I am appreciative that I’m learning to cry again. Over silly things or sad things. I’ve struggled for a long time to properly access, feel, and process my emotions. I do not get angry when I should, and it isn’t unusual for me to go months without crying, despite having valid reasons to do so. Without that internal monitor It makes caring for myself difficult sometimes. This may hurt, but it feels like progress.
This book is a cozy cuddle to your soul. I love fantasy since I'm a child but sometimes I don't need all the violence, the fighting and the high stakes. Cozy fantasy as a genre has been a revelation! You can have all the fantasy stuff but it is about a former orc mercenary who wants to open a sweet coffee shop where people can relax and be happy and it turns to also be a lesbian romance. Fuck yes.
legends and lattes ☕
“When a flower doesn’t bloom, you fix the environment in which it grows, not the flower.”
— Alexander den Heijer
"Do you ever dream of land?" The whale asks the tuna.
"No." Says the tuna, "Do you?"
"I have never seen it." Says the whale, "but deep in my body, I remember it."
"Why do you care," says the tuna, "if you will never see it."
"There are bones in my body built to walk through the forests and the mountains." Says the whale.
"They will disappear." Says the tuna, "one day, your body will forget the forests and the mountains."
"Maybe I don't want to forget," Says the whale, "The forests were once my home."
"I have seen the forests." Whispers the salmon, almost to itself.
"Tell me what you have seen," says the whale.
"The forests spawned me." Says the salmon. "They sent me to the ocean to grow. When I am fat with the bounty of the ocean, I will bring it home."
"Why would the forests seek the bounty of the oceans?" Asks the whale. "They have bounty of their own."
"You forget," says the salmon, "That the oceans were once their home."
Ma meilleure ennemie is going to be in every enemies to lovers playlist
over christmas when i came out fully to my mom she did tell me i was beautiful and gave me some of her old jewelry and told me she was excited to have another daughter and that was all wonderful, but the part that meant the most to me was when i told her "i want to get my facial hair taken care of sooner than later, the whole "girl" thing is a lot easier to swallow when im shaved" and she examined my use of the phrase "it's a lot easier to swallow" and said "Scout, I didn't have a good relationship with my mother. you know that." (i did know that, my grandma was NOT good to my mother) "but your grandma kim [friend of my grandma's, unrelated by blood in any way, but was adopted as a grandma through familial osmosis] was the greatest woman who's ever been in my life. and up until the day she died, she had a beard and a moustache [which is true, my grandma kim, a cis woman, had VERY thick facial hair]. if you kept your facial hair for the rest of your life i wouldnt think of you as less of a woman" and ya know what? THAT'S the part of her support that made me cry.
my grandma kim was an amazing woman and she had peach fuzz that she didnt give a FUCK about. and everyone loved her.
you can have your own fuzz too, and that doesn't make you not a woman.
Stop everything. We literally have whale language. We just discovered definitive whale language. We can't translate it (yet) but we literally deciphered that whale calls are not random, and they're not simple. They follow linguistic patterns just like us. They have names for each other.
We're on the brink of ACTUALLY understanding what an animal is talking about, beyond basic warning cries. My childhood dream of being able to talk to animals is like, 1 step away from happening.
And omg if we ever do get to talk to whales, my adhd ass has a MILLION questions. Do they see/use the stars and moon to navigate? Do they have religion? Can they understand other whale species, or is it like trying to talk to a chimp? Do they like people-watching while we're on our boats whale-watching? Do they teach their offspring the way humans and apes do? What's the most annoying animal in the sea?
I want to tell them about us and our relationship to whales. How we have movies about them. We see their jaws in museums and marvel at how big they are. We try to save them when they wash up on the beach. How we made such a big push to outlaw whale hunting and bring back the whale population. How much I hated the novel Moby Dick.
I wonder if they would have questions for us? They can't really fathom the land the way we can understand the ocean. They might be able to see shorelines, maybe some islands. But think of how much land stuff a whale has never seen. They've never seen a cat, or a desert. I wonder if they would know that there must be more land, or assume that it's all just concentrated around the shore.
I imagine they would be curious about our boats, and why we can't swim very well. If they have culture, which I strongly believe they and most intelligent animals do, they might even remember stories passed down about whale hunting. They might ask why we suck at singing. Why do our fins look weird? How would we explain walking to a sea creature?
Of course, that is the one wrinkle - in all linguistic research and animal communication research, we haven't yet discovered a species that also asks questions the way we do. Apes don't seem to care about where or why things happen. They just make the tools and move on. At this point we have no reason to believe that a whale would need or want to ask questions. They have the ocean, they have their food, and they don't even make tools the way we do.
But still... can you imagine really having a conversation with a whale? How amazing and humbling it would be.
His Dark Materials is a franchise that tackles so many branches of physics and even creates a universe where the main course of study is experimental theology which is all about identifying and explaining dark matter while also adding dimensions to string theory, the multiverse theory, and the very concept of the human soul. At the same time, it aggressively calls out the problem with the state being controlled by the church, how people are condemned for being different and religious fearmongering stops the chance at growth both on an individual and a societal scale. It’s a franchise where the heroes of the story are two children who aren’t allowed to know the prophecy they’re a part of, who save the world unwittingly simply by doing what they believe to be right. Meanwhile, the person who thought he was the hero all along, the person who rallied an army from multiple universes to FIGHT. GOD. HIMSELF. is ultimately consumed by his own ego and forced to take a back seat when he realises he’s just one tiny piece of a much larger story that’s true heart is his own daugher. The child he abandoned, the child he didn’t know or care to know how to look after. It’s a franchise about finding love even when your biological family abandon you, it’s about looking evil in the eye and seeing your own mother, it’s about good and evil not being black and white but instead a complex and cruel mixture of both. It’s about the two worst people you know banding together at the last second to save their daughter with their final breaths. It’s about exploration and learning how to grow through experience, it’s about kindness being shared across the multiverse, exchanging stories with strangers and saving the whole world by doing something perfectly ordinary and receiving no reward.
Oh, and it’s also a franchise rich with fantasy, with giant talking polar bears, witches and ghosts, angels and daemons, and a mammal-like species from another world that travels exclusively on roller skates.
And it fucking. rocks.
#Marine fashion
fashion is cyclical
Sea animals, hopepunk, fantasy, queerness, and a bit of philosophy
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