JVL
Alisa U Zemlji Chuda
trying on a metaphor
One Nice Bug Per Day
shark vs the universe
Mike Driver
NASA
cherry valley forever
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"I'm Dorothy Gale from Kansas"
hello vonnie
AnasAbdin
Sweet Seals For You, Always
Andulka
#extradirty
★
Lint Roller? I Barely Know Her
No title available
TVSTRANGERTHINGS
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@catwingsthespatula
Impeccable music choice here:
On the American broadcast, about five seconds after the music started the announcer said about the woman, “she lists her hobbies as ‘forgetting things’ and ‘existential crises’”, and I can’t imagine a more delightful one-two punch
It finally happened! I'm officially a published author! And today I got to celebrate that with two of the people who are a huge part of making that happen.
@catwingsthespatula THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU for all of it. Rory and Emmett would not have been the same without you!!
@nade2308 you're an INCREDIBLE cheering section and I love how much you love this story!!!
If you're curious about what we all made as a result of this chaotic three way team effort, you can find Thief of Hearts in paperback or ebook form here!!
Thief of Hearts by Heather Clark
Happy Valentine's Day from the author who didn’t even mean to write a love story in the first place! 💗
As someone who has read (and been deeply involved and invested in from the early stages of the process of writing) Thief of Hearts, here's my attempt at telling you why you should read it:
The entire main plot of Thief of Hearts takes place within forty-eight hours: the approximate length of time it takes for someone to die after a 'heart thief' magically pulls the life force out of their body. For Rory, that clock starts ticking when Emmett, a hostage of an organized crime boss who forces Emmett to kill for him by threatening his son's life, fails to obtain the heart he'd been sent after and, in desperation, takes Rory's as a substitute. By the time Rory realizes her heart has been stolen and tracks down the thief, intending to take her heart back even if it means putting a knife through someone else's, Emmett has already handed over her life to the person who controls his own. He's also the only person who might be able to help her get it back... and Rory might just be the only person who can help Emmett get his and Carlo's lives back, as well. If they want to live, they'll have less than two days to plan and pull off an impossible heist against an untouchable criminal mastermind. To have even the slimmest chance of success, they'll have to work together... and to trust each other enough to even try. Luckily, they don't have any better options.
Rory and Emmett are gritty, complex, beautiful, and deeply messed-up people in a gritty, complex, beautiful, and deeply messed-up world. When this story begins, a combination of impossible circumstances and the equally impossible decisions they've each made in response have brought them both to the lowest point in their lives, and they're both clinging to some level of denial in place of any real hope. While it manifests in different ways and for different reasons, they're both isolated, despairing, and broken. They're both aware that their situations are unsustainable, but terrified of change because their margins of survival are too slim to endure any change for the worse. Over the course of the story, their tentative, practical, calculated decision to trust each other sets in motion events that force them to grapple with the cost of the survival mindsets they've fallen into, give them a glimpse of a life beyond just surviving, and ultimately, lead them to becoming worthy of each other's trust.
Tl;dr: Do you want to see two people given less than two days to go from mutual attempted murder to taking on a magical mob boss in an impenetrable fortress in a what's basically an eternal-winter-night cursed prison city, all the while dealing with extreme weather, magically induced illness, bounty hunters, and each other's and their own psychological issues, who save themselves and each other and accidentally become better people and forge themselves into a family while they're at it? Of course you do. Read the book.
(Also, there's a pigeon sidekick.)
@thethistlegirlwrites AURORA
PSA: if you're watching the new Knives Out mystery (Wake Up Dead Man), please be aware that around 1 hr 34 minutes in, there's a series of flashing/strobing lights. the sequence lasts about a minute.
^ comment I got on tiktok bc I posted this same thing there. this is why I'm giving the warning because netflix and the theaters didn't 😔
[ID: comment reading "I have epilepsy went to see it yesterday and covered my eyes too late and had a seizure and all I could think was why are we STILL not putting strobe warnings on movies..." /end ID]
To be specific [spoiler warning for Wake Up Dead Man] there is a scene in the rain, the priest will slip on mud, run into the woods, and a fist will knock him out. Close your eyes immediately when you see the fist. Don't open again until you start hearing conversations.
Sharing for the plot specifics which makes it a bit easier for people who are watching compared to tracking the timings
monks debating whether vows of silence should still allow you to leave emoji reacts on the monastery groupchat
So a guy I went to middle school with now works in the vatican and according to Cam, the rules on:
Whether you can leave emoji reacts in the groupchat
Whether you can leave regular messages in the groupchat
Whether you can HAVE a groupchat
Whether you can have Electronic Devices
-vary from one silent monastic order to another, but none of them have ever successfully banned "Long trail of increasingly hostile post-it messages on the fridge".
