#precipitation bears in trees

[a-map-of-gays]

Easily one of the most main-charactercore moments I've ever had is walking down the street in the pouring rain while Precipitation by bears in trees blasts on my headphones

[hootowlgryph0n]

When Bears in Trees said "life is beautiful but life is work" I felt that

[generic-sandbox-member]

i feel like emef and how to stay shining dont get enough love, i love emef so much

[jamiemaybeme]

every single reference to christianity i can find in bears' in trees songs because. yeah. fight me

uhhh idk why i'm doing this at 1am but enjoy ig

just five more minutes:

4am: "for god's sake it's only 4am"

fly out to alaska:

"well moses saw God in a burning bush, so i'm praying please"

bits n' pieces:

fyaaa (bandcamp exclusive): "praying to saint jude all of our lives"

i see blue:

nights like these: "stop asking st anthony"

EDITED: two of my very lovely friends, berry and jamie 1, pointed out that "mother help me, madonna and child" is a reference to mary and Jesus. thank you guys!!

i want to feel chaotic:

rust: "a broken piece/of God's great plan"

"stop me eating the sand/stop me feeling so goddamm bad"

keep me safe:

laugh/cry: "demons of the soul"

and everybody else smiled back:

heaven sent is a coffee cup: ..."heaven" (repeated throughout the song)

mossy cobblestone (kind of): "stained glass" - stained glass windows are often found in churches

"my body is a temple" - common idiom with religious connotations

"and God knows i'll live forever/or die in the attempt"

confidant: "but because you were my home/built on stone instead of sand" - reference to the wise man and foolish man, a parable Jesus told in the new testament (in the bible)

little cellist: "“even Jesus Christ himself needed help to bear his cross”"

sun machine: "i cradle God on my walk to u n i"

"she preaches gospel truth down the hall"

if i just ask politely: " you tell me you're going to church in the morning"

precipitation:

"they said the clouds opened up/and the heavens came down" (technically it's an idiom but leave me alone idc /lh)

every moonbeam every fever dream:

kind love: "set 'em in stained glass windows/build cathedrals to our flaws/the spire's crowned by galaxies"

doing this again: "oh [my] God we're doing this again"

"my mother 'cites a rosary downstairs"

"but Lord these blesséd words fail me"

how to stay shining:

bart's bike: "find heaven sent in brooklyn street" - a reference to heaven sent is a coffee cup

how to build an ocean: instructions:

i can't see anything i don't like about you: "when i'm good, good god, i'm great"

"i am everyone and everything all of the time/oh god i'll be..."

all you get is confetti: "you are magdelene, mary" - mary magdelene is a woman from the bible, who was possessed by demons until Jesus told them to leave her alone. she then became a follower of Christ and was with him until his death. in all four gospels she is cited as one of the women, or the only woman, to be the first people to see Jesus' empty tomb. she also is the first person said to see Jesus resurrected. he speaks to her and she does not recognise him until she says his name.

henry says: "but/and i'll make snow angels out of all their bad dreams"

hot chocolate: "and if it snows right now that would be heaven/i mean honestly, that would be heaven"

nothing cures melancholy like looking at maps: "praying the police won't call on us"

we don't speak anymore: "we can part any sea/that surrounds us" - in the old testament, moses leads the israelites out of egypt by parting the red sea. it is a miracle that God performs through him. moses is also mentioned in fly out to alaska (above).

unreleased songs:

tea: "whether it's the devil's water or the holy water/your essence bleeds out and you diffuse"

[ghost-in-a-cup]

Tumblr and bitblr i require aid

i want a custom phonecase. the following images are some of the cases i made/liked

[fallen-goldfishcracker]

not to be sappy on main but like

I wanna sit with you and have healthy conversations/ our wants, our wills, our trials and tribulations/ sort through faults and fears, the happier years/ let the smiles be the tears replacement

[still-july]

day 13 of posting my favourite bears in trees lyrics:

they said the clouds opened up //

and the heavens came down //

felt like precipitation all the same //

but I guess friend well look //

when we go to sleep for good //

we'll just sing in the rain

Precipitation

[toripar]

when bears in trees said

but pressure causes pipes to crack and now his shoulder's drenched in tears. she was so overwhelmed, it was like she hadn't cried in years— and he said, "even jesus christ himself needed help to bear his cross. please feel free to lean on me if the world becomes too much."

