“To Protect Their Copyright, Streaming Sites Do Not Allow For Screenshotting Of Any Kind.”

how i became impossible by Mary Ruefle

Their eyes - Gods, wow!

a dance with dragons, daenerys x

I’m a “they’re beautiful in their own way”. I agree with all of this, so thanks for the thinking imma have to do.

a lot of it just boils down to "as you move through the world sometimes you will see ugly people, and that's not a problem that needs solving"

you will see people who are old. you will see people who are fat. you will see people who are disabled. you will see people who are not making an effort to keep up with their hygiene or their hair or their clothes. you will see people wearing clothes and makeup and jewelry of a subculture you find disturbing and offputting. this is all fine. this does not need to be solved.

the offered solution has often been to say "oh no, don't say ugly, they're all beautiful in their way!" but that's not the point. nobody has to be beautiful just to exist, to be in public, to be in your view. that road leads to dudebros saying that women they don't consider sufficiently fuckable should wear bags over their heads. to HOAs urging residents to call the cops on homeless encampments being an 'eyesore' on their beautiful streets. to people pushing for institutionalization so that they don't have to share a public with neurodivergent people. to people demanding that physically divergent people trigger tag photos of themselves.

"everyone is beautiful" works up until you find someone you can't see the beauty in. but it doesn't matter. nobody is entitled to a world populated exclusively by beautiful people. no matter what tv and the internet may have led you to believe.

Fuckyeah Terry Pratchett!

Terry Pratchett about fantasy ❤

Terry Pratchett interview in The Onion, 1995 (x)

O: You’re quite a writer. You’ve a gift for language, you’re a deft hand at plotting, and your books seem to have an enormous amount of attention to detail put into them. You’re so good you could write anything. Why write fantasy?

Terry: I had a decent lunch, and I’m feeling quite amiable. That’s why you’re still alive. I think you’d have to explain to me why you’ve asked that question.

O: It’s a rather ghettoized genre.

Terry: This is true. I cannot speak for the US, where I merely sort of sell okay. But in the UK I think every book— I think I’ve done twenty in the series— since the fourth book, every one has been one the top ten national bestsellers, either as hardcover or paperback, and quite often as both. Twelve or thirteen have been number one. I’ve done six juveniles, all of those have nevertheless crossed over to the adult bestseller list. On one occasion I had the adult best seller, the paperback best-seller in a different title, and a third book on the juvenile bestseller list. Now tell me again that this is a ghettoized genre.

O: It’s certainly regarded as less than serious fiction.

Terry: (Sighs) Without a shadow of a doubt, the first fiction ever recounted was fantasy. Guys sitting around the campfire— Was it you who wrote the review? I thought I recognized it— Guys sitting around the campfire telling each other stories about the gods who made lightning, and stuff like that. They did not tell one another literary stories. They did not complain about difficulties of male menopause while being a junior lecturer on some midwestern college campus.

Fantasy is without a shadow of a doubt the ur-literature, the spring from which all other literature has flown. Up to a few hundred years ago no one would have disagreed with this, because most stories were, in some sense, fantasy. Back in the middle ages, people wouldn’t have thought twice about bringing in Death as a character who would have a role to play in the story. Echoes of this can be seen in Pilgrim’s Progress, for example, which hark back to a much earlier type of storytelling. The epic of Gilgamesh is one of the earliest works of literature, and by the standard we would apply now— a big muscular guys with swords and certain godlike connections— That’s fantasy. The national literature of Finland, the Kalevala. Beowulf in England. I cannot pronounce Bahaghvad-Gita but the Indian one, you know what I mean. The national literature, the one that underpins everything else, is by the standards that we apply now, a work of fantasy.

Now I don’t know what you’d consider the national literature of America, but if the words Moby Dick are inching their way towards this conversation, whatever else it was, it was also a work of fantasy. Fantasy is kind of a plasma in which other things can be carried. I don’t think this is a ghetto. This is, fantasy is, almost a sea in which other genres swim. Now it may be that there has developed in the last couple of hundred years a subset of fantasy which merely uses a different icongraphy, and that is, if you like, the serious literature, the Booker Prize contender. Fantasy can be serious literature. Fantasy has often been serious literature. You have to fairly dense to think that Gulliver’s Travels is only a story about a guy having a real fun time among big people and little people and horses and stuff like that. What the book was about was something else. Fantasy can carry quite a serious burden, and so can humor. So what you’re saying is, strip away the trolls and the dwarves and things and put everyone into modern dress, get them to agonize a bit, mention Virginia Woolf a few times, and there! Hey! I’ve got a serious novel. But you don’t actually have to do that.

(Pauses) That was a bloody good answer, though I say it myself.

I am so proud of Kanga for weaponizing Roo.

With Winnie-the-Pooh and The Battle of Hastings sharing an anniversary today, did you know that E. H. Shepard once drew this amazing scene for an exclusive book bag?

Bathrobe if ya nasty. USA English. Honestly, I think I use mine for the purpose of a “house coat”

RB to see how others think-- also, what territory you're from and version of English you speak! (this is to settle a thing I am pondering)

Origami books/diagrams are wild, if they do have written instructions they include lots of beautiful and baffling phrases like “mountain fold” “valley fold” “crane base”, etc. What is this code?!

As a 90′s kid, it blows my mind that origami youtube videos exist. You can look up any model and watch a pair of manicured hands assemble the thing in real time, in full color, in 3D, with cheerful flute music in the background. When I was little, you had a library book with no words and these esoteric little dotted lines and arrows and it was just you, your hands, your paper, and the cruel, uncaring eyes of God.

“It never gets easier. It’s always wonderful.”

This is the great tragedy about being alive and finding love. But it’s always wonderful.

hi Mr. Gaiman. My cat died two days ago and I really miss him. I’ve seen pictures of your dogs so I think you might be a dog person so I don’t know if you’ll get this but, I not only miss my cat (Kittywitty), but I also miss the the unconditional love that he gave. I’m scared that I won’t experience that kind of love again and it makes me very lonely. I’m scared of forgetting him, he deserves the world. He wandered into our farm one day and never left and I’m so grateful. He reminds me of you a lot, he carries this wonderful, otherworldly magic. I’ve known him since I was three. Life got less magical, but he never did. You could have the worst day, but then you’d see him and it was suddenly the best day. Anyways, I hope you have a wonderful day. You’re truly amazing and your writing enraptures me.

I'm so sorry about your cat.

I don't believe that there are cat people and dog people. I had so many cats from 1992 on -- they would turn up at our house and never leave. I wrote a story about them, and about one in particular, called "The Price".

This is Zoe, who was blind, and died in 2010:

This is Princess, who turned up (with kittens, and pregnant with more) in 1992 or 1993 and died in 2013...

One day, maybe, I'll be ready to have a house full of cats once more. It took me ten years after my dog first died to get another dog though. It never gets easier. It's always wonderful.

dany and her babies 🐉🖤