jennydwren

[jennydwren]

🍖 How to Build a Culture Without Just Inventing Spices and Necklaces

(a worldbuilding roast. with love.)

So. You’re building a fantasy world, and you’ve just invented: → Three types of ceremonial jewelry → A spice that tastes like cinnamon if it were bitter and cursed → A holiday where everyone wears gold and screams at dawn

Cute. But that’s not culture. That’s aesthetics.

And if your worldbuilding is all outfits, dances, and spice blends with vaguely mystical names, your story’s probably going to feel like a cosplay convention held inside a Pinterest board.

Here’s how to fix that—aka: how to build a real, functioning culture that shapes your story, not just its vibes.

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🔗 Culture Is Built on Power, Not Just Style

Ask yourself: → Who’s in charge, and why? → Who has land? Who doesn’t? → What’s considered taboo, sacred, or punishable by death?

Culture is shaped by who gets to make the rules and who gets crushed by them. That’s where things like religion, family structure, class divisions, gender roles, and social expectations actually come from.

Start there. Not at the embroidery.

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2.🪓 Culture Comes From Conflict

Did this society evolve peacefully? Was it colonized? Did it colonize? Was it rebuilt after a war? Is it still in one?

→ What was destroyed and mythologized? → What do the survivors still whisper about? → What do children get taught in school that’s… suspiciously sanitized?

No culture is neutral. Every tradition has a history, and that history should taste like blood, loss, or propaganda.

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3.🧠 Belief Systems > Customs Lists

Sure, rituals and holidays are cool. But what do people believe about: → Death? → Love? → Time? → The natural world? → Justice?

Example: A society that believes time is cyclical vs. one that sees time as linear will approach everything—from prison sentences to grief—completely differently.

You don’t need to invent 80 gods. You need to know what those gods mean to the people who pray to them.

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4.🫀 Culture Controls Behavior (Quietly)

Culture shows up in: → What people apologize for → What insults cut deepest → What people are embarrassed about → What’s praised publicly vs. what’s hidden privately

For instance: → A culture obsessed with stoicism won’t say “I love you.” They’ll say “Have you eaten?” → A culture built on legacy might prioritize ancestor veneration, archival writing, name inheritance.

This stuff? Way more immersive than giving everyone matching earrings.

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5. 🏠 Culture = Daily Life, Not Just Festivals

Sure, your MC might attend a funeral where people paint their faces blue. But what about: → Breakfast routines? → How people greet each other on the street? → Who cooks, and who eats first? → What’s considered “clean” or “proper”? → How is parenting handled? Divorce?

Culture is what happens between plot points. It should shape your character’s assumptions, language, fears, and habits—whether or not a festival is going on.

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6. 💬 Let Your Characters Disagree With Their Own Culture

A culture isn’t a monolith.

Even in deeply traditional societies, people: → Rebel → Question → Break rules → Misinterpret laws → Mock sacred things → Act hypocritically → Weaponize or resist what’s expected

Let your characters wrestle with the culture around them. That’s where realism (and tension) lives.

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7.🧼 Beware the “Pretty = Good” Trap

Worldbuilding gets boring fast when: → The protagonist’s homeland is beautiful and pure → The enemy’s culture is dark and “barbaric” → Every detail just reinforces who the reader should like

You can—and should—challenge the aesthetic hierarchy. → Let ugly things be beloved. → Let beautiful things be corrupt. → Let your MC romanticize their culture and then get disillusioned by it later.

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📍 TL;DR (but like, spicy): → Culture is not food and jewelry. → Culture is power, fear, memory, contradiction. → Stop inventing spices until you know who starved last winter. → Let your world feel lived in, not curated.

The best cultural worldbuilding doesn’t look like a list. It feels like a system. A pressure. A presence your characters can’t escape—even if they try.

Now go. Build something real. (You can add spices later.)

—rin t. // writing advice for worldbuilders with rage and range // thewriteadviceforwriters

Sometimes the problem isn’t your plot. It’s your first 5 pages. Fix it here → 🖤 Free eBook: 5 Opening Pages Mistakes to Stop Making:

🕯️ download the pack & write something cursed:

[jennydwren]

#sword #swords #stabby stabby stabby stabby stabby stabby stabby stabby stabby stabby stabby stabby stabby stabby stabby stabby stabby stabby stabby stabby stabby stabby stabby stabby stabby stabby stabby stabby stabby stabby stabby stabby stabby stabby stabby stabby

A helpful assortment of Armor and Sword charts for writers and historians alike.

