the morning breaks and shadows fly

Ladybug_21 on AO3. Mostly here to scream about opera and other fandoms. Blog name is courtesy of Alice Goodman's libretto for "Nixon in China"; avatar is from David Macaulay's "The Way Things Work"; handle is a really stupid joke I made in a fic.

[itsa-me-cavaradossi]

Having joined Tumblr less than a month ago, it's only just occurred to me that there's no reason *not* to post some of my older fic here. So I thought I might as well do a giant post on all of the other Tosca fic I've been churning out over the better part of the past year, in case folks are interested! I'm Ladybug_21 on AO3, by the way, for those of you on Operablr who don't already know me from that context.

Because we love a good, dramatic Castel Sant'Angelo pic!

Fix-It AU Series

Have you ever grumbled to yourself that the body count in Act 3 of Tosca was two bodies too high? Then you might enjoy this Tosca fix-it AU series, premised on the idea that Floria and Mario survived the ending of the opera! Everything is rated T or lower, and the only content warnings are for a canonical suicide attempt (something something "o Scarpia, avanti a Diiiiiiooooooooo"), depictions of depression, and a lotta Scarpia-related PTSD.

This series really exists thanks to @oldshrewsburyian, whose Yuletide 2023 request included prompts for both "pre-canon fluff" and an "improbable fix-it" for Tosca. As always, I can't thank you enough for giving me reason to do a deep dive into a fandom that has come to mean so much to me! ❤️

recondita armonia (5,910 words): Pre-canon meetcute backstory for Floria and Mario, based heavily on certain aspects of Victorien Sardou's play. May contain author-typical levels of nerdery about Renaissance art and the politics of the Repubblica Romana.

sempre il sogno mio d'amore (7,280 words): The improbable fix-it in question, in which Floria and Mario conveniently do not die at the end of the opera, and instead they escape to Paris and figure out how to move on with life from there.

sale, ascende l'uman cantico (5,710 words): Set in Paris circa 1820, this story is told from the perspective of Floria and Mario's teenage kids, who are unaware of everything that happened in Rome, and thus have no clue why their parents are reacting so strangely to various things that trigger memories of their mysterious past.

l'alba vindice appar (6,100 words): It's 1832, and Floria and Mario's son—being a typical Cavaradossi—has gotten himself caught up in a long-running hit Broadway musical an infamous Parisian student rebellion, leading our faves to reflect on their past experiences with failed political heroism.

pe' quante foje ne smoveno li venti (8,250 words): Floria and Mario finally return to Rome to confront some old ghosts and reunite with some old friends, over three decades after fleeing in June 1800.

Gli Amori degli Dei, Galleria Farnese, Palazzo Farnese

Musings About the Baddie

I actually find villains really interesting to explore, so I've written a bit about Scarpia and what makes him tick, for anyone who dares open that rancid can of worms. As a fair warning, most of my thoughts about Scarpia come with a giant side of Shakespeare references, which is the inevitable (?) result of Scarpia's casually referencing Iago within, like, 5 minutes of appearing onstage.

Soliloquy (700 words): The shortest thing I've ever written for this fandom, which is to say, a mini character study mostly based on the idea that Scarpia is kind of a self-aware Shakespearean villain.

bring this monstrous birth to the world's light (9,000 words): A backstory about Scarpia's childhood and young adulthood that aims to explain how he ended up exactly as twisted and horrible as he is, even while not excusing him a jot for his behavior. This fic is rated M and includes all sorts of warning tags I rarely need to use in my writing—graphic depictions of violence, murder, mutilation, abusive parents, underage involving a teenager (very consensual, but still squicky), references to offscreen rape/non-con (I mean, Scarpia)—so, proceed with caution.

Cappella Barberini, Sant'Andrea della Valle ... not pictured here is a little placard on the grille that describes it secondarily as the Cappella della "Tosca"!

