missalexgreenturtle

Latest Posts by missalexgreenturtle

A practice is something you built, it’s very organic like an ecosystem of rituals, knowledge, words, material objects, ressources. Like the branches of a tree it sometimes dies and sometimes branches out, you builds more in one direction or choose to work more in another one. Even if you feel like you are stagnating in your practice, or you don’t know what direction to choose, you have to start somewhere. And with time you build your practice like the gardener maintains their garden.

© pet_foolery

Got an 8. :)

How well do you see color?

I’m cry I scored 60, I feel blind

halloween turtle 🎃

deeply obsessed with the salmon edit by _olive_ridley on TikTok

deeply obsessed with the salmon edit by _olive_ridley on TikTok

My adaptation of the God of Arepo short story, which was originally up at ShortBox Comics Fair for charity. You can get a copy of the DRM-free ebook here for free - and I'd encourage you to donate to Mighty Writers or The Ministry of Stories in exchange.

Again it's an honour to be drawing one of my favourite short stories ever. Thank you so much for the original authors for creating this story; and for everyone who bought a copy and donated to the above non-profits.

this from the guy who wrote the sting pain index, a scale he constructed after letting himself be stung by insects

Get in loser, we're starting an oak cult.

early homo sapiens b like help i cant stop making bowls . help i cant stop domesticating plants and animals. help i cant stop developing language and architecture and religion

There is easy low hanging fruit here, especially about the US and salty tea. And I'm so SO tempted.

But also I'm super in to tea and I'm bored.

The perfect cup of tea is how you want to drink it, and if you do not LIKE tea then drinking it a different way, or a different kind of tea, vastly changes it.

A pinch of salt makes things less bitter, this trick also works with coffee. But other things that affect taste are tempriture, length of time it brews, where the tea was grown, the climate, the soil, and how big the leaves are. Some of the cheapest tea has little more than dust in the tea bag while more expensive teas you will notice have more structure to the leaves.

Tea brewed in colder tempeitures needs longer and creates a different taste. It may require more tea to get the specific flavour you want, and generally it is less bitter for it. Similar thing to spices where if you cook them, use them hot, toast them first, etc, you get a different set of flavours to using them cold.

Like wine, tea can have lots of flavour profiles and colours. Assam for example is very dark, malty, and strong, it can get quite bitter. Ceylon is much lighter. Darjeeling is good with lemon, but Assam is better with milk, in my humble opinion. Lapsang Sushong is very smokey. Earl Grey

Most people will drink a mix. English breakfast is usually a mix of Assam, Ceylon, and Kenyan. Earl Grey is flavoured with bergamot.

White, green, and black tea all come from the same plant, just different parts of it, treated differently. Black tea can take a higher tempriture, but boiling water on green and white tea will scorch the leaves and make it very bitter. Agitating the tea can also have this effect as it releases more tannin.

As a general rule there is a tea for everyone, and a way to drink it that you will enjoy, whether that's hot, cold, mixing it with spices, flavourings, fruit, milk, sugar, lemon, and yes, even a pinch of salt.

I would not, however, recommend tea that has been in the Boston harbour.

vegans make peace with honey

no shut up do it

I've started to actually get excited for school starting, I spend a lot of time online reading scientific papers about my favorite weeds, and I think I want to study weeds forever.

Apparently it's an ongoing mystery why dandelions in North America are so diverse, when all dandelions that have been found so far are apomicts that reproduce only by cloning themselves.

However, any given site will have many distinct dandelion genotypes, with many different traits.

For example, a site might have one dandelion strain that blooms primarily in fall, and another that blooms primarily in spring.

One theory is that there's new genetic information constantly coming in from Eurasia somehow. Apparently dandelion seeds can spread on the wind 150 KILOMETERS! Perhaps some are just blown across the ocean in a storm? But if that's the case, why weren't dandelions found all over North America already when European settlers came?

The other theories are that there are sexually reproducing dandelions here that we just haven't found yet, and that they somehow make new diversity very rapidly purely through mutations and recombination and such.

