... oc mu lebrán, léir ingnu

when applied to drinks, "dry" means "without sugar". therefore it follows that sugary drinks can be called "wet". the meanings of the terms "hot" and "cold" when applied to drinks are obvious. thus the aspect of any drink can be determined.

for instance, green tea, freshly steeped and served without additives, is hot and dry, and therefore has an aspect of fire.

a mocha, on the other hand, while hot, is sweet, and therefore wet, and thus has an an aspect of air.

lemonade, which is wet and cold, has a water aspect.

finally, the drink which most epitomizes the earth aspect, being both cold and dry, is vodka

Kaveh Akbar, from "Wild Pear Tree"

if you want to actually start to end homelessness, you need to give homeless people unconditional homes, including when we use them to do drugs or sit around drinking. either housing is unconditional or it isn’t

someone sitting at home alone, an active alcoholic, squandering your charity, drinking all day is better situation than a street homeless alcoholic. someone using drugs in your charity house is better than them doing the same w no shelter

most of you would not like most street homeless people, I definitely don’t and didn’t when I was street homeless. for every one person who uses unconditional shelter to turn themselves around, someone else will do jack shit and very slowly, if ever, work through the issues that made them homeless, will maybe never be able to live independently. still better than street homelessness, still worth doing. ultimately either you believe that shelter should be universal or you don’t

homeless people actually can’t be rehabilitated if you want to end homelessness. we either affirm the right to shelter for the worst drunken, lying, filthy, cheating, self destructive homeless people that exist, genuinely irredeemable wankers, or we concede that shelter is not a right

This post is the distilled essence of everything I believe in.

edmund pevensie probably felt for jadis the white witch what old-timey gay men felt for judy garland

St. Brendan the Navigator giving Holy Communion to a mermaid

Tamed, 1910, by Marian Wawrzeniecki

To anyone who believes fairy tale romances never happen in real life, may I remind you that JRR and Edith Tolkien met and experienced a forbidden love in their youth, and then were separated for five whole years because of his guardian’s rules that he could not date till he was 21, and she got engaged to someone else only because she assumed he’d forgotten her and lost hope that she could ever be with him, but then on his 21st birthday, he wrote her a letter saying he still loved her and wanted to marry her, she responded basically saying ‘if I’d known you hadn’t left me on the shelf, I would never have said yes to anyone else,’ then a week later she greeted him at the train station and then immediately dumped her fiancé, and they got married and she converted to his religion and danced for him in a flowering field far away from the trenches into which he was drafted, which left such an impression that he crafted an entire story about the most beautiful maiden in the world who danced in the woods and made enormous sacrifices to be with the man she loved, and they had four kids and remained faithful to each other and blissfully grew old together and their gravestones are now marked with the names of that same fictional couple that he created, who broke every rule and overcame every possible obstacle to be together and get a happy ending, who only did all that because he based it all on their own real love story.

Knowing all this has always made this bit of Beren’s song instantly reduce me to tears:

Tolkien straight up wrote a poem that said “the world could end, but it wouldn’t have all been pointless, because she was in this world, however briefly, and that justified all the rest.” Kills me.

Who can outdo Wife Guy Tolkien? Dude was writing elaborate AUs where his wife is an impossibly beautiful magic-wielding immortal elf princess who fights Satan and wins to rescue her human boyfriend from Satan’s doom fortress. Flawless.

pay phone shrine

from barucormorant on pinterest

it is difficult to live in the present, pointless to live in the future and impossible to live in the past.

A triggered lightning strike at the Camp Blanding facility, International Center for Lightning Research and Testing—ICLRT

Gdańsk Stocznia

Leonard Cohen, from The Book of Mercy (1984)

[Text ID (added paragraph breaks): "Israel, and you who call yourself Israel, the Church who calls itself Israel, and the revolt that calls itself Israel, and every nation chosen to be a nation—none of these lands are yours, all of you are thieves of holiness, all of you at war with Mercy.

