I have a story about the Not Deer from two summers ago. I lived deep in the Appalachia mountains at the time, unlike the foothills I’m in now. I was wandering in the woods, probably two thirds of a mile from my house at that point, as one does when they live two miles down a twisting dirt road with the nearest town (and therefore things to do) thirty minutes away, when I heard brush moving. I knew it was probably a harmless animal- a possum, or a deer, maybe a particularly destructive rabbit, and I turned to look.

well. hm. it was a deer in the way that a graveyard is a playground. you can treat it as such, I guess, but it won’t feel the same.

it was about thirty feet away from me, staring. wild deer don’t stare at random people to begin with- they just run away. she was breathing hard and making a low rumbling sound. I didn’t really know what to do, and I hadn’t really thought about the dangers of going near wild animals even if they are “harmless” deer, so I went towards her.

I swear to god, this thing’s eyes blanked out and it took a couple jerking steps forward, moving really strangely? and I flinched, because what the hell, and then she ran off to the side while staring at me until she was about fifty feet away. it was deeply unsettling in a way that I can’t explain and I know that that thing was not quite a deer.

I sprinted all the way home.

I’ve seen something like this myself. I would say “The joints went the wrong way” but it was more that there might have been more or less joints than you’d expect? The bends were not where the bends go. And the shape of the face was wrong in a way I’d describe as: You have a friend who only draws wolves. They’re really, really, really good at wolves. You want them to draw a deer. They try their best, and neither of you are exactly pleased with the results. There was also an issue of scale - like you gave a deer the proportions of a moose.

I’ve heard “Deer” comes from “Deor” which just means “beast” or “quadruped” so… it was definitely a Deor, but 100% not a Deer. 

I collect spooky stories from other people and a friend once told me about driving back from a “ghost hunt” out in SE Oklahoma, seeing what they described as “like a deer” that stood in the middle of the road, and refused to move. So when one of them got out to go shoo it away by hand they all realized, about the same time… that it was only almost a deer. They described the collective reaction as wildly disproportionate to what they remember having seen - which was just … not quite a deer?

They said there was about fifteen minutes of foot to the floor speeding before they all, right about the same time, felt a change in mood come over them and they began to sob like “little scared kids”. It was only weeks later that they were like “You know… deer don’t look anything like that.”

I was at the coffeeshop in the village and someone asked me how my llamas are doing, and a woman overheard and told me that when she was a kid, her parents used to have a couple of llamas in their sheep farm, and every single sheep in their flock imprinted on one of the two llamas. Each sheep chose the best most charismatic llama according to mysterious sheep criteria, and never wavered in their ovine loyalty. Each of the two llamas was worshiped by a small sub-flock of devoted sheep who followed him everywhere like Jesus’s apostles and only left their field for transhumance when led by “their” llama. The funniest thing is the way this woman overheard the word “llama” and immediately came to sit next to me to tell me this, like she had waited since childhood to share her bewilderment about the two religious congregations of sheep led by rival llama prophets in her family farm.

This has blown my mind and I think I need to reread the whole series in light of it.

Harry focuses on the ways that Lily dies as his mother, because how could he not. But Lily also dies as a soldier in a war. She’s a fighter, she’s an impressive witch in her own right, we know these things.

So I wonder if maybe Lily and Severus both shared a taste for great but terrible things that in the end, went in different directions.

I mean, Lily clearly has a strong sense of right and wrong and of justice. Harry inherits that. But we can see, via Harry, how much that can be expressed in dangerous, risk-taking, risk-causing ways, and sometimes virtue is to be more feared than vice.

Potential: Lily has a liking for “the bad guy.” Whether it’s a power fantasy of being their equal, an acceptance fantasy of being the person an uncaring person cares about, an enjoyment of fighting or drama or the sharper edges of affection (note how her sister is to her, for example), she maybe likes Severus and James for the same reasons, reasons that other people would consider reasons to dislike them instead, and maybe the reason she jumped ship from Severus to James was that James started being safe for her and Severus started being unsafe.

