News Anchor In My Area Loses It Over A Fat Cat That Likes To Swim.

Good Omens 2 + Text Posts

“In The Wee Free Men, the village has a tradition of burying a shepherd with a piece of wool on his shroud, so that the recording angel will excuse him all those times during lambing when he failed to attend church — because a good shepherd should know that the sheep come first. I didn’t make that up. They used to do that in a village two miles from where I live. What I particularly liked about it was the implicit loyalist arrangement with God. Americans, I think, sometimes get puzzled by people in Ireland who call themselves loyalists yet would apparently up arms against the forces of the crown. But a loyalist arrangement is a dynamic accord. It doesn’t mean we will be blindly loyal to you. It means we will be loyal to you if you are loyal to us. If you act the way we think a king should act, you can be our king. And it seemed to me that these humble people of the village, putting their little piece of wool on the shroud, were saying, “If you are the God we think you are, you will understand. And if you are not the God we think you are, to Hell with you.” So much of Discworld has come from odd serendipitous discoveries like that.”

—  - Terry Pratchett, “Straight from the Heart, via the Groin,” A Slip of the Keyboard (via thelonelyskeptic)

I want you to write for pleasure—to play. Just listen to the sounds and rhythms of the sentences you write and play with them, like a kid with a kazoo. This isn’t “free writing,” but it’s similar in that you’re relaxing control: you’re encouraging the words themselves—the sounds of them, the beats and echoes—to lead you on. For the moment, forget all the good advice that says good style is invisible, good art conceals art. Show off! Use the whole orchestra our wonderful language offers us! Write it for children, if that’s the way you can give yourself permission to do it. Write it for your ancestors. Use any narrating voice you like. If you’re familiar with a dialect or accent, use it instead of vanilla English. Be very noisy, or be hushed. Try to reproduce the action in the jerky or flowing movement of the words. Make what happens happen in the sounds of the words, the rhythms of the sentences. Have fun, cut loose, play around, repeat, invent, feel free.

Ursula K. Le Guin, Steering The Craft

this is actually one of the most stunning things i’ve ever seen i’m in awe

I’ve realised that what I miss about fantasy is it being truly escapist. I miss it depicting places where I would actually want to go.

Every dang kid I knew waited for their Hogwarts acceptance letter. Reading the books and seeing it on screen gave you this warm, fuzzy feeling and a feeling of longing, even when they were in danger and fighting monsters and evil wizards, you want to be there.

You want to go to Middle Earth, see hobbits and elves and dwarves and run through this land of incredible beauty, mysticism and magic.

You want to be in the TARDIS, seeing the universe.

The more recent trend of fantasy is this gritty, dark realism and places where you would just never want to go. I don’t want to go to Westeros. I don’t want to be in The Hunger Games, I don’t particularly want to be in The Witcher universe. I’m living in the world of Black Mirror and I hate it.

Fantasy used to say “hey our world kinda sucks but here’s a cooler one”, but now it says “hey our world kinda sucks, but here’s an even worse one.”

That isn’t to say that the above are bad. They’re not. 

But I miss beautiful, escapist fantasy that gives me a break. That takes me somewhere magical, somewhere otherworldly and gives me messages of hope and optimism in the face of darkness. I really, really miss that.

Old Catradora art Noelle posted on her Twitter just now

ghost choir 👻 🎵

I got peckish