Licking My Wounds and Considering the Obelisk

the thing about working as a housekeeper is that sometimes I will be called to clean a room that is in such a state that it gives me pause.

The thing about being a housekeeper at a Hospital is that it is not the things that would usually be concerning that leave me with questions.

Like if I go clean a room and it is just covered in blood, I'm not all "where did all this blood come from" that would be silly. It came from inside the patient and they were already in a hospital so they're probably mostly fine hopefully.

In fact "Inside the patient" is where most of the potentially concerning stuff I have to deal with comes from. Vomit? That's from inside the patient. Urine? Feces? Inside the patient baby. Needles full of unidentified drugs? That was supposed to go inside the patient but I guess they frogot.

But when I go to clean a hospital room and it is full of Sand... Did that come from inside the patient? I hope not. Why is there so much sand? Where did it come from? Was there some kind of terrible beach accident?

I have many questions and I'm scared of the answers.

this is such a delightful pair of tags

Patient happened to be under the effect of the pharaohs curse at the time

[Image ID: tags reading “#unsanitary #but op will fix that”. End ID.]

The Lord said, “If I find fifty righteous startups in Silicon Valley, I will spare the whole place for their sake.” Then Abraham spoke up again: “Now that I have been so bold as to speak to the Lord, though I am nothing but dust and ashes, what if the number of the righteous is five less than fifty? Will you destroy the whole city for lack of five startups?” // “If I find forty-five there,” God said, “I will not destroy it.”

… The two venture capitalists arrived at Palo Alto in the evening, and Lot was sitting in the gateway of the city. … They did go with him and entered his $0.9m one-bedroom home. He prepared a meal for them, baking bread without gluten, and they ate. Before they had gone to bed, all the men from every part of Silicon Valley—both young and old—surrounded the house. They called to Lot, “Where are the men who came to you tonight? Bring them out to us so that we can pitch our startups to them.”

I am finally able to post my piece for wonderful Dragon Age zine! So there is my Lace Harding

i want all my friends and followers and mutuals and acquaintances to know from the bottom of my heart: i don’t respond to your messages because i’m an insane person, i am insane medieval hermit software running inappropriately on modern queer hardware and social media scares me. it is not your fault

when i get a notifications on my phone i try to kill my phone with a rock

Haha, so I’ve been saying I’m going to write something like this forever, and then yesterday my housemate found that someone beat me to it.

Required reading, friends! So you don’t screw it up if you’re writing fanfic – and so you can suffer along with me if you’re reading it.

My contribution to the smut talk behind the cut. XD (And also one of my Craig-writing friend’s finest moments.) So strap in for –

Keep reading

This post is meant to serve as a jumping off point. Those citations exist for a reason and we encourage you to read further. This post can only address so much.

There was so much that simply couldn’t be covered in such a short post; not to mention a breadth of research that feels like it should be must read material for this topic.

A huge thank you to willatheewisps and a.hearth.witch (on instagram) for going over this prior to posting.

Let us know in the comments if you’re interested in a post going over the origins of the Christian Zionist movement, as well as how it inspired Jewish Zionism.

Did you know that it was a “proto-Christian Zionist” Church of Scotland clergyman & author Alexander Keith who coined the phrase, “land without a people and a people without a land” in his 1843 book?

the thing abt being a transhet dude is like i get actually upset at jokes like making fun of straight dudes sometimes which i Know is like kinda lame but like. being who i am i never know how to interpret it as anything other than that queer people would see me as like better/more queer/more human if i closeted myself and identified as a cis lesbian again. which would make me miserable. and it is stupid cuz ik no one ever thinks about it w transhet people in mind but like idk maybe they should. cuz what the hell do you want from me like i just dont want to be seen as deserving of mockery cuz im a dude who likes girls

new favorite tweet

(from the author of fight club)

i think that killing a dragon should have catastrophic nuclear-fallout level environmental consequences tbh. their blood should scorch and wither the earth with fire and poison, the toxic fumes released as they decay should choke the land and all nearby living creatures, and the entire landscape where they fell should be transformed into a blighted wasteland where bleached leviathan bones loom upwards out of the ground as a warning that can be seen from miles away, the boundary markers of an exclusion zone.

i also think that it would be wonderfully ironic if those who sought the fame and glory of the title of 'dragonslayer' only ended up with the bitter, enduring reminder of the devastation they're responsible for. this is not a place of honor. no highly esteemed deed is commemorated here.

