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 All rights reserved  by Tony Xu

Gold Fireflies Dance Through Japanese Enchanted Forest in the Summer of 2016

An array of photographers captured these stunning images of gold fireflies during Japan’s rainy season in June and July. A dazzling long-exposure effort, the fireflies resemble a chimerical glittery effect only seen by fairies in enchanted forests.

do you ever think about this quote by mary lambert because i think about it all the time

Giant Post of Completed Good Omens Human AU’s

I am so excited for this Good Omens Celebration week of Fandom! I have loved all the fan content created for Good Omens. Thank you so much to all the creators out there who bring us so much joy! Here are some of my favorites:

So, to start off, I run a weekly fic and artist rec series that can be found here: 

Dannye’s fic recs   Dannye’s artist recs

ALSO @prolix-principality runs an ongoing series of GO fic recs, so definitely check them out!

And special for this week, a list of some wonderful completed GO Human AU’s: Please feel free to reblog and add your own! 

Series: (not all of these series are complete but the fics in them are finished)

An Album of Our Life series by @satincolt , Rated G (C & A are professors)

Big Plans and Little Additions series by @hope-inthedark , Rated T (Astronomy professor C and bookshop owner A)

Coffee, Wine, and Textbooks-Verse by shaniacbergara, Rated E (C & A are professors)

Corporate romance series by @stubbornjerk (Ao3 stubborn_jerk) Rated T (Lawyer C and security guard A work for rival companies)

Demon and Angel Professors by Ghostinthehouse, Rated T (C & A are professors)

Ineffable Husbands Oneshots series by EmeraldAshes, Rated T (series contains some human AUs. Part 2: C is a client at A’s office; Part 3: C buys a flat haunted by A’s ghost; Parts 6 & 8: C & A are officemates; Part 9: A runs into the Bentley with his car)

Ineffable Teens (Good Omens) series by @sedehaven (Ao3 gypsyweaver) Rated T (C & A - plus Dagon, Gabriel, Michael, and Beelzebub - are high school students with summer jobs at the mall)

Interdepartmental Cooperation series by @bestoftheseekwill (Ao3 Seekwill) Rated E (C & A - and Beelzebub and Gabriel- are professors)

Our touching, our stories ; earthy and holy both by @mortuarybees (Ao3 deadgreeks) (This is a series of nonsequential ficlets in one work; in the earliest part of the stories, C & A are college students) 

Recovering series by @summerofspock Rated E (C & A are doctors)

Soft Comforts Series by @servantofmischief​, Rated G (Artist A draws an anonymous portrait of C in a coffee shop)

So Long We Become the Flowers series by @allonsy-gabriel (Ao3 allonsy_gabriel) Rated G (flower shop owner C and antiques/bookshop owner A) 

Sweet Series by @shay-moonsilk (Ao3: Shay_Moonsilk) Rated E (Lawyer C and cam worker A) 

Tailored Temptations series by CruelBeauty Rated E (Actor C and costume designer A)

The Blind Date AU series by @mygalfriday Rated T (Nightclub owner C and museum worker A)

Their Affections series by @servantofmischief, Rated M (Lord Crowley and Lady Aziraphale in the Regency era)

Til We Loved series by @cardinaldaughter (Ao3: Cardinal_Daughter) Rated E (Victorian age with military officer C and aristocrat A)

Single Fics: 

A bookshop is not a business by @itsevidentvery (Ao3 anactoriatalksback) 5070 words, Rated G (C is a customer at A’s bookshop)

Acts of Service by @bestoftheseekwill (Ao3: Seekwill) 51968 words, Rated E (Mysterious man C - no spoilers!- and vicar A)

A Different Kind of Arrangement by mar_map; 19393 words, Rated G (Flower shop owner C and bookshop owner A)

Against Better Judgement by @weatheredlaw; 6443 words, Rated E (Aristocrat C and bookbinder A)

All’s Fair In Love And Serial Killing by @wyvernquill, 10216 words, Rated M (Detective Inspector C and possible serial killer A in a dark comedy)

An Absence of Stars by @mllekurtz (Ao3 TheKnittingJedi) 56426 words, Rated E (C is an author with a secret and A owns a bookshop)

Angel by @holycatsandrabbits (Dannye Chase) Self-rec! 10841 words, Rated E (Flower shop owner C and nurse A)

Anthophilia by @fortinbrasftw; 49446 words, Rated E (Flower shop owner C and neighboring bookshop owner A)

Continua a leggere

these guys look like theyre fighting over how to make a soup

"hey can i put this in"

"NO ARE YOU FUCKING KIDDING ME IT'LL RUIN IT"

It’s morning. Astoria wakes up, first thing she sees is Draco’s face, eyes closed in a deep sleep, and she feels like she doesn’t want to get up. However, she has the habit of drinking something and read a newspaper. A naked man on the other side of the bed wouldn’t change that. She gets up, puts her robes around her body. She approaches the table in the bedroom and skillfully conjures what she needs to drink with her wand. She sits down to enjoy the coffee and a reading. Only when she turns the page - five minutes later - she realises Draco is awake, though still in bed and heavily asleep.

“Well, good morning” she says, smiling.

He’s eyeing her with lazy curiosity.

“Splendid” he replies, and points to the newspaper she’s holding. “Something more interesting?”

She notices the ton of his voice. His way of saying I want your attention. “I wasn’t sure how long you like to sleep so I didn’t want to wake you unnecessarily.”