[jennydwren]

Headcanon: @spocksjuul has actually drawn the legendary LOTRO NPC, Nimorn of Imladris.

Brenio a maeado, mellyn.

Everyone please admire this beautiful Spock I commissioned from @spocksjuul, thank you.

[jennydwren]

It is a plant-based item.

It definitely has a lot of fiber.

It is a linen tunic.

[jennydwren]

I swear to fucking god. I would claw out OneDrive from my computer if I could. I would burn down their servers if I could. I would run down their stocks to the ground if I could. I hope every single one of their workers gets a better offer from a competitor in the next 24 hours. I hope every single one of their light bulbs explodes at the same time. I hope every single carton of milk in their fridge will always be expired.

Stop backing up my fucking files.

Stop asking me to back up my fucking files.

Stop taking my fucking files off my fucking computer.

I don't want a fucking reminder in three fucking days. Let me fucking say no.

Fuckers.

[jennydwren]

SPOILERS BECAUSE I AM UNWELL ABOUT STAR WARS: TALES OF THE UNDERWORLD

I am so, so very sorry, that this is suddenly not witchblr, nor anything Tolkien or LOTRO-related, but two of my fandoms just collided in a very unexpected way and I am unable to be normal about this. I am so absolutely abnormal that I am going to ramble for a minute here and leave quite a bit of spoiler space because I NEED to talk about this show that just dropped on Disney+.

I know, I know. I live in a household that gives money to them and they SUCK. Bear in mind that I do not have the executive function to learn piracy right now. I literally don't. Please don't @ me about it. I just really need to hear what Andor is saying right now. Like hear it, and feel it, if not actually huff it from a fuel pipeline.

But I'm not here to get all spoilery about Andor. I'm not even talking about throwing yourself at a cause whose outcome you know you won't live to see. Nope nope, the fandom collision I'm talking about involves the brand-new animated series, Star Wars: Tales of the Underworld, which just dropped today. May the Fourth be with you.

I have binge-watched all six episodes. Hot take: the first three were not as good as the other three. It's not that I don't love me some Ventress. The other three, however, were just -- the story is better written, the cinematography itself is better, even though a lot of the best shots are deadass ripped straight out of High Noon with Gary Cooper as the beleaguered marshal. It's just -- it's an origin story but it had a twist that I did not see coming, that was not on my bingo card.

I hope this is enough rambling to constitute spoiler space. If not, please have some more right now.

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Cad Bane having a son was absolutely not on my bingo card and because the episodes are utterly, completely laden with Western tropes, I expected the standoff. The tight focus on fingers twitching near the holster. I expected the two to the center mass of the noble but doomed lawman.

Just as I did not expect the Spanish Inquisition, I didn't expect that the child who called the marshal Papa would actually be Cad Bane's. We see Bane's end -- anticlimactic as it may have been -- in The Book of Boba Fett. But there's still a son running around out there.

AND HIS NAME IS ISAAC. You know who else was in a Western and had a son named Isaac? Arthur Fucking Morgan, that's who.

The trope "Aerith and Bob" has always been at work in the Star Wars universe from the very first movie, in which you have extremely fictional names like Obi-Wan and Chewbacca but then you have names that do exist on Earth, like Owen and Luke. In this six-episode series, you have names that are very un-Earthly like Asajj and (albeit not mentioned or given any dialogue) Obi-Wan again, but ISAAC. Someone in the writers' room played RDR2 and really took it in. That Earth name is absolutely on the (lack of) nose. Only the son survives the father -- both fathers -- and if they had thought of it in time, could have been a Jack Marston.

I can't even wrap my head around how much, because of ONE NAME, I now see those episodes as an alternate RDR universe, or adjacent enough to it to mess with me. I'm just thinking of Corey Burton as Cad Bane delivering lines like, "Well, maybe when your mother's finished mourning your father, I'll keep her in black on your behalf. You think on that, boy."

