Reblog to give an ancient spirit lurking in your room a nice hot bowl of soup
Upon the hearth the fire is red, Beneath the roof there is a bed; But not yet weary are our feet, Still round the corner we may meet A sudden tree or standing stone That none have seen but we alone. Tree and flower and leaf and grass, Let them pass! Let them pass! Hill and water under sky, Pass them by! Pass them by! Still round the corner there may wait A new road or a secret gate, And though we pass them by today, Tomorrow we may come this way And take the hidden paths that run Towards the Moon or to the Sun. Apple, thorn, and nut and sloe, Let them go! Let them go! Sand and stone and pool and dell, Fare you well! Fare you well! Home is behind, the world ahead, And there are many paths to tread Through shadows to the edge of night, Until the stars are all alight. Then world behind and home ahead, We’ll wander back to home and bed. Mist and twilight, cloud and shade, Away shall fade! Away shall fade! Fire and lamp, and meat and bread, And then to bed! And then to bed!
- “They began to hum softly, as hobbits have a way of doing as they walk along, especially when they are drawing near to home at night. With most hobbits it is a supper-song or a bed-song; but these hobbits hummed a walking-song. Bilbo Baggins had made the words, to a tune that was as old as the hills, and taught it to Frodo as they walked in the lanes of the Water-valley and talked about Adventure.“ The hobbits on their quest to Rivendell. Fellowship of the Ring, Three is Company.
I lost my best friend 3 years ago- not lost as in dead but lost as in we only text each other on our birthdays now. Movies and books don't tell you that a friendship dying is like the sinking of a ship, you try to get higher and higher and hold onto the rails and unanswered texts, the captain tries to steer it to safety and salvage pieces of two broken hearts until you're left with memories of what once was. We were friends for a decade and knew each other's diaries by heart, I still remember her phone number and the way she took her coffee. Seeing her in streets is like breathing in a scent you forgot you knew but it immediately takes you back to a summer in '07.
Movies and books also don't tell you that friendships don't just end after one fight or incident, it's like the rusting of a bridge, the slow decay of flesh and bones and secrets. It took weeks, months- until one day I woke up and I realized I hadn't thought of her in a while. And I wrote a poem that day and I titled it 'The dying of a best friend' and I put all my love for her in a tiny box with my half of the matching pendant of a dolphin we had and stored them in a corner of my heart under the heading Grief. Where else can one hide unspent love?
It's been 3 years since I lost my best friend, lost as in I still carry our secrets in a tiny box but we only text each other on our birthdays.
-Ritika Jyala, excerpt from The world is a sphere of ice and our hands are made of fire
Edit: here's the visualizer for this piece
He asked me when I fell in love with him and I knew it sounded dramatic to say the moment I saw him, so I told him this story of my grandma who had Alzheimer's- she forgot her name and the words for fruit and food, she forgot her address and how to use the washroom, all her life lost to the disease. The only thing she remembered was her son's name and when that began to fade, the one thing she always remembered was that she loved him, even in illness, even in insanity. She saw this 6 foot 2 man with a scrubby beard and she didn't know him but she said she trusted him, she asked him to hold her hand when she died. When does memory end and love begin? All I know is- she loved him before she remembered him.
-Ritika Jyala, excerpt from The world is a sphere of ice and our hands are made of fire
Oscar Wilde, De Profundis // @i-wrotethisforme // Jorge Louis Berges // @smokeinsilence //@viridianmasquerade //Jorge Louis Berges // @honeytuesday // Kaveh Akbar // F. Scott Fitzgerald // AKR //Olivie Blake, from “Alone With You in the Ether” // Kaveh Akbar, Pilgrimage
Unique Podcasts:
If you’re looking for something different, try one of these:
What’s the Frequency
What’s The Frequency is a psychedelic noir audio drama podcast set in 1940s Los Angeles. Recently radio broadcasts in the city have been reduced to static, leaving a popular radio serial as the only remaining show on the air. Even then the show finds itself continuously interrupted by a mysterious broadcast. A lone distorted voice reaching out for help. Follow Walter “Troubles” Mix and his partner Whitney as they search for a missing writer and navigate through a city quickly falling into madness. Could the mysterious voice be the culprit? Will anyone be able to stop the madness from spreading? And… What’s The Frequency?
Why I love it: This podcast has some of the best and most loveable main characters ever written.
Alba Salix, Royal Physician
A witch, her apprentice, and her fairy herbalist treat the ills of a fairy-tale kingdom.
Why I love it: A fantasy podcast that not D&D or based on D&D? What? Also, Its absolutely hilarious once you get over Magnus’s voice.
