“I Like The Scars Because I Like The Stories. Bravery, Stupidity, Pain—none Of Them Come Free.”

i never talk about these things but i can’t remain silent.

i know tumblr doesn’t give a SHIT when things happen in countries outside the “most popular ones” (such as the usa & england). it’s true, don’t lie to me. y’all don’t give A FUCK. not every issue and problem in said countries gets the appropriate exposure but in general shit shows up on the news WORLD FREAKING  WIDE. you set up donations, you help out, your spread the word, you say “pray for x”……

southern europe is burning. 

my country is burning.

people are dying - at home, on the road, trying to run away, in their cars.

yesterday my country had 300 active fires.

people are losing EVERYTHING they own.

i have a friend that is on a train right now passing through places that have been burnt to the ground and she says the smoke is so intense it’s getting inside the train and she can barely breathe.

and yet, even though several people (myself included) have been trying to bring awareness to what has been happening in southern europe… what we get from most of you, those not part of the countries suffering, is silence. we don’t ask for money, we don’t ask for shit other than a reblog to spread awareness… something you can delete in 24/48hrs if you wish. 

i don’t know what to tell you. i’m angry. i’m frustrated. i’m disappointed. i feel like i’m screaming into the void. “a reblog does nothing” - you know that’s a damn lie, you know exposure always helps, you know people start paying attention when posts on social media become popular. my country in particular is a small one, we get ZERO exposure. y’all are only starting to figure out we even fucking exist bc of the shit we’ve been winning lately. 

but hell, if the EU doesn’t give a shit, why should some user on tumblr dot com?

again, i don’t know what to tell you so i’ll let the images speak for themselves: 

An image captured by a Nasa satellite shows a thick plume of smoke blowing southward from the Greek island of Chios over the island of Crete

Torneros de Jamuz, Spain

Duca, Croatia

A helicopter from Italy’s civil protection service drops water on a fire near the railway between Venice and Trieste

Residents take refuge on the beach as a wildfire burns on the mountain next to the village of Lithi, on the Greek island of Chios

Men gather cattle during a forest fire in Vieira de Leiria, Marinha Grande, Portugal.

Charred trees are seen on the hills above the Cloister of Thivaidas on Mount Athos, a World Heritage Site in Greece

Portugal

The song that Crowley associates with Aziraphale most is I Want To Know What Love Is by Foreigner and no one can convince me otherwise.

you mentioned you have an irk with teninch fic, what is it? and are there ships you still care about or like doctor x rose, has that fizzled down for you?

heyo nonnie. thanks for sounding so chill! cos really, it’s hard to talk about. i’m a bit afraid to.

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Rereading SW legends!verse for the first time in fifteen years, and having just finished with LotF: Inferno I HAVE THOUGHTS (specifically about Luke):

His and Jacen’s duel at the end of the book is freaking epic and it makes me so mad to know we’ll never have that realized on screen or in comic book. They’re both supremely talented in lightsaber dueling so it was interesting to see uncle and nephew going head to head-- I would have loved to have seen who would have won if not for Ben’s stabbing Jacen in the back.

(Maybe not really loved, because of the implications if Luke had been the one to win, which brings me to my next round of holy s***.)

Luke’s toeing the line this novel. Losing Mara, killing Lumyia, his grief, it’s all festering and you just get the feeling the entirety of the book that he’s not really in the best headspace. (Really, though, who would be?) I’m thinking specifically of his confrontation with Jacen/Caedus, when the former threatens the younglings:

“I'm sure you’re not threatening the younglings.” {Luke} pointed at the base of Jacen’s meditation chair and made a tapping motion with his finger. the pedestal gave a loud whumph, and the seat dropped a quarter meter. 

“Because you really don’t want to see me angry.” Luke made the tapping motion again. The pedestal emitted a metallic shriek, and the seat dropped another quarter meter. “And I think you’re smart enough to know that.”

Luke tapped a last time, and the pedestal collapsed with a loud crump, depositing Caedus on the floor with his feet sticking out in front of him like a child.

“But if you want to try me, go ahead and make that threat.”

Luke’s actions here reminds me a little of my paternal grandfather, who has never once my twenty eight years of life raised his voice in a shout. My parents have been married for forty years and my mother has never seen him angry. My dad can count on one hand the times he’s ever seen my grandpa angry or shouting. Apparently, when my grandpa gets angry it’s terrifying-- precisely because he so rarely gets to that point.

