I am staring down at the contents of my mortar and pestle
and I fear I have made a terrible mistake
it's beautiful!
it won't solidify
I FOUND SOME SALT
...it's from the anti-vampire bottle bombs, but whatever, it's fine
look at this beautiful fuckface
Salt was used to vaguely solidify European soap (the stuff made with potash instead of soda ash). But how much did they use? How solid did that soap actually get?
...I don't want to add arrowroot, but
*stares at clock*
*stares at mortar*
*stares at depths of soul, considers life, considers choices*
holy shit
the salt I have is coarse sea salt (listen, it's big and visible and freaks out the undead, we all know this, keep up), which I was putting in whole--
but a second ago I decided to maybe grind it up smaller in one of my other mortars (yes I have multiple now, we are doing important nonsense here)--
and when I added the finer salt--
this motherfucker finally started solidifying
hey SO ANYWAY, check out these fancy as fuck, sweet as hell wash-balls of neroly, from the 1696 English translation of Simon Barbe's The French Perfumer
and, at least for now, and fucking finally...
if Stede used these soaps
he would not smell like cookies
.
.
.
he'd smell like a goddamn field of fucking flowers
Figure ?. Local dread pirate mesmerized, helpless in the face of sweaty white guy's apparently life-changing scent profile.
It's been half a minute since I checked on these last (11 days since I made them, and, uh... about 10 or so days since I checked them), and these wee fucks have changed a bit:
Figure 1. ...Balls.
However, I should also say that the scent has... developed.
A field of flowers is, I believe, no longer accurate.
What we have now is... and I can't believe this is my fucking luck...
Mother.
Fucking.
Candy.
Not like candy we're used to, maybe! But definitely sugary and sweet and rich and weird and jesus fucking christ Stede Bonnet can you not.
#oooh you have no idea how much I love this #and how much I want to smell the smells you are describing #hey do you think as a kid raised in poverty ed would sometimes like walk by patisserie shops & stand there just hoping to catch a whiff of #whatever they were preparing in there #of course never able to actually afford any candy but still imagining what it would be like to just walk in and then out again #with a sweet smelling package wrapped in colourful paper #do you think his mum snuck him something from her work once. do you think ed took that caramel or whatever & was almost afraid to eat it #but couldn't keep it either for fear of his dad finding out & let it melt in his mouth & it lasted only a moment but it was the most #perfect one in his 7 years of life #and do you think he maybe imagined the place people lived for whom this was a regular occurrence #maybe his mum even took him to an estate one day #and *of course* he wasn't allowed in any of the family's rooms but still saw it that fairy tale palace all the riches and beautiful things #(& maybe that's also when he saw how these people treated his mum; treated *him*; & that fairy tale shattered like glass) #(& of course many things have happened since then grandiose and terrible things & ed isn't that 7yo boy anymore #transfixed and mesmerized by things he could never have) #do you think breathing in the air in stede's cabin (the wood and fabrics soaps and creams; sweet earthy spicy) unlocked a core memory in ed #anyway. thank you for your service.
FUCK MAN, OKAY @bookshelfdreams, BE THAT WAY, I WASN'T PLANNING TO HAVE FEELINGS ALL OVER MY SOAP BALLS THIS EVENING BUT I GUESS THAT'S WHAT'S GOTTA HAPPEN NOW
This.
I don’t know about others but the only reason I put both is so that whichever someone clicks on, they will find my fic. So if there is supposed to be rules, I guarantee you that no writer knows these ones. We can barely get people to comment, you think we’re going to specifically choose & or / ? Hell no.
I’ve been in fandom for twenty years, and “/” means romance and “&” means no romance was literally one of the first things I learned. It dates back to Star Trek fanfiction of the 70s. I’m boggled by the fact that anyone who’s been reading fic on AO3 for more than like five minutes wouldn’t know that, and I’m curious as to what fanfic community you come out of.
I don’t think that tagging with both is actually going to get your fic in front of more readers. People looking for romance often exclude the “&” tag if there are too many gen fics tagged with both. People looking for gen often exclude the “/” tag if there are too many fics with both. So rather than putting your fic in front of twice the people, you are in fact more likely to get your target audience ignoring your fic because it has a tag they don’t want.
Also, by overtagging you are more likely to annoy potential readers away from your fic than entice them. A fic tagged both & and / better have both romance and a ton of platonic interaction between the two characters, like a slow burn romance friends-to-lovers arc. If it isn’t, I’m going to be very unhappy because the author lied to me with the tags to try and trick me into reading a fic with deceptive advertising.
