that slowburn wait while it gets dark

a blog for all the things i love and or have opinions ™ on || he/him || gay rights babey!!

[runningonspitensunshine]

i need everyone to get 300% more insane about mercymorn right the fuck now. this is a lady who spent ten thousand years learning everything there is to the human body to the point where she could just modify a person blind. just reach in and and tie harrow’s lil noodle spine into a knot, bypassing her lyctoral shielding. seduced her best friend, worst enemy, and sworn god to steal his sperm (it’s also apparently implied she just. summoned it out of his balls instead of collecting it the normal way) to help a terrorist make a baby from it.

she slaps augustine across the mouth and he spits out his teeth, despite the fact that he is a ten thousand year old lyctor who should have had ironclad shielding. out of all the necros that swore themselves to god, she was one of the remaining ones, one of the last lyctors to survive the resurrection beasts.

she vaporized god. she vaporized god. she unwound the most powerful necromancer she knew on the fly and reduced him to his base components because she just. had the knowledge in her brain. mercymorn turned a man running on the souls of ten billion into fine red mist on a fucking impulse.

she spends all of htn trying to kill harrow out of some bizarre attempt to live up to her name. she’s kind about it, even. she draws weird little squiggles that look like everything but monsters. she fantasizes about putting her idiot boss in acid jail. she worries about her dress making her look like a melon even though she literally seduces god and also a guy who hates her.

and nobody really likes her. g1deon is g1deon, by which i mean he is being tortured and weird about everything on account of being two people and thus has little to no opinion on what she does. augustine fucking hates her unless they’re working together to honey trap god (no i will not stop mentioning this) and it wasn’t even her fault that alfred died, not really. ianthe follows augustine around like an evil little duckling - does she even have strong opinions on mercy except that it’s gross she’s having a three way with jod and augustine? she was supposed to mentor harrow, but she got the defective one - the one that didn’t even make to lyctorhood properly (does she wish she could’ve done what harrow did? sealed cristabel away forever, even if she had to butcher herself to do it?). and jod. jod loves her, of course, but he’s just so. so. he doesn’t fucking listen is the thing. he deflects and he jokes and he doesn’t say “mercy, i didn’t meant to, mercy, i’ll fix it, mercy, please, forgive me.” he says everything but that.

god fuck what is wrong with me. what is wrong with you guys. be more insane about mercy she deserves it.

[parkchanwoohoo]

[On phone] Whaddya mean I can't say it. Why the fuck not. [silence] Well how many guys do I need to fuck before I can say it

[othellho]

julian de narvaez piranesi illustration i will think about you every day for the rest of my life

[harrietvane]

“Modernist manuals of writing often conflate story with conflict. This reductionism reflects a culture that inflates aggression and competition while cultivating ignorance of other behavioral options. No narrative of any complexity can be built on or reduced to a single element. Conflict is one kind of behavior. There are others, equally important in any human life, such as relating, finding, losing, bearing, discovering, parting, changing. Change is the universal aspect of all these sources of story. Story is something moving, something happening, something or somebody changing.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin (via jayemichaela)

[wifegideonnav]

“bits to use in everyday conversations”

[j4gm]

Pangaea was wasted on the dinosaurs. Imagine the railway network.

[fidelcostco]

the human brain is so cool, if you're tired and stressed enough, your brain will go, "don't worry, I got you" and shadows will start moving

[fidelcostco]

and what's the genital situation on the shadows

[fidelcostco]

oh this is my post

[treecitysessions]

Text I got from my guy friend who’s currently dating a man for the first time when I asked him how it’s going

[treecitysessions]

I heavily fw bro

[wreathedwith]

received this as I was writing smut about him and nearly had a heart attack

[dduane]

I find myself wondering about wizards in stories and where they came from and who they were before Gandalf and maybe before or seperate from Merlin. Do you perhaps know something?

Well, answering that query fully would probably require something the length of a doctoral thesis. 😅

Let's get a bit into the etymology first, so that we all know what we're talking about.

