#{ and there's not many resources for her other than youtube to figure this stuff out }

[mcltiples]

{ OOC } Alright, as promised, a collection of trans related headcanons for Morticia~ Since I want to explore this side of her more~

When Morti first came out, she told her Rick first. Who then proceeded to respond with "I already knew that, it doesn't excuse you getting out of work, so do what I tell you to do." Which made her feel slightly validated, but at the same time, really shitty because it wasn't as celebrated as she hoped it would be.

Coming out to her parents was a bit awkward. Jerry kept messing up her pronouns and went overboard with the praises, making her feel weird. Beth accepted it but then went on a tangent about how hard it was to be a woman. The only one who took it well and handled it with tact was Summer. (And Summer was excited to now have a little sister to dress up and doll up.)

It took a while before she decided to fully transition. She started off slow. Dressing up in more feminine clothes, letting her hair grow out naturally. But then the dysphoria got worse. Often comparing herself to other girls.

The day that she broke down from it all was when Rick approached her with the idea to just go all in and get it over with -- meaning to allow him to fully feminize her body. And, well, she couldn't say no. So using his equipment, some science, and what not. He gave her the body that she always wanted.

While she doesn't experience the physical aspect of dysphoria anymore (or at least, not as intense as pre-transition), she does still experience. She often compares herself to other girls. And she wants to be like them, but she's far too awkward and clueless to know how to go about doing so.

Not many people will know she's trans, unless she decides to tell them. It's more validating for her when other people assume she's AFAB. So sometimes she'll let them believe that. She's sort of unsure or clueless about the whole being out thing and isn't sure if she should tell people that she's transgender.

She's a lot more comfortable coming out when she knows the other person is trans as well. For some reason, it's just easier for her to tell them when they're the same way.

While it's impossible to truly deadname her because her nickname sounds like her original nickname, being surrounded by others who also share her deadname can be a struggle. Especially when the others get called by Mortimer, she knows they're not talking to her but anxiety gets struck within her anyway. Probably a part of her as to why she kills other Mortys for fun is just her taking out her feelings about herself onto them as well.

Also despite this, she has no problem with befriending Mortys. As long as they aren't weird around her, she can handle them.

[benis-chillin]

My Sonic eras(updated)plus canonicity system.

So it’s been a minute since I updated my Sonic eras(which are based in canon rather than arbitrary opinions, like most fan era systems operate in this franchise), so I figured I’d give them a quick touch-up, and explain what systems I use to determine canonicity. Those being:

Objective canon(what happens on screen)

Fair extrapolation(looking at the tiny details to make assumptions, but not outright headcanons)

Behind the scenes info(What the current people at Sega say)

Headcanon(we make shit up with no basis beyond personal opinion)

So, let’s go into detail on what each of these mean.

1)Objective Canon

Basically, if you saw it on-screen in a canon work,  this is irrefutable canon. However, there are some caveats to this, and one of those is that this section doesn’t dictate what works are and are not canon, since those are often decided by outside factors that we’ll explain in a moment. Another is that we usually try to judge a work by its original language. Some works in mainline Sonic canon are written first in Japanese, and others are written in English first. The metric you can use for that is by studying dialogue. If the main differences between English and Japanese are the typical tells of English localization(I.e. Stuff like Shahra’s “Did I change my destiny?” in the English dub of Secret Rings, when in context, this was about her altering more than just HER fate), then it was likely written in Japanese first. However, if the Japanese version has WILDLY different dialogue in the Japanese version(Colors, Lost World, Frontiers, etc), then English came first.

Now, if you still like the other dubs for casual playing, that’s cool. I enjoy some games written in Japanese first with the English voices(and vice versa), but when it comes to this type of analysis, you need to get as close to the original as possible.

If you need a resource for checking into these translations, Windii Gaylord on YouTube is a good one to use. She also came up with the above metric for figuring out which language came first via one of her tweets, btw.

2)Fair extrapolation

So this one is a little tricky, but I think I can get my point across.

One frequent complaint about Sonic canon is that it “makes no sense,” or “contradicts itself” in many instances. Heck, even people up to Ian Flynn would make this argument.

And they’re wrong. 

Beyond a few instances in the Classic era, Sonic canon only doesn’t make sense if you either don’t pay enough attention to it, have multi-media brain rot from Archie and shit, or make up the contradictions in your head. The Sonic fanbase is wont to do that last one a lot, with “All of Classic Sonic was put into another dimension by Forces!” or “Unleashed/Frontiers contradicts the Chaos Emerald lore established in Adventure/Unleashed!” 

This type of thinking comes along when you SEEK contradictions, and it’s a loser way of going about these things. Fair extrapolation goes entirely against this idea. Instead of looking for contradictions, let’s instead assume that everything connects perfectly, you just need to find out HOW, without going on any crazy leaps.

For example, in Forces, Classic Sonic is established as coming from another dimension/world, despite coming from the past in Generations, and other games have shown the pre-1998 games to have taken place in the mainline universe.

A loser would scream, “Contradiction!” and rob everyone else of a cool idea, but fair extrapolation tells us that his previous encounter with the current timeline put this version of Sonic into his own dimension/world, and since that story involved time travel, we can assume this means timeline. Ergo, split timeline.

Or, in another case, the Chaos Emeralds are ancient gems with a lot of power. If a battery still has power, I can still use it in more than one device if I choose to move it, yes?

So, logically, the Chaos Emeralds can power the Ancients’ ships in Frontiers, get placed in the guardianship of Chaos in Adventure, and have been used for the Temple Megazord in Unleashed at different points in the long history of Sonic’s Earth.

Ergo, these games do not contradict each other.

If connecting the dots doesn’t require you to outright make up details, then it’s fair extrapolation, and thus not a headcanon. I’ll explain what that is in a moment, but first,

3) Behind the scenes information

Alright, this section requires some harsh truths, so I’m gonna just rip off the band-aid:

Creators are far less reliable than the on-screen canon.

They may try to claim otherwise, but as far as I’ve observed, their knowledge on details can be fuzzy and swayed by a corporation who has even LESS of an idea of what they’re talking about. It’s okay to pick their brains a bit to use as feelers for canon, but they can and sometimes do contradict what’s actually on-screen, so for MY money, they’re tertiary canon that can easily be ignored.

Death of the author is inherent to any long-running continuity, unfortunately. We just have to accept that.

4)Headcanon

This receives very limited use. It’s mainly deciding what your personal order of events is, what explanation you prefer from fair extrapolation on the rare occasion you can get more than one, and other details you may need to fill the gaps with. It is the most objectionable form of canon, thus why it is at the bottom of the list. Also, every time you cite it, you MUST say something to the effect of, “My headcanon is…” Don’t try to push it as fact, because you know it isn’t.

So, with that all established, let’s get our eras established.

1)Classic Era

1991-1997, 1999, 2023

Both the hardest and simplest to explain. Every game from 1991-1997 is in here, so pre-Adventure.  Sadly, the manuals for Sonic 1-3&K, and CD have been retconned by Sonic Origins(I don’t like this retcon, but as it was done through proper channels, I have to accept it by my standards), but the others remain fair game for now.

Pocket Adventure remains as the end of this era, personal headcanon keeping it in the loop because I doubt Sega is gonna make a work that replaces it, so there’s nothing in the work itself to make decanonizing it necessary.

And yeah, you may have noticed that 2023. Yeah, I’m putting Superstars in the main timeline. This may change in the future, but for now, I am eschewing the “takes place between Mania and Adventure” stuff from the creators to cause less contradictions, unlike Sega who seem to be wallowing in causing a contradiction with the “Mania in the main universe” bullshit. Objectively, from the official material, Mania is from an alternate timeline, and any instances of Mania elements appearing in the main universe are continuity errors out of universe, but can be explained in-universe as non-specific objects and locations that exist in both timelines.

I would prefer that Superstars be a split timeline game, personally, but we’re not allowed good things. If Trip ever appears in a comic with the Hardboiled Heavies, then she just exists in both timelines as a pre-Generations thing. No muss, no fuss.

2)Adventure Era

1998-2006,  2010,  2012

Works relatively the same as before, so I will copy and paste. 

Not named after the Adventure games, but rather after Pocket Adventure, which is our transition into it. This era encompasses everything released from 1998-2006, save for Pocket Adventure, Rivals, Riders, and Rush, the latter 3 being folded into the following era. Sonic 4 Episodes 1, 2, and Metal are also part of the Adventure era as their earliest canonical instances. What ends this era is the reset created at the end of 06, which reboots Silver to his new Rivals origin, and either reboots Blaze to be from the Sol Dimension now, or simply makes it so she never traveled from the Sol Dimension to Silver's future(my preferred theory). Since this is a shift in the timeline caused by canonical events, it transitions us into our next era…

3)Post-Solaris Era

2006-2011

Silver and Blaze receive their reboots in the form of Rush and Rivals, and Riders starts up. Covers every game from 2005-2011 that isn't Shadow the Hedgehog, Sonic the Hedgehog(2006), Sonic the Hedgehog 4 Episode 1, and Sonic Chronicles, since that game is explicitly in the not-canon zone, and will probably never get out of it. The cause of our next era shift will be explained shortly.

4) Post-Time Eater era

2013-present(?)

Caused by the events of Generations splitting the timeline so that one version of Sonic grew up to be the Modern counterpart, and one is having considerably different adventures like Mania and the IDW anniversary comics, this new timeline SEEMS to be our current era, with all post-2011 games, save for Sonic 4 Episode 2  being in it...Hypothetically. And, for the first time, non-game media like the IDW comics and Prime are in it, so that's neat!

(Btw, if you wanna bitch and moan about Prime being canon, I discussed it here)

However, I should note that as all of these eras are formed in retrospect, we will not properly know when we have left this era until WELL after we have exited it. 

I see two possibilities for our next era shift:

1) Another timeline shift that properly addresses the timeline split, and uses that to smooth over some of the extra contradictions leaving post-Gens Classic Sonic in the main timeline would bring. I have the story ready in my head if you want it, Sega.

2) The revelations of Frontiers go somewhere further in the future, bringing us into a “Discovery” era, and making our years for this period 2011-2022, 2022-2024(these are for Prime), and starting this new era with Sonic Frontiers, Murder of Sonic, and Sonic Dream Team, along with whatever IDW comics follow the events of Frontiers.

(a small mock-up)

So that’s my canon system as it stands as of March 2024. Feel free to discuss, and even borrow elements for your own systems, or just to use it outright. I just felt that having this all typed out in one spot was a good idea. See ya, suckers!

READ MY DUMBASS FANFICTION!

[clove-pinks]

Today on Eighteen-Forties Friday I'm thinking about the roots of my interest in the 1840s, which is probably the same reason many of my mutuals are interested in that decade: the 1845 Franklin Expedition.

I became obsessed with the Franklin Expedition around age 11, when I saw the Nova documentary "Buried In Ice"—also on YouTube now! Content warning for graphic depictions of frozen mummified bodies, pretty electrifying stuff for a kid in middle school. Believe it or not, one of my teachers showed this documentary to the whole class, and I successfully begged her for a VHS copy. (I first saw it on broadcast TV).

It wasn't easy being a Franklin Expedition fanatic as an isolated child in poverty, pre-internet age. But I had a library card, and I read everything about polar exploration that I could get my hands on—always heading straight for Dewey Decimal 919 on the shelves. I desperately wanted to know more about Franklin's men, and to understand their world, which here and there would be illuminated by a reference to objects on the expedition.

I couldn't find 1840s Punch magazines in the local library, which the Franklin Expedition had; but the library had Charles Dickens. Numerous books would mention that the Franklin Expedition had volumes of Dickens in their library aboard ship—so I would read him too! I tried as hard as I could to locate English literature written pre-1845, because maybe the Franklin expedition crew read those books too. I looked at the comic illustrations by Phiz with studious intent, trying to figure out how the clothes worked, how houses would be furnished and how people traveled and lived. I read vast amounts of Dickens because he was accessible and still in print.

