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cr: 百变花央

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If You Abide With Me

Art by @artgroves

Story by ZairaA

Fandom: The Old Guard

Rating: Explicit

Wordcount: 33 k and complete

Relationships: Joe/Nicky

Tags: Different First Meeting, Historical, Angst and Feels, Catholic Guilt, Hurt/Comfort, Language Barrier, Cultural Misunderstandings, Secrets, Unresolved Sexual Tension, Forbidden Love, First Time, Romance, Sexual Inexperience, Canon-Typical Violence, Religious Bigotry, Temporary Character Death, Happy Ending

Summary:

Nicolò’s path has always been clear. As the third son he would become a monk and dedicate his life to the service of God. Nicolò has come to accept that, but when a mysterious stranger is washed up on shore and placed into his care, Nicolò has to fight with the temptation of everything he never knew he could want: companionship, friendship and maybe even more.

Read it on Ao3

NOW FINISHED AND WITH MORE AMAZING ART!!!

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Grandmas were so right about puzzles and knitting and crocheting and solitaire and reading slow and slippers and baking and watching deer in the backyard send post

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Reason #1,324,789 of why I love this show.

This was a casual side conversation between Bashir and Sisko about a fellow crew member, completely unrelated to the episode’s plot, and its just so sweet.

It’s nice to know that if you’re a pregnant father-to-be on DS9, your buddies Julian and Miles will build you a hatchling pond, buy you baby clothes, and throw you a shower eagerly attended by the station’s commanding officer (who was practically beaming with joy when he found out that you were expecting).

How wonderful.

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Tonight I choose not to start fights with posters freaked out over how big moose are about how horses are even bigger.

But I’m just saying: an average horse is about the same weight as an average moose.

A draft horse is like two moose.

You sheeple need to be more afraid of horses.

You are people, and you are sheep, and both people and sheep are much smaller than horses. This is just science.

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i have this unnerving fear that i’m gonna meet keanu reeves in some tight elevator and his eyes are going to burn into my soul as he tells me the secrets of this universe then bites me on the neck to give me immortality so he’s not alone anymore

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ADORABLE AND THE DIRECT LINK WORKS

Hey y’all! Two things: 

1. Time for a free pattern! I reached another follower milestone and am using it as an attempt to force my brain to focus on sharing a pattern lol. What pattern should I share? You can request a specific pattern I’ve made before if there’s one you’ve had your eye on, or if there’s a general preference between sewing and crocheting I can go through my notebooks to list all the options for that craft 2. what pattern should I design next? Bear 2.0 will be done tomorrow (probably) and Bear 3.0 has to wait until my safety eyes arrive in the mail, so I need to pick what to make next. I’m thinking either a slug or a snake, but a lion is also an option (or I could take a brief break from pattern designing to make baby minotaur a grim reaper costume)

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Okay, I don’t know how true this is - but this is huge fucking news.

I’ve been saying this for a while now, but Disney, Amazon and co. are trying to return to the studio system of the old Hollywood days that got - rightly - discontinued in the 1960s. Those were the days when each studio owned their own cinemas that could only stream their movies, where they owned actors who could only play in their movies (unless hired out by others) - and that led to people like Judy Garland, Marilyn Monroe etc. literally being owned by studios that fed them non stop pills and driven to overdose.

That’s the end point. That’s not the point we’re at now. But you’ll notice that in the last 3 or 4 years, every major production company now has a streaming platform. Much like up until the late 1960s in America, you can only see movies on company-owned platforms. This, with Johansson, is a huge step further - the largest production company in the world - who breached contract, not the other way around - are now essentially blacklisting Johansson from working with them for speaking out against them. Sure, this isn’t a blacklist on the level of the red and lavender scares - but if they can do this to Johansson, the biggest actor in the world, it sets a huge fucking precedent for blacklisting anybody who stands up for workers’ rights.

