#type: salt

[retroghost16]

I love salt, I'd definitely use a small shaker as a Queen piece in chess, simply because it's one of the best spices.

[sweetoothgirl]

5 Ingredient Salted Chocolate Lace Cookies

[pagan-stitches]

Cleaning with Intention

As a part of my major pre-Spring Equinox cleansing ritual I decided to make some cleansers with intention.

First up is this rose water scrub that I’m going to use to clean up the surface of the bigger of the two altars, which accumulated some wax spots over the Koleda/Christmas holiday. Rose water is used to promote feelings of love and harmony, feelings which I want to send to the deities and ancestral spirits I work with.

It also has salt which is good for removing unwanted spiritual energies.

Ingredients:

1/4 cup baking soda

2 TB water

1 TB coarse sea salt

2 tsp rose water

Directions:

Just stir the ingredients together.

I also made up an all purpose lemon cleaner which I’ll use on the floors and any other surfaces I feel could use a good scrub.

“Lemons have a cut-and-clear effect on a space, and have long been associated with destroying curses and breaking hexes . . . vinegar will help get rid of unwanted energies and protect the home from invaders and malicious forces.”

The intention here is to get rid of habits and any bad energy that has accumulated.

Ingredients:

1 part white vinegar

1 part lemon juice

1 TB lemon extract

2 parts water

Directions:

Mix it all together

[metamorphesque]

i don't pay attention to the world ending. it has ended for me many times and began again in the morning.

― Nayyirah Waheed, Salt

[savorytoothgirl]

Salted Honey Butter Sourdough Parker House Rolls

[wenclair-more-like-whenclair]

All it takes for a character to be interpreted as heterosexual is simply for the character to exist. A character can never kiss a member of the opposite gender, hook up with one, or show any signs of attraction and still be viewed as straight. Meanwhile, two members of the same gender can have the most intimate onscreen relationship, flirt, check each other out, show visible signs of being in love with the other, and somehow none of that is enough to even SUGGEST that they might be queer.

What a gross double standard. Sexuality is not “straight until proven otherwise” like so many believe it to be. Newsflash to all the straight normies out there, your favorite non labeled, sexuality unconfirmed character in your favorite show is NOT STRAIGHT just bc they haven’t been confirmed as queer. Use your fucking brains for once. It’s all about diving into media and picking up on subtext until that subtext suggests queerness. Then, suddenly, everyone loses their fucking ability to interpret a piece of media. Have you considered that: if all signs point to them being gay then maybe they actually really are just gay???

[tharrb]

I thought about this too.

I’ve heard that Marcy couldn’t have grown because Amphibia was her problem, and that her true arc started on earth. The problem with that is 1) the reason she couldn’t grow was because Andrias impaled and got her possessed, and 2) we don’t actually she her arc on earth.

Worse, we spent an entire season showing that her fears were correct; Anne and Sasha are the only friends she’ll ever have, and she can’t survive without them. The show throws her to the proverbial wolfs and expects us to assume everything turns out okay, despite all evidence to the contrary.

Heck, I’d argue that what we see of her in the epilogue isn’t enough. Anne and Sasha have careers befitting their arcs, but Marcy is still clinging to escapism with her career. We don’t her of the friends she made after the move.

And while I hate to admit it, but the scene in all in kinda…falls apart when you look too closely. While this is the angriest Marcy ever got, the anger is directed entirely on herself. She’s takes responsibility for her own actions, but doesn’t hold Aldrich accountable for all the thing that’s been done to her.

What’s more, her decision to go back isn’t about how she’s learned to accept change; it’s because she’s punishing herself. She’s effectively trading one oppressive force for another.

Plus, it’s ultimately futile, as the core just puts her back into the void. The scene impacts nothing, and is never brought up again. It’s inclusion is blatantly just to appease Marcy fans. Matt even said that Marcy redeemed herself in true colors, which makes it redundant.

I don't like complaining about S3 too much, it's kind of a bummer to focus on what I don't like when there's so much I love, but one thing that I can't help but feel disappointed by is how we never got to see the new Marcy.

We got to see the new Sasha all through S3, who is completely different from S1 and S2 Sasha, and she's such a wonderful and loveable person, you can't help but adore her. Peak girlfriend material. It makes her oddly homoerotic friendship with Anne so sweet! And Anne herself, as the literal star of the show, had her development front and center from day 1. All of S1 was about her growth, and while she still had some work to do in S2, by then she had already changed a lot. Much like Sasha, she goes from being a selfish little shit to becoming a noble, honorable young woman, driven by love and responsability, with the emotional intelligence necessary to face any challenges coming her way.