and when they said

i wanna sit with you and have healthy conversations. our wants, our wills, our trials and tribulations. sort through faults and fears, the happier years; let the smiles be the tears replacement

and

but i love my friends, they make me feel alive again! keep me, oh, keep me safe, stuck within this maze encompassing my brain,

oh, and

there's a picture of ben smiling so sweetly, didn't know i took a photo, he just looked up to see me

[snowychicken]

I WANNA SIT WITH YOU AND HAVE HEALTY CONVERSATIONS

OUR WANTS OUR WILLS OUR TRIALS AND TRIBULATIONS

LET'S SORT THROUGH THE THOUGHTS AND FEARS THE HAPPY YEARS

LET THE SMILES BE THE TEARS' REPLACEMENT

[sargeantsarmy]

💜And I guess we all live

💚In the eye of the storm

💛And around us it rages

💗It raged

[wholesalesoftie]

got heartache for a friend

[s-ccaam-era-crepe]

💌 😳😳

sage green and midnight blue for colors. tma stranger and spiral stuff. The oak-garcias + close-fosters (and dndads in general :D). lemon and raspberry flavor paring. cloud-watching on a nice day. rowan chnt OH!!! Also nark, duh :)

[craftingcreatures]

Today I want to talk about the Pacific Northwest Tree Octopus (Octopus paxarbolis).

OK, so for those who don't know, the PNW Tree Octopus was an internet hoax created in 1998 consisting of a website detailing the animal's life history and conservation efforts. It's completely fake - saying that up front. This animal never existed.

But if you look at this from a speculative biology standpoint? It's genius.

There is one, and only one, thing preventing Octopus from colonizing and being hugely successful in terrestrial environments in the PNW, and that's the fact that no cephalopod has ever been able to overcome the osmotic stress of inhabiting freshwater. We don't know why this is; other mollusks evolved freshwater forms just fine. But if you hand-wave away that one, single limiting factor, the PNW is just primed for a terrestrial octopus invasion.

The Pacific coast of North America is an active tectonic boundary, meaning the coast transitions pretty much immediately into the Cascade and Coastal mountain ranges (contrast with the east coast and its broad Atlantic plain). It's also a lush temperate rainforest, with very high precipitation. This means lots and lots of high-gradient mountain streams with lots of waterfalls and rapids and cold, highly oxygenated water, and not as many large, meandering rivers.

This has important consequences on the freshwater fauna. For one, there are not many freshwater fish in the Pacific Northwest - the rapids and waterfalls are extremely hard to traverse, so many mountain streams are fish-free. There also just isn't much fish diversity in the first place - there's sturgeon in the big rivers, salmonids, a few sculpin and cyprinids and... that's pretty much it. These cold northern rivers are positively impoverished compared to the thriving fish communities of the Mississippi or Rio Grande.

Few fish means few predators, and depending on the size of the first freshwater octopus, salmon and trout just wouldn't be much of a threat. And while these rivers don't have much in the way of fish diversity, there's lots of prey available - crayfish, leeches, mosquito larvae, frogs and tadpoles, water striders, and other aquatic insects, just to name a few. So the first Octopus pioneers to invade the rivers would be entering what essentially amounts to a predator-free environment with lots and lots of food and no competition. Great for colonization.

These ideal conditions get even better once you get up past the rapids and waterfalls, since there's no fish whatsoever in those streams. Octopus, with their sucker-lined arms, are perfectly equipped to navigate fast-moving, rocky-bedded streams and climb up cliffs. They'd also be well able to traverse short stretches of dry ground to access even more isolated pools and ponds. In fact, once Octopus overcome the osmoregulation problem there's nothing at all preventing them from colonizing land in earnest, since the PNW rainforests are so wet; there's no danger of drying out.

Finally there's the question of reproduction. Octopus are famously attentive mothers, because they need to keep the water around their eggs moving and well-oxygenated. In a mountain stream, this wouldn't be an issue, because the cold, turbulent water holds lots and lots of oxygen. Breeding in high mountain streams would be ideal, and the mothers might not even need to attend to their eggs, freeing them up to evolve away from semelparity and allowing them to reproduce more than once in their lives; their populations would thus increase rapidly and dramatically.

