#why should you bother with doing thing when you don't DO thing))

[heroesofchroma]

I stepped with confidence on day 1... Well, night. Close enough at this point.

My batwing stretched softly from my arm with a hint of anxiety as I patrolled, looking for the least moss-coated graves to start with. The place was in massive disrepair thanks to rumors of being haunted. And as I finally found a good grave to start with, kneeling before the stone gently, I could tell why. Especially when a bony, half-rotted hand wrapped around the grave just into the corner of my vision.

With a calm gaze, I looked up and saw beady, sunken eyes of an amphibious-looking face staring down at me from over the grave. I simply smiled and waved as I reached into the bucket and pulled the water-wet brush free, and simply got to work.

The Thing groaned in displeasure, and in an instant I stopped, leaning back. "Oh, I'm sorry. Is this your stone?" I asked calmly.

The ghostly moan of the Thing echoed again, then a second, more mournful one. Its face didn't shift or move, not even its lips. Simply remaining still, a tiny bit more of the face emerging and showing that the jaw was bare bone with sharpened teeth.

"I apologize for intruding. I was hoping to clean it. Maintain your memory," I explained calmly, despite my slowly accelerating heartrate at the sulfurous-smelling frog-breath wafting towards me.

At my words, though, the thing seems to stop. It tilts its head this way and that for a moment before retracting a bit.

I hum, seeing it isn't totally satisfied with the answer, and so I slowly reach into my messenger bag, pulling a small, shiny stone free, as well as a handful of fragrant dried flowers. "Perhaps we can start over. These are for you!" I tried, laying the offering just beside the gravestone the Thing was still hiding behind.

I could see as the Thing's defensive tension gave way to an almost curious, shy nature. I smiled encouragingly as I watched a second left hand reach out from behind the grave and poke gently at the flowers and stone.

In an instant, I watch the stone disappear and both hands disappear behind the grave. I smile wider. "See? I want to be a friend here. Can we be?" I ask softly. The spirit disappears behind the grave and my smile falters. I wait a moment before I sigh and decide to get back to work. I have a job to do, after all.

I manage to clean four graves through the night, though that frog spirit is the only one who seems to bother me. I see a couple of others, whispy things that seem to be peering from behind a fallen curtain, but they don't bother me. I don't even know if they look at me. And whatever they're mourning or visiting, I don't want to interrupt, so I clean.

...

......

............

The next night I find something rather peculiar as I find the first grave I can clean. It's in rough shape, and I don't know what makes me believe I should start with it...

Maybe it's the frog perched atop the crumbling stone.

You've been hired to clean a graveyard every night for 80 bucks an hour. Its haunted. And by god you are going to make that 80 bucks an hour

[uncanny-tranny]

r u chill w non transitioning ppl?

Why wouldn't I be? At one point, every trans person who is transitioning was once someone who wasn't (whether or not that was a choice or their need is a separate discussion).

Hatred of any kind of trans person is not a Righteous or Good Thing - every single trans person has their place, their entitlement to safety, community, and respect of who they are

[restinpeacesensei]

traditional style 💖

[steelthroat]

I'd always thought I preferred the messiest, most chaotic and fucked up people but with a grain of wil and spark that makes them do something over passive people that do nothing wrong, that don't care about anything but themselves and that never help...

AND I WAS RIGHT

People who are willing to try, that give a shit, that MEAN IT when they try to do something, smuah smuah come here here’s your smooches smuah.

[bellepeppertronix]

I love that movie and that book, and both are core memory/personality pillars for me.

So, in their defense, I have some thoughts.

Sorry, OP, I have a Lot of Thoughts:

She doesn't understand time.

She doesn't even understand THE PASSAGE OF TIME. Because unicorns are immortal and exist outside of it. In the book, she RUNS FOR A YEAR STRAIGHT, and only remarks that the animals in the lands she passed through "grew long hair, and then it grew short again".

When Schmendrick temporarily changes her into a human, it is jarring and horrifying because UNICORNS HAVE NO FRAME OF REFERENCE FOR A MORTAL BODY. So she could literally feel herself growing towards death. It's heavily implied that unicorns don't even actually need to EAT.

So her transformation is the opposite of the stories where a beautiful princess is transformed into a bird or something, and it's shocking. She's a graceful, beautiful woman, but she is not HERSELF, and the change gives her insomnia, nightmares, and severe depression.

She is quiet and reserved but not rude, ever. At times she is very mildly sarcastic to Schmendrick, but is never cruel. Even to the witch who held her captive, Mommy Fortuna, she is never cruel. If anything she sounds weary and slightly annoyed, that Mommy Fortuna wants to keep her like a living trinket--but then she even warns her that she should not tamper with real immortal beings.

Also, as a woman and a Black woman, I don't know why, but this has always stuck with me: the unicorns are sapient.

King Haggard wanted ALL OF THEM for himself. For the elusive pleasure of seeing them trapped in the surf, too afraid to even step foot onto the shore.

And yet he never would have spoken to them, never would have tried to know or befriend them.

Because they were THINGS to him. He wanted them, all of them, enough to sell his soul (?) To the Red Bull to keep them all trapped there for himself.

It didn't matter to him that they were minding their own business in their forests and glades. It didn't matter that he likely caused a lot of the desolation on his own lands by imprisoning the unicorns in a narrow spit of ocean that only he had access to.

It didn't matter that the unicorns were sapient magical beings at all, because he never bothered to consider them as anything other than playthings and live anti-depressants.

