#mountain holly

[gradienty]

Holly Mountain Meadow (#00180d to #1ce796)

[avas-poltergeist]

To the five people who also read The Modern Faerie Tales alongside The Folk of Air series. have ya'll talked about the parallels between Roiben and Kaye and Jude and Cardan? Has anyone in this place talked about how Cardan more times than not is like Kaye? Has anyone talked about the Kaye and Cardan got along right before the coronation and how she sent him a mug with a phrase that imitates the mug in Knives Out, apparently a movie that Cardan likes? Has anyone even tried touching upon the way knighthood is just constantly unattainable to Roiben and Jude?

[pastafossa]

“And The Holly Cookies Too” (Matt Murdock x F!Reader, Fic)

Right I had to go out to shovel the furnace pipes again so while I’m waiting to warm up and go back to bed, I figured I’d finish editing and drop this little bit of TRT Christmas fluff, too, as a bonus! Summary: Matt is determined to support you in your experimental Christmas cookie bake-a-thon, even if it kills him. Warnings: none really, just Matt and his senses and cookies and humor. Wordcount: 1,481 Ship: Matt Murdock x F!Reader. This is technically TRT’s reader again, but TRT is not required reading. 

“Right.” You put your hands on your hips, narrowing your eyes at the messy sea of ingredients on the counter and the containers stacked high on the kitchen table. “So we’ve done… cranberry shortbread—”

“Mhm,” Matt said behind you, his voice muffled.

“Gingerbread. Italian rainbow cookies. Ciro’s Christmas pizzelles. Your dad’s seven-layer cookies.”

“Mhm.”

“Christmas fudge. Snowball cookies.” You glanced back, then did a double take. “Matt.”

“Mmm?” he said, dusting his fingers off on his shirt.

 “Stop eating the snowballs.”

 “I wasn’t,” he said around a mouthful of snowball, blinking innocently at you.

“Then why is there powdered sugar on your face?”

“I can’t see them,” he said mournfully, abruptly shifting his argument. He tipped his head, licking the powdered sugar off his lips, and only Matt Murdock could manage a look so tragic after he’d just been caught red-handed… or sugar-handed, rather, with the evidence literally written across his face. “How was I supposed to know these were the snowballs?”

You snatched another snowball out of his hand, and he pulled a sad face until you leaned in and smacked a kiss against his lips. “Don’t eat them until after I pick the ones that we can give away. I want to make sure we have enough.”

 At that, he chuckled, leaning in to touch his forehead to yours. “Sweetheart, we’ve been baking all day. We’ve got hundreds of cookies.”

 “Some might be bad. I want to make sure I have good ones to give away,” you fretted, turning back around to stare at your latest project: a tray of sticky, marshmallow-y holly cookies. It had amazed you how much food coloring you’d needed to dump in to achieve the bright-green color, but damned if it hadn’t worked. Each little clump of cornflakes, held together by a sticky green mass of melted marshmallow, looked just like a holly leaf, complete with bright red cinnamon candies set in like berries. Or… or did they look like holly leaves? Were they too crooked? “Everyone else has gotten way more practice than me. I’m behind. I don’t want to be…”

“Be what?” He set his head over your shoulder as you morosely nudged at one of the holly cookies.

“Bad at Christmas,” you admitted.

“You can’t be bad at Christmas,” he told you gently. “That’s not how it works, sweetheart.”

“But what if I am!?” you howled, throwing your sticky hands up in the air. “Jesus—”

“Close,” Matt said with a straight face. “He’s on Christmas eve.”

“You know what I mean!” You turned, pulling away to pace wildly in the kitchen, baring your teeth at the holly cookies as if they were an enemy that needed defeating. “They look crooked.”

Matt closed his mouth, turning his head with a furrowed brow to consider the cookies.

“What are you doing?” you asked him curiously.

“They don’t…” He narrowed his eyes in focus. “They don’t… sound crooked? And even if they were, isn’t nature crooked? I’m sure they’re fine.”

You let out a huff, abruptly circling around, soothed a little by the sheer determination Matt had aimed towards your holly cookies. You let out a sigh as you stepped back up beside him, staring down at the cookies silently.

Maybe… maybe they didn’t look… all that bad.

“You think they’re ok?” you asked him nervously.

“I think they sound and feel amazing.” He leaned over to kiss your temple, and—you had a feeling—left some powdered sugar in your hair from the snowballs he’d been stealing. “For obvious reasons, I’m a poor judge of looks, and there’s a lot of sugar and cinnamon in the air from the last batch so I can’t quite separate the taste, but I’m sure they’re perfect.”

“I guess they look alright,” you mumbled, reaching forward to nudge one with another sigh. “Besides, it’s half taste anyway.”

“Let me try one, then.”

You threw him a baffled look. “What, these?”

“Yeah.”