In retrospect it's curious that I didn't discover Captain Marryat's work then; he was that forgotten and obscure in the late 20th century despite being actually read by Franklin's men. It was also a tall order to only read books written before 1845. I remember reading Thackeray's Vanity Fair, published 1847-1848, with the thought that if only Franklin's men had made it home, they MIGHT have read this book too. (Apparently I couldn't imagine what other hobbies and interests Franklin's men might have had, other than endlessly reading novels).

Almost needless to say: I didn't understand the 1840s very well as a child and young teenager. I didn't have the background, I didn't have the body of historical knowledge to see things in context, and above all I didn't have the resources and references that I have as an adult. But I don't look down on what I accomplished with my limited means, focusing on the popular culture and entertainment that people from 1845 Britain may have enjoyed.

I had many thoughts about the limitations of how history is written and recorded, and I would wonder all the time, what was it really like on the Franklin Expedition? I greatly overestimated how often they would be using the steam engines and I underestimated the sophistication of the lighting. Decades later and I'm still enthralled with it—and the shipwrecks found! What will emerge from those wrecks, and will it be something I can dig into to feel closer to Franklin's men, like reading Nicholas Nickleby?

[bitchineering]

Guess I’m back with more note tips?

So, for the 30 of you who were on here, I’m back. I was sick and it put me out for months. Not a really fun experience but I think I got better. With it being break yes I’m working hard because I got finals next week :) and literally have to teach myself a subject in class. But that’s alright I don’t think any of you guys came here for that. Let’s go into my study sessions: How to study from things?

I also did not care to read this so yea... enjoy the none beta version

first things first, I’ve already talked about scheduling, but summary just make sure you have enough time to actually study and by that I mean review your materials so that you understand the concepts. I think about 50 minutes is a good time however you might need more or less. 

- If studying for a unit test a good idea might be to use this idea of writing all the topics that are going to be in the exam and your comfort level (I got this idea from someone else on tumblr btw, I didn’t save the post sorry). You could have the hardest things be more than 90 minutes (or however long you think they need to be) then the medium hard stuff can be 45-90 minutes, and then the topics you feel good/okay on are less than 45 minutes. This all depends on how many things you have to learn, how much time you have, and etc because other factors always stop us from studying. 

So you figured out your scheduling now we need notes. I really hoped you took notes in class but if you didn’t I guess we can work with that. I would suggest to try and find something similar, probably asking a friend for notes (and dont ask them to send pictures, you need to take your own pictures especially if that class if a humanities course). You could also look up powerpoints online if your teacher doesn’t publish them. (some websites I know others use is this: https://www.appracticeexams.com/ just click your class and then go to notes. Usually they have notes available and sometimes study guides. This is for AP Classes. For IB/A level courses my friend recommended this https://app.senecalearning.com/courses but they also have AP and American coures). Also textbooks are amazing resources, usually you can find someone who has a pdf on reddit or that one website which I can’t name but its that gen lib rus thing... besides that all you really need is a brief knowledge of what you will be studying. Maybe look up some youtube videos that talk about it or you have your notes and some idea of what is going on. Now we can start studying. 

1. Building relationships with the material. I’m not saying you need to proclaim your undying love for your calculus homework (I could never) but I do think it is important to find similarities and bring material together so that they connect and have overarching ideas (think of yourself like Aphrodite who will stop at nothing to get her OTPs cannon). 

- for example, in World History we know that the success of the American Revolution started the age of revolutions in many nations, like France’s revolution and in Haiti. Some could argue all revolutions go back to the American revolution and how it sparked that uprising from a controlling government. It was was the Confederate Americans did. Another example is that when Germany lost the 2nd World War, they basically ended facism- why? because all political leaders and nations saw that facism lead to complete failure. Creating these connections really helps people retain information. Many study channels I see always say to use mindmaps with this, but I don’t know if Mindmapping is everyones direction. I do like mindmaps, I just don’t do them much myself. Honestly I like lecturing and having discussions with my material. That way others could ask questions and it really helps me prove I know this material/ can effectively teach it to others. 

2. Finding what is important. I don’t know how many of you like to study for fun or do it because you’re graded but I think it is still important to figure out what exactly you need to study. If you’re studying for a quiz/test from your teacher then you need to find materials your teacher provides. I think this is a little easier for IB/AP/ any large test company that has practice exams out there. Get the teacher to give you practice quizzes and tests/ ask for your old ones back. If they don’t give you anything back then make questions yourself. You might struggle with this the first few times, but if you pay attention to your teachers enough, I think any dedicated student can find how the teacher writes questions and answers them. Also you could work with a friend or other study buddies to make questions. 

While only two steps, I think this really can show to students how you just need the right mind to study. I know it can be hard, especially if questions are worded confusing and you feel like your professor/ teacher would rather see you fail than succeed however, that isn’t always the case. Most definetly you will have to teach yourself and two of my hardest classes this semester are classes I have to teach myself. Just finding your way through may be able to help. Becoming the best student you want to be will take time and I know everyone basically learns for eternity. Find methods that work for you, people who will always encourage you, and know that you are a smart and dedicated student. For some high schoolers I know the university/college applications are being wrapped up and for some early applicants they are being released. Its honestly a terrible process some kids aren’t allowed to go to higher education when they deserve it and I’m sorry if you happen to not make the cut. We all find our places somewhere and think of what amazing future you’ll have. Also, just make the ivies your slut when you’re rich and powerful, f*** em up. 

[alatismeni-theitsa]

Hi! Hope you're doing well <3 I been reading some of your posts about LO and Greek culture in general! And as a non-greek I think your culture is amazing and it should be respected as any other culture, so, I had this question a little while ago

I made a couple of characters based on greek myth creatures, and I kinda had a story for them in an ancient greek inspired world (highly inspired tbh, I think it might take place in an ancient greek ambience as well), but now I think that might be insensitive (?) I don't know how to express it, but I just want to know, would it be ok if I continue with that idea or should I scratch it?

TIIIME TO FINALLY ANSWER THIS

I am really sorry for the long wait! I was trying to think how to answer this properly and also mustering the energy for it xD I will pin it so you can find it more easily, if you come back to the blog.

For starters, you can write whatever you wish. I am hesitant to say to people “you can't write this and that” because it might make people feel estranged and uncomfortable and I believe that distance serves no real purpose. Yes, it’s likely that a xenos won’t be making the story VERY culturally accurate but if the story is 30% culturally accurate as opposed to barely 5% which we see in the popular media today, then it’s still a win. Not to mention that Greeks themselves are not 100% culturally accurate most of the time in their Greek mythology stories. This happens because 1) Americanization has hit us hard 2) They write them just for fun without bothering to research much. We are also lucky if we have a 30% accuracy in our texts most of the time.

(I love percentages if you can���t tell 😂)

You might have figured out I have the tag #writing (and perhaps also #writing advice ??) where I answer these type of questions, so visiting it might help! I'm not gonna tell you if you can write it or not - you can write whatever you like - but I would advise you to treat the Greek culture like any other real or fictional culture. Do a proper “worldbuilding”, let’s say.

THE CREATURES

As you know, some are more serious and some are more playful. They don’t easily “switch” from their behaviors so it’s best to keep a serious creature serious and a playful creature playful throughout most of the story. Some reading is needed, to figure out how the ancient Greeks saw those creatures. Because assumptions are usually not helpful. If we have no clues about their behavior, that’s free real estate I guess 😂

Now, if you are going for the “almost like Greek culture but not quite” thing, that still needs similar studying. You need to know where you are basing those creatures and how they see their world - or how the world sees them. And what elements make sense to change.

You can still not base the characters nowhere and just have a gal with snakes in her head. You can do that xD However, if you like to be more in touch with the culture you need to use some context and the “ambience” you talked about. It’s another thing to say “this gal has snakes on her head“ and another to say “this is THE Medusa“.

Some Greek culture needs to shine through. I mean, it would be great if it could shine though in general, so your references and basis to Greek mythology are better. It would be safe to assume the ancient folklore creatures have some Greek culture in them since they have Greek names, they have been written in Greek stories behaving according to the Greek societal rules and ethics, and generally being symbols in Greece until our days. And your story is about Greek mythology, so you want to emphasize the Greek aspects of your heroes and world.

THE ANCIENT GREEK INSPIRED WORLD

I don't know what research you’ve done so far but I will begin from the basics anyways. Ancient Greek ambience, as you can probably guess, is not “chitons, wine, vines and white pillars” 😂 The ambience specifically doesn’t come from the aesthetics but from the feel of it - the food, the customs, the symbols, the dances, the language interjections, the behaviors and values. Parts of the culture are also how is reverence and modesty are expressed, what makes someone present “manly“ or “feminine”. So, it’s gonna take some research.

People usually write some of the aesthetic and think they are covered, even though their worldbuilding is bad, precisely because they have only presented the very top of the iceberg. No food, no dances, no certain behaviors, nothing. You could say they are “soulless Disney remakes”. 😂 You can also do that, but you need to know how it will come out. It might be quite bland and, if I am not mistaken, you said you want to avoid that. (And I think most of Greeks would tell you that they don’t mind a Greek “soulless” remake but it would be super extra great if you put cultural elements in).

Ok, I don’t mean make it like an encyclopedia, but presenting some stuff from the culture is how you get the ambience. You might as well take a writing advice list for worlbuilding stuff you must have and see which ones you can find irl from the Greek culture.

Important! Remember that nearby cultures affect each other, so if you change one element from the Greek culture it’s likely it has to be changed in other cultures next to your area. If wearing green makes you manly in Imaginary Greece, it will also make you manly in Imaginary Turkey and Imaginary Bulgaria, let’s say. (there is no “ancient Turkey” or “ancient Bulgaria” as countries - and depending on the era, “ancient Greece” is also not a thing - but you get my point xD)

For the interpersonal relationships/interactions, you can read some ancient translated texts presenting daily life situations of the ancient Greeks (start from Googling stuff, I really don’t have sources for that xD). It’s very likely that the ancient sources won’t give you a very defined feel (try it anyways, if you like). Therefore, I suggest you see interactions of modern Greek people.

Worry not! YouTube - through me xD - has you covered! Searching the tags #greek tv #greek youtuber #greek podcast and #video. On youtube you can even find vlogs of people visiting Greece and see interactions with the locals. (If you have trouble finding them, you can send me another ask).

Similarly, it might take months to find all the Greek language interjections so you can go for modern ones. Besides, many interjections like “popoo“ are ancient. Besides, if you are not making a very “serious” story, the modern touches might help it feel more in touch with the present.

Surely, people are people everywhere and humans between countries share cultural traits, but there are some slightly more predominant stuff depending on the culture. Cultures close to each other share more traits, so, if you can’t find any Greeks around, you might be able to find our neighbors. Middle Eastern, north African, or south European people (and Hispanic/Latino Americans!) around might help to understand the dynamics between friends and family members. If you already belong to some of those cultures, congrats, you have most of the formula figured out!

I gave so much space to the interpersonal relationships because that’s gonna give you an idea where the line of “respect” is. Surely, the ancient interpersonal relationships won’t be like the modern American ones  😂 There is no way a student goes to Chiron being like “hey, man, how you doin?” Knowing how Greek teachers were, as late as the 20th century, that’s gonna earn him a slap 😂

Another thing: saying “Good morning” and “good afternoon / goodnight” when you first and last see people in the day is VERY important and the best social practice! You won’t be considered rude if you don’t say them but in a slightly formal and especially professional environment, better use them. (Other modern Europeans also consider this a good practice.)

