she-elf4

[she-elf4]

I do find that it is a good way of seeing my thoughts in 3rd person.

"I don't believe Tarot is real, but it does work"

Expand on that, king (genuinely curious)

I feel like…

okay, so it’s a lot like conceptual art, or like introspective meditation, at the risk of sounding pretentious

Like. It’s not so much about “the cards are a portal to a higher wisdom that knows more than me” thing- it’s more of a, “given the symbols drawn, could I interpret them posing a question or possibility or suggestion?” Followed by, “is this applicable to my current context? COULD it be?”

Like.

I don’t lay out á tarot hand and say “ah yes, the devil and the tower, I am about to be betrayed”

But I MAY lay out a hand and say, “okay, devil and the tower. Something treacherous and danger. Am I approaching a treacherous or risky situation in my life? What might be a tipping factor? Am I being deliberately reckless? Maybe I should spend some more time working on X project I’ e been thinking of before spending money on it” or “you know what, I HAVE been kind of uncomfortable with X thing, I should say something” or “yeah okay I KNOW Tom from work sucks to work with, I KNOW, yeah maybe I should consider ways of handling that”

Less of a magic oracle, more of a tool for doing literary analysis on real life. Like simplifying everything and laying it out flat so I can gain some distance to untangle my problems without in-your-head crap like projected feelings and social obligation getting in the way and muddying the waters.

So like. I don’t think tarot cards can legit tell the future, but I DO think that self-reflection, mindfulness, and consideration sometimes allow us to predict and calculate our own circumstances.

So, IMO- It’s not real. But it works

If that makes sense

[she-elf4]

reblog if you’re okay with people writing fanfics of your fanfics and/or fanfics inspired by your fanfics

[she-elf4]

Ok, loves, so we've all got the message that joking about suicide is bad for your mental health. Now we need to get on "joking that the planet/all of humanity has no future is bad for societal health/encouraging resistance to bad shit."

[she-elf4]

Was scrolling through AO3 and found this gem

Enemy to parent is a trope we have to popularise lmao

[she-elf4]

American leftists got told “THIS group of Jews is ok to hate!” and went full Nazi against all Jews in under 3 years.

You would not have hidden Jews in your attic in Nazi Germany because you would not hide a “Zionist” or Israeli in your attic today! You would not have spoken up if your Jewish neighbors were attacked by locals wearing swastikas because today you remain silent (or even cheer) when Israelis and American Jews are attacked by people yelling “free Palestine”!

The Germans who saved Jews did so even though everyone was telling them there were evil Jews out there killing babies and controlling the news. Germans who defended Jews did so even though their friends who found out shunned them, smeared their names, and ejected them from their communities.

Not all of the Germans who didn’t defend Jews were Nazis. Most of them just stayed quiet. They didn’t want to become social pariahs. They didn’t want to risk their own lives.

You will lose friends if you speak out against antisemitism. You will lose friends if you condemn these attacks. But you’ll make friends too, if you reach out. You won’t be alone. You can leave this hate behind.

[she-elf4]

I got the words "jacuzzi" and "Yakuza" mixed up 

Now I'm in hot water with the Japanese Mafia.

[she-elf4]

art history nerd here! when the notre dame burned a few years ago, the most damaged area was the roof. y'know who has a very extensive 3D model of the roof? ubisoft, for assassin's creed! ubisoft has been very involved in the restoration of the notre dame, pledging over half a million euros in support. so yep, that is most likely an assassin's creed dude carrying the olympic torch!

[she-elf4]

The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1996): "The Kitten" original Spain comic issue, uploaded by LunaBergkristall in Deviantart.

[she-elf4]

EPIC!!!!

[she-elf4]

[she-elf4]

[she-elf4]

As practice, I drew some Hogan’s Heroes characters! Fraulein Helga, Newkirk, Schultz, and LeBeau

[she-elf4]

LET THE SPITE FLOW THROUGH YOU!

good….let the spite flow through you….write the new chapter just to take a stand….

[she-elf4]

That has actually happened to me, more than once. For quite a while now, ANYTHING except the most blandly-worded, mindless, generic, "I enjoyed this fic" type comment seems to be taken wrong, unless it's one of my mutuals from here. Combined with my ADD, it's made it INSANELY hard for me to do more than leave kudos most of the time.

^ So I saw this post

And then these comments

Which makes me sad?

It’s already so hard to convince readers to be perceived and that commenting has value.

If you don’t want the deranged comments, please send them to me instead haha!