The word itself, in English anyway, is relatively new (and only goes back to the mid- to late 1400s.). It's a compound constructed from the Old English word for "wise" and the -ard ending (a conditional possessive/associative suffix that usually means "to have a specific quality"—see the entry over here at EtymOnline for some discussion of this). A lot of the earliest uses of this suffix that have come down to us are pejorative (i.e. dotard, dullard, etc...), and the arguments about just why this should be can get pretty heated: so let's not go there just now. But the inherent conflict between the "wise" part of the word and the "-ard" part is interesting.

In English, then, the concept just starts out as meaning "wise person". (From the OED:)

(Pausing here to note that I wasn't expecting to see the words "Vulcan" and "wizard" come up in the same passage today.) 😏

...But after that something interesting happens, and the word starts attracting occult associations. And not just occult ones, either: Biblical ones.

This meaning is mostly still with us, and gives us something moderately solid to hang our mythologers' and folkorists' hats on. The interesting thing here is that the 1550-ish connection to the Magi points in its turn back to much older stories about powerful people (usually male) who were associated with some kind of priesthood or official (usually governmental) structure.

The stories of those wizards go back thousands of years. They can be found in such ancient resources as the Egyptian Westcar Papyrus, which tells stories of a number of magic-workers (some named, some anonymous civil-servant scribes). The Papyrus itself is dated back to between the 16th and 18th centuries BC, and the stories in it are supposed to date back to the 26th century BC.

That's pushing five thousand years ago. So wizards (in terms of being folks who people tell stories about) plainly have some staying power. Merlin is a mere babe in arms compared to these guys.

One of these wizard-scribes discovers that his wife is cheating on him, and teaches her paramour a lesson by creating a wax crocodile that drags him to the bottom of a nearby lake. (I'm afraid neither of the "cheaters" survive the events that then follow.) In another story, after one of a king's barge-rowing maidens loses an amulet overboard and the whole rowing team goes on strike until it's found, the king's scribe Djadjaemankh performs a spell that piles one half of the lake's water on top of the other half, revealing the lost amulet. A third story tells of the wizard Dedi, who (besides being a big eater and drinker) is really good at reattaching severed heads to animals, and possesses various other types of secret knowledge...

You get the picture. The Papyrus is famed for the complexity of its language, for its contents, and their age... and leaves us wondering, "How many other stories like these were out there and were simply never found?" ...No telling.

It wasn't just the Egyptians who had wizard-stories like these, either. The Mesopotamians had two clearly described classes of priestly magic-workers: one group (baru) who were diviners and visionaries, and another class (esipu) whose title is usually translated as "wizards," and who specialized in exorcism and the removal of taboos and evil spells.

For me, the interesting thread here is that these classes of magic-workers were all theoretically under some higher authority's command. In this regard, the concept of Gandalf as being in Middle-Earth on the business of the Valar is sort of an unexpected connection to these older traditions.

...But there's a dark flip side to this very ancient approach. Mesopotamian freelance witches and wizards—practitioners functioning outside of their cultures' "approved" supervisory structures—routinely came from disadvantaged and marginalized groups (foreigners, peddlers, actors, women...) and were equally routinely persecuted and killed by the authorities. ...So it becomes obvious that some of the uglier tropes surrounding wizardry go way back.

...Anyway: wizardry as a concept, and wizards (under various names) as characters, are old: far older than our own last millennium or two. What I've referenced above is just a smattering of what the ancient world has to offer on the subject. (If I started in on China alone, we'd be here for the rest of the month...)

There's plenty more info on this online, once you start rummaging. Hope this interests you in doing that! 🙂

[chloeinletters]

Hopecore-ing my way through my terrible retail job. Via IG.

[milfygerard]

in summary. I find taylor swift interesting bc shes lost the idgaf war against everyone including herself.

