Salut|Hello|Bore Da

I like hetalia, Lotr (Silm), Star Wars, Naruto and so many other things. I also like art and classical music (though I’m kind of obsessed with Finnish polyphonic singing like Värttina and Kardemimmit rn) - I speak English Cymraeg Français

[wearethekat]

Favorite Books of 2025

The Raven Scholar, Antonia Hodgson. My big standout new author find this year, with a classic fantasy court drama/murder mystery featuring a truly excellently written cast of characters. Review.

A Drop of Corruption, Robert Jackson Bennett. Second of the Holmes and Watson-style intrigue murder mysteries, with a rare combo of unique fantasy worldbuilding and a classic, plotty mystery. Review.

How to Find a Nameless Fae, AJ Lancaster. bi4bi fantasy romance with a sensible 40 year old protagonist, fairy tale plot, and a love interest with more than a little bit of Howell Jenkins. Review.

I Leave It Up to You, Jinwoo Chong. Leaning a bit towards litfic, about a queer man's complex relationship with his family and their sushi restaurant after waking up from a coma. Review.

Blood on Her Tongue, Johanna van Veen. A properly bloody Gothic novel set in 19th century Netherlands. Excellent atmosphere. Review.

A Brother's Price, Wen Spencer. Genderswapped Regency romance with the sociological SFF worldbuilding to back it up. Review.

The Incandescent, Emily Tesh. Emily Tesh never misses. Slice of life about a jaded teacher at a elitist magical school for teenagers. Review.

The Everlasting, Alix Harrow. Time loop narrative about butch lady knights, fascism, and the meaning of the stories we tell ourselves. Review.

A Far Better Thing, HG Parry. Excellent fairy changeling angst based on A Tale of Two Cities. I love a good tragedy. Review.

Upcoming Releases

The Subtle Art of Folding Space, John Chu. Probably a bit obvious to compare it to Everything Everywhere All At Once. Messy family drama and interdimensional shenanigans. Out April 7th. Review.

The Duke, Anna Cowan. Absolute souffle of a lesbian melodrama and very much in the shape of classic eighties Regencies, except the duke is a woman. Has the intensity and drama I've been missing from some sapphic romances. Out April 28th. Review.

The Poet Empress, Shen Tao. Still thinking about this one. Ruthless, pragmatic fantasy set in a mythical China that takes aim at a lot of dark romance tropes and hits it out of the park every time. Out January 20th. Review.

A Widow's Charm, Caitlyn Paxson. Delightful fantasy romcom about a widow blackmailing a guy into (illegally) necromancying her recently dead husband. Out March 31st. Review is held until spring but here's the Goodreads.

Honorable Mention

One Yellow Eye, Leigh Radford. Story about a woman trying to save her infected husband in the most compassionate take I've ever read about a zombie plague. Excellent medical details also. Review.

Notes from a Regicide, Isaac Fellman. Messy, rambling narrative about a trans man trying to make sense of his trans parents, with a sprawling SF future that only shows around the corners. Review.

What Fury Brings, Tricia Levenseller. The only thing you need to know about this book is that CS Pacat enthusiastically blurbed it. What if HE got kidnapped and dark fantasy romanced, and also the protagonist lady had biceps the size of cantaloupes. Review.

Nicked, MT Anderson. Queer medieval relics heist with a good touch for the historical period. Review.

[auxphono]

Needed a clean graphic for a project, and figured while I was vectoring I would put sex and magic back in.

Happy Pride Month

[auxphono]

Reblogging this yearly for anyone who needs a very clean version <3 Happy Pride.

[drosophilamania]

Reblog to put the sex and magic back into pride

[skyinide]

[afronerdism]

This might be the funniest reply I’ve ever seen in my life

[thepioden]

[fozmeadows]

I AM WHEEZING

[skyinide]

PLEASE STOP REBLOGGING THIS OMFG

[viralfrog]

[dragongirlbunny]

[status-quo-hater]

I think one of the funniest abortion stances I've heard was from my parents neighbor. He's a like, hard-core libertarian viking larper guy who is very tall and very fat and very bald.