“I’d hate that” he says ironically and then in the next minute he’s walking to the window to open the curtains for her. "Do you know, reading in such dark room can damage your eyesight?”

“I’d hate that.” She’s completely aware he didn’t bother to put any clothes on. “Thank you. Join me for breakfast?”

“Yes.”

This time he puts his robes and comfort himself in front of her on the small table in his bedroom. Draco drinks her coffee, but immediately makes a disgusted face.

“Sugar completely ruins the experience of drinking it for me” she explains, laughing about his expression.

“Very peculiar.”

“At least you didn’t pretend you liked it.”

“You will never see me pretending anything.”

He says that with such seriouness in his voice, Astoria looks at him intently and deeply and she knows that’s why she’s there. That’s why she slept with him.

“That can be too much, sometimes” he warns, even though he doesn’t seem worried about that. Astoria decides that’s what Draco likes about himself, and that’s what she likes as well. “If I’m too honest, and I hurt you-”

“You wouldn’t hurt me with honesty, Draco. I can be brutally honest, as well.”

“I’ve seen that. Any other examples?”

“Like what?”

He pretends to take time to think.

“Like when we were fucking.”

Astoria didn’t blink.

“A constructive criticism, then.”

“Criticism?” he raises an eyebrow, and without noticing, he drinks the coffee again. “I don’t know why I drank that again.”

Why couldn’t she stop smiling? So stupidly smitten. He was genuinely preocupied when he begins defending himself before she could say anything about last night.

“It’s been a while since I practiced.”

“Oh cut it. You knew exactly what to do.”

He doesn’t pretend that her statement made him feel better.

“Well, it’s easier when the person on the other side is absolutely…”

She waits for his word. He just didn’t know how to describe her insane beauty, body, movements, lips, kisses, without sounding too cheesy.

“Loud.”

She laughs, and this time he joins her. Seeing him laughing feels intimate and nice and she doesn’t want to leave so soon. She doesn’t have too.

“I was surprised about that as well” she admits.

There is no denying they had a great night, maybe like no other before. It’s just different, when there are feelings. Astoria knows it.

“Is there something you like, especifically?” he asked.

“In sex?”

“Anything. It’s just extremely satisfying to satisfy you. I want to know everything I can do.”

“Somehow I trust you will know.”

“You trust too much in me.”

“Somebody has to.”

He finds her hand over the table, brushes his long fingers over hers and stays quiet for a while. He observes when she touches the Death Eater scar on his pulse. He likes that with Astoria he never expects her to run away.

*crouches to go into stealth*

the cracking of my knees alerts the guards, I am immediately killed

My best friend and I had a call recently—she’s back with her family for a bit helping out with some hometown stuff. As part of the stuff, she’s been going through a (deceased) relative’s scrapbook, compiled in the American Midwest circa 1870-1900 and featuring mostly cut-out figures from the ads of the day.

She talked about how painstaking this relative’s work was. (Apparently the relative was careful to cut out every finger, every cowlick; this was by no means carelessly or hastily assembled.) But she also she talked about how—the baby on the baking soda ad is ugly, it is so ugly, why anyone would clip this heinously ugly illustrated baby and paste it into a scrapbook? Why would you save the (terribly told, boring) ghost story that came with your box of soap?

(Why include these things in the first place? we asked each other. ”There’s a kind of anti-capitalism to it,” she mused.)

And we discussed that for a bit—how most of the images, stories, artists, and ads were local, not national; they’re pulled from [Midwestern state] companies’ advertisements in [Midwestern state] papers, magazines, and products. As a consequence, you’re not looking at Leyendecker or Norman Rockwell illustrations, but Johann Spatz-Smith from down the road, who took a drawing class at college.

(College is the state college, and he came home on weekends and in the summer to help with the farm or earn some money at the plant.)

But it also inspired a really interesting conversation about how—we have access to so much more art, better and more professional art, than any time in history. As my bff said, all you have to do to find a great, technically proficient and lovely representational image of a baby, is to google the right keywords. But for a girl living in rural [Midwestern state] of the late 1800s, it was the baking soda ad, or literal actual babies. There was no in-between, no heading out to the nearby art museum to study oil paintings of mother and child, no studying photographs and film—such new technologies hadn’t diffused to local newspapers and circulars yet, and were far beyond the average person’s means. But cheap, semi-amateur artists? Those were definitely around, scattered between towns and nearby smallish cities.

It was a good conversation, and made me think about a couple things—the weird entitlement that “professional” and expensive art instills in viewers, how it artificially depresses the appetite for messy unprofessional art, including your own; the way that this makes your tastes narrower, less interesting, less open.

By that I mean—maybe the baby isn’t ugly! Maybe you’ve just seen too many photorealistic babies. Maybe you haven’t really stopped to contemplate that your drawing of a baby (however crude, ugly, or limited) is the best drawing of a baby you can make, and the act of drawing that lumpen, ugly baby is more sacred and profoundly human than even looking at a Mary Cassatt painting.

And even if that isn’t the case….there was this girl in [American Midwestern state] for whom it was very, very important that she capture every finger, curl, and bit of shading for that ugly soap ad baby. And some one hundred years later, her great-something-or-other took pains to preserve her work—because how terribly human it is, to seek out all the art we can find that resonates with us, preserve it, adore it.

It might be the most human impulse we have.