Jane Austen really said ‘I respect the “I can fix him” movement but that’s just not me. He’ll fix himself if knows what’s good for him’ and that’s why her works are still calling the shots today.
Meanwhile Emily Brönte just said “We can make each other worse.”
Mary Shelley said, “I can make him
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#I didn’t actually laugh aloud but it still amused me enough to reblog #Frankenstein #this post was queued because my to-reblog list is too long and I didn’t want to dump it on you all at once
There is a forbidden type of magic out there. It isn’t forbidden because it’s inherently evil, or forces you to lose your humanity, or requires human sacrifices – it’s just forbidden because it’s annoying as heck to fight against.
“Ma’am, I really must insist that you pay for the room and board I’ve been giving you! It’s been a week!”“Fine, fine,” I grumble. “I have a few options for payment: I could give you paper money, cheap gaudy jewelry, chocolate coins, spiders, some pretty seashells-”
“Spiders????” he repeats, baffled.
“Spiders it is, then,” I agree equitably, and with a wave of my hand the bed I’ve been sleeping in for the last week turns into a writhing mass of various spiders.
Worth it.
—
“Stop right there! You’re under arrest for fraud, destruction of property, and-!”
I yawn. “Didn’t ask, don’t care.” A few gestures, and the guards’ swords are all transmuted into spiders, and then they’re too busy to worry about little ol’ me.
—
“You have insulted my honor and humiliated me in front of my children! I demand satisfaction! I demand a wizard’s duel!”
Shrugging, I say, “Sure, okay, whatever. Right here and now okay?”
The pompous wizard-noble blinks. “I- you don’t want to prepare? Get your wizard’s staff or anything?”
“Nah, I’m pretty good with somatic gestures.”
“Well, if you’re sure… here and now then! Have at you!” He slams his staff down on the ground dramatically, a small shockwave of fire radiating out from the impact.
So of course, I turn his staff into spiders.
“AHHHH WHAT THE FUCK WHAT THE FUCK”
“So if you’re too busy screaming to cast spells, does that mean I win?”
“AUGH ONE OF THEM BIT ME”
“I’m taking that as a yes.”
—
After that, they start coming at me in waves, with cheap wands and staves and swords and bows bought in bulk, hoping to exhaust my magical reserves so they can get close enough to put a magic inhibitor on me.
They did not expect my reserves to be as vast as they were, not did they expect me to be able to transmute the inhibitors themselves into spiders.
“Didn’t you take Magic Basics in wizard college?” I yell at the panicking mages. “Inhibitors aren’t immune to magic until the moment they activate! Serious weak point in the design, tell your magitechnicians to fix that!”
—
So of course they try assassins next.
Poison fails, because I transmute any food and drink I get into spiders and then transmute them back. Pretty easy way to get rid of poison.
So then they try knives in dark alleys. The knives bruise through my full-body spider-silk outfit, but do not penetrate, and they only get one shot before they have bigger problems.
Next is killing me in my sleep. None live to report back that the human-shaped lump under the blankets is actually a mass of highly venomous spiders.
The kingdom throws everything it has at me, and I continue to walk away, heralded by the chittering of spiders and the screams of everyone else.
—
Finally, I stand before the king himself in his overly opulent throne room, and by now he is a broken shell of a man in the face of my unorthodox tactics.
Good.
“What do you want?” he practically sobs. “You’ve singlehandedly redirected the entire crown’s budget for the next three years into replacing every weapon you’ve turned into spiders. Much more and we’ll be invaded by our neighbors! We wouldn’t be able to resist being annexed! So what can I give you to make you stop doing this?!”
I pause and pretend to consider, tapping a finger against my chin thoughtfully. “You know, you sent my brother off to war a few years back. That conflict with the Yughs up north, I believe. He didn’t want to go, so your guards forced him at spearpoint. I haven’t seen him since.”
He seizes on that, as I expected. “Yes, yes, I’ll have him returned right away! Tell me his name and I’ll honorably release him from duty and have him escorted safely home!”
“Oh?” I raise one sardonic eyebrow. “Are you able to bring back the dead now, oh wise and glorious king?”
He pales, and it’s the most satisfying thing I’ve seen in years.
“You have nothing I want,” I growl, letting the anger slip through for the first time in years. “You cannot bring him back, you cannot make up for my loss with all the riches in your kingdom. The only thing I want is to take everything from you, the way you did to me. Your kingdom will bleed out of resources, one of the neighboring countries you’ve been trying to conquer for decades now will take advantage and annex this place, and you will either be executed or forced to work for a living for the first time in your life.”
I glare at him, and he refuses to meet my eyes. “You will lose everything you ever cared about in your life. One spider at a time.”
I transmute his throne and crown into spiders (non-deadly; he doesn’t get to escape my wrath that easily), then turn and walk away, ignoring his screams and sobs.
—
And that’s why, when the Yughs finally annexed the kingdom I grew up in, they preemptively made Transarachnomancy a forbidden magical art. Not sure how they intend to enforce that, mind, but I’m not looking to challenge that. I’ve gotten what I wanted; if some other aspiring mage wants to try and follow in my footsteps, that’s not my problem.
Besides, in terms of magical skill, I’ve always been an outlier anyway. Most mages would be lucky to turn just one knife into a spider at a time; I can turn ten thousand with a few gestures. I doubt anyone will outdo my legacy.
But hey, if you want to try and surpass Georgia of the Spiders? Feel free. I’ll welcome the competition.
