The Runalongs are rare in worlds without fast transportation. It seems they are brought into being when someone, bored by a journey, looks out to watch the countryside go by. They daydream of a creature that follows their path (guarding? Or hunting?) and suddenly, without fanfare, it appears.
Runalongs have little in the way of ecology, but they are known to eat other dreams. Sometimes if the one who called them is particularly lonely or afraid they will get closer and even speak in humming voices without opening their mouths. But the second you stop moving, the creatures turn and vanish behind themselves, disappearing to wherever fantasies come from.
A Runalong can also have other forms; a humanoid figure (without distinct features) is common, and these may also ride things that are supposed to be horses. If only we were better at imagining, then they might not look so terrifying.
Please, I’m nearly 30 and I still have Runalongs join me on long, boring car journeys. They must be able to sense people who are in need of their presence, for company, for entertainment, or are just so used to them being there.
when you put your hand palm down out the window and it jumps and sways in the speed, the pressure you feel, not quite solid but not quite air is the ghostly backs of the runalongs arching up for a pat.
My favorite brand of people are musicians who hear Rush Fucking E, which isn't technically meant to be played by a human at all, and immediately picking up their instrument and going 'bet'.
this was submitted as a one sentence horror story, but it feels like it could be an old jewish joke, like the one about the two rabbis proving g-d doesn't exist or the saying 'people plan, g-d laughs'
Even more, it sounds like the beginning -- the set-up -- of the joke. Can’t you hear Carl Reiner opening a bit with this line, or Shalom Aleichem using it to kick off a story?
Well I'm not quite an old Jewish man just yet, but let me give it a shot...
Losing confidence in Himself, G-d became an atheist. He decided to go down to Earth, to walk among humans and see how they found meaning.
He wandered the world until he came to a town, where he happened upon a pastor. "Come to our church this Sunday!" said the pastor. But G-d shook his head. "I don't believe in G-d anymore," he told the pastor sullenly. "And besides, I really shouldn't be working weekends." . . .
He continued wandering, and as night fell, he realized he had no money for a hotel. Walking down the darkening sidewalk, he passed many shivering folk, some young and thin, others old and worn and grizzle-bearded, looking not unlike himself. Just as the rain began to fall, he happened upon a priest. The priest looked him up and down, and said, "You look cold, my son. We're hosting a men's shelter at the church tonight; you can sleep there, and come to Mass tomorrow." This time G-d agreed. He slept well and was warm, and in the morning sat for Mass. They blessed him in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, but he felt beside himself and decided to leave.
By this time G-d was quite hungry. He stopped by a deli, but still had no money, so all he could do was watch the fresh steaming bagels be made. On a bench outside the deli, a man was eating a bagel with lox. As he finished eating, G-d noticed there were still some scraps of food on the waxpaper. Unable to help himself, he asked if he could have the scraps, before the man threw it away. "Please sir, I'm so hungry. I'd just like that crumb of bagel there, and that little shred of lox. I think I could make a bisl of fish last quite a while." The man shook his head. "I cannot in good conscience give you my trash," he said, "But come inside, I'll get you your own bagel. I'd offer to get you coffee—but that's trash too."
So the man bought G-d some breakfast and sat with him on the bench. "Thank you so much," said G-d. "How can I ever repay you?" But the man just shrugged and said, "I'm a rabbi. Buying bagels I don't get to eat is part of the job description."
G-d thanked the rabbi again, and ate in silence. "Rabbi, can I ask you a question? I feel I haven't been on this Earth too long, but already I've seen much misery. How do you do it? How do you still believe in G-d?"
The rabbi pondered this. "I believe in joyful things. I believe in kindness, and people choosing to help each other. And isn't that a kind of godliness?" (G-d suspected there was a bit more to godliness than that, but he let it slide.) The rabbi continued: "I've prayed to G-d every day for the last 30 years, and I will every day til I die. And if He answers my prayers, all the better! But tell me, my new friend, what's your name?" G-d hesitated and said, "It's a little hard to pronounce..." The rabbi chuckled and said, "No matter. Say, it won't be anything like Shabbos dinner, but my wife is baking a delightful fig pie today, and I'd like to have you over for dinner to enjoy it." G-d nodded. "I do like figs..."
That evening, G-d sat for dinner with the rabbi, the rabbi's wife, and their four children. The meal was delicious, the rabbi's family was incredibly welcoming. Their conversation was friendly but never prying, and the children laughed and played with each other. Several times, the youngest child tugged on G-d's sleeve for his attention before her father motioned for her to go play with her siblings. G-d began to see what the rabbi had meant about the joyfulness of life.
