zaebosdemon

[zaebosdemon]

I saw a sign at a nearby village advertising a "veillée", a storytelling evening, which sounded intriguing, so I went out of curiosity—it turned out to be an old lady who had arranged a circle of chairs in her garden and prepared drinks, and who wanted to tell folk tales and stories from her youth. Apparently she was telling someone at the market the other day that she missed the ritual of the "veillée" from pre-television days, when people would gather in the evening and tell stories, and the people she was talking to were like, well let's do a veillée! And then she put up the sign.

About 15 people came, and she sat down and started telling us stories—I loved the way she made everything sound like it had happened just yesterday and she was there, even tales she'd got from her grandmother, and the way she continually assumed we knew all the people she mentioned, and everyone spontaneously played along; she'd be like "And Martin, the bonesetter—you know Martin," (everyone nods—of course, Martin) "We never liked him much" and everyone nodded harder, our collective distaste for Martin now a shared cultural heritage of our tiny microcosm. She started with telling us the story of the communal bread oven in the village. The original oven was destroyed during the Revolution; people used to pay to use the local aristocrat's oven, but of course around 1789 both the aristocrat and his oven were disposed of in a glorious blaze of liberty, equality, and complete lack of foresight.

Then the villagers felt really daft for having destroyed a perfectly serviceable oven that they could have now started using for free. "But you know what things were like during the revolution." (Everyone nodded sagely—who among us hasn't demolished our one and only source of bread-baking equipment in a fit of revolutionary zeal?)

The village didn't have a bread oven for decades, people travelled to another village to make bread; and then in the 19th century the village council finally voted to build a new oven. It was a communal endeavour, everyone pitched in with some stones or tools or labour, and the oven was built—but it collapsed immediately after the construction was finished. Consternation. Not to be deterred, people re-built the oven, with even more effort and care—and the second one also collapsed.

People realised that something was amiss, and the village council convened. After a lot of serious discussion, during which no one so much as mentioned the possibility of a structural flaw, people reached the only logical conclusion: the drac had sabotaged their oven. Twice. (The drac, in these parts, is the son of the devil.) The logic here, I suppose, was that no one but the devil's own child would dare to stand between French people and their bread.

The next step was even more obvious: they passed around a hat to raise money, assuming the devil’s son was after a cash donation. But (and I'm skipping a few twists and turns of the story here) the son of the devil did not want money, he wanted half of every batch of bread, for as long as the village oven stood. Consternation.

People simply could not afford to give away half of their bread, and were about to abandon the idea of having their own oven altogether—but then Saint Peter came to the rescue. (In case you didn't know, Saint Peter happens to regularly visit this one tiny village in the French countryside to check that its inhabitants are doing okay and are not encountering oven issues.) Saint Peter reminded them of one precious piece of information they had overlooked: holy water burns the devil.

People re-built the oven, for the third time. The son of the devil returned, to destroy it and/or claim his half of the first batch—but on that day, the villagers had organised a grand communal spring cleaning, dousing every street and alley in the village with copious amounts of holy water. The poor drac simply could not access the oven; every possible path scorched his feet for reasons he couldn't quite explain. So he was standing there, smouldering gently and wondering what was going on, when some passing tramp seemed to take pity on him, pointed at his satchel and told him to turn himself into a rat and jump in there, and the tramp would carry him where he wished to go. The devil's son, probably a bit frazzled at this point, agreed without much thought, became a rat and jumped in the satchel, and of course that's the point when everyone in the village sprang from the shadows, wielding sticks, shovels, pans, and started beating the devil's son senseless. (Old lady, calmly: "You could hear his bones crack.") So the son of Satan slithered back to Hell and never returned to destroy the village oven again—and the spring cleaning tradition endured; the streets were washed with holy water once a year after that, both to commemorate this glorious day of civic resistance when the village absolutely bodied the devil's offspring and to maintain basic oven safety standards. (Old lady: "But we don't bother anymore… That's too bad.")

She told us five stories, most of them artfully blending actual local events or anecdotes from her youth with folk tale elements, it was so delightful. She thanked us for coming and said she'd love to do this again sometime. I went home reflecting that listening to an old lady happily tell stories of dubious historical veracity involving the Revolution, property damage, demonic mischief and baffling municipal decision-making is literally my ideal Saturday night activity.