I think, if octopus managed to invade freshwater ecosystems in the PNW, it would dramatically change the ecology much like an invasive species. They'd be unstoppable predators of frogs, bugs, slugs, maybe even larger animals like snakes, birds, and small mammals. Nothing would eat them except maybe herons, and things like bears and raccoons would give them a wide berth due to their venom. They would rule that landscape.

The tl;dr is that the PNW is primed for invasion by cephalopods, if only they could manage to overcome the osmoregulation problem and live in freshwater. If the Pacific Northwest Tree Octopus really did exist, it wouldn't be a shy and reclusive species on the brink of extinction; it would be a pest, an invasive, overpopulated menace you couldn't get rid of if you wanted to. I can just imagine them crawling up onto people's bird feeders and either stealing the nuts or luring in unsuspecting sparrows and starlings. They would sit in the trees and throw pinecones at hikers for fun. They would be some unholy mixture of snake and slug with the personality of a magpie and I am incensed that they only exist in fiction.

[generic-sandbox-member]

ive ordered another bears in trees shirt yay , the BiT wardrobe (the beardrobe if u will) is underway

[baddybaddyadardaddy]

a knife in the dark

[adar/oc]

This is a slightly unhinged WIP AU for my longfic, Awake, Arise or Be For Ever Fall'n. Highly recommend (ask/beg/implore) you to read at last the first like, 8 chapters of that first or you'll be... um... maybe a lil confused? PREMISE: Erenyë is reembodied in Valinor, but Mandos shrouds her memories of Utumno, hoping to spare her pain in her new life. But she is restless in Aman, sensing that something is missing... She boards a ship heading for Middle Earth, hoping to discover just what that is. [DON'T @ ME ON REINCARNATION MECHANICS, THIS IS PURELY A NONSENSE DRABBLE THING THAT WILL HOPEFULLY EVENTUALLY LEAD TO SMUT BUT MORE REALISTICALLY WILL JUST BE A LOT OF RIP-YOUR-HEART-OUT ANGST BECAUSE APPARENTLY THAT'S ALL I DO HERE. 🫠 ]

She makes her voyage on an elven ship that is nearly empty.

Why would you go across the sea, the other elves ask her, mouths agape, in the days before her departure. Bliss lies here in the West—you will find little comfort on the shores of Middle Earth.

Erenyë cannot answer them, cannot explain why the eastern expanse calls her so. She has heard many among the eldar who made passage home from the Hither Lands speak of the sea-longing that precipitated their journey—but this feels like something even stronger, a yearning for a place, yes, but something more… something that she cannot name.

Whatever it is, she surmises it must be the reason she has never felt quite at home in Valinor, even surrounded by her Noldoran kindred, the ones who had remained after the terrible kinslaying of old.

As she watches the waves pound against the sharply angled bow, wind whipping through her hair, she speaks a silent promise to the waiting horizon: I am coming.  

...

The tides of fate flow, and the sea is treacherous.

Their vessel is beset by perilous storms that rage by day and night, and no prayer to Ulmo seems capable of assuaging them. Their instruments fail, and the gale proves too powerful to hold their northward course to Lindon.

She asks how far off course the storm has flung them.  

Toward the Southlands is the answer.  

...

They make port in an abandoned Numenorean harbor that the captain calls Pelargir, and it is here that Erenyë takes her first steps into Middle Earth.

The landscape is lush and green, and different from Valinor—for it strikes her as more rugged and wild than the place from which she’d come. The climate is temperate and the air is moist, the trees here are massive, with thick trunks and sprawling branches, growing as they do only in Oromë’s woods across the sea. The forest calls to her—as all forests do—and she wanders eagerly toward the treeline, ready to lose herself in this new world.

But she is stopped by raised voices as a party of men emerges from the woods with warning. They are downtrodden, starving and traumatized, bearing the scars of war and disaster. In due course she learns that they have fled their homeland, several leagues to the east and over the mountains.