Specifically, James started listening to her wants, toning down or ending certain behaviors, and this might have resulted in him becoming the “good” or “safe” bad guy, maintaining the allure without the threat. Meanwhile Severus is going in the opposite direction, developing a threat value (by his association with budding followers of Voldemort, and his eruption of blood prejudice) and becoming less enjoyable company.

We know from the prophecy and how it managed to apply to Harry that Lily doesn’t shy away from fights. “Born to those who have thrice defied him” speaks of a couple, not a man whose wife stays quietly home. Maybe she likes those fights, including as a display of affection with a trusted friend or spouse.

Maybe she went for the type who was sharp-edged somehow, and James was the one who did a better job, to her standards and preferences, of being dangerous enough to be interesting, without being unsafe.

I think that is a very valid point. JK said that Severus thought becoming a DE would impress Lily. For him James was and remained an absolute bully but if Lily goes dating and then marrying said bully then clearly she does find bullies attractive from Severus perspective. He doesn’t know James has stopped hexing random students because James has not stopped hexing him.

Lily knew James was a bully and strongly spoke out about his dislike of that. James then appears to change for her, and she is flattered. Severus refused to change his friendship group and is, to her eyes, accelerating down a path she doesn’t like. She lost social capital with her friends when she hung out with Severus but she seems to gain social capital by being with James and ends up Head Girl. Petunia was not the only social climber in the family tree in my opinion. And Lily was not a paragon of kindness, patience or virtue. And I like her more for being flawed and for having a more balanced character than any amount of “uncommonly kind” drivel painting her as flawless and somehow too stupid to see James and his pals as they really were.

Honestly this reminds me of my annoyance with the characterization of Padme Amidala in the Star Wars prequels. They seemed to be deliberately drawing a contrast between herself and Darth Vader, making her his opposite for some sort of ham-handed thematic purpose of “hey look Anakin’s true love is Pure and Sweet and Pacifist and his turn to the Dark Side places him in opposition to everything about her.” And it was annoying as fuck to see her as this sort of virtuous paragon of idealism, trusting as a lamb to the slaughter all the way to the part where she “died of a broken heart” at news of his Fall.

If Disney handed me (for my soul, probably) the ability to remake the Star Wars prequels, I’d have made her brightly angry instead of pacifist—a fierce warrior in the making in her own right, ready to rip the Trade Federation to shreds for threatening her planet and people, and that being something Anakin loved about her. The contrast between the bright anger, the anger born of love, in the face of injustice and cruelty, and the anger born of hate which is the Dark Side made manifest, and the Jedi Order’s foolish inability to distinguish between the two being its own fatal flaw, their exhortations to Anakin to abandon good emotions as dangerous and Dark being part of the reason he started looking elsewhere for moral guidance.

Enough with the pure selfless love interest lady, already.

After this image became so popular, the quote passed me by on an almost daily basis. Eventually, my brain settled on a bit more darkish interpretation of ‘the crows leading you home’. 

Made for inktober initially, original drawing can be found here 

I think it was before I started posting story concepts on tumblr but I had an old concept called ‘apocalyptia’ which was a dark comedy about a world where every apocalypse movie premise happened simultaneously

The big joke was that all these HUGE disasters cancelled each other out. A bunch of shit flooding kept the zombies contained. The super intelligent apes stopped global warming. The leather-clad motorcycle murder gangs intimidate the alien invaders.

Everything sucks in like 8 overlapping ways but it’s just become the norm at this point. There’s a guy named Cannibal Jack that people trust to cook for them for some reason.

The main character is a recluse with a shotgun who just wants to sit in her shack and give cynical advice to passing young people, but unfortunately, her younger brother and only surviving family member is a conman with his fingers in every stupid decision being made within a ten mile radius

The brother’s name is Sal, which is short for SOMETHING but he changes his answer every time. He seems to think this qualifies as an alias, and bizarrely, it usually works. Notable ‘definitely Sal’s real name’ options include Salt, Salmon, Salamander, and Salad.