Some Love for Various Minor Characters

If you know me at all as a fic writer, you'll know that I'm one of those authors who always gets super distracted by That Person Who Turned Up For Three Seconds, and Tosca is clearly no exception as a fandom. Accordingly, a bunch of fic about random side characters, all rated T or below:

Chiaroscuro (4,210 words): Featuring Sir Not-Appearing-In-This-Opera—and thus naturally one of my absolute faves—Giulia Angelotti, aka, the Marchesa Attavanti. This is a missing episode from just before opera canon begins, exploring why Giulia might have risked everything to spring her brother from prison. (CW for Scarpia making Scarpia-typical threats.)

ben celato (23,300 words): ... uh, so, have you ever wanted to read a history textbook about the Repubblica Romana (1798-1799) that's cleverly disguised as a character backstory, with plenty of gay pining added in for good measure? Well, then, look no further! Cesare Angelotti is my other low-key fave from this opera, and I clearly have waaaaaaaaay too many thoughts on him and his political aspirations and his relationship with Mario, down to why they're still addressing each other using "voi" at the start of the opera even if this fic imagines that they were VERY close at one point. (CWs for brief parental violence against a child, as well as for canonical character death.)

e lascia stare i santi (1,900 words): This story started out as a joke between @rayatii and myself, but then somehow became an actual exploration of the general mood in Rome immediately following the events of the opera. If you can guess from the title who the POV character is, then congratulations, this means you too probably know this libretto way better than is strictly necessary.

Simulation (1,350 words): This somehow is even more Sir Not-Appearing-In-This-Opera than the aforementioned Marchesa Attavanti fic, because it's a character study about the final hours of—you guessed it (you totally didn't)—Palmieri. As in, the guy whom Scarpia and Spoletta reference for three seconds towards the end of Act 2. This fic *probably* makes the most sense in the context of my very long Angelotti fic, given that Palmieri pops up once or twice in that, and thereby gains some characterization that informs this narrative. (CWs for indirect descriptions of torture, and also an execution.)

Miscellaneous Scribblings

And the random grab-bag of things that didn't fit cleanly into any of the above categories!

vivacissimo con violenza (5,000** words): The Tosca high school AU no one asked for, although I am (not so secretly) very proud of it. This modernized little riff on these characters is told entirely through text messages, social media, emails, and other ephemera, as exemplified by the above-pictured excerpt. I and my co-author BloodyMary5667 had WAY too much fun spitballing ideas back and forth for this, and considerably less fun yelling at the very long HTML/CSS code to just *work* already. Innumerable thanks to @april-rainer for patiently teaching me how to debug everything, because who ever said that fandom wouldn't sometimes leave you with some useful real-life skills. (**The word count reads as 5,000 words, but a lot of those words are part of the code that is hidden if you read on AO3 with "Show Creator's Style" on, so the visible text is actually far shorter.)

spasimi d'ira, spasimi d'amore (4,840 words): This is for those of you who were looking for straight-up E-rated smut fic within this fandom (OK, with a little historical political angst thrown in, I can't resist). The first chapter recounts the night that forms Mario's recollections in "E lucevan le stelle" and is all about very consensual, communicative, romantic sex between two people in a loving, committed relationship who are absolutely wild about one another and just want to make each other happy. And the second chapter is the flip side of this, which is to say, Scarpia thinking super creepy thoughts about Tosca elsewhere on the same evening—so, if that is not something you want to entertain, *definitely* stop reading after the first chapter.

toute l'immensité du ciel dans une goutte d'eau (3,790 words): Opera crossover fic alert! This story probably hits hardest if you already know and love Francis Poulenc's Dialogues des Carmélites, as it imagines Blanche de la Force having her wedding portrait painted by teenage!Mario Cavaradossi in Paris, in the pre-Revolution months leading up to the start of Dialogues. It was a fun way to explore how Mario's perspectives on religion and faith and martyrdom might have developed, based on the backstory Sardou gave him in play canon. (CW for canonical character deaths, plus major spoilers for the end of Dialogues.)

And that's all for the moment, but I keep thinking I'm done with writing for this fandom, and then I end up writing more for it. Needless to say, if anyone has any requests or plot bunnies, or even if just wants to scream about this opera generally, please don't hesitate to reach out, I'd LOVE to chat!

[oldshrewsburyian]

Hello! I just finished reading The Dark Queens, by Shelley Puhak, which I found to be an incredibly engrossing read about the rivalry between Brunhild and Fredegund, two Merovingian queens who collectively governed in parallel (either as queens or as regents) much of what is now modern France and its environs for several decades of the late 6th century. As much as I enjoyed this book, however, the author herself acknowledges that it is "a work of narrative non-fiction based on primary sources"—meaning, plenty of rampant speculation throughout about what various people must have been feeling at any given time. And I'm now itching to read a slightly drier and more scholarly account of this entire era.

