#since the dawn of humanity

[ct-hardcase]

just typed out a war and peace style post about wanting there to be an equivalent of body neutrality in feminist spaces re: periods/childbirth/etc and though there are so many caveats to what I have to say, I think that there can and should be a middle ground between "your divine feminine body was built for these processes and you will embrace the pain with grace/this is easy for everybody" and borderline misogynistic fearmongering surrounding standard bodily phenomena

[moonagedaydreamsofrhiannon]

every time someone calls contemporary art “not real art” an angel loses its wings (a creative and unique new artist gives up on their passion and the world becomes slightly less interesting where it could have become slightly more)

[stillprettyunoriginal]

Names are so vital. So important and held to who a person is and gods Claude who has known Jericho through being far closer to Simon than himself now; through Jericho and the taking of his FACE through having to take in the mind of bloody fucking Martin. If names bring power, what sort of humanity does it draw out of a person when they’ve seen you try on a good couple. Maybe I’m just in my own head about this but truly, there are versions and layers of learning and change to the Jericho we know now, and after a certain point? If we move past his childhood? Claude has been there for nearly all of them besides the tubs. When he lost Kassie there was someone else and this one hasn’t LEFT through his learning and hasn’t died through him stumbling into the world and overall at his side. He has truly been one of the people closest to him. One of the closest you could get, at the very least, when you wear the face of a tormentor and feel your gut twisted by their own memories of their hatred of you or how you her them, and you can’t remember a world without that hurt. I’m never going to heal from these two I swear it.

(also the taking of Martin’s face is destructive to my mental health rip someone please save me it ruins me every time I remember it, n WONDER he had brother issues dude)

[swordheld]

hi! your blog is one of my favourites and i absolutely adore reading your thoughts. my grandfather recently passed away and it feels like i lost myself with him. how do i continue living after this? there is this constant weight on my chest and it feels like an emptiness has made a home inside of me. how do i go on when it feels like the world crashed on my shoulders?

hello, love! this is so very sweet and kind of you, and i hope you're treating yourself gently and kindly right now - there aren't words for a loss like this. that heaviness is difficult, and hard, and painful. it's okay if things don't feel okay, right now, or even soon - i think that's something that a lot of the people i know that have gone through similar grief feel: like they should be able to get back to a relative 'normal' in a [insert far too short period of time].

but it's okay if it hurts. that's where i'd like to start. you're allowed to feel that emptiness, that world-crashed feeling that goes beyond words, beyond time. don't feel like you have to rush this to feel some sort of better. things get easier with time, i promise you this, but sometimes painful feelings are important to feel, too. cry, scream, feel your emotions. they're a part of you. grieve.

it's perhaps a little silly, but when i think about death i always think about a couple of space songs: mainly drops of jupiter by train and saturn by sleeping at last. there are perhaps others that speak to the emotions better, but these two have always hit something a little deeper for me, and are popular for a wide-reaching reason.

and while personally i don't know much about grief like this, i do know a lot about love; and i think they're a lot of the same thing.

the people we love are a part of us, and this is why it takes from us so deeply when we lose them, because it does feel like we've lost a part of ourselves in the wake of it. but it's because they were so central to our experiences of living - our lives, that the separation introduces a hollowness - a place where they used to be. a home that now goes unlived in.

an emptiness, like you said.

but just because they're not here physically, doesn't mean he's not still there, in your heart, in your life, your memory. you can hold him close in smaller ways, as well: steal a sweater, or cologne/scent for something a little more physical and long lasting for remembering. hold onto the memories you cherish, the things that made you laugh, the ease of slow mornings and gentle nights. write them all down, slide a few photographs in there, go through it and add more when you miss him. keep them all close, keep them in your heart.

you're not alone, in this. he's still there, with you, it's just - in the little things.

he's with you in the way you see and go about your daily life, in doing what he liked to do, in the ways he interacted with the world that you shared with him. the memories you recall fondly when the night is late or the moment is right and something calls it into you like a melody, an old bell, laughter you'd recognize anywhere.

but i think, perhaps most importantly above all others - talk about him. with your family, your friends, his friends, strangers; stories are how we keep the people we love alive. the connections they've made, the legacies and experiences they've left behind, and so, so many stories.

how lucky, we are - to love so much it takes a piece of us when they go. grief is the other side of the coin, but it does not mean our love goes away. it lives in you. it lives in everyone who knew him, in the smallest pieces of our lives.

