So, something that's emotionally devastated me upon reading SVSSS Volume 3 is this sequence of conversation between Shen Qingqiu and Yue Qingyuan after the collapse of Maigu Ridge:

This is obviously tragic enough on its own, but the thing that makes it so much worse is the fact that it is a direct allusion to this sequence, taking place just a short time before, where the true shape of Su Xiyan and Tianlang Jun's doomed romance was drawn out:

And, just for another twist of the knife of poignant tragedy, MXTX didn't even stop at that. There is one more use of this line, at the very end of the Shen Jiu extras:

aurora 💞 buy a wallpaper or leave a tip / twitter / instagram / shop 

Crowley was rather proud of the Employee Hellpline. There had been a contest, about twenty years back, to create the most confusing phone structure possible, and Crowley had won. (He'd got inspired by calling up a telecom company to cancel service. Despite the fact that he'd made the call without an account, he'd left having agreed to a phone/television/Internet bundle and two magazine subscriptions.)

What he’d forgotten was the fact that he was an Employee, and thus had to navigate the labyrinthine obscurity of the Hellpline every time he needed to put in a request for a little extra power or office supplies. Fortunately, he didn't tend to make many calls; unfortunately, this meant that any insight he gained into the pattern had generally evaporated by the next time he had to face it.

Which was how he came to be sitting in his car, twenty minutes late for lunch, being informed in a monotone that he’d better listen carefully to the following menu, as options might have changed.

“For complaints about colleagues, press 1. For complaints colleagues made about you, press 2. For accounts payable, press 3, then 8, then turn the phone around and repeat. For accounts receivable, enter your ID in reverse. For all other financial requests, spell the first 10 pages of the Bee Movie script using your keypad. For—”

There was a knock at the window. “Are you quite all right?” Aziraphale said.

Crowley rolled the window down, half-listening to the phone menu. “Sorry I’m late—”

“You weren’t late. You drove up twenty-five minutes ago and took the ‘Reserved for Customers of AZ Fell & Co’ spot. So no actual customers have been able to park here this entire time. Which is dreadful,” Aziraphale added happily. 

“This concludes the menu. Make your selection in the next four seconds or this call will be terminated. Four…three…” Crowley racked his brains attempting to remember whether accounts payable was 8, then 3, or— “Good-bye,” the voice said, with gloomy satisfaction, and hung up.

“Ahhh, sanctify it.”

“What?”

“I’m trying to get this reimbursement through. I had to buy eighty live bats for this work thing, and apparently that kind of order can’t go through the normal process. So I’m on the Hellpline. But this consecrated phone—”

“Didn’t you design the system?”

“Might’ve done.”

“May I?” 

Crowley hit Redial and placed the phone in Aziraphale’s outstretched hand.

Aziraphale listened thoughtfully to the first list of menu options, then tapped the phone. He listened a bit longer, tapped twice more, said, “Mammal, not otherwise specified,” and handed it back. 

A voice crackled in Crowley's ear. “Accounts payable, living creatures from twoscore to nine dozen. How can I hinder you today?”

“One sec,” Crowley said, and moved the phone away. “How’d you do that?”

“It was yours, wasn’t it?” 

“Yeah.”

“I suppose I simply know how to thwart you,” said Aziraphale smugly. “Go on,” he said, nodding at the phone as he got in the car. “We’re late.”

Samurai-Class Woman’s Purse (hakoseko) with Carp in Swirling Water, 19th century

Cassiope lycopodioides

Artist : RONPU (pixiv / twitter / weibo / IG)

Source

i love you intimacy in reverse order. yes we've had sex before and i know all the details of your pleasure, but i don't know anything else. i don't know what it feels like to embrace you carelessly. i can barely hold your hand, the grip is so slight it makes me lose my breath. i want to kiss you but what pressure is the right one? how much is too intimate? yes we've had sex and i've done all these things before - but without the guise of mutual pleasure, can i be sure you won't turn me away? will you allow me the delicate feeling of your hand in mine when you know it is me asking to hold it? i know i've held you before with our clothes off, but can i hold you even tighter? may i listen to the steady sound of your heartbeat? is it alright to look for it in front of everyone? yes, yes of course we've had sex before. i know what you look like naked, ive touched you with the lights off. is it alright to want see you with them on? in the morning, with the sun flitting through the blinds?is it alright to want you when the sun is up? yes we've had sex before but have we ever been intimate? can we be? tell me that it's alright to hold you. no, not like that. just like this.

