#oloriel

[breelandwalker]

My previous place of work watched the entire Conjuring universe during night shift as of summer 2022. I was deeply annoyed with the Warrens when I found out the truth of their behavior.

I'm with you there. The Conjuring films, as horror movies, are WONDERFUL films and I enjoy them quite a bit. Props to James Wan and crew for all their hard work and creativity. But the second I remember that the Warrens were real people who took public and financial advantage of the Perrons for their own aggrandizement, I want to chew the leg off a table.

Also it puckers several of my orifices when grifters and con artists with a religious bent get to have a pop culture stage because Whatever Church-Related Group sees such projects as free advertising and will happily throw money at anything that tells the viewing public that ghosts and demons are Out To Get Them at every possible opportunity and that the only possible solution is An Intercessory Christian Ritual.

See: The Conjuring movies, The Amityville movies, the recent spate of big-budget exorcism-related movies, and any ghost-oriented show that mentions the Warrens or their lore, including but not limited to A Haunting (which is literally bankrolled by the Catholic Church), the Ghost Adventures franchise, Paranormal State, A Ghost Ruined My Life, etc.

So yeah, fuck the Warrens, and fuck all the other evangelical opportunists that carry on this gross tradition of scaring people through church doors and profiting from it.

That being said, let's enjoy our creepy movies for what they are but also educate ourselves about the allegedly-true stories behind those Based On True Events claims.

[anghraine]

I do adore your Tolkien posts

Oh, thank you very much! That's really lovely to hear.

[copperbadge]

Radio Free Monday

Good morning everyone, and welcome to Radio Free Monday!

Ways to Give:

oloriel linked to a fundraiser for Sean, who is close to his $5K fundraising goal for a liver transplant; he needs a healthier environment to live in once he has the transplant and they're raising the funds for a new place and at least some partial furnishings. You can read more and support the fundraiser here.

gwydion's very elderly car broke down in late October; the repair, to a cooling hose, has cheap parts but expensive labor, and ate most of zir budget for the month. Ze can't do without a car, being disabled, but can't afford to replace it either; ze's raising $280 to help cover bills and the repair. You can give via PayPal here.

nivchara-yahel and her sibling rivalconga are raising money for rent, medicine, and living expenses; they need to pay November rent by the 10th to avoid eviction. You can read more, reblog, and find giving information here.

Anon linked to a fundraiser for The Environmental Conservancy of North Port, Florida, who are trying to raise $14K to purchase a parcel of land that will protect a group of gopher tortoise burrows from being forcibly relocated, which could stress or kill the tortoises, a threatened but keystone species in Florida (their burrows are often home to numerous other species). You can read more and support the fundraiser here.

Buy Stuff, Help Out:

francescaswords is dealing with some worsening health issues which are preventing her from working as she completes her degree, which has had funding cut because she's dropped to a part-time student. She's raising funds by sharing her latest novel, the YA contemporary fantasy Rotting Trees, on Patreon between now and December 2024, where patrons can read the book in installments for as low as $1.50/month. The novel follows a girl with a cursed family necklace and the antiques shop she visits to try to break the curse. You can read more and reblog here or join the Patreon here.

Recurring Needs:

rusty-chevy is very close to her fundraising goal after her work cut her hours and thus her ability to cover bills from her reduced paycheck; she's hoping for one final push to reach goal. You can read more, reblog, and find giving information here.

gwydion linked to a fundraiser for Squirrel, a good friend who has recently lost his job and needs to raise about $800 to cover bills and food; Squirrel has had a lot of interviews and believes he will have an offer but won't start work until December. You can give via paypal here.

rilee16 is raising funds to cover November rent and possible late fees after an aggressive roommate hiked their utility bills; Rilee is now sick and also needs to be able to pay to have medication delivered. You can read more, reblog, and find giving information here.

And this has been Radio Free Monday! Thank you for your time. You can post items for my attention at the Radio Free Monday submissions form. If you're new to fundraising, you may want to check out my guide to fundraising here.

[vaspider]

*squeaky noise of delight over NerdyKeppie sticker included in most recent purchase*

Heeee! :) We often send little surprises along. ;)

[words-writ-in-starlight]

I just bought Gideon the Ninth and I would like you to know it's your fault

YOU’RE WELCOME

[qqueenofhades]

Just read your post on explaining end-stage capitalism, and "Nobody wants to be the actual generation that lives through the fall of capitalism, because it’s going to be cataclysmic on every level," - do you have thoughts on how much longer its going to be until this happens? I'm mostly just curious if our generation is going to be the one it hits

...aha. A cheery question (if a totally understandable one). 

