Feathers, For You

You don’t have to love your body

I really needed to read this today. Thank you.

Potato girl has her life goals in order.

This is a game changer. 

this comic basically sums up my feelings on body positivity

If Snow White literally had “lips red as a rose, hair black as ebony, and skin white as snow,” she’d look like a walking nightmare.

honestly this sounds like the description of a vampire. Which would also explain how she convinced seven dwarves to let her stay with them. How she could control some animals to do her bidding. How she could sleep for a long time without aging. Why the hunter betrayed the queen for her, and why the queen wanted her heart, so she could be sure she was killed properly. 

the first baby is born in may, and dies in his sleep. the second does not make it to term. the third lives for a year before an unknown illness claims him. the queen pricks her finger on a needle: old magic. blood on snow on an ebony windowsill. the wind carries the the contract, and the woods accept. 

blood now must be repaid with blood later, but the fourth baby is a girl, and she lives.

she grows slowly, and out of order. first her hands, long and bony; then her arms, thin, hollow-looking. she never looks quite like a child: no chubby cheeks, no skinned knees, no missing teeth. her hair is thick and so black it sometimes seems viscous. her skin is so thin you should be able to see the blood running through it.

they name her snow white, for the fairness of her skin. so fair that she cries when left in the light too long.

the queen dies when snow white is four, still small, and beloved. she is not beautiful, her mouth too painfully red, her eyes too liquid dark, her teeth too pointedly sharp. but only those who do not live in the castle think this. to know the child is to love her. to know the child is to want to please her. to know the child is to know that she is precious.

that she must be protected. that she must be obeyed.

“it is not your fault,” the king whispers to the child on his lip, petting her head. “she was not strong enough. i will make sure you never go hungry.”

the child presses her tiny hand against his cheek. “i know you will,” snow white says.

peasants begin to go missing. young boys are snatched from the fields. women are summoned to the castle and never seen again.

“gifts,” her father calls them. “eat. you are too thin.”

the girls are always silent, and the boys always scream. snow white hates it. she wishes they would stop, but she is hungry. she is so hungry. and doesn’t she have the right to survive? isn’t she a child, too?

but her mother’s blood is the only food that ever made her feel full. now she can eat and eat and eat and never feel like she has taken a single bite.

she grows thin. the sun becomes too strong for her to go outside.

“a mother’s blood,” the king muses, and sends his advisors out to find snow white a new one.

the kingdom has six queens in six years, but no more peasants go missing. it must be something in the castle, they say. some mold. some terrible illness. something that lingers, and kills you slowly.

but snow white grows healthy regardless. she can be seen, sometimes, on the parapets: in the early years she wears a heavy cloak but as she grows it gets thinner, and then disappears entirely.

she is small, and delicate. her laughter, floating down into the village, is silver and gold and painted in eighth notes. it is said that if you look into her eyes you can see your deepest desire. it is said that she will give it to you. it is said that every time a queen dies it breaks snow white’s gentle heart. she shrinks. she hides away indoors. she becomes frail and cannot leave her bed.

so many queens in so many years. eventually, somebody will notice.

eventually, somebody does.

“mirror, mirror, on the wall: who’s the fairest of them all?”

you, my queen.

“there are no others?”

there is one other. but she is young. she was made by the forrest. she doesn’t know what she is.

“another? after all this time? where?”

the kingdom of six queens.

“how strong is her heart?”

she is too young to know for certain. but she when she is hungry, she has always been fed.

snow’s new mother arrives on horseback. her lips are red as blood, her hair as black as ebony, her skin as fair as–snow’s. 

she marries the king and they spend the night in his chamber. this has never happened before. snow white does not understand. she is hungry. she always gets fed, the very first night. she always gets blood on her gown.

but her father stays in his chamber and does not come out. in the morning, his eyes are hazy and he does nothing but smile. her new mother’s teeth are red.

snow white waits. she isn’t starving yet. surely her father will snap out of it and feed her.

“today?” snow white asks, and her father pats her head.

“i will find you a peasant boy,” he says. “a strong one. your favorite kind.”