[zaebosdemon]

Farmers Market

[zaebosdemon]

enough about the timeloop I wanna hear about the post-timeloop.

person who just got over the horror of being trapped and settled into a comfortable routine...but then the timeloop breaks and they struggle to reacclimatize. person trapped in a loop for years who grieved their loved ones—who are suddenly back and acting like nothing happened (because for them nothing did). teenager who aged physically and mentally during the timeloop and now they're so much older than they're supposed to be. random strangers who were trapped in a loop together relieved to get away from each other at last, but feeling oddly bereft of familiar company. service worker who is pissed as fuck to have to go back to work

[zaebosdemon]

one off gag from my notes

[zaebosdemon]

man, I love this character so much! [fills them with a deep and inescapable yearning which they don’t know how to fill or even name]

[zaebosdemon]

Hey so ynow how in dunmeshi teleporting someone is actually extremely dangerous bc if someone else happens to be where they’re being teleported to, that random person will just. explode. …anyway on an unrelated note, does anyone ever think about how in the very beginning of the story, Falin teleports the entire party to the surface, where people can’t be revived.

[zaebosdemon]

Reach WITH IN To your LOCAL bog and you may find A Friend And Boy…

[zaebosdemon]

I was just talking to Ahmed @90-ghost (alongside Av, who might be reading this, idk if they’d like to be part of this post tho). He has given me permission to write a post about our conversation.

This whole thing has gotten Ahmed to the point where he admits he’s started to hate tumblr after 12 years of being on here. He has over 3k messages in his inbox and can’t handle it right now, his brother and other family members are still in Gaza and he himself doesn’t have the money to help them out. I’ve noticed that donations have slowed among palestinian fundraisers in general, before this whole debacle that a few individuals on this site started. this is anecdotal, but I know Ahmed gets like $30-$50 per week in donations at this point, and that barely makes a dent in his and his family’s needs. Remember that people in Gaza need to pay massively inflated prices for what basic necessities are available right now. I think things are looking pretty dire to the people who would like to flee Gaza but don’t have the money. It already was dire that Egyptian government, working in lockstep with Israel and the west, charges $5k+ to Ghazzawis. Hala Agency, Ibrahim Al-Argani, and the other scumbags running the Egyptian state are all demons and they’ve lined their pockets throughout this genocide. But I digress—it was dire already and now the enthusiastic aid that helped people like Ahmed seems to have run dry.

All that is to say: Ahmed can’t continue to verify peoples’ documents or promote their fundraisers at this stage. He’s privately talked to hundreds of Ghazzawis and looked at their IDs, and he was the only person doing it for a while (a very small handful of other Palestinian users on here were doing it, but they’ve also gotten overwhelmed and stopped). When he was in Gaza, Ahmed was displaced multiple times, left sleeping in tents or on the streets while in active physical danger, starving, forced to drink unsafe water, and often sick. It’s not an exaggeration to say that his body and mind have been pushed to the limit. When he told me he’s depressed all day after doing this work while attracting a ton of negativity, I told him he’s allowed to stop for the sake of his own health, because frankly he needs to focus on his physical recovery. There’s nothing selfish about that, it’s not sustainable for him to be doing this, particularly not when he’s still under the immense stress of his brother and other relatives remaining in Gaza and relying on him for help.

Since I know people will ask: I currently don’t know of anyone on tumblr who still vets fundraisers. Everyone I know of who did has had to stop. I don’t know about the inner workings of Operation Olive Branch, but they seem to be one of a few collectives with enough members to distribute this work. It IS work, and those of us who have tried to do it have done so with a low failure rate (el-shab-hussein and nabulsi’s spreadsheet had over 200 entries and they misidentified a scam as legitimate ONCE). I hope everyone will be more considerate towards the people at collectives like OOB.