the people we love never really leave us, like this: they're in how we cook and the way we fold our newspapers, our laundry, in the radio stations we tune in to and the way we decorate our walls, our photo albums. they're in the way we store our mail, organize our closets, the scribbled notes in the indexes of our books. the meals we love and the drinks we mix, the way we spend time with one another. they've been passed down for generations, for longer than history - and we are all the luckier for it.

think about what you shared with him, and do it intentionally. bring him into your life, like this, again. whether it's crosswords or poetry or sports or anything else. if one doesn't help, try another. something might click.

i hope things feel a little easier for you, as they tend to do only with time. i hope you find joy in your grief, even if it is small and hard to grasp at first. know that your hurt stems from so much love that there isn't a place to put it properly, and that it is something so meaningful and hurting poets and storytellers have been struggling to put it into words and sounds that feel like the fit right for eons, and that it is also just simply yours. sometimes things don't have to make sense. sometimes they just are - unable to be put into words or neat little sentiments, as unfair and tragic as they come.

but i promise it will not feel like this forever. your love is real. and perhaps, on where to begin on from here - i think it's less on finding where to begin and just beginning. and you've already started. you've taken the most important and crucial step: the first one. wherever you go, after that, from here? you'll figure it out. you always have, and you always do. it'll come, as things always do. love leads us, as does light - and you're never alone in your hurt. in your grief, your missing something dear to you. i think if you talk about it with others, you'll find they have ways of helping you cope as well - and they have so much love of their own to spare, too.

as an aside, here is the song (northern star by dom fera) i was listening to when i wrote this, for no other reason more than it makes me think of connections, and love, and how we hold onto the people we love and how they change us, wonderfully and intrinsically. it's a little more joyous than the others i've mentioned, and plays like a story, and it made me think of what is at the core of this, love and stories and i am here with you, and maybe it'll bring you some joy, if you'd like it. wishing you all my love and ease 💛

[andaniellight]

honestly since we won't be seeing Johnny and Yosaku (or will we, eventually?), Zoro's former companions as bounty hunters, i can only say best of luck for OPLA!Zoro (and partly OPLA!Nami as well) to figure out that sometimes emotional comfort requires physical touch to actually settle into the real calm zone for certain people, and then learn it the most speed-run way from the most clingy and touchy with the most aggressive younger-sibling-energy of a person that is their very much captain

[dingodad]

i think for a while after the epilogues we were all assuming ultimate self meant having special narrative awareness but i think in retrospect it's pretty obvious that to have narrative awareness in homestuck you kind of just need to be able to look around you. like i don't think dirk strider knows he's in a story because he had a jimmy neutron brain blast i think he just knows he's in a story cus he like, opened his eyes to the last 20 years of his life

[activatebutterflyshield]

Something something the album Coyote Stories by The Crane Wives is about the current objectively horrid state of the world and also a call to action on changing that.

Okay. Starting with “Keep You Safe”. Here, the singer starts out as a young adventuring child who is afraid of joining their friends in slightly dangerous games. They never joined in, too afraid to face the consequences. As they grow up, they get more and more scared of the world as they see more and more slightly dangerous things happening around them. The refrain is a mantra that “Time is not your friend / Time is not your remedy / No amount of waiting will make you, make you brave / No amount of fear will keep you / No amount of fear will keep you safe”. The singer in this song is symbolic of the current state of the world, with so many people afraid of what is to come. The fears keep on piling up, from climate change to war to so many other things, and the people stay afraid, but they never grow any safer by being afraid. Time can and will march on, and, as the song says, “Come what may”.

Going on to “The Moon Will Sing”. The singer speaks of an unfulfilling relationship, with someone or something that keeps on leading them on but never fulfilling their promises. They mindlessly follow the something, and quietly ignored their neglected heart for a time. The chorus is “The moon will sing a song for me / I loved you like the sun / Bore the shadows that you made / With no light of my own”, in which the singer is lamenting their neglected state, but is also speaking of it in the past tense. They’ve moved on now, and are recalling the unhappy past. The singer in this case still represents the state of the world, but of a slightly altered state. They used to be in a bad place, but they’ve changed for the better, reflecting how the world has started to shift for the better. We’ve caught sight of our sorry state and are trying to remedy that.