But the lawman is the one whose last words are those of triumph. Whose words are a gift. Not "I gave you all I had" like Arthur, but, in response to "You took everything I had," the simple "Not everything." A Pyrrhic victory, pulled out of loss. And the gunslinger turns his back on the dying friend and walks away.

I will be unable to even until further notice.

[jennydwren]

Ohh god. So I sell crystals part of my year (gig work, my beloved), and moldavite is the only rock in the shop that attracts what I call the Evil Anti-Buyer.

A group comes in, right? Usually between two and six people who are going around the giant outdoor entertainment venue together, browsing the things for sale. The moldavite -- the entire world supply of which is controlled by one family -- is up by my register because it's heinously expensive because of the fad bekkathyst mentions. (Also because it literally only comes from one meteorite crater in the world.) Like a chip of it the size of my pinky nail is one we would have to sell for $89. But we got it in because it was a fad. And some people indeed beeline for it and go, "Ooh, moldavite!"

I don't get excited because I know what's coming. The person's friend, family member, or SO who came in with them -- the Evil Anti-Buyer -- goes, "Oh, you have to be really ready for moldavite, because it turns your life upside down." The prospective buyer invariably decides that, even if those changes are for the better, they are too stressful to handle and they want to lose their bad job in their own way. Moldavite stays, group leaves.

Toward the end of our giant outdoor entertainment season, I started pointing out that I had been sitting behind six chips of it for nearly an entire college semester, and I was still married to the same person and OBVIOUSLY still had the same job. Nope. No dice. The Evil Anti-Buyer just tells me that clearly nothing is wrong with my life, which I wish they'd tell my spine and/or therapist. And they leave.

I've sold one of these chips of moldavite in the last three seasons. I've literally had a better success rate selling semiprecious stone dice.

Amazing. I just came across a TikTok video with 1.5 million views trying to convince people who bought moldavite during that ridiculous hype in 2020/21(?somewhere around there) that their energy was actually being harvested by aliens and the whole thing was some nefarious scheme to get humans to wear moldavite so their energy could be absorbed. Instead of, you know, the very logical conclusion that it was just another fleeting overhyped TikTok trend that people got bored with eventually.

To my absolute surprise, all the top comments were agreeing with the video

[jennydwren]

the suffering never ends

[jennydwren]

Anyway, daily reminder from a culturally isolated Romani person.

Gypsy does not mean wanderer.

It literally means ‘people from egypt’ or similar, as europeans believed Romani people were from Egypt. It has become known similar to nomad due to how our ancestors have been forced to be nomadic due to racism and ostracization, but it is a SLUR.

Romani people are STILL being forcibly sterilized.

Romani people are STILL being forced into ghettos.

Romani people are still facing violence and danger in countless European countries- and recently, I’ve seen the beginnings of the extremes in the United States.

Have a little fucking respect and DON’T USE A SLUR THAT’S BEEN USED FOR CENTURIES AGAINST US.

And for the love of whatever’s up there, ESPECIALLY do not use it to describe your witchcraft. It is playing on the ‘magic gypsy’ trope, and is EXTREMELY insulting.

non romani people, please reblog this.

[jennydwren]

Okay, so I try hard to cover global queer history, and this isn't marking a stop to that, but I am aware that most of my audience is American, and I want to address them very directly right now.

Google Removed Pride Month From Its Calendar App, and Stonewall National Monument's "LGBTQ" status was changed to "LGB" on the government website. This is the beginning of the erasure of queer history, not the end. I don't know what the future of the United States looks like, as someone who studies queer history and has done so for many years, I want to share some tools with you.

Now is a good time to prioritize local queer history, Making Gay History is a great project, so is the Digital Transgender Archive, but also check your city and see what resources there are.

Read and buy books about queer history. I have an affiliate list with some of the books I personally recommend.

If you use Google Calendar, repopulate that resource with so much queer history with a free queer history calendar plug-in, it has names from queer history that you can also learn more about for free when they come up. As the author of these articles, feel free to save them, print them off, whatever makes them freely accessible as suppression get's worse.

Use your local library. Email the board about book bans, request banned books, request queer books, and make your voice heard.

Make queer art. Share queer art. Protect queer art. Here is some public-domain queer art to use as you wish.

Keep up with queer news, THEM is a great resource.

