melodioustongue

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LETS FUCKING GOOOOOO

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I used to wonder, when I was younger, how people could let such terrible things happen. I remember at school they showed us pictures of the piles and piles of bodies, sprawling stick limbs in the death camps in Germany and Poland and Cambodia and Rwanda and. They said to us: we let this happen. You must not.

Ah, I thought, how could I? How could anyone?

Now I am beginning to see.

Years ago they said: if you are not angry you are not paying attention. But oh I am so tired of being angry and more I am afraid.

It is hard to be afraid for so long, and to see that there are those in power and rising up and eating the fear and breathing it and spreading it out. Sleeping on a fort of money to keep them safe and breathing out death and other people's misery and we are all so afraid. Stop the boats and keep the money and how will we afford bread, my partner has a new job now and maybe we'll make the rent and there are people starving and drowning and they are making laws against us; 

It is about keeping children safe they say on the radio. That is what justifies your suffering.

I turn off the radio.

I wish my child would go to school, but she says she is afraid of everything all the time now.

Did you know that a hundred years ago, one child in four, one child in three, in two, would die and now I wonder: how did they do it? With cholera and dysentry and your children dying in your arms, was it not hard to say: " I think even bad men should have a chance to live. I do not want them to suffer as my child has suffered?" 

I think it would be much easier not to care, to say: let them all perish as my sister/child/husband/friends have perished. Is that not justice? O only let the ones I love breath and be easy.

In the news I read about "invasions of migrants" and "keeping women and children safe" and I think about the men far away in queues for bread starving with their money frozen by foreign banks. And I think about moving countries and making plans, and try again to get my child to school.

The news comes on the radio and I turn it off and I think 

I understand now.

And I am afraid.

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My thing with vaccine info is that it's all there and publicly available. It's not hidden. There are so many doctors and scientists that have broken the info down so it's digestible.

The same questions keep getting answered over and over and over again in multiple different ways. So like what now. What else do you need. Millions of people have been vaccinated and have been fine. It's been explained multiple times that side effects show up in the first couple of weeks so there's no "long term effects"

The vaccine wasn't created in three days. Years and years of research was already available. And funding was what does the process up. What else do you need

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why are wlw books so angsty and deep all the time like where is my casual wlw romcom or my fantasy lesbians, space bis and trans princesses like not every wlw has some lost love in some town in the middle of nowhere

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“It’s like in the great stories, Mr. Frodo. the ones that really mattered. Full of darkness and danger they were. And sometimes you didn’t want to know the end. Because how could the end be happy? How could the world go back to the way it was when so much bad had happened?

But in the end, it’s only a passing thing, this shadow. Even darkness must pass. A new day will come. And when the sun shines it will shine out the clearer. Those were the stories that stayed with you. That meant something, even if you were too small to understand why.

But I think, Mr. Frodo, I do understand. I know now. Folk in those stories had lots of chances of turning back, only they didn’t. They kept going, because they were holding on to something. That there is some good in this world, and it’s worth fighting for.”

↪ “The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers” by J.R.R. Tolkien

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trans people can and do have biological children

t4t couples can and do have biological children

the narrative that we are infertile, incapable, and unwilling to have children is a lie 

trans people often face discrimination in adoption opportunities, and we need to normalize the idea that people like us do have our own children

transfem people/trans women/other non-gestational parents can induce lactation and feed their children

transmasc and other gestational parents can find trans affirming healthcare, even in obstetrics. there’s a growing number of lgbt doulas and midwives trained to help affirm the gestational parent’s wishes 

intersex trans people can also have children - and we often face a doubled-down narrative that we are infertile and shouldn’t attempt to have children 

polyam trans couples also have a broader range of gestational and postpartum opportunities for raising children, or even multiple monogamous trans couples co-parenting/co-gestating with shared resources 

if you are a trans person who wants to have bio children, there are spaces out there for you, there’s a community of trans parents and trans people who are trying to conceive 

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#revolutionaryshoe

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all sorts of echoes in these caverns

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Happy là nam pòg to my wonderful spouse ♥️♥️

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Underwater Footage Captures a Blanket Octopus Revealing Her Billowing Iridescent Membrane

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Awesome!!

so i’ve seen this around a lot and i always felt like the version i listened to just. didn’t have everything? sO! i edited together my three favourite versions of the tik tok sea shanty! enjoy!!

(listen with headphones if possible!)

(yes i know the ending is bad oKaY-)

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A SAVAGE PLACE

because I just re-read Prince Caspian and remembered how completely different it is to the movie, and because it says Aslan is good but not safe and I think so is Narnia and, as they become part of the fabric of it, so are the Pevensies

“You may find Narnia a more savage place than you remember.”

Trumpkin has never heard a silence so loud as this that follows his warning. The children glance at each other, crowding the air with a language he isn’t hearing. His skin prickles with it. He turns away from them, drawing his knife to begin skinning the wild bear.

Only a moment later, the smaller, darker boy is drawing his own knife and dropping to his knees. Trumpkin looks at him sidelong, uncertain.

“I’m a fair butcher,” King Edmund tells him mildly, and he plunges his arms in up to the elbows.

~

This is the story Trumpkin knows.

That once, Narnia was held in the grip of a terrible Winter brought upon it by a tyrant Witch, that four children were called by Aslan the Great Lion out of their own land to cast her down, and when they had done so the Lion crowned them himself at the shining castle of Cair Paravel, where the ruins now lie on the sea. That they governed so wisely and well that the folk of Narnia knew nothing of evil or hardship. That all was joy, when the trees danced and the animals spoke.

