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@witchcraftloverpsycho-pomp
Tarot and Oracle card readings available!
$15 for pendulum (yes/no questions, 5-10minutes)
$25 for 3-card reading
$40 for my unique in-depth spread (30 minutes)
+$1 for every minute over 30
$35 for 30minute Distance-Reiki healing sessions
$50 for spell work and consultations
Reblog if you will never. Ever. Use AI in your writing.
Yeah I'm old enough to have been taught that plagiarism is bad.
And I have enough pride in myself as a human that if I'm bad at a craft... I'll practice so I can get better. Instead of stealing other people's work and slapping my name onto it.
You know what? I'm bilingual too.
And I still don't use AI as a "revision consultant to refine clarity and nuance".
If you're so proud of your skills and degree that you have to "warn" an imaginary quaking audience about how they'll be intimidated by your astounding writing skills, maybe try "clarifying" and "refining" shit on your own.
And if real writers whose work gets plagiarized by the bot you're using don't appreciate that? You're being called out for exactly what you're doing. You're not a victim or a martyr.
Using gen AI for your writing doesn't make you a "perfectionist". It makes you a plagiarist.
On AI, Authorship, and Ethical Transparency in Creative Works
So, I’d like to put on my scholarly hat for a moment and have an educational discussion on AI, authorship, and transparency as it relates to fanfiction communities.
Lately I’ve seen discussions about the distinction between “evaluative” and “generative” AI use in writing, and I think it’s worth clarifying some points for the sake of better community understanding. These topics matter not because anyone is looking to shame writers, but because there are well-established boundaries in publishing, academia, and digital ethics that affect how we define authorship.
Below are a list of items that I believe are important to address:
1. AI Cannot “Learn Your Voice” Without Generative Use
A recurring claim I’ve seen is that AI is used strictly for evaluation, yet the same users say the model has “learned their voice” over time.
This is a contradiction.
AI cannot “learn your voice” through passive evaluation. Research consistently shows that large language models do not adapt to individual user style or preferences through ordinary usage. Model behavior only shifts through deliberate alignment techniques such as fine-tuning, reinforcement learning, or controlled inference methods (Li et al., 2023). In other words, simply having an AI “evaluate” your writing does not cause it to internalize your voice, and passive exposure does not produce learning in these systems.
The only way an AI adapts to your prose rhythm, tone, and metaphor patterns is by generating content based on your inputs, meaning that the user is engaging in generative refinement, and not mere proofreading.
If an AI is shaping rhythm, pacing, flow, metaphor structure, or tonal consistency, that is authorship influence and no longer gets to be defined as editing.
2. Revision is Not Ethically Neutral When the Tool Generates Output
There’s a misconception that “I wrote the first draft, so the rest doesn’t count.”
But in academic and publishing ethics, if a tool meaningfully alters style, structure, or expression, the tool is considered a co-authoring agent. Even replacing sentences, restructuring paragraphs, or smoothing dialogue can constitute generative contribution.
Multiple professional organizations make a clear distinction between editing tools and generative systems, and all agree that when a tool contributes to the expressive elements of a text, that contribution constitutes authorship. COPE’s 2023 position statement emphasizes that AI systems generate content and therefore cannot be treated as neutral editors; they produce text that meets authorship criteria even though they cannot assume responsibility for it (Committee on Publication Ethics, 2023). Similarly, the Modern Language Association (2023) states that any text that is generated or significantly shaped by AI must be formally acknowledged, as failing to do so misrepresents the true source of authorship. The U.S. Copyright Office reaches the same conclusion from a legal standpoint: when an AI tool determines or materially contributes to stylistic, structural, or expressive choices, that portion of the work is not human-authored and cannot be claimed as such (U.S. Copyright Office, 2023). Taken together, these guidelines establish that meaningful stylistic or structural alteration by AI moves the tool’s role from editing into co-authoring, requiring transparency.
3. Intent Alone Cannot Establish Authorship
Another idea circulating is: “If the intent comes from me, the work is mine.”
