On Behalf Of All The Pagan Peoples Of The World Let’s Share Easter With The Transgender People And

reblog if you need a hug

"I would kill for you. I would die for you" would you take a break for me? Would you sit down and rest? For a day, a week, a year? Would you let others take care of your needs for me? Would you let yourself be held for me? By me?

C’mere, kid.  I want to tell you a secret.

Whoa, whoa, not like that!  This isn’t one of those “strange man tells you something that you’re not supposed to share with your parents” situations.  I want you to share this with your parents.  I want you to share this with the whole world.  You wanna be my prophet, you go right ahead.  It’s not like most folks are gonna listen, but every so often, one of you people decides to try, and I’m always grateful, even if I don’t think there’s any point to it.

Okay.  You with me?  You listening?  You cleaned your ears out recently?  Because if you’re gonna be my prophet, I don’t want you to go around telling people I said something I didn’t.  That’s happened to so many of my friends.  They lay out one message, and folks pick it up and turn it into something terrible, into some sort of cudgel to beat people with.  And that’s not what I’m about.

Okay.  You’re good?  Then here you go.  This is the secret, this is the essential thing I wish you over-important primates would hammer through your heads, this is what matters:

People are essentially good, and essentially the same, everywhere you go.  Optimism isn’t shallow, and being a happy person doesn’t make you a fool.  You’re allowed to irrigate and plant flowers in your heart.  That won’t make you weak.  It won’t make you irresponsible, or petty.  Be joyous.  Find your light and nurture it, and once it’s strong and healthy enough to light up your room, open the windows and share it with the people around you.

There’s a lot of shadow in a lot of folks.  A little light can help to beat it back, and can bring us a better world.  All of us, not just the divine, and not just the damned.

Do your part, prophet or no.  Nurture and protect your joy.

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.

I got to hold a 500,000 year old hand axe at the museum today.

It's right-handed

I am right-handed

There are grooves for the thumb and knuckle to grip that fit my hand perfectly

I have calluses there from holding my stylus and pencils and the gardening tools.

There are sharper and blunter parts of the edge, for different types of cutting, as well as a point for piercing.

I know exactly how to use this to butcher a carcass.

A homo erectus made it

Some ancestor of mine, three species ago, made a tool that fits my hand perfectly, and that I still know how to use.

Who were you

A man? A woman? Did you even use those words?

Did you craft alone or were you with friends? Did you sing while you worked?

Did you find this stone yourself, or did you trade for it? Was it a gift?

Did you make it for yourself, or someone else, or does the distinction of personal property not really apply here?

Who were you?

What would you think today, seeing your descendant hold your tool and sob because it fits her hands as well?

What about your other descendant, the docent and caretaker of your tool, holding her hands under it the way you hold your hands under your baby's head when a stranger holds them.

Is it bizarre to you, that your most utilitarian object is now revered as holy?

Or has it always been divine?

Or is the divine in how I am watching videos on how to knap stone made by your other descendants, learning by example the way you did?

Tomorrow morning I am going to the local riverbed in search of the appropriate stones, and I will follow your example.

The first blood spilled on it will almost certainly be my own, as I learn the textures and rhythm of how it's done.

Did you have cuss words back then? Gods to blaspheme when the rock slips and you almost take your thumbnail off instead? Or did you just scream?

I'm not religious.

But if spilling my own blood to connect with a stranger who shared it isn't partaking in the divine

I don't know what is.

Bathrobe if ya nasty. USA English. Honestly, I think I use mine for the purpose of a “house coat”

RB to see how others think-- also, what territory you're from and version of English you speak! (this is to settle a thing I am pondering)

Aesthetically, I kinda love the antique gold of Syrax.

I’m rooting for Vhagar - I just LOVE💚 big granny Godzilla dragon sooo much. She can burninate anyone she wants. Xoxoxoxo.

Pleeeeese can we get some legit Dreamfyre in the next season, please?

"jace’s character development" umm... his what? Pretty sure they could have swapped in a Zoolander Blue Steel cutout and left it in the background of the Dragonstone scenes and gotten 90% of his 'character' covered. And the one time they do give him some depth, it's to 100% completely contradict the books. They're doing EVERYONE on Team Black dirty in S2 except I guess Erryk.

i cant do “are the writers biased towards team green or team black” for 2 more full additional years we need a new thing to fight about

Y'know, I just saw the phrasing in @mega-ringsandthings-world ’s post about annoying Jonsas and went “Holy shit, that’s right”.

“She only burned a couple hundred people tops”

But that makes sense. Think about it. King’s Landing is huge. Drogon is tiny in comparison. Look at this:

They’re just picking streets at random; look at how much isn’t burning! The only possible way King’s Landing could have been burned to the foundations was if Dany and Drogon purposely went back and forth row by row like that one time I tried to cover a small Minecraft world in gemstones. I’m not sure how long dragons can breathe fire, but that doesn’t seem right. And considering how quickly the battle was over…

Yeah, there’s no way she did that. There were a lot of buildings still standing while the Red Keep fell. This isn’t the Dany we know and love, but it still puts her at a lower kill count than some characters in Game of Thrones (not even counting the prequels to A Song of Ice and Fire). This website put it at 300-500,

maybe a bit higher (possible, depending on how many people were stupid enough to stay in the streets, because they definitely seemed to be mostly targeting streets). Still random death—not genocide. Learn your words.

In conclusion, D&D were grossly overestimating by saying half a million. Fuck’s sake, you think that’s systematic genocide? Look at the Holocaust. You think that’s a lot of deaths for a war and definitely the worst war crime ever? Look at WWII, and tell me Daenerys is Hitler. That’s insensitive to actual victims.

But here’s a fucking thing:

Look at who’s number two on the list.