To be honest, I would say the odds are....good. People have noticed some rather pointed similarities between the first few decades of the twenty-first century, and the first few decades of the twentieth century. Fascism on the rise, surrealist art, a focus on personal pleasure, Europe in turmoil, an ongoing war (the War on Terror in our case), etc etc. It goes without saying that something major in the economics department happened in 1929, and the country only recovered because of World War II and the need to stimulate wartime production. In the meantime, the Great Depression wiped out the savings and net worth of most of the country, and while the iconic images are the Dust Bowl of the Midwest and the popular myth of stockbrokers jumping out of windows on Wall Street, it was a serious and worldwide event that, as noted, only ended because of an even worse calamity. That is...not something to aspire to.

2029 would be just under ten years from now, though we hope history isn’t THAT on the nose (also, we fucking never learn. Anything. Ever.) That matches rather well with the outer limit of the time we have to save the planet from runaway climate change, and frankly, it all depends. If Trump gets re-elected in 2020, I... honestly think we’re fucked. We’re already fucked as it is now, but I just don’t see a way in which the present system could cope with another five years of this (shudders, throws salt over shoulder, spins in a circle). We’re already well down the Nazi checklist as it is. The prospect of allowing that to go on for another half a decade is.... let’s just say I don’t think there’d be much of anything recognizable as America at the end. Not that there’s much now.

I also think that as is always the case, middle-class and marginally middle class people (especially white ones) will probably miss out on the worst of it. It’s already the case that climate change and global poverty and this kind of thing most affects the people who are safely “out of sight, out of mind” for the complacent West. After all, WE aren’t the Bangladeshis getting flooded because of climate change, WE aren’t the kids in Chinese factories forced to spend 18 hours a day, 7 days a week making iPhones, WE aren’t the immigrants from Central American countries getting caged at the border and being thrown into concentration camps, so on and so forth. These things are already happening, but American/European/etc people with a certain amount of privilege are still able to remain insulated from that. If there was to be a comprehensive collapse, then even people who have been able to minimise the effects on themselves until now would be caught up in it. The world has changed to such a degree that if there was another Great Depression, it wouldn’t happen in the same way, but we already saw what the financial crash of 2008 did (and it in fact came very close to wrecking the global economy permanently). Plus, think of how much of our possessions/money/etc are now virtual. Most of us don’t get a physical paycheck anymore (it’s all direct deposit) and rarely carry cash. Our savings are just some numbers in a database in a bank’s computer system. There’s no such thing as privacy, corporations own all our data and personal information, and you can’t opt out of this system or boycott Amazon because they literally own too much of the infrastructure to make that realistically possible. It would basically take one good crash of the internet to leave a lot of people destitute, and our current civilization is a very fragile thing.

I.... really don’t know. I’m not sure I have anything necessarily optimistic to say, and that’s a struggle. You have to live in a state of hopeful nihilism, because if you focus on the big picture and how chaotic and nightmarish things are on the macro level, you’ll go crazy. You can’t control that, you will give yourself anxiety over it, and you will miss out on what you can do on a day-to-day level. As one person, you can’t fix this by yourself. But you can still make choices about what you do and how you interact with people and what you value and how you behave even in this comprehensively flawed system. We don’t know if we’re all going to die, it’s true. But nobody in the history of time has ever known that, and the human race has gotten through some pretty tough scrapes before. We don’t know. We really don’t. And despite /waves hand/ ALL THIS, we’re... still here, for now. Many of us have things that make us happy. And those mean something. It’s not all chaos and nightmare. As Samwise Gamgee would say, there’s good in this world, Mr. Frodo, and it’s worth fighting for.

In short: yes, the world is very probably fucked, and I can’t rule out the possibility that a major collapse affecting even the privileged groups/people who have the luxury of avoiding the worst of it happens in our lifetime, or even within another ten years. I worry constantly about not having enough time to have a real life, as I think a lot of people of my generation do. But I have also had that stare-into-the-abyss-and-decide-what-I’m-going-to-do-about-it many times, and I don’t think it’s worth just giving up and deciding that nothing matters and etc etc. I think it’s worth going on with your life in the day to day, small-thing moments. I think it’s worth having things you enjoy and things you dream about and those seemingly wildly impossible dreams about what you’ll do when you’re old and the idea that any of us will in fact get to live a real life. There is still goodness, and kindness, and beauty in the world. Because we’re plugged into the constant bad-news-from-everywhere power hour in terms of the internet, we miss that.