#prev#uh#hwhat - @thirdspin, responding to #I still remember the christmas that half the nuns decamped to grandma's#because the debate about whether it was sinful to grease bird feeders#to prevent squirrel theft#had gotten out of hand#grandma didn't know where to PUT them all So. My grandparents were catholic and born in the late 20's. Nearly 100 years ago. Therefore my Grandma's youngest sister became a nun, which was a viable career path if you 1) didn't really want to get married, 2) wanted to have an education, 3) were dirt poor and hey! Your parents know the church will feed their daughter through the depression!
Most of my great aunt's cohort came from option number three. It was the Midwest, these were farm girls, their order was mostly about public service, teaching, and hard work, and they were used to a life of telling men "yes sir" and then doing whatever they were going to do anyway. Priests did not faze them. My mom remembers them mostly as teachers with rulers, but the ones willing to deal with me as a small child in the 90's and early 0's were pretty rad.
This made for some, shall we say, spirited arguments. Great Auntie's order drew from a lot of very small towns with a lot of strong immigrant farming tradition and English as a second language, and an Irish catholic, a German catholic, and an Italian catholic are not the same thing, even if they've been Dominican Sisters for sixty years. They were all also named Sister Mary Something, except Sister Scholastica, and whenever things got too ridiculous at the convent my great aunt decamped to her biological sister's house for dinner and a round of scrabble. She always returned with a few jars of grandpa's honey "for the church" which goes a long way towards explaining why the convent approved of Gramps so much, even though he was born a protestant.
On to the squirrels. One year, Christmas break fell in such a way that my family arrived at my grandparents' to stay several days before Christmas eve. We even got there before the convent cookie drop, which was usually shortbread from the depression and pizzelles. Pizzeles are anise flavored wafer thin cookies that are cooked in highly decorative waffle iron things one at a time, and come out looking like snowflakes or quilts or some combination of the two. We got pizzeles every year because Sister Pizzele was good friends with my great aunt and had inherited her pizzele irons from her mother's dowry. We got crisco shortbread with grocery store brand jam in it because of rampant market speculation in the 1920's.
No, when we arrived days before Christmas eve, the nuns were still baking in the convent kitchen. Entertained by the extremely fat urban wildlife of the convent garden that they could see out the window, courtesy of Sister Birdfeeder, who kept their various seed dispensers full despite her aging knees, and whose love of all god's creatures was tested by the fact that squirrels are thieves.
Thieves that don't just eat the birdseed, but knock it all out of the feeders so that Sister Birdfeeder had to go out into the iced over sidewalk of the convent courtyard to refill the bird feeder multiple times a day, which the squirrels regarded as a neat hack for endless room service.
So in secret - relative secret given that it was in a convent - Sister Birdfeeder had gone out the night before the big bake to grease the bird feeder pole with crisco. An extremely fat grey squirrel took a running leap at it in full view of the nun baking battalion and sliiiiiid back down the pole. Slowly. Bewildered that its endless buffet was not a quick scamper away anymore. The nuns either burst out laughing or turned to Sister Birdfeeder, who proudly exclaimed that she'd shown those little thieves, and produced a partially used tub of crisco to demonstrate.
Immediately, someone in the crowd exclaimed "But that's a sin!"
Cue instant chaos. Everyone had an opinion. There were bible passages being quoted. Someone threatened to Get The Priest About This. Great Auntie and Sister Pizzelle looked at each other over a table of cookies and boxes as the argument raged on, and decided that this was one war they did not want to be part of. They made their excuses (Gotta deliver these cookies to my sister, her grandkids are coming early this year!) and escaped the kitchen trailing nearly another dozen nuns who all wanted out of the current convent schism. Their excuses included carrying boxes, driving the car, loading up people's walkers, and driving the other car with all the other people necessary for this voyage. They descended on my grandparents' house on Christmas Eve eve to tell this story to my grandmother, her fine educated catholic daughters who were their former students, and her fine educated catholic granddaughters. Who they would attempt to recruit to convent life as soon as any of them showed signs of reaching twenty five without being in a serious relationship. "So is it a sin to grease bird feeders?" I asked, having taken seven pizzeles while the adults were occupied, much like the squirrel. "It depends," said my great aunt. "On intentions and the actual consequences and -"
"More importantly," said my mother, staring at the shortbread, "Which tub of crisco did you make these cookies with?"