It’s time to Be a Adult and mythologize your local Flora, Fauna, Rivers, and rock formations,

No that isn’t just a birch tree,

That’s the Sisters Rosamund, Lyonesse, and Miranda, They are under a shape shifting curse and trapping themselves inside a tree is the only safe way for them to figure out how to break it.

Leave them Ribbons, or crystals, Your secrets, your Social security number, whatever you think they will like

An archivist found a long forgotten 8mm film reel in an old metal box, marked “Philippines 1942”. Thinking it was lost WWII footage, he sent it in to be restored/digitized. When he got the footage back, he found puppies instead (via)

thinking about all the “small” art that’s ever existed. songs that were only ever sung in one village. stories written by children that got lost in the shuffle. personal paintings that didn’t survive the test of time. how they affected the lives of just a few, but still existed, still mattered to someone.

Italian Easter Cookies/Piricchittus

Follow for recipes

Is this how you roll?

To The Substitute Art Teacher - Jordan Bolton

Clean House Powder

Intent: To cleanse a dwelling of negativity, “heaviness,” stale energy, bad atmosphere, etc.

Ingredients:

Lemon Peel

Solomon’s Seal Root

Cayenne Pepper

 Arrow Root

Blue Vervain

White Oak

Sage (any color)

Salt (both black & white)

Materials:

Mortar & Pestle (or spice grinder)

Funnel

Mesh Strainer

Collection Dish

Container

Note: Powdered versions of most herbs are available online. I recommend such sites as Starwest Botanicals and Penn Herbs for the quality products at reasonable prices. Also, if you can get your hands on a good spice grinder, you can make your own powder from dried herb products. Grind each ingredient separately to produce fine powder. Sieve the material through the mesh strainer into the collection dish; this removes the larger unground pieces and gives you cleaner powdered herb. (Pro-Tip: Putting a funnel under the mesh strainer reduces lost material and makes collection much easier.) Combine the component powders in the collection dish, mix well, and bottle immediately. For volume, go heavier on the less expensive or more easily available materials like Lemon Peel, Cayenne, and Salt. Otherwise, combine in more or less even amounts. Sprinkle a pinch in the corner of each room to dispel heaviness and clear the air, so to speak. Useful for spring cleaning and touch-up jobs throughout the year. Add to floor washes, incenses, or charms for general cleansing and purification of the home.

Wheat fields are more mystical than fields of other crops. You are 7,000 times more likely to meet an old god or see a portent of doom in a wheat field than in a field of like… soybeans.

the bison...we gotta bring back the bison...auuuuughgghfh

Toad Words

            Frogs fall out of my mouth when I talk. Toads, too.

            It used to be a problem.

            There was an incident when I was young and cross and fed up with parental expectations. My sister, who is the Good One, has gold fall from her lips, and since I could not be her, I had to go a different way.

            So I got frogs. It happens.

            “You’ll grow into it,” the fairy godmother said. “Some curses have cloth-of-gold linings.” She considered this, and her finger drifted to her lower lip, the way it did when she was forgetting things. “Mind you, some curses just grind you down and leave you broken. Some blessings do that too, though. Hmm. What was I saying?”

            I spent a lot of time not talking. I got a slate and wrote things down. It was hard at first, but I hated to drop the frogs in the middle of the road. They got hit by cars, or dried out, miles away from their damp little homes.

            Toads were easier. Toads are tough. After awhile, I learned to feel when a word was a toad and not a frog. I could roll the word around on my tongue and get the flavor before I spoke it. Toad words were drier. Desiccated is a toad word. So is crisp and crisis and obligation. So are elegant and matchstick.

            Frog words were a bit more varied. Murky. Purple. Swinging. Jazz.

I practiced in the field behind the house, speaking words over and over, sending small creatures hopping into the evening.  I learned to speak some words as either toads or frogs. It’s all in the delivery.

            Love is a frog word, if spoken earnestly, and a toad word if spoken sarcastically. Frogs are not good at sarcasm.

            Toads are masters of it.

            I learned one day that the amphibians are going extinct all over the world, that some of them are vanishing. You go to ponds that should be full of frogs and find them silent. There are a hundred things responsible—fungus and pesticides and acid rain.

