#forge letters

[serpentarius]

you’re allegro, I’m andante 🎶

[whatelsecanwedonow]

STAR TREK: PICARD S03E10 | The Last Generation

[cirrus-ghoulette]

A Personalised Prime Mover Proposal Letter from Papa to You!

Have you ever wanted a letter from Papa Emeritus? What about one better, a proposal letter from Papa Emeritus?

This personalised letter comes from the Papa (or Cardinal!) of your choice. The recipient's name on the letter, along with the gender of the petnames within the letter, can be changed to suit you.

The letter comes within a black, handwritten envelope, sealed with a Grucifix wax seal. When dispatched, the letter is placed inside a mailer envelope to protect it during transit.

If you would like a letter, you can view the listing on my Etsy here!

[dejablonde]

I hadn't changed my letter board in a while. Inspiration struck.

[feyres-divorce-lawyer]

where’s that post that showed what the note would actually look like pls😭😭

[runawaymarbles]

I want to believe that the Secret Gospel of Mark is legit so so bad you guys. Can you imagine.

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

Nick Anderson

* * * * *

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

January 6, 2024

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

JAN 7, 2024

Today, three years to the day after the January 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol to prevent the counting of the electoral ballots that would make Democrat Joe Biden president, officers from the Federal Bureau of Investigation arrested three fugitives wanted in connection with that attack. 

Siblings Jonathan and Olivia Pollock, whose family owns Rapture Guns and Knives, described on its Facebook page as a “christian owned Gun and Knife store” in Lakeland, Florida, and Joseph Hutchinson III, who once worked there, are suspected of some of the worst violence of January 6. The FBI had offered a $30,000 reward for “Jonny” Pollock, while the other two had been arrested but removed their ankle bracelets in March 2023 and fled. 

Family members of the fugitives and of other Lakeland residents arrested for their involvement in the January 6 attack on the Capitol insist their relatives are innocent, framed by a government eager to undermine their way of life. The Pollock family has gone so far as to erect a monument “in honor of the ones who lost their lives on January 6, 2021.” 

But it does not honor the law enforcement officers who were killed or injured. It honors the insurrectionists: Ashli Babbitt, shot by a law enforcement officer as she tried to break into the House Chamber through a smashed window (her family today sued the government for $30 million for wrongful death), and three others, one who died of a stroke; one of a heart attack, and one of an amphetamine overdose. 

The monument in Lakeland, Florida, is a stark contrast to the one President Biden visited yesterday in Pennsylvania. Valley Forge National Park is the site of the six-month winter encampment of the Continental Army in the hard winter of 1777–1778. After the British army captured the city of Philadelphia in September 1777, General George Washington settled 12,000 people of his army about 18 miles to the northwest. 

There the army almost fell apart. Supply chains were broken as the British captured food or it spoiled in transit to the soldiers, and wartime inflation meant the Continental Congress did not appropriate enough money for food and clothing. Hunger and disease stalked the camp, but even worse was the lack of clothing. More than 1,000 soldiers died, and about eight or ten deserted every day. Washington warned the president of the Continental Congress that the men were close to mutiny. 

Even if they didn’t quit, they weren’t very well organized for an army charged with resisting one of the greatest military forces on the globe. The different units had been trained with different field manuals, making it hard to coordinate movements, and a group of army officers were working with congressmen to replace Washington, complaining about how he was prosecuting the war.  

By February 1778, though, things were falling into place. A delegation from the Continental Congress had visited Valley Forge and understood that the lack of supplies made the army, and thus the country, truly vulnerable, and they set out to reform the supply department. Then a newly arrived Prussian officer, Baron Friedrich von Steuben, drilled the soldiers into unity and better morale. And then, in May, the soldiers learned that France had signed a treaty with the American states in February, lending money, matériel, and men to the cause of American independence. When the soldiers broke camp in June, they marched out ready to take on the British at the Battle of Monmouth, where their new training paid off as they held their own against the British soldiers.

The January 6 insurrectionists were fond of claiming they were echoing these American revolutionaries who created the new nation in the 1770s. The right-wing Proud Boys’ strategic plan for taking over buildings in the Capitol complex on January 6 was titled: “1776 Returns,” and even more famously, newly elected representative Lauren Boebert (R-CO) wrote on January 5, 2021: “Remember these next 48 hours. These are some of the most important days in American history.” On January 6, she wrote: “Today is 1776.”

Trump has repeatedly called those January 6 insurrectionists “patriots.” 

Biden yesterday called Trump out for “trying to steal history the same way he tried to steal the election.”  

Indeed. The insurrectionists at the Capitol were not patriots. They were trying to overthrow the government in order to take away the right at the center of American democracy: our right to determine our own destiny. Commemorating them as heroes is the 21st century’s version of erecting Confederate statues.

The January 6th insurrectionists were nothing like the community at Valley Forge, made up of people who had offered up their lives to support a government pledged, however imperfectly in that era, to expanding that right. When faced with hunger, disease, and discord, that community—which was made up not just of a remarkably diverse set of soldiers from all 13 colonies, including Black and Indigenous men, but also of their families and the workers, enslaved and free, who came with them—worked together to build a force that could establish a nation based in the idea of freedom.  