Marcy... doesn't get that chance. The content of her arc is fine - she realizes she was selfish and self-centered, she understands how that's wrong and she decides to be a better person. But when Sasha (and I'm comparing her to Sasha because Anne, as THE protagonist, is not a fair comparison) had like... all of season 2 to change and develop, and half of S3 to truly shine as her new, improved self, Marcy... well, she did get some development in S2, true - the First Temple and New Wartwood are important moments that come to mind, but...

Okay, so, we knew everything about Sasha's situation from the start. She's lying to the other characters but not to the audience, so everything she goes through in Toadcatches, Barrel's Warhammer, the Dinner, Battle of the Bands and True Colors is very visible to us. We see her going up and down and we always understand what's up with her. We get a very clear view into her mind. We know Sasha. Marcy, on the other hand, has been lying to the audience up until True Colors, so everything we knew about her prior to that has to be recontextualized given the new information, and what we inevitably conclude is that nothing she learned was enough to make her question her plan. She understood the concepts, but she didn't apply it to her particular situation. That's not a bad thing! She's just halfway through her arc - accepting the Truth without letting go of the Lie. But when so much of her arc is hidden from the audience and further recontextualized through more flashbacks near the finale, what we get is a very mysterious Marcy who tells us "everything you thought you knew is more complicated that it seemed", and given that this is the season finale, that set-up inevitably promises a deeper exploration of the REAL Marcy in S3. No more scheeming and lying and manipulating, just Marcy in real time, with no need for flashbacks to recontextualize things again.

But S3 gives us very few chances to see Marcy in Real Time. We see her in Olivia and Yunan, All In and The Hardest Thing. Three episodes. I'm not gonna complain about that because I think we all feel the same way. There's no need. But I will insist that a good solution would have been to have at least two or three episodes about Marcy inside the Core. The King and the Core should have been about Marcy uncovering that ancient information in Aldrich's memory without him noticing, for example. This would have been an improvement in several ways:

More Marcy screentime and development

More exploration on the nature of the Core

We have a present day character knowing all about the Box's lore, and it's not just Andrias randomly thinking about in with a vintage filter on.

Marcy having more agency inside the Core in general would have allowed her to fight back in some way, which would be necessary for another change I'd like to suggest below.

Other episodes could be about her "bonding" with Aldrich and slowly realizing he's delulu, her learning about some old Olm lore, and unlocking a secret that will help them later with like, Anne's powers or the Moon or something, and just... her thinking and realizing she fucked up. If the Core knows her memories, it could recreate a more prolongued scenario with Anne and Sasha, maybe a sleepover? In general, I think Marcy would need someone in there to bounce off of, whether it is a bad guy like Aldrich or lifeless projections of Anne and Sasha, or even someone in there that's actually on her side, sick of living forever in this fantasy, maybe.

She needs time to define her new, changed self after learning her lesson, just like Sasha got to do. Because we barely see who Marcy has become after the events of Amphibia. We got like... TWO scenes to tell us ANYTHING about it.

"No! Only a coward would hide away in this place! Well, I reject this sick fantasy, and I reject you!"

"Even if your friends win, your parents will still tear the three of you apart."

"I started this whole mess because I wanted to escape that reality, but I won't run away from it anymore!"

And later near the end:

"I came to this world thinking only of myself. It was wrong of me, and I wish I'd gotten to know you both better"

These are like... the only indicator of the person Marcy became in Amphibia. They're not worthless - she learned to be more aware of the people around her, and to be stronger in the face of change. Her final scene with Aldrich is her most confrontational scene in the show, and certainly her most angry one. Before, she'd only been like... mildly annoyed one time because Anne was being too overprotective, and she glared at Andrias for like two seconds during O&Y but didn't actually say anything. Marcy is not an angry person, and she does seem to be scared of conflict, so to slap Aldrich's hand away, call him a coward, and proudly raise her fist and declare she's done running makes her look much stronger, and I appreciate that. And she does pretty much declare she refuses to be a coward. But this isn't nearly enough. If I want to write fanfic about Marcy post-Amphibia, I shouldn't have to sit down to analyze these two moments to extrapolate what her characterization would have been like. It should be like with Sasha. We know exactly who the new Sasha is, but we never get to see the new Marcy shine. I think that's why her arc feels so rushed in comparison to Sasha, whose beginning of her arc arguably took up one 11 minutes episode, and the rest happened mostly off-screen: the new Sasha was radiant in S3B, even if we didn't see much of the transition.