Who will say it? Will America say We have stolen it, or will France step down? Will Russia confess, or will Poland say, We have sinned? All bloated on their scraps of destiny, all swaggering in the immunity of superstition.

Ishmael, who was saved in the wilderness, and given shade in the desert, and a deadly treasure under you: has Mercy made you wise? Will Ishmael declare, We are in debt forever? Therefore the lands belong to none of you, the borders do not hold, the Law will never serve the lawless.

To every people the land is given on condition. Perceived or not, there is a Covenant, beyond the constitution, beyond sovereign guarantee, beyond the nation's sweetest dreams of itself. The Covenant is broken, the condition is dishonored, have you not noticed that the world has been taken away? You have no place, you will wander through yourselves from generation to generation without a thread.

Therefore you rule over chaos, you hoist your flags with no authority, and the heart that is still alive hates you, and the remnant of Mercy is ashamed to look at you.

You decompose behind your flimsy armor, your stench alarms you, your panic strikes at love.

The land is not yours, the land has been taken back, your shrines fall through empty air, your tablets are quickly revised, and you bow down to hell beside your hired torturers, and still you count your battalions and crank out your marching songs.

Your righteous enemy is listening. He hears your anthems full of blood and vanity, and your children singing to themselves. He has overturned the vehicle of nationhood, he has spilled the precious cargo, and every nation he has taken back.

Because you are swollen with your little time. Because you do not wrestle with your angel. Because you dare to live without God. Because your cowardice has led you to believe that the victor does not limp."]

playing trivia games as a nonamerican introduces a real element of chaos because sometimes the super easy beginner questions are like what was the top selling brand of toilet paper in texarkana in 1972 and sometimes the hardest questions will be like oh no a super tricky one for you: what country are dutch people from?

I usually try to be tolerant of anachronisms in books, particularly ye olde medieval generic swords and sorcery type books, but I think I broke the sound barrier with how quickly I just shot out of my immersion in this book when ye olde ancient archivist in the ye olde fantasy-england castle's library tells the protag where to find a certain book by giving him its dewey decimal number.

Today in an arthurian retelling set in pre-saxon britain I encountered a character who said he was going to quit drinking "cold turkey," which I think puts him roughly a thousand years prior to European awareness of the existence of turkeys, and the dissonance had barely registered in my mind before I remembered the medieval lending library run on the dewey decimal system and decided a chronologically misplaced poultry idiom wasn't worth noticing in comparison.

Absolutely insane lines to just drop in the middle of an academic text btw. Feeling so normal about this.

[ A Critical History of English Literature, Vol. 1, Prof. David Daiches, first published in 1960 ]

"may this great plague pass by me and my friends, and restore us once more to joy and gladness"

Feeling a powerful kinship with this scribe from 1350 today.

OTD (Christmas Eve), 670 years ago

[For example, a note on p. 36 gives the text a definite fourteenth-century date and a Mac Aodhagain provenance to this manuscript:

It is one thousand three hundred and fifty years tonight since Jesus Christ was born, and in the second year of the coming of the plague to Ireland was this written and I myself am full twenty one years old....and let every reader in pity recite a ‘pater’ for my soul. It is Christmas Eve tonight, and under the protection of the King of Heaven and earth I am on this Eve tonight. May the end of my life be holy and may this great plague pass by me and my friends, and restore us once more to joy and gladness. Amen. Pater Noster. Aed, Mac Concubair mac Gilla na Naem, Mic Duinnslebe Mic Aodhagain wrote this on his father’s book the year of the great plague.

The following year he wrote at the top of the same page:

It is just a year tonight since I wrote the lines on the margin below; and, if it be God’s will, may I reach the anniversary of this night many times. Amen. Pater Noster.

Translation by R.I. Best.]

Thank you for transcribing the image! I always forget to do that.

It is just a year tonight since I shared this... may we reach the anniversary of this night many times.

From MS 1316, Trinity College Dublin:

You can see Aodh Mac Aodhagáin's notes at the top and bottom of the page.