The Unicorn, or Amalthea, then has to walk around in his decrepit castle, full of images of her real self--but caricatures. She has to be I the same space as a man who thinks of herself and others like her as less than animals, more like tokens, and who would happily have his demonic bull imprison her with the other unicorns. She knows that he knows--he looks at her and accuses her of not being human more than once!--but that even seeing her in a human form and theoretically being able to talk with her, he cannot contain his selfishness or meanness. He says he will allow she and the party to stay there and that he will "...look at them...for awhile..."

Even if she wanted to, she could not tell him any of her truths, because he likely would not have wanted to hear them.

Do you think a man who lived like that, would listen to someone tell him about the way their favorite plum tree dropped blossoms precisely into a moonlit pond? Do you think he would have cared at all, beyond his own bitterness and selfishness?

All of this to say that the movie and book are much deeper than "pretty anemic pony plus her wizard and cook friend go to fight an evil king and a fiery bull monster".

Following the author of The Last Unicorn on Facebook is the only thing that makes being on that site worthwhile.

(source)

[little-whats-her-name]

"I can't hear you over the sound of the eight billion glasses and plates clinking, and the very high possibility that I'm going to lose my job, and the fact that everyone at this charity dinner hates me but we have to act nice to each other, and the weird lighting in this room, and these fucking Spanx!" - Katherine Hastings, probably

[sskk-manifesto]

Ep 5!!!

[goldkirk]

as I'm going back over my past history and items and journals and years, I come across all sorts of things, like the pencil I saved from that so-precious memory from second grade, and a pair of flip flops I've been missing for two years, and [checks notes] the modern-high-school-AU-kidnapped-by-a-serial-killer story I wrote in late high school jdfsjdfsjkjlksfd

[awkward-teabag]

"Seriously considering" with it not being expected to be operational until the mid-2030s with an election a year away and two parties were committed to it over a decade ago without a word since...

I'm very much for passenger rail but I have very little expectations for this to happen given the project was announced in 2021, the winning bidder hasn't been selected yet, there's been no public input, and the whole thing has been in limbo for over a decade.

It smacks of a "concept of a plan" and the Liberals announcing it's considering it (yet again) to try to get votes without breaking election campaign laws with no commitment to follow through on it.

It's not like Trudeau has had a majority for just shy of a decade, the framework of this hasn't existed before that, or there hasn't been demand for this if it was really such a priority to get done.

Also with VIA being involved, I doubt it will be affordable. Reliability may increase by not having to give way to freight trains (frequency is also unknown and they aren't big on frequency to begin with) but the company has jumped feet first into embracing air travel baggage fees and restrictions while charging as much or more than a plane ticket would be.

It's almost like selling off nationalized rail to freight companies was a bad thing, as was expecting a Crown corp to figure out its own funding to minimize how much the government subsidizes.

The federal government is "seriously" considering building the country's first high-speed rail link between Quebec City and Toronto, says Public Services and Procurement Minister Jean-Yves Duclos. Ottawa announced plans back in 2021 to build what it called a "high-frequency" (HFR) rail corridor with stops in Toronto, Peterborough, Ottawa, Montreal, Trois-Rivières, Laval and Quebec City. At the time, the government estimated the cost at between $6 billion and $12 billion. The federal government identified three qualified bidders for the project last year. A spokesperson for VIA HFR, the VIA Rail subsidiary set up to oversee the project, said the bidders have been asked to provide the government with two options: a "conventional" rail network with trains reaching speeds of 200 km/h, and a network with trains reaching speeds "comparable to those of European trains."

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Tagging: @newsfromstolenland

[keeps-ache]

hm. i do not remember the screenshot being this big hfvsh

[thenwethrowitonthefire]

Shout-out to everyone who survived a "fun" easter with the family

[tevatron]

i'm so glad i won't be working with my pi after this month. i think i've reached my limit. i just can't deal with her anymore

[kaurwreck]

if you have a question, it is wholly okay and arguably important that you at least sometimes look up the answer. if you aren't sure about information you want to share on social media, you can also double check its veracity prior to sharing. if you still aren't sure after searching for more information yourself, then asking strangers on the internet is fine, but confirm any answers you receive prior to internalizing them. (which you can do by using key terms from others' answers in your subsequent search strings.)

this won't stop you from interacting with others on tumblr dot com. instead, it will deepen those interactions, improve your digital literacy, and prevent me from manifesting as your sleep paralysis demon.

[hopefulqueer]

I'm starting to think the reason I'm not as good of a writer as I want to be is because I like writing more than I like reading.

[consolecadet]

I’ve faced multiple back surgeries with moderate stoicism, still drive despite experiencing a car-totaling mid-speed collision, continued to live in the same town for years as someone who had repeatedly tried to choke me out, and signed up for a 4-hour session for my first tattoo because I was not afraid of the pain…but I am only now voluntarily getting a Steam account because I feel embarrassed to have been afraid to play a video game for twenty seven years. I still don’t know why other than that Video Games Are For Other (“Normal”?) People. I am the kind of person who is Not Allowed To Play Video Games. What kind of person is that? The kind that’s not allowed.

I realize that this is insane. I know literally none of you care whether or not I play a video game. The only thing any of you are likely to judge me about from this post is "being extremely weird about trying to do something many of your peers have been casually doing for fun for years". And yet even posting the words "I am getting a Steam account" to a public forum where people kinda know who I am is requiring me to muster bewildering amounts of courage.

Anyway, the hidden rule forbidding me from attempting to play a video game or talking about wanting to do so is just made up bullshit that doesn't exist, so I will ignore it and do whatever I want. If I realize I want it.

[arklayraven]

I swear the fact some of us had to make new special tags just because some people hate that we talk negative about their special characters...Really is damn ridiculous.