the-lighthouse-lit

[the-lighthouse-lit]

Once the results are done, I'll multiply 255 to the decimal version of the percentage, and see what color we make!!

[the-lighthouse-lit]

[the-lighthouse-lit]

People don’t realize how much we sound like other things because we are created from the same laws of physics. “That potato in the microwave sounds like it’s screaming” is funny because it really is, air is vibrating out of a small hole which is how our throat works too. The babbling river that sounds like humans whispering, that’s because it’s a wet hollow cave with echo delivering the same functionality. The river doesn’t just sound like us, we sound like a river. They use a metal trashcan to create a lion’s roar for movie sound effects. But the truth is, not only does a trashcan sound like a lion, a lion sounds like a trashcan. Cars purr when you turn them on. Everything is like everything else. Inanimate objects are not so far away from life as it seems.

Remember the next time you feel more alone in the company of large buildings, or maybe less alone among the rocks of the river, that they are not completely unlike the parts of you.

[the-lighthouse-lit]

Now up on AO3!

BBRae Week Day 2: “I wasn't expecting that”

Length: 1,384 words

Rating: K

@bbraeweek2025 📣

───

I am not a dog.

I don’t know why I look like one. I don’t know how I ended up in this mess.

I am on the curb, in the rain, on a staring contest with the girl shaking the bowl -my bowl- and frowning at me from under her porch.

At this point I can tell what she’s thinking from far away. There’s a storm. You’re getting wet and cold for no reason. But last time she tried to be sneaky and hook a collar on me while I ate from that bowl. I need her to know I’m drawing the line: I’m not okay with that.

Finally she huffs -I can’t hear it with the rain being so loud, but I see the gesture-, leaves my bowl on the ground and goes back inside. I wait a few seconds before I go eat.

─

The first time I met her, wandering her neighborhood, I thought I would’ve given anything to be taken into a family and adopted. I think I hadn’t looked like a dog for long at that point, but I already felt like I’d been forsaken forever. I was hungry, I was cold, I was lost and unsafe: all problems I had to clear out before I even got to my main problem of why I looked like a dog.

I’d tried my luck with all the strangers I came across, quickly getting a crash course on how to read people from a very low vantage point, from the way their jaws set and what their hands did. Some people shot me a dirty look, and that was my only cue to get out of the way before they kicked. A lot stopped to coo at me, some of those to pet me. But no food; no taking me along with them.

Across her house is where I stopped to think, to try to come up with a plan. Where did abandoned dogs go? How did one go about being adopted? Were there tricks I could learn to endear myself to people? Was it all a game of numbers? How did I know the right ones to follow? I didn’t want to get to the point of turning myself in at a shelter, and I didn’t even know how I’d find one. I was lost—the city looked so different from down here.

That’s when a door opened, and a girl left her house, crossed the street and set a bowl of food in front of me. That whole process she said not a word—like she was used to making herself understood without them. She just looked at me, and she only looked at me to make sure I knew the bowl was for me.

Seeing as I still didn’t move, she spoke. “Come. Eat.”

Just like that. Cold and clinical. A little impatient.

After all the people who’d stopped to pet me and gotten away quickly when I’d tried to follow them, after all the parents who’d turned kids away from me; after all the people who’d smiled at me performatively while they kept walking, and those who’d just passed by pretending not to see me, this girl had come out of her house, all comfy clothes and loose hair trailing behind her, just to connect me, unsmiling, to a plate of food.

She only turned to go back to her house once she saw I was eating. I was in love by the time she’d crossed the street.

─

But that’s the whole reason I can’t let her adopt me.

On one of those evenings she said it for the first time. “Do you want to be my dog? I think you like it here. I’d take care of you, you’d take care of me. How’s that sound?”

I didn’t see it immediately. At first, I was just glad to have something stable going for me.

We established a routine where she’d feed me before leaving home for work and on her return. I’d be there waiting patiently when she returned in the afternoon, she’d go inside for a bit and come out in clean clothes and wet hair, she’d bring me food and we’d hang out. I’d always eat on her porch, right by her door. Eventually we moved on from the raw minced meat she’d given me the first few times into actual dog food. When she’d pet me, it was like she’d never had a pet before.

The reality hit me only when she put it like that. I ran off, all the way across the street.

When I looked back, her hand was hovering where she’d been petting me a moment ago. I heard her say, “Well I wasn’t expecting that.”

Message received, I’d thought. I’m not up for adoption.

─

But evidently, I didn’t make myself understood like I thought I had.

Over the next couple of days, she pushed the offer. First, she showed me a leash. I answered that by running off. This began a silent war.

She’d come at me with a leash or a carrier, trying for hours to get me to at least smell it, while I gave a step back for her every step forward. Finally she started just leaving her back door open, and only offering me the bowl inside her house.

