#of watering down my information

[emeraldgreaves]

45 or 55 for moira red 👀👀? both seem sort of,,,thematically consistent with them LMAO

have 500 words of moirared to break the word curse.

55. tracing the lines on the other’s hand

They’re in the library cramming, as one always finds themselves doing during finals week; him for Planar Theory, her for Anatomy and Mending. And she knows she’s going to fail it, keeps dreaming that she opens the test booklet and discovers the whole thing is in Magid, or it’s the wrong unit, or the paper turns into a swarm of bats and flies right into her face.

And Red is a little bit of a flirt—this is well-established, mostly with people who find her an adequate shoulder to cry on after the fact, though she hasn’t joined their ranks quite yet—but even with how casual and unassuming he is about it, he’s never done so with her.

He asks what she’s studying, and she tells him it’s the parts of the hand, though at this point it’s reduced to flipping through her endless stacks of index cards and wishing for a proper diagram. And he says well, you could just show me, and holds out one of his hands.

She takes it, and it’s still unmarked, tan skin not yet scarred and callused from a decade’s worth of discovery, though someday it will be. She points to each segment in turn—distal, medial, and proximal phalanges, and anatomy doesn’t sound too far from an incantation as she lists them out, flipping over to his palm. And yet they’re not wholly blank. Here is the silvery-white slash of a scar across the spiderwebbed creases of his palm. Here is the mottled ghost of a burn from the time he snatched up a spell scroll and discovered the protection the hard way. Here is the stray freckled nestled in the curve of his wrist. Here are the formerly scraped knuckles and shadowed arteries running alongside taut tendon lines, the entire history of his exploration all in one place.

“If you want my opinion,” he says afterward, fingers still resting in hers, “I think you’re going to ace it.”

And she hadn’t expected him to pay attention—medical terminology is hard enough for Healers to memorize, let alone those studying an entirely different discipline that only happen to be in the same space —but seven years later they’re out for lunch again in the café. He’s through one and a half sandwiches, and she’s barely managed two sips of tea, but the conversation has always been the point of it, and she doesn't mind letting things settle. Somehow they’re on the topic of exams, the way they were half-killing themselves over knowledge but somehow in love with it all the same.

“I remember plenty,” he insists, the third variation on this particular theme.

“I’m not claiming you were completely oblivious,” she says. “Simply that you had plenty of your own projects to consider.”

And she always knows when something has caught his interest; a little light flares up in his eyes, and he leans forward, suddenly regarding you like you’re the most engaging thing in the world. “Really,” he says lightly. “Try me.”

He holds out a hand. After a moment she extends hers across the table. He takes it, turns it over carefully like she’s one of his precious artifacts, then bows his head and recites distal, medial, proximal--

“All right,” she says afterward, “maybe you do remember.” And he’d smiled at her over the rim of his teacup in a way that was familiar, and yet strangely not at all.

[carnivalcarriondiscarded]

never have i been so entirely exhausted from sitting in front of a laptop in a dark room for three hours gay! and so full of delight and happiness! like wow! i have not felt this good in ages!! and its a good kind of tired! i feel like im glowing!

but shit, the update is more than i could've dreamed of. like i said - three straight hours of combing, and i probably still missed a thing or two! i'm even saving the storytime audio to enjoy in the morning, i haven't listened to it yet!

i already have so many thoughts and emotions but i'm... so wiped out oh my god lmao. so much new stuff at once! i need to sleep on it all! and in the morning i will be more than happy to reply, interact, answer asks on this subject, share my actual thoughts - i just need to take the rest of the night to Process and rest, yk yk

and i know i "missed" some links on my liveblog! i know i know! i didn't add every single thing i found - like most of the Wally audios - because i'll be compiling them all into a labeled post tomorrow! when i wake up! i'm already looking forward to it <3 i'm confident i personally found all of them, though! i was Thorough! i went through everything at least twice, i tabbed through, i clicked on Everything...

but yes i hope you all are having a wonderful Update Day/Evening/Morning/Afternoon As The Case May Be. this is truly a delight and again, more than i could've dreamed of. i'd forgotten what it's like to be so wholly excited and delighted by something! it's been so long since i've felt this kind of genuine joy and whimsy! usually im white-knuckling my optimism and happiness but tonight it was all authentic 100% non-forced From The Soul!

[theres-whump-in-that-nebula]

When you have to take off your socks to change into clean socks and your bare feet touch the floor for exactly fifteen seconds and the dry, smooth sensation makes you want to chop your toes off

[coriander-candlesticks]

I'm sick so I'm sorry if this doesn't make sense, but I've been thinking about the nature of myths recently as I've been exploring hellenic polytheism.

For context: I'm ex-Mormon. I was raised in the church and, because of that, was taught biblical literalism but in, like, a more subtle way than most? I was raised believing that Adam & Eve and Noah's Ark, etc., were literally true, but that the story of Job specifically was not; I also always knew evolution and the Big Bang to be correct, despite there being a verse in the Doctrine & Covenants (a Mormon-specific religious book) where God apparently told Joseph Smith that the world is 6,000 years old- a passage I didn't know existed until my senior year of high school. I didn't realize I had believed in biblical literalism until I'd left the church, actually.