I know that, due to structural reasons, Marcy wasn't going to have much screentime so they had to rush her arc quite a bit, and while my suggestion to give her more time inside the Core stands, I think that's not enough either. I think she needs time to interact with Anne and Sasha, and also King Andrias, her Amphibia friend. It's hard to think of a solution to this problem given the way the finale is structured, but my first idea is to make it longer: The Beginning of the End stays the same, All In stays the same except for the way Marcy is released: instead of just, cutting a cable, Sasha needs to reach her with the Power of Friendship. Think something like the Running Up That Hill scene from Stranger Things, or the Toothless Found scene from HTTYD2

Because we can't miss a chance to develop Sasha and Marcy's relationship here. AND since they both share the roles of the Betrayer, the Liar, the Manipulator, of Anne's toxic friend in the path of redemption, it's poetic that Sasha, who has held Marcy under her thumb for years, is the one to help her break free, not through brute force like in canon, but by actually putting into practice what she's learned. Kinda like how, in AtLA S3, Zuko is playing the role of group therapist to the rest of the Gaang. Sasha figured things out first, now she wants to help Marcy find redemption too. Make it a callback to Anne's little speech from TBOTE

"It's not easy. Forgiveness is hard, and it can take time. But believe me: it's worth it. I mean, just look at what you and I have now."

Because redemption isn't easy. It's hard, and it can take time. But you still need to show up, even when you think they don't want you, even when you think you ruined everything. Getting up to so the right thing is always worth it.

Of course, if we want Sasha to save Marcy, a little bit of previous development wouldn't hurt. What if we add a little episode in S3A about the girls all thinking about each other? Anne finding a copy of War of the Warlocks that Marcy forgot in her house, Sasha being reminded of Marcy while helping Maddie with curses for the resistance, and Marcy just... thinking about them, in general, while in the Core. A simple 11 minutes segment, 3 minutes and a half of screentime for each of them. You don't need much, just a moment for them to explore their conflicting feelings for each other.

But then... then, we still need to see Marcy - the new Marcy - interact with her friends, so let's add one or two more episodes to the finale, between All In and The Hardest Thing. Maybe we can shift the Olms storyline here? Would that mess with the pacing too much? Tbh the writers did put themselves in a predicament with Marcy, so it's hard to find a perfect solution. I guess we can keep the tension if the moon is falling veeeeeery slowly, giving our girls just enough time for one more quick adventure together while not making it feel like they're taking their sweet time. So we have one or two extra episodes, and what do we do here?

We challenge Marcy. Just like how Sasha was challenged in Commander Anne, Marcy has to prove she's changed too. Tempt her with her past self-centeredness, her possessive instincts, the easy way in which she lies to herself, her impulse to plan around Anne and Sasha and not with them, hiding important information. Her fear of change. She knows what she needs to do, and she's ready to sit with the uncomfortable feeling of change instead of rejecting it immediately. Maybe she has to let Joe Sparrow go, for example, to be with other sparrows or something, idk. Whatever it is, it needs to be an opportunity to show her newfound emotional maturity. Show how, just like Anne and Sasha before her, she became a more noble person, one who, from now on, is honest, selfless and brave. One who embraces change, and who may even seek it out, because she understands this is how you grow.

Anyway. Yeah, that. I guess I'm just disappointed we never got to see the person Marcy became, but at least it's not hard to extrapolate it from what little the show gave us. We're not 100% in the dark. Though it's not nearly enough. If they ever give us more Amphibia, it would be awesome to see more of this new Marcy, but until then, we have a beautiful community here of galaxy brained people to put the pieces together 🥰

[389]

Inside Ukrainian Moria: Huge Artyomsol Salt Mine Deep Under Ground by Ivan R.

[scavengedluxury]

Salt mine, Ocna Mureș, 1930. From the Budapest Municipal Photography Company archive.

[sweetoothgirl]

Flourless Chocolate Cake with Salted Ganache

[jack-of-heartstrings]

"Give it time" was specifically intended as "time for the antikuma effect to build to something more interesting and meaningful than just its immediate effects so far."

Regarding "most of the target audience can drink by now", I could drink before this show started, so I suppose that might affect my readings, but...

At no point did I say they were meant to be equals. They aren't. They are not co-protagonists. He is the deuteragonist and the love interest. That doesn't mean he's incompetent and inferior. It means that they aren't the same, that his strengths and flaws are different, and at the same time, that the primary focus is on her.