I refused to go in.

“Come on,” she tells me from her living room, exasperated. “It’s the same as outside, but it’s warm and there’s always food.”

But it’s not the same. She doesn’t know what she’s offering me. Or rather, who she’s offering it to.

I’m not a dog. I only look like one. How can I enter her house under false pretenses?

“I’m an introvert too. It’s not like you have to be around me all the time.”

I bark—I’m not an introvert at all. More to the point, I don’t want to keep finding out stuff about her when she doesn’t know I understand.

She picks up my bowl and shakes it. I stand in anticipation. Seeing my interest, she tries, one last time, to place it inside next to her. I sit again.

Finally she sighs and puts the bowl outside. The way she’s glaring at me makes my heart ache.

“This isn’t like me, you know!”

That’s all she says. Then she goes back inside and closes the door.

I don’t know what she meant, and that’s exactly the thing. I don’t want to know what she meant. Not like this!

I want to know her as human. I want her to tell me the story of how she got a weirdly smart dog that won’t let her adopt him over a glass of wine, while she’s all made up and coy, and I’m trying half-heartedly not to stare at her the whole time.

I give it a few seconds after she’s closed the door to eat. I think she’s glad when I do eat, no matter how frustrated I make her otherwise.

─

I’ve called a ceasefire because she hasn’t tried to trap, lure or leash me in a few days. After the storm didn’t make me fold, she seems to have given up. Tonight, I let her pet me comfortably because she closed the door when she came out to feed me. It's bittersweet.

She talks to me like you’d talk to a pet; stilted, more for herself than for me, and trusting her tone to carry her meaning. Right now she says, like we’ve been arguing out loud all along, “But you can’t be an outside dog. Not with the cold coming.”

Well. I had hoped to resolve my situation before then, but she’s right. I leaned in on her, as if to show her I saw the direness of the situation too. What the hell are we gonna do, girl?

“You’re too smart for your own good. I’ve never seen a dog so smart.”

Funny. Before this, I remember being called dumb for the better part of my life.

“Maybe I could get a catio…”

I don’t bark to tell her she got the wrong species. I can appreciate she said it as shorthand, because she’s deep in thought. And maybe there isn’t a catio equivalent for dogs.

I wouldn’t know. Truth is, I was a cat person myself before all this.

───

Notes:

The fact this is out today is a MIRACLE, seeing as my brain was living two whole weeks in the past and I was still at the vague stage of ‘wow I need to get those things done for BBRae Week ❤️’.

I’m also doing Day 6. It seems tradition now for me to shoot for 3 prompts and manage to do 2 *shrug*

Anyway, enjoy this weird little story with a conundrum that came right the fuck out of nowhere and even I don’t know how they solve. ❤️❤️❤️

[the-lighthouse-lit]

i don’t think people understand how much of life is grief. not just people dying, but losing the version of yourself you thought you’d become. grieving the city you had to leave. the friends you lost not in argument, but in silence. the summer that will never come back. the feeling that maybe you peaked at 12 when you were reading books under the covers and believing in forever

[the-lighthouse-lit]

Souvenir shop

[the-lighthouse-lit]

wikipedia no longer being anywhere near the top of search results when looking up anything feels eviscerating

[the-lighthouse-lit]

BBRae Week Day 2: “I wasn't expecting that”

Length: 1,384 words

Rating: K

@bbraeweek2025 📣

───

I am not a dog.

I don’t know why I look like one. I don’t know how I ended up in this mess.

I am on the curb, in the rain, on a staring contest with the girl shaking the bowl -my bowl- and frowning at me from under her porch.

At this point I can tell what she’s thinking from far away. There’s a storm. You’re getting wet and cold for no reason. But last time she tried to be sneaky and hook a collar on me while I ate from that bowl. I need her to know I’m drawing the line: I’m not okay with that.

Finally she huffs -I can’t hear it with the rain being so loud, but I see the gesture-, leaves my bowl on the ground and goes back inside. I wait a few seconds before I go eat.

─

The first time I met her, wandering her neighborhood, I thought I would’ve given anything to be taken into a family and adopted. I think I hadn’t looked like a dog for long at that point, but I already felt like I’d been forsaken forever. I was hungry, I was cold, I was lost and unsafe: all problems I had to clear out before I even got to my main problem of why I looked like a dog.

I’d tried my luck with all the strangers I came across, quickly getting a crash course on how to read people from a very low vantage point, from the way their jaws set and what their hands did. Some people shot me a dirty look, and that was my only cue to get out of the way before they kicked. A lot stopped to coo at me, some of those to pet me. But no food; no taking me along with them.