When I’m in a fandom and see tagging where some of the tags don’t really apply and are just there to get it in front of more eyes, I’m going to assume one of two things. Either the author is a newb who doesn’t know anything, or the author is purposefully spamming the tags because they don’t care about lying to their potential audience and think that “spray and pray” is an effective tactic. In the first case, their writing probably will not be very good, so why bother reading their fic. In the second case, the fact that I can’t trust the tags to be accurate means I’m not going to read it to see if it’s interesting even if it has a tag I like. Chances are, that tag isn’t actually in the fic anyway, and even if it is, by spam-tagging the author is making the archive harder to use for everybody. Why would I reward bad behavior with attention? No. Far better to mute the author and move on.
More to the point--and no, I will never stop harping on this, because we have GOT to stop leaving our strongest points in the drawer--it doesn't matter if you heard of this convention before joining AO3 or not, because it's in AO3's tagging FAQ.
[id: the "How do I tag a romantic or platonic relationship?" section of the tagging FAQ here.]
"But Jo," you may argue, because you're wrong. "There's no way to find that without digging through site FAQ menus, and that's really inaccessible!"
sure
except
that when you go to post a new fic, and you go to put in those relationship tags, you see this
[id: the Relationships field]
and that tooltip, the one THERE TO EXPLAIN HOW THE FIELD WORKS, links to the Relationships segment of the tag FAQ, which explicitly lays this shit out.
I don't care if you don't know fandom history. I don't care if you've never heard a goddamn word about the spirk shippers. I don't care if you've never been exposed to fandom culture in your life. It is, frankly, not fair to expect those things of everyone.
What is entirely fair to expect is that you will READ THE INSTRUCTIONS PRINTED NEXT TO THE FUCKING BOX, actually. Forget fandom conventions. It genuinely doesn't matter whether you agree with or respect fandom conventions. This is a site policy. This is explicitly how tagging on AO3, specifically, works.
tv appreciation week 2022 📺 favorite tv villain feral lil vampire guy
Spike Buffy the Vampire Slayer
So Arizona launched an “education hotline” that allows “concerned parents” to report “””critical race theory””” and other things like ~gender identity~ being taught in the classroom
It would be a shame if the number and email were spread to bad actors looking to prank call the AZ Department of Education
602-771-3500 or empower @ azed .gov 🤡
and for the love of god, don’t just spam it with memes or le funny shrek jokes or whatever, they’ll just hang up
make plausible-sounding reports for things that don’t actually exist, so that they actually have to waste time/resources investigating false leads - the goal is to waste time they would otherwise be using to do their jobs, not to get tumblr clout for being an epic troll
So apparently the internet article said the superintendent wouldn't be deterred by the prank calls because they would 'taper off eventually'. It'd be a real shame if this post stayed in circulation via queues so they get a consistent list of prank calls to filter through. 😇
spread the word everyone
Update: They've moved the hotline to a form on their website in an attempt to stem the flow.
The form doesn’t require your name, but it does require the name of both school and principal. Troll responsibly to keep innocents out of the crossfire.
Sometimes I think about the utter shitfit that would ensue if Avenue Q came out today.
Nursing home staff finding ways to keep their charges engaged and entertained.
Slingshot on the walker is my fav I think.
Life goals
“X bodily fluid is just filtered blood!” buddy I hate to break it to you but ALL of the fluids in your body are filtered blood. Your circulatory system is how water gets around your body. It all comes out of the blood (or lymph, which is just filtered blood).
“Okay but why is it always so chemically roundabout and unnecessarily complicated” well buddy, that’s because your blood is imitation seawater. See? It’s very simple.
Blood is what now?
It’s imitation seawater what part is confusing
Buddy if anything is living in your blood (except for more parts of you) in detectable amounts then you have a serious microbial infection and need to go to the hospital.
Humans are seawater wastelands kept sterile of all but human cells, with microbial mats coating their surfaces.
Thank you that’s…very disturbing
It’s not my fault you’re human.
Ok but “It’s not my fault you’re human.” Is the best comeback ever.
You can use it against anyone except children that you biologically helped to create.
