#of salem

[shawow]

my #1 cardinal sin that would definitely get me kicked out of heaven is watching among us streams in 2023 (im so sorry)

[hawkeabelas]

while kissing my cat's little head: you're a problem *smooch* you're a terror *smooch* you're a menace to society *smooch smooch smooch*

[sincerelystesichorus]

i have spent so long trying to place who astarion reminds me of

his dry little sarcastic bits gets me every time and like it's automatically funny but it felt so familiar...

this bastard.

and some more similar comparisons i think

thank you for coming to my ted talk

[asasdemorcego]

me lately once again

[dykesbat]

Palestinian wedding at a tent in Rafah on January 18, 2024. Their names are Shahad (bride) and Mohammed al-Ghandour (groom). Photos taken by Mohammad Salem of Reuters.

[alchemistmelody]

[firas-salem]

My Daughter just told me her wish for her third Birthday is to sleep on her bed and before that take a bath with bubbles

I pray to God everyday that all of this doesn't scar them mentally and leave them with untreatable traumas just like us . I pray that they aren't as aware as they seem ! The happy façade held especially by Rokayah keeps fading away everyday.. Hopefully when we reach her birthday on December, this war would end and all of us would be Safe ! 🙏 Thank you all .. Whenever depression and fear get to me like today I think about all of you guys who keep helping us and supporting us by every means possible, we feel heard and supported ,loved and cared for . God BLESS You All 🙏🙏🙏💕 Forever Indebted to All of you ! PLEASE Donate and share Verified by @el-shab-hussein Here

You Helped us get €33,150 raised of €65,000 goal ! Thank you so much !! I really can't thank you enough !!🙏💖🌹

[beauzone]

a redraw

[krossan]

[beggars-opera]

On the road leading into the center of Concord, Massachusetts, there sits a house.

It is a plain, colonial-style house, of which there are many along this road. It has sea green and buff paint, a historical plaque, and one of the most multi-layered stories I have ever encountered to showcase that history is continuous, complicated, and most importantly, fragmentary, unless you know where to look.

So, where to start? The plaque.

There's some usual information here: Benjamin Barron built the house in 1716, and years later it was a "witness house" to the start of the American Revolution. And then, something unusual: a note about an enslaved man named John Jack whose epitaph is "world famous."

Where is this epitaph? Right around the corner in the town center.

It reads:

God wills us free; man wills us slaves. I will as God wills; God’s will be done. Here lies the body of JOHN JACK a native of Africa who died March 1773 aged about 60 years Tho’ born in a land of slavery, He was born free. Tho’ he lived in a land of liberty, He lived a slave. Till by his honest, tho’ stolen labors, He acquired the source of slavery, Which gave him his freedom; Tho’ not long before Death, the grand tyrant Gave him his final emancipation, And set him on a footing with kings. Tho’ a slave to vice, He practised those virtues Without which kings are but slaves.

We don't know precisely when the man first known only as Jack was purchased by Benjamin Barron. We do know that he, along with an enslaved woman named Violet, were listed in Barron's estate upon his death in 1754. Assuming his gravestone is accurate, at that time Jack would have been about 40 and had apparently learned the shoemaking trade from his enslaver. With his "honest, though stolen labors" he was then able to earn enough money to eventually purchase his freedom from the remaining Barron family and change his name to John, keeping Jack as a last name rather than using his enslaver's.

John Jack died, poor but free, in 1773, just two years before the Revolutionary War started. Presumably as part of setting up his own estate, he became a client of local lawyer Daniel Bliss, brother-in-law to the minister, William Emerson. Bliss and Emerson were in a massive family feud that spilled into the rest of the town, as Bliss was notoriously loyal to the crown, eventually letting British soldiers stay in his home and giving them information about Patriot activities.

Daniel Bliss also had abolitionist leanings. And after hearing John's story, he was angry.

Here was a man who had been kidnapped from his home country, dragged across the ocean, and treated as an animal for decades. Countless others were being brutalized in the same way, in the same town that claimed to love liberty and freedom. Reverend Emerson railed against the British government from the pulpit, and he himself was an enslaver.

It wouldn't do. John Jack deserved so much more. So, when he died, Bliss personally paid for a large gravestone and wrote its epitaph to blast the town's hypocrisy from the top of Burial Hill. When the British soldiers trudged through the cemetery on April 19th, 1775, they were so struck that they wrote the words down and published them in the British newspapers, and that hypocrisy passed around Europe as well. And the stone is still there today.

You know whose stone doesn't survive in the burial ground?

Benjamin Barron's.

Or any of his family that I know of. Which is absolutely astonishing, because this story is about to get even more complicated.

Benjamin Barron was a middle-class shoemaker in a suburb that wouldn't become famous until decades after his death. He lived a simple life only made possible by chattel slavery, and he will never show up in a U.S. history textbook.

But he had a wife, and a family. His widow, Betty Barron, from whom John purchased his freedom, whose name does not appear on her home's plaque or anywhere else in town, does appear either by name or in passing in every single one of those textbooks.

Terrible colonial spelling of all names in their marriage record aside, you may have heard her maiden name before:

Betty Parris was born into a slaveholding family in 1683, in a time when it was fairly common for not only Black, but also Indigenous people to be enslaved. It was also a time of war, religious extremism, and severe paranoia in a pre-scientific frontier. And so it was that at the age of nine, Betty pointed a finger at the Arawak woman enslaved in her Salem home, named Titibe, and accused her of witchcraft.

Yes, that Betty Parris.