The most ancient greeting of Greeks is “be happy” (χάιρε / χαίρετε) but health is also very important and is another old greeting. Xάιρετε is more formal in our days and Γεια/Γεια σας ("have good health”) is the most used formal and informal one. Seeing how people wish health in the middle east, it might be that the Health thing has been here for centuries. Also, if you break something or something bad happens to you, we say “health” because having your health is more important than anything else.

Fun fact, “Charon“ (Χάρων) probably means “the happy one” :P It has the same root with (χάιρε / χαίρετε).

Many other social cues can be found in the tags I mentioned, but you can send me an ask if you need to know something more specific!

As for the food, you can find ancient recipes and even use modern ones (which are usually with the same ingredients). Same goes for dances and symbols. You can google stuff about them, go on Google Scholar and search there, as well. (Also, google pages where you can download those papers for free ;) ) Please do some cross examination to make sure that this element indeed exists and it’s not just one person pulling it our of their a**. 😂

If you can’t find info, you can lean on modern symbols and dances. The dances are similar through the centuries anyways. No one is going to come for you if you say you based an element on a modern Greek thing bc the ancient one was impossible to find with the resources available to you.

I don’t have many more things to add on these cultural elements because I already have tags for the modern ones. #greek cuisine #melomakarona #greek dance #greek custom #greek tradition  etc.

And, last but not least, research the weather!! I can't stress this enough 😩 We are not a desert and we are not the Tropics. If your weather is similar to the Greek one, then your creatures most likely will need some serious covering in Autumn and Winter 😂

All in all, it’s certainly not a piece of cake to write about other countries and cultures but, if they are open to let you in, you can learn stuff and do your best depicting them. It might not be perfect (and no work is actually perfect) but it would be a step to the right direction and might encourage more writers to do the same - instead of throwing some chitons in and calling it a day xD

If you have any other questions feel free to send me another message (dm or ask). You - or anyone else - REALLY WON’T BOTHER ME if you ask me many questions on my DMs or here.

[a-queer-seminarian]

I am trying to read more theology and I would love to know what texts have been most important to you? I am not a super academic person so things that are modestly accessible would be great, but also I am trying to push myself to read more challenging texts! ty so much!

Oooh what a fun question -- I’ve offered people book recs before, but never one that’s specifically the texts that have been most important to me.

To start, i recommend my #books tag on my other blog for way more books than the ones I’ll list here -- not every post in that tag is relevant to your question here, but some are. Here’s a list of the posts that are relevant to your request -- you’ll see that on most of them, I note how accessible vs academic or dense a text seemed to me. 

a list of recs for theology that’s helpful in this 2020 climate of pandemic and protest.

a list of recs for books about being queer and Christian

And now for a list of theological texts that have been most important to me -- deeply impacting how I read the Bible, how I relate to God or to other humans or to creation, etc.:

The basics

I have to include Christian Doctrine by Shirley Guthrie on this list...

simply because it was the first book I read when trying to figure out what Reformed Protestants believe after growing up Catholic. It’s actually a fairly easy read -- it’s longish, and not like the most riveting book you’ve ever read, but dang it has great stuff in it. It made me way more excited to enter the PC(USA) denomination than I’d been before reading it -- before, I felt like i was mainly running from the crappy parts of the Roman Catholic Church; after reading it, i realized i could also be running to the beautiful parts of Reformed theology!

But yeah, if you’re looking for a book that helps solidify in your mind concepts like the Trinity, or sin, or divine inspiration....this is a great book for that! (Assuming you want to learn about those things from a(n LGBT affirming) Reformed Protestant lens.

If you wanna read tons of excerpts from this text before deciding whether you want to read the whole thing, I posted a lot of passages from it in this tag over here.

Inspired by Rachel Held Evans

this is the best book I can think of for non-academics who want to learn about reading the Bible in a way that confronts rather than ignores/accepts its more disturbing passages.

If you need help figuring out how to read the Bible without a fundamentalist / literalist lens, this is the book for you.

Holy Envy: Finding God in the Faith of Others by Barbara Brown Taylor

Very important if you want to practice a Christianity that doesn’t pit you against people of other (or no) faiths -- and very easy to read

Books that helped me develop a liberationist + queer + disabled theology

Justin Tanis’ book Transgendered was super important to me when i was first getting into trans theology...

However, the language in it isn’t particularly accessible -- it’s not horribly dense but I would now recommend OtherWise Christian by Chris Paige instead. Paige quotes from Tanis -- and many other foundational trans theologians! -- and does a great job of making their scholarly language a lot more accessible to non-academics. Ach yeah, OtherWise Christian is what you wanna read to get deep into the academia of trans theology without having to wade through the denser older books yourself.

If you do want to read some of Tanis’ book, you can read my fave chapters as pdfs here.

I’d also recommend Austen Hartke’s Transgender and Christian YouTube channel and my website blessedarethebinarybreakers.com for more trans theology presented in simpler language!

Disability: The Inclusive Church Resource by John M. Hull

Nancy Eiseland’s The Disabled God is also, like, foundational to a lot of disability theology but it’s not the easiest read. The last two chapters are the best part in my opinion.

For more great resources on disability theology, including some of my own writing (which is, I hope, easy to read), see this Google Doc i compiled once and also my disability theology tag.

Jesus and the Disinherited by Howard Thurman.

It’s a bit more academic / written more formally than some of the books on here cuz it’s older, but it’s also short and if you can get through even just the first two or three chapters you’ll have absorbed material that i promise you’ll be thinking about for a long, long time to come.

God of the Oppressed by James Cone

So foundational. Another classic by him is The Cross and the Lynching Tree. These books are both more academic but yeah, foundational stuff.

The only full text I’ve read by Gustavo Gutiérrez is On Job but I’ve read a lot of excerpts from other stuff by him...

You’ve gotta read at least a little bit of this guy to help you understand liberation theology as it originated in Latin America. Unfortunately, I do think he’s much more academic so not an “easy” read at all -- you could try to find other authors who sum up his ideas and works and offer fundamental excerpts in his own words, if you try to dig into something he’s written and find it too tough

But yeah, his book On Job in particular really helped me start figuring out “theodicy” -- the question of why there is suffering in the world / what God’s role in suffering is. But I had a lot of trouble figuring out what Gutiérrez was saying at a lot of points in the book, and I’ve been reading academic texts for like a decade now!! So if you try to read it and find it’s just too much, don’t feel bad. I only was able to get a real handle on this book after discussing it in a seminary classroom with a teacher helping us.

If you wander through my #theodicy tag, you’ll find my own understandings of suffering as shaped by On Job without having to read the book yourself! You also might like Everything Happens by Kate Bowler for a great look on suffering. 

Native: Identity, Belonging, and Rediscovering God by Kaitlin B. Curtice (progressive Christian + citizen of the Potawatomi nation)

This book is truly incredible in that its language invites you in and reads like a devotional while making powerful statements about settler colonialism and assimilation and stuff. So so so good. 

When it comes to books that have deeply enriched, like, my “personal” prayer life / relationship with God:

Learning to Walk in the Dark and An Altar in the World by Barbara Brown Taylor (Episcopal background)

This author’s books are all so easy to read, and so so so full of wisdom. If you want your theology served to you in a less “so this is theology” kind of way and more of a devotional kind of way, this is the author for you.

Also she’s super popular among non-academics and academics alike so it’s easy to find people to discuss her work with!

An Altar in the World is about finding God outside of church, in the everyday, in the “secular”...

Learning to Walk in the Dark is about forming a faith that can survive and actually nourish you during the struggles of life (as opposed to what she calls a “full solar Christianity”)

A Tree Full of Angels by Sister Macrina Wiederkehr (Catholic nun)

this one is a little bit more formal in style, but not bad if you read it like i did, which was as a devotional where i’d only read a section or two each evening. It focuses on finding the divine in the most mundane of things -- see here for some posts sharing short excerpts from it.

Wow this got long....sorry about that! And if you were hoping for more shorter works, like articles instead of whole books, let me know and I can dig through my seminary stuff and share my faves!

[dustedmagazine]

Ian Mathers’ 2020: We’re stuck inside our own machines

I’ve had a song I loved in high school and haven’t thought much about since stuck in my head. The song “Apparitions” by the Matthew Good Band is a fine example of the alt rock of the late 90s; if you grew up then but somewhere down in the states (or elsewhere) instead of my southern Ontario you may well have your regional equivalents, and like this one they may not resonate terribly strongly outside of their time and place. It popped back into my head after a long time recently and of course 2020 has changed it a little. A song that as a teen I felt keenly as about loneliness (albeit also about how technology can feed into that) of course now plays on my nerves as another small piece of art about the way that most of us (those scared and/or responsible anyway) have only that relatively narrow, technologically mediated connection to the people we love. All of us, artists and listeners alike, are trying to fit our feelings and art and selves down these little connections, with some success.

On a personal level, 2020 wound up being stressful in ways we couldn’t have predicted even after the pandemic hit. In circumstances that could have seen governments on this continent support those unable to work (and those who shouldn’t have to), support those workers who are truly essential, support workers and renters and even landlords and small businesses, instead we got a near-total abeyance of those governments using the resources we provide them with to save any of us. On a personal level my wife and I were lucky enough to be able to work from home (not that it didn’t come with its own forms of stress, and now that I’m off until January I have several work/stress-related illnesses to recover from) but still saw friends and loved ones lose good, used-to-be-sustainable livings overnight, saw family businesses succumb to a near-total absence of effective government support after months of trying to keep above water, etc.

It is probably no surprise that this is not a situation conducive to listening to music, let alone writing about it; I have deliberately and happily kept busy on behind the scenes stuff at Dusted that I could still manage but looking, at the end of the year, at the amount I managed to actually create is demoralizing if not at all shocking. I’m not sure I think next year will be ‘better’ in many important ways, although at our job there is a growing feeling among coworkers that next year has to have some work/life balance because 2020 was, maybe more than anything else, unsustainable.

That’s not to say I didn’t spend a lot of time and emotion on music this year, and if nothing else constant sleep deprivation, stress, and panic meant I was probably open to being deeply moved by all sorts of art even more than normally (it’s gotten to the point where I can’t even read a sad or moving twitter thread out loud to my wife without getting teary, which is kind of… nice?). Funnily enough the band that did the most to keep me sane didn’t really put out anything in 2020. Personal favorite, Low, instead started, in early April, getting on Instagram with something they called on whim “It’s Friday I’m in Low.” With one brief break they have now done by my count at least 35 shows (catalogued here, by the way), every Friday at about 4 my time.

Admittedly it’s easier for Low to pull this off than some bands, since the 2/3 of the trio that sing are a married couple (they’ve had a couple of socially-distanced backyard shows with bassist Steve Garrington, but he’s mostly been isolating elsewhere). These shows have seen the band’s Alan Sparhawk take a mid-set break to do follow-up phone interviews with the acts featured in the COVID-curtailed touring bands series Vansplainingthat they started on YouTube, or just to give a tour round their vegetable garden and talk tips. It’s seen Alan and Mimi Parker draw on their impressive, 25+ year body of work (averaging 4-5 songs a set, I don’t think they’ve repeated themselves yet) and talk a bit between songs about pandemics, politics, song choices, and whether Alan should grab his bike helmet this time.

They’re not the only musicians out there speaking love and sanity (and playing music) into the strange digital interzone filled with hate and disinformation where we’ve all been forced to gather while locked down, but they were and the most consistent and steady signal being emitted each week. No matter how tired I was from work or what new symptoms I’d developed or what horrific thing I read into the news, even if I had to take an emergency nap while it was actually airing, every Friday the show was there. Once things do return to something more like normal, it’s one of the few things I’ll unambiguously miss about this weird-ass year.