Next is “Allies or Enemies”. This one is blunt and very personal. The singer immediately references “wildfires and weeds”, as well as an “awful damn disease”, all of which are rather familiar to 21st century Homo sapiens as omnipresent news headlines in the backgrounds and foregrounds of our lives. We are intertwined with these tragedies just as the singer is intertwined with the subject of their song, to the point that neither can conceive of a world without the tragedy or the subject. Anything and everything may or may not happen, as “All is fair in love and war”, but if this dynamic keeps up, it will be “the death of me”.

“Unraveling” is mostly a heaping pile of metaphors and symbolism. The singer is lamenting their lost loves, people who seemed to care for them before disappearing without a word. Though these men were kind and seemed to help, each and every one would eventually disappear and leave the singer worse for wear. Perhaps the best line to be applied to the world’s current state is the one about the carpenter: “Sanded my rough edges, crafted new and lovely things / But now my love is gone / And I can’t help the fracturing”. The carpenter represents the groups and people who have shepherded the world into its current state, keeping the population complacent by plying them with pretty little gifts and things to distract them while profiting all they can. But as soon as the carpenter has gotten what they wanted, they leave the world to its own devices to deal with the consequences of their profiteering. These profiteers are partially the ones at fault for the current state of the world.

“Hard Sell” does, in fact, hit hard. The singer is clearly going through something rough, holding themself together through sheer will to live. They’re trying so hard to get better, but it’s so hard to improve that it seems that they’re “working with barbed wire and moth wings”. To go on a tangent, the decision to specifically say “moth wings” and not bird or fly wings evokes (in my biology-addled brain) the image of salt and pepper moths. These are moths that rapidly evolved to have darker coloration thanks to the sooty, polluted conditions of the Industrial Revolution. The singer is using the only things they have: a metal material designed to harm and keep out and the wings of an animal greatly impacted by human-spurred climate change, and they’re lamenting that it seems that everyone might be going through the same thing. And its true; we’re all facing the same consequences of the state of the world in one form or another, and the only difference is how we present ourselves to the rest of the victims out there. We’re all affected, and we all need to “stop pretending now” and get something done.

Finally made it to “Rockslide”, the song that got me down this track in the first place. It has a runaway rhythm with a singer that speaks of feeling the “wild weather” that’s “got the mountain shaking weak”, and of the “quaking” of “rocks … a’tumblin while the people are asleep”. That wild weather is all the rapid and negative changes rocking the world, or the mountain. And the rocks are the consequences crashing towards the people so ignorant they might as well be asleep. Though the singer prays that they might keep their soul and that “you”, whom they’re singing to, wants to settle down, they also acknowledge that they must run or “the devil we will meet”. The people of the world must run, or make changes, else they’ll face the horrible consequences, or the devil. The devil, or “monster”, is coming and does not care what it hits.

On to “Metaphor”. Oh boy, “Metaphor”. The singer here is someone broken, jaded, the sort of person who’s been hurt ten too many times. They are a liar, a scavenger, a (metaphorical) killer. “You can’t trust a single thing I say”, they sing, because they’ve been lied to and forced to survive in the corners and the margins of the world. They are loud, they are hurt, and by goodness do they not want to go through that again. I really shouldn’t have to say why this is all to real to so many people in this world. They’re the ugly, hard to look at truth of the world, the headline you’re afraid to finish reading, the words just a little too raw to be fake. “I’ve gotten good at making up metaphors”, they sing, because that truth is too hard to bear without at least a little bit of sugarcoating.

Now comes “The Hand That Feeds”. Do I really need to explain this one? “I’ve seen good men spoiled / Chained to their jobs like hounds / They work and sleep, and work again / In the darkest nights they howl”. The people of the world, those who by all measures should not suffer, are chained and bound, deprived of freedom beyond their desperate laments. This is the fate the singer’s father wants his child to avoid, the snare he wishes them to see and remain free of. They sing of how “He taught me that the hand that feeds / Deserves to be bitten when it beats”. No matter how good it looks, you should never take the deal. Never shake the hand of the devil, despite his honeyed words, and remain your own self. That hand only wants to drag you down deeper.

