full of sound and fury

A tale told by an idiot, signifying nothing

[alamutjones]

OOoof. It has been a while.

[alamutjones]

Thoughts About Bran Stark

So, I’ve been thinking, and I have Thoughts About Bran Stark. More specifically, I have thoughts about Bran’s injury. I’m not an expert or anything, but...

In some ways, it seems like Bran Stark might be the luckiest cripple in Westeros. Based purely on what we see, the level of function he gets to keep after being pushed out of a window is really, REALLY high. Abnormally high.

He’s got full and unrestricted control of his upper body (including fine motor stuff with his fingers, which sometimes deteriorates even if it’s not totally lost) and even potentially some of the lower - he can’t feel or control his thighs or anything lower than that, but he seems able to use his hips at least a little bit. Not all paraplegics have that, since the level of control you get to keep depends on exactly where your injury is and exactly what kind of damage was done in that spot.

He’s had no mention of pressure sores or of circulation issues. This is huge. Circulation is an almost universal issue for people with limited mobility, including me and every wheelchair user I’ve ever met, but Bran doesn’t have a hint of it. We’d KNOW if he did, because cold makes circulation issues much worse and he’s been north of the Wall for sodding ages. If there was any character who should have serious issues in those conditions, it’s Bran, but Bran’s fine and somehow it’s Jojen Reed who falls apart.

He SEEMS to have surprisingly good bladder and bowel control. Again, this varies depending on where the injury is and what kind of damage was done...but there’s no mention of it, which sticks out a bit considering how happy GRRM is writing characters (even very young ones) being helplessly and gratuitously biological.

Every flip of the coin after his injury seems to have gone Bran’s way. Every single one. As I said, I’m just a layman...but he seems to have been freakishly lucky.

Is this just me?

Thoughts? Anyone? @nobodysuspectsthebutterfly, @racefortheironthrone, @dknc3? @joannalannister? @cynicalclassicist?

[alamutjones]

I decided that for the length of October I wasn’t going to drink any tea, coffee or soft drink. There wasn’t any particular reason. I just wanted to prove that I could do without.

Three days in, I’m already struggling. I keep staring at my tins of tea and having to tell myself NO ALAMUT, YOU PROMISED.

My strength of will is considerably less than I thought it was. Bugger.

[sizvideos]

[sizvideos]

Video

[decemberpaladin]

I love how she almost drops it until she smells it and that flashbulb memory hits.

[saunteringvaguelydownwards]

“Real isn’t how you are made,” said the Skin Horse. “It’s a thing that happens to you. When a child loves you for a long, long time, not just to play with, but REALLY loves you, then you become Real … Generally, by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose in the joints and very shabby. But these things don’t matter at all, because once you are Real you can’t be ugly, except to people who don’t understand.”

― Margery Williams, The Velveteen Rabbit

[redscudery]

Notice she says “who” it was and not “what” it was.

[katdensetsu]

Im crying

[voidbat]

sobbing and clutching my stuffed lion i have slept with nearly every night for 33 years. i can’t fathom being separated from him long enough to not recognize him on sight, but if you blindfolded me and held up things to smell, i’d know him just as quickly and as hard as she did.

[cumaeansibyl]

Video link is broken so here it is on YouTube, and I was already sniffling but then I saw this in the comments:

“The teddy bear was given to Jessica’s mother as a baby shower gift. After a long life, the bear was no more than part of head and a torn apart body with no stuffing. After a month of research and scouring through 10,000 vintage teddy bears online, Jessica’s fiancee was finally able to obtain the missing pieces of the bear, and had have him brought back to life at the local Teddy Bear Hospital.“

So that’s why she didn’t recognize him – he’d been so damaged that they had to reconstruct him. And now I’m crying even harder.

[0krepta-starchild]

@alamutjones

Stopped in the middle of the Velveteen Rabbit quote to grab Fatso and hug him while I read the rest of the comments <3

[alamutjones]

@krepta-starchild, how is Fatso looking these days?