Laika's still up there. not her body, sure, but her soul is. i saw it through my telescope one night when i was looking for aliens. she was sniffing for table scraps under saturn's ring. she chases comets and bites down on satellites. i saw her napping by neptune, she was kicking her feet. passing through the oort cloud is like the stroke of a hand on her fur. eyes like marbles and four little paws like flames. she bobs through jupiter's moons like cold moscow streets. up there the stars are a great big field. and look, she's running so fast. god damn, look at her go.

some episodes of the magnus archives are like we are impossibly small and inconsequential in the vast expanse of the universe and nothing we do matters. the fragility of human existence is as beautiful as it is horrifying and we must make our peace with that as it is a fate not even death can save us from.

and then some episodes are like what if this band was so shit people died

Ok new game. What's the thing you're a fan of that you're the most pretentious about. NOT the most pretentious thing you're a fan of, I mean the thing that makes *you* act like one of those "oh yeah? Name five of their albums" people. There is a difference

The gas statioj has a drinks store because it helps the car/owner bond if you eat fluids together

thinking about mountaiin trloll again

guys he's helping

aerarius_metalworks

@eldriwolf sent me this, and I immediately thought of the Indian bagh nakh “tiger-claw” weapon, which isn’t usually articulated or as realistic - for a given value of realism - but was a very nasty piece of kit.

The basic version was a steel bar with two rings for index and pinkie fingers, and four steel claws for ripping into an enemy’s soft parts - probably neck and stomach, where there were no awkward bones and the result would be more effective.

These simple versions had an extra advantage of being easy to conceal…

…and sometimes the finger-rings would be gilded and decorated with gems as if they were just jewellery.

Okay, maybe quite a lot of jewellery.

I bet that if timing and location were organised properly, political assassination could be passed off - in honest belief or for convenience - as the victim having encountered a real tiger.

“But where are the marks of the tiger’s teeth?” That too could be arranged:

These double daggers have proper flattened-diamond blade profiles, and their points are too close for a full-grown tiger or leopard - but (fiction-writer imagination at work) there’s no reason why a special-purpose one couldn’t have been made with realistic separation and correct tooth-spike shape.

The modern era has seen plenty of convenient “accidents” and “suicides”(what writer Len Deighton calls XPD or Expedient Demise) so how good was Mughal-era CSI?

Or more correctly, when required by Certain Circumstances, how bad did it need to be?

If an Important Person announced: “Clearly a tiger did it. How sad. Too bad. Long live the new maharajah, my Dear Little Nephew”, the best way for doubters to maintain good health would be agreement…

*****

There was another version which - if the “attacked by a wild beast” excuse was still used - came with a suggestion that tigers in that particular region were getting disturbingly smart. (Though pointing this out may not have been wise, see above…) :->

These are bichuwa bagh nakh, “scorpion-sting tiger claws”, the dagger name deriving from its recurved blade shape resembling the business end of a scorpion’s tail.

They were sometimes carried in combat, bichuwa bagh nakh in the left hand and a talwar (curved) or khanda (straight) sword in the right.

During close-quarter grappling the claws could rake and the dagger stab, while the finger-rings meant less risk of dropping it.

In the same way that many Indian weapons had “tacticool” add-ons - miniature pistols, axe-gun combinations, concealed daggers and so on - there were bagh nakh with more than just one extra blade…

…bagh nakh with extra folding blades and a knuckle-guard…

…and this articulated contraption which (IMO anyway) was for defence as well as attack.

*****

It was, like the much simpler two-ring-no-blades version, a lot less obvious than the first photo suggests…

…and since many Indian helmets were open-faced while others had face-protection only of mail…

…a surprise slap across the face might spoil any warrior’s day.

The reason I think it also had a defensive purpose is the fairly thick metal palm and that little spur low down on it, almost certainly meant to stop a palm-blocked blade from sliding any further.

I’m not sure there’s enough articulation for such a blade to be actually gripped tightly, but once trapped between spur and claws it could be twisted aside for long enough that a weapon in the other hand could attend to its wielder.

*****

Yet again: when creating a fantasy weapon for writing or RPG, do a search for whatever you have in mind, because it may well have been made for real a couple of centuries ago by an Indian weaponsmith demonstrating what he could do to advertise his skill, or just making some oddity in steel to see if it was possible… :->

(reminding self to ask @petermorwood if he’s sharpened the kitchen knives this week)

Suehiro Maruo’s depiction of Saint Sebastian

Misc filthy ipad doodles