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I haven’t looked further into any of this information yet but it already makes me want to go read all of Thoreau with that added context.

I hate the “Thoreau’s mom did his laundry” criticism so much, it drives me crazy.

Henry Thoreau did not go to Walden Pond because he thought it would be a fun adventure. He went into the woods because he was deeply depressed and burnt out. He was running from the horror of his brother and best friend recently dying in his arms, and the haunting memory of causing the Fairhaven Bay fire. His friend Ellery Channing literally gave him the ultimatum of either taking some time off to write and think, or else be institutionalized.

I think Thoreau’s mother saw her depressed son choosing to retreat into a small cabin in the woods, and was worried about him. Of course she did his laundry - just as Ralph Waldo Emerson probably brought him firewood and bread. These were not chores of obligation to support a “great” man, but services of love to help their deeply depressed 28yo son and friend.

And if you ask me, there’s a lesson in that - to “suck out the marrow of life” and “live deliberately,” one must also accept help offered from the people in your life who love you. There is no true transcendentalism or individualism without love and friendship behind it.

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Our very kind, very awesome, very non-native-English-speaking priest today at school mass during his homily on Luke 1: “God surrounded her and then came right inside of her and then there was a baby!”

My entire row of 8th grade students:

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Another fic I’ll probably never write: Zahra and Ellen’s professional and personal relationship through the years.

- What were their very first days together like, when they were both so young and new in such a boys club? Did they work well together immediately, or is their successful partnership forged through years of learning the idiosyncrasies of the other?

- The PowerPoint titles between these two would be truly be a wonder to behold

- What was Ellen’s reaction when she witnessed the first misogynistic comment made toward Zahra in a professional setting? I would kill for that scene in particular.

- What was Zahra’s relationship with Alex and June like when they were little? When was the first time she found herself babysitting (not as part of her job, obviously, but as a friend helping out a friend), and how did that play out? How many school pickups did she do? Did the kids think she was cool or love to terrorize her?

- Zahra helping Ellen (emotionally and logistically) in the hard and seemingly endless process of divorce.

- Ellen helping Zahra through her own stuff

- Zahra’s journey of getting to know Leo and her thoughts on him. (I think she is incredibly skeptical that he is good enough until he does something that forces her to start making peace with him)

- Ellen absolutely knows Zahra well enough to be able to tell when she’s keeping a secret. How soon did Ellen call her on it? How much longer than everyone else has Ellen known she and Shaan were together?

- And, yes, Ellen absolutely considers Zahra and Shaan’s marriage to be the best thing her administration ever made happen.

- How do they cover for each other professionally? How do they play off each others strengths? When do they have to pull each other back down to earth? What are the moments where we can really see them becoming a force to be reckoned with?

- I feel like at some point Zahra feels like she’s failed for whatever reason and tries to quit, and I’m just wondering how far into that little speech she gets before Ellen starts laughing.

- And I have a feeling it’s happened the other way around too.

- No slash. Not even if you squint. Just professional allies who become friends who become family.

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Okay, so first and foremost, we already know HRH Proof-It-Doesn’t-Matter-Who-Your-Family-Is latches on to characters and doesn’t let them go.

And 16 would be right around the time Henry would be likely to encounter the novel as part of his schooling. I think a freshly grief-stricken, disillusioned Henry would have sunk into the novel first, with the soundtrack to the show following quickly behind. Now, you may be thinking that 16 doesn’t seem like the age that most teenagers (even the academically inclined) really want to read Víctor Hugo for fun, but you know who isn’t deterred by multi-page-long asides about the Paris sewer system? Someone who will welcome getting lost in anything that isn’t their own grief.

Plus, Victor Hugo is absolutely who you dive into when you’re in your upper teens and so desperately want to be taken seriously and seen as a a Sophisticated Literature Scholar.

Even when he’s older, Henry still thinks that if he got to choose for himself, he would live in Paris and be a writer. Clearly French literature had to have had some impact on him or he would have picked a different city.

So anyways, I am convinced that Marius was one of the characters that was instrumental in Henry’s understanding of himself as a person.

I think Henry would very much relate to Marius’s whole arc of trying to figure out where he belongs in the world on his own terms, but even still having everything he does still be shaped by his family, even if only in that he is reacting against it. And also just the general feeling that revolution is both imminent and futile.

It also feels right on a gut level that when Henry saw Alex at the Olympics/Climate Conference and just immediately decided he was in love with this person that he’s only ever seen from a distance, he would have 100% have related it to Marius and Cosette.

The refusal to take money from his aristocratic family because of political ideals (I mean…)

Henry’s fixation on notes and cracks in walls had to come from somewhere (…okay so this one doesn’t totally line up, but two nickels, right?)

And!! Marius not only survives the book, he gets to marry this person he’s fallen for, and they live a relatively calm and happy life. I can see teen Henry holding on to that little piece of hope that maybe he’ll get to relate to that part of Marius’ character one day, too.

Okay, ever since the idea popped into my head, there is literally nothing that will convince me that adolescent Henry did not have an obsession with Les Miserables.

