given him a father. Luck would’ve given him a face that doesn’t remind him every damn day of the man he loathes. Luck wouldn’t have had him crawling out of his own fucking grave and dragging himself back to life.

Luck would’ve been fantasy.

Simon Riley does not live in a fantasy.

He lives in a body that barely made it back. Knife wounds down his ribs, healing jagged. A shattered radius. Dislocated shoulder. Crushed digits. Stitches up his thigh. Two cracked vertebrae. An eye that still doesn’t always focus right in fluorescent light.

The worst part? The ache in his jaw. Not from injury—though there was that too—but from grinding his teeth night after night, just to keep the screams in.

Price had visited. Simon was never sure if it was real, or if the drugs were still puppeteering his grief into hallucination. He remembers a warm hand on his shoulder. That was real.

He remembers not crying. Only because he’d already run dry.

The anger came later. When the fog lifted. When the pain stopped being an abstract thing and started screaming in every nerve. When he realized he couldn’t tie his boots.

Couldn’t hold a fork.

Couldn’t even sign the discharge forms without his hand seizing up.

He nearly threw a chair at the wall when his pen slipped again. The physical therapist just handed him another sheet of paper. Told him to try again.

Like it was that fucking simple.

But he did. Again and again. Because the fury needed somewhere to go.

And repetition was safer than silence. His body healed, but his hands were the worst.

He started tracing letters. First his name. Then lines from books. Then nothing at all—just letters, shapes, lines.

Somewhere along the way, it got… good. Neat. Sharp. Clean block print, easy to read. And if he really focused, if he took his time—

It became beautiful.

A steady hand in ink. A small act of control in a world that had stolen everything else.

Simon Riley doesn’t like to talk about what it took to come back. He doesn’t talk about the way rage nearly drowned him. Or the way he still checks every lock twice. Or how he sometimes wakes up clutching at fingers that no longer hurt, just to make sure they’re still there.

But the handwriting stays.

On gear manifests. On margin notes. Initials. Coordinates.

Sometimes letters.

He’d written them to Price as practice, as part of the therapy—physical and mental, he now realizes.

He still writes them today. Habitual. Short notes, mostly.

Mostly—always—to Price.

But eventually he slides one under Johnny’s door. He couldn’t tell you what he wrote. Doesn’t remember. Something gentler than he'd have ever said out loud at the time, probably.

And soon after, Kyle gets them too. Appreciation. Praise. Anything Simon can give, even if he might never speak the words into the air.

There exists a note to his family—to his mum and Tommy. It sits at the bottom of his desk drawer, forever sealed.

He does NOT like to talk about it. Those months spent in agony.

He probably won’t ever talk about them now.

But maybe he’ll write something.

a/n: I just think he would have pretty handwriting and I could write a whole essay on why. like wdym this tortured man wouldn't come back and find that this is something he has the max amount of control over (other than when he realizes how much control he has over himself (see: non-existent essay on Simon having the MOST control over himself out of the 141 because discipline, trauma, and dog-motif.)) started at this headcanon post if you care