Unfortunately, that is not how authorship is defined in any formal discipline. Authorship is tied to expression, and not intent (U.S. Copyright Office, 2023).
If the expression is significantly shaped by a non-human system, intent doesn’t override the system’s contribution.
If intent alone determined authorship, ghostwriting, translation AI, and text generators would all be considered ethically equivalent to self-written work, which they are not.
4. The Editing vs. Generating Distinction Is Often Misunderstood
Many claim, “I don’t tell the AI to write scenes, so I’m not generating.”
But generative AI does not require scene-level prompts to be generative.
Examples of generative influence include: restructuring sentences, rewriting passages for tone, creating metaphor suggestions, smoothing dialogue, adjusting prose rhythm, rewriting transitions.
Each of these is generative because the new text did not originate from the author.
If someone rejects “robotic” suggestions yet continues to use the tool until the flow feels natural, the tool is shaping style. This is very different from grammar correcting.
Ultimately, this post is not meant to be anti AI. AI has many valuable uses, but when it begins shaping expression in creative writing, its role becomes an ethical consideration rather than a simple tool choice.
Committee on Publication Ethics. (2023, February 13). Authorship and AI tools: COPE position statement. https://publicationethics.org/guidance/cope-position/authorship-and-ai-tools
Li, Y., Wei, F., Zhao, J., Zhang, C., & Zhang, H. (2023). RAIN: Your language models can align themselves without fine-tuning. arXiv. https://arxiv.org/abs/2309.07124
Modern Language Association. (2023). MLA guidance on the use of generative AI in academic writing. https://style.mla.org/citing-generative-ai/
U.S. Copyright Office. (2023, March 16). Copyright registration guidance: Works containing material generated by artificial intelligence (Policy Statement). https://www.copyright.gov/ai/ai_policy_guidance.pdf
Author is a bilingual person who is one class away from a whole ass science degree, capable of reading primary sources.
R.I.P. The 2976 American people that lost their lives on 9/11 and R.I.P. the 48,644 Afghan and 1,690,903 Iraqi and 35000 Pakistani people that paid the ultimate price for a crime they did not commit
A 10-year update to this post:
R.I.P. to the more than 4,500,000 people of Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Yemen, and Syria, who have lost their lives as a result of American occupation.
keeping the tags well said op
December 3, 2024 (Tuesday)
For an astonishing six hours today, South Korea underwent an attempted self-coup by its unpopular president, Yoon Suk Yeol, only to see the South Korean people force him to back down as they reasserted the strength of their democracy.
In an emergency address at nearly 11:00 last night local time, Yoon announced that he was declaring martial law in South Korea for the first time since 1980, when special forces under a military dictatorship attacked pro-democracy activists in the city of Gwangju, leaving about 200 people dead or missing. South Koreans ended military rule in their country in 1987, writing a new constitution that made South Korea a republic.
Yoon claimed he had to declare martial law because his political opponents were sympathizing with communist North Korea. It was a thin pretext.
A member of the conservative People’s Party, Yoon was elected to a five-year presidential term in 2022 after a misogynistic campaign fueled by young men who saw equal rights for women— whose average monthly wage is 67.7% of that a man, according to the BBC’s Laura Bicker—as reverse discrimination that is taking away their own rights and opportunities.
Before his election, Yoon had no experience in the National Assembly, and once he was in office, his popularity slid to record lows. In legislative elections held last April, voters crushed Yoon’s party, giving opposition parties 192 of 300 seats in the National Assembly. The legislature fought with Yoon over his budget and launched a number of corruption investigations into Yoon’s allies as well as his wife.
And so, Yoon declared martial law, bringing the media under his control and banning political activities, “false propaganda,” “gatherings that incite social unrest,” and strikes. Police officers formed a blockade around the National Assembly, and helicopters landed on the roof to prevent lawmakers from getting inside to overturn Yoon’s declaration.