It also sees Disney - and other companies will follow suit, as they always do - moving a step closer to owning their stars. What Disney is trying to say is that Disney and Johansson are not equal partners in the contract, but that Disney has the ultimate say over everything. This idea that the contract is a formality is absolutely fucked, because it means that artists have no rights under the corporations, and if they want to continue to work they have to obey. Nobody is signing exclusive contracts yet, but you bet this is reverting to Judy Garland times. 

We are not going forwards. The movie industry is going backwards to the days of Louis B. Mayer (and it’s capitalism’s fault) and we all need to boost the fuck out of this. The courts will handle the Disney case - but we must support ScarJo (I say as very much a non ScarJo fan) and make sure that she continues to have a career after this, to set the precedent that audiences will not stand for future blacklisting.

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Gather ‘round kids: I had a coworker mention to me this morning that it’s impossible to get grease stains out of fabric. As a former chemistry minor who worked two years under the table doing housekeeping and who generally tends to be a fucking disaster, I am here to tell everyone that it absolutely is not impossible, in case this is a widespread belief. Here are a few of my favorite cleaning stain removers that I always have at home.

Here are some options:

A Tide™ pen.

I’m a generic kinda lady. I hate promoting brands 99% of the time. BUT if you catch absolutely any kind of stain before it gets ground in, you can get most of it out with one of these babies. I’ve tested it on blood, chocolate, coffee, guacamole, pizza sauce, red wine on, on that one time i accidentally slopped some oil I was supposed to be using on antiques onto a fancy rug (also an antique but not the one I was gunning for). If you’re washing something delicate, pump it onto your finger a couple of times and gently rub it in. I’m not sure what they put in these things but I’m pretty sure it’s an arcane secret.

Dish soap

Granted, this is a little trickier for upholstery/carpet, but it can still be done using a rag, some water, and some patience. But for clothing, just pour some soap on the stain and rub it in under cold running water.

Absolutely any clear alcohol is your new best friend

You know the old “white wine to clean red” trick? Well, this is its updated sister I like to call “you, too, can use coconut rum to get red jello shot out of your nice white dress”. It’s a nice party trick. Straight vodka works even better. For every day situations involving any kind of alcohol-related spills (including markers)–and especially work situations–rubbing alcohol is ideal. To quote another adage, this one from every chemistry teacher you will ever meet, “like dissolves like.”

Hydrogen Peroxide

It can get blood out of absolutely anything, including your mattress. It reacts with the iron in hemoglobin, which breaks down the molecule, causing it to lose its red color. So make sure you’re not using a cast iron skillet to wash your period underwear in.

Vinegar

This will dissolve lime buildup overnight. Fill a bag, tie it around your showerhead, and presto. You can also use it to scrub the area around your sink and to break up any buildup in pipes. (Limeaway™ is for rich people.) 

Baking soda

This is great if you have a pet or child who peed on the carpet. Just cover the area, wait until it dries, and vacuum it up. The longer you leave it, the better it will do at removing the smell. It’s also good removing mild odors from a small space, like a fridge or a laundry hamper. 

Charcoal

This is your heavy duty odor killer. A little goes a long way. In chemistry, activated charcoal is used as a purifier in reactions, and in medicine, it can be used to treat mild poisoning/overdoses. In your car that smells like someone died because you forgot you had potatoes in the trunk for six months? All you need are regular old charcoal briquettes. Stick a couple handfuls in a flat box and the smell will be gone overnight. Guaranteed. For larger areas, just use more charcoal.

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this was funnier in my head

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What if we started actively disincentivizing landlords letting real estate stay empty rather than renting at reasonable prices? Like, give them a maximum of three months to get a new tenant in, and then they start accumulating fines for the unused space.

And some similar system to disincentivize the ridiculous airbnb market as well. Make it unprofitable to have homes sitting empty in a city where people with jobs find themselves living in tents. Hell, make it unprofitable to have homes sitting empty anywhere that has a homelessness problem.