So if that makes an argument for Low as my band of the year (admittedly again… it’s not like Double Negative has aged poorly, either), that does a disservice to those 2020 records I did connect with; even if there are still literally dozens I have to go through, many of which I expect to love, my top picks this year (if as unrankable by me as always) hit me as hard as any top pick in recent years did. So here I present a quick and informal top 5, which the rest of my top 20 following in alphabetical order. Here’s hoping for more time and space in 2021 for music, and even more than that, for more support for those who need it from those who could have been providing it all this time. (The Matthew Good Band, incidentally, always did best with their ballads. “Strange Days” is another I’ve had in my head these days; the image of moving “backwards, into a wall of fire” has stuck with me since the 90s and it’s never felt more grimly appropriate.)

Greet Death — New Hell

New Hell by Greet Death

This one is, in some sense, cheating; it came out November 2019. But that just means it’s the latest winner of my personal Torres Prize for Ian Being Late to the Party (so named because becoming slightly obsessed with Torres’ Sprinter just after I sent in my 2015 list was the first time I noticed that one of my favorite records of each year tends to get picked up by me just after I call it quits on the year, no matter how long I try to wait). This very doom and gloom slowcore/metal/(whatever, just know it’s heavy) trio at first felt very much like my beloved Cloakroom (whose Time Well has also won a Torres Prize) but sure enough nuances revealed themselves. Back in February it felt almost a little too negative, but then the rest of 2020 happened. And the extended burns of “You’re Gonna Hate What You’ve Done” and the title track remain searing.

Holy Fuck — Deleter

Probably the record I’ve been trying to write about the longest in 2020, and the one I’m most disappointed in myself that I just couldn’t get the requisite paragraphs together. It’s a wonderful effort from the consistently great Toronto resolutely human-created (and —mediated) dance music quartet, one that both feels like a summation of everything they do well, and with the addition of some outside voices (including strong turns from the singers of both Hot Chip and Liars) a step forward at the same time.

Spanish Love Songs — Brave Faces Everyone

Brave Faces Everyone by Spanish Love Songs

As the year got worse, this roar of defiance only got more crucial for me to hear every so often; I was a big enough fan of it, even after writing it up for Dusted, that when they solicited fan footage for a subsequent music video you may just be able to get a glimpse of me in it. (I’m the one in a “No Tories” t-shirt.) My punk rock-loving twin brother was the one who introduced me to Spanish Love Songs and we were supposed to spend an evening in June screaming along to them live in a packed, sweaty room. I need that in my life again.

Julianna Barwick — Healing Is a Miracle

Healing Is A Miracle by Julianna Barwick

It’s a sign of what 2020 has been like here that even just this album title leaves bruises, and while I privately worried Barwick would have a hard time following up 2016’s sublime Will (probably my favorite record that year), it seems that continuing to take whatever downtime she needs to keep focusing and refining her particular muse has once again yielded amazing results. Anyone who thinks they know what a Barwick track sounds like should really check out, say, “Flowers”, but much of this record absolutely sounds like Barwick, just even better than before. She also boasted my wife and I's favorite streaming concert of 2020, an absolutely gorgeous rendition of this album with Mary Lattimore showing up.

Phoebe Bridgers — Punisher

Punisher by Phoebe Bridgers

I joked on Twitter recently that I have far too nice a dad (and far too good a relationship with him) to be as obsessed as I am with Phoebe Bridgers’ “Kyoto”, but here we are. Like most of her generation, Bridgers’ social media presence ranges from shit-posting to inscrutable, but even though things are often just as hard to figure out in her beautiful songs (as they often are in life), there’s an emotional clarity to them that can just grab you deep down. Couple that with seriously impressive songcraft and the progress from her already astounding debut Stranger in the Alps and more than anyone else in 2020 I’m excited to see just where the hell Phoebe Bridgers is going to go, because it feels like she’s talented and hardworking enough to go just about anywhere and drag a lot of our hearts with her.

Other Favorites

Aidan Baker & Gareth Davis — Invisible Cities II

Anastasia Minster — Father

Deftones — Ohms

Hum — Inlet

Kelly Lee Owens — Inner Song

Mesarthim — The Degenerate Era

Perfume Genius — Set My Heart On Fire Immediately

Protomartyr — Ultimate Success Today

Rachel Kiel — Dream Logic

The Ridiculous Trio — The Ridiculous Trio Plays the Stooges

Sam Amidon — Sam Amidon

Shabason, Krgovich & Harris — Philadelphia

Stars Like Fleas — DWARS Session: Live on Radio VPRO

Well Yells — We Mirror the Dead

Yves Tumour — Heaven to a Tortured Mind

Five Reissues/Compilations/etc.

Aix Em Klemm — Aix Em Klemm

Bardo Pond — Adrop/Circuit VIII

Charles Curtis — Performances & Recordings 1998-2018

Coil — Musick to Play in the Dark

Hot Chip — LateNightTales

Ian Mathers

[thejakeformerlyknownasprince]

How To Get Into DnD in 10-ish Easy-ish Steps

Cates here. I just wanted to add my thoughts about joining or starting a DnD game for the first time, as someone who’s been there, done that, and still can’t calculate Rogue Sneak Attack damage to save her life. It can definitely be intimidating entering the world of DnD, but for me the best thing about DnD is running around with a group of people who would literally take a sword in the gut for you. Find a supportive and welcoming group (or start one!) and you’ll be fine.

(Note the “easy-ish” modifier in the title. If you’re a hardcore DnDer who thinks that 5e is a travesty and we all should have stuck to 3.5e, or if you’re the kind of person who gets annoyed about DnD suddenly being “mainstream” and “popular”…chances are some of what I’m about to say will make your eyeballs twitch.)

1.       Use other media as a way into understanding DnD. My absolute number one recommendation would be to see or read the play She Kills Monsters by Qui Nguyen. Not only is it a beautiful send-up to nerd culture in general and DnD in particular but because the main character is playing DnD for the first time, it actually provides a decent overview of the mechanics of the game. Another entry point is, of course, Stranger Things—the first season in particular establishes a pretty solid picture of what playing DnD is like.  

2.       From there, find a podcast, YouTube channel, or similar where a group plays DnD, and watch to get a sense of how things work. Film Reroll is fun but that’s GURPS, a different system than DnD. The Adventure Zone is another good one. By far the most popular is Critical Role. I personally don’t care for Critical Role (put away your torches and stink bombs, please,) but it seems to work for other people.

3.       Purchase (or check out from your local library,) the DnD Player’s Guide, 5th Edition. (The most current edition.)

4.       Now that you have a sense of how DnD works, find a game. Bug mentioned some good avenues, like comments sections on Podcasts. To that I’d add check out Reddit subs, Facebook groups, and your local game store if you’re lucky enough to have one. Most game stores have resources for finding parties or even host games at the stores themselves.

5.       Another option: get together a group of friends, form a party, and stumble your way through one of the early level adventures. If no one wants to DM, do what my second party* does and rotate DMs. We each take turns running an adventure, and while each of us does so our character is off on another quest/on vacation/bringing goblin corpses back to life/etc. Ideally, you’ll have at least one person in the group who has some experience with DnD, but if you don’t…so what? The internet is an endless bounty of information. Some of it is even accurate!

*As opposed to the one I’m in with Bug where I’m the permanent DM. 

6.       Figure out what you want from a game of DnD. Are you there for the complicated character backstories? Does the complex system(s) of magic fascinate you? Do you want to be like Legolas from LotR, or like River from Firefly, or like the Incredible Hulk? This will help you get a sense of the kind of character you’d like to play. Some people will wildly disagree with me, but here’s my rough-and-tumble ten second mini guide to figuring out your class as a first time player.

Want to be the smooth talker, the one who gets info from the local bartender? Be a bard, or a rogue who leans into Charisma instead of Dexterity.

Want to be really useful/involved in combat situations? Be a barbarian.

Want to use magic? Be a cleric. Your team will thank you. If you want a more “hardcore” magic class, go with sorcerer over warlock or wizard.

Want to come up with unusual solutions to specific problems? Be a druid.

Want to be sneaky? Be a rogue or a ranger. 

Want to be some combination of the above/figure it out as you go? Be a fighter. Fighters get overlooked as a class because they seem so generic, but that’s actually the advantage of playing one. It’s so broad you can pretty much do whatever you want with it, taking on just about any of the roles I listed above.

7.      Keep in mind that to set your party up for success you’re going to want at least one of each of the following: a healer, a magic user, a ranged (long-distance) fighter, a tank, and a talker. Now, this doesn’t mean you need a party of five, because one character can take on multiple roles. For instance, in the game where I DM, mine and Bug’s brother plays a character who is the party’s main talker and their main magic user. We also have a healer who can be a tank when needed. Basically I just wouldn’t recommend that you have a party consisting of a wizard, a sorcerer, and a warlock, or a fighter, a barbarian, and a monk. Cover different areas of expertise and you’ll have a happy and harmonious party that actually stands a chance of surviving their first combat.   

8.       Resist the urge to use unusual races or classes for your first game. Trust me when I say that you’ll have so many other things you need to work out, sorting through a class or race that isn’t clearly outlined in 5e is a headache you don’t need. More to the point, it’s a headache that your DM doesn’t need. The amount of work that goes into figuring out how to give an unusual class or race a good combat experience (ie, one that doesn’t kill them and one where they don’t kill all the enemies with a snap of their fingers) is a ton of work…and that’s only one aspect. If you really want to be unique, look at the subclasses and subraces. There are some delightfully strange varieties in there.

9.       Similarly, for the love of the Ellimist make sure everyone is clear on the goal of your standard game of DnD: you are a party of adventurers. For the game to work, you need to, for whatever reason, work together. Keeping a whole bunch of secrets from your party, excessively lying to your party, and going against the party’s goals are all ways to make the game waaaaaaayyyyyy less fun for everyone involved. This doesn’t mean that you have to be an open book, but keep in mind that is a COLLABORATIVE, not COMPETITIVE, game. Save the trickery and theft and all for the monsters your party will fight. For instance, in my first game I played a gnome who was disguising himself as a woman because he was on the run from a sorcerer who’d kept him enslaved. He lied about his gender and his name and was vague about his backstory, but he didn’t tell any lies that were aimed at getting a leg up on his party members. Eventually as they bonded he came to trust them and revealed his past, and the party helped him disguise himself as an elderly dwarf so they could take down the sorcerer (it made sense in context : ). Tl;dr: work with your party, not against them.

a. For all my “well, but in my party…” friends, if your game features a bunch of cutthroats all trying to assassinate each other, or if your character was secretly planning on murdering another player’s character for Reasons, that’s fine. All I’m saying is don’t do it in your first game, or you’ll never get off the ground.

10.       Within reason, ignore the minutiae. Don’t worry too much about money, food, or how much weight you’re carrying. (At this point I’m assuming some of my hardcore DnDers’ eyes are popping out of their heads.) Again, note that I said within reason: this doesn’t mean that you can take whatever kind of weapon or armor that you want, and you shouldn’t have a never-ending supply of arrows, nor should you be able to purchase that super rare artifact. But if you focus too much on this stuff, you’ll have a hard time getting anyone (yourself included) invested in the game. If this sort of hyper realism appeals to you, add it in after a few sessions. But give yourself a break at the start and don’t roleplay every afternoon tea.

Remember, a good DnD game is a game that you enjoy playing. A good DnD party is one in which the characters AND the players respect each other. Don’t metaphorically or literally split the party, and you’ll be fine. 

[brujoenlafrontera]

hi!!! I’m a puertorriqueño/nicaragüense enby looking into resources for learning bruja stuff, any good place you know to start?