[milfygerard]

this is my favorite ever photo of her bc it captures this deep obsession within her work regarding the creation and curation of her art and her image. Shes both object and subject, artist and muse. She's essentially a woman whose been curating her life since the age of 15, trapped in a permanent adolescense that shes constantly struggling to escape. She's been putting out work consistently for almost 20 straight years with little to no breaks and has been succeeding on a comical level the whole time. Shes critically acclaimed and one of the most financially successful artists in the world to the point where her success receptors are completely broken and she KNOWS IT!!! She knows how weird she is and how impossible it is for her to ever have normal connections and it terrifies her. She has a song thats just her begging her fans to let her drown herself in alcohol and die alone in an empty house. All art she ever makes is going to be about the act of Being Taylor Swift because its something you can never escape

[fallout-lou-begas]

Thank you all for being a patron of the Wonderful Funny Circus, coming from far and wide for so many years to see our wonderful funny clowns. Since we are the only operating circus that has such wonderful funny clowns, we know how much you come to our circus specifically to see them, and to laugh and have fun in a way that, simply put, no other circus can offer. We have decided to executed the clowns

[195195119511951-deactivated2021]

In the first poetry workshop I ever took my professor said we could write about anything we wanted except for two things: our grandparents and our dogs. She said she had never read a good poem about a dog. I could only remember ever reading one poem about a dog before that point—a poem by Pablo Neruda, from which I only remembered the lines “We walked together on the shores of the sea/ In the lonely winter of Isla Negra.” Four years later I wrote a poem about how when I was a little girl I secretly baptized my dog in the bathtub because I was afraid she wouldn’t get into heaven. “Is this a good poem?” I wondered. The second poetry workshop, our professor made us put a bird in each one of our poems. I thought this was unbelievably stupid. This professor also hated when we wrote about hearts, she said no poet had ever written a good poem in which they mentioned a heart. I started collecting poems about hearts, first to spite her, but then because it became a habit I couldn’t break. The workshop after that, our professor would tell us the same story over and over about how his son had died during a blizzard. He would cry in front of us. He never told us we couldn’t write about anything, but I wrote a lot of poems about snow. At the end of the year he called me into his office and said, “looking at you, one wouldn’t think you’d be a very good writer” and I could feel all the pity inside of me curdling like milk. The fourth poetry workshop I ever took my professor made it clear that poets should not try to engage with popular culture. I noticed that the only poets he assigned were men. I wrote a poem about that scene in Grease 2 where a boy takes his girlfriend to a fallout shelter and tries to get her to have sex with him by tricking her into believing that nuclear war had begun. It was the first poem I ever published. The fifth poetry workshop I ever took our professor railed against the word blood. She thought that no poem should ever have the word “blood” in it, they were bloody enough already. She returned a draft of my poem with the word blood crossed out so hard the paper had torn. When I started teaching poetry workshops I promised myself I would never give my students any rules about what could or couldn’t be in their poems. They all wrote about basketball. I used to tally these poems when I’d go through the stack I had collected at the end of each class. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 poems about basketball. This was Indiana. Eventually I couldn’t take it anymore. I told the class, “for the next assignment no one can write about basketball, please for the love of god choose another topic. Challenge yourselves.” Next time I collected their poems there was one student who had turned in another poem about basketball. I don’t know if he had been absent on the day I told them to choose another topic or if he had just done it to spite me. It’s the only student poem I can still really remember. At the time I wrote down the last lines of that poem in a notebook. “He threw the basketball and it came towards me like the sun”

[again-thepommel]

Imo missing Gideon is part of the experience of reading Harrow the Ninth. Everyone who read GtN goes to HtN like "but where is Gideon? How can I read this book without her??" And that is just like. Part of the book. Her absence. It hurts. You feel it. Youre mystified by it. Where is she?? I love it.

[cloudabserk]

he was bracing himself for bad news

[vile-wizard]

It's easy to think "nobody in the whole wide world cares about me" on an empty stomach but try doing it while eating Vegetables and Rice. Seems less convincing now doesn't it? That's simply the power of Vegetables and Rice..