Across her house is where I stopped to think, to try to come up with a plan. Where did abandoned dogs go? How did one go about being adopted? Were there tricks I could learn to endear myself to people? Was it all a game of numbers? How did I know the right ones to follow? I didn’t want to get to the point of turning myself in at a shelter, and I didn’t even know how I’d find one. I was lost—the city looked so different from down here.

That’s when a door opened, and a girl left her house, crossed the street and set a bowl of food in front of me. That whole process she said not a word—like she was used to making herself understood without them. She just looked at me, and she only looked at me to make sure I knew the bowl was for me.

Seeing as I still didn’t move, she spoke. “Come. Eat.”

Just like that. Cold and clinical. A little impatient.

After all the people who’d stopped to pet me and gotten away quickly when I’d tried to follow them, after all the parents who’d turned kids away from me; after all the people who’d smiled at me performatively while they kept walking, and those who’d just passed by pretending not to see me, this girl had come out of her house, all comfy clothes and loose hair trailing behind her, just to connect me, unsmiling, to a plate of food.

She only turned to go back to her house once she saw I was eating. I was in love by the time she’d crossed the street.

─

But that’s the whole reason I can’t let her adopt me.

On one of those evenings she said it for the first time. “Do you want to be my dog? I think you like it here. I’d take care of you, you’d take care of me. How’s that sound?”

I didn’t see it immediately. At first, I was just glad to have something stable going for me.

We established a routine where she’d feed me before leaving home for work and on her return. I’d be there waiting patiently when she returned in the afternoon, she’d go inside for a bit and come out in clean clothes and wet hair, she’d bring me food and we’d hang out. I’d always eat on her porch, right by her door. Eventually we moved on from the raw minced meat she’d given me the first few times into actual dog food. When she’d pet me, it was like she’d never had a pet before.

The reality hit me only when she put it like that. I ran off, all the way across the street.

When I looked back, her hand was hovering where she’d been petting me a moment ago. I heard her say, “Well I wasn’t expecting that.”

Message received, I’d thought. I’m not up for adoption.

─

But evidently, I didn’t make myself understood like I thought I had.

Over the next couple of days, she pushed the offer. First, she showed me a leash. I answered that by running off. This began a silent war.

She’d come at me with a leash or a carrier, trying for hours to get me to at least smell it, while I gave a step back for her every step forward. Finally she started just leaving her back door open, and only offering me the bowl inside her house.

I refused to go in.

“Come on,” she tells me from her living room, exasperated. “It’s the same as outside, but it’s warm and there’s always food.”

But it’s not the same. She doesn’t know what she’s offering me. Or rather, who she’s offering it to.

I’m not a dog. I only look like one. How can I enter her house under false pretenses?

“I’m an introvert too. It’s not like you have to be around me all the time.”

I bark—I’m not an introvert at all. More to the point, I don’t want to keep finding out stuff about her when she doesn’t know I understand.

She picks up my bowl and shakes it. I stand in anticipation. Seeing my interest, she tries, one last time, to place it inside next to her. I sit again.

Finally she sighs and puts the bowl outside. The way she’s glaring at me makes my heart ache.

“This isn’t like me, you know!”

That’s all she says. Then she goes back inside and closes the door.

I don’t know what she meant, and that’s exactly the thing. I don’t want to know what she meant. Not like this!

I want to know her as human. I want her to tell me the story of how she got a weirdly smart dog that won’t let her adopt him over a glass of wine, while she’s all made up and coy, and I’m trying half-heartedly not to stare at her the whole time.

I give it a few seconds after she’s closed the door to eat. I think she’s glad when I do eat, no matter how frustrated I make her otherwise.

─

I’ve called a ceasefire because she hasn’t tried to trap, lure or leash me in a few days. After the storm didn’t make me fold, she seems to have given up. Tonight, I let her pet me comfortably because she closed the door when she came out to feed me. It's bittersweet.

She talks to me like you’d talk to a pet; stilted, more for herself than for me, and trusting her tone to carry her meaning. Right now she says, like we’ve been arguing out loud all along, “But you can’t be an outside dog. Not with the cold coming.”

Well. I had hoped to resolve my situation before then, but she’s right. I leaned in on her, as if to show her I saw the direness of the situation too. What the hell are we gonna do, girl?

“You’re too smart for your own good. I’ve never seen a dog so smart.”

Funny. Before this, I remember being called dumb for the better part of my life.

“Maybe I could get a catio…”

I don’t bark to tell her she got the wrong species. I can appreciate she said it as shorthand, because she’s deep in thought. And maybe there isn’t a catio equivalent for dogs.

I wouldn’t know. Truth is, I was a cat person myself before all this.