His sister’s name is Marian, occasionally called Misery Marian. It is a running joke that young characters think this is a reference to her bad attitude, but anyone who actually CALLS her that is clearly terrified of her for some unspecified reason.

Sal’s got an on-again off-again business partner by the name of Kent Bardsley, who is just.... SO irresponsibly horny. Sal’s motivation is money, but Kent’s is sex. He keeps getting run out of town for sleeping with important people’s wives. He’s an idiot, but he’s not a conman like Sal, he just helps him with his schemes as an in to towns so he can visit his assortment of fuckbuddies.

The joke of Kent’s character is that the ‘apocalypse’ he’s part of is conservative scaremongering about sexual freedom destroying society. He gets a last name because while Sal calls him Kenny, Marian calls him ‘Bardsley’ with deep contempt.

The fuck types of our characters so far:

Marian: fuck off

Sal: fuck you, pay me

Kent: fuck me

Cannibal Jack: what the fuck

There’s an alien named Glipix who is investigating why the invasion failed and her analysis tends to boil down to ‘damn bitch you really live like this?’

Kent is really into her but his flirting goes right over her head. Marian’s the only one she respects anyways.

Kent: Hey, you looking to get those eggs fertilized, beautiful?

Glipix: What pollinators are operating on this horrible planet? Did you see one? I need to speak with them if you did.

Kent: uh

I have a mental image for a TV opening where it’s Marian at like.  12.  watching some apocalypse happen through a window and saying “The world ended when I was a girl...” in a really serious tone, and then it pans out to show like 6 other apocalypses happening and her voice turns sarcastic and she says “about thirty fucking times, actually.”

Alright here’s more content for you guys:

—Marian is 46 and spent her 20s and early 30s as a mad max style motorcycle gang member. ‘Misery Marian’ was her moniker while she was LEADING one of these gangs.

—Sal and Kent are somehow unaware of this.

—Sal’s apocalypse is capitalism. Also Godzilla.

—I’m not kidding about that, Sal and Marian’s parents were killed by a giant dinosaur that still sometimes shows up to bother Sal.

i’m in love with this

Please for the love of god write this book so i can do fanfiction of the characters in already in love with

IM SCREAMING

IT CAME FULL CIRCLE IM HOLLERIN

IT JUST KEEPS GETTING BETTER

IS HE GOING TO BE DRAFTED NEXT???!!!??

This is so sweet and pure. Lol.

I’m crying. I’m also rooting for the Blues now.

@kvnbksa have you seen the updates?

more updates

I love when he says “I want the jersey of someone who’s literally the worst” and Tarasenko is like “This is my moment”

where is the emmy nom

I need to let y'all know “my fellow white people” is the very first line of the show atgjsgjgs

Soda is bubbly soup.

Soup is boring soda.

Make your own goddamn controversial post

you fuckin heard me.

O hmy god

I’m disturbed

This is like reading of two people getting into an argument in a bar then one of them commits a war crime.

No marriage required.

the entire time i spent watching this movie i was just waiting for charlotte to turn into a traitorous bitch, because that is what the media has told me for my entire life that her character archetype is supposed to do

kudos to disney for proving me wrong

Let me tell you how great Lottie is. 1. She has EVERYTHING. This girl can literally have anything she wants and instead of hanging out with girls of her social class she’s friends with a poor girl. 2. Not only is she below her social class but she is African American which back in the twenties was COMPLETELY frowned upon. Lottie is risking social status to be friends with Tia. 3. When Tia and Naveen end up together in the end, Lottie doesn’t throw a fit or act upset, she is genuinely happy that Tiana has found true love even though that’s all Lottie has ever wanted her whole life. Something that her daddy can’t buy for her. 4. She’s true to herself and doesn’t let others judge her just because of how much money she has and she has a wonderful friend like Tiana that loves her for that. Lottie is wonderful and is highly underrated.

