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When you’re in the middle of a fic and realise you’ve missed a very critical tag

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black cats are wonderful because you can stare into the void and not only does the void stare back, sometimes it trots up to you happily and begs for pats

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Finally - some good news!

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This is badass: Medieval Nubian Fashion Brought to Life. Click through to the link because there’s more replica clothing and it is all stunning!

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LOVE IN THE AIR: KOI NO YOKAN (2024) I EP. 2 "Watch me, I'm going to make you fall for me."

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peace of snow

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APO NATTAWIN as PORSCHE KINNPORSCHE: THE SERIES (2022) dir. Khom Kongkiat

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The Wrath of Khan / The Search For Spock / Unification | ID in ALT

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Broke af?

But still interested in feeding yourself? What if I told you that there’s a woman with a blog who had to feed both herself and her young son…on 10 British pounds ($15/14 Euro) per week?

Let me tell you a thing.

This woman saved my life last year. Actually saved my life. I had a piggy bank full of change and that’s it. Many people in my fandom might remember that dark time as when I had to hock my writing skills in exchange for donations. I cried a lot then. 

This is real talk, people: I marked down exactly what I needed to buy, totaled it, counted out that exact change, and then went to three different stores to buy what I needed so I didn’t have to dump a load of change on just one person. I was already embarrassed, but to feel people staring? Utter shame suffused me. The reasons behind that are another post all together. 

AgirlcalledJack.com is run by a British woman who was on benefits for years. Things got desperate. She had to find a way to feed herself and her son using just the basics that could be found at the supermarket. But the recipes she came up with are amazing. 

You have to consider the differing costs of things between countries, but if you just have three ingredients in your cupboard, this woman will tell you what to do with it. Check what you already have. Chances are you have the basics of a filling meal already. 

Here’s her list of kitchen basics. 

Bake your own bread. It’s easier than you think. Here’s a list of many recipes, each using some variation of just plain flour, yeast, some oil, maybe water or lemon juice. And kneading bread is therapeutic. 

Make your own pasta–gluten free. 

She gets it. She really does. This is the article that started it all. It’s called “Hunger Hurts”.

She has vegan recipes.

A carrot, a can of kidney beans, and some cumin will get you a really filling soup…or throw in some flour for binding and you’ve got yourself a burger. 

Don’t have an oven or the stove isn’t available? She covers that in her Microwave Cooking section. 

She has a book, but many recipes can be found on her blog for free. She prices her recipes down to the cent, and every year she participates in a project called “Living Below the Line” where she has to live on 1 BP per day of food for five days. 

Things improved for me a little, but her website is my go to. I learned how to bake bread (using my crockpot, but that was my own twist), and I have a little cart full of things that saved me back then, just in case I need them again. She gives you the tools to feed yourself, for very little money, and that’s a fabulous feeling. 

Tip: Whenever you have a little extra money, buy a 10 dollar/pound/euro giftcard from your discount grocer. Stash it. That’s your super emergency money. Make sure they don’t charge by the month for lack of use, though.

I don’t care if it sounds like an advertisement–you won’t be buying anything from the site. What I DO care about is your mental, emotional, and physical health–and dammit, food’s right in the center of that. 

If you don’t need this now, pass it on to someone who does. Pass it on anyway, because do you REALLY know which of the people in your life is in need? Which follower might be staring at their own piggy bank? Trust me: someone out there needs to see this. 

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Obligatory blep~

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SO.

I'm already seeing people saying that The Curse of Taekwondo is not a BL, and I can see why, if we go by BL as a genre, since it doesn't follow many of its convictions, so okay, arguably you could create a conversation about it.

What I don't like to see and I'm actively against, is to treat it as something "better" than other shows because "it's not BL", as if just because something actually is BL, is of "lesser" quality automatically.

I mean, I just saw someone stating, quote

"...calling it a BL is an insult to shows like this … Let's call it a LGBTQ+ series."

and. NO? IT'S NOT? AN INSULT?? AND BL SERIES ARE LGBT+?? WHY DO YOU EVEN THINK THE TERM QL CAME TO BE.

It's the same discourse about how Yaoi = bad, BL = good, all over again, and it's the exact same line of thought that claims a show with sex = bad, or any Thai show = less quality than any Korean show.

It's the exact same reasoning, of giving certain ambiguous classifications a moral high ground, just because acknowledging the "lesser" classification as something more than general entertainment or bad quality would require people to actually recognize a whole lot of racist, sexist, puritanical and even queerphobic bias, in the way they interact with media (and how a lot of those also translate to how they treat real-life people).

Just at the top of my head, My School President, Be My Favorite, Moonlight Chicken, Manner of Death, Triage, Monster Next Door, Knock Knock Boys! are some of the amazing shows that ARE BLs, where every single one has a different offering, and they're not great DESPITE being BL, on the contrary, I would argue that being a BL show is essential to each and every story that's being told.

So yeah, discuss the conventions of the genre as much as you'd like it, ponder the evolution of it, the portrayal of queerness, etc. but c'mon, don't act as if there's a certain label that makes everything good and holy and another that makes everything dirty and undeserving of appreciation.

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the poem by Franz Wright

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I love this picture so much! Post it whenever I come across it.

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Zehra Naqvi, from The Knot of My Tongue: Poems and Prose; “لسان الحال | The language which things themselves speak”