[writing-prompt-s]

You’re the most recognised and internationally praised superhero, but you don’t fight any crime. Instead, you use your powers over stone and metal to repair the damage caused by the catastrophic fights other heroes get into.

[fakecrfan]

They didn’t call you a superhero when you started. You didn’t claim to be one, either. 

You didn’t have a costume or a sponsor or training or anything like that. You were just a kid who had just seen your entire world knocked down. So, in a moment of childish determination and belief, you thought you could fix it all. 

The first emergence of your powers wasn’t a huge triumphal moment. Moving stone and earth and steel doesn’t matter if you don’t know anything about how to stack things up so they don’t fall back over again. 

Your first attempts crashed right back down again. That was your first lesson. 

—

Even when you got good at what you did, they didn’t call you a superhero. 

You still didn’t have a costume, but you’d gotten your hands on every architectural diagram you could and done plenty of practice. Then you started to show up to the aftermath of battles and put them quietly together again. 

But it still wasn’t right. You couldn’t do much if you didn’t have the diagrams for the buildings demolished–if the city planners didn’t let you have them.

So you stitched together a costume, something bright and colorful that would grab the attention of the cameras on the scene afterward as you tried to work. 

“Look! Someone’s putting those houses back together!” 

The effect was instantaneous. The moment you’d grabbed public attention, there were requests for interviews, think pieces–each giving you a platform to ask for the help you needed. 

This was your second lesson. 

–

You didn’t call yourself a superhero, or come up with the name yourself. You were never really good about all of those things. But once the attention was on you, you got offers from managers and sponsors. One, a blonde with perfect hair who introduced herself as “just Sandy” 

“I don’t have any money.”

“That’s alright,” she said, her grin showing spectacularly white teeth. “All I need is for you to take on some gigs and give me a cut.” 

Sandy set you up. She got you the costume people would know you for, gave you the name, managed all of the PR and set up interviews. Your fame skyrocketed, and soon you were seeing yourself on billboards. 

Soon you had access to hundreds of city plans and blueprints. After enough attacks happened, you learned them well enough to hardly need to reference them. After a few years, you could rebuild a tower in a matter of minutes, and cities in a matter of days. 

Your powers evolved as your understanding did. Soon, you could read the entire layout of a building just from touching. Then, just from touching the ruins. You no longer need blueprints, then–just your own hands on the metal.

The gigs were simple, too–just fixing up hero bases after they’d gotten wrecked in attacks. Feel good work that paid well. 

With the help of many people, you do more. That’s the third lesson.

—

The problems started with the homeless thing. 

You were in between projects and itching to use your skills more. Creating homes for the homeless seemed like the perfect, feel good project to flex on. 

It was, for the first few weeks. Then came the backlash. City dwellers crying foul, saying they hadn’t agreed to an enormous den of undesirables in their backyards. There were protests, white suburban moms holding up signs about drug dealers and rapists and criminals. 

It wasn’t your choice in the end. Eventually the city mandated that you deconstruct your shelter, or they would do it the hard way. 

Regretfully, you took it down. You did not look in the eyes of the people that had sheltered there as they had to go on their way.

It was the same story in every area you tried to build shelters in afterwards.

—

“Can we just buy the land to build them houses?” you asked Sandy. 

She clicked her perfect teeth. “Sorry, there are laws against building new things in the city. You need mayoral approval to start a new construction project.”

“Why?”

“Well, there are already too many empty houses,” she said matter of factly. 

You stared. “What? Then let’s just buy those and put people in them!”

“You don’t have that much money,” she pointed out. “Not when you’ve been giving it away every year. Also, it wouldn’t do as much good as you think. Just think of the effect on the market–”

This is not why you fired Sandy. But it was the first time you thought of it.

—

Opinion started to turn against you when you began using your interviews and platform to talk about this problem, to demand permission to build or otherwise help. Exasperation turned to hostility when you started to reshape the landscape to be softer to the unhoused, anyway–when you created caves in parks where people could easily shelter, or made every bench large and soft so that anyone could have a place to sleep.