            When I heard this, I cried “What!?” so loudly that an adult African bullfrog fell from my lips and I had to catch it. It weighed as much as a small cat. I took it to the pet store and spun them a lie in writing about my cousin going off to college and leaving the frog behind.

            I brooded about frogs for weeks after that, and then eventually, I decided to do something about it.

            I cannot fix the things that kill them. It would take an army of fairy godmothers, and mine retired long ago. Now she goes on long cruises and spreads her wings out across the deck chairs.

            But I can make more.

            I had to get a field guide at first. It was a long process. Say a word and catch it, check the field marks. Most words turn to bronze frogs if I am not paying attention.

            Poison arrow frogs make my lips go numb. I can only do a few of those a day. I go through a lot of chapstick.  

            It is a holding action I am fighting, nothing more. I go to vernal pools and whisper sonnets that turn into wood frogs. I say the words squeak and squill and spring peepers skitter away into the trees. They begin singing almost the moment they emerge.

            I read long legal documents to a growing audience of Fowler’s toads, who blink their goggling eyes up at me. (I wish I could do salamanders. I would read Clive Barker novels aloud and seed the streams with efts and hellbenders. I would fly to Mexico and read love poems in another language to restore the axolotl. Alas, it’s frogs and toads and nothing more. We make do.)

            The woods behind my house are full of singing. The neighbors either learn to love it or move away.

            My sister—the one who speaks gold and diamonds—funds my travels. She speaks less than I do, but for me and my amphibian friends, she will vomit rubies and sapphires. I am grateful.

            I am practicing reading modernist revolutionary poetry aloud. My accent is atrocious. Still, a day will come when the Panamanian golden frog will tumble from my lips, and I will catch it and hold it, and whatever word I spoke, I’ll say again and again, until I stand at the center of a sea of yellow skins, and make from my curse at last a cloth of gold.

Terri Windling posted recently about the old fairy tale of frogs falling from a girl’s lips, and I started thinking about what I’d do if that happened to me, and…well…

if you’ve never seen one before

deer are smaller than you think

raccoons are bigger than you think

bears are smaller than you think but you were pretty close

otters are bigger than you think no even bigger than that

wolves are bigger than you think

wild cats are smaller than you think but hopefully you’ll never see one

chipmunks are smaller than you think

so are mice but you’ve seen a mouse right

you were right about the size of moose, mostly

pigs are bigger than you think

coyotes are that size

so are foxes

woops bears are bigger than you think but only that one type

this is an informational post about mammals if you know more please do tell

In the future, children will think our ways are strange. "Why do old people always grow so much milkweed in their gardens?" they'll say. "Why do old people always write down when the first bees and butterflies show up? Why do old people hate lawn grass so much? Why do old people like to sit outside and watch bees?"

We will try to explain to them that when we were young, most people's yards were almost entirely short grass with barely any flowers at all, and it was so commonplace to spray poisons to kill insects and weeds that it was feared monarch butterflies and American bumblebees would soon go extinct. We will show them pictures of sidewalks, shops, and houses surrounded by empty grass without any flowers or vegetables and they will stare at them like we stared at pictures of grimy children working in coal mines

What i find super interesting about the backrooms is its becoming one of the first instances i know of of modern folklore, a hundred years from now this very well might have books written about it. To further that thought, the backrooms, by definition, are liminal, strange, "inbetween" spaces. Guess what other folklore is related to strange, liminal, inbetween spaces? The fae, something that already exists in folklore. Not only is history repeating itself, but if fairies exist in modern times THIS is where they'd exist. Would the backrooms be considered a modern fae realm?

Love how tumblr has its own folk stories. Yeah the God of Arepo we’ve all heard the story and we all still cry about it. Yeah that one about the woman locked up for centuries finally getting free. That one about the witch who would marry anyone who could get her house key from her cat and it’s revealed she IS the cat after the narrator befriends the cat.

A mark on your forehead identifies the god you must worship to stay alive, usually by joining its local church or temple. Your mark is unknown, meaning an old, forgotten god sponsored you. To survive, you must either find an old temple to worship at, or do the arduous task of building a new one