“You hate green.”

He made a noise of protest. “I don’t hate green.”

“The last time you had something with green food coloring, you pulled a level ten stinky cat face. These have way more green food coloring than that.”

“It’s different when it’s a cookie,” he said stubbornly.

“Are you lying?”

“No,” he lied, licking his lips just once.

You narrowed your eyes. “You are lying! Matt—”

But it was too late. Before you could blink he’d snatched up one of the holly cookies and darted out of the kitchen. “They’re fine,” he told you, backing away. “I can smell the green. There’s not too much.”

You quickly came around the corner, pointing a finger as Matt boldly lifted the cookie. “Matt, don’t you dare.”

He got that look in his eye—the one that spelled trouble, the one that ended in gunshot wounds and legal cases best avoided, the one that meant he was about to do something absolutely ridiculous.

He took a confident, massive bite.

And froze.

Silence.

His lips and nose twitched, and you swore you could see the momentary flash of regret sweep through his eyes.

“You’re trying not to make the face, aren’t you?” You stepped in closer, mildly amused now. “The stinky cat face.”

“No,” he said, very, very carefully, his voice hoarse behind a mouthful of green food coloring and processed marshmallow. His nose and mouth wrinkled briefly before he forced it down, struggling with himself as he tried to chew. You swore his eye twitched. “These are… delicious.”

“You’re ridiculous,” you said fondly, your lips curling up into a grin at just how determined he was to carry on the lie for your sake. “Please stop suffering for me.”

“I’m just… enjoying it,” he said roughly, and oh, this time his eyes did twitch as he swallowed with great reluctance. It looked like it went down like acid, his body shivering as if to punish him for what he’d just knowingly ingested. Even so, he twisted his face into an approximation of contentment. “That… was one of the best cookies you’ve ever made. I didn’t… taste the green at all. People will love it.”

You held out a hand for the rest of the cookie. “I appreciate your attempts to lie to me about my terrible holly cookies, but—”

He shot you a look, something like absolute fire in his dark eyes.

Shit.

You shouldn’t have said that.

“Matt, give me the cookie,” you said quickly. He tipped his head and took one slow step back.

“Matt—”

“...No,” he said hotly, clenching his jaw. “I want to eat it. It’s mine.”

You darted after him, and he took off, vaulting over the couch with one hand, your holly cookie in his other. You, unfortunately, had to go around and by the time you circled the couch, he’d already hit the first landing on the stairs, and goddamit, normally you loved his level of athleticism, but not when you were trying to take something back from him like he was a dog who’d run off with the remote.

 “Matt!” you shouted from the bottom of the stairs as he spun, now on the second level. “Don’t fucking eat that, I appreciate it, but you don’t—”

Which was when Matt—somehow managing the appearance of direct, aggressive eye contact—promptly shoved the entire goddamn cookie into his mouth.

“Are you serious?” you barked. “Matt—”

Matt stubbornly closed his mouth and chewed, once.

Then abruptly spun around, his back to you.

There was a choked noise, and you snorted as you came up the stairs. “Matt, spit it out.”

Another, more stubborn choked noise, and this time he shuddered. You were pretty sure he was just trying to get it down as fast as possible at this point, and you didn’t blame him.

“You goddamn masochist,” you said affectionately as you reached him, rubbing your hand softly down his shuddering back. “You didn’t have to do that.”

“I love you,” he said hoarsely, fervent determination lying beneath, and you managed to spin him just in time to watch him work his throat, forcing down the rest of the holly cookie. He groaned as he did, though he tried to make it sound more like a moan of delight. “It… was amazing, sweetheart.”

And now that you got a better look at him, you slapped a hand over your mouth, holding back your laughter. “Oh God, Matt.”

His lips and tongue were now a bright, vibrant shade of emerald green.

Something he seemed to notice the second you did.

He lurched, his mouth falling open, his hand rising for just a moment as if in instinct to scratch at his tongue. He made a strange, ragged noise, then, one somehow full of both regret and apology.

You caught his chin, leaning in to kiss his cheek in sympathy. “I love you. Thank you for trying. It was a wonderful Christmas gift.”

“I’m sorry,” he grit out, groaning and leaning in to bury his face against your neck, his words garbled as if he hated the taste of his own tongue. “I-I tried. God, I hate green.”

“I know you did.” You kissed his hair beneath the glow of the Christmas tree, and somehow the Christmas lights were even less green than his mouth. And, well, even if your cookies didn’t ever turn out perfect, you’d still come out ahead as long as you had Matt here to try them with you. The reminder made you... a lot less nervous about the whole thing, even if you were hoping to prevent something like this from happening again. “No more holly cookies for either of us.”

“No more holly cookies.”