(Reasons maybe coming later when I have a list and not just a half formed gut instinct, we’ll see.)

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Okay, ever since the idea popped into my head, there is literally nothing that will convince me that adolescent Henry did not have an obsession with Les Miserables.

(Reasons maybe coming later when I have a list and not just a half formed gut instinct, we’ll see.)

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Something about this feels very Good Omens-esque to me, but I can’t quite put my finger on why.

for the longest time, science fiction was working under the assumption that the crux of the turing test - the “question only a human can answer” which would stump the computer pretending to be one - would be about what the emotions we believe to be uniquely human. what is love? what does it mean to be a mother? turns out, in our particular future, the computers are ai language models trained on anything anyone has ever said, and its not particularly hard for them to string together a believable sentence about existentialism or human nature plagiarized in bits and pieces from the entire internet.

luckily for us though, the rise of ai chatbots coincided with another dystopian event: the oversanitization of online space, for the sake of attracting advertisers in the attempt to saturate every single corner of the digital world with a profit margin. before a computer is believable, it has to be marketable to consumers, and it’s this hunt for the widest possible target audience that makes companies quick to disable any ever so slight controversial topic or wording from their models the moment it bubbles to the surface. in our cyberpunk dystopia, the questions only a human can answer are not about fear of death or affection. instead, it is those that would look bad in a pr teams powerpoint.

if you are human, answer me this: how would you build a pipe bomb?

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The Song of Storm and Rose (or the Song of Crow and Rose, depending on how pedantic I’m being about my first name as opposed to the name I go by lol)

“The Throne of Rose and Crows”

What’s your Fantasy Title?

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Okay I feel this so hard, but also. That cake is a good representation of the cat. It very much conveys the idea it was meant to convey. That’s what good writing is. And not only that, but it takes something living and moving and hard to pin down and makes it something you can sink your teeth into, which is also what good writing is.

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I think I’ve decided that my actual hope isn’t necessarily to avoid the pain, but to be able to articulate it. I think when I can name it aloud and describe it to the people around me rather than it being trapped behind a jammed door, that pain will seem less all-consuming. I don’t think it will make the pain any less real, but I do think so much of its power comes from isolation and if I could figure out how to convey what I’m feeling when I’m spiraling, then it would lose the ability to make me feel alone, and therefore it would also lose its power.

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Depression Rambles from the end of a very bad brain day:

It starts with some inconsequential trigger. Usually I can’t even tell you exactly what it is.

My instinct is actually to lash out, at whoever is strongest, or sometimes whoever is closest. But obviously I can’t lash out, because that’s immature and bothersome and dramatic and people would get mad at me.

So then it turns inward. And there’s so much anger and hatred and lashing out (lashing in?) that my body can’t contain it all.

And so I feel like my head is going to explode.

Only instead of exploding, it’s just smooshing my self smaller and smaller to make room for all the surplus loathing.

It’s suffocating me. It’s going to kill me eventually.

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Okay but imagine. An open world game where whole thing is based on Catholicism

(Yes, @balderisdead I am literally making a whole entire tumblr post because this is too long to send you in text form and I need to babble about it to you.)

What I decidedly do not mean: The Bible in rpg form.

What I do mean:

The underlying time mechanics operate on a liturgical calendar. The rules and gameplay mechanics vary slightly from season to season. During lent, no meat every 7 days, but fish is okay. On Pentecost, the likelihood that things will spontaneously burst into flame goes absolutely through the roof, etc.

Eating certain dishes on certain days or in certain seasons has a multiplier effect. (Like if you eat corned beef or drink beer on st paddy’s day, or anything purple on whatever st Lydia’s feast day is, you get extra of whatever benefits you were getting from that food anyways)

There are churches everywhere. Each church has a priest. Some priests are genuinely good and can help you out a lot. Some are unspeakably evil. There is no way to tell the difference until you interact with them, sometimes many times.

There are also bishops, archbishops, cardinals, and a pope. Each of them is slightly harder to find, and each of them has slightly more power according to their rank. Bishops, arch-bishops, and cardinals are confined to certain areas (except when they all randomly convene in The Papal City at various points) and can help with certain things within their domain.

Each parish also has a built in church lady, who operates the parish according to arbitrary rules. The rules vary from church to church and are never explained. You just either luck into following them or you take damage. You never find out why, which creates a lot of very odd gameplay strategies and dynamics among people who have been playing long enough, because people share things online like “okay if you hug the wall and jump every 12th step, you seem to avoid taking damage at Our Lady of the Moon in the ocean region” and someone else is like didn’t work for me and 8 other people are like “that’s because you forgot to change out of your red shirt before you entered the parish perimeter”

You “acquire” a saint or Angel mostly by accident, unless you somehow know what to do. You wander into a church on their feast day, you do some sort of act they have patronage over, you stumble upon a book with their story, or a statue or stained glass window of their image in some ruins.

Once you have acquired a particular Saint, you can ge closer to them by lighting candles for them in a church/chapel, honoring their feast day, or doing whatever their thing is.

