Silvergirl

Sherlock, Good Omens, reading, writing, hiking, singing, and polishing guillotines. Reblogging the wonderful world of tumblr: tagging me helps me reblog your art, fic, photos, etc. 🤍

[lisbeth-kk]

Infinifluff in August!

Astonishingly enough, the 14th is only a week away! The August prompts are: herbs - moss - hedge + the image above.

Alternative prompts: orchard - forest - landscape - oak - abundance + the image below

Remember to tag us when you post your fluff so we can reblog it!

[totallysilvergirl]

All fandoms, all relationships, all the fluff!

[scribblesonpebbles]

in sync

[politijohn]

Source

Wales looking like Mars is not a good thing

[permanent-fire-hazard]

Jack is Robby’s friend.

That’s it. Robby knows that’s all they are, or ever will be, but his heart still begs for more.

Part of him wants to blame Jack. If he wasn’t so kind, so funny, so smart, so understanding, so perfectly tailored for Robby to fall in love with, then maybe he wouldn’t have. But Jack is all those things, and Robby is in love with him.

Has been since they were randomly assigned as lab partners during pre med, but Robby only admitted it in his own mind after a drunken night in MS4 when one of their classmates dared them to kiss. Robby had gone rigid and was two syllables into his excuse not to when Jack wrapped an arm around him and planted one on him. It’s was sloppy and tainted with the leering cheers of the people around them, but it still made Robby’s heart sing.

Jack’s friendly arm stayed locked around his shoulders for ten minutes after and Robby spun in and out of a fantasy where Jack loved him back.

The next morning, the hangover pounds in Robby’s head, but there’s an extra sickness with it. It starts trapped in his chest, then hacks its way to his throat before spewing his hopelessness into the toilet in the form of bloody petals.

Over the years, Robby has had the displeasure of watching Jack’s string of girlfriends come in and out of their apartment. As much as it hurt then, Robby never worried it would actually kill him, but that becomes more likely by the day.

Hiding his illness is a challenge. Jack is a gentle, attentive soul who notices something is off with Robby almost immediately. He offers support, but backs off when Robby denies it. He’s perfect.

Being in love with Jack is easy; Robby just wishes it didn’t hurt so much.

After they graduate, Jack leaves to repay the military with his life and Robby wanders south to hide his shame. The distance alleviates the pain, Robby can go weeks with only a few odd coughs until Jack calls him. He always erupts into disgusting bloody fits after they hang up.

One day, Jack is extra giddy during their call. “I’m coming to visit,” he says. “Clear your schedule. I’ve got big news.”

Robby does as he’s told and practically trembles with anticipation. What news? Stupidly, he daydreams of Jack kissing him again, saying he’s fallen in love with Robby and wants to be together. Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell be damned.

When Jack arrives, he does so with the biggest smile Robby has ever seen. He wraps Robby in his arms and squeezes tight. Warmth transfers between them and for a brief moment the flowers suffocating Robby wilt. Then Jack speaks:

“I’m getting married!” The joy on his face rivals the sun.

A thorny vine scrapes its way through Robby and clenches around his heart. Blood and petals pool at the base of his throat, but he forces it down. “That’s great,” he chokes. “Congratulations.”

“I couldn’t believe she said yes! Oh, Mikey, you have no idea how nervous I was—“

He prattles on happily while Robby wonders when Jack got so serious with this girl, he hardly ever mentioned her name to Robby and now she’s unknowingly signed his death sentence.

His weekend with Jack passes painfully. Robby frequently has to make excuses to pull fully grown flowers out of his mouth and cry alone in the bathroom.

“Ceremony is happening when I get home from the deployment,” Jack says. He’s halfway in his car, unknowingly saying goodbye to Robby for the last time. “It’ll be a few months, but Amy will send out the invitations. You’ll be there, right?”

“Of course,” Robby lies.

Jack gives him one last hug. Robby does his best to savor it, but the metallic threat creeping up his throat makes it difficult. That night he prays this girl loves Jack enough for both of them, and that one day Jack will forgive him.

—

Eleven months later, Robby is watching nonsense TV alone in his living room when the phone rings.

“Hello?”

A man’s voice comes excitedly through the speaker. “He lives! I was starting to worry.”

“I’m sorry?”

“Don’t be. Your RSVP got lost in the mail; do you want the steak or chicken?”

Robby frowns. “I think you have the wrong number.”

“Don’t tell me you’ve forgotten my beautiful voice already, Mikey,” the man laughs. “It’s Jack! I got home about a week ago.”

“Uh…” Robby racks his brain, but it comes up empty. “I don’t know a Jack.”

There’s a pause. “This is Michael Robinavitch’s number, right?”

“Yes,” Robby says carefully.

Another pause followed by an uncertain chuckle. “I don’t know what this game is, man, but, it’s me. Jack. Jack Abbot.”

The long scar running between Robby’s ribs begins to tingle, though he’s not sure why. He drags his knuckles over it to soothe the ache. “I’m sorry, sir, but I really don’t know you.”

“What? Mikey—“

“Sorry,” Robby says again. “I hope you find who you’re looking for.”