[bonefall]

Hello! I absolutely adore Better Bones despite never reading beyond the first series of Warrior Cats. Last time I checked canon, Bramblestar was a kit that nearly died in a fire. So your canon is canon to me and it’s probably better that way.

I do have a question though. How big do your cats think the world is? The meaningful size of their world is from the Lake to the Forest to the Ocean, but I keep thinking of how medieval peasants sometimes had their whole lives uprooted for a crusade thousands of miles away, and wondering what Clan Cats think the real edges are. Do they see Ireland and France as mythical, far off lands filled with fairytale creatures? Do they know that anything exists beyond the oceans at all? The other side of possibility is that kittypets have given them some concept of human geography, and the cats can tell stories about a land further south than a cat could walk in a lifetime, where the stars are unrecognizable and the very moon is upside down.

Have fun with your worldbuilding!

Clan cats believe that the sky, earth, ground, and aquifers below are actually one big mobius strip, and that existence repeats from top-to-bottom. Water that soaks to the bottom ends up in the sky just as steam rises up to it.

Moles dig down so far that their pelts become gently touched by StarClan, and that's why they're so soft without shine.

The world in a horizontal sense is less important, they don't talk to kittypets very much, not enough for cultural diffusion to take place in regards to human geography. They are blissfully unaware of London, let alone anything beyond the coast of Albion.

The closest anyone's really come to learning more was Heartstar, when she was on her Dovewing Quest, seeing trains and a singing cat. She decided that this was not anything she needed to know about.

SO when they see something like the sea, they believe it's a really big lake. Airplanes are probably birds flying far away. Clan cats believe that StarClan is the greatest force in the world, so surely, wherever they choose for the cats to live must be the most beautiful of all. They're a pretty self-absorbed bunch, but more than that, culturally discourage "wandering" cats!

Depending on where they are exactly (this is why Albion isn't exactly the isle of Great Britain and it's been renamed, I'm shuffling some geography) they may also be able to see part of Wales, Ireland, or the Isle of Man from where they usually collect salt. Which just leads to them believing the ocean is just a big, salty lake, given time.

[caribeandthebooks]

Caribe's YA Fantasy & Science Fiction TBR - Part 2

[cookiecrumbconundrum]

on getting distance and a fresh start

| This Year, The Mountain Goats | personal photo | Act 1: “Viva Stiffelio”, Giuseppe Verdi | Jujutsu Kaisen, Gege Akutami | On forgiveness, bell hooks | Return Trip, Holly Warburton | Clean, Taylor Swift |

[tracingpatternswrites]

My darling @heartofspells has printed this beautiful copy of Wilder than Mountain Thyme and sent one to me 😭

It’s so gorgeous and I cannot tell you how weird it is to hold an actual solid copy of something I’ve written in my hand.

I love it so much.

[dizzybevvie]

Why was the Until Dawn fandub literally life changing

[athalantan]

OH END ME. I looked up the relevant quote in Elminster's Daughter [because again I haven't read it in full yet]. It's not that El has control over their fertility. MYSTRA does. Mystra has full say in whether her Chosen have children and when. I'm gonna start eatin the fckn drywall.

[vandaliatraveler]

Hazy mid-summer day on the Sods, Part 2.

The planet's fantastic life energy reaches its peak in mid to late summer as the sun's precious light shrinks by the day and every living thing senses its time is running out. On the Plains of Dolly Sods, where the growing season is already compressed by the high elevation, plants compete for the swirling, buzzing masses of insects with their gaudy blooms and produce successive waves of berries to seed new generations. The drone of the insects carrying out their instinctive missions of renewal is constantly in your head as they dive and dart and skirt around you. You barely register as a distraction against the great drama playing out here - one whose stakes are survival, regeneration, salvation. I feel so privileged to have connected with this life force in the most intimate way, even for the few short years of my mayfly existence. I will die a happy man for having immersed myself in its lovely, purposeful chaos and becoming part of something much greater than myself.

[yourbelgianthings]

fire fist ace and straw hat luffy

he ain’t heavy, he’s my brother (the hollies) / bleed out (the mountain goats) / soul flame (elena sattarova) / solitary confinement (henri cartier-bresson) / save rock and roll (fall out boy) / the gardener LXVIII: none lives forever, brother (rabindranath tagore)

[activatebutterflyshield]

The Muses hit me with some random inspiration today so here’s a proper design sheet for He of the Lingering Smog and the Glittering Lights, aka Hollywood Angel, aka the God of Los Angeles, featuring the script Chahvinik by @thecrazyneographist.

He’s mostly based on the name of his city, the fashion sense of the famous bit of Humanity that calls him home (clothing is half gala dress, half black tie suit), all the ink those writers use up, paparazzi, Hollywood’s history of censorship, the smog that blankets his land, the manipulative nature of the industry, and the horses of the Spanish who took the land for the Angels.