All of these tools are currently freely accessible with an internet connection. Queer history is a community responsibility, do your part.

[jennydwren]

Happiness Will Come To You.

[jennydwren]

Apparently a lot of people get dialogue punctuation wrong despite having an otherwise solid grasp of grammar, possibly because they’re used to writing essays rather than prose. I don’t wanna be the asshole who complains about writing errors and then doesn’t offer to help, so here are the basics summarized as simply as I could manage on my phone (“dialogue tag” just refers to phrases like “he said,” “she whispered,” “they asked”):

“For most dialogue, use a comma after the sentence and don’t capitalize the next word after the quotation mark,” she said.

“But what if you’re using a question mark rather than a period?” they asked.

“When using a dialogue tag, you never capitalize the word after the quotation mark unless it’s a proper noun!” she snapped.

“When breaking up a single sentence with a dialogue tag,” she said, “use commas.”

“This is a single sentence,” she said. “Now, this is a second stand-alone sentence, so there’s no comma after ‘she said.’”

“There’s no dialogue tag after this sentence, so end it with a period rather than a comma.” She frowned, suddenly concerned that the entire post was as unasked for as it was sanctimonious.

[jennydwren]

faramir and eowyn in the gardens of gondor

[reblogs appreciated, commissions open]

[jennydwren]

[jennydwren]

Fuck It, Internet Guide

Hey there! As social media becomes more and more inhospitible for the local user, I wanted to post some useful/fun links to just about anything I can think of! Enjoy! Also, if you'd like an invite to the P!rated Games discord, lmk! ^_^

I AM CURRENTLY STILL UPDATING THIS POST AND I WILL REBLOG IT WHEN I ADD TO IT! Feel free to comment things I've missed, I'm sure there's way more than this came from!

WEB CENTRIC

CURLIE: THE COLLECTOR OF URLs (Curlie strives to be the largest human-edited directory of the Web. You can save sites and create your own mini webring!)

Internet Archive (A collection of over 818 Billion websites, books, movies, music, and more. Hosts the Wayback Machine, which can be used to access a multitude of sites, given they were indexed in time.)

Wiby (Human submission search engine for older webrings, as well as a how-to guide on how to develop your own search engine)

Unicode Text Converter (Easy way to make your text illegible to Google but be warned, it will make screen readers malfuction)

Embed Responsively (Easily convert links and embeds to work responsively within your site - perfect for neocities!)

Generator Land (Generate a list or prompt for just about anything!)

GifCities (Part of the Internet Archive, a special project done as part of the 20th anniversary in an effort to save data from GeoCities. Find a gif for just about anything!)

Animated Images (Another gif repository, though this one is easier to search and includes small animations.)

Gifs-Paradise (Another gif repository. I swear I collect these. Searchable and categorized.)

ASCII Art Archive (Database of ASCII Art, also known as text art)

Christopher Johnson's ASCII Art Collection (Another, arguably larger, ASCII Art database)

MelonLand (A web project and online arts community that celebrates homepages, virtual worlds, the world-wide-web and the digital lives that all netizins share, here at the dawn of the digital age. See their thoughts and the WEB REVIVAL they're starting.)

Sadgrl Webrings (Webrings brought to us by Sadgrl.Online - 60+ different ones to be exact) and Sadgrl Links (70+ links just like the ones in this post)

Districts at Neocities (Remember neighborhoods on Geocities? Imagine that but for Neocities!)

Neocities Banners (Banners from all across neocities. Blinkies, banners and more leading all over the web. Mostly 88x31, though there are bigger ones too. Technically counts as a webring.)

Blinkies.cafe (Site for blinkies where you can even make your own! I get most of my blinkies here and off DeviantArt.)

88x31 Collection (Possibly the largest collection I've seen for 88x31 buttons)

90's Cursor Effects (Want a funky cursor for your blog or website? Wanna be able to realtime preview what cursors would look like? Come get some code!)

The Malware Museum (Interact with malware and viruses from the 80s and 90s through emulation! No nasty virus interactions needed :D )

KNOWLEDGE BASES

Library Genesis - LIBGEN (Scientific journals - dedicated to archiving every science journal and their articles in existence.)

Information Mesh (A web platform celebrating the 30th anniversary of the World Wide Web that explores social, technical, cultural and legal facts throughout different interactive timelines.)