With terror-laced voices, they speak of a fire mountain, lately awakened, belching fire and cloud so high that it swallows the sunlight, rendering the land a waste, overrun by orcs. They answer to a single leader, the men tell her—a villain who calls himself Adar.

....

Adar.

It is a perplexing name for a servant of darkness, an elvish word.

She ponders the mystery late into the night, after the newly established encampment falls still. The elves had wasted no time in offering aid to the refugees, and Erenyë had done her part, though the forest still calls to her, insistent.

She considers going off alone, but the threat of orcs roaming the hills seeking captives to return to this Adar gives her pause. She knows enough of orcs to understand that the safest time to move through their lands is in daylight, and though she has never encountered one, memories of the stories that had reached her ears in Valinor, and the accounts of the Southlanders strike a deep chord of fear within her breast. She passes the night restless, yearning to roam.

At dawn, a small party of elves from the ship sets off toward the mountains, and Erenyë accompanies them eagerly, taking up a sword and dagger from one of the men who had not survived the night. The elven leader, Telemnion, tells them they must discover as much as they can about Adar and his legions so that a report can be sent north with all speed to High King Gil-glad.

They set a northeastern course that takes them up steep hills as they near the borders of the Southlands. As the day wanes, she catches the scent of smoke upon the air—ash and scorched pine, the smell of instantaneous destruction. Without warning, she doubles over, bracing herself with one hand against the nearest tree, retching.

“Are you well, Erenyë?” Telemnion hurries to her side, his eyes wide with concern.

In truth, she cannot say why the smell affects her so—she only has the keen sense of having experienced it before.

Her mind is filled with visions of ruined land—even before they emerge from the trees on a high precipice just before nightfall and see the blackened remains of the Southlands for themselves—and she knows that the visions are not simply abstractions. They feel like memories.

But it does not make sense—there had been no destruction of that kind in Valinor. Yet as they stop to rest, she cannot shake the sensation of touching ruined ground: of trailing her fingers over blackened, hollow trees, over the bleached bones of dead animals, over ash-laden earth.

As day gives way to night, she watches the skies above turn color. It is not the natural, blue-black of a peaceful night, but a wicked orange glow, cast by flames and smoke. It is yet another strangely familiar sight, and it fills her with blackest dread.

...

Several nights later, they are attacked by a band of orcs.

They are far outnumbered, and Telemnion cries out to them, telling them to run. With a pounding heart, Erenyë flies as fast as she can through the trees. When she’s confident there is enough distance between herself and the skirmish, she climbs, seeking for the safety of the upper branches of a great oak tree.

In the distance, she sees torches gleaming, and the sound of orc horns pierces the night air. She hugs the trunk of the tree, pressing her body close as though hoping it might open and absorb her into the safety of its bark as the orc army presses closer.

They are chanting something in unison—something that sounds victorious—and it is not long before they are close enough for her to understand it.

Adar… Adar… Adar…

The orcs continue their advance toward her tree. She considers climbing down and fleeing, but the chant soon falls silent, and the flickering torches stop moving.

A new voice fills the air.

It is low and husky, speaking the guttural language of the enemy. She cannot understand a word, but she tips her ear toward it, for there is something, some phantom quality about it that she cannot place. The trees are close in the glen, and with great care, she makes her way from one to the next, sidling toward the voice.

The orc army comes into view, and she can see their leader standing before them. His back is toward her—she can see only his silhouette against the torchlight. He is tall and slender—strangely elven, compared to the other orcs, the majority of whom are stooped and stocky. His presence is commanding, though he does not raise his voice beyond what is required to adequately fill the clearing.

He finishes his address with what is clearly a command for the uruks to set up camp, for they break out into groups, busying themselves with assembling tents and unfurling bedrolls.

Adar, for his part, watches the flurry of activity, then retreats into the shadows of the treeline. He is outside the torchlight now, but Erenyë follows his shape in the dark as it moves deeper into the forest. Keeping a safe distance, she scrambles down from her tree, closing her hand around the dagger she carries. Her heart begins to thrum again, pounding with a mixture of intrigue and terror.

He weaves gracefully through the trees, making no sound. There is something about his bearing that seems ancient, as though he is a part of the old forest itself and she creeps closer, fearing that at any moment, he might be swallowed by the trees, absorbed into them.

