#tbl*

[jimmyspades]

"Let's call it The Blacklist. That sounds exciting! That’s why we’re all here, of course. My wish list. A list I’ve been cultivating for over twenty years." THE BLACKLIST 1.01 "Pilot/Ranko Zamani (No. 52)"

[windvexer]

Being that helpful spirits may be absent, here are three ways to facilitate their presence

Have got a few people in the tags saying they vibe with this other post about my animistic views, so here's a tie-in with Witchcraft:

You know how in that other post I say that the spirit of Lavender isn't already present in the physical lavender, and that's why I have to call him? Well three things!

One, what you are doing when you lay a compass opening metaphysical roads and gateways that make it easier and less burdensome for spirits to travel to you!

Imagine you live in a hut in the middle of the woods with no roads leading to it. You could call a spirit to visit you and they could, but it would be a laborious journey for them because they have to hike across the rugged terrain.

But as a witch, you have the power to weave gossamer fairy roads that float upon the air like spider silk, scintillating in the moonlight, floating high above the clawing trees, dense underbrush, and slippery rocks.

Spirits can walk back and forth across these magical roads, making it easier for them to arrive much more fully to you by exerting the same amount of effort. Also, it's nicer for them!

The point of opening roads is to facilitate the movement of the spirits, so that they are not wasting energy just traveling, but may have more left over to help you with, or appear to you.

Two, one way to get Lavender fully present inside of the physical lavender is to carefully harvest the lavender under auspicious times, and using charms and techniques meant to preserve the spiritual power of the plant.

This is wild foraging magic - and it's a very powerful way of gathering and storing power so that it lives with you in the hut, and you don't have to call for the attention of faraway entities.

One way to think about going out and gathering magic in this manner is mushrooming. You know how those mushroom people are like, "wait until the weather gets warm and it rains, then a few days later look under fallen hardwood logs"?

It's the same thing when witches say "wait until midnight on a Saturday and go to the churchyard fence and sing this charm while you harvest a flower stalk."

It's the same in the sense that it's not arbitrary steps you have to do to prove you're more traditional. It's a map to instruct you how to find power that is only present sometimes!

The nature of magic is such that the datura growing on the graveyard fence may always be physically there, but its spiritual power may wax and wane. If you harvest the datura while it's spiritually hibernating (or if you harvest it in such a way that the spirit retracts itself and leaves your harvest inert), you are not necessarily harvesting something of power just because it's not commercially grown.

Three, if I have a really wonderful relationship with Lavender or I really like this spirit and would love to have it be a big part of my practice, I can go through the steps to request that Lavender enter my home and my life as a familiar spirit, a tutelary spirit, or a helper spirit.

You know how we live in a hut in the woods with no roads leading to it? Well I can build Lavender a room in my house so he can always just stay there with me - that room is a spirit house, spirit vessel, or shrine that you build which is dedicated to Lavender and is sort of like a permanent, hardwired road for Lavender to travel down.

In this way, every single time I want to call on Lavender, I do not necessarily have to lay a compass and open a road to call to him. That is because he has permanent access to my house, until such a time as I sever the relationship or remove the shrine.

With a big step like this undertaken, Lavender may then be available to help me in many more ways than just simple acts of sorcery - maybe by teaching me things, protecting and guiding me while I engage in spirit flight, becoming a guardian of my home, and so forth, while in return receiving the support, attention, appreciation, and care deserved by such helpful and venerable spirits.

[lansjue]

THE BLOSSOMING LOVE 千朵桃花一世开 dir. Sam Ho, 2025.

[mossycakes]

"youre a vampire michael! you wait till mum finds out!!"

funniest possible reaction to your older brother being turned into a vampire

[allmyandroids]

Raymond Reddington

Season 6 Episode 3 - The Pharmacist

[phoenix--quill]

Prompt 17: Cock warming

Pairing: Raymond Reddington/female reader

Rating: E (minors DNI)

Warnings: cockwarming

Length: ~650 words

Summery: a tired Raymond wakes you up in middle of the night

Notes: I know this is short and really late but in my defence I’ve had a fever for the past two days and is currently blowing my nose every 5mins so honestly I think we should all be grateful that anything even remotely coherent made it to paper.