The people at the Capitol on January 6 who followed in the footsteps of those who were living in the Valley Forge encampment 246 years ago were not the rioters. They were the people who defended our right to live under a government in which we have a say: those like the staffers who delayed their evacuation of the Capitol to save the endangered electoral ballots, and like U.S. Capitol Police officers Eugene Goodman, Harry Dunn, Caroline Edwards, and Aquilino Gonell and Metropolitan Police officer Michael Fanone, along with the more than 140 officers injured that day. 

Fanone, whom rioters beat and tasered, giving him a traumatic brain injury and a heart attack, yesterday told Emily Ngo, Jeff Coltin, and Nick Reisman of Politico: “I think it’s important that every institution in this country, every American, take the responsibility of upholding democracy seriously. And everyone needs to be doing everything that they can to ensure that a.) Donald Trump does not succeed and b.) the MAGA movement is extinguished.”

Unlike the violence of the January 6th insurrectionists, the experience of the people at Valley Forge is etched deep into our national identity as a symbol of the sacrifice and struggle Americans have made to preserve and renew democracy. It is so central to who we are that we have commemorated it in myths and monuments and have projected into the future that its meaning will always remain at the heart of America. According to The Star Trek Encyclopedia, the Federation Excelsior-class starship USS Valley Forge will still be fighting in the 24th century… against the Dominion empire.

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

[marzipanandminutiae]

do you think thomas would write to (or try to) lucille while she was in the asylum ?

I think he absolutely tried, in part because I don't think he knew where she was. She was away at school like him, wasn't she? And HE received half-hearted letters from Aunt and Uncle, who'd bundled him off as soon as it could be arranged but still felt guilty enough to write now and then. Maybe some half-sympathetic teacher at his school promised to post the letters. Maybe he even did, or intended to and forgot. Or maybe he simply threw them into the fire and hoped that in time the boy would forget a sister he was certainly better off without.

(He didn't. But he might have thought she'd forgotten him, when he never received a response. Until the truth about just what kind of institution she was in reached him at last.)

[valeria-fortnite]

i can see smoke from my side of the island, you guys okay over there?

-gg

Smoke? You're probably seeing the forge's smoke, nothing to worry about.

You're sweet for worrying though.

[nordleuchten]

"I love to build castles of happiness and pleasure in France"

One of my absolute favourite letters is this one from La Fayette to his wife Adrienne from January 6, 1778. The army has just begun the encampment at Valley Forge and La Fayette longs for his wife, children, family, friends and home after he made the decision that he, at the current moment, can not in good conscious return to France. He is in a rather bleak mood and writes this rather long letter to his wife. This letter gives great insight not only into his feelings towards his wife and children, but also concerning his relationship with Washington, the state of the Revolution and his position within. He also takes the reader along his reasoning, allowing us to have a better understanding of what words like “honour” and “duty” meant for him personally. Since the letter is longer, allow me to present you some of my favourite passages:

The passages in the brackets are the ones taken out when the letters where published in La Fayette’s Memoirs.

What a date, my dearest, and what a country to be writing from in the month of January! My destiny is strange indeed. In a camp, in the middle of the woods, fifteen hundred leagues from you, I am confined by the winter (when I should have been with you two months ago – when, my dear, all my desires and even good sense obliged me to depart.

*-*-*

Honestly, dear heart, do you think that it would not require very strong reasons to induce me to make this sacrifice? Everything tells me to depart, but honor has told me to remain (…)

*-*-*

You must be aware that it is not for my pleasure that I remain buried in this wretched place, while every possible happiness awaits me in Paris, in the midst of all my friends, and in the arms of a charming wife whom I love more than ever. If you could see for a moment what is in my heart, I would have no need of excuses; and if my feelings affect you ever so little, I dare say that you will be content with the sentiments that I express.

*-*-*

Take advantage of that to write to me, and even though your letter may well arrive long after I have left, write anyway, in case I may be so unfortunate as to be here still, to soften a bit the boredom and sorrow of my exile.)

*-*-*

You should have received by now the letter I sent to you as soon as I heard of your delivery. How happy that event has made me, dear heart! I like to mention it to you in all my letters because I enjoy thinking about it constantly. What a pleasure it will be to embrace my two poor daughters, and have them ask their mother to forgive me. You must not believe that I am so insensitive, dear heart, and at the same time so ridiculous, that the sex of our new child has diminished in the slightest my joy at her birth. We have not become so decrepit that we shall need a miracle to have another child. That one absolutely has to be a boy. For the rest, if one must worry about the family name, I declare that I have decided to live long enough to bear it myself for many years, before I am obliged to bequeath it to another being.

*-*-*

If those ladies do not understand the reasons that force me, despite myself, to remain here (from day to day), they must think me a very ridiculous person, especially since they are able to see my dear heart, that charming wife from whom I separate myself. But that same idea must impress them with a sense that (if I remain, if I sacrifice pleasure to boredom, happiness to sorrow, life in the most amiable company to the dreary life of a savage, if, in short, dear heart, I am far from you instead of being near) it is because I have overwhelming reasons for making that decision.