Next is “Little Soldiers”. Okay when I started writing this thing I had just finished All Quiet on the Western Front and so I had a lot of sad war metaphors about this one, but it’s been a while and most of them have vacated my brain in the meantime, so… here goes. “On the broken backs of all the words we spared” they sing, “Like little soldiers in the trenches / It was a march we made towards ruin and despair / but we held hands all the while”. The singer here is recovering from a horrible loss, of the ending of a relationship they thought was good and healthy, but in reality was false to both parties. Both the singer and their former partner are representative of the common suffering of the common people, of their past struggles and strife, and how, in the end, they banded together to fight for each other. The refrain reflects this bittersweet dynamic, switching between “I swear that I loved you” and “I swear that you loved me”. The common love was the only good thing in the lives of the partners, and is all they can look back to in the end.

Following is “Sleeping Giants”, with a return to a feel similar to that of “Rockslide”, as forces beyond mortal comprehension threaten to wake. “I feel the mountains / Shifting under me / The sleeping giants are finally waking”. The singer is hyper aware that they are in danger, and said danger is something so alien, so powerful, and as unexpected as the land itself was shifting beneath their feet. Their pulse is racing, they are in fight-or-flight as all those prophecies from the previous songs in the album begin to come true. “The moon is humming / Lovely melodies / The forest echos, the trees are crowing / Hungry, hungry harmonies”. Natural keystones as far separated as the trees on the Earth and the moon in the sky are calling out in tandem, something is wrong. Something is terribly, horribly wrong.

A rather abrupt tone shift as “Of Everlong” follows. It’s a very short song, barely more than a minute, and its poetry is perhaps the strongest. I’ll just write the whole thing here.

“Out of the ocean / Over the harbor / Lay no sons and / Lay no daughters / Among the mountains of everlong / Twas there I wrote me / A sad, sad song / And if my lover / Will not hear it / Take my voice and / Take my spirit / Leave me weakened / And dig my hole / Only my lover not I can keep my soul / Only my lover not I can keep my soul”.

The singer, a lover much like the one mentioned in “Little Soldiers”, is singing a lament that they are alone, here in the mountains of everlong, beyond all reach of other people. Here they sing of what they have lost, or perhaps never had, a tune that can only echo about those mountains and never reach beyond the ocean. They declare that they’d rather die than never see their beloved again, consigning themself to eternal loneliness rather than risk breaking their heart all over again. Theirs is a song of what was and what will never be, of a world of memories that was long taken by the mists and will never emerge from the horizon with the breaking dawn.

It stays melancholy with “Never Love an Anchor”, with a rocking rhythm like a ship in a calm sea, and a singer who laments that they were never enough for their beloved. They were unable to care for their child, their spark of light impossibly kindled in a life made of sorrow, and feel that it is all their fault. “And I tried to do the best that I could / But try as I might I couldn’t bring myself to hold you”, they cry, a gentle, quiet admittance of defeat. They knew that they could never be enough, and so gave a chance to their beloved in exchange for defying their own selfish desires. This singer acted for the good of the many rather than the good of the few, giving what hope they did have to the little one so that they may rise just a bit higher. “On some level, I think I always understood / That a ship could never really love an anchor”, they sing, an admittance of their own failings, and a declaration that their beloved will be better, will have some brighter future, some breaking dawn at the horizon to look forward to.

The final song of the album is “New Discovery”. It’s a final declaration of the singer’s hope for a brighter future, of some true and real goal that they might strive for. It may not be real, it may be a mirage, but by goodness will they bite and claw and fight for it. “I want to believe / There’s something left for me / A new discovery”. It’s a hope, a faraway paradise, an impossible pipe dream, but it’s something. And to a person at the very end of their rope, to those who might sing of their trials and tribulations and torments and tragedies, something can be everything. It doesn’t need to be grand, or golden, or even great. It just needs to be better. And that is something everyone should be able to get behind.

Hope is famously that thing with feathers, the creature at the bottom of Pandora’s box, the last feeling humanity will ever have. It will drive us on through the deep, dark night, be our guiding lantern in the shadow of the dragon, and when we see the light of the sun shatter over the eastern horizon, we’ll think, yes. One more day. One more day to live and to learn, one more chance at making things better. There will always be nights; times of death and destruction will come again and again for the foreseeable future. But the night is always followed by the day, by hope and a new chance to take another step towards a better future.

Never stop fighting to see that next dawn, to once again behold the sun declaring that a new day has risen.

Never stop working to make things better.