[wariowaretrans]

today's mood is annoyed I'll never write a song with lyrics as powerful as the joke song John Darnielle wrote about Star Wars.

[aletterinthenameofsanity]

This Rotten Work Playlist: Lefstebany Acosta!

As @evelynhug0 so kindly requested, I'm going to release each of the main character playlists (and one for the main ship, Rachel and Daiyu) once a week leading up to the release of the book!

Fourth up is Lefstebany "Stebbie" Acosta. Though a Render by magical gift, she is damned if she will let anything disturb her pacifist values. The best friend of a hot-tempered Chosen One and in love with a man who thinks that Mountain Dew is the height of cuisine can sometimes make this difficult, not to mention having to survive a death tournament her freshman year of high school. Being the most well-adjusted of any of the graduates of the Academy of the Rising Sun doesn't mean that she doesn't deal of nightmares of her own; it just means that she's more able to call out Rachel and Zell when they start spiralling.

Excerpt:

Stebbie’s a Healer. Well, more accurately, she’s a Render: someone who can manipulate the insides of bodies, coaxing veins and tissues and cells to heal or fray further. Headmaster Nightbane had the same powers, though he used his very differently.

Stebbie’s nothing like the Headmaster. She hates violence. She loathes the idea of bringing harm to anyone, even those who hurt her. She refuses to use her powers for anything but healing, and as far as the Academy was aware, that’s all she was able to use it for. She was constantly kept at the bottom of the class in battle classes, thus preventing her from ever breaking into the top ranks of students despite her clear academic superiority. The Academy under Julien Nightbane treated healers like the lowest of the low, practically useless. Even Katalyn was considered higher than her, as Katalyn would at least participate in battle training. 

It rankled Stebbie, going from the top of her middle school class to so low at the Academy of the Rising Sun, but she refused to give up her pacifist values for anything. She made it through the Tournament entirely by her survival skills instead of by violence.

Her punk aesthetic actually comes from that attitude. Punk, Stebbie likes to tell Zell and I, is about revolting against the system by being kind, treating people better than the system wants you to. It’s about hanging fairy lights and clay calaveras skulls on the walls of the living room, about caring about those who no one else cares about.

@snazzy-hats-and-adhd @blufox3542 @neshatriumphs @khruschevshoe @weedpoop @thesirhandsome-tepalehuia @sillylittlecheeto @nefertittti @henrythepug @meet-me-behindthemall12 @aboutblankpages-blog-blog @artemisiaarm @profiterole-reads @marchionessdebrannas @harrietmjones @thearcaneuniversity @little-bloodied-angel @artemisbones @jacksope-lives @fleuranna @shehungthemoon @spacecatrainshell @celestedeluna @thefiresofpompeii @gerardway-jpeg @fleuranna @smokecloudsandrollingpapers @idealuk @aceumbrellaheroes @evelynhug0 @madhare0512 @fool-for-luv @nealmcclure @elposting @mikereads @corvidspectre @thanatosdetesreves @sapphicsigh @ameliapondmd @possumsmushroom

[shitpostingfromthebarricade]

2 & 3 for the book asks :)

2. Did you reread anything? What?

... okay, so.

I listened to The Foxhole Court trilogy as audiobooks (and read the Sunshine Court as an eBook after).

And then I went back and reread the the trilogy as eBooks because there were a lot of names to keep up with and I felt like I missed a lot the first time around.

And then I still didn't understand Andrew's character, so I read the entire trilogy from his PoV (a fanwork, but a very complete fanwork).

I have no defense except that this series is fucking insane.

3. What were your top five books of the year?

I am choosing to count series as one "book" and also doing a top 10 because I read a lot of really good books so, in no particular order,

The Poppy War trilogy by R.F. Kuang

The Baru Cormorant trilogy by Seth Dickinson

Lady Susan by Jane Austen

The Scarlet Pimpernel by Baroness Orczy

The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt

Poor Thing by Alasdair Gray

The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida by Shehan Karunatilaka

The Nickel Boys by Colson Whitehead

Overthrow: America's Century of Regime Change from Hawaii to Iraq by Stephen Kinzer

Pachinko by Min Jin Lee

and as a bonus because I accidentally put it in the wrong place before and therefore didn't count it

Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes

[sonicmusicmusings]

Sonic Battle isn't a soundtrack we cover that much over here, so let's give another GBA track a listen!

I always find it impressive when a limited soundfont like this can produce an atmospheric track. This one goes for a couple of repeated mellow synths in a counter melody with each other, while the bass is a trusty square wave. The drum samples include a rim tap and an open hi-hat, as well as another low hand drum. The pentatonic movement in both the bass and the main melody keep the tonal center open. It's cool and mysterious to contrast with the high octane, almost hip-hop influence of the rest of the soundtrack. One could say this is the same, just dialed down a few notches. Very cool!