A 5200-year-old Pottery Bowl From Shahr-e Sukhteh Bearing What Could Possibly Be The World's Oldest Example

Spin the wheel and whoever you get, you have to fight in one to one melee combat. You can't run away.

if you need a refresher on who you got, The Arthurian Name Dictionary by Christopher W. Bruce and The Arthurian Companion by Phyllis Ann Karr has you covered.

Since 2023 I've been putting together an almanac and nature guide. It first started as notes on my phone and it's now become a fairly huge project and labour of love. I'll be posting things like:

How to find south by looking at Orion and the branches of trees

When foxes have kits and swallows migrate

The early signs of spring

Irish folklore about the Devil spitting on blackberries and how to ward off bad luck if you catch sight of the new moon

How to know if there's a storm coming by examining the clouds

I recommend this blog for anyone looking to learn about and connect with nature in new ways. It would also be helpful to writers for help with your natural settings, in fact, this project started when I was doing research for a fic!

About This Blog

This blog grew naturally out of my project to put together a perpetual almanac and guide to nature for my friends and I. All of the things I've learned have brought me so much unexpected joy and have really changed simple things like walks and how I look at trees, the stars, clouds, the weeds in the verges and more.

The Lay of the Land

In monthly almanac posts I'll share what's happening with the plants, the animals and the skies, as well as some applicable folklore and traditions. These will be tagged with #almanac and posted in the first few days of every month.

!! Please note that while it may sometimes cover edible plants, this almanac is not a foraging guide !!

I'll also be posting about natural navigation techniques and general knowledge to help you understand what you're looking at and to give you things to observe and notice year-round. These will be tagged with #naturalnavigation and/or #natureknowledge.

I'll add my sources and further reading/listening recommendations to each post.

Posts will relate largely to the Northern Hemisphere, with plant and animal information mostly applicable to Ireland, the UK and northern Europe. Some information can be flipped for the southern hemisphere (e.g. the sun and moon travel across the southern sky for those in the northern hemisphere, and the northern sky for those in the southern hemisphere).

Come Along

If you'd like to come along for the adventure, I recommend that you keep your own notes of the posts and tips that interest you. You can also think about looking ahead and using other sources to note the dates of the spring and neap tides where you are (highest high-tides and lowest low-tides) and the dates of the new and full moon. When recording monthly information about the planets, I recommend you look for their rise and set times and what portion of the sky you can expect to see them in. This is not only another thing to track, but it will help you correctly identify the planets. If you aren't living in the same part of the world as me, you could also note down what the plants and animals are up to where you are.

Mad excited to share this project with you all!

Sleepy merthur sketch 💛

(References under the cut)

... eepy

one thing the show doesn't care about enough: the dragonlords and the dragons themselves. they were hunted to extinction. merlin is the last of his kind. and he'll never know anything about being a dragonlord because his entire family and anyone who might've known about them is gone. how do you fix that? you can't. there's nothing you can ever do to make up for something like that. absolutely nothing.

and i love fics that explore arthur surviving and struggling through the realisation of just what kind of monster his father was for everyone else but also. they rarely focus on that bit of history, on the fact that uther actually managed to destroy that part of magic completely as merlin is the very last of his kin and there are only two dragons left (the first one won't live much longer and he has no knowledge on how to help the second). uther actually did eradicate something, it wasn't magic as a whole maybe but an entire branch of it is just gone.

Update: I have been freed from bob-jail!

Today will be attempt 37 of trying to get something other than a bob.

You see, I have these duel curses and there are that 1. I'm apparently not enough of baddie to be given a not-bob and 2. that I belong in bob-jail for even asking.

Last time, I fought tooth and nail (asked very politely and over-explained myself and my choices) for an undercut that no one could even see under the bob I was given.

Wish me luck.

Cover for Ray Bradbury's : 'The Autumn People' by Frank Frazetta, 1975.

“It is extraordinary that nobody nowadays under the stress of great troubles is turned into stone or a bird or a tree or some inanimate object; they used to undergo such metamorphoses in ancient times (or so they say), though whether that is myth or a true story I know not. Maybe it would be better to change one’s nature into something that lacks all feeling, rather than be so sensitive to evil. Had that been possible, these calamities would in all probability have turned me to stone.”

— The Alexiad, written by Anna Komnene, the daughter of the Byzantine Emperor Alexios I Komnenos, c. 1148.

See, our first mistake was trying to have a civilization in northern Europe between October and February. The darkest three months of the year should be for staying home under the blankets, midwinter festivals, and getting blind drunk when the sun goes down at 4 pm like the bog gods intended.

Sliding my timely fic into the reblogs here. Credit for the prompt goes to @futurepastme

Love Hold You 'til the Morning Sun

https://archiveofourown.org/works/61994113/chapters/158533081

Teen and Up | No archive warnings

At the whims of his magic and the demands of the world's various turnings, sleep never came easily to Merlin, that is, until he met Arthur.

Or

Lifelong insomniac Merlin discovers that he sleeps better next to Arthur, and better still in his arms.

You cannot convince me that Merlin and Arthur didn’t cuddle on trips through the forest. Like come on, Arthur literally sleeps holding his pillows and you cannot convince me Merlin doesn’t run cold in his sleep. There’s no way they didn’t cuddle, even if they didn’t mean too, they definitely woke up curled around each other. They never spoke about it, but it just got to the point where they’d place their cots right next to each other because they knew they’d end up snuggling at some point through the night.