Y'all are not ready for this fight 🖤💚

This is what alys saw in the flames 👀🔥

How Mexicans feel about duendes too.

True. Most Irish people, as Norwegians do with Trolls, will happily let the 'fairies' be a thing to make tours for tourists and idle threats to make children behave. Most Irish people will have a very normal and mature explanation of fairies as a common folk mythology that expresses some dimension of Irish culture but are not, obviously, to be taken literally.

And most Irish people, if you ask them to move a stone from a fairy circle will immoveably, flatly respond with 'absolutely fucking not'.

Construction projects have had to halt and be abandoned for it.

At work me and a couple coworkers (black, white, and mexican) had a fun discussion on whether there are more ghosts at a hospital or a cemetery.

everyone individually took a moment to specify that ghosts probably aren't REAL real. then weighed in on where and why.

for the record my position was that there's probably way more ghosts in hospitals because that's where people die horribly, but since you can only see ghosts in dark, solitary conditions, graveyards at night is where the majority of ghost sightings occur. hospitals are usually well lit and busy, so even if they're crammed with ghosts the living are too damn busy to see them. meanwhile if a cemetery has even one ghost that followed her corpse there from the hospital, she'll be spotted because that's where all the ghost hunters go to look.

this theory was received as extremely sensible, and a coworker drew the conclusion that that's why abandoned hospitals are even scarier than graveyards. once the place gets abandoned then you can tell how much ghosts got built up.

we all liked this explanation a lot and explained it to everyone else all night. and of course, none of us believe in ghosts.

Apparently I celebrate birthdays by giving my blorbos magical girl makeovers. Happy birthday (observed), Neil!

Also he gets a matching Andrew for his birthday.

These are the cutest things in existence and they’re also available as stickers

(stickers)

He needed another friend.

I very rarely catch myself doing the things that made me feel a little crazy in the middle of the night in my twenties. But buzzing my hair after midnight somehow feels just the same as it did in college, that combination of unhinged and grounding.

Cutting hair is great for that because it's not permanent, except for the way it is. It'll grow back, but it won't be the same. You can't undo it, you can only wait.

So anyway I think that released enough tension that I can sleep now.

... I just realized I've accidentally given myself emo hair. Oops.

In the light of the morning I can also see that it's not straight.

Which, fair, neither am I, but I will probably need to trim it a bit later. At least to make it look intentional.

Points to Midnight Breakdown Me for cleaning the sink when I was done, though, much appreciated.

Hi! This is a rickroll. Please visit youtube dot com, type "never gonna give you up" in the search bar, then click on the first video that comes up. Thank you for your consideration.

I very rarely catch myself doing the things that made me feel a little crazy in the middle of the night in my twenties. But buzzing my hair after midnight somehow feels just the same as it did in college, that combination of unhinged and grounding.

Cutting hair is great for that because it's not permanent, except for the way it is. It'll grow back, but it won't be the same. You can't undo it, you can only wait.

So anyway I think that released enough tension that I can sleep now.

... I just realized I've accidentally given myself emo hair. Oops.

AM radio is like literal magic. There is music all around us that we can't hear, and to hear it you just have to tap a crystal (diode) to the earth and listen to it with another magic rock (magnet) and a tin can. You dont even need electricity to make it work because this music around us is literally all the power you need. Oh and at night when the sun has set, the light of the day gets replaced by MORE music because the signals can travel further at night. This is magic. If you even care.

Kevin, Neil, and Andrew on the way to the court:

some of y'all fundamentally misunderstand my favorite characters but im being sooooo normal and mature about it. i haven't even killed anyone yet

A Blessed Trans Day of Visibility

I won't lie, wishing a trans person a "happy" TDOV this year feels inappropriate. While it is such an inspirational display of resolve to declare that this year's politics won't steal one's joy, I believe it is equally important to acknowledge and hold space for the other emotions we may be feeling today. Anger, betrayal, fear, isolation--these are all valid emotions, and you have every right to feel and process them.

So instead of wishing you a happy TDOV, I wish you this:

May your TDOV fill you with pride. You have so much to be proud of, even if all you did today was survive. You are beautiful, unbreakable, resilient, strong, and you are loved by the gods and by so many people. You are the very best thing you can be: yourself.

Today, I thank Loki for the bravery they instill in us to live authentically. I thank Frigge for the love she inspires us to feel within us, for ourselves and our Family. I thank Thor for the strength he lends us as we carry our cultures into the future. I thank Tyr for the advocacy and tireless efforts of our allies and within our communities. I thank YOU for existing.

scars

click for better quality | id in alt

the weirdo loner kid

I have been thinking a lot about what a cancer diagnosis used to mean. How in the ‘80s and ‘90s, when someone was diagnosed, my parents would gently prepare me for their death. That chemo and radiation and surgery just bought time, and over the age of fifty people would sometimes just. Skip it. For cost reasons, and for quality of life reasons. My grandmother was diagnosed in her early seventies and went directly into hospice for just under a year — palliative care only. And often, after diagnosis people and their families would go away — they’d cash out retirement or sell the house and go live on a beach for six months. Or they’d pay a charlatan all their savings to buy hope. People would get diagnosed, get very sick, leave, and then we’d hear that they died.

And then, at some point, the people who left started coming back.

It was the children first. The March of Dimes and Saint Jude set up programs and my town would do spaghetti fundraisers and raffles and meal trains to support the family and send the child and one parent to a hospital in the city — and the children came home. Their hair grew back. They went back to school. We were all trained to think of them as the angelic lost and they were turning into asshole teens right in front of our eyes. What a miracle, what a gift, how lucky we are that the odds for several children are in our favor!

Adults started leaving for a specific program to treat their specific cancer at a specific hospital or a specific research group. They’d stay in that city for 6-12 months and then they’d come home. We fully expected that they were still dying — or they’d gotten one of the good cancers. What a gift this year is for them, we’d think. How lucky they are to be strong enough to ski and swim and run. And then they didn’t stop — two decades later they haven’t stopped. Not all of them, but most of them.

We bought those extra hours and months and years. We paid for time with our taxes. Scientists found ways for treatment to be less terrible, less poisonous, and a thousand times more effective.

And now, when a friend was diagnosed, the five year survival odds were 95%. My friend is alive, nearly five years later. Those kids who miraculously survived are alive. The adults who beat the odds are still alive. I grew up in a place small enough that you can see the losses. And now, the hospital in my tiny hometown can effectively treat many cancers. Most people don’t have to go away for treatment. They said we could never cure cancer, as it were, but we can cure a lot of cancers. We can diagnose a lot of cancers early enough to treat them with minor interventions. We can prevent a lot of cancers.

We could keep doing that. We could continue to fund research into other heartbreaks — into Long Covid and MCAS and psych meds with fewer side effects and dementia treatments. We could buy months and years, alleviate the suffering of our neighbors. That is what funding health research buys: time and ease.

Anyway, I’m preaching to the choir here. But it is a quiet miracle what’s happened in my lifetime.

i'm trying to fight the second one but THE VOICES-

Kirsten Chursinoff