AO3

It was still dark when you woke up – you weren’t sure if it was early morning or late at night. You rolled over, about to go back to sleep when you heard a noise from somewhere in the apartment. You almost reached for the gun hidden below the night stand but then you recognized the footsteps. They sounded heavy, tired, but you would recognize him everywhere. You smiled and snuggled back under the covers, he would join you soon enough.

Sure enough, you heard the bedroom door open and Raymond’s soft steps as he entered the room. You heard the soft swish as he took off his jacket, the soft click of his shoulder holster as he placed it on the dresser – layers after layers you heard him take off, carefully fold and place on the bench at the foot of your bed. You felt the mattress dip as he slid in behind you and planted a kiss on your shoulder.

“Raymond,” you whispered as he ran his nose across your shoulder blades.

“Shh, go back to sleep,” his voice was barely more than rumble against your skin.

“Is everybody okay?” you asked that every time he had been away without you and his answer was usually somewhere along the same lines.

You felt him nod behind you, “everybody is home and safe.” He kept his voice low and ran his soft lips across your shoulders. You could practically feel the exhaustion roll off of him and yet he didn’t seem to be able to stop kissing your sleep-warmed skin.

He ran his nose up your neck, planting a soft kiss to your hairline before burying his face in your hair and you could feel him take a deep breath, inhaling your scent.

He groaned softly and moved even closer, your bodies now completely flush under the covers, and placed a warm hand on your hip. “Can I...?”

“Always,” you breathed with a smile and moved your leg up and back to lie on top of his. It was another one of your little rituals, especially when he came home like this: too exhausted but unwilling to be apart from you.

His hand on your hip moved up under your long night shirt – technically one of his that you had borrowed – and found the waistband of your underwear, dragging it down your legs. He grabbed your leg, hiking it further up his and opened you up to give him better access to your leaking core – making both of you groan as his fingertips brushed against you.

You felt him reach behind you and then the blunt head of his already half-hard member as he ran it through your nether lips, catching the liquid that had already gathered there. He then sank into you, slowly, both of you savouring the feeling of simply being connected in such an intimate way.

His nose returned to the shell of your ear and you heard him give a sigh as he finally bottomed out and came to a stop, his fat cock nestled deep within you.

Your own body felt heavy, both with the exquisite, pleasurable stretch of having him inside you and the simple fatigue after having been woken up in the middle of the night.

“Go back to sleep,” he repeated in your ear as he placed your leg back down against the mattress and made sure you were both covered by the duvet.

“You too,” you whispered into the darkness.

You knew you would feel it in the morning, you always did when you had spend a night with him buried inside of you, but you knew it was worth it when you heard his breathing even out before going heavy as he drifted off to sleep; both of you feeling happy and safe, tangled up in one another.

[angelixues]

Merry Christmas! 🎄✨

[mawchops]

Night Shift Part 02

[gravitasmalfunction]

(spoilers up to ep 20) Thank you to The Blossoming Love for blasting the bad aftertaste left by Love Game in Eastern Fantasy right out of my brain.

Mu Xuanling, forced to take the Disillusionment Water, isn't her old self anymore and even though Xie Xuechen has got other urgent matters on his plate, he knows something is up and cares and wants to do something about it. Nan Xuyue knows and cares and wants to help XXC do something about it. Gao Qiumin can tell something has changed, even if she isn't convinced that MXL hasn't just been like that all along. I appreciate that even though MXL's character is currently not the best version of herself, she's still important enough to multiple other characters that they can see she's different and wonder why.

Compare and contrast with LGiEF where nobody in-universe clocked Miaomiao had become a hollow shell of herself, not even her beloved, and the show waited until the very end to confirm that the hollowing out was deliberate and the consequence of an in-world decision. And this after setting up what, until then, had been a great romance with solid beats. But they never made it to a proper third act breakup because one half of the couple had basically stopped existing by then.

I am by no means saying a romance MUST follow the beats in order to be good, but the characters of the main couple are always going to be the main focus of interest. Mind-wiped, amnesiac, bespelled or whatever, it's their relationship with each other and their relationship with the world of the story that we buy into as viewers. If it matters to the characters, it matters to us. I think LGiEF botched its storytelling badly by neglecting to address how and why Miaomiao faded out in the final arc. But The Blossoming Love is powering through all guns blazing for all its characters and for the romance, even while MXL has had her personality altered, and I love it to pieces for going so hard.