Anyway. This has turned into a ramble, and it explains the weird state we live in of trying to be personally optimistic even when we know things are shit, and how hard that is, but is still the only thing we can do. And honestly: the future isn’t set. Our destruction is not inevitable. We’re in the darkest timeline now and we seem to have been in it for a while, but even that can end. Enough people just have to decide that we’re not putting up with it anymore, and act accordingly.

We are many. They are few. It’s always been the case. They have a lot more than we do, materially speaking, but it’s still possible. It always is.

So yes.

[naamahdarling]

Random drive-by, I saw that post about customizing ponies with acrylic paint and not nail polish and while I have no stakes in that I wanted to say OMG THAT PONY YOU POSTED IS SO BEAUTIFUL YOU ARE SO GOOD!!!!!

Thank you so much! I have worked really hard to get to this point and I’m glad that it shows.  I think Poppy is probably my personal best. I can’t believe how well she turned out, and pictures don’t do her justice.

This is my first rerooted custom, done around 2011 on a dollar store knockoff:

I learned so much and made so many mistakes. I still love her, though.

And this is one I did not very long ago:

That’s a lot of progress in a relatively short time.  I truly believe this is something anyone can try at and succeed in making something that sparks joy.  What you make at first may not be perfect, but I promise you will love it and be proud of it, and I will be proud of you, too.

If you want to try customizing/altering/retouching toys, just go for it.

It’s seriously SO MUCH FUN.

If you want to see a list of all the customs my GF and I have made, you can view a list here: Custom Pony Masterlist.

If you’d like to support me making more lovely ponies, my GF and I have a Patreon where we do just that!

[isanah]

oloriel replied to your post “so I’ve seen the Mulan 2020 trailer (teaser?) and, hmm. Feelings about...”

Too Chinese???? What did they think Mulan was???

I--I don’t know.  I get that the absence of musical numbers like “Let’s Get Down to Business” and Mushu are going to make Mulan 2020 unlike Mulan 1998, but IDK, did they think the Chinese influences should have just stopped at musical instruments and design?

[eighthdoctor]

@oloriel “Chows”

I was actually just talking with @mylordshesacactus about my favorite breeds, which are almost universally “large shaggy working breeds with Opinions and Personality”

chows...fit that description but I’m not a fan of the opinions and the personality >.<

They are notorious for being standoffish and dog aggressive, hard to train, etc. They are extremely independent.

They’re good dogs? It’s an extremely old breed with a very nice history. But they don’t at all suit me.

[neumh]

Snippets by Oloriel

Short snippets and word sketches, mostly Pieder.

[dduane]

For the calligraphy fans out there: the formal Instrument of Consent to the upcoming UK royal wedding. (via the excellent Alastair Bruce on Twitter)

ETA: BTW, from the comments (thanks @oloriel): “This is pretty neat and all, but now I’m curious about the form. Does it always say “Our Most Dearly Beloved [relation]”, or if it was someone less Dearly Beloved (but still liked enough that the marriage is ok)...”

I suspect the form of address is laid out by the Crown Office, as is the case for letters patent ennobling new barons, etc. (Possibly it’s in this law: “Crown Office (Forms and Proclamations Rules) Order 1992 (SI 1992/1730).” If you go take a look at the Wikipedia page on Letters patent*, you can see (for example) the different levels of address used according to the degree of ennoblement: from “trusty and well-beloved” (for mere Barons) up to “right trusty and right entirely beloved cousin” (for Dukes, who are way higher up the power-and-influence ladder). (For “right”, here, to bring the sentiment more up to date, substitute “exceptionally” or “extremely” or even “really”.)

My own suspicion is that as regards the higher levels of nobility, the image one wants to project in such a presentation is that the person being referred is (or had best be) beloved, considering their proximity (and implied access) to the Crown. So this would count double for princes and those related by blood to the Crown -- hence “most dearly beloved grandson”.

An interesting side note here: The press has been comparing the two Instruments of Consent issued to the two royal couples, and noting that Kate Middleton is referred to as “trusty and well-beloved” but Meghan Markle is simply referred to by her name. Apparently there was some concern that Meghan was being dissed somehow, but this turns out simply to be a matter of nationality. Meghan is not a British citizen. (Yet, anyway.) Kate already was, before her marriage, and so in her and William’s Instrument of Consent she gets the basic form of address to which all Brits are normally entitled in such a letter or instrument.