Obsessed with vampires but specifically when they're really pathetic
Obsessed with a vampire's existence being symbolic of the terror in a lack of control. Of having needs that scare you. Of a non-violent heart having to enact violence for the sake of survival. Of hiding yourself and longing for the honesty of companionship that you may never hope to get. Of fearing fearful eyes. Of more hunger than you know how to fill. The vampire wants to be taken care of, the vampire is scared, the vampire feels small, the vampire wants to rest. I!!!!!! Like that a lot :) I like pathetic vampires. And I like the catharsis of when someone does offer that vampire the space to be loved and trusted. Of someone offering their blood as a symbol of the vampire being taken care of. I love you, I'm not scared of you, I trust you, I'll feed you. You're safe here. And I know that I am too
Now don't look too deeply into what this says about me
(Belated) Cover Reveal!
Well, apparently Tumblr ATE my scheduled post and I did NOT realize that until today! So without further ado, here's the cover of Thief of Hearts, which will be releasing February 14, 2026!
He stole her heart. She wants it back. Rory Blake has nothing to lose. Growing up in the eternal winter city of Rime has taught Rory survival belongs to those ruthless enough to fight for it. After her heart is stolen by a magically gifted assassin, she has forty-eight hours to take it back or die trying, and her only hope of pulling off a successful heist is the man who's just killed her. Emmett Santos has nowhere to hide. In exchange for his son's life, Emmett uses his lethal gift in the service of Rime’s most powerful syndicate, stealing the hearts of his employer’s competition. When a theft goes wrong, he's trapped between the heart's determined owner and the boss who won’t hesitate to make Emmett pay for his failure. Their only chance is each other. Rory needs Emmett’s gift to steal back her heart, but keeping him alive long enough to succeed means protecting him from rival syndicates’ bounty hunters. And if Emmett wants to rescue his son, he’ll need to trust Rory’s plan to bring the Star Syndicate’s empire down before her heart stops beating.
If this sounds like the kind of book you’d enjoy, I’m currently accepting applications for ARC readers! https://forms.gle/zLyLXYX4MTzUc9aVA
Faces in coffee.
"God needs to demonstrate His attribute of justice by punishing sin." This is the highest density of bad theology I've ever seen in a single sentence; I'll elaborate if someone wants me to.
I am asking you to elaborate if no one has already 👀
This is fun!
"God needs"... Since when does God "need" to do anything? And weirdly enough, this is terrible in a different way to the other awful nonsense in this statement, because that rests on theological voluntarism (I'll explain what that is and why it's bad later) and this is here asserting that God "has" to do certain things.
"...to demonstrate...": Demonstrate to who? To Himself? Does He not understand Himself perfectly? To His creatures? See #1.
"...His attribute...": God doesn't have attributes (although we do experience Him as though He had attributes, because creatures are limited like that), because if He were made of parts then He wouldn't be Ultimate Reality but another being made of parts. This is where voluntarism comes in - voluntarism is the theological position which believes that God's will is more fundamental than His intellect or goodness (this is where "everything God does is good regardless of what it is because it's God" comes from). This causes a lot of problems (and I'll get to that soon), but the relevant one here is that it puts God's attributes in contest with each other.
"...of justice...": This is presupposing a certain type of justice, which revolves around punishing sin. However, the definition of justice in the Ancient Near East that the Bible hence uses is about the proper ordering of the world, which may include but is much broader than punishment (Fr. Stephen DeYoung has a good article on this), and so God is just simply by making a properly ordered world.
"... by punishing sin." The end conclusion of this line of reasoning is that God needs sin in order to fully exhibit His goodness. I hope I don't have to explain how messed up this theology is.
Reblogging because I realised I didn't explain what's bad about voluntarism, and this is as good a place to do it as any.
To recap, voluntarism is the belief that God's will is more fundamental than His intellect, compassion, etc. I already mentioned the problems with divine simplicity, but there's more
(Cribbing this from David Bentley Hart's Atheist Delusions) - voluntarism cripples natural theology. One of the key points of classical theism (and found in the Bible in both the Sermon on the Mount - "if you, who are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more does your Father in Heaven?" - and Romans 1) is that we can make inferences about God's character from the nature of creation. This is instinctively true; as an amateur writer, I'm sure people can learn things about me from my writing, even pieces that aren't didactic. However, if creation is just an expression of God's will that could have gone in any direction, then we can't learn things about God from it.
Voluntarism sends you tumbling headlong into the Euthyphro dilemma - are things good because God commands them (in which case morality is arbitrary) or does God commands things because they're good (in which case he's not the origin of morality)? The classical solution is that goodness' shape is intrinsic to God's character, but voluntarism - by making God's will more fundamental than the other traits of Him - blocks that off.
Relatedly, it leaves you facing the "can God draw square circles or make two plus two equal five"? problem. Like with the previous question, classical theism deals with it by saying that rationality is intrinsic to God's character, but that's an impossible statement if God's intellect is subordinate to His will.