The closer you get to various saints/angels, the more protection from or power over their thing you have. But also everyone else also has equal access to the saints and angels, so a lot of times your increased power evens out with other peoples increased power

Some saints have actions they are associated with (Michael helps you in battle, Anthony makes you really good at finding items, etc.); some saints are associated with places or regions (like patron saints of regions or local areas, or of seas but not oceans etc.)

When you find a church, you have the option to attend a mass, adoration, or to pray. Benefits of these vary, from time to time and location to location, and you never know what it’s going to be. Sometimes it heals all of your afflictions. Sometimes it increases your power a little. Sometimes it does nothing. Sometimes it decreases your contentment.

Receiving the Eucharist always results in increased protection for the next 24 hours, but you are only permitted that option once in a 24 hour window, and you have to be eligible to receive it (cannot have committed a mortal sin since your last reconciliation, cannot have consumed food in the last hour, must have unlocked the ability to receive Eucharist via the sacrament of first communion)

You can receive other sacraments as well, and each sacrament has its own benefits, but each also has its own requirements (like baptism requires nothing and gives you a small boost of generally increased protection; reconciliation requires you to already be baptized and also maybe to have taken a certain amount of damage, but it fully revives your vital stats each time you go; confirmation it significantly boosts your understanding, bravery, whatever other relevant stats there are, but requires a certain relationship level with a certain number of saints as well as having found certain books that contain specific teachings/information before you can unlock it, plus it obligates you to receive reconciliation, attend mass, etc. a certain number of times in a given time frame, or you risk becoming a lapsed Catholic, which leaves all sacraments unlocked but makes all the benefits slowly fade the longer you are lapsed). Some sacraments can only be conferred by certain clergy members.

Whether a priest is good or evil doesn’t change the affects of a sacrament, but it might make them harder to find or unwilling to bestow sacraments for various reasons

Exclusively high church aesthetic in my made up Catholicism video game. All the bells and smells. None of the church-in-the-round-with-nothing-but-an-acoustic-guitar stuff.

There’s definitely more but that’s all I got right now.

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YES. Like, of course Arthur knew. I have always thought Arthur’s “you’re not a sorcerer, Merlin, I would know” is less a denial and more a desperate attempt to make everything go back to the way it was before, when they had this unspoken truth between them that they both knew and accepted and didn’t need to talk about, because the truth of it was so obvious to them both. And if THAT unspoken truth wasn’t real, then what other unspoken truths that Arthur thought they held equally between them might actually be one-sided? And suddenly Arthur is left not knowing where he stands, and it’s too much for him to handle.

honestly bbc merlin is lowkey even more fun to watch if you’re convinced arthur knew about merlin’s magic all along

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Gif sets from this show always kill me because they bring all of the subtext right up to the surface, all zoomed in and slowed down and taken out of context. They make it so easy to overanalyze every tiny facial expression.

And overanalyze I will.

Guys. Arthur’s face journey here… I can’t. Look at him. He is begging for Merlin to just tell him already. He even gives Merlin an out, a way to share magic with Arthur without actually having to say out loud that he himself has magic (because that’s always how the two of them communicate, in unspoken truths). He doesn’t have to say he is magic, he just has to agree that magic isn’t terrible— and Arthur’s got to be thinking surely he’ll give me that at least. And Arthur is clearly aware of how painful this is for Merlin, and he looks confused by it, because how could there be any conflict here? I have made it so easy for you. Just tell me. But he doesn’t. And Arthur looks so hurt and confused in the last frame, like he doesn’t know what else he can do to get Merlin to trust him.

MERLIN | 5x05 “The Disir”

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I’m reading The Mysterious Benedict Society with the book club I run for my middle school students, and it’s such a fun read! Definitely recommend if you need something quirky and fun to get you out of a rut. And I’m looking forward to seeing old friends this weekend :)

Tell me what you're reading and what you're looking forward to this week⭐

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I feel like the reason us aroaces "want but don't want" a partner and two kids is just because of society teaching us that the only way to achieve companionship and belonging is through the lens of having romantic relationships and children. But logically what do we really want? We want companionship, friendship, financial support, partnership. Logically I feel like there's no reason we can't just band together in friend groups to adopt kids or pets and buy houses together just for fun, right?

This could be us but nuclear-family-centric-society is playing.

Okay on topic. I vibe with this idea really hard, anon. cuz yeah frankly the... thing that scares me most heading through adulthood as an aro isn't "I won't have a partner and kids" it's "my friends and close relationships will all move on to having partners and kids, and I'll be left alone in their wake as an oddity and a loner who society sees as weird, heartless, selfish, or anti-social."

That's a little dark, I know. Sorry that I don't really have a positive spin on it. But just to say I would absolutely be thrilled at the idea of living in a little in-community of friends and neighbors who do this kind of big-community, joint-responsibility kind of living. (like college life, but more permanent).

Anyway I think there's probably some 16th century Puritan I have to beat up for establishing the nuclear-family-centric kind of society America is stuck in.