The South Korean people reacted immediately. Reporting from Seoul, John Yoon of the New York Times recounted the story of a real estate agent who watched President Yoon’s speech, got in his car, and drove for an hour to get to the National Assembly. The man told journalist Yoon, “I thought, ‘The end has come,’ so I came out. The president of a country has exerted his power by force, and its people have come out to protest that. We have to remove him from power from this point on. He’s in a position where he has to come down.”
Editor of The Verge Sarah Jeong, who works out of the U.S. and does not cover South Korean politics, happened to be working in Seoul this week and was on site after a night of drinking, giving an informed and honest account of what she was seeing. “[T]he crowd is a pretty even mix of young people and the older folks (mostly men) who would have been young during the dictatorship…. I heard tanks were here but I haven't seen one yet. [O]ld men swearing 'how dare the military come here.'”
Michelle Ye Hee Lee, Washington Post Tokyo/Seoul bureau chief, reported that the National Assembly managed to pull together a majority of its members—190 of 300—in about two and a half hours to participate in a unanimous vote to overturn Yoon’s emergency declaration of martial law. That vote included members of his own party.
Political commentator Adam Schwartz shared a video taken by the leader of South Korea's Democratic Party, Lee Jae-myung, as he climbed over the wall of the National Assembly to vote against Yoon’s martial law declaration. Other videos showed people in the streets boosting legislators over the walls for the vote.
Yet another video showed South Korean soldiers trying to get into the National Assembly during the voting thwarted by people wielding a fire extinguisher and flashes from cameras.
While the law said Yoon had to abide by the legislators’ vote, it was not clear whether Yoon would do as the law required. About six hours after he had declared martial law, Yoon bowed to the National Assembly and the popular will and lifted his declaration.
Yoon has been widely condemned, and South Koreans from all parties, including his own, are calling for his resignation or impeachment. Raphael Rashid of The Guardian reported today that on the morning after the attempted coup, South Koreans are bewildered and sad. “For the older generation who fought on the streets against military dictatorships, martial law equals dictatorship, not 21st century Korea. The younger generation is embarrassed that he has ruined their country’s reputation. People are baffled.”
For the rest of the world, though, South Koreans’ immediate and aggressive response to a man trying to take away their democratic rights is an inspiration. Among other things, it illustrates that for all the claims that autocracy can react to events more quickly than democracy can, in fact autocrats are brittle. It is democracy that is determined and resilient.
The events in Seoul also cemented the shift in social media from X to Bluesky, where news was breaking faster than anywhere else, in a way that echoed what Twitter used to be. Since Twitter was a key site of democratic organizing until Elon Musk bought it and renamed it X, that shift is significant.
And finally, the events in South Korea emphasize that for all people often look to larger-than-life figures to define our nations, our history is in fact made up of regular people doing the best they can. Journalist Sarah Jeong found herself entirely unexpectedly in the middle of a coup and, recognizing that she was in a historic moment, snapped to work to do all she could to keep the rest of us informed. “I'm f*cking blasted and hanging out in the weirdest scene because history happened at a deeply inconvenient hour,” she wrote on Bluesky. “[S]o it goes.”
When she finally went home, Jeong wrote: “I expensed my cab ride home. I'm tired so I put 'korea coup' down in the expense code field.”
- Heather Cox Richardson, US Political Historian
Remember, remember
while we can see clearly the issues
and they’re all watching as it all comes crashing down around them
A single act can tip the scales
We are fighters
We are lovers
We are writers and readers
musicians and dreamers
So don’t be afraid to hold your loved ones close and speak out
Because they want you to forget
You are bright and powerful
You hold within you the fires of change
You are more free than they’ll ever understand even as they try to hold you back.
So put on your best face: yours.
Hold on to your convictions and give them an idea.
That we are more numerous than they realize; you are NOT alone.
Remember that.
Necromantic Herbs: Plants of the Dead
Sourced from Grey Necromancer on Wordpress: There are a number of plants which can be extremely useful to the necromancer. Among these are the following.