Laws and ordinances passed, all regulating the amount of alterations one was allowed to make to public property. About how many changes you were allowed to make as you were reconstructing a city. The fines for altering things started to heap up. 

Firing Sandy didn’t help. Your good reputation was always as much her work as yours, but after what she said about—you couldn’t. 

You couldn’t. 

You learned not to read the scathing opinion pieces on you. That was the hardest lesson yet.

—

Of course, shit really hit the fan when you were contracted to rebuild another base.

It was a simple enough decision for you. You found out they had been building drones and firing them on civilians. That at this base Techno has been building surveillance technology that would be able to monitor every single person in the country at every moment, and be able to fire upon them with impunity the moment suspicious activity was detected. 

It made you rethink every base you had built in the past.

“No,” you told them. 

“You already signed your contract–”

Instead of dignifying that with an answer, you transmuted the entire area into the rockiest, most impossible terrain you could. Every trick you had learned to make land easier to build on–you reversed it, turning what had once been the base into a precarious canyon of jagged, diamond-hard steel, nearly impossible to remove or build on.

“I said no.” 

—

Stopping the construction of the stadium was the next kicker. 

“You’re insane!” said the heroes who came to remove you.

“They evicted a hundred families for this!” you spat. “Those were people’s homes. It’s disgusting that it’s allowed for the government to do that–much less to do it for-for a stadium? For entertainment?” 

And so you stood there for the next 48 hours, deconstructing every single thing they tried to put on their ill-gotten land. 

Then, they sent the heroes to stop you. You were never the best at fighting, so they knocked you out quickly.

—

They don’t call you a superhero now. Behind bars, you glance over every thinkpiece and profile about the world’s most beloved hero fell. You read speculation about evil, greed, madness. All things you’ve heard about “villains” who came before you. 

It makes you wonder about those people. If maybe you had misjudged them, too.

But that’s alright, you realize after the sting of it fades away. That was the second lesson, after all–more than anything, you need people to be talking. And for all the bitterness in these words, you realize grimly that people will never stop talking.

Once you’ve thought things through, you decide you’re ready. The steel of your cell melts away. After all, there is no prison that can contain you. No earth or stone or metal can withstand your will. 

Your legacy as the world’s greatest supervillain begins with a left turn down the hallway, right to where the other villains are kept.

[jbirdoftheriverlands-deactivate]

Nice day to remember that:

Celtic peoples were not just “ancient wiccans”

Norse peoples were not just “ancient wiccans”

Jesus was not wiccan

Wicca was invented/smushed together in the 1950s.

That is all. Tell all of your dumbest friends cuz they are out here needing HELP.

[creature-wizard]

After awhile of being around people into metaphysical, occult type stuff, you develop a sense for who's just... kinda full of bullshit.

There's always people proclaiming imminent apocalypses or world upheavals. They can't fathom that they could possibly be wrong; or if they suspect, you'd definitely never know it from the way they talk. They're always wrong.

There's always people who claim they're from a special magical bloodline and have a special connection to a major deity. They're always threatening curses and divine punishment from their deity any time someone pisses them off.

There's also the ones who claim their family line has been practicing magic since pre-Christian times. They refer to their practice by the vague and culturally nonspecific term "the Craft," and their narrative is very clearly inspired by Margaret Murray's debunked witch cult hypothesis. They tend to believe in and push a lot of conspiracy theories.

There's always people who claim they were scratched up by a demon. Some of them even have photos. When they post photos, the scratches are at most shallow abrasions or obviously inflicted by a cat or other small animal.

And then there's the ones who claim they can transform into mermaids. No, they can't send you photos. If they did, the mermaid hunters would come after them. Never mind the danger they're putting themselves into by merely telling you about this at all.

There's the ones who claim they're warriors in a cosmic battle between good and evil. They claim to know Michael and Lucifer personally, and they'll tell you how the Bible and the Church are full of lies, and/or rage about other people spreading "lies."