Windfall
Ever since the castle first appeared in the sky above the city of Windfall, its residents have been building upward. Now the city consists of towers where the wealthiest residents live at the top while the poor eke out a living on the ground. Our podcast follows Cas, Shaima, and Argus, three brothers who live with their Uncle Vern after being orphaned during the grounder rebellion twenty years earlier. When Cas’s best friend, Kendall, is offered a position with the Wolfpac, Windfall’s military cult that acts as the city’s police, Cas is forced to decide where his loyalties lie. Meanwhile, something sinister looms over the city itself, threatening the lives of all who live in Windfall, from the wealthiest residents to the ground-level poor.
Why I love it: This is so well written, and so well voiced, and the sound design is amazing, and I don’t understand why it doesn’t have a cult following to be honest.
Time: Bombs
Created, written, recorded, produced, and released in just one week, Time Bombs is a new audio drama podcast about the hilarious world of bomb disposal. From the team behind the Webby Award nominated sci-fi audio drama Wolf 359, ride along with EOD technician Simon Teller on the busiest night of the year for him and his team - when business is, quite literally, booming.
Why I love it: Its literally the same team that made my favorite podcast ever of course I love it.
StarTripper!!
Feston Pyxis, native of the bureaucracy planet Lorvin, has left it all behind! He’s said his goodbyes, he’s sold all his B-movie memorabilia, and he’s bought a Physiclast QCS-25 K-series ship, known to the wise as a “StarTripper.” Together with the onboard assistant PROXY, Feston’s looking for any and every good time there is to be had across the stars!
Why I love it: Its actually happy. There are so many sad podcasts with angst and inetemse emotion and this was something I could just…. Enjoy? With no hurt? Yes!
Zero Hours:
Zero Hours is an anthology series, where every story is a different take on the end of the world - or at least something that feels like the end of the world. Each episode is organized around a kind of apocalypse, whether the cataclysm is planetary or personal. The stories are also set in succeeding centuries, with 99-year intervals separating each episode. The show begins in the past, catches up to the present, and eventually overtakes it.
Some installments are darkly comedic, others grimly contemplative, and others still thrillingly contentious. But they all explore the same question: how do we keep going when the world is crashing down around us? Again and again, issues of survival, trust, and personhood will plague our characters as they attempt to navigate dangerous, changing circumstances and figure out how to avert The End, or at least how to meet it.
Why I love it: This was also made by the team behind Wolf 359, and its such a unique concept.
Fairy Tales for Unwanted Children
Imagine if fairy tales were written like episodes of the Twilight Zone. Now imagine listening to them while happy music plays in the background.
Why I love it: I love the Twilight Zone, and nothing really filled that gap after I watched every episode ever produced. But Fairy Tales for unwanted children fills my need for more Grimm’s fairy tales and more twilight zone at the same time!
Janus Descending
Janus Descending is a limited series, science fiction/horror audio drama told through single perspective narration. The story follows the arrival of two xenoarcheologists, Peter and Chel, on a small world orbiting a binary star. But what starts off as an expedition to survey the planet and the remains of a lost alien civilization, turns into a monstrous game of cat and mouse, as the two scientists are left to face the creatures that killed the planet in the first place. Told from alternating perspectives, Janus Descending is an experience of crossing timelines, as Peter describes the nightmare from end to beginning, and Chel, from beginning to the end.
Why I love it: Watching it all come together as Peter slowly works his way backwards through the story, and Chel forwards, was fascinating.
The Antique Shop
In desperate need of a job, Maya finds work in an old antique shop owned by a mysterious woman. The more time she spends in the shop the further the real world becomes, and Maya soon begins to realize that nothing is as it seems.
Why I love it: This is the Genre that just Hits The Spot. It’s like Howls moving castle (Book version) but podcast form and slightly darker. Why is there not a bigger following for this podcast? It deserves a bigger following!
Podcasts I enjoy in no particular order:
Spines (love): spooky, creepy, body horror
King Falls Am: sci-fi, small town, spooky
Mirrors: spooky, multiple narrators, sci-fi
Limetown: spooky, small town, creepy
I Am In Eskew (love): horror, absurdism, multiple narrators
The Magnus Archives (love): Horror, creepy, sure is a podcast
Within The Wires: sci-fi, dystopian future, multiple narrators
We Fix Space Junk: sci-fi, comedy, fun
Wolf 359 (love): sci-fi, character focus, feelings
Camp Here And There: horror, comedy, character focus
Old Gods Of Appalachia (love): horror, spooky, southern gothic
Neighbourly (love): small town, spooky, horror adjacent
The Strange Case Of The Starship Iris: (love) sci-fi, emotions, sci-fi politics
Welcome To Night Vale: spooky, you already know what night vale is
Unwell: Magic, spooky, midwestern gothic
Alice Isn’t Dead (love): road trip, horror, creepy
My Brother, My Brother And Me: comedy, bad advice, talking
Unseen: Magic, long breaks, please upload more frequently
The Penumbra Podcast (Juno Steel) (love): sci-fi, noir detective, RITA!
