rainorshine13

[rainorshine13]

What's the highest altitude you've been at, in meters above sea level? (NOT including flying)

- 8 848+m

-3000+m

-1000+m

-500+m

- under 500m

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Anybody else feel like the house is always weird and echoey and quiet and strange every morning you wake up early to leave on a trip?

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there is no greater joy on this earth than Making Lists, Categorizing, & Sorting

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I’d like to live through a week that’s not a whole new verse of “We Didn’t Start the Fire.”

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i think we should be talking about the semi-recent advancements in cystic fibrosis treatment like all the time every day. there hasn’t been a drug like this since AZT medications for HIV infection it is truly fucking miraculous and very important

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Y'all ever have a jaw dropping moment when you realize how blessed you are? It feels crazy

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Chat, is it considered “abusive roommate behavior” to release a raccoon into the living space after you have asked your roommate for months to please clean up their messes (they do not pay any of the mortgage)

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find it so funny how when i look at others posts and go "10k to me. you cooked" a lot of the time it works but when i look at my own and go "damn i cooked" it's 10 notes and a piece of lint

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Your Worth is Unchanging

I am someone who has had difficulty understanding the way we use 'worth' and 'worthiness' in the church, and has felt my worthiness before God or God's approval and Grace were somehow tied to my performance and obedience.

Today, Sister Tamara W. Runia spoke to me (and judging by the tears, many others) when she emphatically stated: "Your worth isn’t tied to obedience. Your worth is constant. It never changes. It was given to you by God, and there’s nothing you or anyone else can do to change it."

I also love the way she said "heaven isn’t for people who have been perfect. It’s for people who have been forgiven, who choose Christ again and again" and "if you wait until you’re clean enough or perfect enough to go to the Savior, you’ve missed the whole point."

She also made the point that God forgives "without shaming us, comparing us to anyone else, or scolding us, because this is the same thing we were repenting of last week... Everyone is diving with their own degree of difficulty, and your Savior is the only one who truly knows the difficulty you are diving with."

But perhaps the most important thing I will remember from this talk - "If you could hear the Savior praying for you, what would He say?"

Love, Erran

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“All this for money,” whispered Crane. Looking at him, Briar thought that only people who were born rich had such a low opinion of money.

 - Briar’s Book, Tamora Pierce

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A non exhaustive list of things Tamora Pierce taught/influenced me on.

Periods exist

You don’t have to (and probably shouldn’t) marry the first guy you date

Chickens are the stupidest birds (I know she’s backtracked/regretful about this but I can’t shake it)

A undead dinosaur army is literally the coolest concept ever

Crows are the best

Servants often make the best spies

Bullying is not just a “childhood” thing people grow out of, it can and does often does have serious consequences

Delegation/management is an actual skill that most people don’t have (I’m not sure why the clerks’ death in Lady Knight is the thing that always sets me off crying but it does)

There’s magic in everyday creativity

Forest fires are the most terrifying thing to experience

Except not really because actually the isolation from a wide spread disease is humanity’s worst nightmare (wish we hadn’t experienced this first hand 😭)

Respect sanitation workers

Friendships are more complicated as adults, but also sometimes the first step is realizing friends mostly likely won’t judge you as harshly as you judge yourself

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”i love your vibes” thanks it’s the holy spirit :)

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THE PRINCESS BRIDE 1987, dir. Rob Reiner

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Someday your hands will be old and wrinkled, the skin spotted and bunching over your knuckles. And a child will watch you make something. It's a simple task, you'll have done it a thousand times before. But to that child, the smooth, confident way your hands move will seem like impossible magic. You have to keep living.

[rainorshine13]

Reading through the Tortall books in publication order is funny because you start with Alanna “the village healing woman taught me all she knew” going off to become a knight, and end with Numair “world’s most powerful mage” as young Arram Draper first learning magic at the Carthaki university. Because of the 40 intervening years and five(?) different series further developing the Tortall universe, the magic system is now SO much more complex.  Arram is learning an elementally-based, heavily theory-dependent form of magic where conceptual power is applied to physical objects or energy constructs. His teachers make him develop skills in non-magical areas like juggling, jewelry making, and gardening so eventually they can safely guide him through complicated applications of magic. In comparison, Alanna complains that Duke Roger is spending too much time on theory in order to prevent her and her peers from learning “actual magic” and becoming his rivals. And then she throws purple light at things until they explode or she passes out! We also learn from Arram’s misadventures that most of “magic” is creating methods of applying, storing, and accessing power so the user doesn’t drain their own life force and pass out or die. Alanna uses NONE of these techniques; instead, she pulls her magic directly out of her own life force, thinks about what she wants it to do, and hopes she reaches that goal before draining herself. She even (sometimes) factors in the impact of magically draining herself of energy while attempting tasks that require both magical and physical endurance (such as when deciding how much magic to spend warming herself when making her blizzard hike to claim the Dominion Jewel.)

For one thing, this makes Alanna insanely powerful. In In the Hand of The Goddess, she breaks open Roger’s magically locked door (presumably designed by Roger himself– an immensely strong and well-trained sorcerer) by shoving her own magic into it until it MELTS. This builds an Alanna who decided magical theory was useless at age 12 because she has an immense access to magical potential energy, and who never learns the basic life-preserving models of magic usage that are taught in intro-level classes. She doesn’t have an interest in learning more sophisticated forms of magic, except in healing, which she cared about enough to learn non-magically. So when she heals, she uses magic as a guide or a supplement, rather than depending on it and then draining herself.  Since she isn’t attempting complex magic, most of the time the limitations of drawing directly from her own life force doesn’t impact her that much. The things she does magically all have much more efficient alternatives, but they require an understanding of magical theory and ability to store energy that Alanna never learned! If she wants to do larger spells, she just keeps feeding energy into it until it breaks or she does. 

The intervening series and Numair’s story makes Alanna’s simultaneously more and less believable. It now makes sense why everyone with even a slight understanding of Alanna’s type of Gift gets angry at times and tells her she’s using magic irresponsibly. (Before, we only understood Alanna’s side of the argument: “Well, I didn’t die and it worked, so calm down.” !!!) The fact that she never actually dies and only rarely is seriously harmed through her own magic use now requires some suspension of disbelief!

[rainorshine13]

People are like “these animals have exoskeletons and these ones have endoskeletons” but no. It’s all exoskeletons, your exoskeleton is protecting your bone marrow which is where your soul (which is you) is. The rest of the stuff is extraneous decoration that Big Pharma wants you to think is important/

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We Will Not Wear Chains

Wounded

Trying to understand tragedy is like trying to drink water from an open palm.