Her accusations may have started the Salem Witch trials, but unlike her peers, she did not stay in the action for long. As a minor, she was not allowed to testify at court, and as the minister's daughter, she was too high-profile to be allowed near the courtroom circus. Betty's parents sent her to live with relatives during the proceedings, at which point her "bewitchment" was cured, though we're still unsure if she had psychosomatic problems solved by being away from stress, if she stopped because the public stopped listening, or if she stopped because she no longer had adults prompting her.

Following the witch hysteria, the Parrises moved several times as her infamous father struggled to hold down a job and deal with his family's reputation. Eventually they landed in Concord, where Betty met Benjamin and married him at the age of 26, presumably having had no more encounters with Satan in the preceding seventeen years. She lived an undocumented life and died, obscure and forgotten, in 1760, just five years before the Stamp Act crisis plunged America into a revolution, a living bridge between the old world and the new.

I often wonder how much Betty's story followed her throughout her life. People must have talked. Did they whisper in the town square, "Do you know what she did when she was a girl?" Did John Jack hear the stories of how she had previously treated the enslaved people in her life? Did that hasten his desperation to get out? And what of Daniel Bliss; did he know this history as well, seeing the double indignity of it all? Did he stop and think about how much in the world had changed in less than a century since his neighbor was born?

We'll never know.

All that's left is a gravestone, and a house with an insufficient plaque.

[thebusytypewriter]

...has this been done yet

[goryhorroor]

horror sub-genres: cults

[vampiire-diary]

[failsquirrel]

wanted to make another fake ds screenshot so i made some fanart for @wolfertinger666

[teddybeartoji]

18+ mdni; gn!reader

thinking about roomie!suguru, who steps out of the bathroom with just a towel hanging loosely around his waist. it's dangerously low and his happy trail is... leading your eyes to a forbidden place. water droplets cascade down his temple and his neck, his scarred chest and his toned muscles.

he finishes drying his hair with another, smaller towel before slinging it over his shoulder. he gives you a warm smile. there's still a bit of sleep in his tired eyes but he looks fresh, he looks good.

(he looks more than good.)

the morning light shines in through the small window of your shared kitchen and he hums at the smell of coffee. you're an angel leaning on the counter, hands busy with preparing your drink as he steps inside.

he chuckles. he asked you a question but you didn't hear it. he smells so fucking good; the smell of his shampoo and his fancy conditioner wash over your senses and it's easy to forget where you are. his eyes flick behind you before walking over to you with a smug little grin.

he bores his sharp purple eyes into yours – he loves how you react to him. he doesn't shy away from it, he's cockier than he looks. he loves the attention, he loves to be in your spotlight. he wouldn't care so much if you were a stranger, if you were a random person on the street ogling away, ut you're neither of those things, are you? no, you're something else.

he exudes warmth as he towers over you, his head tilted down to keep his eyes on you. he wants to play with you a little – he loves the way you're staring up at him right now. eyes big and wide, lip tucked under between your teeth. he's good with people, he can read them like a book and you're no different. he sees you swallow a dry lump, he sees you grace him with a flustered smile as you try to brush by the fact that he caught you admiring him red handed. he sees the way you're taking deeper breaths than normal, surely just to keep your composure. he can't wait to break you.

his arm reaches behind you to turn off the coffee machine with a small click.

"wouldn't wanna make a mess this early in the morning, now would we?"

melting. crumbling. falling down to your knees. you hate how much he teases (you love it), you hate how patronizing he sounds (it's hot). he's the only one that can get away with it – a charming smile that hides his deepest desires of sinking his teeth into little lambs like you, soft eyes that hide the need to watch them unfold before him.

his gentle hands long to hold, long to keep and covet. he thinks about you a lot; your shared mornings and afternoons, your exhausted naps and bitter rants about your days. shy gazes and lingering touches, stupid jokes and the cute little hidden sounds he keeps hearing from your room in the late hours. he's being patient, he's warming you up.

he's just as infatuated with you as you are with him. he's just more subtle with it.

or is he?

because you've heard him, too.

you don't know whether he's doing it unknowingly or he's actually trying to make you go insane – whichever it is, you are ready to bend at his will. soft groans accompanied by a steady slick pump; you didn't mean to listen in. you just wanted to make sure he's okay!

ear against the wooden door, you listened to him think about you. your name was on the tip of his tongue, but it was too early for that. he wants to smear you with his honey, he wants to drag you in but he needs to wait for it. this is perfect.

he did know you're were there.

he heard the floor creak, he heard the cutest gasp that left your pretty lips. fuck, you're perfect. his head was lolled back as he stroked himself to the thought of your wide, doe-eyes. how flustered you'd be, how flustered you were in that very moment. he imagined your trembling hands and your stuttered words and his dick twitched in his palm.

he thought about inviting you in and just making him watch as a form of punishment, for being a little pervert. he shuddered out a laugh and watched a glob of pre-cum cover his own fingers before mixing with the saliva and spit that's covering him already. he thought about making you sit between his legs so he could jerk off right in front of your beautiful face, he thought about your wobbly lips, your teary eyes. the way your thighs would press together.

your fingers would itch and twitch and he'd make you place them on your legs. he wouldn't want you to touch. yet. maybe he'd make you apologize and maybe he'd make you kiss the tip. he thought about how good you'd smell, how good you'd taste. another raspy groan crawled up his throat and you were about to cum untouched behind his door. like a creep.

he loves it. he's proud of you, he wants to push you even further. he wants to see what else he can make you do. this is exciting and he can't wait to devour you whole as a reward after he's done bullying himself into your body and your mind. utterly loved and corrupted—

— you're meant for him.

[villain-disorder]

Unfortunately, I think stigmatised disorder (personality disorders, psychotic disorders, etc) culture is realising something you experience has a name and finally feeling seen, but you go to google it for more resources and only find people talking about how horrible and morally evil you are for daring to have that symptom you never chose in the first place.