The Penumbra Podcast (Second Citadel): high fantasy, knights, funny
Jar Of Rebuke (love): creepy, character focus, notdeer
[id: screenshots of tiktok captions. the images say, “but the only reason we still love princess diana is because she did not have the time to disappoint us.”]
begging queer kids to read up on princess diana’s involvement with the community. yes, she was a rich, pretty monarch. yes, she died young.
but the reason why queer people love her is because she used her privilege during the aids crisis to advocate for sick queer men, when very few others would - much less someone of her status.
diana spent years advocating for the health and care of queer people with hiv/aids. in 1987, at the height of the epidemic, she opened the first specialist clinic dedicated to treating aids patients (the first clinic of it’s kind in the uk).
she also fought public hysteria by hugging and shaking bare hands with aids patients, at a time when aids was thought to be spread by skin to skin contact. not only that, she visited patients in the clinic regularly and even comforted them through their sickness.
and when queen elizabeth told her to try focusing on “something more pleasant”?
diana ignored her and kept fighting.
and this is only her work towards the aids crisis. she publicly called out the royal family, brought attention to numerous world issues, and was known as an advocate for empathy and kindness. she’s known and loved as the people’s princess for good reason
It is in these little details that we see ourselves, that we define how we are not others, and thus how we are ourselves. When confronted with someone whose “normal” is not our “normal,” we are forced to confront the most frightening prospect of all: that there is no such thing as “normal.” Just the accidental cultural moment we happened to be born into, a cultural happenstance that never existed before, and will never exist again. Our idea of “normal” is a city built on sand. For instance, for us, our city is literally built on sand and this is our “normal.” We resist difference because it requires we acknowledge that the culture we grew up with as “normal” is just a momentary accident. It requires we accept that the world we were born into will never be the same as the world we die in. The longer we live, the more we become interlopers, even in our home towns. But, if we’d let it happen, also, the more we will learn.
Welcome to Night Vale, episode 83: One Normal Town
Nita: A pessimist sees a dark tunnel. Diana: An optimist sees light at the end of the tunnel. Kovit: A realist sees a freight train. Adair: The train driver sees 3 idiots standing on the train tracks.
ascending-conures-deactivated20
this has been in the drafts for a while
percy just existing and half the main characters in the pjo series falling in love with him is so funny to me… like he’s this greasy fifteen year old boy he hasn’t washed his chb shirt and same ratty pair of jeans in like a week and he’s like in his own head half the time so you say something to him and he’s like “what?” and the only thing he talks about ever is how cool his mom is and yet everyone flocks to him like he’s a celebrity. like go white boy go
please read.
I can’t believe I have to write this as I’m sobbing. I was just turned away from a shelter with my sister because I need personal support workers to come in and help me. When I spoke to the intake worker on the phone, they were ready to give my sister and I a spot at a live in shelter. As soon as I brought up the fact that I need a personal support worker, they said they couldn’t accept me unless I’m able to do all my own personal care. It’s getting too hard for my sister to help me because she’s disabled as well.
As a result of this discrimination, I literally have nowhere to go tonight. It’s already hard being a black, disabled nonbinary lesbian in a society that ostracizes me. The reasons they gave me for not allowing personal support workers to support me in the shelter is that it is a requirement to have a fixed address and because of this, it could be putting personal support workers at risk because of the uncertain environment they may be going into.
I completely agree that personal support workers deserve safety in whatever situation they go into. However, I also deserve a roof over my head. I shouldn’t have to be broken up from my sister who struggles in a lot of ways as well, but she deserves shelter too, so she’ll be staying without me.
I don’t know where I’m going yet as the hospital says we can’t stay with dad tonight. I’m so anxious. Please share this and let’s make change. I will find somewhere for the night, don’t worry, but this has lit a fire underneath me.
Thank you in advance to anyone who helps get my story out there. If nothing else, I’m just lucky to have you all and the opportunity to vent.
Anonymous asked:
Any time Bruce refers to his kids as his babies fuels me. Yes, including his adult children. Dick and Jason may be into their twenties but they’re still his babies.
Okay but anyone remember that one post where batman shows up to the watchtower with his “little boy” and it’s a full grown red hood? That’s totally what I’m thinking here
Bruce: You’ll understand when you’re a parent, but your babies are always your babies.
Some new Justice League member: That’s not a baby, that’s a man.
Red Hood: *waves*
Justice League member: You know what, I’m not sure that’s even a man. That’s a tank.
Bruce: Yes, but actually
