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kay-tf-volution · 28 days
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This is so fucking good it makes me ache.
you used to be able to do magic at the gas station
(ficlet, I have no idea)
You used to be able to do magic in the gas station.
Oh, if you hit the right time, the right clerk, the exact right bag of potato chips, I guess you still can.
But time was, you could buy a magic potion and a amulet from the bored guy behind the counter, pay for that and your cigarettes and your gas all at once.
Time was, a tank of gas would cost you ten dollars too, so let's not get too attached to the past, ok?
Nowadays, yeah, you can buy the potato chips, cast a nice protective circle with potato chips, and some of the energy drinks have real magic in them, but it's nothing like it used to be. Once upon a time a young woman and her beau could take twenty dollars and be in a different land by the end of the night.
Gas station magic is a particular kind of magic - it's gritty, it doesn't hold up in the light of day, it's got the scent of desparation on the exhale, but it works, every time.
Sometimes the magic was in the cigarettes, and we try not to talk about those times so much.
The potions would be in the drinks section just like the colas and the bottled waters, and they glowed green and pink and unnatural unearthly blue, and most of the time they'd have the ingredients printed right on the label. This one would take you to the fey lands, this one would give you the stamina to stay awake through finals, this one would help you find true love.
The potion makers eventually had to cave to the pressures of a government that preferred to regulate what people put in their bodies, and the magic was a little too uncertain. Potions were relegated to the places where the FDA stood down - "herbal" supplements and badly labeled energy shots and weird chocolates, and instead of being able to do magic and also go away intot he night for twenty dollars, it took twenty dollars to put enough gas in your car to get home safe, and another twenty to buy snacks and cigarettes for the trip, and now we were forty dollars in and you hadn't even gotten any magic.
Some people were especially good with potato chip spells, and those people could thrive in the new world, in the world where gas was four dollars a gallon and cigarettes were twelve dollars a pack. they could read fortunes in the oil-slick puddles under the pumps, and would charge two dollars a fortune. You didn't pay a gas station fortune teller until you were ready to hear the truth, because it was always the truth, and you never ever stiffed them on a tip.
The rainbow oil puddles and the scent of stale smoke and the slight tang of salt in the air, these days you could add those up and get magic.
Or you could add those up and get a gas station, at half past midnight on a Thursday night, a space slightly removed from time but not that magical in an of itself.
The old magic, the creeping slow magic of the vine and branch, the rushing streams and gusting wind, that never went away. But the middle magics, the magic from just about a generation ago, when it was cheap and plentiful and everyone walked around just bursting with it, that magic was all but gone now, gone with the dreams of a tech bubble, and the dregs of that were spread thin, providing just barely enough to the people left.
Time was, you could buy potions at the gas station, get to the fey lands for twenty dollars and an offered up American Spirit.
Not gonna lie, it's a little lonely on the border roads, now that it's a little harder to get here.
They still pay the tolls in American Spirits, though, and the potions on this side are a heck of a lot better. Cheaper, too.
Can't beat gas station potato chips for a protective circle though. Maybe the next tourist group will offer some of those up. The toll booth is running a little low.
This is the last gas station too, and the fortune tellers are starting to flock again. It's about time to send them on south, to the human lands, for the summer.
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kay-tf-volution · 2 months
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In mine and many other east Asian cultures, the dragon traditionally symbolises things like power, wealth and strength (imperial symbol and all)
I think we often forget that in the story of the Great Race, the dragon came in fifth because it'd stopped to give people rain. Then it'd stopped again to push a rabbit adrift on a log across the wide river so it reached the shore safely (that's why the Rabbit year comes before the Dragon).
Dragons aren't meant to just be powerful - they are meant to do good with such power, and to help those in need.
So in this lunar new year, I hope you gain more power, so that you might be able to help others. I pray you have abundant resources so you may give to yourself and those around you. I wish you courage, endurance, kindness and generosity, for yourself and your people.
I hope you, and I, will be rain givers, life preservers, joy bringers.
I hope we will be dragons.
