#living from nature

[balkanradfem]

I hope it's not rude to ask (you can reply in private if you wish), but I am very curious on one thing. I tried to research your blog a bit but haven't figured that out. Are you trying to live of only things you can garden/find in the forest and only things you can make yourself I assume? Is that bc of some complicated situation or is that bc of your dedication to some live style/idea? I think it's both admirable and interesting whatever the reason you want to live that way, and your posts are very nice read, especially to city-stuck but nature-longing reader, so it's just my curiosity.

Haha it's not rude at all! I feel okay answering publicly.

My situation is a bit complicated, but it comes down to this: I'm on my own, no family support, I'm in poverty, and I'm chronically ill. I dream to leave the city and live in the wilderness, where I can have my own garden, and make my own everything. I'm very stressed out by the city and long to live in a place where there is no male contamination (pollution, noises, construction, destruction of nature, violence, sexual violence, oppression of women), so I could live peacefully!

I am only able to work part-time so saving up for buying my own land is going very slow, but I am determined to use this time to learn as much as possible about survival in nature. That's why I'm trying to learn everything, all of the plants, preservation methods, foraging, gardening, herbalism, basketry, soap-making, shoe-making, making threads and fixing things, creating stuff out of natural resources - because the second I get where I'm heading, I will not have internet, I will not be able to look everything up in a second. I want to be ready. I want to come there and observe and know everything, what I can eat, what can I preserve, what I can make from resources immediately around me, how to build my own house and where to place it, how to make a greenhouse or a conservatory, how to build a fireplace, all of that knowledge will be vital.

I'm not against relying on capitalism when I have no other choice, like for flour and oil, I currently have no means of producing those, so I do buy them. I think in the future as well, if I'm sick I would go and buy medicine, if I can't make it on my own (which often I cannot).

I'm not following any kind of lifestyle, just trying to ensure my own survival the best I can. I also love sharing whatever I learn because I noticed a lot of the information got lost for this generation, a lot of survival skills are no longer passed down and knowing even a little bit of it can be incredibly helpful for survival in capitalism. I want everyone to feel encouraged to try, it's great for mental health as well.

I also get great feedback from people who know better than me! I learned so much just from comments and replies that is a treasured source of wisdom for me.

I feel like this world wants us to be as helpless as possible, as little equipped with knowledge as possible; not knowing how something is made, how it could be made from nature, what worth it actually has or what has been sacrificed or destroyed in order for it to exist. It has us making uninformed choices, unaware of the impact we have on the earth and the climate. I think we deserve to know all of it. I'm interested and curious in all of it.

I've been interested in survival in nature since I was a kid, and when it became an option to pursue it, I wholeheartedly did. It fills my heart so much to make something or to build my own pantry from scratch, or feeding myself easily during summer because of the abundance of produce! I feel like if everyone knew how wonderful this is, the store would no longer feel so convenient or so reliable; it's on the soil that we rely, it's always nature that all these things come from.

Thank you for trying to figure it out, I feel flattered that you got interested in my lifestyle. I hope I managed to answer your question :)

[cordspaghetti]

The twin devils, humbled by her blunt force trauma

[pixelpolls]

Vamps vs Werewolfs like its 2010!

[demigods-posts]

sometimes. i just have to remind myself that percy took annabeth to paris. like, canonically. he forgot their one-month anniversary. and took his girl to paris to make up for it. the standards are in elysium.

[weirdmageddon]

help whats with him clinging to shit. almost every panel he is shown theres something hes clinging to

[violottie]

"It might be hard to believe that this video was taken today after 155 days of genocide and war and continuous death and bombing even though Gaza still astonishes me because every single day I walk to a new place I find places that are full of beauty and life, its like the land itself is resisting to be killed to be demolished and to be wiped from the planet earth, long live Palestine and for God’s sake ceasefirenow🇵���"

from Hossam Wail, 16/Mar/2024:

[screwpinecaprice]

Oh oof I slipped and hit them with dark and serious beam. 😣

[24601orwhatever]

KYLE ADAMS as GRANTAIRE

mastered by @bikinibottomdayz

[mattodore]

you're begging me to take a bite

[probablybadrpgideas]

Just came up with the concept that elves have a larval growth cycle and their larval stage is a goblin.