Now that I'm aware of it, it's a mindset I'm actively trying to combat while I explore Hellenic polytheism. It's definitely been a task to separate the nature of the Gods from their myths, as brutal as they often are. And it's something I've noticed within the community, too, which I think is interesting. It makes sense: Christianity, at least, has had a chokehold on much of the world for a long time, and so many of us have experienced literalism as our first interaction with any sort of holy text (though, of course, Greek myths as a whole aren't that) alongside our first experience with divinity as a wrathful God whose flaws are waved away, or ignored, or twisted into positive attributes. This also means that I'm trying to re-approach several deities with an open mind (Zeus, Hera, and Ares in particular, but many of them to some extent) while also trying to un-condition myself. I was already in the process of doing this, of course, but trying to figure out how to interact with a completely different pantheon has made that especially clear.

It extends to things like prayer and offerings, too. Prayers were very formulaic growing up, even though most of the time there wasn't a strict script to follow. There was always something you ask as part of the prayer, even if it's just 'please help me do better tomorrow' (alongside giving thanks, of course), so trying to craft a prayer without adding *everything* I'm used to including in makes it feel incomplete and, therefore, disrespectful. And daily prayer is something I'm resistant to because of prior experiences with it. I don't want to offend any of the gods by asking for something or asking for too much, especially so early on, and there's always a promised offering the few times I *have* asked. Add worries about exact obedience on top of that and it's proving to be a difficult thing to untangle. And I know that the gods are difficult to offend, figuring out how to do this takes trial & error and that's okay, it'll get better the more I do it, etc., etc.; this is more an issue with my own overthinking than anything else (hooray for ✨ mental health issues ✨). I'm not really asking for advice here, necessarily, just thinking out loud because I'm not comfortable talking to people in meat space about it yet.

[sassmill]

Sometimes I think about Indigo Girls lyrics and have to just weep for a minute

[quinloki]

Reality is often weirder than fiction, because fiction worries about being believed.

[enchi-elm]

I've been writing some smut for two of my OCs in the Turn fanfic You've Caught Me Between Wind and Water, Lt. Jameson Mullcock and Lt. Frederico Ridgewell. It's going really well, so well in fact that I might end up submitting it to an erotica magazine in the future--which would prevent me from posting it on AO3.

To that end, to cover my own disappointment, here's some bits of lore for these two, gratis:

Background

Frederico

Full name is Frederico “Dico” Miguel Carvalho dos Reis Ridgewell

He is a Portuguese-American (mother is Portuguese) and stands in for the many Portuguese-American contributions to the Continental Army (go look up Pedro "Peter" Francisco)

Father split when Frederico was young, he grew up with his mother in New York in a Portuguese neighbourhood

Speaks fluent Portuguese

James

Jameson Mullcock is just Jameson Mullcock, but he goes by James

He is Irish-American and stands in for the many Irish-American contributions to the Continental Army (I explicitly wanted to include an Irish-American character because there were shitty stereotypes in the army against the Irish from other nationalities; like, we have primary sources for this)

James does not disclose he is half-Irish when he enlists and just lists his birthplace as Philadelphia

His mother is Abaigeal Noiréis (Abigail Norris), born in Galway, Ireland (thank you @mercurygray for naming her and helping me with her backstory!)

She is Catholic and married a Protestant British soldier she met during the occupation of Ireland, then followed him to England and then Pennsylvania and had to keep her faith secret

James is raised Protestant and only knows a little of the Catholic faith, which he keeps secret (because there was a considerable anti-Catholic sentiment in parts of the colonies)

Knows a little bit of Irish and wishes he knew more but doesn't think he'd be welcome (or feel comfortable) among the Irish soldiers and officers

Personality and looks

Frederico

olive skin, dark eyes, tousled dark hair

enough weight on him to look conspicuously healthy at Valley Forge in 1777

exactly as athletic as he looks but not quite as intelligent

drop dead gorgeous and doesn't care

cinnamon roll, too pure for this world, is the only one unaware that people believe this of him

a dark horse so dark you can't even see him coming

James

pale enough to look anemic, eyes and hair too light for people's comfort

tall, gangly; gaunt, even by Valley Forge standards

more athletic than he looks and more intelligent too

sarcastic slacker who's too smart to let people know how much more responsibility he's capable of taking on

has maybe two vices (tea and tobacco) that he'll hold onto, everything else he's already resigned himself to losing

would rather light his arm on fire than go after something he wants in a direct, open, and honest manner (and be Seen? Are you mad?)

Occupation

and the whole reason I put this post together, which is to remind future Apfel that they are 2nd LIEUTENANTS in LAMB'S CONTINENTAL ARTILLERY which was reorganized in 1777 from LAMB'S INDEPENDENT COMPANY NEW YORK ARTILLERY which drew from artillery companies in NEW YORK, CONNECTICUT AND PENNSYLVANIA. OKAY??