At the end of the night, G-d stood up to leave, and felt renewed. The rabbi said, "My friend, don't leave us so soon!" And G-d replied, "I will always be with you, for I am the Lord Your G-d." And they understood it to be true.
He had done this sort of thing a few times before and generally knew how it went. As expected, the rabbi and his family fell to their knees, weeping with joy and awe. He did not expect the youngest child to walk right up and tug G-d's sleeve again. He smiled graciously down at her, and she looked up with the wonderful bright eyes of a child who understands nothing but the urge to play. In a high voice, she said, "Knock knock!" G-d couldn't help but laugh. "Who's there?" He replied cheerfully.
Suddenly from across the room, the rabbi swore loudly and rudely. Dismayed, G-d asked, "What troubles you?" He saw the rabbi was trembling, half in rage and half in embarrassment. "I'm sorry Lord! Thank you for this, thank you so much for gracing us with your light, Baruch Atah and so on, it's just..." The rabbi swore again. "Thirty years of daily prayer, Lord, and a KNOCK-KNOCK JOKE is what you'll answer?"
it’s sort of funny that the current cultural idea of the flapper dates not from the 1920s, but the 1950s when costume designers took the radical, gender-fluid, sexual, sexually liberated ideas and fashions of the 20s and made them sexy. as in sexual objectifying.
hokay. so it’s the 1950s and it’s the heyday of the studio system and writers and movie makers (and audiences) want rom coms and frolicking films and lighthearted fun, but there’s just one problem.
WWII
but that was the 1940s! you say
you’re right.
but in order to set a film in the 1950s, writers and film makers have to establish what the male lead character did during the war or risk it coming across like he didn’t, well, serve. can’t have a shirker or a coward and rejected for medical reasons really doesn’t fly in the 1950s. and there’s only so many times you can write about soldiers and sailors and airmen and the occasional spy before it starts to become stale. and it doesn’t terribly fit with the fluffy writing because, well, war and death and tens of millions of people dead. contemporary films more fall in the line of what we now call film noir. men and women who have been damaged by war, but that’s another topic.
sooooo, you do period pieces. no one wants to do the 1930s because that’s the great depression. so 1920s. frolicking and gay and fabulous!
(Great War, what Great War?)
but the thing is, the 1920s, especially in Paris and Berlin, were a massively transgressive, reversal, and experimental time period in art, fashion, society, and all over. but only a little bit in america because honestly we were barely touched by wwi so it’s not like we’re partying to forget an entire generation of young men killed off and entire towns wiped off the face of the earth using weapons the likes of which had never been seen before. the us as a whole mostly heard about sarin gas, not see it poison entire landscapes and men and animals dropped to the ground and die in truly horrific ways.
the europe that emerged from wwi was massively shell shocked, angry, and living in a surreal dream of everything being upwards and backwards and live now because tomorrow you may die and it’s all nonsense anyway. it’s a world in which surrealism and dadaism and german expressionism make sense because fuck it all.
you get repudiation of the old, experimentation, deliberate reversals, transgressive behavior, and if there’s an envelope to push, you tear it open. France calls the 1920s “Années folles”, the crazy years.
the things we’re doing now, with fluidity and experimentation and exploration of gender and sexuality and presentation? the 1920s did that already. it’s drag and androgyny and blatant homosexuality. it’s extramarital affairs and sex before or without marriage, it’s rejection of marriage as an idea and an institution, it’s playing with gender and gender roles and working women and unrestrained art and
it’s everything the 1950s hated. or more accurately: absolutely terrified of.
the flappers of the 1920s went to college and cut their hair to repudiate a century of a woman’s hair being her crowning glory. they wore obvious makeup and makeup in ways that are not terribly appealing now and weren’t terribly appealing then, but they signaled you were part of the tribe.
they were women who wanted independence and personal fulfillment.
“She was conscious that the things she did were the things she had always wanted to do.“
so the 1950s didn’t want that. they wanted films with dancing and chorus lines and pretty girls to be looked at. they wanted spaghetti straps and fringed dresses that moved pretty when the chorus girls danced.
1920s fringe doesn’t. 1920s fringe is made of silk, incredibly dense, incredibly heavy, sewn on individually by hand, and rather delicate. the all-over fringe dress didn’t exist until the 1950s invention of nylon and continuous loops that could be sewn on in costume workshops by the mile on machines.