“that is not my favorite,” snow white tells him. she frowns. he has never told her no before. he, and everyone else, has always done exactly what she wanted. “father, i am hungry. you promised i would never be hungry again.”

she begins to cry, and the hazy look leaves him. he falls to his knees, her face between his hands. “of course,” he murmurs, “of course, tonight, i’ll send her. i don’t know why i didn’t before. i don’t know what i was thinking. tonight.”

snow white kisses his cheek. her red lips leave a print.

her new mother does not come. in the morning, her father’s eyes are hazy once again.

“father,” snow white begs.

“i promise,” he answers, but he is weak, every night he gives in to weakness because her new mother does not come. snow white is hungry. snow white grows thin. snow white cannot go out into the sun.

at last, her new mother comes. she has a plate of food: vegetables, fruit, and a slab of meat.

“eat,” her new mother murmurs. she perches on the edge of the bed.

snow white shuffles away from the sunlight coming through the window. “i’m not hungry,” she says.

“but you must be hungry,” her mother says, smiling. she reaches out to chase the edge of snow’s jaw. “you haven’t eaten in weeks. not even a peasant boy.”

snow white looks up, startled. “they aren’t filling,” snow white says.

“no,” agrees her new mother. “i agree. i prefer kings, when i can get them.”

“i prefer mothers.”

“i am not your mother.”

“then what are you?”

her smile is slow and bitter red. “my mother made the woods a promise, and the promise was me. she did not know that promises must be paid in blood, and sustained in blood, and that the blood was also me. she got what she wanted, and i ate until i was as full as a human could make me.”

“are there others? like you? …. like me?”

“there were,” the queen says. “once, there were many of us, and all of us were starving.”

snow white does not yet understand. “then what happened? where did they go? how did you survive?”

the queen runs a finger along the fabric of snow white’s blanket. her nail rips a line through the thread. “humans are weak, snow white. a thousand of them would not be enough to fill us up. but we are strong. our hearts can sustain a body for a hundred lifetimes.”

her teeth grow long. “i have been hungry for such a long time,” she says. 

snow white understands.

she runs.

it hurts: her skin is so hot it is nearly on fire. her feet blister as she runs. she has never been outside of the castle grounds, but the woods are dark and shaded. the shade is like jumping into a pool of water. the red bleeds from her skin, leaving her fair and white once more.

she hides inside the hollow of a tree (the woods created her and the woods will keep her safe until her mother’s debt is paid). she sleeps while the hunting parties pass her by, all but one. he is a huntsman. he knows the woods. he knows the woods have favorites, and protect them; but the woods are old and can be tricked.

he waits.

when she emerges, it is dark. her skin is so white he almost wants to drink it. she is small, her hair so black he thinks she has woven the night sky into it. as he notches his bow he thinks it seems a shame to kill something so beautiful, something so beloved by the woods. the huntsman is loved by the woods, too. he knows how its favorites suffer.

she turns to look at him. when their eyes meet he sees his deepest desires. her eyes promise to give it to him. we are the chosen, her eyes promise, as she approaches and he does not shoot. cannot shoot. cannot look away.

“i am so hungry,” she whispers, reaching out to touch his face. “my father hasn’t fed me.”

“she wants your heart,” the huntsman confesses.

snow white knows that already. snow white is beginning to understand the bargain that her mother made.

“she cannot have it,” snow white says, and her teeth get long, and she eats.

“mirror mirror on the wall, who’s the fairest of them all?”

you, my queen. but not for long.

part two

I feel like @neil-gaiman would love the ever loving shit out of this.

The history of corporate propaganda.

'Nobody wants to work' fails to mention the poverty wages and horrible workplaces.

Reframe the narrative: Capitalists refuse to pay thriving wages.

So I binged the entirety of How To Build a Sex Room last night and this one scene just cracked me up

The designer's at a western leather/tack store looking for supplies to make a rustic-style sex swing and turns to one of the store employees for advice, which initially goes about as amusingly as you would expect

So then she pulls up some pictures to give him an idea of what she needs

And he's Immediately like

The professional disgust, I'm living

alex hirsch going rogue… king shit

ok so there’s a game me and my friends play called “don’t get me started” and basically someone gives another person a random topic and they have to go on an angry rant about it and it’s the best thing that’s ever happened to us at parties and car rides so I highly recommend playing sometimes with your friends

I love this idea. We used to do things like this in Improv.

