#sand thing

[nopizzaaftermidnight]

[kitskiis]

What I am gathering from current fandom discussion

[such-a-daydreamer]

Based on a real thing that happened to me and my sister (me as Stan and my sis as Ford)

She had held my foot up for a while trying really hard to pull me up thinking it was my arm, we laughed about it almost instantly after but it was still scary.

Be beach careful people! Waves can easily pin you against the sand if you don't dive at the right time.

[proxycrit]

Day 39– ARBITER'S GROUNDS

Weird Gross Skinned Things in the Sand that burn in the light!?!? The desert is WET? We are not off to a good start.

(This totk au is called Familiar Familiar! It all started when Zelda did not get whisked back in time and devolved from there.)

((Want to see behind the scenes and other sketchbook crimes? Check out my patreon!))

[sciderman]

well - webtoons is over, gang

[ravencromwell]

Rereading Dickens Christmas Carol for the first time in a long time. And the more I reread, the more it strikes me how seamlessly a queer reading could slip within these pages. Not an especially twee reading, wherein all Scrooge's troubles start and end with grief over Jacob Marley's death. For we know that Scrooge was a "Tight-fisted hand at the grindstone, Scrooge! a squeezing, wrenching, grasping, scraping, clutching, covetous, old sinner!" And we know that he and Marley were "two kindred spirits"

And perhaps that very fact makes the similarities to queer life, unintended as they most likely were by Mr. Dickens, achingly poignant to me. Scrooge is, we're told, "secret and self-contained and solitary as an oyster." How much that resonates, for so many of us who shield our innermost selves but from a select group of friends. And we know that Scrooge and Marley were, at the very least, certainly that for one another. Scrooge is Marley's sole mourner; his sole executor and beneficiary; and even Dickens notes, "friend." How reminiscent is that of queer couples across history, estranged from their families?

Scrooge lives in a set of chambers that once belonged to Marley—clearly Dickens wanted us to believe Scrooge gave up his own dwellings after Marley's death to economize. But with only a flicker of change, those chambers become _their chambers, rented by Marley as the senior member of the couple. The place is so desolate Dickens notes "one could scarcely help fancying it must have run there when it was a young house, playing at hide-and-seek with other houses, and have forgotten the way out again." The perfect abode for two queer misers who wanted no one prying into their business.

Marley's name is still above the door of Scrooge's counting-house: a mark by which, no doubt, Dickens meant to convey Scrooge such a penny-pincher he couldn't bother to have it changed. But a thing can be both! mark of frugality to ludicrous excess and! mark of mourning. "sometimes," Dickens opines, "People new to the

business called Scrooge Scrooge, and sometimes Marley, but he answered to both names. It was all the same to him."

This is why "death of the author" matters so much, in expanding our interpretations of texts. It is vastly far from the lens Dickens would have intended. But, the idea of a ghost of queerness, so taboo in the society it could barely be glanced at sidewise in this tale that is all about the inexplicable and yet that lingers over everything becomes an astonishing lens through which to read this book. Thinking of Scrooge as a queer man, his "melancholy dinner at his usual melancholy tavern" becomes a eerie prefiguring of the hollowness of days spent by Isherwood's A Single Man. In this universe, little wonder Scrooge doubly hates mention of time with family, marriage, etc. when the precise nature of his grief is both unacknowledged and unacknowledgable.

And readings like this are vital, because the uncomfortable truth is, discrimination doesn't "discriminate between sinners and saints", to borrow a Miranda phrase. It is easy, in my liberal circles, to fight for queer people who hold "the good sorts of politics". But what about men like Michael Hess, culpable for supporting Reagan even as his contemptuous homophobia let the aids epidemic run rampant? How much harder is it to remember Michael had a partner? That he deserves empathy and compassion for being practically tarred and feathered out of the party upon his own aids diagnosis?

Expanding our imaginative universes to include queerness, not as redemptive panacea, but merely as one aspect of identity, personality, often in vicious conflict with others. Even! as we consider those stories equally worthy of being told feels vital if we're ever to truly express the complexity of what queer humanity looks like.