Mullein: Erroneously described as a substitute for graveyard dirt, this in fact is a misconception. Known as the “Hag’s Taper”. The soft leaves are used as candle wicks and the dried stalks are soaked in beeswax or tallow to make a torch for rituals of necromancy. It is also burnt to see manifestations of spirits of the dead at night, to see into the Otherworld, and communicate with the spirits and deities that dwell there. Can also be used in talismans.
Wormwood: Used for summoning spirits and to help them manifest.
Cedar: The dried needles when smouldered serve both as a sustaining feast and call for the blessed dead, and the smoke is used to exorcise malevolent shades. The wood works for this purpose as well when turned into a fetish or as a staff.
Dittany of Crete: Used to aid in the manifestation of the spirits of the dead. Also has somewhat of a nasty reputation because of where it tends to grow. Harvesters tend to fall from the cliffs and crags where it grows and plummet to their death.
Aconite: Also known as Wolfsbane or Monkshood. Because of its incredible toxicity it is better to not to harvest it. If one has the dried root it can be preserved in order to serve as a tutelary spirit. Not to be used by amateurs.
Yew: Known in European countries as the Death Tree, it is a symbol of death, reincarnation, and longevity. Is planted in graveyards to protect the spirits of the dead. It can be used to banish malevolent spirits of the dead. Often associated with sorcery and dark magic. It is considered the sister of the Tree of Life, the birch.
Apple: Considered the food of the Irish dead and the inhabitants of the Otherworld. Can be added to incense blends to feed the spirits of the dead and ancestors.
Mugwort: Ingested as a tea to aid in divination and talking to the dead. Also boiled in water and, then the liquid is used to wash divination tools.
Copal: Serves as a offering to the dead and can be used to appease the spirits who remain in states of trauma or confusion after death.
Willow: The wood of the willow is used in incenses and in the construction of fetishes dedicated to the dead.
Tobacco: May be presented as a herbal offering upon a ancestral altar or a grave in the form of a incense or sacramental smoke to honor the shades of the dead.
Cypress: The oil of this tree serves as a great addition to incenses and formula of the underworld.
Myrrh: The oil aids in all blends of a necromantic design. Can also be mixed into incenses.
Graveyard Mold: Technically no folklore or magical traditions associate this herb with necromancy of any kind. However I have included it here because I believe it can be used as a compound in necromantic incenses. Since it grows on graves it should contain some of the essence of the dead.
Mandrake: According to legend King Solomon carried a piece of this root in his seal ring to give him sovereignty over souls. Since one of its names is the “Little gallows man” it can be used as a poppet for laying curses of death, illness, pain, etc.
Birch: Petitions and blessings are written on the bark of this tree which is then burnt or buried in the grave of the spirit.
Bay Laurel: Used to communicate with the dead, possibly through use as an incense. Easily available in the form of bay leaves.
Chervil: Also known as garden chervil or “gourmet’s parsley” a tea or other drink made with it can be imbibed to aid in rituals of communion with the dead.
Lavender: Burnt as incense in order to bring peace of mind to the dead.
Marigold: Associated with funerals and used in funeral sprays.
Asphodel: In Greek legend is connected with the dead and the underworld. Sacred to Hades, Persephone, and Hekate. The roots were eaten by the poor of Greece and hence thought good enough food for the dead. Could be burnt as incense or the roots could be given as food offerings.
Thyme: Burnt as an incense helps ease the soul of a person who died a violent death.
American Sycamore: Known as “Ghost Trees” for their distinctive patchy appearance. Associated with the dead and poverty.Elder: In Norse mythology the tree is considered the Guardian of the Road to Hel (and thus sacred to Hela, Goddess of the Dead). Also associated with the ancestors.
Am I the only one wondering why pomegranate isn’t on this list?
Tutorial: Make a Canteen from a Birdhouse Gourd!
I’m always on the lookout for lightweight, character-appropriate ways to carry water around at Dagorhir events, so when I spotted birdhouse gourds drying in my gardener-mother’s back hall, I knew I had to beg one off her to turn into a canteen. The process was interesting enough that I thought I would share!