If Tiana had let her, Charlotte would have bought the restaurant for Tiana and stocked it with the most expensive everything and had a grand ball for the opening. 

#Charlotte was a ride or die chick to the end#like she’s the defination of sugar and sweetness as a person#like Tiana could ask her for anything and Charlotte would do it no questions or conditions required

Remember that scene when Charlotte was hanging out with the prince until she came across Tiana who had fallen into her beignet table and gotten desserts all over her dress after being rejected by the racist assholes who denied her restaurant, and Charlotte immediately dropped everything to get Tiana cleaned up and gave her one of her own dresses. The entire night she’d been going nuts because all she wanted was to be with the prince but her friend was in trouble so she put that shit on hold no questions asked. Charlotte was a real one.

Kaitlin Olson on Danny Devito (x)

god I LOVE HIM

Danny Devito took care of Mara Wilson when her mom died while filming Matilda. He babysat her when her parents had to go to the hospital and was there for her after she passed. On all accounts, Danny Devito is the person you want in your life

Friendly reminder that he also saved a suicidal teen’s life

Can someone from the Pokemon fandom explain this, I don’t understand nurse Joy’s reaction.

Ho-oh is basically a minor deity, so nurse joy pretty much just heard this ten year old say “i threw a rat at a god.”

i threw a rat at a god

The best part? Pikachu is awake. Pokemon faint upon being defeated.

What Nurse Joy heard was more along the lines of “I threw a mouse at a god and the mouse won.”

what is a king to a god

what is a god to a ten year old with an electric mouse

THIS. I wish I could be as eloquent as this person. Because this is how you make a difference.

for everyone in the notes asking: this was @raindovemodel​ (who is no longer active on tumblr, they’re active on instagram where this was posted but i wont link it because tumblr would hide this in the notes)

Rain (any pronouns) is a genderfluid model & posts a lot about how their ability to “pass” as either a man or a woman influences them, and shows off the absurdity of double standards such as mens vs womens olympic uniforms and societal treatment based on perceived gender

They’re also incredibly patient with transphobes and other bigots, and much more so than most of us can manage and I think it’s amazing that they put up with what people say & do

BRO !!!!!!

…. that was an unreal level of skill. Wow.

All of these books are queer, but they all have back blurbs that don’t say they’re queer. While this can be a pain if I’m scouting for queer SFF, it can come in handy for people in a situation where they don’t want to be reading queer books openly. 

Please do note that I don’t have hard copies of the books on hand so it’s possible that an author quote or something mentions one being queer (I feel like this isn’t super likely, but I don’t want to rule it out). Some might also have author biographies mentioning that the author is queer. Also, some may be shelved as LGBT on Goodreads or categorized as queer on Amazon. So if you’re planning on asking for any of these as holiday gifts, I would suggest going to the Amazon page or where ever your relative is likely to buy it from and double check that it’s something you’d be comfortable with sharing openly. 

I wish I had more pansexual books, but the ones I know of tend to mention queerness in the back description. 

With the exception of The Spy with the Red Balloon, these are all books I have read or are currently reading. If you want to recommend others, feel free to do so in the replies!

You can find my other queer book recommendations here.

Links to the queer books database (or Goodreads if the book hasn’t been added yet) are available below the cut. You can find information on content warnings there.

Keep reading

this 50′s hungarian comic strip I’d never heard of until now is so damn cute for something that also gets so horny

It helps that the writer was trying to create something he hoped would appeal to women as much as men.

Yeah and I think where it really succeeds vs. modern anime wifey fantasy shit is that Jucika really is just a character super comfortable with being sexual, likes looking sexy and even has no shame in using it to get her way:

….But at the same time, she doesn’t tolerate being objectified against her wishes:

….And the comic takes her side in both cases, whereas I’ve seen countless modern narratives in which this same character would have only been framed as like a Slutty ™ Bitch ™ or full blown villain.