Picture this: you are a Thing That Lives In The Ocean. Some kind of small multicellular animal a long time ago, before proper circulatory systems existed. “Wow,” you think, metaphorically, “it sure is difficult to diffuse chemicals across my whole body. Kinda puts a hard limit on the size and distance of what specialised organs I can have. Good thing I have all this water around me that’s the same salinity as my cells (they have to be that way so I don’t explode or shrivel up) so I can diffuse and filter chemicals with that.”
“Wait a minute,” you say a couple of generations later, because you’re not actually a small animal but an evolutionary process personified and simplified to the point of dangerous inaccuracy for the purposes of a Tumblr post, “instead of losing all these important chemicals to the water around me, how about I put it in tubes? I can keep MY water separate from the rest of the world’s water! Anything I want to keep goes in my water! Anything I don’t, I dump back into the outside water! I’m a genius! An unthinking natural trial-and-error process that’s a GENIUS!”
“Wow,” you think a great many generations later, “being able to have such control over such high concentrations of important chemicals is so great. Look how big I’m getting. I even have a special pump to move my seawater around, and these cool filter systems to keep the chemicals in it right, and that control and chemical concentration has let me grow so many energy-intensive, highly specialised organs! Being big is so hard. I need special cells just to carry my oxygen around now, to make sure my enormous, constantly-operating body has enough of it.”
At this point you are embodying a fish, and eventually, fish start straying into water with different pressures and salinity levels. (I mean, they do that since befor ehty’er fish, but… look, I’m trying to keep things simple here.) “What the FUCK,” you think. “My inside water is at a different salinity and pressure to the outside water?? How am I supposed to deal with that? I can’t have freshwater inside my seawater tubes! My cells have a set salinity and they would explode! I need to start beefing up my regulatory and filter systems so that my inside seawater STAYS SEAWATER OF THE CORRECT SALINITY even if the outside water is different! Fortunately, adding salt to my seawater is a lot easier than removing it, and I want to be saltier than this weird outside water.” At this point you beef up your liver and urinary systems to compensate for different salinities. (Note: the majority of fish, freshwater and saltwater, have a fairly narrow band of salinities they can live in. Every fish doesn’t get to deal with every level of salinity; they are evolved to regulate within specific bands.)
You also, at some point, go out on land. This is new and weird because you have to carry all of your water inside. “It’s a good thing I turned myself into a giant bag of seawater,” you think. “If I wasn’t carrying my seawater inside, how would I transport all these important chemicals between my organs and the environment?” As you specialise to live entirely outside of the water, you realise (once again) that it’s a lot easier to add salt to water than to remove it in great quantities. Drinking seawater in large amounts becomes toxic; your body isn’t specialised for removing that amount of salt. Instead, you drink freshwater, and add salts to that. The majority of your organs are, at this point, specialised for moving your seawater around, protecting it, adding stuff to it, or taking stuff out. You have turned yourself into an intelligent bag for carrying and regulating a small amount of imitation seawater, and its salinity (and your commitment to maintaining that salinity) is based entirely on the seawater that some early animals started to build tubes around a long time ago.
And that’s what a human is!
Well, there’s another few steps, of course.
Because at some point, operating along lines of logic that worked out perfectly so far, you did decide to be a mammal.
A mammal is a machine for adapting to Circumstances. A mammal is a tremendously resilient all-terrain life-support system, with built-in heating, cooling, respiration, and incubators for reproduction. Mammals internalise everything (grudges, eggs) and furthermore are excessively, flamboyantly wet internally. Sure, everyone’s a bag of chemicals; but mammals slosh. Mammals took the concept of an internal ocean and took it in an unnecessarily splashy direction, added aftermarket mods and a climate-control system,
and just to show off, you leaned across the metaphorical gambling table and said: “my internal ocean is so good-“
“Bullshit,” said the shark, keeping it salty (ha)
“My internal ocean is so brilliantly resilient, more so than any of YOURS,” you said, holding their attention with a digit held aloft, “that for my next trick, I shall artistically recreate the ballad of evolution as a performance. I shall craft a complex chemical ballet depicting the origin of multicellular life - using some of my own material, of course-”
“Oh, ANYONE can lay an egg,” yodel the fish, and the ray adds: “ontogeny does NOT recapitulate phylogeny!!”
And you’re like, “yeah no, it’s an artistic rendition, not a literal thing. Basically I’m going to take some cells and brew them up-“
“Like an egg.”
“Like an egg. An egg but internally.”
