merlinsreceptionist

20 she/they wanderer of the wilds.

[expressions-of-nature]

Spring in Altai Krai by Alyona Ruban

[inkskinned]

Every day I handle more money than I will ever make. Every day.

At the start of my employment, my boss showed me videos of people stealing, and we both had a chuckle about it. How silly they were! There was a camera overhead, and it’s not to watch the shoppers. See, we can’t actually stop shoplifters. They get away with it maybe nine out of ten times. But we, who are watched and tallied and witnessed? We are always caught.

At first it was hard to hold one hundred dollars bills. An amount I had never seen before. An amount that didn’t exist in my household. It’s normal now. Here is something that is not for me.

“What the hell, I’ll take another,” says the man, pondering our 200 dollar watches. What the hell. Total comes to 580 and not even a flinch in his face. I have been working for 11 hours today and made only 110 dollars. It will go to my rent. Today I work for free, it feels. When I get my check, I will have 35 dollars left for food and saving.

The six hundreds he hands me go into the cash register. For a moment, I imagine having money. Then I put it away, counting out his change.

I know for a fact we sell our products for double what they are worth. That I could be making commission. That they could hand me those 580 dollars and change my life and not even mark the difference in their checkbooks. He’s not the only sale they make today, but I am the reason they made it. He’s not the only one spending 600 dollars, but if I hadn’t spent two hours with him telling me about his life, he wouldn’t have spent any. I go home. I don’t own a watch.

I have watched and rewatched a video on how to make salmon four ways. My shopping list is always the same. Pasta. Rice. Tuna. If I can afford butter it was a good week. I dream of the world I will never walk in, where I can throw the best fish fillet in the cart with a shrug. I hold hundreds in my hand and look up at the camera. I put them under the cash drawer.

I go to work. I scrap together my savings. I eat my bowl of rice slowly. My manager takes a paid week off from work just for his birthday. He owns a yacht. 

I’m not worth the cost of a watch.

[inkskinned]

i wrote this while i was working at orlando’s walt disney world parks.

i was part of their college program. i moved to the state for it. they legally owned the building i was living in and still charged me rent. i ostensibly was being charged to work for them. it was a 2 bedroom apartment and they placed 6 adult women in it in forced triples.

as many as one in ten disney employees have experienced homelessness while working for the company. despite huge efforts to unionize, strike, or otherwise demand fair treatment; disney has refused to increase employee quality of life.

disney admits publicly that a good portion of their success is because the employees (“cast members”) are dedicated, passionate, and selfless. this is never reflected in pay. even “face” characters (ie those that are princesses etc) make barely above a minimum wage.

at the time that i worked there, i made $8.50 an hour. at one point i was asked to create a human shield around a bag because a bomb dog had alerted to it. for eight fucking dollars an hour.

i now work a very cushy office job. i have bought the salmon and cooked it all four ways.

i go to the store. i am nice to the person behind the counter. she looks up at the camera while she counts out my change. there is nothing fundamentally different about her and i.

we are both worth more than the watch, anyway.

[succubusboyfriend]

practicing self care less out of self love and more for the sheer logical reasoning of it’d be kinda stupid of me to expect myself to be able to function without proper maintenance

[succubusboyfriend]

“oh i don’t deserve rest and relaxation, i haven’t done enough, i haven’t earned it” and my car’s breaks don’t deserve break fluid because they aren’t breaking well enough to earn it. that’s what you sound like!!!!!

[butterflypeaflowertea]

trees are very 🥺 because sometimes i’ll stand under the shade of a tree and look up at it and it’ll sway its branches about in the wind and i’m like oh my God i’m alive and YOU’RE alive. we are alive together and made up of the same starry stuff and standing right next to each other in this moment on this earth. do u feel it when i reach out and press my hand to your trunk? can you hear me? i think you’re so neat. and then the sunlight filters through its leaves just so and that lovely green color leaves me dazzled. it’s just very nice to be an alive thing next to a different sort of alive thing

[h4nds4ndwich]

“It’s just very nice to be an alive thing next to a different sort of alive thing” I’m in love

[throathole]

Oh thanks but what the fuck does any of that mean

[anariel-the-elrond-apologist]

I’ve seen quite a few of these in my time, but this one takes the cake.

[throathole]

This is fucking killing me

Golp: a roundel purpure.

Repeat this to yourself until it begins to have meaning

[a-book-of-creatures]

Okay then since some of you need to be reminded of this:

Roundels are circles in heraldry. They are named according to their color, which also has its own lingo. Let’s meet them!