Queue the epic anime battle music

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treasure planet is a fucking phenomenal film and was released during a time where it was destined to be forgotten by everyone

Fun fact: Slitted pupils only give you an advantage when your eyes are just a few inches above the ground. They help you focus on small and close up prey in the horizontal plane. That’s why they’re primarily found in animals like snakes, foxes, cats and reptilians.

Round pupils don’t work as well when they’re that close to the ground, they’re more suited for hunting larger things that are also further away than pouncing distance, which is why larger predators like tigers and humans got them.

But that doesn’t mean your cat person character or whatever, needs round pupils, it just means it is implied that they mostly hunt small animals and that they look like this while doing so:

Benjamin Sullivan, the honorable and somewhat mysterious court magician was married last Saturday to Lettie Hatter, formerly of Market Chipping. The other court magician was also there, presumably as a guest of the matron of honor, Sophie Pendragon nee Hatter, the bride's sister. They seemed wrapped up in some sort of disagreement for most of the ceremony though.

Viola

I was going to transcribe this, but looked it up instead after seeing the username. Brown Butter Brownies from Broma Bakery!

The single serve double chocolate chip cookies that I pretty religiously make like four times a week are from Broma Bakery and they are so decadent and rich and amazing, I def recommend their recipes.

#adding milk powder to brown butter elevates it immensely. just add a teaspoon or so after browning#and adding instant espresso to the butter cocoa mixture will help deepen the chocolate flavors#food

“Walked around the corner, there she was. And zing went the string of my heart. Zing! I said: ‘I gotta catch up with that girl,’ and I never did let her slip. There was a big song on the radio back then, about gettin’ married. Everybody was singing it, something about: ‘When we get married, we gonna have a celebration.’ You keep hearing it every day, and you wanna try it too. Never thought it would last this long. It’s been a good ride though. Everybody has a little bump here and there. We had our arguments, and I ain’t never did win one. Ain’t no man ever gonna win when it comes down to arguing with your wife. You could be married for a hundred years, she’s gonna have the last word. So no need to get your mouth all rolled up. Don’t stand there arguing and cursing. Just listen, laugh, and let it go. Kiss her on the cheek and say: ‘you the winner.’ After that, everything will be beautiful.”

Coolest thing about lord of the rings? The king of horses shows up. It appears he is no different from all other horses

King of the eagles shows up later. He can talk. Horse king couldn't talk.

He didn't want to talk to you.

Uh.

Point of order.

King of Horses ran 450 fucking miles at almost entirely a gallop, without more than a few minutes rest, in 4 nights and basically was like "wait why are we stopping?" when Gandalf took him into the city and he ended up in a stable.

This was not his top speed, nor did it push any limits on his endurance.

King of horses is very different from other horses, actually.

Look, at a full gallop gallop (25 mph), that trip would take under a day (18 hours). Doing it in 4 doesn't sound so impressive now, does it.

I don't know shit about horses, but I have a feeling no mortal horse can sustain a gallop for eighteen hours without keeling over dead

To contextualize:

Horses are not machines. You cannot just take the max speed of a horse and scale it up and go "that's how far a horse can go and how fast!" Horses are like us. The top speed of a human recorded is somewhere around 27mph. We sustain that for about 30-35 seconds, which is much less than a mile distance even at 27mph.

There is a guy who pulled 350 miles in something over 3 days running, but a. Humans actually have better endurance than horses (we're just a lot weaker) and importantly for this discussion, b. He was in absolute physical ruin at the other end - missing toenails, feed bleeding freely from multiple blisters, hypothermic, and woulda been in some Trouble if he hadn't had modern medicine right there to help him out. He was also running in the best equipment modern money can buy, on paved roads and clear terrain, and with his family driving alongside to help him swap socks, shoes, rinse the blood out, give him food to eat, water, and so on.

And again: humans are better at endurance than horses (honestly we're just fucking ridiculous, at peak condition, in terms of endurance, we're absurd) and the guy was a useless wreck at the end.

