unearthlychild34 - Tumblr blog

[unearthlychild34]

The Wet Hex, Sun Yung Shin

[unearthlychild34]

Once, as a friend and I walked together

Through an old churchyard, they told me about

The old stories of a church grim.

That, our elders believed the first creature

To be buried in a graveyard would be

Doomed to guard it for all eternity.

Thus, the first creature they buried

Would be a dog, man’s faithful guard.

There is something amazing in the fact that,

While I cannot tell you the cosmonauts

Who first orbited the earth,

And cannot even name from memory

Everyone aboard Apollo 11 who saw the moon,

There is one name that always comes to mind

When I think about being first to space.

Because when we needed to know about space,

And expected no survivors,

The one we sent up was no man at all,

But little Laika, the blesséd stray.

Perhaps it’s selfish of me

To hope you stand guardian over us all

When we look to the stars with wonder.

But I still hope you are there.

Are you watching, Laika?

Does your spirit guard the stars for us?

[unearthlychild34]

FOUND family??? you think i just found them like this??? babes this is FORGED family. Me & the bros were scrap metal in a junkyard (very valuable, very sharp, very dangerous, uncared for) and we GOT IN THE FUCKING FIRE TOGETHER. WE did this. we said I AM NOT LEAVING YOU and melted into each other for better or for worse (it’s for better) and we are A FUNCTIONAL UNIT now. DO NOT SEPARATE. BATTERIES FUCKING INCLUDED. FOUND family my ass, we built this non-nuclear family unit from the ground up, don’t devalue this!!! it was is and will be a labour of love!!!

[unearthlychild34]

[unearthlychild34]

I’m not a classicist, but I suspect one of the reasons so many of the Greek gods are portrayed so unflatteringly was less because they were seen as villains than because they represented their domains.  Of course Zeus sometimes misuses his power, that’s what a king does.  Of course Artemis’s wrath is wild and painful, that’s what nature can be.  Of course Hades snatched away a young girl from her mother’s arms, that’s what death does.  This is one of the reasons callout posts for some gods comparing them negatively to ‘nicer’ gods are kind of missing the point.

[unearthlychild34]

I feel like any aliens that were prey at some point in evolution would have an odd fear of humans. Mostly cause they look like predators, act a bit like predators, and ARE predators. One perfect example is when we're focused on something like a mosquito that's been bugging us for a long time and we are just done.

Alien: "What. What..?"

Human: *HUNTING down a mosquito it saw*

Alien: ".... yeah I am really uncomfortable...."

Human: *quiet footsteps, pupils dialated, intense focus,*

Alien: *WAR FLASHBACKS*

Human: "Found you." *absolutely desimates the mosquito, squashing it into a million pieces as it's guts and various body parts liquidize into blood of the bloodthirsty, now stained on the palm of the human. A living being now reduced to a useless corpse as the human wipes the remains on their pants*

Alien: "I feel like I've just gained trauma."

[unearthlychild34]

Years before the covid pandemic began, author Naomi Kritzer wrote the charming, emotionally genuine short story "So Much Cooking," which was a pandemic log through the eyes of a cooking blog. The premise is that the author is a home cooking blogger raising her kids, and then a pandemic hits--and bit by bit she's feeding not only her own, but her sister's kids, some neighbors' kids, and so on, in a situation of pandemic lockdown and food shortages.

It's very good, and was prescient for a lot of the early days of the covid pandemic. I found myself returning to it often in the first couple of years because of how steadfast it was in its hopefulness.

Last year she wrote a novelette, "The Year Without Sunshine," which attacks a similar problem in a similar way; instead of pandemic, this one is about the aftereffects of a distant nuke or a massive volcano explosion (it doesn't say), which has churned a great deal of dust into the air, causing massive damage to society and agriculture. The story covers one neighborhood, pulling together to keep each other alive--not through violence, but through lawn potatoes and message pinboards and bicycle-powered oxygen concentrators.

I recommend both stories. They're uplifting in a way that a lot of what I see lately isn't. They're a bit of a panacea for constant fearmongering about intracommunity violence and grinding hatefulness. We can be good to each other, if we try.

[unearthlychild34]

The haunting ancient Celtic carnyx being played for an audience. This is the sound Roman soldiers would have heard their Celtic enemies make.

[unearthlychild34]

I remember reading a post that once tried to day that stories of transformation and self-discovery largely follow YouthsTM because people get settled as they age and tend to change less.

But is that true? I think they’ve done some research that shows teens tend to have more environmental placticity due to brain development but like… Im rebuilding my life at 26 and watching my friends do the same at 34 and 46 and 63 and 72. Jobs often don’t last more than a few years, even when you’re lucky. Even in the “natural course” of older US job cycles, it’s so common for people to leave the workforce, to realize that they’d hung a lot of their identity and social life on that job, and to have to reinvent themselves for this new retired era of their life.