You’ll need:
Gulf Wax + a cup to pour it with.
A thoroughly dried birdhouse gourd
A craft knife
A handful of gravel
A dust mask (like the kind you wear to paint and sand around the house)
1 lb of paraffin wax (look for it by the canning supplies or buy it online. I buy Gulf Wax brand, which should be closer to ~$6 in physical stores)
A throwaway container for melting the wax (an empty tin can or plastic container works well)
A stove and a pot of water
If you’re playing along at home, you can buy pre-dried birdhouse gourds on eBay. These come in many different shapes, but they all have one thing in common: unlike, say, pumpkins or butternut squash, they have really thick rinds. This is why the drying is the important part: these thick-walled gourds are hollow when they’re dried, but it takes a long time for them to be ready— between six months and two years! My gourd was already dried, so I was ready to go.
Warnings:
You’ll be playing around with a fair number of hazardous processes and, in one case, a hazardous material (gourd dust, ick). Woodburners can burn YOU, and gourd-dust, when inhaled, can make you really sick, and hot wax is dangerous, flammable, and annoying to clean up. Take your time and be careful, and don’t let kids do this unsupervised!
Process:
1. Decorate your gourd!
I wanted my gourd-bottle to be interesting, so I used a cheap soldering iron from the hardware store to do some pyrography on its surface. I practiced on some wee gourds I’d bought from a merchant to get the technique down.
Here’s a tiny gourd I use to hold healing potions! The pattern was inspired by basic embroidery stitches. The gourds have thick walls, so there was no danger of burning through it. Do ALL your wood burning decoration before you wax the gourd’s interior. Paraffin WILL catch on fire if it gets hot enough, so don’t try to use your iron on your finished gourd!
The gourd is decorated with instructions for how to find Drentha camp, a list of my names, titles, and boasts, a bunch of doodles, and a long curse detailing what will happen to anyone who steal its. It took a few sessions of Drentha’s Skype craft nights to finish it, but it wasn’t difficult— just tedious!
2. Cut the top opening
This will by the hole through which you’ll remove the gourd’s pith and seeds.
I had decent luck cutting through the top with a craft knife. The walls of the gourd may be thicker than you expect– mine are about 1/4″ thick– so work carefully. Some people have better luck cutting this hole open with a dremmel or by working around the opening with a thin drill bit.
Don’t make this hole too large. You may want to trace the cork you’ll use as a stopper to see how big the hole should be. You can always go larger, but you can’t fix a too-large hole.
3. Clean out your gourd.
The gourd is dried out, so it’s not wet or fleshy inside like a pumpkin, but it will need some work before the internal cavity is totally hollow: it still has pith and seeds inside.
The easiest way to get the gunk out is to drop a handful of sharp gravel into the gourd, shake it like blazes, and dump the ensuing dust, seeds, and gravel back out. Repeat until you’re not getting big pieces out. You might want to run a bent bit of wire along the inside to dislodge any stubborn seeds. Anything you don’t pull out will get encased in wax, though, so it doesn’t need to be perfect.
Warning: When you clean out your gourd, you’ll be producing a LOT of gourd-dust. Inhaling these particles can make you feel awful, so wear, and use, your dust mask! If you go without, you might come down with something crafters call the “gourd flu.” Even worse, the inside of your gourd might have been moldy, which is not something you want to introduce into your lungs. Buy and use a mask, dang it.
If your gourd has a “neck,” like mine, and the opening in it looks really small, try poking down through it and testing the “walls” of the gourd there. You might find that there are a few layers of papery pith there that you can punch through and pull back out, giving the gourd’s neck a larger opening so you can fill it with water faster.
4. Heat up your gourd.
Put your oven to 200 F, no higher, and put the gourd inside on the rack. This will gently heat the gourd up so the wax won’t instantly solidify when you pour it into the gourd. We want the wax to stay nice and liquid so we can slosh it around and coat every bit of the cavity. Heat the gourd for ~20 minutes.