That the first of them held with equal steadiness the sceptre and the sword, that to him was given the crown above crowns, that every sovereign before or since stood but palely in the shadow of his glory. That the second of them surpassed all other beauties, that she was soft of hand and soft of heart. That the third of them had learned such wisdom on the path of darkness that his counsel was worth more than rubies, and the tongue in his mouth was as silver as his crown. That the fourth of them was the darling of the land, that laughter and lightness were her constant companions, that to see her smile was to be blessed.

In front of him now, the fourth is drying her eyes with dirty sleeves, and the third curses as he picks blood from under his fingernails, and the second scowls, tugging at her long hair, all straggly with salty air and sweat, and the first of them is building a thin fire with trembling hands, silent.

~

“Don’t say much, eh, that brother of yours?”

He is walking alongside Queen Lucy the Valiant, who is all of nine years old, wearing a grin and a dagger. They are following the tall one, whose steps are sure and make no sound.

“Well, of course not. He has to be careful what he says.”

“Don’t we all?”

He is chuckling, but she isn’t. Her face is young and pale and flecked with sunlight that shifts like a glamour.  There are moments when her teeth look too big for her mouth, when her eyes sit strangely, as though she has stolen them from another. Sometimes she is difficult to look at.

“Not like Peter does. When he speaks…”

Smiling, she spreads her arms wide, embracing the still trees and sleeping waters, the sky above them and the earth below.

“Narnia listens.”

They trudge on, and Trumpkin watches King Peter watching the clouds. He has never been so far as Narnia’s northern border, where the sky lies heavy and indomitable on the bleak, open land. He does not know what it would mean to be crowned for the blue mountains and distant thunder of the cold, still North; the terrible immensity of it. The carvings on the walls of Aslan’s How are flat and dead, fading under the dust of uncountable years. They do not show these things, and they do not show the High King’s lion-gold hair or his clear, calm predator’s eyes, or how at dusk in enemy lands it was once whispered that behind closed lips, his teeth were fangs and his breath smelled of iron.

The little girl skips ahead to catch her brother’s hand. The trees shiver around them, remembering the rhythm of her steps on the earth, the way she’d danced, mad and barefoot, her shrieking laughter in the night. The echo of it has hung in their leaves for a thousand years. Trumpkin sees them stirring, shakes his head, cannot help wondering if her voice, too, is threaded with this deep magic. It’s here in the very presence of these four living ghosts, in their fingertips and their footprints and the corners of their eyes. And though Trumpkin has never been a believer until now, he has heard enough to know that magic is not always sweet.

Behind him, the older girl is humming a tune that Trumpkin doesn’t quite recognise, though it catches in his ears like something familiar. There are no histories written of Queen Susan and the sly sirens, of how she would step from the sea like a drowned woman with her clinging hair, her deep-hued lips, to sing the music she had learned. The histories that remain crown her to the rich south, where the crops grow and the flowers open their delicate hearts for the indifferent eyes of the sun. As Trumpkin turns to look, pulled by that hypnotic song, she snaps a bloom from a bush of wild roses to slide into her hair.

She has not seen him glancing back, but the other one, the younger boy, has. Under his dark eyes, Trumpkin feels as pinned as if he were at the point of a dagger. Though they are far from the wild woods of the west, this is still King Edmund’s realm: the forest with all its shadows and its green secrets, laid bare when winter’s frozen hands come to strip them away. But now it is high summer and the leaves are thick, cloaking the woods in their mystery, and Trumpkin cannot see what is behind the boy-king’s sharp smile.

~

Time is long and wearing, and this is the story the Old Narnians have forgotten.

That Susan’s soft fingers had stung under the tautness of her bowstring, the first time she’d pulled it back to kill. That Peter had wept beside the corpse of the wolf. That Aslan’s maw had been red and sticky, dripping thick ropes of blood, and that the Witch had been beautiful, in her cold way.

~

“I have been told – I have learned about the Golden Age,” Caspian tells them later, shaky and fervent. “The legend. Of what Narnia was when you ruled it. It must seem like a sparse, savage place, compared with the one you knew.”

They watch him silently. Peter, whose eyes are bright and blank as a clear sky, and Susan with her full, unsmiling lips are already their own statues. After a moment, Edmund’s harsh laughter fills the darkness, and Lucy pinches him with fingers as sharp as any faery’s.

That night, Caspian puts the Horn where he cannot see it before he tries to sleep.  

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Elsewhere U pins are here! And they turned out so nice! I’m really really happy with them. I’ll be selling them through Etsy for $10 USD + shipping for as long as this batch of 100 remains.

Butterfly backed, 1.25″/32mm, white knotwork/teal ring/black center with polished silver detail. They read cauti, cordati, auspicati - wary, wise, and lucky, the motto of elsewhere university.

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Ya’ll talk about the Mom Friend and the Older Sibling Friend but I hear nothing about the Goblin Friend

Eats food up off the floor screaming something about the five second rule

Sweatpants count as a look

Throws everything in a pile on the nearest surface as soon as they’re home

“Haha that’s gross let me see”

Hoards of some sort. Mugs, pens, notebooks, anything

Sitting in a dark room for hours wrapped up in seven blankets in front of a laptop unblinking

Makes weird noise effects to express emotions

Laying on random surfaces

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Javert, Pre-barricades: Jean Valjean is the most fiendishly resourceful, cunning, wily escape-artist I’ve ever had the displeasure of dealing with, and he vexes me greatly.

Javert, Post-Seine and having gotten to know Valjean personally: Oh, my god. This man is an idiot.

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The Very Hungry Rust Monster is a mini-comic I made a few years back. I’ve seen it floating around Tumblr without attribution recently, so I’ve uploaded a higher-resolution version, properly credited.

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