Hard Times, Charles Dickens

A truly strong person does not need the approval of others any more than a lion needs the approval of sheep.

Vernon Howard (via my-lifestyle-of-meow)

do you ever think about how fucking wild the premise of hetalia even is though like there are these (alarmingly) consistently attractive immortal beings that represent the soul and state of a country and they’re gifted with weird abilities like magic or hella strength and then they just spend their days having petty playground arguments with each other

Giveaway Contest: We’ve partnered with Alma Books to give away five of their beautiful Alma Classics Evergreens editions (pictured above)! Won’t these look lovely on your shelf? :D To win these classics, you must: 1) be following macrolit on Tumblr (yes, we will check. :P), and 2) reblog this post. We will randomly choose a winner on June 4, at which time we’ll start a new giveaway. And yes, Alma Books has agreed to make this an International giveaway! Good luck!

Every post just makes this better

A Holiday Story

So this is a Chistmas story my mom told me while I was home recently and i thought y’all might enjoy.

So, one Christmas back in the 60′s, my great-grandmother was reminiscing about Christmas in England, and how they used to have pheasant for Christmas, but Ohio sucks and they’d never get to do something like that.

Well Shit!  goes my grandfather,  them woods are full of pheasants, I’ll get you one.  So grandpa and a dubiously related man named “uncle popeye” went out with shotguns to get great-grandma a pheasant for Christmas dinner.

They’re gone for a LONG time.  according to mom, they were basically expecting grandpa and Popeye to be gone for a few hours and come back with a store-bought chicken and apologies.

Instead, they come back eight hours later, covered in mud and freezing cold from the Cleveland winter, but Surprise!  they have a Pheasant.  Great-grandma gives them a lecture about staying out so long and worrying her, but agrees to dress the bird so they can all have a traditional English Roast Pheasant.   Grandpa and Popeye retire to the living room to drink beer and talk about what great woodsmen they are when Great-grandma screams from the kitchen. “TOM!!”  She bellows and literally every male in the house jumps because literally every man has been named “Tom” for three generations at that point.  “THERE’S NO BULLET HOLE IN THIS BIRD.”

They both look massively sheepish and eventually admit that they hadn’t had much luck finding pheasants in the woods and were about to go to the store to get her a chicken when they… backed over the pheasant.

“Then what were you idiots doing in the woods for eight hours?” “We weren’t out there for THAT long-” Popeye starts before grandpa decks him.    Grandma and Great-grandma have to menace them with wooden spoons to get the truth out, but eventually they take thier oversize hiking boots off to reveal bandages. Turns out they had only been in the woods for Two hours looking for pheasants before LITERALLY tripping over one, and they both reflexively aim at the ground and… Shoot each other in the foot.  They hadn’t backed over the Pheasant in the woods.  They’d backed over it in the Hospital parking lot.

And that’s the story of how my great-grandmother made a Roast Pheasant and the ladies of the house got to eat the whole thing while Grandpa and Popey had to watch.

After every game, my former teammates kept asking me why Kagami-kun could jump so high. Kise-kun wondered if there was a trick to it that he could copy. Midorima-kun thought it was special training. Akashi-kun asked which higher power we bribed to get the ability, and what pentagram we used to summon it. I won’t even repeat what Aomine-kun said, because it was too stupid, even compared to Akashi-kun. The truth is, Kagami-kun gets a huge elevation bonus from his moral high ground, an advantage the Generation of Miracles will never, ever have.

Kuroko Tetsuya (via incorrectknb)

Happy International Women’s Day!

“The women we honor today teach us three very important lessons. One, that as women, we must stand up for ourselves. The second, as women, we must stand up for each other. And finally, as women, we must stand up for justice for all.” ― Michelle Obama

Ficlet: The Little Fox

The new vampire, Honda Kiku, reforges some old bonds with a young and unusual friend. AU based on this picture, which has England and Japan swap their 2010 Hetaween outfits, and has England as a chibi. So, vampire!Kiku, and kitsune!Arthur.

        After the bite heals, after the long night of bloody pain when he Turns – after all that, and after coming to terms with the new fangs in his mouth and his new preternaturally keen senses, Honda Kiku hides under the covers on his futon for three days straight and does not move. He knows– he is (was) a well-read man and knows what he has become by the dreams and longings that run through his mind, by the fact he can smell the (hot fresh) blood pumping beneath the (vulnerable) skin of his servants as they go about their business in his home.

(Vampire, whisper the old tomes in his library, echoing the bite of Kiku’s fangs into his lips. Self-control – he is an honourable Japanese man, and he will have some self-control. Anything else is inconceivable. Anything else will make him go mad. Blood-drinker. Life-taker. Vampire.)

When the three days are done and Kiku has regained some of his rational thinking he sits up, pulls his blanket around his shoulders, and takes stock of all the things he will miss about being human.

The list is almost distressingly small.

Keep reading

as a procrastinating overachiever i feel like i don’t necessarily “half-ass” things, it’s more like a “3/4 ass”. like overall did i do pretty well? yeah. did i reach my maximum potential though? i think the fuck Not.