Then I came up with the better concept that goblins have a larval growth cycle and their larval stage is an elf.

[syoddeye]

thinking about soap finding employment as a postie after being medically discharged. it's solid work. respectable. keeps him focused and active. he really takes to it. it doesn't hurt that his route feels like window-shopping.

[trianglesand]

Marble hornets x Slendermansion AU but instead of Hoodie and Masky being proxies they also live in a small cabin in the same woods and are constantly trying to sabotage the creeps plans. Hoodie learns Jeff is supposed to kill some random family and follows him there to purposely set the home security system off and Masky jumps out of the closet and tackles Jeff. They all run away to their own homes afterwards when the cops are called. The Operator/Slenderman could put a stop to it if he so pleased, but finds the shenanigans amusing.

[tinukis]

sabo redraw 🎩💙

timelapse and reference under the cut !

[vaguely-concerned]

This might be due to the fact that on my first playthrough I ended up creating a Rook more emotionally guarded than any of the companions except Minrathous-route Lucanis and perhaps Neve, so I was primed to look for it, but I never got the sense that the companions don’t care for Rook (the thought never even occurred to me until I saw other people post about it) — to me it seems much more like it’s Rook who keeps the last bit of distance, Rook who pulls away when the companions try to extend their care or worry too directly, who keeps themselves slightly apart. (Rook who is so full of grief they cannot know as grief and thus process that there’s no room inside them to let anything else all the way in, perhaps.) They deflect and flinch back when someone gets too close or approaches them too overtly about their feelings — especially when it brushes up against the theme of grief. They can offer care to all the companions who are grieving, come along to any number of funerals as emotional support, but the moment someone turns that towards them they shut that shit down Immediately, like when Taash almost gives the whole game away with ‘Like you’d know? You act like you haven’t lost anyone!’ and Rook just blandly responds ‘We’re talking about you’ and doesn’t engage. But they can also admit that they struggle with accepting compliments, or knowing what to say, or having confidence in themselves without Varric’s help.

Despite all their determination and even in their most stoic no-nonsense incarnation, Rook is awkward, with the struggles that entails. Someone who is eager and happy to be the helper wherever they can, and helplessly unequipped to know how to be the helpee, as it were. It’s not that the companions don’t return Rook’s attachment to them, there’s MUCH more of a ‘okay so what are the ways you will allow me to be good to you??’ desperation of care vibe behind all their invitations to conversations and hangouts together, to my mind. They bring Rook to their favourite places and share the things they love with them, they ask to spend time together (many times just to have their company, not because they have a problem they need help with! Sometimes the problem arises anyway b/c video game quest narrative of course), they bring them out for some direly needed grass touching, they introduce them to their families. Everyone is clearly getting the sense that Rook does Not want to talk about Varric especially (this is in fact what Harding says in banter, if she’s still alive after the reveal :’( ), but they are absolutely SCRAMBLING to find ways to show that they’re there for them even so. AND from the companions’ perspective, with the situation as they have the means to understand it, accepting that Rook isn’t ready to have that conversation and backing off is also a kind thing to do. (tl;dr: To Me Rook is that weirdly socialized friend who is a great hang once they’re actually there but you have to directly invite them or they don’t quite know how to initiate the contact themselves lol) 