Understanding that this is a little before your primary era of research, would you recommend any particular scholars/authors on the subjects of the Merovingians or the Frankish Kingdom generally (Carolingians also welcome)? Or, for that matter, would you recommend any particular scholars/authors whose work focuses on the more general (and admittedly over-broad) subject of what the heck was going on in Europe between the fall of the Roman Empire and the beginning of the Middle Ages? Puhak seems to have drawn most of her research from Gregory of Tours, and I certainly intend to get around to him eventually, but a less-biased and more modern take on this history would be very welcome, in the meantime!

(Also, setting aside the many issues I suspect you'd have with this book, you might still enjoy it very much for its focus on two historical figures who are credited repeatedly for inspiring characters ranging from the Brünnhilde of the Nibelungenlied and Wagner's Ring, to GRRM's Cersei Lannister...)

Hello friend! I confess that the author's claim (on her website) that her work is based on "rigorous historical research" made my eye twitch. Puhak, whose name I didn't know, is apparently an award-winning poet; the "Guinevere in Baltimore" collection sounds fascinating, and I plan to seek it out. I'm sure she's a compelling writer, but... I wish I could put the words "rigorous historical research" on the proverbial shelf. Reading Gregory of Tours -- who is great fun -- is not the same thing. Especially with no historical training. I note that she has also written a book called "The Blood Countess," and that Fredegund and Balthild, according to the publisher copy, were "vilified for daring to rule." ...No.

Anyway! I would argue that the Merovingians and Carolingians are very much part of the Middle Ages, but if you want the classic, field-forming argument that one can speak of an in-between time that includes the Merovingians, it's this:

The World of Late Antiquity

This remarkable study in social and cultural change explains how and why the Late Antique world, between c. 150 and c. 750 A.D., came to dif

Peter Brown is a wonderful author, both incredibly erudite and a beautiful prose stylist. If you ever meet a medievalist who claims not to admire and envy Professor Brown, I will suspect them of lying.

More recent is this extremely readable general history of early medieval Europe through the lens of -- wait for it -- pigs:

Legions of Pigs in the Early Medieval West

An exploration of life in the early medieval West, using pigs as a lens to investigate agriculture, ecology, economy, and philosophy   From

For juicy political scandal a couple of centuries later than Fredegund and Brunhild, see The Fall of a Carolingian Kingdom: Lotharingia, 855-869:

For more primary sources, from earlier in the Carolingian period, including some letters by a laywoman, Charlemagne's Courtier, which you may also be able to find via @jstor here:

I love Gregory of Tours, I really do; I cannot imagine trying to write history using him alone. (Pro tip: do not assume that a busy bishop with an elite family background and chronic headaches expresses normative attitudes about women, or for that matter that he is not crafting his narratives to convey important morals.) Here's the man himself, with the note that the original has been somewhat abridged here:

The History of the Franks by Gregory of Tours: 9780140442953 | PenguinRandomHouse.com: Books

This colorful narrative of French history in the sixth century is a dramatic and detailed portrait of a period of political and religious tu

For more women wielding power in the 6th century, here's Radegund, writing letters:

Epistolae is a collection of letters to and from women in the Middle Ages, from the 4th to the 13th century. The letters, written in Latin,

I love Radegund. Like Brunhild, she made a political marriage, but her husband was really awful, so she left him, got ordained as a deacon, and formed a powerful community of nuns. Love that for her.

Oh! and here are some of Brunhild's own letters, and those to her! Note the warmth with which the pope writes to her:

Epistolae is a collection of letters to and from women in the Middle Ages, from the 4th to the 13th century. The letters, written in Latin,

...I just feel that when the pope is saying "we assert that the nation of the Franks is happy before others which has deserved to have a queen so endowed with all goods," it's at least a little disingenuous to say that queen was "vilified for daring to hold power." Still salty about that, sorry.

This has been fun! Just in case it ends up circulating widely, I'll link to the medievalist tip jar here. Who knows, there might be legions of people just waiting to read about cool early medieval women. Or pigs.

[itsa-me-cavaradossi]

just wanna say i love your @. yes, itsa me cavaradossi. peak mario joke

This was *such* a delightful message to see in my inbox upon logging back into Tumblr for the first time in ages, thank you! I actually gave Mario this handle in a crazy Tosca high school AU fic that my friend and I once wrote (told mostly through social media posts and text messages), and then when various Opera AO3 folks convinced me to create an account here, I figured I might as well recycle my own ridiculous joke. ;) So glad it brings you joy, silly as it is!