He believes a fetus is human with a soul, but also its "basically attacking the woman's body" so if she wants to get rid of it, that's "basically self-defense". He compared it to shooting a home invader. So he supports abortion not as healthcare, but as killing a baby in self-defense

[status-quo-hater]

Y'know I'm so glad someone reminded me of this. Because this was also discussed.

My stepmother did NOT like the way her Libertarian Viking Neighbor framed pregnancy as the fetus "attacking the woman". She incredulously told him this was extremely disrespectful to expectant mothers to portray pregnancy as so violent and negative.

Libertarian Viking Neighbor's response was that people consensually hurt each other all the time, and "there's like a whole community about that, with the acronym the one that starts with a B" And his reasoning was that if the mother was consenting to bring attacked by the baby, it in fact wasn't violent and negative because there was consent.

He brought up people consensually hurting each other, didn't go for one of the obvious answers like boxing or body mods or something, no he went STRAIGHT TO BDSM and he DIDN'T EVEN REMEMBER THE ACRONYM

[homunculus-argument]

The Odyssey but retold as a low-stakes modern adventure of one guy out with his girlfriend leaving the bar with his buddies to do just one (1) simple thing real quick, it'll take like 15 minutes tops, he'll be right back, but then some bullshit happens and the trip keeps getting more complicated as more bullshit keeps happening while he just tries to get back to the bar because he promised his girlfriend that he'd get back and he knows that she's still there because she told him she'd wait there.

And by the time he finally gets back it's almost 3 am and the bar is about to close while she's sitting there stone cold sober, surrounded by 5 drunk guys unsuccessfully trying to convince her to give up on waiting for him and go home with one of them instead. And the guy shows up to proceed to beat the shit out of them before explaining himself to her like hey sorry bullshit kept happening, my phone fell into a storm drain and my wallet got stolen when I was trying to find someone who'd borrow me a phone so I could call and

[thekijs]

His girlfriend had been fending off the 5 drunk guys for most of the evening by explaining that even if she was going to ditch her boyfriend, she can't possibly leave without finishing her beer, which she is keeping perpetually full via careful sleight of hand where she's just pouring it back and forth into and out of the pitcher.

However the drunk guys are also drinking, and eventually she can't afford to buy another pitcher for the table so she can't keep up the ever-full beer glass trick. At this point she has to resort to setting up the pool trick shot that she's never seen anyone but her boyfriend pull off, and says she'll leave with whoever manages the shot first.

That buys her another hour or so and then, finally, her boyfriend makes it back. He looks like shit, hair down and just a mess, he's wearing an entirely different jacket that he got from an alley, and barely recognizable—especially to 5 guys who've been drunk for hours now. He lurks for a minute, finds out what's going on, and proceeds to pull off the trick shot first try. Throws the jacket off, fixes his hair with a hair tie his girlfriend lends him, finally looks like himself again, and THEN beats the shit out of them with the pool cue.

[weaselle]

yuh i was there, that's how it happened

[crystalis]

There was this woman poet in 4th century China called Su Hui (蘇蕙), a child genius who had reportedly mastered Chinese characters by age 3.

At 21 years old, heartbroken by her husband who left her for another woman, she decided to encode her feelings in a structure so intricate, so beautiful, so intellectually staggering that it still baffles scholars to this day.

Came to be known as the Xuanji Tu (璇璣圖) - the "Star Gauge" or "Map of the Armillary Sphere" - it's a 29 by 29 grid of 841 characters that can produce over 4,000 different poems.

Read it forward. Read it backward. Read it horizontally, vertically, diagonally. Read it spiraling outward from the center. Read it in circles around the outer edge. Each path through the grid produces a different poem - all of them coherent, all of them beautiful, all of them rhyming, all of them expressing variations on the same themes of longing, betrayal, regret, and undying love.

The outer ring of 112 characters forms a single circular poem - believed to be both the first and longest of its kind ever written. The interior grid produces 2,848 different four-line poems of seven characters each. In addition, there are hundreds of other smaller and longer poems, depending on the reading method.