The man, Jack, starts to yell something through the line, but Robby can’t help him. He hangs up the phone.

[tolovaj]

THANK YOU

[dykepuffs]

Friendly unfriendly reminder that "Ovulation is like an animal being in heat and makes you stupid" has been a keystone of western misogyny pretty much since Europe worked out what periods are.

[expressions-of-nature]

by Nikolett Emmert

[imsupposedtobestudying-whoops]

I finished it 💚🌿🗡

[ishowdespair-deactivated2026012]

[thealogie]

ever since i remembered you can cook chicken and fish en papillote my cooking life has been so good and easy. no clean up. maximum flavor. you can vary the aromatics/veggie. perfect lazy dinner in 15-20 minutes every time.

[moonofpoosh]

Tap, tap.

[smudgeandfrank]

Fan Expo Boston Day 1 is a GO!!!! 💖🤩✨️ Stop by my table, A807 in the artist alley and say hi, my darlings!!! 💖🫂✨️

[caribbean1989]

Sherlock + John, Sherlock s2e3

My GIF masterlist

[inbabylontheywept]

My dad will listen to me talk about the same ten things that have interested me since I was 8 years old, and I am 27 now but he still thinks they're fascinating. He has like, a best-hits-of-Babylon rants, and when we're in a topic adjacent to them, he'll occasionally just invoke them. We'll be talking about the 1960's, and he'll be like, so, whatever did happen to those original Apollo rocket engines, and he knows what happened to them because I've told him about it like thirty times, and he knows that I know that he knows, but he also knows that I love talking about it and that this is a carte blanche to spend the next ten minutes spinning a yarn about the lost machining arts and the death of knowledge and the constant red-queen-hypothesis style sprint that technology is locked into just to try and preserve itself.

So I'll do the rant again, and he'll listen to it like it's his first time hearing it, and he'll ask the best questions because he's been hearing this rant for 19 years, you can bet your ass he knows the best questions, and it's... beautiful. The words are almost adjacent to the dance.

I can remember reading a book once, where there was a perfect translator. Too perfect, because it translated for meaning alone, independent of the words. A man might ask his wife, "Hey, do you remember that hotdog we shared in 1972?" and the translator would spit out "We have been many different people, but we have always loved each other. Isn't that beautiful?" And I've imagined it for those rant-dances, and tried to imagine what the words would be. I think his parts would just come out to something like "Your handful of intense interests are something that I love about you, and I want you to know that they are not merely tolerated." And my parts would come out to something like "I am sharing who I am with you because I trust you. And I've always been able to trust you. You are, and were, and remain, an amazing dad."

[inbabylontheywept]

I'm reblogging this because this story ties into it and I want you all to read this story very much. It's from @drenamigmo and it is unbelievably good and I get a little watery every time I think about it. Also, just follow Dren in general, they're good people.

[softness-and-shattering]

What is red queen hypothesis?

[inbabylontheywept]

A very streamlined explanation of the red queen hypothesis is this idea in evolution biology that some animals get locked together in evolutionary traps where one animal is evolving an offensive trait as a counter to another animal, who is evolving a defensive trait at the same speed, and that both will evolve in more exaggerated forms until the traits are entirely unsustainable and both die. It comes from the red queen's race in Through the Looking Glass, where she says something about how she needs to run as fast as she possibly can just to stay in place.

If you want examples, some I've heard punted around are things like sabertooth tigers vs. megafauna and some weird ass newts in Yellowstone. The sabertooth theory is that they got locked in a race to eat megafauna that protected themselves with really thick skin, so their fangs get longer to counter the skin, then the skin got thicker to counter the fangs, repeat, and eventually, the skin became so thick that the megafauna couldn't cool themselves properly. Then humans figured out that they could just skip the giant fangs thing and just chase the megafauna until they had heat strokes. Badaboom, now the megafauna and saberteeth are both extinct. The newt example is that there are some newts in Yellowstone that have absurdly high level of tetrodotoxin in their skin. Like, hundreds of times the lethal dose for a human. But! They're preyed upon by birds that have evolved limited immunity to tetrodotoxin. So the newts are stuck always trying to become more toxic, and the birds are stuck always trying to become more immune, and they sit at this uneasy level where the birds can't gorge themselves entirely on newts because then they'll die, but they can eat enough newts that it keeps the newt population down, and neither really has enough evolutionary wiggle room to adapt to their environment in any new ways besides becoming more poisonous and more poison immune. So it's almost like they're not really evolving to adapt to their environment, they're mostly just evolving to adapt to each other, and that means that one day the environment will kill them.

Very useful for describing situations where things are using all of their available energy trying to just maintain balance with a problem that will immediately kill them if they ever relax, and eventually kill them if they don't.

[softness-and-shattering]

So regarding technology, is that the same as the capitalist goal of growth regardless of it makes sense or is sustainable or necessary or helpful, every quarter has to bring in more money than the last even though resources are finite and the shareholders are doing just fine?

Like there always has to be a new phone every couple years, planned obsolencence, that kind of thing? Im reminded of a fashion show, I dont remember the designers name, where the clothes were badly made and ripping and tearing off the models on the runway as a commentary on how fast new clothes are expected to be designed and produced with not nearly enough time taken to ensure quality.