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kay-tf-volution · 2 months
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Jesus I've mostly just been off Tumblr for months now, but came back to find something and find THIS? This is a gift to me on a terrible day, and I cannot thank you enough for it.
I hope your comic is amazing. I'd love it if you sent me a link.
I hope you're well.
Young-woo never has Quiet Hands (h/t to Julia Bascom)
I've been toying around with this post for a while, possibly since that early episode where Jun-ho started to reach out for Young-woo's hands, then didn't. It was in my mind during all those shots of Young-woo twisting her hands together until her knuckles were stark white. I was definitely thinking about it during the episode where the young girl self-harmed by scratching her hand. And I thought about it today when Jun-ho pinned Young-woo's wrists as part of getting her into a hug to help provide the sensory relief she needed.
We're going to proceed with the understanding that while this does not and would not work for everyone, that it did and does work for Young-woo, and I'm going to assume that Jun-ho, for whatever reason, had a reasonable belief that it would, that it wasn't just something he was doing to randomly restrain her.
For us to proceed, I really need you to go read this very brief post from Julia Bascom. I really don't think the rest of what I have to say will make sense without it. (And HUGE thanks to the internet sleuths who were able to help me find an essay with "It was like ten years old? And written by an autistic woman and started with a gif from Glee? Maybe her name started with J?" because the internet is a gift.)
Julia Bascom's piece on Quiet Hands.
This was the first piece of writing I ever read that was written by an (openly) autistic person. I sobbed reading it 8 or 9 years ago, and still can't make it through without crying. I walked into the next preschool meeting with a print out and slapped it down on the table and said "My child will never hear the words "quiet hands." I didn't know this at the time, but the way they looked at me with horror and said "We would absolutely never -" was a gift from god.
(I don't know if I actually need to say this, but do not ever defend ABA on my posts, I will block your ass so fast)
Every time I saw Young-woo's hands, every time they flap and move at her sides, every time she twists them around each other, every time she splays them out to the point I can imagine the tendons creaking, every time they come up near her face because she's excited or thinking or just feeling -
I flinch.
I wait for someone to stop her. To tell her that she's doing something wrong, to scold her, to make her be still, to stop being so strange (yes I chose that word on purpose).
No one ever told me "quiet hands!" but I knew I wasn't supposed to enjoy the feel of things the way I do, that I wasn't supposed to find my fingers fascinating. That I shouldn't wear endless bangles just to enjoy them jingling against each other. That, it occurs to me now, I've avoided replacing the leather band of my old pandora bracelet because when I was in the library and my hand was moving because the weight and the sound of it filled me with glee people began to glare.
I was 38 years old and I stopped flapping because people could see me.
No one tells Young-woo quiet hands.
@kdramedies pointed out that when Jun-ho has to grab Young-woo, when he's concerned because she's hitting herself in the head and could seriously injure herself, he moves his hands off her skin as quickly as possible, brings her arms in so that he's compressing all of her.
But he never touches her hands. He never stills her hands. He never, ever, makes her hands quiet.
He doesn't ever cut off her voice, and so she can tell him.
Tighter. Tighter.
I'm going to go replace that bracelet now, I think.
Tighter.
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kay-tf-volution · 3 months
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Evergreen.
“how’s the writing going?” i’m glad you asked! my room has never been cleaner and i’ve decided to take up baking
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kay-tf-volution · 3 months
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may you achieve all your creative aspirations in the new year, be it professionally, as a hobby, or both. may you gain everything you seek from it and allow it to bring you joy
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kay-tf-volution · 3 months
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“You need to believe in things that aren’t true. How else can they become” - Hogfather, Terry Pratchett
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kay-tf-volution · 3 months
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A frustrating part of the mainstream vegan “love all animals and protect the environment” mindset is the fact that things need to die in real-life ecology all the time but deer hunting season makes icky feelings and carp culls aren’t cottagecore
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kay-tf-volution · 4 months
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DOCTORDONNA DOCTORDONNA DOCTORDONNA DOCTORDONNA DOCTORDONNA
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kay-tf-volution · 4 months
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Reblog this post to cast Crumb of Serotonin on whoever you reblogged it from
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kay-tf-volution · 4 months
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not sure if this will make sense to anyone besides me but: the antidote to negativity is not positivity, its warmth
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kay-tf-volution · 4 months
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Is this a pre-order I see before me?!