This has always been a matter of personal discretion. The vetting process some users tried to implement on here is meant to help people who want to help and accept the risk of offering aid to strangers. If you don’t trust bloggers who’ve been proudly Palestinian on this site for years, that’s up to you—genuinely, it’s fair to think “I don’t know this person and I don’t know what standards they’re operating on.” In the future, anyone who has such concerns should consider asking good-faith questions to the people involved and to converse with them like adults before jumping to accusations, conspiratorial posts, etc.

[zaebosdemon]

So sick of dog motif what about cat motif.

I love you but we don't love the same. I can't be near you when you want me to be. Your love is smothering and your need to keep me safe is trapping me. I'm my own person but I don't know how to show you that. I lash out and hurt you even though I don't mean to. I need you to move slowly around me or I'll bolt. I love you, even though I don't say it. If you stay still I'll sit next to you, and even though we don't understand each other we can be together like that.

[zaebosdemon]

“no one’s ever mad at me unless they tell me so” is the best assumption i’ve ever made

[zaebosdemon]

And speaking of Sophia Tolstoy, her diaries are just so depressing. 

“I am to gratify his pleasure and nurse his child, I am a piece of household furniture, I am a woman. I try to suppress all human feelings. When the machine is working properly it heats the milk, knits a blanket, makes little requests and bustles about trying not to think […].“

She wrote this when she was 19, one year into her marriage to Leo and as she was pregnant with the first of his 13 children.

A few years later, when she was 25 or so:

“I am so often alone with my thoughts that the need to write in my diary comes quite naturally … Now I am well again and not pregnant—it terrifies me how often I have been in that condition. He said that for him being young meant “I can achieve anything”. For me […] reason tells me that there is nothing I either want or can do beyond nursing, eating, drinking, sleeping, and loving and caring for my husband and babies, all of which I know is happiness of a kind, but why do I feel so woeful all the time, and weep as I did yesterday? I am writing this now with the pleasantly exciting sense that nobody will ever read it, so I can be quite frank with myself […].“

During her 12th pregnancy she wrote about taking scalding baths and jumping from high pieces of furniture to try and miscarry.  And at one point while reading her husband’s diary (which he told her to read) she found the sentence “There is no such thing as love, only the physical need for intercourse and the practical need for a life companion.” In her own diary she wrote “They ebb and flow like waves, these times when I realise how lonely I am and want only to cry…”

A few years before her husband’s death, she published a cycle of prose poems titled “Groans”, under the pseudonym “A Tired Woman”.

[zaebosdemon]

I think that Izutsumi and Mithrun would be friends but they're the kind of friends who sit in dead silence for three hours and aren't even entirely sure of each other's names. Izutsumi gives Mithrun the foods she doesn't like and he eats them without question, but then he says something completely out-of-pocket about the legal ramifications of free beastkin (which is out of date by thirty years anyway) and Izutsumi scratches the shit out of his arm and the next day they're back to being best buds. Izutsumi is the one who does "he asked for no pickles!" even though he did NOT ask for no pickles she just wants to steal his burger.

[zaebosdemon]

moss piglet

[zaebosdemon]

''Useless'' Writing Reminders

Save your documents. Strive to be safe, not sorry.

Back-up your documents. Strive to be safe, not sorry.

Placeholder names can quickly turn into forever names. Picking name(s) on a whim can lead to great things, or it can become your worst nightmare (😁).

Your writing has value. Yes, even the most inadequate of writing. You don't have to boast or even like everything you've ever written, but even the most questionable of writing will have contributed to your growth as a storyteller. Cherish it for what it is.

You can take a break. It is absolutely okay.

First drafts are scary. But you know what's more scary? Not having a draft at all.

Using clichés or ''overdone'' tropes will not kill your story. Firstly, tropes are building blocks. Secondly, humans actively search to consume stories revolving around these tropes.

Write your heart out. Boast about your writing. Boast about your friends' and fellow writers' writing. Everyone deserves recognition, even you, from within your own heart. (Sorry. That's really cheesy. But it's true).

[zaebosdemon]

Getting inspired to write is actually really easy! All you need to do is be the busiest you've ever been in your entire life and as far away from a computer as humanly possible. Hope this helps 🥰

[zaebosdemon]

meet the messiest drinker (sound on)

[source]

[zaebosdemon]