I really recommend the TĂĄin BĂł CĂşailnge to anyone looking to get into medieval literature because it's a great story, brilliant poetry (I read the Carson translation, and the way he translates the roscada sections are beautiful) and the backbone of the Ulster Cycle, but it's also just really fucking funny. It has a very slapstick yet dry sense of humor that provides just enough comic relief to make the dramatic moments of the story even more impactful. Genuinely I laugh out loud every few pages. Go read it.
There are no bones, at least not here, as he makes his slow way down what must have once been an avenue of some grandeur. He's not sure why he thought there would be. Five hundred years have elapsed since the cataclysm here. Maybe animals had carried them off. Maybe they were swallowed up by the drifting sands. Maybe Gluttony had eaten them. Maybe someone had buried them.Â
Maybe Hohenheim had buried them.
Al explores his father's ghost town.
ten THOUSAND words of al post-canon exploring the ruins of xerxes by myself and @oriigami ! if you like alphonse elric, haunted houses, other things also . you may enjoy this fic. i think it's pretty good !
There are no bones, at least not here, as he makes his slow way down what must have once been an avenue of some grandeur. He's not sure why he thought there would be. Five hundred years have elapsed since the cataclysm here. Maybe animals had carried them off. Maybe they were swallowed up by the drifting sands. Maybe Gluttony had eaten them. Maybe someone had buried them.Â
Maybe Hohenheim had buried them.
Al explores his father's ghost town.
ten THOUSAND words of al post-canon exploring the ruins of xerxes by myself and @oriigami ! if you like alphonse elric, haunted houses, other things also . you may enjoy this fic. i think it's pretty good !
"Oh, you can call me Alphonse," the armored man said, moving a little further into the room. There were footsteps rapidly fading down the hallway behind him, which he didnât seem inclined to pay any mind to, attention apparently fixed on the mostly-finished circle sheâd chalked on the floor. "Is this a Trismegistrus array?"
Al teaches a little alchemy.
@oriigami and i have been frantically rewatching fmab for our own enrichment so we have written a little pov outsider for al. because we like him . enjoy <3
Her fierce, spun-sugar beauty was intact, undiminished by the lines and liver spots and sagging skin that seemed to have come upon her like an avalanche on a clear day. He managed a smile, and didnât say, Iâve been mourning since the day I met you.
Miles and Taura, on last rites.
MY GIRL TAURA!!!! easily my favorite secondary character in the series i have to say. i want to write more about her (there's a taura-ekaterin scene in my brain, for one) but this little deathbed scene will do for a start. i love her
âDid I ever tell you,â says Miles, âabout Raina?â
Mother and son discuss escape, loyalty, feeding your children to the cannibal planet Barrayar, and other heritable duties.
hello. i have read so many books this month and it's all @cicelythereaper's fault. here's a missing scene set at the end of Memory because i can't stop thinking about the barrayaran woman's historical duty of infanticide, and also other things
time lord sexual dimorphism thoughts pretty please?
Jfc you guys are asking for it aren't you.
A couple of things were vexing me about this subject, namely that "the thirteenth doctor discovers period cramps for the first time" is a fic trope I see often enough for it to annoy me, and that the first doctor claimed to not have a prostate. Let's discuss what I think time lords do and do not have, with a straight face.
Outwardly, time lords are almost identical to humans even though it's possible for them to look like other species as well, internally they have their own shit going on. So how sexually dimorphic are we? Actually, not a lot. The males and females of our species really aren't that different, since we begin in the womb as ambiguous blobs of whatever. Everyone has breast tissue, and the external genitalia of humans are just different shapes of the same structures. The ovary and the testis are the same gonad, the penis and the clitoris are the same erectile organ, and the labia and the scrotum are the same genital fold (which gets either split up or sewn together before birth). Which direction these bits go is determined by hormones, and this is why intersex variations are so common. It's extremely easy for things to get scrambled and come out in an "atypical" way.
So what does this look like for time lords, who are an infertile species as per what is considered TV Canon these days? Consider: the first doctor didn't have a prostate. The prostate's main functions are a) monitoring the switch between urination and ejaculation so the two don't get mixed up in intercourse, and b) producing an alkaline fluid to mix with the sperm and create semen, so that they can survive the acidic environment of the vagina. If the first doctor doesn't have a prostate, then he doesn't produce semen at all. Now, it feels odd to use the Doctor as a baseline by which to compare all time lords, because the doctor is weird. But if you consider that the time lords have been rendered infertile by Pythia's curse/genetic explosion, it makes sense that they wouldn't be able to produce semen whatsoever. Thus: time lords don't have prostates. I'd go so far as to theorize that they don't have functional testes either, but I'm in favor of a multifunctional ovotestis gonad (which is nonetheless useless and dried up). Menstruation is a hormonal cycle dependent on the ovaries, when uterine lining is shed after an oocyte is not fertilized in time. If there are no working ovaries, there is no ovulation, thus the thirteenth Doctor would not have a period (and anyway why is he the only one who has to have period pains? Have we tried giving the ninth Doctor period pains?)
Okay so what DO Time Lords have? Breast tissue which is like the appendix for humans (except presumably they don't explode) and an infertile ovary/testis/ovotestis organ. To start with, how sexually dimorphic are time lords? Conjecture: what if they're not? For all of the science I've just shown, human sex and the sex binary is still a societal construct. So for time lords, who cannot produce children and whose physical forms are subject to change, why would there be a sex binary? The lack of a sex binary would not disprove the existence of the Time Lord Gender Binary, which is a separate thing.