[itsa-me-cavaradossi]

Not pictured here: The bit where Combeferre literally sings a little victory song after everyone but Enjolras and an extremely schooled Marius departs from the café. (Les Misérables, Volume 3, Book 4, Chapter 5)

[astrodidact]

June 12 is Loving Day — when interracial marriage finally became legal in the U.S.

"Loving Day" celebrates the historic ruling in Loving v. Virginia, which declared unconstitutional a Virginia law prohibiting mixed-race ma

Coincidentally, today is Valentine's Day in Brazil. ❤️🇧🇷

[article-reblogs]

This was only 55 years ago. You can understand a lot of what’s wrong with the US if you realize that the average age of our elected senators is about 63. “Good old days” is a dogwhistle.

Our current Supreme Court might’ve ruled against the Lovings.

[jellybeanium124]

[Image ID: excerpts from the article linked above, reading:

“The couple is given a choice: flee or go to jail. After they were arrested, the Lovings were sentenced to a year in prison. Then, a judge offered them a choice: banishment from the state or prison. They chose to leave Virginia at the time, but after several years, the Lovings asked the American Civil Liberties Union to take their case.Bernard Cohen and Philip Hirschkop, two young ACLU lawyers at the time, did.”

and “On June 12, 1967, the U.S. Supreme Court justices ruled in the Lovings' favor. The unanimous decision upheld that distinctions drawn based on race were not constitutional. The court's decision made it clear that Virginia's anti-miscegenation law violated the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment.” /end ID]

[doberbutts]

It was 55 years ago.

My father just had his 70th birthday.

When my parents first met it'd been less than a decade since the ruling was official.

They were convinced it'd be overturned and did not want their children to have to suffer for it, so they did not get married and searched desperately for each other in their own races. They could not find the love they had together in anyone else. They did eventually get married.

Too late for them to have the amount of children they'd desired. They had two, adopted a third, and that was that.

It was near enough to now that I, my sisters, and my parents were directly affected by it.

This isn't ancient history. It's just my parents' childhood.

[inkcurlsandknives]

As a mixed Asian person married to a mixed Black person rulings like this, along with violent backlashes against race mixing are barely recent history. Living in Texas we still run into people who actively harass us for being a mixed race couple in public (even though neither of us are white) The Loving Case and subsequent reactions to it by different states determined where my in-laws chose to settle in the US as a mixed couple. Several states kept anti-miscegenation laws on the books. and State judges in Alabama continued to enforce its anti-miscegenation statute until 1970, when the Nixon administration obtained a ruling from a U.S. District Court in United States v. Brittain.

The Watsonville riots of the 1930's where white mobs attached Filipino farmworkers for being seen in dancehalls with white women, are part of a very long history of whiteness violently asserting its need to "protect" the purity of it's women and future children. And these kinds of backlashes are not in the past, we've just moved to different battlegrounds, the same accusations, of defiling the purity of white womanhood and white childhood are now leveled at the dangerous "othering influences" through book bans and other right wing conservative censorship efforts.

According to PEN America’s Banned Book Index, 41% of banned books include LGBTQ+ themes. 40% feature characters of color and 21% address issues of race or racism.

Remember, if we don't keep standing up loudly for equality the biggots on the right will be louder and keep dragging us further backwards from every step towards equality we make.

That's why I write stories for mixed, brown, bi, folks to see ourselves and our loves reflected in.

Its important to record ourselves into literature, into history so that they can never fully erase us no matter how hard they try to stamp us out of existence.

[annlarimer]

I was in kindergarten when this happened. Star Trek was in its second season. Scooby Doo was just a few sketches in a notebook somewhere. My neighborhood was redlined. I wouldn't see a Black clerk in the mall for several years. This is the bullshit they want to go back to.

[itsa-me-cavaradossi]

I've been terrible about posting things to Tumblr about recent fic, and I honestly wasn't sure if I wanted to post anything about my latest unhinged creations here... but eh, why not, anyone who objects simply doesn't need to engage. :)