At the center a single character she left implied but unwritten: 心 (xin) - "heart." Later copyists would add it explicitly, but in Su Hui's original the meaning was even more beautiful: 4,000 poems, all orbiting the space where her heart used to be.

Take for instance the outer red grid of the Star Gauge. Starting from the top right corner and reading down, you get this seven-character quatrain:

仁智懷德聖虞唐，

貞志篤終誓穹蒼，

欽所感想妄淫荒，

心憂增慕懷慘傷。

In pinyin, it is:

Rén zhì huái dé shèng yú táng,

zhēnzhì dǔ zhōng shì qióng cāng,

qīn suǒ gǎnxiǎng wàng yín huāng,

xīn yōu zēng mù huái cǎn shāng.

Notice how it rhymes? táng / cāng / huāng / shāng

The rough translation in English is: "The benevolent and wise cherish virtue, like the sage-kings Yao and Shun, With steadfast will I swear to the heavens above, What I revere and feel - how could it be wanton or dissolute? My heart's sorrow grows, longing brings only grief."

Now read it from the bottom to the top and you get this entirely different seven-character quatrain:

傷慘懷慕增憂心，

荒淫妄想感所欽，

蒼穹誓終篤志貞，

唐虞聖德懷智仁。

The pinyin:

Shāng cǎn huái mù zēng yōu xīn,

huāngyín wàngxiǎng gǎn suǒ qīn,

cāngqióng shì zhōng dǔzhì zhēn,

táng yúshèngdé huái zhì rén.

It rhymes too: xīn and qīn, zhēn and rén

And the meaning is just as beautiful and coherent: "Grief and sorrow, longing fills my worried heart, Wanton and dissolute fantasies - is that what you revere? I swear to the heavens my constancy is true, May we embody the sage-kings' virtue, wisdom, and benevolence."

That's just 2 poems out of the over 4,000 you can construct from the Xuanji Tu!

At the very center of the grid, the 8 red characters wrapped around the central heart, she "signed" her poem with a hidden message:

詩圖璇玑，始平蘇氏。 "The poem-picture of the Armillary Sphere, by Su of Shiping."

Or reversed:

蘇氏詩圖，璇玑始平。 "Su's poem-picture - the Armillary Sphere begins in peace."

Many scholars, and even emperors, throughout Chinese history have been completely obsessed by Su Hui's puzzle.

For instance, in the Ming dynasty, a scholar named Kang Wanmin (康萬民) devoted his entire life to the poems (kangshiw.com/contents/461/2…), ending up documenting twelve different reading methods - forward, backward, diagonal, radiating, corner-to-corner, spiraling - and extracting 4,206 poems. His book on the subject ("Reading Methods for the Xuanji Tu Poems", 璇璣圖詩讀法) runs to hundreds of pages.

Empress Wu Zetian herself, the legendary woman emperor of the Tang dynasty, wrote a preface to the Xuanji Tu around 692 CE (baike.baidu.com/item/%E7%BB%87…).

Incredibly, there's even far more complexity to the Xuanji Tu than just the poems:

- The name 璇玑 (Xuanji) - Armillary Sphere - is astronomical in meaning and the way the poems can be read mirrors the way celestial bodies orbit around a fixed center. It's a model of the heavens.

- Her original work, with the characters woven on silk brocade, was in five colors (red, black, blue/green, purple, and yellow) which correspond to the Five Elements (五行) - the foundational Chinese philosophical system that explains how the universe operates. So it's also a model of the entire cosmic order according to ancient Chinese philosophy.

- It's also of course deeply mathematical with this 29 x 29 perfect square grid, with sub-squares, lines and rectangles, and a structure which allows for symmetrical reading patterns in all directions

- Last but not least, the content of the poems themselves contain multiple registers. On top of expressing her personal grief and longing for her husband, it's also filled with accusations against the concubine (Zhao Yangtai) he left her for, reflections on politics (with many references to sage-kings) and philosophical reflections.