[quickchangeartist]

I found this really good photo of a blue heeler puppy

I love him

[alamutjones]

He needs a lamb or one of those wee ginger heiland coos to be friends with. It is known.

[thechanelmuse]

Hazel Scott playing two pianos at the same damn time with ease

[underparisianskies]

True talent✨

[alamutjones]

This has been stuck in my head for the last four days. Continuously.

It’s a good album, but AAAAAAAAARGH

[i-gwarth]

You’re welcome

[thesporkidentity]

[Narrator: A scientist in Peru [pause for peep] captured this, escaping from the tiny body [pause for peep] of a sleeping hummingbird. [pause for peep] A high-pitched [pause for peep] but unmistakable snore. [pause for peep] Hummingbirds are loved for their beauty and speed [pause for peep] but this one was behaving a little bit like a human. [pause for peep] The perfect cute-response trigger.]

[continuants]

[pause for peep]

[shiropoint]

This is mesmerizing to watch.

[fuu-dog-treats]

actually physically painful to watch because you know months were spent masking all those frames for each of the kajillions of transitions in this

[ask-ickle-mod]

[thatsthat24]

Holy………..shmokes…….

[mozzarella-shenanigans]

Oh?? My god??

[pomrania]

I’ll try my best to describe this. It’s a video with a mash-up of a bunch of different Disney movies, set to a song that’s a mash-up of a bunch of other songs. That in and of itself wouldn’t make it praiseworthy, but this is DONE SO WELL that just, holy cow.

[drawnsnake]

HOLY SHIT

[shiftythrifting]

I found this really creepy beetroot jar in the charity shop I work in and it freaks me the hell out!

[yohandere]

ingredience

[alucardfucker]

this allows me to draw two vegetables from my deck and add them to my salad

[alamutjones]

Good god. It’s Barnaby Joyce.

[attackfish]

So I have seen the headcanon floating around that Steve Harrington is Jewish, and I’ve seen the Byers as Jewish pop up (probably because Wynona Ryder) but what I really want is for these to be both true, because I am a small town Jew and there is a very special agony with being one of only two people at your school that goes to the same synagogue as you three towns away, and the other person runs in very different social circles, and you wouldn’t be caught dead with them in public, but you share the very special bond of having suffered through being drafted into every Purim spiel together since you were tiny, and who else is going to understand your veiled reference to the Sedar Fiasco of ‘78?

[attackfish]

The whole King Steve thing is secretly really funny for Jonathan, who got to see the look of existential despair on his face when forced into the King Ahasuerus costume every year, ages nine through twelve. When Steve finally got his growth spurt and was allowed to retire, Will got the part for a year before becoming Mordecai, while Jonathan was a very deadpan Haman, ages ten through fifteen. Joyce has pictures of all of them.

[attackfish]

Look Nancy has some vague recollections of her brother mentioning Will camping out for some Jewish holiday, but the second she puts together Sukkot, outside, and October together, she’s going to start screaming.

[attackfish]

The one year Jonathan actually put some effort into his Purim spiel performance was the year Will was Ahasuerus, because it was his little brother’s first year and all. The next year, he went straight back to doing his best impression of a vulture someone tried to sit on, but there is a picture of him, standing next to a smiling eight year old be-turbaned-and-crowned Will, throwing his head back and making a credible attempt at an evil cackle.

[attackfish]

No but I’m rewatching season one, and making Joyce and her children Jewish just makes Will’s very Christian funeral and Lonnie’s sugestion that she talk to a pastor that much more depressing and aweful. Because Jonathan is in the middle of planning the funeral when Nancy drops the bombshell that she’s seen the same faceless figure as Joyce, and he leaves that to go solving that with her in the hopes that his mother is right and Will is alive. So then who planned Will’s funeral? Who would give him a Christian burial? My guess would be Lonnie. It must have added to the unreality of the whole thing for Joyce and Jonathan. Not only is Joyce half convinced Will is alive and the other half convinced she’s going crazy, and Jonathan is clinging to hope by his fingernails, there they are at his funeral, which isn’t even the right kind of funeral, expected to mourn him with rituals and words that are not their own.