Months ago, @rayatii made me aware of the existence of the Latvian National Opera's production of Tosca in which Tosca and Scarpia are depicted as ex-spouses. Being a reasonable person (ostensibly), I cackled hysterically over how totally *insane* that premise was, when I first heard about it. But for reasons I will never be able to explain, I then went ahead and wrote two paragraphs, just for giggles, about what that wedding and honeymoon might have looked like. Fast-forward to the totally incredible Tosca as Vines video that @rayatii gifted me back in December, which reminded me that Latvian Divorce Tosca existed, and which made me decide then and there to actually flesh out this concept with an entire backstory fic, set vaguely in the 1970s (as Italy's first divorce law was passed in 1970). But when readers throw interesting ideas my way via AO3 comments, I often can't resist writing them, so this Divorce AU has somehow turned into a whole crazy series:

turning in the widening gyre (6,290 words, rated M): Scarpia's perspective on his ill-advised marriage to Tosca. As would be expected, Scarpia's point of view is very possessive and calculating, and for all he thinks he loves Tosca, it's quite clear that he only loves a self-created version of her that he can control—until, of course, Tosca eventually recognizes exactly how toxic their relationship is and gets herself out of it. CWs for domestic violence, divorce, and implied rape/non-con (not involving Tosca).

the falcon cannot hear the falconer (15,250 words, rated M): Tosca's perspective on the same sequence of events, plus the beginning of her relationship with Cavaradossi after her divorce (with all the expected complications of falling in love with someone who *hates* her ex-husband). It's probably obvious from the word count alone that I far prefer spending time in Tosca's head than in Scarpia's, and I actually really enjoyed using this as an excuse to write about a version of the character who's far less innocent than in the original canon, and who has to really grapple with her complicity (or at least willful ignorance) with respect to some of Scarpia's actions. Plus, since this is set in the 1970s, I had a great time imagining what Tosca's artistic life would look like in an Italy with Regietheater productions of Verdi operas and such. Same CWs as above.

the ceremony of innocence is drowned (10,260 words, rated T): More properly a Kid AU of the Divorce AU, because it takes the concept one step further and asks what things would look like if Tosca and Scarpia had had a kid during their marriage. For being an even more deranged premise than what the Latvian National Opera dreamt up, this story somehow turned out to be the most upsetting thing I've ever written in my life? It's basically the canon events of Tosca, as told through the eyes of a precocious eight-year-old who doesn't understand why horrible things keep happening, and who has absolutely no control over anything that's going on—which, in the words of my beta, means that the perspective somehow ends up infinitely more disturbing than even anything I've ever written from Scarpia's POV. (I was having too much fun imagining what a production of Latvian Divorce Tosca would look like with a kid added into the mix, but since no one is ever going to give me a budget and cast to stage that idea, I decided I'd just have to write things out in fic form, instead.)

Again, many thanks to @rayatii for pointing me towards this production and for leaving such lovely comments on all of these fic! So glad you feel I did this premise justice, despite how insane it continues to be when I allow myself to actually think about it too hard. ;) Also, a huge shout-out to @shredsandpatches for letting me scream headcanons about the Kid AU fic via Tumblr messages, and for suggesting the best moment of comedy in that entire story. Additional thanks to @cowcreamer5 for reading the beginning of the Kid AU fic and reassuring me that the narrative voice wasn't too far off the mark! And, while not on Tumblr, eternal thanks to my friend BloodyMary5667, for being such an excellent beta and for brainrotting with me in this opera fandom for the past year or so.

[itsa-me-cavaradossi]

I clearly have fallen off Tumblr in recent months even more dramatically than Tosca fell off the Castel Sant'Angelo at the end of this opera, but as I have popped back onto the hellsite for a moment tonight, a brief update here:

surely some revelation is at hand (15,840 words, rated T): For better or for worse, I got *so* attached to my little narrator from the above-posted Kid AU fic that I couldn't resist writing a sequel, mostly because I felt irrationally guilty about how extremely sad the poor kid was at the end of that very canon-compliant retelling of the opera's plot. So, voilà, here's a fix-it in which Tosca and Cavaradossi somehow have survived the ending of the opera and are now hiding out from the Italian authorities in Paris, and Tosca's kid accordingly has to negotiate all sorts of complicated feelings about being reunited with them after a very emotional year of thinking they were dead. Also featuring my eternal blorbo Giulia Angelotti, because of course I'm not going to pass up the opportunity to write more Marchesa Attavanti content as I dig myself deeper and deeper through the strata of this whole strange AU.

Once more, thanks to @rayatii for nudging me towards the Latvian National Opera production that inspired all of this, as well as for being so shocked that I didn't save Floria and Mario in the original Kid AU fic that it felt like a rational idea to write that fix-it. And additional thanks to my wonderful betas for this fic: @cowcreamer5, whose excellent book recommendations also put me in the right headspace to tackle this project; and of course my eternal Tosca fandom partner-in-crime BloodyMary5667.

[derring-do]

Do These Wagner Characters Eat Pussy?