So the Star Gauge is simultaneously:

- A love letter (expressing personal longing)

- A legal brief (arguing her case against her rival)

- A cosmological model (structured like the heavens)

- A Five Element diagram (encoding the fundamental structure of the world according to ancient Chinese philosophy)

- A mathematical construction with perfect symmetry and precision

And yet, for all this complexity, we should not forget this was all ultimately in service of the simplest human message imaginable: a 21-year-old woman asking the love of her life "come back to me".

Her husband did, eventually. According to what empress Wu Zetian herself wrote in her preface to the Xuanji Tu, when he received Su's brocade he was so "moved by its supreme beauty" that he sent away his concubine and returned to his wife. As the story goes, they lived together until old age.

The heart at the center was filled after all.

[morphmaker]

the silmarillion bride

[lavidaextraordinaria]

What if oxygen is poisonous and it just takes 75-100 years to kill us?

[frenchshower]

My science teacher said he thinks that’s true actually

[thepioden]

Yeah this is actually pretty much exactly what is going on. It’s why anti-oxidants are such a big deal. Bonus fact: oxygen oxidizes stuff in your cells or, in other words, it’s not toxic, just setting you on fire very very slowly.

[sarah-mcelroy-deactivated202601]

[femonologue]

What if there are aliens out there but they subsist on entirely different substances and they’re just scared as shit of us and our crazy ass hell planet? Once in a while some alien anthropologist type suggests checking out the people on this inhabited planet out towards the galaxy’s edge. The other aliens just look at the naive academic with horror. No!! We do not go to that world. That is where the DEATH BREATHERS live. They recreationally consume poisons and are more or less composed of biological fire. Their atmosphere is made of rocket fuel. We must leave the DEATH BREATHERS in peace. Do not go there. Do not.

[optimysticals]

I tend to always reblog posts about humans being terrifying weirdos to aliens.

[alessariel]

@brainsforbabyjesus

[brainsforbabyjesus]

okay but…that is actually what went down on earth about 2.5 billion years ago.

Earth was doing just fine with a mostly nitrogen/carbon dioxide atmosphere and everyone was happy to go on living in anaerobic bliss and then cyanobacteria suddenly hit the scene, altered the atmosphere composition so that there was a ton of oxygen gas and killed practically everything (97% or more of all species on earth).

We are literally descendants of the DEATH BREATHERS and cyanobacteria is our deadly mother.

[digitaldiscipline]

The cyanobacteria holocaust is so big, it doesn’t even have a cool name; it’s just called “The Great Oxygenation Event”; the *second* most apocalyptic extinction event in our planet’s history is the one that’s called THE GREAT DYING (the Permian-Triassic event, about 252 million years ago).

This shit makes like the rock-throwing that wiped out the dinosaurs look like kindergarten.

[scottpocalypse-now-deactivated2]

The Great Dying is my absolute favorite nickname for an epochal event.

[fuckyeah-nerdery]

Cyanobacteria, Mother of Death Breathers.

[drowning-in-deadlines]

I see a lot of people in the notes are still skeptical, so

~ Carl Sagan, Cosmos, Chapter II- One Voice in the Cosmic Fugue

~ Horst Rauchfuss,  Chemical Evolution and the Origin of Life

It’s more than just a theory on tumblr. It’s an accepted hypothesis by a large number of extremely well-respected scientists. Not that oxygen kills us in 75-100 years, but oxygen is actually poisonous to all living beings. So yes…. Earth is a deathworld.

[totallyfubar]

My girlfriend is on a cruise so while she’s gone I’m gonna cut the sleeves off of all my shirts

[nightstargalaxy]

why

[totallyfubar]

She’s pretty much 85% of my impulse control

[totallyfubar]

This post is around 10 years old and I just had someone bring it up to me at a wedding

[partywithponies]

Strange racists and homophobes on the internet seem to have access to an alternate way cooler version of TV than me. "every white character on TV is in an interracial relationship" "every show has a gay couple in it" "main characters keep having to secretly be bisexual and nonbinary" "every show has gratuitous full frontal nudity" like damn promise?? What channel???