“Yeah,” said the viviparous reptile, “yeah, like, that can work really well. I’ve always said it’s the highest test of one’s chemical know-how. It’s a lot of work. And forget about support from your family - forget about support from your PHYLUM - all you get is criticism.”
“I’m gonna do it on purpose forever,” you said. “The highest chemical, thermoregulatory, immunological, everything-logical challenge. It’s gonna be my thing.”
“I’m with you,” said a viviparous fish, stoutly. “Representation.”
You kindly don’t point out, once again, that you’re planning to do this outside the ocean, in a range of temperatures; carrying the dividing cells in a perfect 37.5• solution of saline broth in all terrains, breathing oxygen in a complicated matter, you know, bit more difficult; but you need your allies.
“It’s solid,” says the coelacanth.
“But is it metal?” says the deep-vent organism.
“Oh, it’s metal. I will feed the young,” you say, magnificently, “on an echo of the mother ocean. The first rich feast of cellular matter, the first hunt for sustenance, the first bite they sip of our liquid planet-”
Everyone waits.
“Will be a blood byproduct. My own blood byproduct.”
Everyone looks uncomfortable.
“But,” a hagfish says carefully, “don’t you outdoorsy guys still need your blood?”
You cough and explain that if you stay wet enough internally and hydrate frequently, you should be able to produce enough blood byproduct to sustain your hellish new invention until they can eat your peers.
The outrage that follows includes questions like “is this some furry shit?” And: “milk has WATER in it?”
And you won the bet. “My inner ocean is such a perfect homage to the primordial soup that I can personally cook up an entire live hairy mammal in it. And then generate excess blood byproduct from my body and give it to the small mammal until it gets big.”
That is an absolutely bonkers pitch, by the way, and everyone thought you were a showoff, even before the opposable thumbs. When the winter came, and the winter of winters, and the rain was acid and the air was poison on the tender shells of their eggs and choked the children in the shells; when the plants turned to poison, and the ocean turned against you all; when the climate changed, and the world’s children fell to shadow; your internal ocean was it that held true. A bet laid against the changing fates, a bet laid by a small beast against climate and geography and the forces of outer space, that you won. The dinosaurs fell and the pterosaurs fell and the marine reptiles dwindled, and you, furthest-child, least-looked-for, long-range-spaceship, held hope internally at 37.5 degrees. Which is another thing that humans do, sometimes.
It has been MONTHS, @elodieunderglass, and I am still mumbling “furthest-child, least-looked-for, long-range-spaceship” under my breath as a comfort phrase, and the FUCKING INDIGNITY that it came from this godforsaken post about THE HORRIBLE WETNESS OF MAMMALS!
“The horrible wetness of mammals” would make a great band name.
“hold hope, internally, at 37.5 degrees” and “Mammals internalize everything (eggs, grudges)” Now live permanently in my vocabulary
“They’re not a golden retriever boyfriend! >:( They’re nonbinary.”
“Oh… so… they’re a lab partner?”
The fact that dishes feel like The Horrors but literally take less than fifteen minutes is a personal insult to me
This is what I use when I explain to people what I mean in saying "not all feelings are valid"
Good tags from maculategiraffe
Thinking about the fact that Stede, who’s only worth to his family and his wife was the fact he had money, gave it all up to be with the person he loved.
But also, here is a man who, like it or not, is a product of his environment and upbringing, and has on some level internalised that his money is his sole redeeming feature, and all he has to offer in any type of relationship.*
Now he has to face the OTHER not-Ed people in his life that he abandoned, and this time he won’t be able to pay them to stick around.
Area pirate discovers found family in his late forties, is what I’m saying here. But the lead-in to it will probably be pretty harrowing for him.
* I absolutely believe that Stede’s lost sleep over the way Ed lit up over all his neat luxuries, and how he was teaching Ed about the upper classes, and so on and so forth. And now all he’ll have offer is… Stede Bonnet.
Everyone will not just
If your solution to some problem relies on “If everyone would just…” then you do not have a solution. Everyone is not going to just. At not time in the history of the universe has everyone just, and they’re not going to start now.
Aziraphale and a friendly little cardinal ❤️
*intense stare*
Oh thank you for all the lovely comments on this one 🥹 it's kinda niche and I genuinely thought people would be weirded out afdsddsdf
This is the 'original' version, tame and easy, I liked it but and then I went 'ehh let's add some colors and eyes. life is short'
BLACK WIDOW (2021) CAPTAIN AMERICA: CIVIL WAR (2016)