[she-elf4]

I’m a firm believer of “every writer can write whatever they want, however they want” however I physically wince every time I see a writer unironically use “member” to refer to a cock in smut setting and “orbs” to refer to normal human eyes.

from a fellow writer who used to use both of these words in her writing during her wattpad days, member isn’t as sexy a word as you may think it is, and orbs isn’t a normal way to refer to normal human eyes.

also you can say cunt, hole, pussy, anything is sexier, more erotic than “princess parts” I promise

[she-elf4]

I ain't a wimp when I get writers block I STRESS ABOUT IT FOR A WEEK STRAIGHT, and not to ChatGPT like a coward. I face writers block like a man, laying in bed hours crying.

[she-elf4]

When I was 3 years old I went to a preschool that had this little green crocheted crocodile finger puppet that was my absolute favorite toy to play with of all time. I named her Chelsea, because Chelsea starts with C and crocodile starts with C and more often than not wild animals in fiction aimed at kids have names that start with the same first letter as their species. I played with Chelsea every day, because she was my favorite toy, and because the other kids weren't really interested in her, and also because I eventually started to hide her in a special secret spot in the room so no one else would find her before I did. She was so beloved by me that when I graduated from preschool, my teachers gave Chelsea to me permanently, because it was clear no one else would ever love that little crochet crocodile as much as me anyway (in part because I hid her). They waited a few weeks after I graduated before doing it, too, and sent Chelsea with some post cards as if the crocodile had been on a whirlwind "travel the world" vacation before deciding to come live with me.

And Chelsea remained my favorite toy all through my childhood. There were others I loved nearly as much, like my Imperial Godzilla and the big red T.rex from the first Jurassic Park toy line and my tiny knockoff plush Charmander, but Chelsea always held the place of honor in my heart. She was my absolute favorite toy.

I kept a lot of my favorite toys through adolescence, even if social pressure eventually got me to give away a lot of them (and some, y'know, broke). That's obviously not surprising to you if you've followed my blog, since I still collect toys into my adulthood. But it's important to note because while I know I made a conscious effort to never throw out Chelsea every time I pared down my collection... at some point, she went missing.

I became aware of it when I graduated from high school. I was feeling really emotional about leaving that stage of my life and, y'know, becoming an adult and shit, and in that state I decided to find Chelsea to reassure myself that I hadn't entirely left childhood behind. But Chelsea wasn't there. No matter how hard I looked, I could not find Chelsea anywhere.

And that was, like, devastating, because the only explanation was that somehow, at some point, I had accidentally tossed her out with some other "childhood junk" while trying to grow up and be responsible in my teen years. I had literally thrown away my childhood in a careless attempt to be more grown up.

Of course I knew she was just a toy - nothing more than some yarn twisted together in the loose shape of a crocodile, lifeless and soul-less and more or less worthless in the objective light of day. But she was also Chelsea, my best friend since i was three, my stalwart little pal, a source of comfort for most of my life at that point, and I had just... tossed her out! Like garbage! What kind of person was I becoming if I could do that to my best friend?

I was very visibly distraught, and my mom noticed. Being very crafty, she tried to find the pattern for Chelsea so she could crochet me a new one. The problem is, she had no idea where to find said pattern. She checked all her books of crochet patterns, and when that failed she tried the internet, but no matter how hard she looked, she found nothing.

So my mom found the next best thing.

The original Chelsea was a tiny finger puppet, and I had "met" her when I was three. Well, I was eighteen now - shouldn't Chelsea have grown too? And as has been established, this crocodile was fond of whirlwind vacations. My mom found a pattern that looked as much like Chelsea as possible while also being a much bigger crocodile, and gifted her to me before I left for college - to show that while we can't stop the flow of time or how it changes us, that doesn't mean we have to leave it behind.

And yeah, I decided to believe it. That's Chelsea now. Yeah, I know that in reality it's a completely different set of yarn made by my mom rather than... whoever it was that crocheted the original Chelsea, but then, Chelsea was never really the yarn. She was the feelings I put into the yarn, you know? So that's Chelsea, all grown up, and still my most prized toy.

...

Flash forward... Jesus, eighteen years, holy shit. A few weeks ago I saw a post trying to identify a different crochet crocodile pattern, and thinking it was cute, I decided to try and look for it on ebay and etsy, just to see if maybe I could find it. I didn't, but do you know what I found instead?

A very familiar crochet crocodile finger puppet. An intensely familiar one, you might say. Of course I bought it. And of course I asked the seller if, perhaps, they might have the pattern for it or know where it came from (they did not, alas). And after a few days, she showed up at my house.

She's not Chelsea, obviously. For one thing, she's far too clean and fresh looking - Chelsea was very well loved, and looked the part, while this crocodile finger puppet has definitely not endured years upon years of a child's affection. And, more importantly, she's not Chelsea because we've already established that Chelsea grew up into a bigger crochet crocodile. This has to be Chelsea's younger sister, Cici.

And if I could find another of Chelsea's kind after all these years, then maybe, with a bit of luck, I might find the pattern for her, and be able to make more of them. Fill the world with Chelseas.