I’ve gotten a couple of asks about this lately, and i’m so happy to know there are more latinos finding their way to the practice, tumblr’s brujeria tag often gives the impression that theres so little of us out there reclaiming our practices but getting asks like these brings me a lot of faith that thats not true :) first and foremost:

GETTING INTO BRUJERIA IS HARD.

it really is. baby brujos like us know that better than anyone- getting started, is often the hardest part of doing anything, and its no different with brujeria. it can feel so overwhelming and feeling lost is natural. from my experience, although i am still a newbie ive been able to find a lot of information out there, here are the best places to find info, sorted by priority:

FAMILY! a little self explanatory, but brujeria at its best is truly is an inherited, familial practice. If you can, before delving into internet resources, definitely connect w your family if you’re able to and ask them for guidance and about their experiences!

Your family is always the best resource over anything you can find online; theres so much misinformation out there or information not relevant to your region and if someone in your family already has established practices, always trust them first

 Do some thinking back to all your cultural traditions, quirks, stories, and superstitions that you’ve  learned from your family across time and never thought too much about- and rediscover them under a new light

KEEP IN MIND: brujeria is NOT a singular , concrete practice w concrete rules in itself, the term blankets a lot of traditions across latam, the caribbean, mexico, but imo its always best to stick with brujeria related to your heritage and where your connection is.

this can be hard for people (like me!) with huge family taboos toward brujeria that make it unsafe to ask around about, and/or limitations in family connections (also like me unfortunately). I personally can really only get the tidbits and stories that my family accidentally slips out when I occasionally see them. i try to write them down as much as possible, but the info i can get is limited... and thats where the following comes in.

ONLINE COMMUNITIES. i.e, youtube, tumblr, instagram brujx communities. notice I haven’t said “internet” in general- the reason why i trust community based social media more than random individual websites you find on google is because, in the case of brujeria and honestly any non-european craft, you’re often gonna find a LOT of white people writing blogs, books, etc about their “spiritual experiences” in latam countries and wrongly/incorrectly taking ATR or indigenous traditions (like with smudging). I know, with social media, although those same white people are also on insta and tumblr, it’s a LOT easier to see the face behind the accounts and differentiate who to trust, who’s legit and has real experience to share, rather than a nameless, faceless, website that is actually some colonizer sharing colonized ideas who thinks theyre on a spiritual journey taking traditions all willy nilly. And the fact that in social media, its much easier to find a lot of good brujas at once bc they tend to follow each other lmao.what ive personally done to find information tho is essentially SCOUR tumblrs, insta accs, and watching tons of youtube videos for posts, accounts, videos, etc, and narrowing down good info from there through , namely:

CHECKING WHO YOUR SOURCE IS!!!

ASKING YOURSELF FROM WHAT EXPERIENCE THEYRE SPEAKING FROM

ALWAYS TAKING EVERYTHING WITH A GRAIN OF SALT

AND STICKING TO INFO FROM CULTURES OPEN AND RELEVANT TO ME.

again, brujería is different depending on where your family is from in latam, and if you have an established connection to indigenous and/or black roots, so it’s useful to use keywords relating to that when searching (like if ur black, you can look into ATRs(african traditional religions) which tend to mix deeply with brujeria, if ur indigenous, finding other people from your tribe is great, and if youre not pursuing your already learned traditions you can think about connecting to them more deeply(altho indigenous traditions are their own thing, sometimes they do mix with brujeria too), and apart from familial roots, if ur catholic/christian and/or want to explore it, saint work/catholic brujeria might be a good fit for you!)  

tumblr: there are a couple of fantastic brujxs on this site with great blogs and resources who have sadly left the site, but i still go through their posts heavily for spells, rituals, scraps of info! etting started w brujería is hard bc there’s really not that much info out there right now, but i compile as many good brujeria posts i find on my acc.

@brujeria-n-bongs great for catholic brujeria, now at @Upliftherbs on instagram

@brujeria-lost @barberwitch @reina-morada @highbrujita

@naomi121406 is by far the most active and informative tumblr resource ive found, shes an afro-indigenous diaguita curandera from argentina so shes also really helpful if ATRs are in your path!

Im not black myself and dont follow ATRs so i don’t really know many good blogs for afrolatine brujxs out there but if anyone would like to tag some in the replies thatd be awesome!

instagram: Ive found that instagram #brujeria tags has a pretty healthy active stream of posts. You’re gonna have to sift through a lot of them to get to the good stuff though- imo a lot of hispanics use the brujería tag not to mean “latine brujería” but just the spanish word for witchcraft, so a lot of white hispanics will put wicca/neo witchcraft in the tag. imo that’s really not something i’m personally interested in bc it’s not true to brujeria’s traditional nature, is very white/eruropean , and that wicca shit basically just got here. its a relatively a recent thing😭 so i try to stick to bruja accounts that aren’t influenced by that.

youtube: The youtube brujería tag is hit or miss? and again, contains a lot of wicca. But there are some good practitioners on there like The Mexican Witch! You just gonna look around, and dont be afraid to click on videos by really really small youtubers; they often are the ones with the most informative and legit things to say!

Everyone’s path as a bruja/o/x (sjdf trying to be inclusive w gendered language is difficult) is different but here are some topics i think are great to look into as a beginner!

ancestors: start at the bottom and figure out who they are, where theyre from, and set up an altar. it’ll help you a lot with figuring out your identity and path as a bruja later on.

setting up a grimoire

divination: tarot is actually what got me into brujeria at first! tarot isnt strictly traditional and is european in itself but its a wonderful tool for connecting to dieties, saints, etc as well as super fun and helps a lot with introspection

ritual abrecaminos, aka road opening spells!

amarres (love spells... proceed with caution)

limpias, mal de ojo

saint work: even if you’re not catholic (im ex catholic), a growing number of us (especially lgbt latines like @/upliftherbs on instagram) are starting to take back and decolonize our view of saints like La Virgen Maria and removing her from the rigid european/colonized interpretation thats been forced into us

candle spells in general (i fucking love candles tbh, cheap, easy, fun, and WORKS)

spiritual colognes, how to cleanse

finally, here are some helpful posts yall should definitely read and think about moving forward!

about using tumblr as a resource

about looking into brujeria as a part-white part latine

bruja psa + about reclaiming lost indiginety

honestly naomi’s entire brujeria tag is great and super informative for beginners and basically holds answers for almost anything at this point

hope this post helps yall out!

EDIT: oh lord now that this is posted the outline format i tried to use is all kinds of fucked up please dont mind the odd numbering lmfao tumbr hates organized formats

[anonymoushouseplantfan]

I’m the budget anon! Thanks for working on my question, I have an even harder time now so I’d really like your advice. I followed your grocery shopping list when you posted it and it helped me a lot!

I’m glad it helped. Thanks for sending the ask. I was working on the post when news of my husband’s pay cut arrived, so it helped me get into that “survival budget” mood, lol.

Right now, I am very grateful for the one good piece of advice my father gave me. He always told me to “keep your overhead low.” Overhead meant essential expenses like rent, transportation, health care, etc... It’s a lot easier to cut luxuries than it is to cut essentials. 

You’re lucky that there are lots of bloggers and YouTubers sharing their strategies for budgeting and frugal living on the Internet. I’ve been watching them a lot lately.

Here are some of my favorites:

Kate Kaden has a very simple budgeting style. I like her super-simple “four categories” model. I particularly like her use of “household” and “lifestyle” categories. That really helps me figure out what are my essentials and what are my luxuries. You follow my blog, so you know I love my “lifestyle.” However, it’s important to keep in mind that all of that stuff can be cut if necessary. I also like the “give every dollar a name” strategy. It really helps me mentally keep track of the budget.

And I really love how this vlogger, Emily, does her budgets. This was her emergency job loss budget and I love how calm and upbeat she is about it. Her budgets are sooooo pretty too. Needless to say, mine don’t look like this.

Both bloggers are big fans of the Dave Ramsey method. I am too. Some of his advice is controversial and I don’t buy any of his products, but the basic advice is very good. The way he lays out his “baby steps” is soooo useful.

https://www.daveramsey.com/blog/a-financial-plan-that-works

And he uses an “envelope system” to “give every dollar a name.” It sounds little quirky at first, but it really helps. I don’t keep actual envelopes, but I do keep a mental “envelope” and track what I spend on each category to make sure I don’t go over.

https://www.daveramsey.com/blog/control-spending-with-envelope-and-clip-systems

There are many financial vloggers on YouTube giving advice on how to do a survival or barebones budget. It’s an amazing resource right now. I love Kristin Stone because she focuses on developing purpose-driven budgets where you focus on what you want to get out of life and figure out a way to do it with less.

There are some other great bloggers out there. Just make sure you don’t fall for any investment schemes, side hustles, or financial planning products they may be selling (not even the Dave Ramsey ones!!!). You don’t need any of that. All you need is paper and pencil (and maybe a calculator).

Also, keep in mind that most of these people are following Dave Ramsey and one of his tips is to have an emergency fund set aside. It’s great advice, but, sadly, not everyone has that right now. Don’t get discouraged by that.

[betterpathoflyfe]

Who is May the Author? - 3/22/21

You may have noticed that whenever I write a blogpost, I sign with this pseudo name, “May the Author.” Those who know my personally know that “May” isn’t my real name, but I never really talked about the significance behind that name (I use it as a few of my social media handles too). I mentioned an aspect of it briefly (like...super brief lol) in the previous post, but I want to shed a bit more light!

Sooooooo....

For the longest time...when I was around like...10-13 years old?

I...was the biggest Sonic Hedgehog fan.

Like...#1 biggest fan. I really got into it with the shows and movies first (surprisingly), and then the video games and computer games. I loved watching the gameplays, especially for Sonic the Hedgehog 2006 (wow...the nostalgia I just got LOL), as well as the fan-made videos on Youtube like Ask the Sonic Heroes & Sonic Shorts (if you only knew how many times I’m saying “oh my gosh” as I type this...like it’s nostalgic, a taaaaad bit embarrassing if you know me in real life, just....oh my gosh!!!)

But yeah! What really solidified my love for his character was actually through this sprite comic that I followed called, “Sonic and Pals,” by Trevor Fayas (his site crashed years ago sadly). Essentially, it was sort of like a college project for him at the time, and he utilized Sonic characters to portray things like “Romeo and Juliet,” “Caesar,” etc. Yet, he still maintained the characters’ personalities and had running jokes throughout it. It was really good, and was pretty popular at the time! 

His comic then allowed me to get into this world of sprite comics, with the website, https://www.theduckwebcomics.com/ getting me familiar with different styles, characters, etc. I soon learned about sprite sheets that include different characters, and then accessory, background, and other sheets that people compile to create their stories! I really started to become invested in these so I eventually decided I wanted to do my own comic (I can’t pinpoint the exact reason, but I guess I was just inspired?)! And what better characters to use than Sonic characters? 

Once those sprite sheets were compiled, however, I had no idea what the comic should be about. But after talking to my dad about it, I figured I’d have my “debut” comics talking about Jesus! Therefore, I made this website: https://christskidscorner.wordpress.com/ and tried my hand at a few comics. My goal was to incorporate lessons about God, but still maintain the characters’ personalities through it. Here’s an example of one (if the picture is blurry, here is the link to it and then click on the image: https://christskidscorner.wordpress.com/2011/10/01/comic-4/ ):

Now mind you...I was 12...so chill 😭

BUT, I really enjoyed doing these, and also incorporated other things on the site, including how one could become saved through Christ, prompts featuring “What Would Jesus Do,” and other Christian resources that people could check out (like Adventures in Odyssey)! It was really my way to begin getting familiar with sprites in general.