(this is before “vintage” exists. to the 1950s, the 1920s (or earlier) wasn’t vintage, it was old-fashioned. démodé. out of style. last last last last last season.)
1950s 1920s-set movies have clothes that are the 1950s take on it. the dresses have a dropped waist, but they’re form-fitting, figure-revealing. the actresses are pretty clearly wearing bras and 50s girdles under them a lot of the time. they’re not
the woman on the far left is basically wearing a man’s suit with a skirt. la garçonne. some women went full-out and wore pants. you could be arrested for that. they were. still wore pants. and pyjama ensembles in silk and loud prints.
or class photo of ‘25
or even
not that 1920s dresses could be sexy or sexual; they often were. i’ve seen 20s dresses that were basically sideless and held together with straps. but it’s sort of like how the mini skirt went from being a thing of sexual liberation to an item of sexual objectification.
it’s ownership and it’s agency and it’s hard to put a name or finger on it, but you just know. sex goddess versus sex icon.
#wait sentinel aus are based on an actual show???#I thought they were just one of those inexplicable Fandom Things - im WHEEZING, i love this so much
never Once have I ever seen a reference to an actual extant intellectual property, it’s always “what if we had this super complicated codependent pseudo-magic sci-fi thing going on” and then just running with it OTL
i do not have the spoons to FULLY get into it, as it demands, but the one with the military haircut (he’s a cop, a “protector”, c’est la vie) is Jim Ellison, former Army Ranger, repressed fool. curly haired bb is Blair Sandburg, an anthropology grad student who realizes Jim is a Sentinel of legend, latches onto him like a remora, and Jim basically leans on Blair like a crutch all the while pretending he doesn’t care for him in a very “I made you a friendship bracelet” “ugh gross” “well you don’t have to---” “shut up I’m gonna wear it” way
they were handsy
HANDSY I SAY
they STARTED handsy
they moved in together in like. ep one.
they become partners in the cop sense, they do a lot of gift of the magi shit for each other, every time I start to think of the stupid shit they do for another I remember More Weird Shit, codependent fucking weirdos
Okay, I absolutely MUST chime in For The Sentinel which NEVER gets the respect of its peers just because "the plots were a little convoluted" and the "central premise wore a little thin as the seasons went on." those men were in love. THOSE MEN WERE LOVERS!!!!!
What you need to know about The Sentinel is that the very first episode is about Jim Ellison acquiring mystical powers. YES I want to be clear, the way he acquires these powers is "problematical" and "not great, respecting indigenous cultures wise" but okay, so he's got these powers that make all of his senses amped up to dangeous levels. he can hear things no one else can hear, he can see things like he's fucking legolas, you get the deal.
so he goes to the doctor to be like "i feel weird" because of course, and Blair Sandberg, twink anthropologist to the stars, BREAKS SEVERAL LAWS to get in Jim's exam room and say—i know how to help you. i know what's wrong with you. i know how to make life better. and jim ellison looked at the little twink man and said yes....YES to love YES to life YES to living in a 1 bedroom LOFT apartment together. YES to being soulmates and life partners! YES I'LL MARRY YOU!!!!!!
This is the ORIGINAL big gruff german sheppard/lil yapping chihuahua pairing. And fandom looked at this show and said "this is good. i will build a kingdom upon this land. from now on, these are the two genders: big, angry, powerful, forced to their knees by circumstances beyond their control AND small, jokester, has skills INVALUABLE to Big, bad self worth. And then so the sentinel/guide aus RULED the pervert community, and everyone rejoiced.
And then SPN looked at this, and said "but what if the guides also had wet butts" and u kno what? innovation is CRUCIAL.
my friend had Sentinel VHS tapes acquired from someone on the internet and basically every episode featured tough military man Jim being driven to his knees in agony verging on madness bc of his mystical senses being overwhelmed and tiny commie academic Blair soothing him and healing his agonies by touching him (and communicating with him via psychic leopards????) so they could save lives and the show wasn’t GOOD but my god it was something
God this was such an important fandom to me. My Sentinel friends are my family now, more than a quarter of a century later. Merryish, who first offered my fanfic a home* in —1997? 1998?—taught my kid to snorkel 20 years later. Flummery are my kid’s fairy godmothers. I basically married astolat 25 years ago. And every time I see one of you Sentinel people online (waves to a bunch of you who reblogged this) I feel like I’ve run into someone from the old country! That fandom literally changed my life.