Conjecture: there are no societally recognized Time Lord sexes. There are no male or female Time Lords. There is ONE bisexual Time Lord sex with some variation. But since you all want to know what I think the Time Lords bits look like: sporks. Intersex Tumblr user status-quo-hater once made a helpful post explaining that ambiguous genitalia looks less like a fork and spoon attached together than the hybrid of a fork and spoon, because of the aforementioned common development of the human genital.
Prostate: no.
Menstruation: no.
Breast tissue: obviously.
Working testes or ovaries: no. They have an ovotestis organ which is mostly useless.
Penis: no.
Clitoris: no.
Clitorophallus: yes.
Labia: not really.
Scrotum: no.
Labioscrotal structure: most likely.
As you can see, there's still some room for nuance here. Does the urethra follow into the clitorophallus structure, or lie beneath? Do Time Lords even piss? Is there a vaginal opening? I am in favor of a vaginal opening, but whether it actually leads to a uterus can depend. I've just talked about Gallifreyan dick with a straight face for your education, please clap.
âYou-â growls Zoro, which makes Luffy laugh, clarion and delighted into the night. Stupidly, pointlessly, Nami swallows against the sudden urge to cry.Â
Watches, instead, Zoroâs head turn towards Luffyâs silhouette, lanternlight glinting orange off his eyes, off the swords resting across his waist.
âWhatever,â he says. Some demon. He could be a king of Hell for all the mythologizing Namiâs heard, but he folds like grass to laughter. âFine.â
Nami, Zoro, Luffy, and the shadows of what theyâll become.
hello this is a fic that i have been meaning to write for awhile. you can read it with NO SPOILERS! if you have gotten past BUGGY ARC! for this reason it is VERY ACCESSIBLE TO NEW READERS! unlike the VAST MAJORITY OF MY WORK!
New The Mountain Goats song just dropped but for real!
Respect to Bob Weir of the Grateful Dead and his passing, from the Goats' bandcamp page:
"I've been writing songs whose titles start with "Going toâŚ" for thirty years or so â it's an informal series within our catalog, though I don't do so many of them any more. Last year I was listening to multiple versions of the Dead's "Peggy-O" (try the version from Cameron Indoor Stadium, Durham, NC, 4/12/78) and thinking about Fennario, also the land of "Dire Wolf," and I thought I'd write a traditional style tune myself. I thought about how lucid and unsentimental traditional songs are about death and change â how folk songs present life as it is and let the feeling flow from there â and I wrote "Going to Fennario."
I listen to the Grateful Dead all the time; their endless musical curiosity is a north star for anybody who seeks a life in music, plus anybody who tours in a rock band walks down paths cleared by the Dead. Their work means so much to me. We weren't going to release any new music until later this year, but in honor of Bob Weir, who's crossed over to the next life and leaves behind a musical legacy that will be treasured for as long as people listen to music, I wanted to put this out now, so here's an early look at what we got up to last fall between tours. It's got Mikaela Davis on harp, Rob Jost on bass, George Douglas on the hammered dulcimer â his son plays in the Mountain Goats â and then the usual suspects â me, Matt Douglas, and Jon Wurster â holding down the rest. You can pay what you like, believe it if you need it, or leave it if you dare; 100% of the proceeds on this single will go to the American Cancer Society.
Thanks, Bob Weir, for all those "Jack Straw"s that're always right there when I need 'em. Your work lives on. Travel safely home.
A little preview of my spot art for a wonderful, unique, and beautifully formatted fic centered around Inazuma, identity and reflections, by my lovely writer we paired up with, Zeph @grainjew to remind you all that preorders for the @transopzine are OPEN and available here and you won't want to miss it!!
the wonderful mods over at @transopzine let me write something real weird and experimental about inazuma, ivankov, and looking at your own distorted reflection!
i think it's one of the best things i wrote in all of 2025, and if you want to see it (and the beautiful spot art @manzanamarim drew for it, and the fun formatting that the mods graciously collaborated with me on) you can preorder the zine right here. do it! go on! all proceeds go to charity and everyone's work is gorgeous!!
@landhozine combines two of my all time favorite things, which is location focus and strict wordcount limits. so i had an absolute blast writing for it!
here are my pieces, newly released from zine jail:
Continuous Cities
Water 7, built seven times, breathes, anchored and shuddering, with the tides.
There is an inflow to her, and an outflow: her mouths are many; she swallows shipwrecks and whales, spits up childrenâs toys, rusted-over bolts, sailcloth and scales. Water 7 balances, unstable, on a foundation of bones.
water 7 haunted!!!
And so on
Clapp, dutiful pastor, pillar of the community, husband to a wife and father to a son, presses his grandfatherâs grandmotherâs amulet between the broom-handle and his palm and sweeps out the corners of his lie.
do you ever think about kuma's dad. i do. i sure do
hairline
Once upon a time, there was a kingdom made of mirrors.
so germa kingdom, huh
Holy Mariejois is made small by the sun.
(collab with @oriigami for the Land Ho! add-on, We Go!)
The wall is red. Higher.
Upwards. The sky is blue.
character study and formatting fuckery for the duo of fisher tiger and queen otohime. one of the best things i've ever written, also