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It is! Coming December 5th, the fourth of the Saint of Steel books!
You can pre-order now wherever fine ebooks are sold*, and paperback orders are available from Argyll Productions! And Patreon patrons get it free, probably a few hours before midnight my time on the 4th.
This is Shane and Marguerite’s book, and it’s a chonker at 130k. There may even be a few more tidbits about the death of the god, in amid the adventure, romance, demons, and semi-accidental destabilization of the world economy!
*UK readers, you may have some glitches—OrbitUK is taking over the distribution there and we’re still ironing out transferring territorial rights—if the pre-order gets canceled, just re-order, it’s not you, it’s not even me, it’s the vast machinery of international commerce. But you also will get a snazzy paperback printing of all four books next year, which will not require ruinous shipping to the UK!
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kay-tf-volution · 5 months
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“I feel very strongly that if historical romance can give women a happy ending, it can give queer people a happy ending. M/f historical romance doesn’t tie itself in knots over the likelihood of the rake having syphilis, the terrible dentistry, the lice, the prolapsed uterus after multiple pregnancies, the prospect of death in childbed, or the horrifying legal discrimination against married women. We don’t close the book on the wedding scene reflecting that the heroine can now be legally raped, has just lost all her property to her husband…and would be vanishingly unlikely to obtain a divorce. Historical romance readers aren’t stupid; we know this stuff, but we choose to believe our heroine will be one of the lucky ones. And I don’t see why we can’t extend that happy glow to other stories, too. If women’s lives don’t have to be blighted by social oppression in romance, neither do those of people of color or queer people. Moreover, human nature doesn’t change. A lot of what we read about LGBT people in history is appalling because the rec­ords we have are the legal documents, the newspaper reports, the accounts of people who were victimized. We don’t generally have the hidden stories of the people who lived under the radar…. But we know…people we’d now call gay, bi, trans have always existed and [that] as a matter of statistics plenty of them must have lived and died without ever coming to the law’s attention. Which is not to hand-wave the horrors of the past but only to say that horror isn’t the only story, and it’s not an acceptable reason to deny marginalized people their happy-ever-after.”
— KJ Charles (Library Journal interview)  (via bookgeekgrrl)
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kay-tf-volution · 5 months
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"Knitting is like sex. If I love you, it's free and I'm happy to do it. And if I don't, you cannot pay me enough."
--Barbara Benson
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kay-tf-volution · 5 months
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i don’t want to go into too many deets, but earlier this year we got really fucked over by some shit UPS pulled on us and it’s been majorly screwing with our production timeline so if you know anyone who wears a 5-8X and would like a cute skirt, there’s a bunch on clearance right now and it would really, really help out
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kay-tf-volution · 5 months
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im mostly interested in how many ppl are children of immigrants, so if one of your parents is an immigrant and one isn't, vote parents are immigrants. for previous generations, choose whichever applies to most members of that generation or if that doesn't work, whichever feels most right to you.
say where ur from in the tags!
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kay-tf-volution · 5 months
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There's a tendency to read war poetry in this very polite, reserved style that highlights the prettiness of Wilfred Owen's rhymes and rhythms. Christopher Eccleston is uninterested in letting you escape the horror of what the First World War poets (mostly wealthy, classically educated white men, Kitchener's Army, utterly unaware of what they were going to face in the trenches) saw in the war. It's not just his dramatic reading, it's his refusal to use a (what's it called? received English?) accent that sound polished and posh. He sounds, like Rose once said, like he's from the North.
Lots of boys in the trenches were from the North. And the colonies. And under 18 years old. And thinking they were going to France to have a jolly old time.
Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori.
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kay-tf-volution · 5 months
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Um or write 2500 words I guess?
I don't think these particular characters are EVER going to keep their clothes on. This is technically a romance but that technically is getting more and more, uh, technical...
I put a nanowrimo page in my bullet journal cue writer's block until December 1 in three....two...one...
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