If you look closely, a certain element of tragedy usually makes itself apparent. Something is terribly wrong in their lives. It could be incredible boredom, social alienation, stress, unresolved traumas, untreated mental illness, poor coping skills, poor social skills, or general personal unfulfillment.

Make no mistake, many of them are potentially extremely dangerous. If they find someone they can harass or convince into their beliefs, they can do some serious damage. And when they do, they seriously need to be held accountable.

But the fact that there are so many people like this speaks to so many systemic failures. These people wouldn't be like this if something hadn't gone incredibly wrong in their lives somewhere, and if they had been able - physically, monetarily, and psychologically - to get the help they needed, they could have been able to heal and find better ways to meet their emotional and psychological needs, and done a lot less damage to other people.

[momowho34]

Christians (specifically Protestants): we have little versions of our sacred text that we carry around in our pockets to pull out if we encounter something and want guidance. The version used during sermons and in church are the same ones that we carry with us

Jews: you can read the torah and Tanakh in a normal book if you want. But if you want a torah you can use as a congregation? *cracks knuckles* you must prepare paper made from the skin of a kosher animal and special ink and a quill made from a turkey feather and you must use no metal in the preparation process because metal is used in the creation of weapons for war and before you even think about actually started to write you must take The Holy Bath to purify yourself and ritually blot out the name of Amalek, the sworn enemy of the Jewish people and every time you write the name of god on the scroll you must say it out loud and recite a special prayer and if you mess up one letter you have to start over and when the scroll is finished you must wrap it in tapestries and pretty cloth and shit and then put little crowns on the end and then put it in a Super Special Box in the synagogue so every time it’s time to read it you can open the Super Special Box and everyone can gawk at the Ultra Big Boy Important Text and the words of god within the scroll. this entire process takes about a year to complete and is done by special sofer’s that devote their lives to making Torah’s specifically and when you read from the torah you must use a little tiny pointer in the shape of a hand so your hands don’t mess up the paper. Oh, you think I kid? You think I jest?

Think again.

(rb encouraged for everyone. Share the sacred baby hands with the goyim. Everyone deserves to know about the sacred baby hands)

[no-longer-another-bondi-blonde]

“In 1984, when Ruth Coker Burks was 25 and a young mother living in Arkansas, she would often visit a hospital to care for a friend with cancer.

During one visit, Ruth noticed the nurses would draw straws, afraid to go into one room, its door sealed by a big red bag. She asked why and the nurses told her the patient had AIDS.

On a repeat visit, and seeing the big red bag on the door, Ruth decided to disregard the warnings and sneaked into the room.

In the bed was a skeletal young man, who told Ruth he wanted to see his mother before he died. She left the room and told the nurses, who said, “Honey, his mother’s not coming. He’s been here six weeks. Nobody’s coming!”

Ruth called his mother anyway, who refused to come visit her son, who she described as a “sinner” and already dead to her, and that she wouldn’t even claim his body when he died.

“I went back in his room and when I walked in, he said, “Oh, momma. I knew you’d come”, and then he lifted his hand. And what was I going to do? So I took his hand. I said, “I’m here, honey. I’m here”, Ruth later recounted.

Ruth pulled a chair to his bedside, talked to him

and held his hand until he died 13 hours later.

After finally finding a funeral home that would his body, and paying for the cremation out of her own savings, Ruth buried his ashes on her family’s large plot.

After this first encounter, Ruth cared for other patients. She would take them to appointments, obtain medications, apply for assistance, and even kept supplies of AIDS medications on hand, as some pharmacies would not carry them.

Ruth’s work soon became well known in the city and she received financial assistance from gay bars, “They would twirl up a drag show on Saturday night and here’d come the money. That’s how we’d buy medicine, that’s how we’d pay rent. If it hadn’t been for the drag queens, I don’t know what we would have done”, Ruth said.

Over the next 30 years, Ruth cared for over 1,000 people and buried more than 40 on her family’s plot most of whom were gay men whose families would not claim their ashes.