[alamutjones]

I thought I was the only one that headcanoned Jewish!Byers family. Then I found this, and was pleased in the oddest way.

[alamutjones]

So, I have a new Skyrim character. He is supposed to be that most impossible of things, an Imperial Stormcloak.

That’s sort of what happens when your parents are priests of Talos in the Imperial City, with every intention to raise you into that role too, only to have that future and a huge chunk of the comforting background noise to your life taken away by the White Gold Concordat. My lad Sanctus could not give less of a fuck about the earthly politics of the civil war - he’s never set foot in Skyrim before now, he doesn’t have the context for the earthly side. He’s not completely sure how he feels about Ulfric personally. Nevertheless, this is a holy war, and he has the Voice of a god ringing in his ears.

...Unfortunately, I’m delaying doing the Jagged Crown, because that will lock him into a Stormcloak path permanently and I just can’t bring myself to do that to Balgruuf.

Goddamn it.

[copperbadge]

7th Witness:

I heard a guard talking through the barbed wire to a nine year old boy You know a lot for a boy your age  he said The boy answered I know that I know a lot and I also know I’m not going to learn any more He was loaded into a truck with a group of about 90 children When the children started screaming and struggling the boy yelled Get in here Get in the truck Stop your crying You saw the way  your parents and grandparents went Climb in then you’ll get to see them again And as they were being driven off I heard him shout back to the guard You won’t be forgiven anything

Quoted from The Investigation by Peter Weiss, a play originally in German and based heavily on (usually directly quoting testimony from) the Frankfurt Auschwitz Trials from 1963 to 1965. 

ETA: per request, the translators on my edition are Ulu Grosbard and Jon Swan.

[alamutjones]

Guess who’s got two thumbs and a raging case of tonsillitis?

...I hate my life right now.

[alamutjones]

So I spent roughly forty minutes this afternoon trying to put together a budgie toy for Livingston’s cage. Her Christmas present was a kind of tube food holder, so she wouldn’t throw seeds everywhere (making my life easier when I clean) and would have to think a bit more about how to get her food out.

It took me forty sodding minutes.

God only knows how a bird with a brain the size of a pea is supposed to figure it out. Is this how parents feel at 3AM on Christmas morning when they can’t fit the bits of the new trampoline together?

[bitchfromtheseventhhell]

Ser Amory dragged Princess Rhaenys out from under her father’s bed and stabbed her to death. 

[alamutjones]

...Was it absolutely necessary to break me?

I mean, this is beautiful and perfect. But poor little baby girl Rhaenys is possibly the thing that gets to me most about the Sack of King’s Landing, damn it. Aegon dies with Elia. For all the horror of it, at least he dies with his mum.

But Rhaenys runs to Rhaegar, who isn’t fucking there. Rhaenys dies alone.

[alamutjones]

It is entirely possible I may drown this weekend

Worst rain in twenty-something years forecast. Expecting three months of rain in three days. They are explicitly telling people not to go anywhere and not to do anything. Sandbags everywhere. Every single river in the state is on flood warning.

My sister’s sent her kids to town without her, since they’ve got a creek at the back of their property and they can’t move livestock to safety AND keep the kids out of trouble/away from rising water at the same time.

Please note, I live right in the single most likely place to flood in the ENTIRE city. Where I live always, ALWAYS floods. Lowest bit of ground in town, built along an underground creek’s path, and a nice big stormwater drain! Hooray! I’m gonna get wet as fuck!

Mind you, I’m several floors up, but still. Castaway On Lonely Island weekend commences now. Good times.