Bezant: roundel or (gold) 🟡

Plate: roundel argent (silver) ⚪️

Torteau: roundel gules (red) 🔴

Pomme: roundel vert (green) 🟢

Hurt: roundel azure (blue) 🔵

Golp: roundel purpure (purple) 🟣

Pellet: roundel sable (black) ⚫️

If your field is strewn with roundels, you can describe it appropriately as being bezanty, hurty, golpy, and so on.

[cognitohazardous]

[bunkey]

notice how everyone is horny today

[bunkey]

[cherryhatter-deactivated2015072]

KICK THE CAN!

Let’s play the biggest game of kick the can on the internet.

To kick the can, reblog it. I wanna see how long this can go on for.

[visibun]

the oldest reblogs for this post that i can find are from january 2nd of 2013. this can has been getting kicked around tumblr for almost 13½ years now

[drtanner]

And yet somehow this is my first time kicking it!

[wrishwrosh]

ive said it before and i’ll say it again not enough historical romance focuses on technicalities

[wrishwrosh]

really for this kind of thing it’s no use going to published trad romance and i should know that. the really good shit is 400k on fanfiction dot net for a heterosexual pairing you’ve never considered from a piece of media you havent thought about in years written by a bored doctoral candidate who’s read a lot of primary sources from the long 18th century

[wrishwrosh]

recently rediscovered my absolute favorite entry in the genre: customs and duties by tortoiseshells, which is an insane technicalityromance set in 1738 boston, ft the stuffy british navy guy from pirates of the caribbean/ofc, smuggling, puritanism in the john calvin sense, the legal realities of widowhood, several real historical governors of massachusetts, debts, accounts, and of course customs regulations

[marzipanandminutiae]

I would also like to nominate and psyche's lamp shall darkling be, a story based on the 2025 Frankenstein movie that gets into the intricacies of 1850s convent school life, the process of Catholic ecclesiastical courts verifying miracles, multiple points of mid 19th century marriage and inheritance laws pertaining to property, and also spells the word connection with an X so you know the author has been in the 19th century literature trenches 

[navigatorwrongway]

It is a truth universally acknowledged that I’ll never miss a chance to rec Town and Country by @charminglygrouped! Pride and Prejudice is already set historically but T&C engages with some of the contemporary issues the source material doesn’t touch by exploring what might change if, say, the Bennet family were South Asian. The intersection of class and racial privileges, alienation from parents’ cultures, how racism and orientalism mirrored each other in the fashions of the day (and how that is present in p&p’s use of plain vs opulent attire to signal virtue), with relevant boilerplates on every chapter, fantastic dialogue, citations to make your head spin, and a genuinely compelling relationship at the heart of it.

[mons7errr]

biting your forehead friday

[lionesshathor]

Actually that's very affectionate and careful grooming. Wolves and other carnivores use their incisor teeth to nibble out tangles and scratch itches in their fur. Doing so for someone else, especially on their very sensitive face, shows a highly intimate level of trust. These two are likely a mated pair, or possibly parent and child.

If you have a cat, you've probably had this happen to you. If they lick and then bite your arm, they're trying to groom you. Trouble is, we humans don't have fur, and those teeth are sharp!

[afieldinengland]

normal country latest

[redsunrisinginthesky]

[theladymisandry]

You CANNOT hide these in the tags @injuries-in-dust

[samryx]

Karlach redraw of that trend

[the-big-mood]

[isuggestlandback]

I have a baby cousin who's Two Spirit.

Their parents are leftists, open minded, pro LGBTQ+, learned to use the right pronouns (to their face at least) all that jazz.

Their Auntie grew up in a remote area, little old fashioned, doesn't really "get" the non binary thing, and hasn't quite got the hang of the singular 'they' yet. But she tries.

When my cousin got injured and couldn't drive their parents shrugged and told them to quit their job.

Their Auntie drove them to and from work every day until they got their cast off.

Which family member do you think they'll ask next time they need help?

Do you want to be ideologically perfect, or do you want to help?

[probablyapinecone]

[isuggestlandback]

☝️☝️☝️

[greelin]

need me a man who skitters & crawls around like some sort of creature. a bug, even

[greelin]

i could put him in a jar. with twigs. and leafs

[pglang]

someone airdrop me a hug a mf going through alot

[darkaviarymc]

Tragedy alignment chart. Feel free to use, but please reblog if you do.

[mikkeneko]

And of course the second part of the tragedy, which is: which quadrant did you think you were in vs. which one you were really in

[mynameisrocks]

[linecoveredinjellyfish]

love dating a singer cause sometimes when she practices it's like i'm a king with a private musician here to provide beautiful music to my court. and then also sometimes it's like sharing a car with a really distressed bird.