For this, Ruth has been nicknamed the ‘Cemetery Angel’.”— by Ra-Ey Saley

[macaronsandfries]

She’s 60 now, she’s still doing activist and advocacy work, and working on a memoir.

[dreverybodyilovedies]

my favorite thing about this story is that ruth had inherited a large family graveyard and never really knew wtf she was going to do w dozens and dozens of empty grave plots but then the AIDS crisis happened and she realized what she could do with it

When Burks was a girl, she said, her mother got in a final, epic row with Burks’ uncle. To make sure he and his branch of the family tree would never lie in the same dirt as the rest of them, Burks said, her mother quietly bought every available grave space in the cemetery: 262 plots. They visited the cemetery most Sundays after church when she was young, Burks said, and her mother would often sarcastically remark on her holdings, looking out over the cemetery and telling her daughter: “Someday, all of this is going to be yours.”

“I always wondered what I was going to do with a cemetery,” she said. “Who knew there’d come a time when people didn’t want to bury their children?”

(x)

[tienriu]

Articles:  

Ruth Coker Burks, the cemetery angel: https://arktimes.com/news/cover-stories/2015/01/08/ruth-coker-burks-the-cemetery-angel

Caring For AIDS Patients, ‘When No One Else Would: https://www.npr.org/2014/12/05/368530521/caring-for-aids-patients-when-no-one-else-would

And a final quote from the first article:

She hasn’t been back to Files Cemetery since her stroke. While she made sure it was kept up back when she lived in Hot Springs, it appeared to have been let go a bit when the reporter visited in late December, some of the tombstones pushed over and broken, the snag of a dead oak left to rot among the graves. Even without knowing the story of the place, it might have been downright spooky if not for the constant stream of traffic cruising by at 10 miles an hour over the speed limit.

Before she’s gone, she said, she’d like to see a memorial erected in the cemetery. Something to tell people the story. A plaque. A stone. A listing of the names of the unremembered dead that lie there.

“Someday,” she said, “I’d love to get a monument that says: This is what happened. In 1984, it started. They just kept coming and coming. And they knew they would be remembered, loved and taken care of, and that someone would say a kind word over them when they died.”

[kittenagain-forever]

<3

[aletheia-rose]

Hail Delius Apollon, patron of healers, musicians, and poets!

May your divinity inspire and reach the masses with your ever-watchful eye.

Khaire, Apollon.

[sanguinebutch]

Hermes Chthonios, guider of souls, sacred messenger and shepard of men, i honour you this holy Khytroi night. i honour those who begin their return to the underworld, guided by your grace.

Hermes Psychopompos, lord of boundaries, assist me to bid farewell to the restless souls around me. help me to celebrate their lives, to grant them peace, to continue their legacy.

Athanatos Diaktoros, messenger of the Blessed, send my regards to those i have lost and those who came before me. relay my greatest respects to *[insert names of ancestors/deceased friends or family here]*. grant them a peaceful and cherished departure from the kind of the living, and send them home with joy and blessings.

Dôtor Eaôn, immortal friend of mankind, may this night be yours.

i hope you all had a very blessed Anthesteria <3

[rosavaya]

“Many people seem to think it foolish, even superstitious, to believe that the world could still change for the better. And it is true that in winter it is sometimes so bitingly cold that one is tempted to say, ‘What do I care if there is a summer; its warmth is no help to me now.’ Yes, evil often seems to surpass good. But then, in spite of us, and without our permission, there comes at last an end to the bitter frosts. One morning the wind turns, and there is a thaw. And so I must still have hope.”