I'm starting to go the opposite direction of all the "you're a literal baby infant until 25 bc your bwain is a baby bwain :(" shit
We should be treating teens as more adult than we do. I don't mean some lowering the age of consent creep shit, I mean presuming competence. Get a job, learn life skills, learn to cook, be fully responsible for a pet, walk places alone (in daylight) or with a friend, have intergenerational friendships, teach skills to littler kids, be someone people can trust with more than wiping their own ass. Be someone they themselves can trust to do stuff and go places. We're stealing children's confidence by treating them like they can't do anything. Treat them like they can and should do many adult things and more will find the confidence to practice at them.
Yes, the brain isn't finished growing when you're like 15. No, you shouldn't get treated like a preschooler till it is. The general experience of adulthood is like 90% practice 10% maturity I think. The maturity is needed but it doesn't account for much if you just do nothing.
YES. And with support! Teach your teens to make their own doctors appointments by sitting by them in case something comes up they don't know the answer to. Show your elementary schoolers how to cook a meal. Teach them how to read a map and guide you where they want to go. Kids are capable.
Your brain develops when you fucking use it, so let teens use their brains!
Everything here except 'get a job' because education is already a full-time job.
I say this as a person who did labor for money as a child and teenager and should not have had to.
And especially: *teach your kids, however small, what they can do in emergencies." That learning (because you trusted them with it as important) will sink deep into their brains and help them cope for the rest of their lives. They will know, from tiny times, what coping looks like. It'll lead them toward strengths they never knew they had.
When I was still nursing in NY and occasionally helped out our colleagues in ER, several times I saw small children who'd been taught what to do save their whole families from burning buildings by having been coached in how to use the phone to call for help and say what the trouble was, even when their parents and other older kids were unresponsive.
Teach your kids to rely on themselves, even when "people who'll tell them what to do if they're not sure" are unavailable. ...Because they may not always be available.
This is why art is important, in case you were wondering.
And kids will be so productive if you make it a game. I bet at least 50% of the kids who met this sculpture went and intentionally hunted for litter to feed it.
Gob Mouth perfec t size for put plastic in to n\ap! inside very Soft and Comfort plastic sleep soundly put plastic in goby Mouth. Put plastic In goby Mouth. no problems ever in gobby mouth because good Shape and Support for plastic neck weak of big plastic head. Agoby Mouth yes a place for a plastic put plastic in goby mouth can trust goby for giveing good love to plastic. friend goby
Meme source vvv
Some good things happening of late.
We have already averted truly apocalyptic levels of global warming.
Yes, read that again. Let it sink in. This is what the science now says. We have already averted truly apocalyptic global warming.
To quote David Wallace-Wells, author of The Uninhabitable Earth, from his huge feature in the New York Times:
"Thanks to astonishing declines in the price of renewables, a truly global political mobilization, a clearer picture of the energy future and serious policy focus from world leaders, we have cut expected warming almost in half in just five years... The window of possible climate futures is narrowing, and as a result, we are getting a clearer sense of what’s to come: a new world, full of disruption but also billions of people, well past climate normal and yet mercifully short of true climate apocalypse." (New York Times, October 22, 2022. Unpaywalled here. Emphasis mine. And yes, this vision of the future is backed up by the current science on the issue, as he explains at length in the article.)
So we've already averted truly apocalyptic warming, and we've already cut expected warming IN HALF in just the past five years.
The pace of technology, of innovation, of prices, of feasibility, of discovery, of organizing, of grassroots movements, of movements in other countries around the world, have all picked up the pace so fast in the last five years.
Renewable technology and capacity are both increasing at an exponential rate. It's all S-curves, ones that look like this:
-via The Economist, June 20, 2024.
How much more will we manage in another five years? Another ten? Another twenty?
I know the US is about to fucking suck about the environment for the next four years. But the momentum of renewable energy is far too much to stop - both in the US (x) and around the world.
(Huge shoutouts to India, China, and Brazil for massive gains for the environment in renewables, and Brazil for massive progress against Amazon deforestation.)
We're going to get there.
Say it with me. We're going to get there.
“[T]he root of modern totalitarianism is to be found in the denial of the transcendent dignity of the human person who, as the visible image of the invisible God, is therefore by his very nature the subject of rights which no one may violate — no individual, group, class, nation or State. Not even the majority of a social body may violate these rights, by going against the minority, by isolating, oppressing, or exploiting it, or by attempting to annihilate it.”
— John Paul II (Centesimus annus, §44e)
HUMANITY WIN
woke up from a dream where i was making this and i had to make it a reality. i can now go back to sleep