Just as a crushing sense of responsibility for their family is a trait that is built into Hawke no matter how you play them or how you make them respond to that, I feel like Rook — however helpful and earnest, warm, charming, jocular, stoic or straightforward they seem at a surface glance — is always someone who struggles deeply with connecting to themselves and other people. (Emotional Intimacy, the Final Frontier.) As, indeed, is the case with all of the Veilguard companions too! It’s clearly a deliberate theme. These are all lonely people struggling with their sense of identity and belonging in some sort of way. AND having, working on and eventually starting to overcome these difficulties also makes Rook a direct foil for Solas, who doesn’t learn that lesson unless you corner him at the end of the world to force feed him his medicine lmao. They don’t manage to break out of the regret prison under their own steam, it’s because even struggling and grieving they have managed to create mutual bonds with other people who show up for them in turn now — and with all the protective walls of denial around what happened to Varric crumbling and making them less of a stranger to themselves, Rook is finally able to let them. An outcome Solas seemingly didn’t even consider to guard against, because he’s become that deeply entrenched in his loneliness, the utter isolation of the self — he can no longer truly imagine an alternative. (It’s not that he can’t form these bonds, obviously, it’s that he resolutely refuses to value them. Whether it’s because he feels like he doesn’t deserve it or out of a need for control or the martyr complex where he must sacrifice everything he loves on the sacrificial pyre of fixing his mistakes, all of the above and more, the result is the same. Mind!Varric, who I think is mostly Solas speaking, even calls this out directly. So yet again a situation where he has some self awareness about it and it doesn’t help At All haha. Solas falls to the temptation of making people into tools again and again and again, no matter how many times it comes back to bite him in the ass and the eternal solitude it traps him in.) 

And that deep deep loneliness… There but for the grace of… well the theological state of thedas being what it is right now, let’s just go with the grace of Something, Presumably go you as well, Rook. The same capacity/tendency to pull away from connection clearly lives in them as well in some form (again, for whatever reason and with whatever motivations and instincts behind it for any individual Rook). Solas and Rook coming together to create a blood magic paper doll of the mind Varric in response to acute loss and loneliness is one of the most deep , deeply fucked up and invasive acts of intimacy I’ve ever contemplated. I don’t think that’s accidental, there’s something There’s Something Wrong With You (there’s something wrong with you that’s also wrong with me (derogatory)) here that resonates no matter how both parties would hate to hear it. (A fitting legacy for Varric and his wild ‘I made my best friend into a story because it’s the only way I know how to love with this desperation of sincerity’ brain to leave in the narrative, methinks. I feel he’d appreciate it on a craft level, if nothing else.)

If you read through all of Rook’s potential backstories, one of the common threads through all of them, along with a certain maverick ‘I’ll do whatever it takes’ streak, is a sense of profound alienation. They did something or have some sort of quality that made it hard for them to fit in with the group they’re from, causing a conflict that cuts them off from parts of their identity as it’s been up until now. All of which also adds to how important Varric is to them — he was clearly able to break/see through some of that and be closer with them, even in the relatively short time they spent together. No matter what else goes to shit, they can trust that a) Varric sees them, b) he genuinely likes them and believes in them not despite who they are, but for it, and c) he’s got their back, we’re in this together kid. And then he is gone, and it takes them the whole game to be able to bring themselves to accept that and know themselves again, be able to let new relationships in fully. The very understandable ‘the last time I let someone in, they got stabbed before my eyes and the world ended’ flinch away, even if they’re not consciously aware that’s what it is. Anyway I love Rook. So much space to play around in here as to WHY they might feel or react like this, even when the framework is more defined.

[reading-tlt-help-me]

finally has gotten around to finish gtn act i and dude Harrow is 17.. Gideon keeps describing this satan incarnate super duper evil person then line drops something like she looks young and frail and shes actually short and emo and she teared up when she left her tomb of a planet what a loser

AND YOU WANT ME TO HATE HER????

THIS IS MY FIRST READ PLZ INTERACT WITH NO SPOILERS

[bunnieswithknives]

Okay but does Peri KNOW that Dev has a robotic leg when he shows up? Something about the fact that Peri's wand is a cane and the fact that Dev could have kept his leg and just had a cane for the rest of his life instead tickles my brain.

I mean he doesn't know immediately, he wasn't like briefed or anything, but he basically lives in Dev's house so he definitely finds out. Peri doesn't comment on or react to it all though really, there's no reason for him to think anything of it, plenty of people have missing limbs, a lot of people are born without them, it doesn't necessarily mean anything sinister happened. He had no reason to pry or ask and I think Peri's lack of reaction to it helped Dev feel a bit more comfortable in his skin. (Not by much but.. a little bit.)