Tannhäuser: definitely

Lohengrin: lol no

Brünnhilde: on occasion

Hans Sachs: since his wife died, those days are behind him

Parsifal: has never had sex with anyone, ever

Walther von Stolzing: nope

Siegmund: if he did it would have saved a lot of trouble

Wotan: it pains me to say this but yes

Eva Pogner: it happened once in a dream

Isolde: pillow princess

Wolfram von Eschenbach: looks forward to participating one day within the bonds of Holy Matrimony (this never happens)

Sixtus Beckmesser: no, terrified

Tristan: yes, but due to circumstance most of his sexual experiences have been desultory post-battle fumblings with Kurwenal

Venus: baby she invented it

Siegfried: he's never heard of it

Brangäne: pussy-eating champion of the world

[weirdness-is-good]

[whunt]

me on days when i’m in the lab doing gruesome medical experiments on human subjects

[jacob-the-gun]

Today is the only day you can reblog this.

[marlinspirkhall]

Nothing quite like seeing this on my dash on both April 10th and October 4th

[attackfish]

As it is Passover again, it is time for the annual debate as to whether the frog plague, which thanks to a quirk in the Hebrew, is written as a plague of frog, singular, rather than the plural, plague of frogs, was in fact, as generally imagined, a plague of many frogs, or instead a singular giant Kaiju frog. This is an ancient and venerable argument that actually goes back to the Talmud because this is what the Jewish people are. If we can't argue for fun about this sort of thing, what are we even doing.

In that spirit, I would like to submit a third possibility, which is that in fact it was one perfectly normal sized frog, who was absolutely acing Untitled Frog Game: Ancient Egypt Edition. One particularly obnoxious frog, who through sheer hard work, managed to plague all of Egypt.

[koshercosplay]

[chevygirl78-deactivated20211112]

[itsa-me-cavaradossi]

Title: Contrapposto Fandom: Heated Rivalry Word Count: 2,740 Rating: T

Throughout grad school, Kip sees Scott everywhere.

Read on AO3.

I'm only halfway through watching this show, but the absolutely lovely romance between Scott Hunter and Kip Grady in Episode 3 really and truly stole my heart away. I know absolutely nothing about hockey, but I do know something about art history, so here's a little story about Kip in grad school, nursing a broken heart and desperately trying not to see Scott in every beautiful statue of a male nude he encounters.

[itsa-me-cavaradossi]

So the Met has been doing radio broadcasts during the season every Saturday at 1 PM EST and this Saturday is Idomeneo. The only opera I've listened to is Le Nozze di Figaro (I think you were who I tagged when I watched it months ago and gave my thoughts?), would you recommend Idomeneo if I can listen to it?

Hello! I'm SO sorry for only just seeing this, *right* after an answer would have been actually useful... I've been taking a much-needed social media break and am only just hopping back on Tumblr briefly to check in on things.

I absolutely love the Met Opera's Saturday radio broadcasts, and I'd definitely recommend checking them out, if you haven't begun doing so already! They're a great way to test out which musical styles you might want to explore further, without needing to commit to sitting down and watching a full hours-long operatic production. You can easily put the broadcasts on while doing chores or driving places, and I find that listening to them while doing something else doesn't take away from my enjoyment of them at all. And, you can learn a lot about both the breadth of operatic styles and your own musical preferences within them, even by listening for only 15 minutes or so on any given Saturday!

I suspect you've already tracked this down, but in case not, the full schedule for the Saturday radio broadcasts is available here. I hope you're able to check some of them out in the future! And, if you listened to Idomeneo earlier today, I hope you thoroughly enjoyed it—it's actually not an opera I know, so I may have to give it a listen myself, just to see how I like it. :)

[shutyourmoustache]

This makes me weepy for so many reasons:

1. There’s a kid out there already thinking of inclusivity at such a young age.

2. There’s a blind boy who feels more seen and loved and part of his class.

3. The tenderness and consideration that the mom put into creating the special heartfelt felt heart (see what I did there?) for the classmate is so apparent.

4. That boy’s parents must have bawled seeing the valentine their son came home with and knowing that he’s being included and welcomed by his peers.

[birdandmoon]

If you're looking for some highly specific nature Valentines cards, my Valentine comic from last year is now available as cards! They start shipping January 12.

[maviyenot]

[mybeingthere]

Fossil ammonite pavement in the town of Lyme Regis, Dorset, Great Britain.

[frostedmagnolias]

Brooch-Pendant

c. 1850

gold, amethyst

London Museum