[mint-clackelroy]

Ally Beardsley was right. Vic Michaelis is indeed a chaos gremlin.

[jewish-sideblog]

did you guys know that the Hebrew word for phoenix is "sand chicken"

[muffinlance]

Preschooler apparently took that book about tar pits as a life lesson. Today one of his classmates got their boots stuck in mud on a hike, which led to multiple other children going over to help and also getting stuck.

Meanwhile, Preschooler: drags over a huge stick, helps the rest out from a distance

[nekrosmos]

Sailor Nikolai, loyal first mate of Captain John Price ⚓​🐻​

Bonus alternate versions under keep reading (no bg and lineart only)

[hellcifrogs]

Sand siblings and Matsuri, who is also basically adopted by them.

Kankuro's weapons follow the same idea of Penny's, but no lasers. Gaara's is like Reese's hoverboard. Temari is a weapon enthusiast like Ruby. And Matsuri has trouble using weapons so she's given something to protect the team instead (haven't worked out a design for the activated shield)

[bonebrokebuddy]

I did a molding and metal melting lab today and when returning home after class, my twin took the little metal smiley face that I so lovingly made and filed down and immediately asked me “is this made out of lead?”

Then, without waiting for a response immediately put it into her mouth, spit it out, went “Well, it’s mainly lead acetate that’s sweet so I don’t really know if it’s lead or not”

AND THEN PUT IT IN HER MOUTH A SECOND TIME TO CHECK

i mean, it’s not lead but I didn’t even get the time to say that before she popped it into her mouth D:

[artaxlivs]

"Eddie, babe, you've seen this movie like seven times already." Steve whispers, rubbing his hand down Eddie's back as it hitches with sobs. "You know the horse comes back."

"N...Not this horse. That's a new horse. A new idea." His shoulders shake as he fights the build up of grief. "It's just *sniff* Bastian is a new reader, making a new story, making n-new w-wishes. This Artax dies."

Oh.

Oh.

Steve gets it, finally. Wonders just how long he's been missing the point here.

Because Eddie died. They got him back. But he'll never be the Eddie he was before. He's different now. It wasn't the Swamp of Sadness but it got him all the same. Maybe worse because he died full of hope and heroism. He died fighting. And when they got him back, they were still fighting. The story had continued without him.

Shifting them on the couch so they're face to face, Steve tucks Eddie's curls behind his ear, watches his face as he tries to calm his breathing, rubs Eddie's tears with his thumbs.

"If I got to wish the whole world into existence, you are the first thing I would wish for." Steve tells him, chest aching with weight of all the love he's been building up for Eddie since he'd taken his second first breath. "You. Every version of you is this one because you wouldn't be you without all the things you've learned along the way. Even death."

Fresh tears spill from Eddie's dark eyes and when he closes them against the honesty, eyelashes shadowing his pale cheeks, he shudders, "Promise?"

"A grain of sand. Just like in the Empress's hand. I promise on that grain of sand, you, and all the versions of you yet to come, are what I would wish for. Promise."

Steve tucks Eddie in close, holds him while he trembles through the last of his grief. Silently thanking The NeverEnding Story for showing them that there is hope after grief. Even if it starts with just a grain of sand.

[opbackgrounds]

I don't think it's ever said directly, but the implication is that the "sand" of Level 3 is basically corpse dust from the people who have died on this floor plus the ash that's come up from Level 4 from the vats of boiling blood. The average body, if cremated, makes between 4-8 pounds of ashes, so, uh, that's a lot of dead bodies they're stepping on

[justarobowren]

Day 7: Shimmer!

Ok I know this one is a stretch, but when I thought shimmer I thought Mirages. But by the time I got to coloring I forgot? So I rendered it completely and then was like “wait. It was supposed to be in daytime.” But I didn’t want to redo it

So

:|

[lijeuxs]

being gay and annoying and the beach