Lay down some newspaper or paper towels on your work surface. You’ll have to work fast when the wax is ready, so everything should be in its place BEFORE you need it.
5. Melt your wax in a double-boiler.
Coating the inside of your gourd will make it waterproof, which will keep your water from tasting like old dried squash and prevent the inside of your canteen from getting moldy.
I used about half a box of Gulf Wax, or ½ lb, but you can get by with using a single block, depending on the size of your gourd.
I’m impatient, so I chopped my wax up into small pieces on my cutting board so it would melt faster. Paraffin is perfectly food-safe (though not exactly tasty), so no worries about toxicity here.
Paraffin is flammable, so rather than melt it directly over the stove, we’ll be making a quick and dirty double boiler. This just means we’ll put the container with the wax in a pot of hot water. I sacrificed a cheap Tupperware plastic container to hold my wax, but a clean aluminum can also works. (Since we’ll be pouring out hot wax later, the can might be even better— crimp the top of the can, a little, and it will have a spout that facilitates pouring out the wax!) In a double-boiler, the wax can’t get hotter than the temperature of boiling water, so there’s no anger of it catching on fire. Just make sure you don’t drop wax scraps onto the burner of the stove!
Put your wax-container in a small pot containing hot water to about half its height. Turn the stove to medium-low heat. Don’t walk away from it— again, paraffin is a synthetic that will catch on fire. The wax will melt faster if you stir it around a bit and break up any clumps that form.
Turn the stove off when the wax is melted. The hot water will keep the wax from solidifying.
6. Coat the inside of the gourd with melted wax.
You’ll be sloshing hot wax around in the next step, so put on some oven mitts and shoo small children and underfoot pets out of the way.
Grab your gourd from the oven (it shouldn’t be too hot to touch, but be careful anyway), and, working quickly, pour your wax into its interior. Slosh the wax around so it coats the cavity. Don’t worry if you’re not getting everything this pass— we’ll do another coat. When the wax starts to feel solid, not liquid (it’ll swish in a slightly different way), pour the excess wax out of the gourd back into your container.
Your used wax might look disgusting because it trapped bits of the gourd’s inside that you couldn’t get earlier. That’s fine! Better trapped in wax than in your body. My used wax was so gross that I decided to melt a new batch for the next coat. This is up to you.
7. Set the gourd aside to let the first coat cool.
Don’t put it back in the oven (you can turn that off, now). The first coat of wax needs to cool completely, or you’ll just melt it right back off when you pour more hot wax in for the second coat. After half an hour or so, it should be solidified enough for you to do coat #2.
8. Add another coat of wax.
Melt your wax again, but don’t put the gourd back in the oven. This second coat is to get the bits you missed the first time, so we don’t want to melt off the first coat.
Pour the wax into the gourd again and carefully swish it around, paying special attention to the neck and the top “bulb” of the gourd. Pour it out.
9. Stick the cork in while the wax is still warm.
While the wax is still hot around the opening of the gourd, jam your cork in so the wax will take the impression of its shape and create a good seal. You might need to cool the gourd and do a third coat for this, but that’s fine!
The outside doesn’t really need to be coated, so you’re basically done!
10. Rig up a strap for your gourd.
Once your cork fits in and the gourd is cool, you’re done waxing! Your gourd is now waterproof. Rig up a strap to carry it and carry it with pride! (I was rushing to prepare for a battle, so I just threw my Amtgard warrior sash around mine. It deserves something nicer!)
Since the walls of the gourd are so thick, my water stays cool even in the Florida heat. Also: I am super cute. ;) My finished canteen is about 9″ tall and holds 40 oz water. I now can carry water to carry to the field without resorting to my ugly mundane Nalgene water bottle (which only holds 32 o!), and I have a new piece of kender-appropriate gear to add to my kit.