Web Design Museum (Over 2,000 sorted websites showing web design trends from '96 to '06.)

The History of the Web (A twice monthly newsletter about web history, and the incredible people that built it. Goes from 1989 to present.)

Field Guide to Web Accessibility (Principles and applications to every day web scenarios in order to make the web a more friendly place!)

CARI - Consumer Aesthetics Research Institute (an online community and collective association of researchers and designers dedicated to carrying on the important work of categorizing "consumer aesthetics" from the late midcentury, when work on the subject somewhat trailed off, through today.)

The Eye (Archive consisting of 140TB of books, websites, games, software, or anything else you can really think of.)

The Uncensored Library (A project from Reporters without Borders, where they use a loophole using Minecraft to distribute information.)

National Gallery of Art Public Domain (The National Gallery of Art has an open access policy for images of works of art in their permanent collection which the Gallery believes to be in the public domain. Images of these works are available for download free of charge for any use, whether commercial or non-commercial.)

Library of Congress Public Domain (Features items from the Library's digital collections that are free to use and reuse. The Library believes that this content is either in the public domain, has no known copyright, or has been cleared by the copyright owner for public use.)

Public Domain Review (an online journal and not-for-profit project dedicated to the exploration of curious and compelling works from the history of art, literature, and ideas.)

New York Public Library Public Domain (Our digitized collections are available as machine-readable data: over one million records for you to search, crawl and compute.)

Official articles from NASA (PubSpace is NASA's designated public access repository. It is a collection of NASA-funded scholarly publications within the STI Repository, aiming to increase access to federally funded research in accordance with NASA Public Access Policy.)

Universal Hint System (Wanna get some vague help for an older video game without getting spoiled? Check out these awesome hints!)

Smithsonian Open Access (Download, share, and reuse millions of 2D and 3D digital items from their 21 museums, 9 research centers, libraries, archives, and the National Zoo.)

Instructables (Wanna know how to make just about anything? Check here!)

QZAP Zine Archive (Archive of LGBT+ Zines, began in 2003 with zines dating back all the way to the 1970s. NSFW AT TIMES, BROWSE AT YOUR OWN RISK.)

P!racy Masterpost (Tumblr-based masterpost of game piracy, last updated 2021. A bit old but some of the stuff there is still good. If this link breaks, please contact me.)

P!rated Games Megathread (masterpost created by r/P!ratedGames includes required components as well as anything else you need. NOTE: PLEASE HAVE SOME SORT OF PROTECTION WHEN NAVIGATING THIS SITE)

Geocities Gallery (A website hosting a working archive for many abandoned Geocities Sites.)

Snipplr (Code Snippet repository. Great for coding issues.)

GeoCities (Archived) (Great for searching ancient webrings for gifs and website ideas. Not so great for downloads.)

Freeware Guide (Archived) (The Freeware-Guide died sometime in 2021 [we think March] but it's still full of VERY valuable information. Links are broken pretty much all the way through, but the names of software as well as what they do can be useful in finding them elsewhere thru some google searching)

Peelopaalu (Where I got a good handful of these links - AND THERE'S MORE!!!)

The Simple Site (More links to so much more cool stuff!)

ART TOOLS

Untitled - Paint (An in-browser version of classic Microsoft Paint!)

KidPix (In-browser version of classic KidPix for the public domain!)

Pixel Logic - A Guide to Pixel Art (Comprehensive guide to making cool art for $10 USD, updated semi-frequently and you get all new versions for free)

SAI - Bootlegged (A version of SAI with a multitude of brushes and textures pre-installed. Quite literally the only thing I use to draw aside from Clip Studio Paint.)

Stripe Generator (Need some easy stripes for an art piece? Can't be bothered to try and space stripes evenly? This is for you!)

Photopea (Free online photo editor supporting files for Adobe Photoshop, XCF, Sketch App, Adobe XD, and CorelDRAW, as well as many more!)

blender (A FOREVER free and Open Source software for 3D Modeling, full of tutorials and assets. I feel like most people don't know it's completely free to play with)

Vertex Meadow (A web-browser tool that renders 2D images as explorable 3D terrain. With it you can create detailed and unusual 3D environments to explore using a 2D paint-program-like interface.)