[inbabylontheywept]

I don't know that my concerns with how much technology struggles to propogate itself have to do with capitalism as with the pace of technology itself, with is incredibly fast. By the time a generation masters how to use a tool in electrical engineering, it is generally almost obsolete. So there's this tradeoff that exists, naturally, between how cutting edge something is and how well the field knows how to use it. Additionally, there are sometimes older technologies that work better in niche fields that can wind up stranded later because they become extremely expensive without widespread use. There are niche applications where vacuum tubes aren't just used, but are truly necessary, but since there's not enough consumers to justify mass production in those fields they're almost always being created custom.

To make an analogy of it, imagine that you live in the bronze age. And you know what? Some stuff is actually just better when it's made out of bronze. Like, a bronze knife isn't great because it'll be soft, quick to dull and easy to bend, but bronze works really well in nautical environments. I think we still commonly make boat props out of bronze. So if you're a boat guy, maybe you used to just go to your local smith and ask for a prop and he'd hand you one. But then iron becomes a thing and now your local smith is an iron only guy, and the one the next town over is an iron only guy, and it turns out that the only guy within a week's journey of you that knows how to make bronze is some old as dirt crabby bastard from the old bronze days. And you can get on his wait list, but you're very acutely aware that he's not gonna live forever, and there's not exactly a bunch of young students clamoring to learn this guy's craft, so you're not sure exactly what's gonna happen when he dies. Maybe someone else will pick up his niche, but there's a world of difference between a knowledge handoff and reinventing the field. Experts almost never write down all that they know. They often don't even know that they know it themselves. They just do things in a very particular, almost superstitious way.

And even if, if, that old guy does a real handoff, gets an apprentice and everything, the apprentice is never going to have the same kind of environment the old timer did for learning. They're not going to get the kind of general practice that existed in a world where everything was made of bronze. They won't be made into an expert, they'll be born one. And it will make them worse.

In electronics, we've basically moved through the bronze age, to the iron age, to the steel age, to the diamond age, all in the last 60 years. It's like living through three consecutive Tower of Babel's. There is no system for doing handoffs. There is a terrible struggle for each generation to understand even the one previous, least of all the ones before that. We have to keep running because behind us, the past is going up in flames, and we are afraid of what will happen when all that fire catches up to us.

(Anyway, please read The Universal Translator. It's a very good short story.)

[wheeloffortune-design]

my publisher: Good morning! Huh did you advertise for the pre-sale yesterday? Because we launched twelve hours ago and we already made sales!

me: yeah, i posted on tumblr

publisher: .........tumblr?

me: that's where the gays are.

(link to Mrs. Victoria buys a brothel, a sapphic western)

[wheeloffortune-design]

update

publisher: And what is your marketing strategy on... tumblr?

me: idk, i shitpost at 2am?

publisher: .....and it works?

me: depends on what the gays find funny at that point in time.

publisher: Could I have a link to your tumblr?

me: .......absolutely not.

(link to Mrs. Victoria buys a brothel, a sapphic western where 50 year old women kiss and murder)

[janeaustencomics]

Where we stray from the path (but keep a lot of dialogue from the book, because it's so perfect)

[a-mel0n]

reblog if you’ve had an online friendship that’s lasted more than 2 years

[tiltedsyllogism]

An Archive of Our Own, a project of the Organization for Transformative Works

Chapters: 5/5 Fandom: Sherlock (TV), Sherlock Holmes & Related Fandoms Rating: Mature Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings Relationships: Sherlock Holmes & John Watson Characters: John Watson, Sherlock Holmes, Greg Lestrade, Sally Donovan, Original Characters Additional Tags: Case Fic, original casefic, Veterans, War Veteran John Watson, Moral injury, POV Sherlock Holmes, POV John Watson, POV Alternating, Shippy Gen, Season 1 vibes, Suspense Series: Part 9 of author’s favorites Summary:

Somebody is systematically killing veterans in London. Sherlock is on the case, but he’s definitely not worried. John will be fine. Even if he doesn’t seem fine.

Set in 2010, sometime between TGG and aSiB but firmly in the vibe of Season 1.

[totallysilvergirl]

@tiltedsyllogism I LOVE YOU and your Sally Donovan

@stellacartography @meledol84 @thalialunacy @johnlocky @macgyvershe @the-reading-lemon @srebrnafh @keirgreeneyes @podfixx @imakewordsandpics @charlie-novakk @snowfilly1 @jazzthecat00 @starrla89 @kittenmadnessandtea @kitten-kin @sherlockian4evrsblog @semiprofessionalmom @mysterythecat @solilu @beloved-child-of-the-house @izhunny @mazaherstuff @riverwithoutbanks @a-different-equation @oetkb12 @seekers-who-are-lovers @dixkens @alltingfinns @daziechane @beltainefaerie @barachiki @fieryphrazes @lhrinchelsea @imnova @notjustamumj @saki101 @peanitbear @devoursjohnlock @cupidford @221beloved