[pencilscratchins]

miles “who’s morales” morales’s biggest weakness is the cover story

[disregardcanon]

peter, lying out of his ass: i was, uh, married to his uncle aaron. he just never let you know

[fallenangelvictorious]

Jefferson, later: Do you think Aaron never told us because Peter’s…

Rio: …Tall

Jefferson: I didn’t think Aaron liked … Tall people.

[teapotsahoy]

Jefferson: “But listen: Aaron might have married a white boy just to annoy me, specifically. It’s a thing he would do!”

Rio: “I can’t hear you. I’m asleep.  I have a shift in four hours.”

[dracophile]

I really wish there was a way Uncle Aaron lived and came back to meet his “husband” at some point now.

Aaron: …Miles…I love you, and I am proud of you…but you are somehow the smartest and dumbest boy I have ever known.

Miles: Says the man who used his big brain to become a criminal when he could’ve been a black Tony Stark with that gear he made. And thought working for the Kingpin, who everyone knows will throw his minions away like tissues, was a good idea!

Peter: He makes a good point, babe, you did kind of mess up first–

Aaron: Call me babe again and see what happens. I’ll whoop you with a collapsed lung.

[christchex]

All I see is “fake marriage au, but it’s also enemies to lovers”

[izzyhill]

[camiekahle-deactivated20190815]

THIS IS THE BEST THING I HAVE EVER SEEN

[macncheese-blog]

I’VE BEEN TRYING TO FIND THIS FOR SEVEN YEARS

DO YOU UNDERSTAND HOW HARD IT IS TO ?????

[amethystthe-gem-deactivated2016]

I’m fucking dying

[pinkifingers]

That last fatal scream tho

[4gifs]

[setscarylazerstomaximumcaptain-]

The guy in the sleeping bag wiggling around

I’m weeping

[yourstoryisnoteverover-deactiva]

The two people in the front wearing one shirt.

[lightsareout]

Are we really not going to talk about the guy in the back who is attached to another guy’s back while spinning?

[witchsyren]

WHAT ABOUT THE GUY THAT FALLS OUT OF THE WINDOW

[thedoctor-and-his-trolls]

WHY IS IT BACK

[organicorc]

no you guys don’t understand, not only is this the first harlem shake out there… these guys aren’t normal military. This is “Telemarkbataljonen”. They’re pretty much the Norwegian equivalent of the fucking black ops. My brother knows a guy in this battalion, and when asked what they do there, he looked my brother dead in the eye and said “That is strictly confidential”. These guys are hard as shit, which makes this even more hilarious

[theapatheticstag]

Don’t bring this meme back

[ichiwashername-o]

BRING THIS MEME BACK.

[un-rare-deactivated20151106]

let’s stop seeing sex as the biggest thing you can do to show someone you love them

[huntinthedwellin98]

everyone knows that the real way to show someone you love them is to find them a really cool rock. not a diamond. just a neat rock that you think they will enjoy

[anonymoussong]

[elvenkingtranduil-deactivated20]

Not a rock THE  ARKENSTONE 

[glorfy-the-bright-haired-ellon]

Why just one rock Why not three Why not the silmarils

[mondknight]

#i’m pretty sure there’s an entire book on the topic ‘why not silmarils’  (x)

[desidesidesi]

And one on why not the arkenstone

[cakeisnotpie]

You’re right. Just get them a ring.

[bcfurs]

[totally-not-nyarlathotep]

do not get them a ring

[penelopevalentine]

Can’t not reblog this again

[barian-phoenix-nvbh]

Just gift them a sword. Or an axe. Or a bow.

[shencomix]

[shencomix]

[shencomix]

[shencomix]

[shencomix]

[shencomix]

[shencomix]

[shencomix]

[shencomix]

[solo-walker]

I love how The Man With No Name from the dollars trilogy keep vaguely alluding to some tragic backstory but nobody ever takes the goddamn bait.

he'll be randomly dropping lines like "i never found home that great" "how can i appreciate something [peace] i've never known" "i knew someone like you [a woman kidnapped and kept trapped by goons] once and nobody was around to help them" and the people around him are just like aight bro saddle up we gotta do some murder