I always say, though, that my “breakout” comic was my comic called “Sonic and Chums” (as you see, I really loved Trevor’s comic haha). But I always say that that comic is really my baby! Here is the link: https://sonicandchums.wordpress.com/. With this comic, I really took a page out of Trevor’s comic from the very beginning, but by season 2, really began to create my own ideas! Each season sort of took it’s own story, but still kept it interesting, you know? On the site, near the right, you’ll see that I said that the funniest comic was Comic 19. I loved it because it really embodied the personalities of Sonic and Knuckles (to me, at least). This was it (https://sonicandchums.wordpress.com/2011/10/22/comic-19-dealing-with-villains-rouge-runs-into-eggman-again/ ) :

It may be hard to see on here, but in my early comics, I was still learning editing aspects as well! This one, for instance, wasn’t even cropped. But through practice, I got pretty familiar with it! I began using other characters in the comic and creating my own, as well! For example, I sort of created a new storyline with an alternative universe that is parallel to Sonic’s. That season was my favorite (and when I revisit the site, it definitely still is), as I really got to learn how to recolor characters and backgrounds (me and Paint became best friends throughout all of this), give sprites transparency, etc. I was able to mesh different games together and still make it work, you know? This, for instance, was my first real, mini fight scene that I was able to create (from the Alternative Universe comic https://sonicandchums.wordpress.com/2012/02/16/comic-74-121/):

I was invested in all of this to say the least, and allowed me to learn some cool editing skills at the same time!

THAT BEING SAID, one thing that I thought Trevor did that was really smart was the usage of a “sprite author,” which would kind of break that fourth wall between them and the audience. Essentially, it was him as a sprite. Therefore, I knew that I wanted to incorporate myself as the “sprite author,” as well. But I wanted to create a name for it, too, but still have related to me.

Now, Amy Rose was my favorite character only because I, too, am sort of a hopeless romantic myself. So I figured I’d do a play on her name and switch around the letters to May, which also happened to be my birth month as well. I also loved the name, “Mai,” because of Avatar the Last Airbender, so yeah! 

 May the Author was born (https://sonicandchums.wordpress.com/2011/10/20/comic-1-new-beginnings-a-stick-of-power-2/ ):

Even though it’s sometimes a little embarrassing to talk about it, I truly am proud of those comics because I know the work I really put into make each one, and it was a lot. My website in itself was hard work as well, as I created interactive links for each season, as well as Sonic related stuff like videos and games. It makes me a little sad, though, how some of the comic links and, because Adobe Flash expired, game links have become inactive over time. But, in it’s prime, it was really a great site! My friends and even teachers checked it out during that time, and I even got hits from different parts of the world. It was truly something I enjoyed doing when I was younger.

That is why I wanted to keep the handle. It’s sort of like a remembrance but also a credit aspect! I know that some of my peers today would not believe I created something like this, so I’ve just always kept the name to show like...yeah...I did lol.

So yeah! That, my friend, is the background story behind that name (it’s also my Twitter handle, so follow me on Twitter!).

“Work hard, that way no matter what happens you know you did your absolute best.” 

~ May the Author

[irarelypostanything]

Software engineers make a lot of money, but…

The average annual salary for an American software engineer is $86,000; the average annual salary for an American is $48,000.  The above figure may be seriously skewed by Techlead, who makes a million dollars every time he comments on YouTube, and Silicon Valley, where it costs $3000 a week to live in a broom closet...but those are the statistics.  So, compared to the average, software engineers make a lot of money.

Is that a lot, when you account for the amount of money it costs to become a software engineer?  This is where things get interesting.  Coding bootcamps are springing up, and some are good and some are borderline scams.  Colleges themselves tend to be incredibly expensive, so the argument becomes more of a “computer science pays better than most majors” than a “computer science is worth it,” in my opinion...though actually, if you work out the math, student loans might be worth it if you major in computer science, MAYBE.  Another interesting thing is comparing it to other majors, in a cost-benefit sort of way.  Do doctors make more than software engineers?  On average, definitely.  Do you have to pay more for school to be a doctor?  Probably...maybe…

This post wasn’t supposed to be strictly economic, but I still think about this from time to time.  College for me is over - the question isn’t “Should I have majored in computer science?”, but “should we keep encouraging anyone and everyone to major in computer science?”  There’s been a massive push to get more people into computer science.  Anyone who’s watched “What most schools don’t teach” knows exactly what I’m talking about.

And it’s probably good, but what I take issue with is when money becomes the opening statement.  I saw some people burn out of computer science in college - not that many, I’ll be honest (some of our classes weren’t tough, but we were Davis...not Berkeley), but some.  One commenter on Piazza/Facebook complained that people come into computer science thinking it’s an easy route to money, when in reality it’s as rigorous as other fields of engineering and math.  I think Cal Newport said it best: If you know in your heart that you’re in this major because YOU CHOSE IT, yourself, you’ll find the motivation to keep going.  If someone chose it for you, then you might burn out.

Actually, I don’t even remember if he was talking about computer science.  Maybe it was a general statement, or something crazy like astrophysics.  

I knew a math major in my dorm.  She loved math as both a hobby and a career - that alone should give you pause, and I don’t know why she never saw the campus therapist, but let me continue - and she decided to take on a little coding for a possible minor.  I wrote out a study guide (admittedly irrelevant because the class changed) for her and tried to make sure she stayed motivated.  For her, as it turned out, this was all a non-issue.  She told me she loved it.  It was her first time coding, coding was hard, and frustrating, and took forever, and she absolutely loved it.

In the actual field, we had an intern whom I shall leave unnamed.  To be honest, working with him was pretty frustrating in some respects, or at least stressful.  We planned out his task and vision.  We knew his experience level, or his supposed experience level, and so we plotted out exactly when we expected each milestone to be completed.  I was prepared to give him a better experience than what I had - just empathy, and motivation, and making sure he had the resources he needed.  

Then he started, he came up to speed in a day, and he blew each task out of the water within days.  Half-way through his internship and he was done with everything we thought he would complete, and then some.  He apparently hadn’t worked with any of our various technologies before, but he picked up on each one, excelled, asked tons of questions, and then dominated.  After learning our system through some walkthroughs on day one, he barely needed any sort of help at all.  I think the best parting gift I gave him was leetcode frequencies, because God forbid a software engineer of that potential ever pay $14 a month for Leetcode premium.

So...for some people...there’s no need to motivate.  They’d probably be engineers even if engineers were paid average salaries, and they’d probably do this even if it were just a hobby.  Is software engineering for everyone, though?  What about people like me, who have brains that were probably better suited to major in something like English, or history?

Well...they can be, I believe.  I think we get wrapped up in this idea that software engineers, like my insane dorm mate, have to love coding so much that they relish the opportunity to sort names in C.  But there’s a lot more in coding than just sorting names in C.  There’s also C++, and then there’s this thing called Java, and then there’s that one language everyone swears will be the future.

We start people with C, and a lot of normal people like myself look at it and think, “Wow, this is confusing and boring as hell.”  Then it kind of grows on them when they realize how far they’ve come, but for some people it doesn’t.  They stick around for C++, maybe for the intellectual challenge, and they learn data structures.  Then comes all the extraordinarily useful theory, and algorithms that will definitely come up in extremely relevant interviews, and if you get to the very end of your college career without failing (since it’s a ladder) you might just get to take the boring stuff like hacking, graphics, AI, bioinformatics, and that one class where you actually build an app for a real company or campus client.

And we sure as hell don’t start people off with frontend, where they can reap the benefits of their efforts in days instead of weeks.  I actually see why this part makes more sense, but...there’s a lot of coding out there.  Even if you realize you despise most coding, there’s a whole world of UI/UX that...I admittedly have not seen in a while because we’re back in middleware.

But then in middleware, there’s that whole world of stock trading, where every nanosecond matters, and books explaining why every nanosecond matters, and infrastructure with applications that...that…

...there’s a lot to coding, and there’s also money.  But you can make money doing anything.

[kreuzdrache]

LONG RANT/REVIEW ABOUT TERRARIA 1.4

Long post ahead lol

I beat finally beat Moon Lord a few days ago on Master Mode, so I figured I can finally drop some thoughts about the update as a whole. 

For the most part: I love it!

Like, previously mentioned, I enjoyed the new content added to the game. Admittedly I did not use a lot of the new items, due to them being outclassed by the time I did found them, but they were still nice to have.

The two new bosses: Queen Slime and Empress of Light were also a welcomed addition, and finally makes the hollowed biome feel more complete. Queen Slime was a bit more chaotic than I would have liked, but it was not a big deal breaker. Empress of Light on the other hand was perfect for the most part! Her attacks easy to see and easy to understand, as well as being a pretty spectacle to behold. Might take a few times to understand her patterns, but her summoning item spawns fairly commonly in the hollowed biome in the outer 2/3rds of the world, so you will have plenty of chances to practice against her without spending too much time and resources.(Unlike Moon Lord............) She is definitely my new favorite boss(and Terrarian waifu...).

The new music themes added were also great. They even included the option for the Party Girl NPC to switch out the Terraria soundtrack with the Terraria Otherworld soundtrack after you go talk to her in a world generated with the seed “05162020 “. These tracks are also very good! Although, Otherworld’s Night theme does feel a bit out of place with terraria: 

Seriously, this is terrifying! I thought I was playing a crafty sandbox game, not survival horror! Then again, Terraria does have the Blood Moon enemies, the entirety of the Crimson biome, and Wall of Flesh; so perhaps it is not all out of place.

Little things like the bestiary, the updated backgrounds and trees and flowers swaying may not be be needed, but they are nice and help enrich the experience of the game. I really like reading through the bestiary just to see why the descriptions are for some of the enemies. I especially love how the backgrounds show little details, like shooting stars in the sky, an Eye of Cthulhu floating in the mountains, birds flying in formation, clouds forming various shapes, and even a large meteorite falling in the sky.

Pylons...I like them, but I do have issues. They do cut down having to travel across the map as well cheap and easy to set up. All these do come with drawback though, compared to to making a more traditional network of teleporters. You cannot use them during some events, like invasions or lunar events(This is a big one.) If your housing npcs powering the pylon dies, then pylon doesn’t work, until you replace them or the died ones move back in. BIOME SPREAD CAN AND WILL MESS UP YOUR NETWORK. Whether it be through displacing your npcs or because biome is different from the placed pylon. You can also only have one of each pylon, so no two cavern pylons or ocean pylons for fast travel. You can buy a universal pylon though, after filling out the beastiary 100%, which also works for any area and does not require npcs near it, so that’s useful.

NPC Happiness, I was kinda disappointed. On one hand, I like that they are not super demanding: Just pair them up with npc they like and place them in biome they like and they become happy and lower prices of their services. On the other, I was kinda expecting more challenge: Like, the nurse npc greatly prefers crystal furniture, or the Witch Doctor npc wants his house built with Rich Mahogany instead of normal wood, as ideas. But again, this probably for the better, cause it makes things much more easier to work with.

Luck. OOH BOY, I do not get the inclusion of luck. Yes, I know they got rid of bad luck from the code, but I still think luck is pointless in the game. Luck is a hidden mechanic that is not really explained well at all, apparently affects your loot drops, finding bounded npcs like the Wizard, Stylist, ect, rare spawns like golden critters and Pinky, gaining healing hearts from downed enemies, ect ect. I do not know how accurate the wiki page is but reading it is not exactly instilling me with confidence on how useful the stat really is if you go all in. Like, I would do easy stuff like slapping down biome torches and garden gnomes in my arenas, but I would not bother waiting till lantern nights and making luck potions. By the way, luck potions require pearls, and those are fished from the desert biome and are rare from oysters, especially the pink ones that give you best luck potions are the rarest at around 1/125 oysters. Yes, you have to depend on luck, to gain a temporary buff to make you lucky in game. Silly, I know. Its a lot of effort for a small increase, I just do not think it’s worth it. If the goal was to help players with making better drops rates, why not just make better drop rates for the items, instead of making the player jump through so many hoops??? Or make an accessory or even an armor set that makes drop rates better, or something, I dunno. This mechanic just feels so unnecessarily esoteric, and for little benefit too.