At this point in Luke’s EU arch, he’s still performing awesome feats with the Force, still proving that he’s the son of the Chosen One. But this moment with Jacen/Caedus hits harder, because he’s using the Force so casually. Such casual use of the Force on Luke’s part has been something he’s eased up on in the last few series of the EU, and to find him using it now so blatantly is terrifying in its implications.

Which leads us to his discovering Caedus torturing Ben in the Embrace of Pain:

...He started to accept that the horrible scene was real. He was, in fact, standing in the doorway of a secret cabin filled with Yuuzhan Vong torture devices, watching his twisted nephew taunt his captive son.

Luke didn’t give Jacen a chance to surrender. He just sprang.

Definitely not the Luke we’re used to in this moment, and it gets even worse as the fight continues, as he’s injured and draws on the pain to give himself strength; he lands some serious blows on Jacen and relishes in the pain he inflicts. Dark Side traits, anyone? He snaps out of it when Ben asks to be the one to kill Jacen, but it’s a near thing, and it’s an interesting plot point that’s only compounded in LotF: Invincible, when Luke looks at possible futures and sees that if he’s the one who kills Jacen the galaxy is plunged into a darkness worse than even Palpatine’s Empire. 

More thoughts to come, but this post is long enough already. Feel free to debate or share your own thoughts if you want!

Peggy Carter and Ellie Miller are related. Just saying.

I’m fascinated by Tess, and I’ll be perfectly honest in saying I do still ship Alec/Tess. This fic itself isn’t shipping in terms of the show but gives a (hopefully) realistic reasoning as to how Alec and Tess may have first met, how their marriage dynamics would have been, and how their marriage ultimately dissolved.

As a shorter summary, Tess can be a possessive bitch and Alec is too “good” sometimes for his own well-being.

Theodore Roosevelt listed Ulysses S Grant as one of the greatest Americans in history (alongside Washington and Lincoln). This was said in 1900.

Only fifty-so years later, President Dwight Eisenhower would state that Robert E Lee was one of the greatest Americans of all time. 

This post is not an assassination of Lee or his character-- that’s not the point of this. What I am curious about is how this reverence of Grant, who played a key point in keeping our country together and helping African Americans get the right the vote during his Presidency, could then turn so sharply to a reverence of Robert E Lee (a man who, despite his personal disapproval of secession, still fought on behalf of the Confederacy). This strange twisting of reverence is a clear example of the Lost Cause narrative taking root.

We weren’t taught much about Grant’s Presidency during Social Studies/History class. We barely touched on him as a General in the Civil War, except as the man who was called The Butcher and who drank a lot. 

So my question is just how much has this Lost Cause infiltrated our own History books?

Throughout all of my recent research into Ulysses S Grant and William T Sherman, I realized that we were never really taught in school about the Western Theatre of the Civil War; i.e., Grant’s mostly-successful campaigning around the States of Kentucky, and Tennessee, and Missouri. It’s his and others’ victories there that later helped win the Mississippi River and cut the Confederacy in two.

But what do we learn about in Social Studies/History? Gettysburg. Fort Sumter. Bull Run/Manassas. Antietam. In other words, the Eastern Theatre of the War. And those battles were dominated by incompetent Union commanders for a large majority of them: McClellan, Burnside, Hooker, McClellan again-- men who were more likely to retreat at the very cusp of victory than jump forward and seize the day. It’s bad enough learning about the Eastern Theatre that I remember saying to my parents that with such incompetent commanders the Union deserved to lose the Civil War.

I understand that History class has only so much time to teach students, and I understand that the Civil War is too big to teach in-depth, but why do we focus so much on McClellan and Lee, Hooker and Lee, Burnside and Lee, Meade and Lee, and brush over such an important part of the War as the Western Theatre? We effectively forget about Grant and Sherman until they’ve entered the Eastern campaign, let alone all of their fellow commanders and soldiers, and their years of fighting to take back and then keep the Mississippi in Union hands.

Just listened to a much-garbled but still understandable recording of Queen Victoria speaking. As someone historically interested, the thing that saddens me most is the fact that we'll never know what these people sounded like. Did Abraham Lincoln really sound as high-pitched as contemporary accounts said he did? What was it like to hear Harriet Tubman speak? There's a few seconds of silent video of Anne Frank, but what did she sound like? Every so often I find myself looking up videos of people like Eva Peron and I listen to her speak and she's alive to me in a way a lot of these people aren't and it's all because I can listen to her voice.

‘A Little Priest’ has got to be the most passive-aggressive song ever written for a musical ever.