Dawn is breaking when he pauses in a clearing, and she realizes that the trees around them have started to thin, their leaves charred. The scent of smoke is stronger here, and with a soundless gasp, she discovers that they have reached the line of the fire-mountain’s destruction.

He kneels down, and she is struck by how suddenly small he appears. The sight of his silhouette stirs something in her—something that originates from that same place of strange recollection.

Why, her heart cries in anguish, does he seem familiar?

Without a thought, she steps closer.

He is crouched beside a green sapling that the fire had somehow spared, fingering the delicate leaves with a reverent—almost loving—tenderness.

She takes another step, disturbing the ground in her wake. A twig snaps beneath her foot; his head whips around toward the sound, and she flies at him, unsheathing her dagger with a cry.

They collide, tussling in the ashes. Erenyë scrambles and struggles with all her might until she lands on top with a dagger to his throat, gasping to reclaim the wind that was knocked out of her in their skirmish. His face comes together in her field of view: grey, mottled skin, covered in scars, thin lips, and shockingly deep, green eyes. She loses herself in them for a moment, as she steps seemingly out of time itself, spellbound by their depths. Her heart accelerates, threatening to batter itself out of its cage within her chest. She leans closer, bearing down on the dagger that is still pressed against the flesh of his neck.

He draws in a sharp breath as the blade bites into his skin, drawing a few drops of black blood. His eyes close, and his exhale is a soft moan, she presumes of pain, but she recognizes it as excitement, somehow. Pleasure.

She squeezes own her eyes shut, striving to steady herself, for it seems as though the ground itself is now swaying beneath her. She feels it again—the familiarity, the certainty that she has heard that sound before—no, not just heard it, she has been the cause of it.

He is no longer struggling—his body is languid beneath her, boneless. She clenches her teeth, confused, weighing her next move. He is the enemy; he and his army are responsible for the fire-mountain, for the destruction of the forest, for the torment of the Southlanders. She should let the dagger finish its work—drag it across his throat, spill the rest of his black blood here upon the ashen ground.

He murmurs something, something in a language that sounds like elvish, but it is older: an archaic form—one that she has only ever seen preserved on ancient scrolls. A dream, this is a dream, he rasps over and over, in that same low, husky tone that sends a shiver rolling down her spine, but not one borne entirely of fear.

The sound of the ancient language comforts her. Inexplicably, she thinks of stars, and the sound of water falling gently over stone. 

She feels him shift and opens her eyes, preparing to defend herself. But he does not attack—instead, his hands seek for her hips, sinking softly into her flesh as he drags in another quaking breath. He wears an iron gauntlet on one hand, and it digs into her side, stopping just on the edge of pain.

Her stomach roils at the sight of this creature, this thing, this orc touching her, but her skin tingles beneath his fingers, even through her tunic.

She lets the dagger drag another quarter of an inch across his throat—she isn’t sure if she intends it to be a warning or an invitation—and he groans again. Tremors roll steadily through her body now; she feels she is dancing on the edge of a dangerous precipice, and she does not know whether to seek for safety or let herself fall into it.

He opens his mouth, and breathes a single word:

“Erenyë…”

Fear wins out—the sound of his name upon her tongue sends an earthquake through her body and she moves automatically out of shock and terror. With a strangled yell, she yanks the dagger into the air. He tries to rise, but she is too quick, slamming the butt of it against his temple—hard.

He falls back, unconscious, and she clamps a hand over her mouth to stop the scream that threatens to break free.

tagging @catz4ever @toddthekiwibird @eowyn7023 HERE YA GO MY FELLOW BADDYDADDY BRIGADERS

Read part 2 | part 3

[orions-brush]

Doodle-a-day Aug 20 & 21

I'm taking this pixel art thing very seriously and yesterday I found the doodle-a-day challenge? event? on instagram so I decided to undertake it.

August 20 was a beetle, and today it was "record", which I interpreted as vinyl record lol I made an Atlas (?) beetle and a vinyl for Bears In Trees 'Precipitation', which is one of my favorite singles of them. I had a little help with figuring out the highlights of the vinyl but overall I'm proud of how they both came out!