Master Mode: I already mentioned in previous posts, but I disliked it. Greatly. I love Terraria, but it is tedious game. Master Mode cranks up that tedium by a lot, due to higher spawn rates enemies, higher damage from enemies, losing all your carried money on death(But thats not that big of deal, especially when you get the piggy bank), and more enemies have more hp. It is just not fun to deal with. Especially when doing lunar events, those are especially hellish in Master Mode.

Journey Mode: I do not get it. “Its creative mode with extra steps” as said by a youtuber is the perfect explanation. Why make the player go through all the trouble to unlock infinite copies of items by making them play through the game again? Honestly, if I knew how much I was going to dislike Master Mode, I would have skipped that and made Journey Mode character and world instead. I will most likely still play through journey, but having to go through all the same game to unlock infinite copies of items is still going to be tedious, even with god mode on.

That is my big issue with Terraria 1.4, nothing really seems to address the tedium issue. I am not asking for all good loot to get handed to me on the first kill a mob, but would it really affect the game negatively if stuff like biome keys, rod of discord, or even silly things like the jellyfish necklace were a little bit more reasonable to farm for? Perhaps make the whole lunar event a little less tedious, by cutting down the required amount of kills before you can turn off the pillars’ shields? And/or give us more fragments so we can craft more Sigils if we fail the event and just want to farm Moon Lord? Did Revear Shark really needed to get nerfed? Were explosives for harvesting meteorite too good? I dunno.

Despite my negativity, I am still actually largely positive to the game and I would still recommend it, either if you have not played the game in while or if you have yet to play the game even. Its on sale on steam right now for 5 USD or 10 USD through GOG. Even if you do miss out on the sale, it is still VERY worth the 10 dollar price. Also the soundtrack is still rocking.

[gg-astrology]

Can you tell us 10 things about you? and about ur friends irl? How u met them/ how long u know them/ what u like to do with them? This is gonna sound nosy but how's ur love life hdjsks LISTEN YOU'RE LIKE MY DREAM BEST FRIEND AND I WANT TO KNOW EVERYTHING ABOUT YOU AND ACT LIKE WE'RE TOTES HOMIES OKAY IM A VIRGO SUN PISCES MOON smh a girl is cURIOUS AND (platonically) IN LOVE WITH YOU 😖❤❤❤❤

Hey there!! 💕💓❤️ Oh wow!!!! 💕💓❤️💕💓❤️ Don’t worry this is fine!! I’m actually -- like, really happy and giddily flustered you’d want to get to know me!? 💕💓❤️ I’m really flattered and really grateful/touched aaaaaaa only virgo/pisces deserve rights, my current wife is also a virgo/pisces this is obviously some kind of synastry destiny (jk *wink wonk?*)!! 💕💓❤️thank you for caring about me!!! 💕💓❤️💕💓❤️💕💓❤️💕💓❤️

Yeah sure!! 💕💓❤️I can tell you more things about me!! 💕💓❤️

Disclaimer? I think it’s good for the audience to know where I’m coming from and who I am? I just think transparency/knowing who you’re talking to is important because knowing who I am, can also help you and me see where my flaws are and where I may be coming from! 💕💓❤️ Or what I provide, but where I might miss my mark somewhere, y know? 💕💓❤️ Not to say you have to judge me, I just don’t see the point in not just being who I am and saying yeah I can see where I took the L there. It’s just-- better? for future endeavors as well? So here we are? 

More about me? In sections?

10 things about me? 

I’ll start with this since it’s the shortest!

This may come off as totally random but I do better in colder climate than hotter ones -- even though I currently live in a tropical island 

I used to live in the US!

I actually have a designated place where I go to sit, open up my laptop and answer asks from tumblr. I sit outside my little patio and stare out at my garden, and then answer qs from here!

This means I’m always subjected to the Wild Life coming at me unexpectedly sometimes, but my cat also visits me at my table! So it balances out! 

My favourite drink is milk but I like plant-based ones, or rice milk? Or the lactose free ones! They’re delicious! 

Cherries are my favourite snacks but I usually get them once every 3 months -- so the result is I don’t tend to snack often. This is by design of me trying to Not Snack + using my pickiness to weaponize against myself and my eating habits.

To unwind I watch cat/animal videos on youtube before I go to sleep - it’s not very effective because I have to keep my eyes open to see, plus I always end up making cooing noises at the screen -- so I’m not sure when if it’s actually making me sleepy or not. But it’s working so far so I’m continuing to do it.

I have very specific knowledge of certain things in very acute details + link/resources of further studies on the topic, but otherwise I have 0.5 braincells most of the time, just a lot of Forbidden Knowledge.

I have a folder of cursed memes and that’s all you need to know about my sense of humour I think? 

Love life?

I am currently single! 💕💓❤️ Gf application is always open! 💕💓❤️ However, I’d like everyone of you to know I’m a 95 liner and I will not accept applications from those born after 98′ 💕💓❤️

Although I’m bi + had ex-bf before... I am (as of right now) on the fence about men personally in my personal life (disclaimer) because I’ve got a week of quarantine, thus I haven’t been doing the do and can think clearly for once. I am contemplating. Men. And the necessity in life. Y know? 

Although my love life is free!! I am not excused from the occasional panic of having a crush (annually). I’m lucky enough to go through it just once every year, but every time it happens I am an absolutely clown + always in turmoil. It’s what happens when you’re a sag venus who can’t control your p***y brain. Luckily, my crush just have to insult me or make me explain things from my past and then I’d be too traumatize to crush on them again. It’s quite effective, and works out best for all of us! 💕💓❤️

I’ll refrain from talking about my ex because I know I have a habit of recounting the good and being mushy. Even if we ended it on rocky terms. So! I’ll save everyone from that. 💕💓❤️    

Friends (expanded, clarifications?) 

The ones I mention on the blog are usually 

taurus/taurus, 

cancer/cancer, 

leo/libra, 

leo/cap (x2), 

virgo/sag, 

libra/aries (x2), 

scorpio/sag, 

scorpio/cap, 

sag/taurus, 

pisces/scorpio, 

pisces/aqua,  

Oof that’s alot.. This might be better to outline in a timeline format... so leo/libra, scorpio/sag, libra/aries and partially virgo/sag are whom I grew up for the majority of my childhood-teenage life! 💕💓❤️ 

They obviously made a very big impact on me! 💕💓❤️ They’re with me through thick/thin, leo/libra (sag rising) is the extrovert of the bunch. He’s one of my best friends, close guy friend, most of the time I too find him a little exasperating because he’s.. well its his problem so nevermind, but he’s also very endearing! 💕💓❤️ If it wasn’t for him-- well, there’s also another leo I thought was very endearing in a little brother kind of way. So leos to me have a very positive influence in my life, they’re very cute especially when they ask for your attention. I think they are like puppies/kitties when they are needy, and their blatant way of just being themselves always makes me feel refreshed + I  admire them for it. In the end, I’m totally heart-eyes endeared for Leos! 💕💓❤️

Scorpio/sag is also my best friend! 💕💓❤️ She’s a taurus rising, and she’s so sweet, kind, chatty and very open/friendly to people! 💕💓❤️ Her, my cousin (who’s also a scorpio but a scorpio/pisces), and quite a few of my other best friends who are scorpios - actually made me realize they’re not like what they’re usually describe as. Maybe that’s just me? But I think they’re very sweet and comforting to be around, not to mention they’re quite supportive and willing to listen when you’re having a tough time with something!! 💕💓❤️The pillar of support and one of the few rare people I don’t mind interacting with (actually crave interacting with them) because of just how chill they are, I wish more people recognize that in a scorpio! 💕💓❤️

Libra/Aries is one of my longest childhood friend, probably from birth! 💕💓❤️ He’s a supportive big brother type figure. But he can be very silly and he doesn’t hold himself so seriously most of the time! 💕💓❤️ Whilst he’s very understanding and quite nosy with others, he tries to be subtle/sleek but he isn’t! I think he’s very endearing when he wants to be, and he deserves someone who loves him lots as well 💕💓❤️ We reunited for the first time in 6 years the other day? And I think we both ended up crying a little and holding hands because we miss each other alot! 💕💓❤️ It was very nice, I think he’s much more emotional (just suppressed) than what people realize! 💕💓❤️ He’s very caring though - like willing to talk you through your problems and make sure you’re taken care of, back on your feet, but also willing to smile scarily at people who’ve hurt you and actually take them to court/yell at them for you. I think its very sweet! 💕💓❤️

Virgo/Sag is someone I hung out with for a short period of time, but kept in contact with periodically throughout my life because we ended up going through similar majors/path in life! 💕💓❤️ She’s someone who’s very caring, wants to take care of you, when she’s endeared by you she makes sure to dote on you often! 💕💓❤️ Actually, she’s born a day after Namjoon I think? But that’s not the point, the thing is - she’s my virgo/sag and when she’s not by my virgo/sag she’s super cool and I can see that many of our friend respects her/think she’s very mature + she’s the Shit! 💕💓❤️ I really admire her too and I think she’s super cool, but more than that, I love how caring and tender she is. She’s the best 💕💓❤️

These are the people I grew up with, and then I went to college and met/lived with Scorpio/Cap + Pisces/Scorpio+Aqua. 

Scorpio/Cap and I actually hit it off since the first day? We were in orientation, and we’re both talkative I guess! But in similar ways. He appreciates my bluntness/sense of humour and I like that he’s sarcastic and the only one engaging enough to be around/paying attention to what’s happening. We went to a house party together and then had 1 class together the semester. After that, me and him decided we’d live together off campus (along with our other friend who fell through, I think he’s a Leo?) - whilst we lived together we share majors in the same division, on holidays or at night after class, we’d grab dinner together + walk there, or we’d eat at home and binge watch a marathon he’d pick together. 💕💓❤️ It’s really fun! 💕💓❤️ 

Both of us like cooking, so he’d make dishes/drinks and I’d do that and we’d coerced each other to hang out in the living space together. Basically, we’re there to force each other to socialize/hang out with people and also encourage each other. It’s very fun! But we also had moments where we’d buy each other dinner/go to art galleries/exhibit together. There’s more serious too of course, like talking about our problems or worrying about stuff. But I think I found someone who looks out for me/I can look out for him, be confidants for each other and not be embarrassed with each other. Besides this, he also found my p0rn collection and suddenly mentioned it when we’re on campus so now I can never unfriend him because he has blackmail material on me. I’m forced to be his friends forever now. 

Pisces/Cap and Pisces/Aqua are my roommates after Scorpio/Cap - actually, Pisces/cap invited me to live with them when I was finding a place, it was very fortunate! 💕💓❤️ We’re all close friends because we live in the same hall during first year, plus me and Pisces/cap (and a Gemini friend) would get drunk + go to parties together so!! This is very convenient! 💕💓❤️

Actually.. Pisces/cap, me and Gemini friend.. I went with Gemini friend to buy his apartment with him (along with his friends, I’m good friends with them too) and Pisces/cap went with him to buy furnitures lmao! 💕💓❤️ And then me and Pisces/cap moved in together, although I didn’t room with them. I roomed with Pisces/Aqua whom till this date is my favourite roommate I’ve ever lived with! 💕💓❤️

It’s a little messy with Pisces/Cap but not in a? bad way? at all? Like we’re close friends who still talk often, but they did confess once over the holidays, and I turned them down (that was when I was about to move in) - we did make out along with pisces/aqua but like.. that’s... I guess that’s normal for college y know? We did a couple projects together for their class, like a comic about me and gemini friend, poems, photography, I drew them something. And I think they did have something with Gemini friend as well but! Gemini friend moved away on the last year so it never went anywhere there. 