[namazunomegami]

"But I can't know God's intentions... How could it depend on my decision... Who made me a judge of who shall live and who shall not?" - Crime and Punishment

[liskantope]

Did I just make a half-joke in my last post about the 2010's brand of aggressive internet feminism being dead? Have I mentioned more than once in recent posts that the I consider it a happy development that the TERFish ideology seems to have siphoned away a lot of the visible "women are fragile because men are so terrifying" mentality in more mainstream feminism? Well, that was before I read the below post that is apparently making the rounds in the last few days about the "bear test" and the oh-so-nailed-it commentary on it claiming that the "bear test" illuminates exactly two fundamentally types of men:

This "bear vs. man" question is obvious to me a rhetorical sleight-of-hand playing on a convenient arrangements of cultural emotion-based ideas of what bears symbolize and how protective a man is supposed to be around his daughter having men in her life and so on. Treating it as a serious thought experiment leading to an obvious conclusion about the patriarchy or something would be annoying enough, but first post has to inject that familiar gleeful smugness about how the simple question is guaranteed trip us men up and expose our toxic mindset for all the world to see and illuminate the writer's perfect black-and-white view of gender relations. (It reminds me of the question designed to trip up atheists: "You're walking down a dark street at night and see some shadowy figures coming your way. If you were to discover that they are people who just came out of a Bible study, would that make you feel better or worse?" Except I think that old pro-religion argument, much as I've always hated it, actually rests on firmer ground.)

As for the follow-up social media post, it's nice to know that, as a man who sincerely believes probability-wise that the bear in the woods is a lot more dangerous to my hypothetical daughter than a randomly-chosen man is (an assessment supposedly no woman holds), I am now properly classified as one of those men who is more dangerous than a bear, or (to a more charitable reading) one of those men who is providing cover/excuses for / not doing his part to stop the men who are more dangerous than bears.

(I doubt very much that there's actual data around on chances of a young woman being attacked in the woods by a human man or chances of being attacked by a bear, but I'm willing to change my prediction if I learn that most species of bear ignore humans who wander into their midst like 99% of the time or something like that. Which would cast doubt on most cultural treatment of bears, of course and also kind of undermine the punchline of the "test".)

[singswan-springswan]

It's those Syndulla kids...

closeups under the cut

[circusk]

unsure if you'd even like asks for this but I can't help but be curious- do Dev and Dawn end up seeing each other much? Because I feel like Peri of all people might have some Thoughts about a fairy and godchild becoming close as siblings, considering his personal experience with the inevitability of Da Rules...

i love asks always and forever

peri would definitely try to keep her away from everything, on one hand she's a baby and he wants to avoid everything that happened when HE was born and on another hand. yeah he has worries about what could happen if she got close with her human family. her magic's really weak and she struggles with a lot of stuff that's usually second nature to fairies so there's a significantly lower kidnapping risk, but still worries a lot.

he leaves dawn with cosmo and wanda a lot cause even though they can attract problems they're experienced and even if he thinks his parents are dumb they've been around for millennia and know what they're doing

also they love their little grandbaby and make her ten million little outfits

hazel hangs out with her sometimes and mentions it to dev who just . ? wharg?

blahblah blah yadda yadda dev learns about dawn and she leaves to see him all the time cause hashtag family and peri doesn't find out until weeks later and just . ough. hes like damn would it be mean to separate them now. his focus shifts from cushioning potential issues to looking for loopholes in da rules since there's almost nothing known or documented about creatures that are only part magic

also she likes to nap in bowls much to dev's annoyance

[sunnibits]

do y’all ever bite into a particularly tasty and juicy fruit and feel like eve in that fuckin garden

[vintageseawitch]

eddie boi was at the peak of "him being interesting in any way, shape or form" when he was feeding on baddies & he did more for the sake of humanity than the Cullen & Denali ✨️ecological disaster✨️ clans put together 🥰🧛‍♂️🩸

[soracities]

There's something about the human condition where a barista will make latte art in your takeaway coffee cup that may never be opened. I'm not sure what it is, but maybe you'll know.

honestly, i just think the lines and curves of the universe compel us ! also it keeps the Thoughts quiet 💓

[dandyshucks]

blinks tiredly. i decide "hm maybe i should try to expand my circle and step outside of it a little, lets go look at the main community tags" and im just greeted with a bunch of edgelords who think saying "fiction doesn't affect reality, don't like don't read" is peak activism and "fighting censorship". head in my hands. this is partially why i do not ever go into the community tags, my nervous system cannot handle blocking fifty weirdos every single day just so i can have a normal experience in the community tags hfdsjkl

[frutavel]

You would not believe the bullshit I can come up with to justify my own character designs to myself