[fake-ascension]

MARCH???? WHY DO YOU HAVE THE RENHENG "BEATS UP A CHILD" DIVORCE PHOTO ON YOUR WALL???

[prentissrollins]

Megan Boone as Elizabeth Keen

The Blacklist (2013 - 2023) - 7x08 (5/∞)

[jimmyspades]

"I want you to know, wherever I am, whatever I’m doing, if you are in need, I will be there." THE BLACKLIST 1.10 "Anslo Garrick (No. 16): Conclusion"

[windvexer]

I actually do think that doing magic takes a lot of work and is kinda hard and there aren't very many good shortcuts, and many modern shortcuts actually just amount to leaving out steps, which means you either have to be powerful enough to brute-force it or it fizzles.

Look, I know some people are just much better at magic and witchcraft; anything they do works with little effort, and the lengths some of us have to go to accomplish magic seems bizarre to them. Those people are cool and I wish I was like them but I'm not.

But I also think some of the truth of how to work effective sorcery gets paved over by these "witchcraft has no rules, do anything you want" support posts.

Because A) that is not true, I believe that witchcraft has lots and lots of rules (it's just that nobody else can tell you what they are), and B) I think do anything you want is taken to mean anything you do should work, which is also not true.

I feel like I always see advice given that you don't need to do things (like use physical tools, or cast circles, or whatever). But I never see anyone explaining the techniques and paths of power that are supposed to replace them.

Let's just imagine for a moment that clear quartz really is a universal substitute. Discordians would say that it totally is. So does that mean all you have to do to sub out clear quartz is to just put it on the altar and do the ritual as if it's something else?

Or do you have to do something more?

Do you have to consecrate the stone as being something other than what it is? Do you have to ritually birth it into a new life and baptize it like a baby? Do you have to spend weeks or months honing your technique of focus and beliefs so that you can mentally shift from consensus reality to a personal reality where there is literally no difference between clear quartz and sodalite?

Do you have to raise energies of sodalite and imprint them into the quartz crystal, perhaps working over it for an extended period of time? Do you have to use energy work to tie the clear quartz into Ideal Sodalite so that it becomes like an avatar?

No, you don't have to use physical tools if you don't want to. But that shouldn't be taken to imply that tools are useless or can be replaced in a way that matters by just visualizing that you have them.

A witch spends six months propitiating a tree, ingratiating themselves with the land, offerings and acts of fealty to the tree, a week-long branch harvesting ritual, blood offerings at midnight on a holy day, then another year curing the wood and crafting a wand. Big effort, right?

And you don't need to do that. But if you want that power, what are you going to do instead?

Same with circle-casting. Same with magic on the full moon. No, you don't have to wait until the full moon. You don't have to wait until the moon is in Libra. But there's a really good reason people do those things. So if you want those effects, what actions can replace those effects?

You literally could not do the spell while the full moon is in Libra. That's fine. But then what will bridge the gap? Will you have to raise more energy somewhere else? Include a new aspect? Modify the spell for the moon you can work with?

"You don't have to follow the moon phase for magic" doesn't mean the moon phase is irrelevant and some witches just like to inconvenience themselves for no reason. But it does mean that you can probably adapt your working to overcome the moon being in the inopportune phase.

Every time I talk about how much time, energy, and effort magic can be I feel like someone always replies, "well, it's just not that hard for me! I do what I want with what I have when I need it and it always just works, with very little effort."

Which I think is very great for them, but I also don't think that most people can get results with such low effort.

So anyway my entire point is that I think sometimes the reason people struggle with getting witchcraft to work is because they are operating off of out-of-context soundbites that make it sound like you can just completely cut out some of these foundational concepts of witchcraft.

Maybe you don't have to accomplish those steps in traditional ways. Maybe you don't need all of those steps for every spell you're doing.

But if you've just cut out swaths of steps only because you heard someone say you don't need them (not because of your own experiments working with magic and determining what works best for you), then is there enough left to constitute a functional system of magic?

[lansjue]

THE BLOSSOMING LOVE 千朵桃花一世开 dir. Sam Ho, 2025.

[pigglepiephi]

They both live in houses with death stairs, so no wonder they have no regard for their emotional or mental wellbeing when it comes to relationships

This first episode was confusing but at least you can rely on the stability of seeing this old friend!

[allmyandroids]

Need that tbh 🥹💕