OpenGameArt (Need art for your game but you're not an artist? Consider checking here first [or just hire a real artist looking for work on here!])

MUSIC TOOLS AND DISCOVERY

BandLab (Social music platform that enables creators to make music and share their creative process with musicians and fans. Completely free with an option to set up stripe where you get 100% OF PROFITS. Available for apple/android/desktop)

JummBox (Free online beat-maker with a very simple interface that runs on your browser)

Mydora (Mydora is a continuous streaming player that gives you a deep dive into the lost archives of Myspace Music, based on some recovered data called the Dragon Hoard, with some additional metadata (most notably the locations and genres) from a different scan of Myspace conducted back in 2009. Contains 490,000+ songs, only a fraction of what was wiped out.)

Radiooooo (A place where people are able to play hit songs from the decade of their choosing from whatever country they wish.)

WFMU (Independent freeform radio broadcasting. Currently ongoing.)

Gnoosic (A sort-of music search engine that finds you songs/bands based off of your music taste.)

Khinsider (3.1 TB worth of video game soundtracks)

Radio.garden (Listen to thousands of radio stations all around the world.)

FUN STUFF

FrogLand (The purpose of Frogland is to show that the Internet can indeed provide a wealth of useful information and still be fun. Mainly, this site is dedicated to the many teachers out there who are finding new uses for the Internet as a tool for educating youngsters. Hopefully, it will inspire some young minds to find new interest in herpetology, biology, and environmental issues...not to mention providing some inspiration for young future computer "wizzes"! No longer active but still useful.)

Windows 98 icon Viewer (Want clear jpgs of all the Windows 98 symbols and icons? They're all here!)

GifyPet (Create your own embeded pet that people can play with and feed when they visit your page! See my version HERE [only works on desktop tho])

Ultimate Mushroom (Like the idea of picking mushrooms in your area but no idea what to look for? Check out this info hub!)

Gif Gallery (Another gif repositiory, only sorted by being numbered 1-100,000. Fun and silly, not so much useful unless you're looking for random gifs. Part of the MelonLand Webring)

Interesting DOS Programs (A host of DOS programming, guides and links.)

Internet Archive: MS-DOS Games (8,000 games right in your web browser! Your browser can play DOOM!)

Tiled Backgrounds (Need some small jpegs for easy website bg tiling? Browse this collection sorted by color.)

cOOl & EMO tEXt cOnVERTer xXX (Flashing warning. Wanna type like you're in the 2000s? Need a funny Green Day lyric as a caption? This is probably the best place for you.)

0x40 (Flashing Warning. Anime images synced with music. Fun for parties, lol)

WebGL Fluid Simulation (In browser fluid simulator, great for art backgrounds and desktop wallpapers.)

Flashpoint (The biggest collection of preserved Flash Games and Animations)

NCase (Free games and open source projects from Nicky [THESE ARE REALLY COOL AND FUN, I HIGHLY RECOMMEND])

Your World of Text (A huge interactive text doc that anyone can add to anonymously.)

Text To Speech (TTS in more than 30 languages and over 180 voices.)

ASCII Art Generator (Make ASCII Art from any image.)

Petit Tube (Random Youtube videos with less than 10 views)

Noclip Website (Noclip around various video game maps in your browser!)

Monster Mash (Create and animate some monsters in browser! You can also download their files.)

[jennydwren]

Crystal DONTS

Crystals that are damaged/Dissolve/Chemical Reaction by Water

Angelite

Azurite

Boji Stones/Shaman Stones/Moqui Marbles

Calcite

Celestine

Halite

Hematite

Jet

Lapis

Malachite

Moonstone

Pyrite

Selenite

Unakite

Mica

Fluorite

Turquoise

Damaged/Fade/Cracked by Sun/UV

Amethyst

Aquamarine

Aventurine

Calcite

Celestine

Citrine

Fluorite

Jade

Jet

Kunzite

Lapis

Malachite

Rose Quartz

Sapphire

Sodalite

Topaz

Tourmaline

Amber

Beryl

Chrysoprase

Opal

Smokey Quartz

[jennydwren]

so I got into grad school today with my shitty 2.8 gpa and the moral of the story is reblog those good luck posts for the love of god