We’re all constantly experiencing life transitions. People around us come and go, tragedies happen to us and the people we love, and “life cycle” transitions involving partnering, children, or even grandchildren are things that happen to us and those around us. And also, we sometimes make big life decisions that involve seismic shifts, whether we’re trans or cis. And it would actually be really cool to have that explored in stories more, to help people see that they aren’t freaks if they find themselves still growing and changing past age 19.

I’m gonna throw a quote here my coworker likes: “If you’ve made it 10 years and haven’t changed at all during that time, then you just wasted 10 years of your life.”

We need more stories that follow old people. I'm tired of thinking my life ends the day my hair turns all white or the day I get my first prominent wrinkle. Especially as a trans person, I need to know it doesn't end here. You tell us we need to live..how do we expect us to keep going when we can't even exist in fiction?

This isn't just about being trans, this is about being human.

[unearthlychild34]

the two fundamental truths of historical and contemporary mankind:

we were just as smart then as we are now

we are just as stupid now as we were then

[unearthlychild34]

its been p common knowledge for decades that light pollution can be massively reduced by just putting shades on streetlamps, and that doing that would save energy, help wildlife, and let us see the stars better, but are society says if u wanna change any minor little tiny thing u gotta dedicate ur whole life to campaigning for it and this is a good ways down the list of priorities for most ppl, so instead i gotta walk past newly-installed streetlamps that are just dumb glass globes that use half their electricity to blast half their light directly into the sky where it does only bad things for no reason and think "we should overthrow the government"

[unearthlychild34]

YALL. Holly Black has a list of resources she's used for writing her books on the fair folk. I'm OBSESSED. I love her work and world building. it's so true to the heart of faeries

[unearthlychild34]

And speaking of scurvy, I am eternally amused by the thing where some ancient form of healing that was born in a time where people didn't know exactly how the human body works, or what causes it to stop working sometimes, that still somehow worked. Like how so many old folk medicinal plants were listed as a cure for various ailments that - from a modern view - are clearly just symptoms of scurvy, and the plant itself is rich in vitamin C.

I recall reading some story, no recollection of the exact time or place, where the king of a large empire suffered from constant horrible headaches and was incapable of falling asleep unless drugged or blackout drunk. Sick of taking temporary fixes to dull the pain and having to be sedated every night, he called up some old sage healer who was said to know how to fix things nobody else could explain, and the healer heard his symptoms and went

"Hmm. You spend too much time being a king. Your skull is packed so full of kingly thoughts that they don't all fit in there and that's why your head is in pain. You need to spend time not being a king." And prescribed him to schedule three days every month where he must go to a peasant village where nobody knows he's the king, live with a family there under a fake name and identity, work in the rice fields with them, eating the same food and sleeping on the same mats. Absolutely nobody is allowed to address him as the king, speak to him of any royal or political matters, and he himself is not allowed to think any kingly thoughts or think of himself as the king.

And naturally, this worked. Taking a regular scheduled break from a highly stressful office desk job to completely decompress, paired with physical exercise in the form of hard but simple physical labour, plain and simple food and Just Not Thinking About Your Fucking Job All The Time does help chronic stress, which here was worded as "spending too much time being a king clogs your brain."

Sometimes you do have ghosts in your blood, though I'm not entirely sure whether you should do cocaine about it.

[unearthlychild34]

like i'm gonna be real-- this is not good. they can now frame the left as the violent and dangerous people that they've wanted to all this time. they can now actually claim to be the victims that they've been saying they are this whole time. they can use this as a mandate to crack down on everyone who opposes them. with biden already in freefall this is the galvanizing thing that will make those who were unsure about aligning with the democrats the motivation to swing to the republicans in droves. it will give the already united republicans the "moral" authority to condemn not only the elected officials in the democratic party but characterize the entire progressive movement as violent anarchists based on social media reactions. if we were cooked before, we've just entered the flash fryer.

[unearthlychild34]

no i don't want to use your ai assistant. no i don't want your ai search results. no i don't want your ai summary of reviews. no i don't want your ai feature in my social media search bar (???). no i don't want ai to do my work for me in adobe. no i don't want ai to write my paper. no i don't want ai to make my art. no i don't want ai to edit my pictures. no i don't want ai to learn my shopping habits. no i don't want ai to analyze my data. i don't want it i don't want it i don't want it i don't fucking want it i am going to go feral and eat my own teeth stop itttt

[unearthlychild34]

Please sign this petition. Almost all of the 500k books that they removed are actually no longer in print and inaccessible to many.

The publishers did not care about those books in the first place but they did this anyway because they have vendetta against open access.

[unearthlychild34]