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[jothehat]

Concept: the extraterrestrial ship captain approaches Human Steve after months of their service, having uncovered an Earth Artifact at great cost.

“Human Steve, I have procured this recording! The seller told me it was a rare, preserved copy of a ‘pop song’, and I wanted to present it to you as a gift of gratitude.”

Human Steve tears open the package and half smiles, half tears up - it’s one of those single-MP3 players from the late 90s, too scratched up to read the song title. He doesn’t expect it to work, but when he taps the play button, a tinny noise crackles out of the speaker.

His face falls.

“Ha ha, Agrax, very funny.”

The ship captain looks confused. “What do you mean, Human Steve?”

“Of all of the ‘pop songs’, this one? Really? Entirely on coincidence?!”

“Does this particular song have a cultural significance to you, Human Steve?”

“Yeah, it does, Agrax, it’s a–” Human Steve sighs. “You know what, it’s complicated. I’ll explain it some other time. Thanks for the gift.”

As Human Steve shuffles off down the corridor, the ship captain opens up their log and makes a careful note.

Stardate 2074.3 : Achievement accomplished. I have successfully Rickrolled Human Steve.

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shirt that says I Got My Top Surgery at the 4077th MASH

[jothehat]

Okay, buckle up buckaroos, because today I met an honest-to-goodness cryptid.

I was out running errands and I made a stop at Intimate Books (…for a friend), and on my way out I realized that the bookshop next door was open.

This bookshop has existed for more than a hundred years, and in all my life it has NEVER BEEN OPEN. I mean, I assume it has to be open sometimes, but never at any normal, reasonable hour. Everyone says it’s a front for the mob or something.

So what do you do when the weird mafia bookshop is open? You go the fuck inside.

The first thing I noticed was the smell. You know that smell when you accidentally leave your towel on the bathroom floor all day and you come back to that mildew funk? The shop smelled like that times a thousand. I expected to see stuff growing on the walls, but the books were pristine. We’re talking first editions, rare editions, weird Bibles and books inscribed to really famous dead people. Librarians would weep for the chance to accession this place. In the first two minutes I found a signed copy of The Crucible and what I think was a first edition of Blake’s Book of Thel.

Then a clerk showed up out of nowhere—honestly nowhere. He looked EXACTLY like a bookseller should look, kind of fluffy and bewildered and really, really gay.

“Are you lost?” was the first thing he said to me.

“Nope. Just browsing, thanks.”

“Browsing, I see. Erm. How do you feel about snakes?” he asked. And without waiting for me to answer, he just walked away and vanished around a shelf.

I figured it was a metaphor, or a code phrase for the mafia. Until I turned a corner like ten minutes later and found a little reading nook. It was really pretty, although I feel like that particular window should have been on an interior wall? Anyway, curled up in an armchair in a patch of sunlight was the biggest fuck-off black snake I have ever seen.

Like, I don’t mind snakes in general. But in their normal context, right? Outside. On the ground. Not six feet long and sitting on a threadbare velvet armchair like it owns the place.

I was about to turn around and leave, but I saw a gorgeous first-edition copy of Leaves of Grass on a shelf, a little too close to the snake for comfort. But I had never needed anything so badly in my life.

So I went back to the counter to buy it, but the clerk was nowhere to be found.

While I was waiting, I noticed a collection of pictures hanging on the wall behind the counter, dating back to the very dawn of photography. A couple were of this rock-star looking guy from the 70s that I should probably have recognized, but there were authors and landscapes and stuff, too. There was even an old tintype portrait of Oscar freaking Wilde, sitting in this very shop with a guy that I would ACTUALLY SWEAR was the clerk from before. Like, I know my family all has the same nose, but this guy had the same everything.

After approximately one year of waiting, the clerk came back out to the desk. By now I’ve realized that he’s too bad at his job to be anything but the owner of the shop.

“I saw your snake,” I told him.

“Did you? Was he behaving himself?”

“He was sleeping.”

“Yes, he enjoys that.”

“Does he just stay out in the open like that? What if he gets out?”

He shrugged and smiled. “He always comes home again, the dear boy.”

Right, a homing snake. That’s totally normal.

Then he cleared his throat and asked, in a weirdly reluctant voice, if I was going to buy the Whitman.

“Yes, please,” I told him. “I saw it on a shelf by the snake, and it was just too tempting.”

He sighed. “Oh, yes, I expect it was.”

When I started to hand him my card, he went all fluttery and said that they didn’t take cards.

All right, fine. I had some cash on me, but I told him that he’d sell a lot more books if he got a Square or something.

He got this scandalized look on his face and went, “Why would I want to do that?”

Oookay. I handed over the cash and he popped open the ancient till and started making change.

In shillings. Shillings! I swear to god I saw Queen Anne’s face on one of them. The silver value of the coins was probably as much as I paid for the book.

But I had to have proof that this happened—at that point, all I had was a book in a plain brown wrapper, not appreciably different from what I bought next door. So I asked him for a receipt.

He looked delighted and wrote one up for me.

By hand.

With a fountain pen.

And that’s the story of how I met a bookseller cryptid and his pet snake.

[jothehat]

Happy birthday Pterry! (This is possibly my favourite drawing of Sam 'Blackboard monitor' Vimes, by zazB)

[jothehat]

i dont remember canon but i have very strong opinions about everything

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what if i just rest my eyes for a second

[jothehat]

i learned about Tim Wong who successfully and singlehandedly repopulated the rare California Pipevine Swallowtail butterfly in San Francisco. In the past few years, he’s cultivated more than 200 pipevine plants (their only food source) and gives thousands of caterpillars to his local Botanical Garden (x)

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[jothehat]

its rude to reblog things from people you arent mutuals with fyi. :/

💀 my brother in christopher

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Omg this is like 800 metaphors rolled into one megaphor

[jothehat]

When I made this post just ten days ago, it was about mass graves discovered at Al Shifa hospital and now we have learned that the same had happened at Nasser hospital in Gaza. The same genocidal pattern: a hospital is put under siege, patients and medical staff are abducted, tortured and buried in mass graves.

But to build on the last point I wanted to bring attention to in the previous post, it is very crucial to also keep in mind is that the Palestinian Civil Defence have reported that Israel had deliberately concealed the identities of those it killed and buried in these mass graves. Close to 400 bodies have been buried in these mass graves, 58% of the recovered bodies have not been identified.

In a press conference, a spokesperson of the civil defence in Gaza said that Israel had intentionally disfigured the bodies postmortem in order to remove any identifying markers such as birthmarks. He also mentioned that they suspect that the bodies have been placed in body bags that expedited the decomposition process, destroying any possibility of them being identified.

One of the main and only ways families have been able to identify the bodies of their loved ones is through the clothes they remember them wearing the last time they saw them. I saw a video of a mother identifying her son by his striped jacket. You can see the grief mixed with relief that she will be able to give her son proper burial.

Remember when months ago I said that to be identified and buried in Gaza has become a luxury? This is very much still the case.

[jothehat]

Shocking how many people don’t know that hens lay non-fertilized eggs and think the yolk they’re eating is a baby chicken