#that moment of dawning comprehension at ”I’ve always been an outlier anyway” #storytime #spiders #anything that makes me laugh this much deserves a reblog #Spiders Georg #murder cw? #death tw? #this post was queued because my to-reblog list is too long and I didn’t want to dump it on you all at once
sorry about the different-sized fonts idk what I’m doing 😎✌
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#I will be keeping an eye out for more of this book #out of context quotes #anything that makes me laugh this much deserves a reblog #vampires #embarrassment squick #death tw #murder cw #violence cw #this post was queued because my to-reblog list is too long and I didn’t want to dump it on you all at once
I’m going to attend a two-day geology conference wearing these
[ID: Two photos of T-shirts. The first shirt is red with a stop sign that says, “Help STOP continental drift.” The second says, “Reunite Pangea” with a globe that has a single continent. End ID]
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#geology #this post was queued because my to-reblog list is too long and I didn’t want to dump it on you all at once
A little more than two years ago now, my grandmother passed away. She and my grandpa had moved down to my home town a few years before so we could take care of them. I brought them groceries once a week, helped them write checks, fixed tvs, and found lost things. I was really close with my grandma.
In addition to her hilarious personality and dry wit, one of my favorite things about her was that she was a painter and a crafter like me! She used to crochet, and I took her to the craft store a couple of times so she could get more yarn and books on crochet. But her arthritis and the shaking in her hands kept getting worse, so she eventually had to stop.
She kept her most recent project, a granny square blanket, safely packed away in a plastic bin. She told all of us she was going to finish it one day.
Her hands never got better, and when she got sick, and we found out it was cancer, she rapidly deteriorated.
After she passed, I went to work helping my mom clean out my grandparents apartment so we could move my grandpa in with her. In our frantic cleaning, I found that bin again:
DOZENS of granny squares, dozens of half used skeins. I asked my mom what she wanted me to do with it, and she said she didn’t care. I set it aside and later took it home.
Maybe a month later, that tumblr post about the Loose EndsProject was going around. It felt like a sign–I was never going to learn to crochet in order to finish my grandmother’s blanket. But they might be able to help!
So I filled out the interest form. They got back to me SUPER quick. And maybe 2 weeks later, I was paired with volunteer in my state (only 2 hours away!) and the box of yarn, granny squares, and my grandmother’s crochet hook were in the mail. That was at the end of January this year.
Over the next couple of months, my “finisher” emailed me regular updates on her progress, and asked me questions on my preferences for how she constructed the final blanket.
At the end of August, the blanket was done!
I had always intended the blanket to be a gift for my mother. So I cleaned it up, put it in the only bag I had big enough to fit it, and drove to my mom’s. I gave the blanket to her and she was gobsmacked. I explained to her all about Loose Ends, and how someone volunteered to finish the piece for us. She was speechless. (I was quite pleased with this, because I am not the best at giving gifts, so this was a pretty exciting reaction!)
She said that it was the most thoughtful gift she had ever been given. She said “your grandma would love this”. To which I replied, “yeah, I know she really wanted to finish it a couple of years ago”. But that was when my mom dropped the bomb of a century on me–she told me that my grandma had started making those granny squares OVER 30 YEARS AGO. She had started the blanket when my grandpa was staying in the hospital, but that was back when my mom was younger than I am now! My grandma had packed them all away, planning on finishing it, when my grandpa was sent home from the hospital. Then it went from house to house, from condo in Chicago to their apartment in my hometown. All that time and my grandma had wanted to finish it, but couldn’t. First because she was busy, then because she forgot how to do it, then because of her arthritis, and then because of the cancer. My mom said she had given up on expecting my grandma to finish it.
She said I brought a piece of her childhood with her mom out of the past.
And really, all of this is to say, if you have seen or heard about the Loose Ends Project and have an uncompleted project or piece from a loved one who has passed away–these are your people. They were so kind and treated my project with such care. That box probably would have been found by my own grandkids one day if I hadn’t heard about Loose Ends.
Five stars, absolutely worth it!
(From what I understand, you can sign up to volunteer too! If you have time to share, it might be worth checking out!)
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#PSA #death tw #this post was queued because my to-reblog list is too long and I didn’t want to dump it on you all at once
#turtles #adorable #anything that makes me laugh this much deserves a reblog #embarrassment squick? #this post was queued because my to-reblog list is too long and I didn’t want to dump it on you all at once
One time my rabbi told us, “imagine you had a box with a little bit of god in it. What would you do with the box?”
So we were like ?? “We’d protect it and keep it nice and clean and polished” and he was like “your body’s that box. Stop eating markers”
Every time I come across this post the last sentence smacks me in the face
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#anything that makes me laugh this much deserves a reblog #Judaism #this probably deserves some warning tag but I am not sure what #poison cw? #this post was queued because my to-reblog list is too long and I didn’t want to dump it on you all at once
got blood work done today and i just remembered a time i got blood work done as a teen. after the nurse drew like 6 vials of the stuff, i asked him “is all that mine?” and he said “not any more” and walked off
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#got a point there #I didn’t actually laugh aloud but it still amused me enough to reblog #fun with loopholes #overly literal interpretations #medical cw #blood #embarrassment squick? #this post was queued because my to-reblog list is too long and I didn’t want to dump it on you all at once
#anything that makes me laugh this much deserves a reblog #overly literal interpretations #art #comics #this post was queued because my to-reblog list is too long and I didn’t want to dump it on you all at once
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