For horses, modern endurance races tend to max at 100miles, which are completed in around 18 hours (the max allowed is 24); there are some 2-day 100 mile races where you do two 50s and then add them together after sleeping overnight.

(This is the race for one rider with the same horse - there are much longer races (like the Mongolian Derby), but those involve switching horses, in order not to, you know, kill them.)

For the endurance races, those are intensely trained for and they're the big Effort for the year. Vet staff monitor the horses' very carefully at multiple stops, because it's very easy to injure them. Multi-day races are maxed at 50m/day in order to avoid injuring the horses.

After the race, horses normally need a month or more to recover from the effort, before it's even safe to do anything BUT rest with them, let alone actually race again.

Now if you're in a hurry and have no posts to get totally fresh horses (which is what things like the Persian messengers or the Pony Express did), you can eke a bit more out of this as within the story Théoden et al certainly did by having multiple horses, as it's harder for a horse to run with you on its back than to just run freely.

In the same time that it takes Gandalf to reach Minas Tirith, Théoden et al get to Dunharrow. Aragorn takes the Paths of the Dead because they cut under Dunharrow and vastly decrease the amount of distance in order to get to the Pelargirs, because his use of the Stone has shown him that if there isn't a lot more help than Théoden is bringing sooner than he is bringing it, Minas Tirith is fucked, and it is not physically possible for Théoden to get to the Pelennor before the 15th of March and still have horses that are capable of being ridden into battle.

(Obviously, part of what he did was cut off the enemy reinforcements by doing this, thus meaning that he reduced the need for significant more numbers arriving before the Corsairs would have . . . because he arrived instead of the Corsairs.)

. . . Shadowfax ran to Minas Tirith over the same terrain in four days. That would be a little over a hundred miles a night without stopping (Pippin is specific about how infrequently they stopped and that it seemed to have been entirely for Gandalf to talk to people) and when they get there he might as well have just come off a long rest, and thinks it's super stupid that he has to go wait in a stall while his two-legs goes and does talky-stuff. The next day he runs a super-speed race out to drive the Nazgûl off in order for Faramir to continue his retreat from Osgiliath (rather than be routed).

Shadowfax just did something that would kill a normal horse and then went " . . .what, like it's hard?"

To be fair, sure, Shadowfax was probably cantering because frankly fuckin' riding at a flat gallop for 4 days would be punitively exhausting even for Gandalf's new incarnation with some of his previous restrictions eased, never mind for Pippin, while a canter is p much the most comfortable gait. But for fuck's sake, guys.

Yes, a racehorse can, at flat fastest run, get over 25mph (Secretariat hit the 30s) - they do this for less than 2 miles.

A normal horse would have keeled over dead somewhere in the middle of that ride. If you had a super-trained endurance one they might make it in six-ish but they're not going to be useful for anything when you get there and are probably useless for several months if you want them to stay sound. (And you might still have killed them, or at least made them permanently lame.)

Shadowfax was like "toss me a waterbottle bro and then let's get back out there this stable shit is boring."

So yeah no, King of Horses was not, in fact, just kinda like the other horses.

Do you think the other horses in the stable were freaked out that he was there?

Honestly suspect the opposite: it's strongly implied thru stated that other horses see Shadowfax as essentially the most comforting and security-imbuing figure in the world and tend to orient around him (implied a number of places; outright stated at the point that the three horses Aragorn and Legolas were riding initially ran away and then encountered Shadowfax in the leadup to when the three of them encountered Gandalf, if I'm remembering correctly).

To horses Shadowfax isn't Scary Freak of Nature; he's Amazing Hero come to Make All Safe. If anything they're probably like oh thank god, Dad's here - I've been getting kinda tense with all this Two Legs Stress around, but if Dad's here and pretty chill, we're fine.

ngl I keep forgetting that Hobby Lobby is a real store that people go to. That people actually think of it as a craft store and not as a crazy Christian mass artifact smuggler. I google "Hobby Lobby" and get a page full of results that make me go "wtf is this craft supplies and operating hours shit, I thought we all knew this place for smuggling looted cuneiform tablets out of Iraq"

#hobby lobby’s Hammurabi robbing hobby… (tag by @stripedroseandsketchpads)

A chive's imitation of the big bang, demonstrating that not all flowers deserve a degree in astrophysics. Even the flowers that have a degree. Although, it's not such a bad model of the sun.