This is not a writing flaw, it's just a choice. The show has from the very beginning overtly played with gender roles. Adrien is given far more agency and competency than many female love interests in male-centered western superhero stories, but he is also in many ways "the damsel in distress." This is intentional. He is the "princess" to Marinette's "knight." And while part of that is about "girl power" and normal enough by magical girl standards, that's not the be-all end-all of it. Because he's NOT just that. He IS her hero partner who she's explicitly said and shown many times she deeply relies on. Being able to ever do things without him doesn't mean she never needs him.

And as much as fans want him to do more and complain about him not being useful, the show itself is explicitly about how he doesn't need to be. Adrien, who has had it ingrained in him his entire life that love is something that needs to be earned, struggles to accept that people just care about him for existing, without needing to prove himself. If it was framing him as some useless garbage to discard, he would be discarded by now, but he's precious, beloved, something to cherish and protect. He is the passive yin to Marinette's active yang.

Desperada wasn't about Marinette being wrong to want him. It was about how she often lets her obsession blind her and prioritizes her romantic interest over figuring out what actually works in a specific situation. Adrien was a bad match for the Snake, and got a chance to redeem himself with it a bit as Snake Noir at the end of the season.

I don't really see how Kwamibuster is a mirror episode either, though it did do a wonderful job at showcasing how Marinette's solutions are insanely complex, yet Adrien's, as simple and straightforward as they are, can be equally effective for way less effort. ("I don't know what Plagg was doing at that elementary school.")

But you know who else has wielded 3+ Miraculous at once very effectively, and whose first time doing so gave us a look at the kind of consequence Kwamibuster warned us about? Gabriel, who is much more a mirror and foil to Marinette than Adrien is. She and Adrien are opposites, but they support each other, if in very different ways. If you want highkey parallels, look at Gabriel.

Ultimately, though, it comes down to, do you want to enjoy the show? Are you willing to accept it as it is and look for the interesting parts, or are you only here to be mad that it's not what you wanted it to be? Is the writing bad, or are you trying to order a milkshake at Home Depot?

Ok so the daddycop trailer shows cat getting antikuma'd mid air... and let me just say:

Can we stop Worfing the cat? Like, at every opportunity?

I get that "hero takes a hit" and "hero goes down" are dramatic narrativs beats, and that for structural "shes the healer" reasons these beats cant go to marinette. But in a post-team era? Can those beats please go to other people on occasion?

We literally have 2 heroes with dedicated "meatshield" powers (invulnerable Ivan and nino the shieldbearer). For the "just protect mari" scenario's, and we have an entire b-team that is just as easily resurectable as Adrien.

[celesse]

Because bland is boring 🧂🐱💢

[herpsandbirds]

Hey y'all, it has come to my attention that many of you crave that mineral…

And even though this is specifically a blog for non-mammalian creatures, I feel as if I should meet your basic biological needs.

So, I got y'all some salt licks. Feel free to lick the screen.

[foldingfittedsheets]

My mom suffers from a critical salt deficiency. This is a lie. She just started her life at a baseline of salt much below the average person. Also untrue. She just fuckin loves salt. That one’s real.

My mom’s boundless hunger for salt manifests in a few ways but it’s almost always met with outrage and to be honest I can’t fault the people who serve her food for being infuriated. She even salts her watermelon.

The most memorable occasion for me was at a creperie in Paris. My mom ordered a ham and cheese crepe. Our food arrived, it looked amazing. My dad and I reached for our silverware.

My mother reached for the salt.

It’s critical to know that she did not taste the crepe before reaching. We had no prior frame of reference for their baseline saltiness. Nevertheless. She automatically went straight to needing more salt.

I looked up and saw our server watching my mother with a look of pure indignation and rage. “Mom,” I said urgently, “You didn’t even try it yet.”

She waved me off and salted the crepe before taking a bite and nodding complacent enjoyment. The server did not return to our table of his own volition.

Most recently for her birthday we went to the aquarium. They had a little restaurant on site and my folks got fish and chips. Mom specified she would like salt and ketchup then waited for dad and I to go collect our food.

I picked up our food and asked the cook, “Is there salt packets?”

His head shot up in confused annoyance, “It’s well seasoned,” he said.

“Believe me. My mom would add salt to a salt lick, I won’t be allowed at the table if I don’t bring extra.”

He looked into my eyes and we shared a silent moment of suffering before he pointed to a tiny hidden bin of salt packets. I thanked him and brought my mom her food.

She salted the fries before tasting them and pronounced them very pleasant.

[maxyvert]

👻Ghost Lady process👻

The footage waited years for me, and finally it could become a lil video. >Finished illustration here<