the forest of illusion

Eli • 23 • infp sort of a mess of fandoms and personal rambles in here. probably mostly Night Vale, Nintendo, Hobbit, and nail polish swatches, with an unnerving sprinkling of selfies, my attempts at fanart, and a few bad puns. always looking for new friends so don't be shy! mobile header image used with permission from zombieaurora

[behindbookshelf8-deactivated202]

October the 24th

[witchsautumn]

[thorinds]

“In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit. Not a nasty, dirty, wet hole, filled with the ends of worms and an oozy smell, nor yet a dry, bare, sandy hole with nothing in it to sit down on or to eat: it was a hobbit-hole, and that means comfort.” 

Happy Hobbit Day! | 22 September

[mienar]

reaching for the stars

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[flavoracle]

I love the song "Scarborough Fair" because it follows my favorite poetic structure:

Nosy question

Grocery list

Haunting personal information

[radoncany0n]

A spinning carousel of colors. Superman ice cream in a special dish meant only for sweet treats. Holiday lights twinkling and the sound of Edelweiss on every hour. Silent Christmas Eves and Christmas mornings of snow and laughter. Jeopardy and cream puffs every Saturday morning. 

I remember hearing you laugh with pride as I sat on your lap and instead of letting you reading me the bedtime story from the pasta book, I read it aloud to you instead. 

I hope I always made you proud and brought you joy. Even though we have to be apart for a little while, I will see you again soon.

It might be a good 2 hours.

[radoncany0n]

“It’s in a pitbull’s nature to be dangerous” they say, as every time I sit down on the couch my full-grown pitbull crawls into my lap and demands to be held in my arms and rocked like a baby until she falls asleep.

[radoncany0n]

One of the strangest feelings is coming back home after a period of being away, and everything remaining exactly where you left it. Beds half-made, kettle on a stove still half-full of tea, light in the hall still left on by accident. Everything in life is constantly changing, acted upon by outside forces. On a subconscious level, I suppose I presume that change extends to the small details as well. 

Even stranger to find the remains of a life cut short. A book open to the same page on a dresser, the contents of a makeup bag still strewn on the counter, a half-knit shawl patiently waiting on the needles. She is gone, and yet the threads of her intent are still woven into the little details. 

Who finishes the story? Who carefully puts away the lipstick tubes? Who picks up the knitting needles and bravely tries to follow the chicken-scratch pattern to completion? Does anybody? Or do we close our eyes and hope that as it does all things, somehow time will eventually change these details as well?

[kesstielarchive]

A 2017 non-comprehensive compilation of my fairy mori, natural strega, and forest influenced outfits!

[radoncany0n]

I’m having another career crisis that I just need to talk through. I work as a front-end web developer right now, just HTML/CSS, WordPress, and I’m just learning a bit of Drupal. I’m in college for a computer science degree with the end goal of working as a Software Engineer. The reason why I want this job is because it’s a career field with the opportunity for little face-to-face client interaction, some jobs can be entirely remote, it is a financially stable industry, and it requires some level of intelligence.

I’m not particularly fascinated by the industry, and I don’t care much for the theory of a computer science. What I want out of a career is financial stability, a steady routine where I know what kind of challenges to expect when I start work each day, a healthy work/life balance, and the ability to travel often or work remote while living nomadically. On a lesser level, I would love a job with little client interaction because I have trouble communicating sometimes and I would also like a job that doesn’t dictate my physical appearance.

Now that I’m in the ballpark of web work, I hear a lot that software engineering is the kind of job you have to dedicate your life to in order to succeed. You have to be constantly learning off the clock, passionate about the industry, and willing to be extremely flexible with your role since it is constantly changing.

I’m afraid this is the wrong career path for me, since while I enjoy the literal act of coding and I feel I am putting my intelligence to practical use, I don’t love the “work” aspect of the stressful deadlines and the constant code reviews. I feel that this type of work haunts me when I’m off the clock and has already begun taking over my life - and I’m barely even a year into a career just doing front end work.