*-*-*

Several general officers have brought their wives to camp, and I am very envious, not of their wives (who are rather dull), but of the pleasure they have in being able to see them.

*-*-*

I love to build castles of happiness and pleasure in France. You are always a part of them, dear heart, and once we are reunited nothing will separate us again and prevent us from enjoying together both the sweetness of loving each other and the most delightful and tranquil felicity. Farewell, my heart, I truly wish that that arrangement could begin today.

*-*-*

Farewell, farewell, my very dear heart, love me always, and never forget for a moment the unhappy exile who thinks always of you with a new tenderness.

Idzerda Stanley J. et al., editors, Lafayette in the Age of the American Revolution: Selected Letters and Papers, 1776–1790, Volume 1, December 7, 1776–March 30, 1778, Cornell University Press, 1977, pp. 222-226.

[defiledtomb]

Counter point to previous anon but choosing Id over L is also completely heart breaking

The person that the Hunter loves the most is always L they are the one person that the Hunter has. But the idea of a completely self sacrificing and honor bound at all times.

Driven by panic and fear as they run for help the single thought of the duty to save their loved ones. The belief that this is their fault they didn’t lead well enough they have to fix this, they have to save them. They find Id begging for help, even as a small part of them says not to risk them for the Hunters mistake but Id agrees and they go.

Then they hear L and a hot spike of hope strikes through the Hunter and they see forgiveness and a happy end on the horizon and then Id screams.

Seconds burn slowly as the Hunter makes the only choice they see as right, to solve a problem that they made by a poor decision and weakness. Another will not suffer for their choices.

So they save Id and live with the fact that following duty doomed the life of the dearest loved one

And then hunter discovering that there is a letter from L written after their supposed death knowing that they probably *did* hear something after all

[yukyunotabibito]

To Gareth, with all of my love,

His Majesty is doing remarkably well, for a boy who is still so naive in the ways of the world. His grades show a wonderful grasp on both the Fodlan language and what is he is learning in class. Though, he's always had a mind for catching on quickly to such things when he can bury himself in a book; hasn't he?

You shouldn't worry so much about him. For as childish as he still is, he is much more put together than we give him credit for. And even if he fumbles sometimes, he is a quick learner. Please, do not fret yourself to death over his safety. He... he can handle himself. And as much as I would not like to admit it, we must allow him to be on his own or he will never learn a thing.

I write to you now to inform you of my decision to leave the main monastery, and reside in the town below. To give Kurthnaga a little space to grow without me suffocating him. Or perhaps it for myself. Either way, I will no longer constantly be keeping a watchful eye over him. As much as that worries me, I am sure he will be fine. Were we any better at his age? I daresay we were not. I certainly wasn't, though I did not know you at the time, so I cannot say for certain that you also weren't.

And to you, my dear Gareth, I ask of your wellbeing. You are not running yourself ragged watching over my great grandson; are you? Surely not; right? Of course you are; what am I thinking? You are too loyal, you care too much. Hopefully he will not turn out to be half the terror that Kurthnaga was when he was young. I still have the scars on my arms from when he believed the best way to greet someone was by biting them.

Gareth... I... [something is hastily scribbled out here]

How is Goldoa? This season was always my favourite to spend there. Though it was also a favourite for sailing. The next time I return, I will take all three of you - that is you, Ena, and the dear child - out on the open sea. And perhaps Kurthnaga as well, should he happen to return with me and fancy a ride.

Gareth. You will never see this part of the letter, as hopefully a better, future, version of myself will have already seen fit to remove it. But... I miss you as I would miss my own heart were it to be torn from my chest. I suppose it matters not what I say, as you will never read it. Allow me to make a selfish request here then, as it will not matter. Visit Lynet's burial place for me. Bring flowers. The blue ones that she always liked when she was alive. And... keep a few for yourself as well.

I will write to you again soon, to let you know of Kurthnaga's wellbeing. I may be in the town now, but he will not fall into danger under my watch. Keep well, Gareth. And take care of Goldoa.

Yours, always,

Nasir Lambros

[chimaerakitten]

Sometimes I wish that memes about comic sans translated into an actual increased awareness of typography because it’s one of my favorite things and I wanna talk to people about it, but I’m that xkcd comic about experts and chemical formulas and nobody knows what I’m talking about :(

[halfyearsqueen]

♦ cregan 🥺

Send me a "♦" for the first word my muse thinks of when your muse is mentioned. ( @savorre )

“ loyal. “

[ritzcrackerswgooglyeyes]

Why hasn't there been a stoner comedy with elves n shit called "High Fantasy" yet

[ritualis]

would you be surprised to learn who im supposed to be

° traded navy for cyan

° let my hair grow out

° started singing again

° still have cotton mouth

and i wonder if she hates me the same way i hate her

° started wearing jewelry again

° re-reading old msn messages

° too scared to tell them my name

° still wandering dark passages

and i want to know if my ghost haunts her like hers does me

° started remembering hell

° haven't been drinking

° Im not the same person I was

° doing the same amount of overthinking

and i want to amend mistakes to move on, but you already did