But also, fannishly, so inventive! Some of the first vids I ever saw back before there were computers –VHS vids, wonderful ones. (Shout out to GloRo!) Great great fanfic and art. I still have gorgeous zines from this period. And the loft tape! Go to fanlore and look up the loft tape you guys!!
*before the AO3! When you needed someone to host your fic! This is part of why we built the AO3! So many (so many!!!) Sentinel people involved in building the AO3! Astolat built the Sentinel archive, 852 Prospect, a decade before the AO3, that was our first practice archive software. That software was adapted and used in other fandoms like due South. Seah and I were both DS archivists. This is all part of the story of how the AO3 came about. The sentinel/guide trope is the least of it. The Sentinel’s impact on fandom is totally outsized considering what a minor show it was. But it had a great concept that it did not fully exploit, which I think is in fact, what an amazing fandom needs.
Yes, The Sentinel was a real show in the 1990s, and gave us one of the classic fandom tropes, please check out The Sentinel, Jim/Blair, and Sentinel AU pages on Fanlore!
I just finished reading The Warrior’s Apprentice by Lois McMaster Bujold yesterday and I can honestly say I’ve never read a book that felt like that.
It’s like a combination of the morbid fascination of watching a car crash in slow motion layered with the upbeat thrill of a heist movie plus politics intrigue and spy-movie style paranoia, all in a gigantic blizzard swirling around this one little guy. I didn’t know how I would be able to become attached to a character in this series after reading Shards of Honor and Barrayar, because I loved Cordelia so much as a protagonist, but Miles Vorkosigan did the job. Truly the character of all time.
He’s a strategic genius. He can figure out a solution to almost any problem. He’s in love with his childhood best friend and gets shut down repeatedly. He serves as the officiant at her impromptu wedding to a guy he saved through another random act of kindness, and plays out the roles of three different people in it like some kind of vaudeville comedy act. He makes people laugh. He inspires everyone around him to genuine loyalty and trust. He was playmates with the current emperor of his home planet when they were kids and is the heir of an aristocratic family. He refuses to get anything by nepotism and uses his mother’s maiden name when he meets people so they won’t know who he is. On a whim, he decides to help a random stranger and has to lie to do it. He commits to the bit so hard that he ends up faking his way into running a mercenary fleet whose existence was initially a complete lie and stopping a war he had nothing to do with. He has stomach ulcers from how stressed out he is. He refuses to break a promise, even when doing so would allow him to escape the web of lies he’s woven. His house of cards is always one gust of wind from toppling and he’s somehow able to keep it standing by sheer force of character. He will not stop because if he does he’ll have a nervous breakdown.
Genuinely the most fascinating and lovable combination of wet rat energy, goodest boy ever, and rogue with a heart of gold. No one is doing it like him. I’m going to read all seventeen books in this series or however many there are, and then everything else Lois McMaster Bujold has written.
okay okay listen okay listen. i finished reading fugitive telemetry and i had to draw my favourite part SO BAD. skip this if u dont want kinda spoilers for that idk
the story behind this book is actually more complicated than this. because first, I watched a video essay on isekai narratives where the guy claimed that generic protagonists work best because people want to project and achieve max escapism. and I thought, that's really stupid. so I wrote a first chapter about a body-stealing alien space slug who gets hit by a truck and isekaid mid-way through invading the Canadian parliament, because I thought that was the most specific and least relatable isekai protagonist possible.
and then I was like fuck, my publisher is going to want a romance from me. who would the slug even kiss?? so I tucked the chapter away for a few months, until I went to reblog this old post of mine about how Kar'niss should've been romanceable, AND REALIZED! THE SOLUTION TO MY PROBLEM! of course, the slug would kiss the spider, it all makes so much sense!
after that, the writing got a bit frenzied. and now it's available in Barnes and Noble
thinking about that toni morrison quote that went to the effect of ‘you’re looking in your children’s face to make sure their face is clean and their hair is combed and they’re looking in your face to see love.’ because it’s saur true.
natural hibiscus dye on a skein of wool!!! loooooook at the coloooooor 🥰 it also smells like rosa jamaica (the drink) which is a pleasant surprise
I had initially dyed this skein with blackberry dye but since I had also eaten most of the blackberries, it wasn’t a very deep dye and so I just over dyed it with hibiscus . I simmered that pot of hibiscus for hours and reduced as much as possible and I am very very happy I spent that time, it was worth it to get this color result !