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To be fair, changing your mind about where a story’s going based on reader predictions isn’t always bad. Sure, it’s not great if you’re all “oh, no, they figured it out, now I have to change everything because my readers aren’t allowed to be cleverer than me” – but on the other hand, sometimes a reader will be like “okay, here’s the dumbest possible way I can imagine this playing out”, and then their dumbest possible prediction is exactly what you’re planning, and you realise that yeah, now that you’ve seen it laid out by someone who isn’t the voice in your head, that’s actually super dumb.

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Problem: I love to knit socks especially as an on-the-go project, but only two people in my life actually like to wear them. And neither of those people want the really girly silly colors I have in my stash right now.

Solution: Make some for myself, maybe?

I do live in New England so actual real wool socks would be well used. However, I have not loved the fit of previous socks I’ve made for myself. They always get too loose with wear and get baggy and uncomfortable.

But! The last ones I tried for myself were literal years ago, and I’ve made at least a dozen other pairs since then. I’m going to try again with the smallest needles I have (2.25 mm) and a very tight amount of stitches, the tightest I can get while still being able to get it on. I’m going to do ribbing down the entire sock and maybe a fancy bottom, haven’t decided yet. It’ll be a good airplane project while I travel to see family.

ANYWAY y’all will see photos of my boyfriend’s birthday socks after his birthday because the bastard follows me here. Love till then

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Here’s one good thing to come out of 2020:

Paleontologists completed a life-sized replica of Sue, the most complete T. Rex ever found.

And she is freaking GORGEOUS!

As I read more about this beauty, I found out some new details regarding things I thought I previously knew about the beast that was Tyrannosaurus Rex, and I’m going to share them with you.

First, and most obvious, her size:

This is nothing new, we all figured T. Rex was big, but I for one never stopped to consider exactly how big it was. Nobody ever really knows what to imagine when they read about something the size of a whale that walked around and ate everything it could kill. 

Speaking of eating things, I just want to remind you all that T. Rex had–by miles–the strongest bite of any terrestrial animal living or dead, somewhere around six and a half tons of force. That’s over six times greater than the current estimate of what Allosaurus was capable of, and three times what was delivered by the highest measured reading of the living title holder–the estuarine crocodile. It didn’t have to waste time swinging its head open-mouthed like Saurophaganax for a little extra oomph, or grow fancy serrated teeth like Carcharodontosaurus to cut pieces out of its prey. It opted for the simplest approach: get its mouth around something and crush it to death; imagine the full weight of an elephant on whatever was between this thing’s jaws.

“How did it find something to eat?” I hear you asking. “It can’t see something if it doesn’t move, right?”

Listen, I love Jurassic Park too, but that’s a big crock of shit.

Notice how both her eyes face forward. That gives her binocular vision (the ability to focus both eyes on one target, like you and I). More importantly it means she has impeccable depth perception due to overlapping fields of vision from each, large, eyeball. Researchers agree that T. Rex not only had incredible vision, but that it was probably better than most modern animals–including eagles, hawks, and owls–and that she could likely spot something three and a half miles away. If something that big can see that well, it doesn’t matter if you move or not, she’d be able to tell if it was an animal trying to hide or a piece of vegetation. So pray she isn’t hungry if she lays eyes on you. And even if by some miracle she didn’t see you, she’d still smell you. 

If she decided you looked tasty, you probably wouldn’t hear her coming as much as you’d feel her. Modern science indicates that T. Rex didn’t roar like in Jurassic Park, but rather bellowed or maybe even hissed like crocodilians. If she were on to you, you’d most likely feel this sense of unease creep up your spine as a low-pitched rumble in the air permeated through you. You wouldn’t know what it was or where it was coming from until you hear her footfalls. By then it’s too late–you could try to run but she’d probably catch you. There’s plenty on YouTube that reconstructs what T. Rex may have sounded like, and it’s legitimately haunting.  

To wrap all of this up, the one bit of good that came out of the cursed year that is 2020 is that this wonderful child of science and art came into the world, and reaffirmed my respect and admiration for the eight ton slab of muscle and teeth that is this magnificent creature.

…and it is nothing if not magnificent.