— Vincent Van Gogh

[anarchistmemedistro]

[mentalhealthmemesofficial]

[americiumam]

reblog w the song lyrics in your head NOW. either stuck in yr head or what yr listening to

[guerrillatech]

[the-marxist-mash]

There really is only like 5 cities in the us that actually look like the top pic and even then its like ten blocks of their downtown

[dark-veiled]

hail, Apollon: The Radiant God. He who shines so brightly and emits radiant light. He who warms us with His sun rays. on this Sunday, i honor You.

i look out at the sun; and how it shines onto the leaves, and the ground, and how bright it makes the sky. how beautifully warm it is. and i think of You.

today, i will read a book in the sun for You. i will soak up the light, and the vitamins, and heat. i will look at Your rays; i will feel Your heat — and tears will well in my eyes. tears of pure joy. the pure joy that You cause me to feel. loving You, praising You, and honoring You is such an intense gift that it overwhelms me physically and emotionally. being able to honor You bring me so much happiness.

thank you for Your warmth, my dearest Son of Leto. thank you for the warmth that You have gifted us. Your warmth is through the sun, the way that sweet music flows and fills my body. realizing that hours have gone by, and you’ve listened to a hundred songs. Your warmth is singing along to a song, then hearing yourself and thinking “wow. i’m not too bad!”.Your warmth is reading a line of poetry that makes you stop and ask yourself how someone could even think of that. Your warmth is something i promise not to take for granted. once again, my Lord,

thank you. i love You.

[honeyandhestia]

Lady Hestia

May your light and warmth guide me through the darkest of pain-filled nights. May your work-worn hands pull me back into the flames of life. May your smile and muttered words fill the back of my mind. May you be with me, and I with you, always.

[stitchtehzombie]

Some witch: * fills a glass jar with crystals, herbs, salt, and glitter, then chucks it in a bush in their local park *

The jar: * breaks *

The salt and glitter: * spills into the soil *

The soil: * becomes infertile *

Plant: * dies *

Some animal: * gets hurt on the broken glass *

Another animal: *chokes on the lid ring *

The nature spirits: "what the actual fuck"

The witch: "why isnt my spell working :(((("

[sleepyowlwrites]

Reblog for me to show up in your asks with a punch-to-the-face line of poetry that I wrote under the influence of Feelings™️

[wishbow]

bog monster - pam wishbow - 2020

[todaysbird]

just so everyone is aware - one of the best ways for bird flu to spread is by encouraging birds to congregate. while the bird flu epidemic from 2022 continues strong into 2023, you should almost always stop feeding birds. this illness can spread between types of birds - you encouraging birds to feed in your backyard could cause the death of the person down the road’s backyard chickens. the disease RARELY spreads to other animals and humans, but it is zoonotic and CAN infect both pets and people, so be cautious and discourage spread of the disease. if you find a deceased bird do not handle it without protective wear and do not let pets interact with dead wildlife. im not going to launch into an outdoor cat spiel but if you have a cat that catches birds regularly, consider stopping them from doing so while this is going on for their & your safety.

[dimir-charmer]

For what its worth, this is also why eggs are so fucking expensive right now, even as other groceries are starting (fingers crossed) to stabilize.

A lot of laying hens are fucking dead.

If you want eggs less than 10 bucks a dozen, take down those birdfeeders.

[exigencelost]

really really not enough people in the united states understand that the reason there is a free breakfast and lunch program in US schools is because of the Black Panther Party's Breakfast for Children program. it's so important to know this. you can't be educated about US history or about the relationship between the US government, US poverty, US formal education, and Black resistance movements without knowing this.

[exigencelost]

I don't want to be unclear. When I say "because of the BPP's Breakfast for Children program" I do not mean that the Panthers had some sort of lobbying program that advocated for children to be fed breakfast at schools which was met with some kind of positive recognition by the United States government. I mean that the Panthers had a program that fed Black children breakfast before school, and J Edgar Hoover described the Black Panther Party as "the greatest threat to internal security of the country" and the Breakfast for Children program as "the greatest threat to efforts by authorities to neutralize the BPP and destroy what it stands for." Media coverage of the Breakfast for Children program exposed U.S. child hunger on an international scale, and the program itself nurtured Black revolutionary community, and in order to ameliorate the former and undermine the latter, the United States federal government was forced to institute a program to feed children breakfast in schools. Almost 80 years later there remains in the United States an assumption that children should and will have access to breakfast and lunch at school and it is because of how much Hoover feared the Panthers. (Quotes are findable various places including this article.)