But these are all good memories we had together and it’s not like-- bad at all, I don’t ever think badly at them for it because it was honest to them/for them, it was their emotions and tenderness from the heart? I can’t ever look down on anyone for that or judge them for being true to themselves, I actually think they’re very brave to be able to heal themselves and process things especially involving emotions like that. I also think these are all precious and honest memories, being friends with them definitely helped me grow my EQ by so much. Without them, I’d be very close-minded today! 💕💓❤️ 

Pisces/aqua is my roommate for a long time, and I love them to bits too! 💕💓❤️ They have two cats, both I love so so much and would sacrifice getting up for very often! 💕💓❤️ More than that, Pisces/aqua is so smart and able to pick things up immediately! It’s honestly very admirable, how they pierce things together. Whether it’s tarot or astrology, they’re the one who got me into this actually? 💕💓❤️ It was their interest before it became mine through proxy or maybe osmosis lmao, but they’re quite judgey and sometimes have a ? idk, superiority complex/elitist attitude towards stuff sometimes? So I never really talked about it much with them because it can get really frustrating sometimes 💕💓❤️ I do love them lots though, I can be ignorant of a lot of things and really slow on the uptake, but they’re very nice and kind and patient with me - honestly they’re as patient as a saint sometimes with me. And I’m really really thankful to them for it! 💕💓❤️ They’re getting married this year to a Scorpio! 💕💓❤️

Taurus/taurus and Cancer/cancer are my college best friends. Actually we hang out outside of class too! 💕💓❤️ I celebrated cancer/cancer’s birthday with them and their friends/roommates and it’s really fun. Heres why it’s -- like, momentous. It’s because my college classmates are more like colleagues or co-workers, so we don’t usually have that kind of camaraderie outside of first year. Plus, we’re all kind of working or busy with our private life outside of class - so it’s hard to reconvene that with who you know in classrooms. 

They like their private life separated from the college one, which is what I prefer as well. I really adore them though, since we have a major that usually makes us get little to no sleep and have to stay at school at night-till morning most nights (for programs on the computer or printing facilities, rip) -- they’re the one who would either stay up with me, working together at the same table and we can ask each other for fresh eyes on our work. Or they’d motivate me to go home and not be stupid to stay at school. Or they’d drive me home so they know I get back safely/on time. It’s just -- I adore them so much they’re very very good! 💕💓❤️

Taurus/Taurus is also a college best friend whom I befriended later on in the years, they’re really sweet! 💕💓❤️ We have more of a friendship where we spend time outside together, walking in the city trying out a new cake store or just going back to their place to play games or talk about what else we have going on in our lives. They’re really busy!! Since they’re involved in church activities, they travel to another town an hour away every sunday - their dedication to their work, school and church (AND spending time with their fiance’s family + fiance) is amazing! 💕💓❤️ They also got me my first job at the firm they’re working in, in our last years - I made sure they’re not too tired and get their work done on time so they don’t rush their finished project. Or give better advice if the teacher is making them fume. I really like them lots too, we had alot of fun together AND they’re a foodie! 💕💓❤️

There’s another Libra/Aries whom I knew from college, while I was still living with Scorpio/Cap - I was in another town/not the same town as the Pisces back then. But Libra/Aries was close and she’d come by often! We’d travel the city together, lay on the lawn, go to parks together or exhibit. They’re very proactive and we spend a lot of time talking about work and projects, personal interests, when we watch movies together - we’d spend time sitting in cafes after watching them to talk for hours/until closing about the movie ( ‘we have alot to unpack’) -- they’re a lot of fun to talk to because they’re just as intense about stuff! 💕💓❤️ And their interest is genuine, give good hugs, a little too loud for our cats but she means well! 💕💓❤️ 

This is brief recount of everyone, mostly focusing on activities we did together but knowing them as people obviously made a big impression on me! 💕💓❤️ 

Leo/Caps are people I met since I finished college/working now, they’re my two admins on the blog actually! 💕💓❤️So internet friends, but I really click with and they’re soothing + fun to be around when I’m home/anywhere! 💕💓❤️ 

Sag/Taurus is also another internet friend, I’ve known her for a year now? But man, every conversation is an adventure and she’s so fun to be around! 💕💓❤️ Also very sweet and an extremely kind person, in a fire sign kind of way. Which means a lot of gawking from me and very loud laughs. But yes! 💕💓❤️ Very good people! 💕💓❤️

I do have friends from work... but well we’re not close enough for me to actually consider them good friends/talk about them personally? They’re nice! But I have yet to form a more positive opinion about them - it’s positive and negative, so I’ll see who survives and come through as a person I’d like to hang out with outside of work. 💕💓❤️

To Virgo/Pisces anon: 

Here’s my best friend application do I make the cut please reply 💕💓❤️

[vriska]

im pretty sure i saw you post your fursuit head on here and if youre not a furry you can ignore this but. i kinda want to try fursuiting and i was wondering did you like. try on a fursuit before getting yours just to see if you wanted to do it? or is there some way to figure out whether you actually want to be a furry before you spend a ton of money on a fursuit?

uhh well ok real talk, before I got my fursuit I had never actually worn a fursuit before? 

but heres the thing, i’ve more or less like, identified as a furry for Years and I’d seen so many videos of people fursuiting and it just looked like so much fun and the fursuits themselves are just absolutely adorable so it’s something I really wanted to do, and I got lucky that an opportunity presented itself where I had a friend who was starting out a fursuit making business and i had money to pay for it 

so like, there wasn’t really anything going into it other than ‘this looks like fun, I want to do it’ 

and I mean you can be a furry without owning a fursuit, you dont even technically need a fursona either! you can just enjoy furry stuff and thats just as valid as anyone else, but if fursuiting is something you are personally interested in I can at least cover a few general things for you 

i got really into talking about this so for the sake of people’s dashes, this is going under a read more! but if you’d like some fursuit info feel free to read! And if anyone (including you, anon) has any further questions that I didn’t cover here, my DM’s are open!! i love talking about this kinda stuff 

to start, like you asked, if you know someone with a fursuit you could try asking them if they’ll let you try it on, but keep in mind that all fursuits are different, every single one of them is a unique, custom made costume, so someone else’s fursuit might not fit the same as one you get specifically for yourself 

likewise it depends on what maker you decide to go with, that is like, the top thing to think about and research: who do you want to make your fursuit 

theres so many different styles and kinds and different things you can get like, do you want a movable jaw? follow me eyes or flat eyes? resin base or foam? and just like the different styles like the common toonish look or maybe something more realistic or maybe the really anime kemono style 

and from there its also like, do you want just a head? a partial? 3/4? or a full suit and like, if you want it plantigrade or digigrade, all of these things will effect the look and more importantly the cost of your suit so again, i cannot stress enough you gotta research what you want and most importantly WHO you want to make your suit 

its also good to ask yourself, how often are you gonna be wearing your suit? will you be bringing it out just for cons or going to fur meets? casual hang outs with friends? or will it just be sitting in your closet most the time 

also like, if you’re under 18 I personally suggest holding off on getting a fursuit because it would seriously suck if you’re still growing and the suit you just spent a heck ton of money on just no longer fits so yeah just another thing to consider 

ANYWAY this has gotten very long winded, but just to leave off another great resource if you’re looking into fursuiting is Pocari Roo’s youtube channel, she covers a BUNCH of furry related stuff and talks in a lot more detail about things like getting a fursuit, what to do when you’re in fursuit, how to clean and maintain a fursuit, etc like while mine was still being made I kind of obsessively watched her videos fjdois so yeah in the end, I find fursuiting to be like EXTREMELY fun and rewarding so I personally recommend giving it a try if you’re in a position to get one!!

[freakwiththeknifecollection]

13, 21, 37?

13. What's the best writing advice you've ever come across?

Oh geez I don't know about BEST... "Show don't tell" comes to mind. Brandon Sanderson has SUCH good writing advice videos on YouTube, he has whole class lectures on there and stuff he's an excellent resource for writing advice. The ones of his I keep in mind most often are 1. MOST of the time the word "that" can be dropped. It's often just filler and if you remove it it doesn't take away from the sentence at all.

2. Unless it's significant, you don't have to say a character started to do something. "He started to get up." Unless it's significant for whatever reason, like for example I have a scene where characters start to get dressed. The reason I say start is that (see? That didn't need to be there) there's a lot of dialogue between them as they're getting dressed. But if a character is just by themselves and nothing happens to interrupt them or anything like that, there's no reason to go into detail about them starting and finishing an action. You can just say "He got dressed."

3. This is slightly related to the last point. Start the story where the plot starts. Unless it's significant (most writing advice is just "unless it's significant" lmao) If the plot starts at the character's workplace or school, there's no reason to show your character going through their entire morning routine step by step and their commute. Unless you're doing it to show their relationship with their family, if you're establishing their character in a meaningful way, etc, there's no real reason for it.

4. If you find yourself getting bored writing a scene, your reader is probably going to be bored reading the scene.

21. How many times do you usually revise your fic/chapter before posting?

If we're talking revision sessions, like how many times I go into one work and edit [x] scene? Dozens upon dozens of times. I couldn't even tell you. It takes me awhile to really feel comfortable with how something looks before I can post it. I'm a bit of a perfectionist. I just last night made final revisions on a prologue I started a year ago.

37. Talk about your current wips.

I have sooooo many in the progress stage. Like 200+. Actual, fully fledged wips though? (All of these I have a lot to revise more of, but as I mentioned earlier, I take a long time to revise lmao)

I write exclusively Dean/Jo fics. Why? Sometimes you like two characters on screen, your friend likes them too, you egg each other on hyping it for awhile and before you know it, it's 4 years later and you're so deep in your own fanon about them, there's no hope of return.

Anyway. Let's get to the wips.

House of Memories (1k) (I have like, 6k more of this I'm working on revising though)

My newest fic!! This one is my favorite I've written so far, it's the best quality-wise IMO. *Ferris Bueller voice* If you have the means, I highly recommend checking it out. But oh BOY is it angsty. It'll get better though! Slowly but surely.

Summary:

In this AU, Ellen and Jo never died, Ellen and Bobby are together, and Bobby was never there for the final showdown with Lucifer and Michael.

After Sam sacrifices himself, Dean doesn't know where else to turn and goes to Bobby's for the night and delivers the bad news. There, he's forced to confront an old friend he'd wronged, and try to make things right while he figures out what to do in this new reality without his brother.

Preview:

She stopped halfway down the stairs. The man before her was not the same man she saw four years ago. He had gotten older, sure, but it was more than that. The spark, the little glimmer of hope that was once in his eyes, was gone. Now, they were dark and tired- the eyes of a man who had survived too much, and wished he hadn't.

Something Just Like This (3.6k)

Summary:

Dean dislocated his right shoulder a couple days ago on a werewolf hunt, so he's needed help with just about everything. Usually that falls to Sam. Now that Jo joined them, however, when he's not around, it falls to her. Which means a lot more physical contact with Dean than her poor heart can take.

Oh My God They Were Neighbors - High School AU (3.4k)

Summary:

Dean meets their new next-door neighbors and is immediately smitten with Jo, who just so happens to be his same age, so he offers to help her unpack after school.

Jo soon realizes her new bedroom window is facing Dean's before he does.

Check Yes, Juliet - High School AU (20k)

(My first ever published fic!! I don't LOVE all of it, I wrote a lot of it when I was 17, but I learned a lot and it has a special place in my heart. One day I'll get inspiration for this one back and update it lol)

Summary:

Dean Winchester and Jo Harvelle secretly dating. 'Nough said.

Preview:

"What are you doing here? I thought you were coming on Friday."

"I am," Dean said, as he climbed through the window and into her room, "But I figured you'd have nothing better to do on a Tuesday night." He teased, and flashed her a smile.

"Well, I'm not the one who came all the way over here and climbed up to a second story window for no reason, so which one of us had nothing better to do?" Jo retorted.

"That's fair." He said between a laugh.