One of the things I also really like about this comic, besides what’s already been stated, is that the humor isn’t always about her being sexy. Sometimes it’s just about other goofy things in her life!

oh yes many of them are experienes just anybody can relate to

but then there’s also the time she just….built a functional AI?

she just didn’t predict how the robot rebellion would really manifest

okay, controversial batman opinion time! it ruins the character for him to be a billionaire, and he’s only a billionaire because too many people think ‘billionaire’ just means ‘millionaire but cooler’. bruce wayne should just be a millionaire. 

a millionaire has enough money to buy a batcave, a fancy batmobile, a supercomputer, a bunch of esoteric custom-made tools and toys, a couple companies that make enough money to fund a playboy lifestyle and a bunch of high-tech vigilante superheroes. millionaires today, even with inflation, can commission the creation of pretty much any physical item short of their own spaceship, and some of them can even do that. 

a billionaire has enough money to own entire cities and write their own laws and do whatever the fuck they want basically all the time, anywhere. look at disney, tesla, amazon, nestle, walmart. these guys are playing on an almost inconceivable global scale and they are not your friend. these are lex luthor motherfuckers. 

the question keeps being asked, ‘if bruce wayne is so rich, it’s ridiculous that he’s using all that money to run around in a bat costume punching mentally ill people’, and that’s correct if he’s got money on a billionaire’s scale. it’s absurdly irresponsible to have the kind of power that could change how a nation operates, much less local government, and just play night time punch guy with it. batman is the bad guy there. 

but say batman’s ‘just’ a millionaire. he’s the heir of a couple old money families, he’s got a mansion and some land and a private jet, he’s in with the elite of gotham, he can put some pressure on the mayor and the city council and the police– but he’s still on a level with half a dozen other families who have their own millions to throw around, their own ambitions. he can’t actually fix gotham just by throwing money at it, because he will run out of money before all the other rich guys do. 

in this situation, batman does make sense for bruce wayne to invent: a secret guy no one can pin on wayne industries, who can run around taking on organized crime and supervillains at the same time, who isn’t beholden to the social or legal conventions that the superwealthy also flout to play their fucked up games with each other. batman can actually do what a single millionaire can’t. 

batman gets written by batman fanboys to be a power fantasy, but with great power comes great responsibility, etc. at a certain level of wealth his power far outstrips his purpose, and being batman is actually irresponsible for bruce wayne. a hero’s limitations make for better stories. stop writing batman as a billionaire, already. 

This is Very Good. I’ve always been basically onboard with ‘Batman can be a billionaire and a good guy because it’s a necessary conceit of the story to justify him being able to be Batman, and also he’s regularly framed as an exception to the rule because he’s Batman’, but just a little shaky about said conceit meaning ‘this thing that’s bad in the real world is actually cool and good here because of circumstances that have absolutely never and will pretty definitely never really materialize’. But yeah, especially in the heightened reality of a comic book world, millions could get the job done and avoids a lot of the worst questions and implications, so works for me.

The stories of women in my family who were forced into lives they didn’t want and didn’t utilize their passions breaks my heart. My grandma wanted to be a journalist and write about the injustices she saw inflicted on disabled ppl while she was volunteering at a state run institution as a teen. Her father decided that she was “too fat and stupid” for college and forced her to get married at 17 or else he’d make her homeless. As a kid she told me that she wished people believed that she had meaningful opinions on events around her. One of my great grandmothers wanted to be an artist but was pressured into marrying a man who beat her. She stayed up late each night when her children were in bed writing poetry and pasting it over elaborate collages she mad herself. We still have stacks of these notebooks she created but was never allowed to do anything with. My mother wanted to be an operatic singer and was considered a musical prodigy in her town because she taught herself three seperate instruments by 13. When she was 18 she met my then 30 year old father who emotionally manipulated her into giving up her dreams to start a family with him. As a kid I would hear her up at night playing the violin or doing vocal exercises until she became too depressed to practice anymore. Like idk y’all there’s a quiet type of violence in the way women’s talents are devalued and brushed aside in favor of bullying them into “traditional” roles that ultimately don’t fulfill what they wanted for their lives. We’ve lost so much art, music, writing, science, and happiness to misogyny.