Related game: “THINK ABOUT IT.” You’re given a random topic, and your job is to build it into an epic conspiracy theory, the crazier the better. You end your rant with a serious face and the command that your listeners “Think about it.” 

Another related game: Illuninati. Similar to Think About It except you are given 2 completely different topics and you have to connect them to each other in a wild conspiracy rant

Rb to safe an awkward hang out

me and my friends play “World’s Greatest Expert” where one of the other players says “Hey, I heard you’re the world’s greatest expert on ____” and you have to give an in depth (and probably completely false) lecture about the thing you’re the greatest expert on. Other players are allowed to ask you questions.

The version I learned was ‘Ah Yes’ in which someone gives you a work of art or famous landmark and you go “Ah Yes, the ____” in a posh accent while making up the most wildly inaccurate history of the topic. Bonus points for how hard everyone laughs.

I'm dead 💀

if i was a star and you were a star i would wink at you and blink at you and twinkle at you and the earthlings would call it science

Sometimes even the villains have standards

I think the moment that convinced me the operating logic of our society is truly fucked in a way that cannot merely be reformed was after that eclipse in 2017 when the articles started coming out about how much money had been lost by productivity dropping from people stopping momentarily to watch it happen. To measure the world by the metric of the dollar to such a devotion that any cult leader would be jealous of that you would look at one of the most sublime experiences in nature which we, our ancestors, and even a not insignificant number of non-human species, have been observing in awestruck wonder for millennia, and decide that such a moment of profundity is something to be fought and preferably expunged from the human experience because it briefly impacts quarterly revenue.

It's a feeling that has been coming up repeatedly, but with increasing frequency in the last few years. That being: what is all of this for? Where are we going? Nobody who defends the status quo can seem to answer it. What's the point of an uninterrupted quarterly revenue stream if we can't even look at an eclipse every few years? What's the point of hustling and grinding 50, 60, 70 hour weeks if you never have time to have dinner with your friends, talk to your family on the phone, but on a bigger spectrum, what's the point of all of that if you still don't have any way of retiring in the future? With the way that our lives are being increasingly monetized and squeezed every second, what is there to look forward to?

I love these kinds of videos ❤️🐱

The Ring: If I had a quarter for every time a hobbit picked me up, I’d have two quarters.  The Ring: Which isn’t a lot, but it’s weird that it happened twice.

Of all the bearers of Sauron’s ring, 4 of them were hobbits.

I was wrong. It’s 5. Not 4

The lineage of ring bearers is as follows.

I love how Deagol counts as a ring bearer even though he had it in his possession for all of like five seconds

He held it for the rest of of his life!

[Image description: Tweet by @banalplay saying “but something happened then that the ring did not intend. it was picked up by the most unlikely creature imaginable: a hobbit, the same fuckin thing that just had it for like 500 years.” End Image Description.] Link to original here. Otherwise reblogging for the final rb there, which made me cackle.

From the ring’s perspective:

1. Home, the finger of my creator and other self.

2. Well, I don’t like it but I can work with this. Cause some trouble, get some revenge, find my way home, this is fine.

3. What the fuck is you?

4. Right personality, wrong species, I don’t know what you are but I hate you and I don’t know why you’re so resistant to my powers.

5. NO NO NO there are goblins everywhere how did I find another one of THESE horrible things. This one’s even more resistant than the last one and also disgustingly nice. I suffer.

6. Listen, I’ll cooperate, just get me the fuck out of this hellhole full of small cheerful people my power doesn’t work on properly. No, not like that. I hate you. Please stop. 

7. FUCK

8. (Frodo again) I still hate you with every molecule of my mortal form but at least you’re not number seven. Think I’m starting to get through finally. 

9. (Smeagol again) YES it’s you I actually missed you now get me back to the Master and NO FUCK NO I HATE YOOOOUUUUU…. *fzt* 

you CHAIN The One Ring?! you chain it like the prisoner?! oh! OH! trauma! deep psychological trauma for hobbits for One Thousand Years!

my most favorite eggs