I wonder often if I should drop out of my second degree and find a job that actually does something. Something more than fixing broken websites whose only purpose is to attract more clients to bloated billionaire corporations. I tell myself that if I suck it up and keep going, I can spend my 30s working remotely and living abroad, and then spend my 40s and onwards teaching at the college level. At least then I would be giving something back, making some kind of difference to someone’s life.

It just all feels empty, and I find myself dreading work every morning. I don’t know how to proceed, but I guess I just wanted to write all this out so it can stop spinning around in my head all the time.

[radoncany0n]

I lost someone unexpectedly this Valentines’ Day. she was like an aunt to me. she was young and full of life and enjoyed every moment of every day, and from one moment to the next she was gone.

I’ve never lost someone I was close to before now. it’s strange how the whole world feels different, emptier, more hollow. it’s odd how quickly she went from being someone I know to someone I knew; a different version of herself - thinner, translucent, a ghost of a shadow of her.

for a few days I was sad for myself living in a world with her absence. for a few more I’ve been numb, disconnecting myself from it all. yesterday I was busy, working a double shift just so I could keep from thinking about the box of chocolates on the table, meant as a gift for her, but given to us because her husband couldn’t bear to look at them on his table anymore. today I feel afraid, because tomorrow I will see her again, pale and small and surrounded by flowers. she is not the same person I knew, and yet tomorrow she will be - and I will have to face that truth. tomorrow she will truly be gone, and I am scared that if I let the sadness back in, this time it will never go away.

people keep saying everything I feel is okay and normal. I suppose it is.

[datasoong47]

Bold of you to go where no man has gone before

[eternalgirlscout]

#op is literally seeking out new life and new civilizations but go off i guess (x)

[star-temeraire]

These are the voyages of the starship enterprise, in this essay I will

[sisterwho-refuses-togetatumbl-r]

[weirdtrek]

[radoncany0n]

I pretty much only ever come here to vent anymore but that’s my life now I guess anyway

today’s the first day in a few months I’ve felt like quitting my job. Over the past month or so, I built a whole website from scratch for a non-profit science organization and i actually enjoyed the work and worked overtime on it because I felt it was in some way going to make a tiny impact on the world when it was done.

but now that that website is done, I’ve been shoved immediately back into maintenance updates on the hellish realty page the company I work with inherited. it’s a broken mess that takes me half the day just to reverse engineer how any of it functions (and yet my boss tasks major update jobs expecting them to take me 15-20 mins like lol my dude have you seen how convoluted the code is on the whole site?) and all that aside, the clients are rude and entitled, and the only goal my work on this is accomplishing is to feed their power trip and make them richer so they can feel even more entitled.

So about the time today that my supervisor started accusing me of not doing the work I said I had done (when she was the one checking the WRONG WEBSITE ENTIRELY), I honestly had to leave the house and go for a walk in the 2+ feet of snow outside just to literally cool down and not quit on the spot.

And now I just got the email that I’ve been assigned even more realty nonsense for the foreseeable future, and I’m not sure how much longer I can keep at this honestly

[googlemenot-deactivated20230921]

[baapi-makwa]

[radoncany0n]

I absolutely understand and respect Julie Andrews’ reasons not to cameo in the new Mary Poppins, and I adore Angela Lansbury ever so much

but the one thing that I feel would have made Mary Poppins Returns absolutely perfect imo would have been Julie playing the role of the balloon lady, and it would have added just that one more little touch of magic when she hands Mary the last balloon

but literally that’s the only thing I would have changed because Mary Poppins Returns was beautiful and touching and was indeed practically perfect

[radoncany0n]

today really sucked. clients weren’t kind and my boss blamed me for a lot of things that weren’t my fault.

but what really made it worse was when I tried to tell the person who’s pretty much my only support system here about it, she just yelled at me for being weak and letting people walk all over me all the time.

I’m just so tired and I feel constantly overwhelmed by everything. I can’t keep doing this every day, especially if I have to internalize it all.