And then men will smugly ask “Well where are all the great women artists, writers, scientists, etc, then?” while they think that they are so great despite not personally contributing to improve mankind in any way because other men have.

I feel like this is a great thing to learn from too. People like to write these kinds of events off as being in the past, but this still happens all the time. We’re taught from a very young age by society to put all of our passions and ambitions aside for our partners, because that’s what our mothers and grandmothers did before us.

If you need me

I’ll be locked in my room reading Letterboxd reviews of the Netflix original movie “The Knight Before Christmas”.

I mean... these are literally just the ones that show up at the top

They’re all like this

It’s just one giant roast

And endless shit posting

False! Oranges are an old world fruit that used to be imported from Italy. He would know exactly what an orange is but think it’s an expensive luxury good that indicates high social status.

Actually, that’s the kind of side-plot I want in a time-travel romance movie:  the modern woman angsting about trying to help get him back to his own time and whether she should pursue this knowing he may soon be gone for good, while meanwhile the man from the past decided he was interested 10 minutes into the movie and has been conducting his own private investigation into what her social status so he can understand if/how he’s allowed to enter a relationship with her.

On mystical facetime to friend in his own time period via magic mirror:

friend:  Perplexing.

him:  She hath no servant-

friend:  What, none? None at all!

him:  Not one.

friend:  Then, surely she must be of the lowest peasant class

him:  So I did assume.  And yet, not two days hence, I did espy her eat an orange, placidly as if this were no special treat.

friend:  Still, no servants at all ...

him, brandishing the mirror:  And yet behold!

friend:  *gasp of disbelief and wonder*

him:  Her store of spices.  And all for her own private use, for as I’ve said, she keeps no household!

friend: ... this mystery is beyond my ken.

him:  *wordless cry of frustration*

btw… important PSA: cutting off the mold on the surface of food does nothing. you can only see the spores on the surface, but mold itself has spread and grown roots into the food. by the time you can actually *see* the spores, that piece of food is completely full of it. youre still eating mold. 

many of which are poisonous and have been shown to cause cancer. youre not even supposed to sniff it, because that can get spores into your lungs. like if you look up the health and safety guidelines for mold they barely stop short of telling you to put on a hazmat suit. 

like produce is okay as long as you cut around it at least an inch, but cooked foods? you gonna die. stop eating mold people 

does that include bread

yes

it’s been linked to before but this is a good solid source

http://www.fsis.usda.gov/wps/portal/fsis/topics/food-safety-education/get-answers/food-safety-fact-sheets/safe-food-handling/molds-on-food-are-they-dangerous_/ct_index

and there’s a lot of ‘whose doing this!?!??’ in comments

the answer is, unsurprisingly, poor people. poor people, and people who fear poverty, honestly

it’s horrible what that will do, how people will endanger themselves because of it, of fear of food scarcity

source for that: me, a lifetime of living under the poverty line and also being mentally ill

I already knew this but I am rebageling this post to warn others! <3

DO WEREWOLVES HAVE TOE BEANS

of course they have toe beans what else do you suck on

if there is a god, mine is surely a trickster, giving me the miracle of sight and of comprehension only for me to be cursed to use it on what you just said

“you talk like a smart/pretentious person” actually I just forget simple words constantly and am forced to rummage through my brain for the nearest synonym, which is usually twice as long and needlessly specific

#see also: the exact feeling im trying to convey with my sentences doesnt get across the same way without that specific word