“It Never Gets Easier. It’s Always Wonderful.”

I see a human in the picture, but this post has such a delightful Hobbit energy. 💗💗💗

baps you on the head, lovingly. What are your top three favourite berries

(/bap'd)

I'm so glad you asked bc I do love a good berry. My favorite berry is any berry growing on a bush for me to eat! I go berry picking a lot, mostly to make jam, but I always keep some just to eat, and also I probably eat as many as I pick while I'm picking. Which slows down the process but I'm just a man.

No. 1 is salmonberries. I love the color & flavor variety! (the little blue berries are huckleberries). You can do so much with them, but they're delicious on their own, right off the bush.

For people with TikTok or Instagram, one of my dear mutuals, Madison Dawn (@ Alaskan8ive907 on both apps), is a Tlingit creator who makes a lot of very cool content about salmonberries and other foraging & fishing on Southeast Alaska's islands. Highly recommend!

One of my ALL TIME favorites is cloudberries (not pictured)! This can get confusing at times, because some people use "salmonberry" to refer to what I know as "cloudberries." It's a regional thing. I often follow the lead of my Indigenous friends and use the berry names in their languages to be more specific, but that doesn't always work either, depending on the language & place. There are so many names for beloved berries!!! I love them so much, I have 2 pairs of earrings by one of my fav artists, Siqiñiq Designs. This is my favorite pair! These are one of her many beautiful "aqpik" designs, the berry's name in more than one Inuit language:

I'm also a big fan of picking blueberries and blackberries!

Although admittedly I think blackberries are the most fun because you get so messy

I also love salal berries, mulberries, and black raspberries (not the same as blackberries)

There are too many smart immortals. I want more stories about immortal himbos.

Fuckyeah Terry Pratchett!

Terry Pratchett about fantasy ❤

Terry Pratchett interview in The Onion, 1995 (x)

O: You’re quite a writer. You’ve a gift for language, you’re a deft hand at plotting, and your books seem to have an enormous amount of attention to detail put into them. You’re so good you could write anything. Why write fantasy?

Terry: I had a decent lunch, and I’m feeling quite amiable. That’s why you’re still alive. I think you’d have to explain to me why you’ve asked that question.

O: It’s a rather ghettoized genre.

Terry: This is true. I cannot speak for the US, where I merely sort of sell okay. But in the UK I think every book— I think I’ve done twenty in the series— since the fourth book, every one has been one the top ten national bestsellers, either as hardcover or paperback, and quite often as both. Twelve or thirteen have been number one. I’ve done six juveniles, all of those have nevertheless crossed over to the adult bestseller list. On one occasion I had the adult best seller, the paperback best-seller in a different title, and a third book on the juvenile bestseller list. Now tell me again that this is a ghettoized genre.

O: It’s certainly regarded as less than serious fiction.

Terry: (Sighs) Without a shadow of a doubt, the first fiction ever recounted was fantasy. Guys sitting around the campfire— Was it you who wrote the review? I thought I recognized it— Guys sitting around the campfire telling each other stories about the gods who made lightning, and stuff like that. They did not tell one another literary stories. They did not complain about difficulties of male menopause while being a junior lecturer on some midwestern college campus.

Fantasy is without a shadow of a doubt the ur-literature, the spring from which all other literature has flown. Up to a few hundred years ago no one would have disagreed with this, because most stories were, in some sense, fantasy. Back in the middle ages, people wouldn’t have thought twice about bringing in Death as a character who would have a role to play in the story. Echoes of this can be seen in Pilgrim’s Progress, for example, which hark back to a much earlier type of storytelling. The epic of Gilgamesh is one of the earliest works of literature, and by the standard we would apply now— a big muscular guys with swords and certain godlike connections— That’s fantasy. The national literature of Finland, the Kalevala. Beowulf in England. I cannot pronounce Bahaghvad-Gita but the Indian one, you know what I mean. The national literature, the one that underpins everything else, is by the standards that we apply now, a work of fantasy.

Now I don’t know what you’d consider the national literature of America, but if the words Moby Dick are inching their way towards this conversation, whatever else it was, it was also a work of fantasy. Fantasy is kind of a plasma in which other things can be carried. I don’t think this is a ghetto. This is, fantasy is, almost a sea in which other genres swim. Now it may be that there has developed in the last couple of hundred years a subset of fantasy which merely uses a different icongraphy, and that is, if you like, the serious literature, the Booker Prize contender. Fantasy can be serious literature. Fantasy has often been serious literature. You have to fairly dense to think that Gulliver’s Travels is only a story about a guy having a real fun time among big people and little people and horses and stuff like that. What the book was about was something else. Fantasy can carry quite a serious burden, and so can humor. So what you’re saying is, strip away the trolls and the dwarves and things and put everyone into modern dress, get them to agonize a bit, mention Virginia Woolf a few times, and there! Hey! I’ve got a serious novel. But you don’t actually have to do that.

(Pauses) That was a bloody good answer, though I say it myself.

Thank you 🙏 I appreciate, and I will not give up on dragon fruit

If you've ever been disappointed by dragonfruit, especially if you felt like it tasted like nothing, then I'm like 90% sure you had unripe dragonfruit, which tastes like nothing. There's a small window of time where it tastes amazing. You must have the patience of a hunter. Do not strike until your prey is at its most delicious

Most beautiful quote of all ASOIAF

—and for the first time in hundreds of years, the night came alive with the music of dragons.

Their eyes - Gods, wow!

a dance with dragons, daenerys x

King of Cups. Art by Megan Rose Gedris, from The Rosalarian Tarot.

My king of cups is taking an active parenting role. He is so strong, and the master of the rough elements around him. He can protect because he knows what he’s doing and knows he won’t get hurt by it. He aligns the heart with the head, emotions with knowledge, and that makes him strong.

So many “fatherly” images fail to show the so-called father with any children, so I wanted to make a point to show that. I didn’t want him to be a hands-off authoritarian figure. In this, he’s rubbing whiskey on a teething baby’s gums. The lightning bolts symbolize how dads love Led Zeppelin.

we are the universe experiencing itself

On behalf of all the pagan peoples of the world let’s share Easter with the transgender people and Trans Day of Visibility. Easter is about rebirth and renewal of nature, and celebrating the joy of the longer days ahead. Sounds like Trans joy.

Okay, so y'all know the phenomenon where American media companies say they can't produce queer stories because they'll just get censored in foreign markets? It's transparent as hell, because the dominant culture of the United States is still violently queerphobic, and in many cases, state queerphobia in other countries is the direct result of Christian imperialism. The US is not the enlightened gay haven in a world of evil homophobic foreigners, and trying to pretend that American media can't be too gay because it'll be censored overseas is asinine. We all know that, right?

Anyway, today I learned that there is an episode of the Australian cartoon Bluey that has been censored in the United States because it shows the dad character pretending to be pregnant and have a baby as part of a game of pretend. Disney refuses to air it on the Disney Channel or on Disney+. It has been made available on YouTube by the Australian rights holders.

So let's quit fucking pretending that Disney is actually scared of foreign censors, hm? The queerphobic censorship is coming from inside the House of Mouse, and it always has been.