I had tons of fun making this, so I’m going to make some more wee containers. They would be perfect for holding shots of liquor, or for carrying salves and balms. Tiny pot of aloe for sunburns? A gob of lip balm? Small container for Tylenol or candy? There are so many uses for these beyond drinking gourds— and now we can ALL explore the possibilities! (Huge thanks to my mom for giving me gourds, inspiring me to be crafty, and never judging me for being a weirdo. <3)
I posted a cultural recipe of mine for faekin & elvenkin (& maybe others?) a bit back if that interests you! / post / 659708035203317761 / luskinikn-for-faekin
Just posting this so that whoever wants to follow the link can copy paste it! Hopefully it works :)
Thanks for the suggestion!
This is Money Snake. She only appears every 312 years.
If you reblog her picture within the next twenty-five seconds you will have good luck and fortune for the rest of your life.
This is Money Snake. She only appears every 312 years.
If you reblog her picture within the next twenty-five seconds you will have good luck and fortune for the rest of your life.
Does anybody else get legitimately worried when a fanfic author who was updating regularly just suddenly disappears with no warning? Like, is it a serious case of writers block or are they in a coma? Did they just up and quit? Was it me? Were my reviews not good enough?! Did they die 😳?! Were they kidnapped? Do I need to file a missing persons report? Excuse me officer, there’s been 13 weekly updates and now nothing for months! Find them! What’s their name?! Name!? I don’t know their name but they write 3k+ chapters and I need them safe and back in my life!
Sir, that’s my emotional support fanfic author.
Officer: i’m sorry, but you can’t file this person missing.
Me: you don’t have all the facts.
Officer: which are?
Me: i love them.
So, painful story, but I’ve really needed to tell it for a while.
My best friend, the woman I loved for 13 years, was a fic writer in the middle of an especially long piece. She updated on a schedule and had for years. She had a small, but loyal following.
And then she died out of nowhere. One day we were laughing, the next she was in a coma, 3 days later she was dead. She hadn’t been ill and to this day we don’t know what took her. She was just gone.
I knew she had friends all over the world so I went into her email to see if I could find addresses and notify people after a week of blind grief. In her inbox were about a dozen concerned messages from her readers. I cried. I cried and cried and I responded to all of them, telling people she had passed.
And the messages kept coming. Those people spread the word and message after message came in, most of them addressed to me now, as I had given those original readers my contact info. There were words of comfort and grief and just every emotion imaginable in that scenario. I wrote back to them all, thanking them and comforting them.
For months after she died, during the worst of my grief, I had those messages. I had those people. And they had me. I really think I might not have made it to the other side without them.
So, the fact that you care? That you think of them? That these authors who became a presence in your world are missed when they aren’t there? It means something very real. On the off chance that the author did die? Anyone who has seen this post will find comfort during the loss of their friend or family member, knowing that you all exist. That they aren’t alone. That you CARE that the world now lacks their loved one.
So, yeah. I’ve seen this post and ones like it for years and wanted to share this story. I finally could today.
Thank you, every person who reblogged this post. People like you are the biggest reason I’m alive today.
Triumph Of The Will: The Challenge (Detail) - James Tissot
Orchid Mantis
my friend met a cecropia moth this morning!!! isn’t he lovely??
Holy wow
An unexpected tenant—after at least three years, a cocoon resting on my mother’s cabinet eclosed this evening to reveal a handsome male Cecropia moth:
He flapped around my kitchen for a while before I managed to get him outside. Talk about a late bloomer!
How long are they normally in the cocoon for?
A few weeks, if born in the spring, but late-summer broods stay in their cocoon all winter.
There’s a lot of variation in moth metamorphosis. Some will simply not spin silk cocoons at all and will just pupate in the nude, which is sort of awkward, and once in a while we’ll have one emerge a year later than expected. This guy takes the cake, though—he was actually born in 2017, meaning that he’s spent FOUR WINTERS in his cocoon! Talk about procrastination...
Big man. Big big very large humongous man.
Very beautiful... very powerful.