*Young Wizards fans will recognize this term (and its callback to its original Latin meaning) as one used for describing worldgate status: an accessible gate open for transport is decribed as patent, or in terms of its patency. The term is also medical, referring to blood vessels that are open and running correctly -- which is also what I was thinking of when coining it. NB, also, the use of “cousin” as a term of closeness and (potential) affection, and nothing to do with actual blood relationship.

[breelandwalker]

My local farmers market had pumpkins on Saturday! Already!

I'M SO FREAKING READY!!!!!

I'm going to eat homemade pumpkin tempura this year until I explode and nothing can stop me.

[olorielmoonshadow]

March Madness Top Ten: Ligeia, under dimmed lights/Oloriel My poem on Sudden Denouement! Please go and read the rest of the amazing submissions. You will not regret it!

[copperbadge]

oloriel replied to your link “Six Harvests in Lea, Texas”

I grew up in Lubbock, it's funny seeing it (and TTU) mentioned in one of your stories. I can smell/taste the dust and feel the sun as I read <3

It was a little strange to write about! I’ve been around Texas quite a bit of course, but never to Lubbock, and I don’t know much history of the place. So I based a lot of what I was writing on the history research I did on a town in Oregon :D 

geekgirl76 replied to your post “auressea reblogged your photo and added: ...”

*gasp* Sam, you don't RINSE your butter?! :p I was always the one on rinse and butter paddles duty becasue I was too small to churn it, but I could rinse and squish like a pro! My great uncles liked to humour us and let us "play farm" when we went to visit. Only in retrospect did I realize they didn't even KEEP milking cows at that point, and they bought in cream specifically for us to churn.

I never knew you should! Churning butter is great for kids because it keeps them occupied -- a friend of mine always brings a jar full of cream and a clean marble to let the kid churn with when she babysits :D 

figtreeandvine replied to your post “auressea reblogged your photo and added: ...”

According to my mother's stories, an additional step is to knead the butter in cold saltwater. The idea is to get as much of the whey/milk solids out as possible. Otherwise the butter can go rancid or even mold. (My grandparents kept a Jersey. Butter making was not a hobby.)

I suppose it’s fortunate I can keep it in the fridge, where it’s at least less likely to happen. I’d no idea leaving a little buttermilk in could do that! 

hxans replied to your post “drgaellon replied to your photo “@tehnakki, have I ever showed you...”

Do you know the trick with parchment paper is to roll it out across the pan with enough spare to fit the sides, and then cut at the corners the depth of the dish? Then when you press it in it will stay in shape and and side bits usually fold around each other so there's no gaps in the corners.

Oh yeah, I’m just too lazy to deal with it sometimes :D 

celeste-de-la-mancha replied to your link “Six Harvests in Lea, Texas”

ooh! i was just thinking about this story the other day, and I was maybe going to ask you about it! perfect timing. i have to finish a thesis by monday but i will read it as soon as i'm done.

Good luck with your thesis! I remember those days....

fatfemme-inist replied to your photo “Mine also advise dragging your favorite toys everywhere with you and...”

If my sibling and I are quarantined in separate cities should I attempt their murder from afar or find another form of amusement?

I mean, figuring out a remote murder ought to keep you busy for quite some time :D 

davisoer5 replied to your photo “@tehnakki, have I ever showed you the results of my first attempt at...”

I am intrigued at why these biscuits are considered cursed. Is it the mysterious 'fermented butter"?

I don’t even remember at this point, just that we both had bad things happen to us after making them :D 

[vaspider]

Am using one of y'alls cold & heat packs for the first time (on heat). Bliss. I don't know why I didnt buy some of these sooner.

Oh I’m so glad it’s helping you! :D 

[words-writ-in-starlight]

I've been watching you delight over The Untamed and now I've started watching it and _it's all your fault_

Anonymous asked:

may i say that reading your reaction to the untamed is very interesting and entertaining. i'm waiting for several plot points with bated breath

@cherryblossomshadow asked:

YES! I AM SO EXCITED THAT YOU ARE INTO THE UNTAMED!

So IN ORDER, I am not sorry, you are so welcome; I know just enough spoilers that I TOO am waiting with bated breath, I literally screamed out loud during the final battle of the Sunshot Campaign, I love dark!WWX so much; and YEAH DUDE SAME I’M REALLY ENJOYING IT.

There’s a funny quirk of how my brain handles new media when I’m in a really intensely bad headspace, and it’s that there’s a 50% chance of my brain going “this media is Rejected” and then refusing to ever engage with it again, versus a 50% chance of my brain going “I would like you to accept this media as a new piece of your personality, there is no gift receipt”, so I’m just honestly relieved that this very good show came down on the right side of that coin flip.