───

Notes:

The fact this is out today is a MIRACLE, seeing as my brain was living two whole weeks in the past and I was still at the vague stage of ‘wow I need to get those things done for BBRae Week ❤️’.

I’m also doing Day 6. It seems tradition now for me to shoot for 3 prompts and manage to do 2 *shrug*

Anyway, enjoy this weird little story with a conundrum that came right the fuck out of nowhere and even I don’t know how they solve. ❤️❤️❤️

[the-lighthouse-lit]

As AI art gets harder to clock, I feel like we are going to need to have a discussion about attribution and it's probably going to bum some people out.

Because the surest way to avoid platforming, reblogging, or encouraging AI art posting is to know where every image you share originated and that's 1) boring, tedious research and 2) extremely limiting in what you feel you can reblog. But if unattributed images never gets traction, people will start attributing their images.

I've been guilty of this in the past, but for a while now it's been my policy that if I can't verify the origin, I don't share the image. That goes for stuff like screen grabs of headlines too -- more than once I've avoided spreading misinformation by saving a post to research before I reblog, then seeing the post refuted before I've been able to verify it.

And I usually try to attribute photos I take -- case in point, the "woman with shrimp" post gets a lot of attention but not one comment about it being AI, despite it being pretty similar to something you'd get from an AI. That's because I clearly state it's in a museum and link to its catalogue page.

I'm not saying this to scold anyone -- I think yelling at the Internet to cite its sources is very much a losing game -- but because I don't see this discussed much. We're such fertile ground to be fooled by AI art because we've grown accustomed to not questioning the origins of any given image. And of course I also want to encourage both OPs to attribute their images and rebloggers to verify unattributed ones.

[the-lighthouse-lit]

optimism

(words by mog)

[the-lighthouse-lit]

Do you have a custom ringtone? (the one you have to download online yourself and set it up instead of just choosing one of a phone presets)

[the-lighthouse-lit]

[the-lighthouse-lit]

[the-lighthouse-lit]

poppy meadow; antelope valley, california

instagram - twitter - website

[the-lighthouse-lit]

I got this while scrolling on instagram to try to convince me to join threads and I—

We did it. We finally saved her.

[the-lighthouse-lit]

WIP Tag Game

I have been tagged by the lovely @badbunny139 to share sentences of my WIPs starting with letters from the word: 🐺 G R O W L 🐺

All of these snippets come from the epilogue of "Nevermore Records", which I am hoping to publish in the very, very near future. 🤞 I'll leave the excerpts under the cut.

I tag @the-lighthouse-lit and @themoonlitsojourner, and your word is: 🐺 T A I L 🐺. (I have no idea if you two are still writing, but if you are, go for it!)

Gar couldn’t help himself from interjecting, “We’re going international?!”

“Technically, we already have,” Dick answered. “Or have you forgotten Toronto and Vancouver, Mr. Stagedive?”

The band launched into reminiscing over their eventful debut tour a year ago, bringing up old jokes and basking in nostalgia. Raven cleared her throat aggressively to get them back on track.

“Speaking of Canadian forays, you’ve been shortlisted to headline Day 2 of the Osheaga Music Festival in Montreal this summer.”

While Gar and Kory squealed in delight, Victor rubbed his chin thoughtfully. “Is that going to conflict with the bachelor party?”

Raven had offered to edit his speech several times in the previous week, but Garfield remained cagey.

“Nah, it’s okay. It is what it is at this point. If I keep re-reading my notes, I’m gonna throw up.”

For a man who normally thrived in the spotlight, Raven knew that Garfield was putting far too much pressure on himself if he was feeling this way. She moved her hand to his face and cupped it gently, scratching the barest hints of stubble affectionately.

“Got your lucky charm?”

Onstage, Honey and the Bees forwent their ska punk sound to perform covers of jazz standards and romantic ballads. 

L is for the way you look at me

O is for the only one I see

V is very, very extraordinary

E is even more than anyone that you adore can

When Gar saw Raven’s eyes twinkle with interest, he went off path and pulled her with him, leading them to sit on a large rock that was perched up against the water. 

“All we need is a rowboat, a talking hermit crab and a chorus of waterbirds, and we’d be all set,” Gar said, swinging an arm around Raven’s shoulders.

“Is that your way of saying that you’d like my voice stolen by a sea witch as well?” was Raven’s blithe reply.

“Living with you hasn’t been a picnic for me either, you know. You’re always working, and you say you’ll clean up after I cook, but you leave pans to ‘soak’ for days at a time. And you used my special Japanese chef’s knife to open mail of all things!”

Raven snorted lightly. “Well if that’s how you really feel, then why bring up marriage?”

“Because I love you, duh!” Gar exclaimed, squeezing Raven’s hands right back.