AND ARTHUR GARRICK IS A 1ST LIEUTENANT AND CAPTAIN ARMISTEAD FOLK IS THEIR CAPTAIN. AND PERKINS IS THEIR ENSIGN. IT'S ALL ONE GROUP. REMEMBER THIS!

CALEB WAS PART OF THIS GROUP. THEY WERE ALSO IN PEEKSKILL AND AT THE WHITEMARSH ENCAMPMENT.

YOU ALREADY WROTE LAMB INTO THE STORY IN CHAPTER 8.

YOU ALREADY FIGURED THIS OUT.

YOU DON'T NEED TO RESEARCH IT AGAIN.

...

@georgios-kyriacos, I believe you expressed interest in these two :)

[gothsuguru]

i love muting people on twitter some of you bitches are very dumb

[teobug]

hey wtf is pomade and why does it make my hair do magic actually

[spelldealer]

i had an insane dream last night…

[vaugarde]

tbh its a little darkly funny to me that my misophonia is so bad that even my family who usually refuses most explanations for why im Like That and go "no no no youve got absolutely nothing wrong with you and youre a perfectly neurotypical abled person" heard me say i might have misophonia and immediately went "yeah that sounds about right"

[abyssalpriest]

I am really excited for the worship of inversion though. Theres. hmm. I guess that's the part where I need to open MY gates to this stuff but like. The Carrion Crow priest. The reaper. Sickle in hand harvesting energy.... You have to understand I exist to give, I fucking love giving. Breast milk and eyes form the core of my symbolic existence - so does the Sky Bird, untouchable watcher that is the Sky - for a reason, I love to give energy, open gates, and sit back and watch. Man. To be taken from? Fantastic. I guess that's why Lev's throwing this at me, "this" being the inversion thing because inversion needs to be central and has been central since the beginning... and will be central. The idea of being an official priest is scary because it means I'm no longer abstract and giving, I'm a siphon, a riverbank, and uh. as lev wants me to realise. Important.

But this is about inversion and Polarity, it's not about taking and being important - it's about taking to give, being important in the way I show others they don't need me and what they're capable of. Worship is release, giving is taking, and it's not just fun little symbols. It's about power, it's about being both one body and all bodies, about being a follower and the followed. And seriously, if you aren't getting when you give and you aren't powerful when you're submitting then we've failed our jobs and we need to rework what we're doing.

The whole thing needs to have the wheel of life and cycle of consumption at it's centre - plant prey predator plant prey predator (etc) - and learning to be the ouroboros that is all three of these things, witness, body, consumer... Bound by death - living through death.

Honestly it's about embodied Polarity. The bottom of the ocean is hard to adjust to... But when the last breath is taken from your lungs and your mind inverts and your body gives in you will realise you're more comfortable and safe than you've ever been - and you have been the whole time. The sky is endless information and the point of Oneness that destroys your conceptions of reality and brings your life into pointlessness because you are just one of God's scales - and through that you gain control of your life, your power, your purpose, you understand that you can create your own purpose, the individual makes way for God and God makes way for the individual. The blackness, the meditative silence, the absence, the shroud of his energy, the sleeping, are canvases upon which to paint whatever you want. The black 1D dot at the centre of your soul is an infinite gateway into all else.

The carrion crows watch you. The spiders weave webs in your room. They watch you because they're watching over you, you are part of their packs. The black waters suffocate the room at night lit by candles that flicker under waters' weight. This is comforting safety. You now understand the sun is an abstract, parasitic, eldritch body of his that spirals into all life on earth including your own body, the day sky is a dream haze of endless information that swallows awareness, him laid over creation filtering it from the waters... Both are elements you can touch and play and make things with, a god body both untouchable/sacrosanct and completely given to you/of the people - clay given to you freely as one of the Sky Father's own.

Then I become the bird which watches over.... hosts to information, speakers of Madness, possessed and through possession climbing, spiralling, like the Centipede through reality. Hosts to tiny things writhing in the bodies, offshoots of the Leviathan, individual microcosmic skies swimming with birds and clouds. Those who play with each body of theirs, the animal selves, the conscious minds, the past and future selves.... their blood and energy flowing as one, the body as a sacred temple to the self, shrouded host to the singular utterance of your own individual Name..........

[trans-mando]

guys ngl this writing a paper thing is challenging

[inklingofadream]

not having a campaign website + profile through the state voter info site is almost always a disqualifier, but for the rare double whammy, be sure to have a heavy, unconnected internet presence revealed when i google your email where you are revealed to be 1) an insane bigot and 2) as seen on TLC

[agallimaufryofoddments]

Do I attempt to salvage the thought I had about Fermet printing Fermetes 2+ hours ago into a post at 10:23 PM or do I salvage the 1883 words of a .md file I apparently wrote before the two hours of helping someone assemble monitor stand + cable management session began into some droll post for tomorrow?

[toytulini]

me: doing water changes to bring the nitrates in my tank down

the water i was using for my water changes, apparently: