writer-of-random-things

[writer-of-random-things]

On the Nature of Holmes & Watson (& Trevor)

This was meant to be a meta, but in reality it's probably just going to be a rambly wall of text and emotions. Oh well.

Something that always captivated me about the ACD canon was how...special Holmes and Watson were. They were unique in their commonality, their casualness. The Holmes stories had served as the blueprint of the modern detective genre in itself--I had expected a sidekick. What I had not expected was the way the sidekick and detective came to be; to be remembered as one of the greatest friendships in literary history.

There is something so inexplicably beautiful about a lost, lonely, war-weary veteran returning to a city of thousands. A 'cesspool' of a city, he calls it; and yet somehow, in some way, he manages to find a enigmatic, strange person that needed Watson as much as he did him. In STUD, Watson mentioned how he spent his days before meeting Holmes wasting his days, idling about from hotel room to hotel room. After all the war and trauma, only followed by the banality and blandness of living in a city that is thronging with distant people, I can't help but think how much Watson and Holmes saved each other. Yes, over the course of their many adventures, they have saved the other's life many times. But I like to think that they saved each other from themselves; from the loneliness and the struggles they faced. Watson finally had something to do with his life again through accompanying Holmes and chronicling his exploits. Holmes finally had something he could project his ideas off of, somebody that could appreciate and constantly be in awe of his talents. Somebody that could help him when needed, and sit in comfortable silence or conversation; someone to make him not alone.

This is very important for Holmes. I suppose anybody who read the ACD canon already knows this already. But for all we know, the last friend Holmes had was Victor Trevor, who was just alone as he was. And Trevor left to work on a tea plantation in Nepal after the events of 'The Gloria Scott' (...I don't know why Conan Doyle made him do that. Is it because the British like tea so much?). The point is, Holmes was alone again. The great detective, who often liked to present his ideas as if he was an monologuing actor, was alone on the stage, with no one in the audience to clap for him. Then Watson came along, and Holmes became a prominent detective; but more importantly, he gained a lifelong friend.

At the end of the day, that's why I keep returning to the Holmes stories. Yes, Sherlock Holmes is brilliant; yes, the cases are intriguing and I love Victorian literature so much that I would've probably read it even if I wasn't invested in the characters. But at the heart of every case is the friendship between these lost, lonely men, who somehow found each other in a city of millions and made the best of it. The ACD canon is as much about mystery as it is human connection. I can't properly express it, but wherever the stories take place--on the windy hills of Dartmoor, the countryside of Reigate, or the crackling fire of Baker Street--Holmes and Watson will always be there, side by side. We see this, in every adaptation since.

They are truly the fixed point in a changing age, and I love them for it.

#acd holmes #acd canon #sherlock holmes #dr watson #uh victor trevor too I guess #me rambling

[writer-of-random-things]

Hey, happy Earth Day! Who wants to talk about climate change?

Yeah, okay, fair, I kinda figured the answer to that would be "ugh do we have to?" What if I told you I have good news though? Good news with caveats, but still good news.

What if I told you that since the Paris Agreement in 2015, we've avoided a whole degree celsius of global warming by 2100, or maybe more?

Current projections are 2.7C, which is way better than the 3-5C (with a median of 3.7C) we were expecting in 2015. It's not where we want to be - 1.5C - but it is big, noticeable progress!

And it's not like we either hit 1.5C and avoid all the big scary consequences or fail to hit 1.5C and get all of them - every tenth of a degree of warming we avoid is going to prevent more severe problems like extreme weather, sea level rise, etc.

This means that climate change mitigation efforts are having a noticeable impact! This means a dramatically better, safer future - and if we keep pushing, we could lower the amount of global warming we end up with even further. This is huge progress, and we need to celebrate it, even though the fight isn't over.

It's working. Keep going.

#climate change #climate action #we can't save everything but every fraction of a degree matters; there's so much we have already saved and need to continue saving

[writer-of-random-things]

I'm sure you may have seen a lot of "how to inoculate yourself against climate disinformation" posts, but we're experiencing a huge amount of content paid for by Fossil Fuel Interest's to put pressure on the internet. And it's been really concentrated for a few months.

The funding is pushing for a cultural shift for people who are undecided in the climate conversation and are possibly more easily swayed. And it's important to remember, fossil fuel interests wouldn't pay for it if they didn't need it.

Most of the disinfo looks like "yeah climate change is real but we can't possibly do anything to fix it" or "these solutions simply don't work." about solutions that are tried and true. They look a lot like nuanced takes, but specifically are trying to motivate inaction.

So if you wake up today and ask "what can I do today that makes a difference?" is honestly post a lot to tip the scales regarding the presentation climate solutions. Silly or serious, for example posting about renewables getting you excited, community food forests that are feeding people, cool solutions to targeting methane, etc. Post about a climate book or show you liked, or whatever. Just make sure it's clear to an onlooker that there are people who believe climate change is anthropogenic, it was mostly caused by extractive practices and fossil fuel use, and that we can still demand rapid action to fix it. And all of this is true, because the science supports it.

#climate solutions

[writer-of-random-things]

Saddest thing ever is reading an academic paper about a threatened or declining species where you can tell the author is really trying to come up with ways the animal could hypothetically be useful to humans in a desperate attempt to get someone to care. Nobody gives a shit about the animals that “don’t affect” us and it seriously breaks my heart

[writer-of-random-things]

I finished the first honeycomb patch! This one’s a tribute to Cosmo Sheldrake and his wonderfully weird music.

The whole thing is a compass, overgrown with moss and plants and lichen and fungi, with the marker for north just visible. It’s based on the lyrics “Legend has it that the moss grows on the north side of the trees” from one of his first songs, “The Moss”.

There are also smaller references to his other albums:

- A blue fish for The Much Much How How and I (album with Birthday Suit and Come Along)

- Water bubbles for Wild Wet World

- A grayscale wing for his bird albums: Wake up Calls, Galapagos, and Pelicans We

- An eye on a stalk for the upcoming Eye To The Ear

Additionally, the fungi are styled after the illustrations in Entangled Life, a book on fungi written by Cosmo’s brother Merlin

Original concept sheet below the cut

#go on make a whole beehive and I'll be there for it #ily mutuals

[writer-of-random-things]

A Poem About Nothing

If we are all stardust then we are part of nothingness Particles floating somewhere, lost and lonely in the universe Silent, wandering, wondering The words we speak, the actions we do, every memory of beauty and pain and everything in between Vanish Faced with our inevitable descent into obscurity Even our names Etched on lifeless slabs of marble in the somber graveyard Will be washed away by years of wind and rain, its fragility a testament to the nothingness within us, around us, of us. In the nothingness that pervades the air That fills the gaps between the words we speak In the moments and memories that slip from our minds There is also: The laughter of a friend The warmth of sunlight on skin The blossoming tree, weighed down by silken petals and pollen Dreams and wishes, hope taking humanity's hand. So I ask-- Is this also nothing? Do we really amount to nothing? I do not have the answer. But I think I can find it the hum of heartbeats and hope, the rhythm of kind words and rolling laughter. At the end of the world, we are all nothing. At the end of the world, we just might return to stardust wandering lost and lonely in the universe Yet Nothingness cannot exist without something to contrast it, this something can be described in a single word: Us. We spend our lives in nothingness to decide how to make something of it And so together, with our broken pieces and sweet nothings, all trying to do something--handfuls of stardust mirrored in the tapestry of the sky--

We can be everything.

#existential poetry I wrote on my schoolwork before finals #except it's been sitting in my drafts for so long I'm nearing my second round of finals #it's the only way to do it #anyway #my terrible poetry

[writer-of-random-things]

et tu brute?

#happy ides of march everybody #julius caesar

[writer-of-random-things]

GNU Sir Terry Pratchett ❤️‍🩹

#may he forever be in the care of the reaper man #a man's not dead while his name is still spoken #gnu terry pratchett

[writer-of-random-things]

"Hope is famously the thing with feathers, the creature at the bottom of Pandora's box, the last feeling humanity will ever have."

Just that sentence in itself would have obliterated me but nooooo you analyzed an album's worth of songs as well. Beautiful.

@activatebutterflyshield has really outdone themselves here, please do them a favor and read this!!!

Something something the album Coyote Stories by The Crane Wives is about the current objectively horrid state of the world and also a call to action on changing that.

Okay. Starting with “Keep You Safe”. Here, the singer starts out as a young adventuring child who is afraid of joining their friends in slightly dangerous games. They never joined in, too afraid to face the consequences. As they grow up, they get more and more scared of the world as they see more and more slightly dangerous things happening around them. The refrain is a mantra that “Time is not your friend / Time is not your remedy / No amount of waiting will make you, make you brave / No amount of fear will keep you / No amount of fear will keep you safe”. The singer in this song is symbolic of the current state of the world, with so many people afraid of what is to come. The fears keep on piling up, from climate change to war to so many other things, and the people stay afraid, but they never grow any safer by being afraid. Time can and will march on, and, as the song says, “Come what may”.

Going on to “The Moon Will Sing”. The singer speaks of an unfulfilling relationship, with someone or something that keeps on leading them on but never fulfilling their promises. They mindlessly follow the something, and quietly ignored their neglected heart for a time. The chorus is “The moon will sing a song for me / I loved you like the sun / Bore the shadows that you made / With no light of my own”, in which the singer is lamenting their neglected state, but is also speaking of it in the past tense. They’ve moved on now, and are recalling the unhappy past. The singer in this case still represents the state of the world, but of a slightly altered state. They used to be in a bad place, but they’ve changed for the better, reflecting how the world has started to shift for the better. We’ve caught sight of our sorry state and are trying to remedy that.

Next is “Allies or Enemies”. This one is blunt and very personal. The singer immediately references “wildfires and weeds”, as well as an “awful damn disease”, all of which are rather familiar to 21st century Homo sapiens as omnipresent news headlines in the backgrounds and foregrounds of our lives. We are intertwined with these tragedies just as the singer is intertwined with the subject of their song, to the point that neither can conceive of a world without the tragedy or the subject. Anything and everything may or may not happen, as “All is fair in love and war”, but if this dynamic keeps up, it will be “the death of me”.

“Unraveling” is mostly a heaping pile of metaphors and symbolism. The singer is lamenting their lost loves, people who seemed to care for them before disappearing without a word. Though these men were kind and seemed to help, each and every one would eventually disappear and leave the singer worse for wear. Perhaps the best line to be applied to the world’s current state is the one about the carpenter: “Sanded my rough edges, crafted new and lovely things / But now my love is gone / And I can’t help the fracturing”. The carpenter represents the groups and people who have shepherded the world into its current state, keeping the population complacent by plying them with pretty little gifts and things to distract them while profiting all they can. But as soon as the carpenter has gotten what they wanted, they leave the world to its own devices to deal with the consequences of their profiteering. These profiteers are partially the ones at fault for the current state of the world.

“Hard Sell” does, in fact, hit hard. The singer is clearly going through something rough, holding themself together through sheer will to live. They’re trying so hard to get better, but it’s so hard to improve that it seems that they’re “working with barbed wire and moth wings”. To go on a tangent, the decision to specifically say “moth wings” and not bird or fly wings evokes (in my biology-addled brain) the image of salt and pepper moths. These are moths that rapidly evolved to have darker coloration thanks to the sooty, polluted conditions of the Industrial Revolution. The singer is using the only things they have: a metal material designed to harm and keep out and the wings of an animal greatly impacted by human-spurred climate change, and they’re lamenting that it seems that everyone might be going through the same thing. And its true; we’re all facing the same consequences of the state of the world in one form or another, and the only difference is how we present ourselves to the rest of the victims out there. We’re all affected, and we all need to “stop pretending now” and get something done.

Finally made it to “Rockslide”, the song that got me down this track in the first place. It has a runaway rhythm with a singer that speaks of feeling the “wild weather” that’s “got the mountain shaking weak”, and of the “quaking” of “rocks … a’tumblin while the people are asleep”. That wild weather is all the rapid and negative changes rocking the world, or the mountain. And the rocks are the consequences crashing towards the people so ignorant they might as well be asleep. Though the singer prays that they might keep their soul and that “you”, whom they’re singing to, wants to settle down, they also acknowledge that they must run or “the devil we will meet”. The people of the world must run, or make changes, else they’ll face the horrible consequences, or the devil. The devil, or “monster”, is coming and does not care what it hits.

On to “Metaphor”. Oh boy, “Metaphor”. The singer here is someone broken, jaded, the sort of person who’s been hurt ten too many times. They are a liar, a scavenger, a (metaphorical) killer. “You can’t trust a single thing I say”, they sing, because they’ve been lied to and forced to survive in the corners and the margins of the world. They are loud, they are hurt, and by goodness do they not want to go through that again. I really shouldn’t have to say why this is all to real to so many people in this world. They’re the ugly, hard to look at truth of the world, the headline you’re afraid to finish reading, the words just a little too raw to be fake. “I’ve gotten good at making up metaphors”, they sing, because that truth is too hard to bear without at least a little bit of sugarcoating.

Now comes “The Hand That Feeds”. Do I really need to explain this one? “I’ve seen good men spoiled / Chained to their jobs like hounds / They work and sleep, and work again / In the darkest nights they howl”. The people of the world, those who by all measures should not suffer, are chained and bound, deprived of freedom beyond their desperate laments. This is the fate the singer’s father wants his child to avoid, the snare he wishes them to see and remain free of. They sing of how “He taught me that the hand that feeds / Deserves to be bitten when it beats”. No matter how good it looks, you should never take the deal. Never shake the hand of the devil, despite his honeyed words, and remain your own self. That hand only wants to drag you down deeper.

Next is “Little Soldiers”. Okay when I started writing this thing I had just finished All Quiet on the Western Front and so I had a lot of sad war metaphors about this one, but it’s been a while and most of them have vacated my brain in the meantime, so… here goes. “On the broken backs of all the words we spared” they sing, “Like little soldiers in the trenches / It was a march we made towards ruin and despair / but we held hands all the while”. The singer here is recovering from a horrible loss, of the ending of a relationship they thought was good and healthy, but in reality was false to both parties. Both the singer and their former partner are representative of the common suffering of the common people, of their past struggles and strife, and how, in the end, they banded together to fight for each other. The refrain reflects this bittersweet dynamic, switching between “I swear that I loved you” and “I swear that you loved me”. The common love was the only good thing in the lives of the partners, and is all they can look back to in the end.

Following is “Sleeping Giants”, with a return to a feel similar to that of “Rockslide”, as forces beyond mortal comprehension threaten to wake. “I feel the mountains / Shifting under me / The sleeping giants are finally waking”. The singer is hyper aware that they are in danger, and said danger is something so alien, so powerful, and as unexpected as the land itself was shifting beneath their feet. Their pulse is racing, they are in fight-or-flight as all those prophecies from the previous songs in the album begin to come true. “The moon is humming / Lovely melodies / The forest echos, the trees are crowing / Hungry, hungry harmonies”. Natural keystones as far separated as the trees on the Earth and the moon in the sky are calling out in tandem, something is wrong. Something is terribly, horribly wrong.

A rather abrupt tone shift as “Of Everlong” follows. It’s a very short song, barely more than a minute, and its poetry is perhaps the strongest. I’ll just write the whole thing here.

“Out of the ocean / Over the harbor / Lay no sons and / Lay no daughters / Among the mountains of everlong / Twas there I wrote me / A sad, sad song / And if my lover / Will not hear it / Take my voice and / Take my spirit / Leave me weakened / And dig my hole / Only my lover not I can keep my soul / Only my lover not I can keep my soul”.

The singer, a lover much like the one mentioned in “Little Soldiers”, is singing a lament that they are alone, here in the mountains of everlong, beyond all reach of other people. Here they sing of what they have lost, or perhaps never had, a tune that can only echo about those mountains and never reach beyond the ocean. They declare that they’d rather die than never see their beloved again, consigning themself to eternal loneliness rather than risk breaking their heart all over again. Theirs is a song of what was and what will never be, of a world of memories that was long taken by the mists and will never emerge from the horizon with the breaking dawn.

It stays melancholy with “Never Love an Anchor”, with a rocking rhythm like a ship in a calm sea, and a singer who laments that they were never enough for their beloved. They were unable to care for their child, their spark of light impossibly kindled in a life made of sorrow, and feel that it is all their fault. “And I tried to do the best that I could / But try as I might I couldn’t bring myself to hold you”, they cry, a gentle, quiet admittance of defeat. They knew that they could never be enough, and so gave a chance to their beloved in exchange for defying their own selfish desires. This singer acted for the good of the many rather than the good of the few, giving what hope they did have to the little one so that they may rise just a bit higher. “On some level, I think I always understood / That a ship could never really love an anchor”, they sing, an admittance of their own failings, and a declaration that their beloved will be better, will have some brighter future, some breaking dawn at the horizon to look forward to.

The final song of the album is “New Discovery”. It’s a final declaration of the singer’s hope for a brighter future, of some true and real goal that they might strive for. It may not be real, it may be a mirage, but by goodness will they bite and claw and fight for it. “I want to believe / There’s something left for me / A new discovery”. It’s a hope, a faraway paradise, an impossible pipe dream, but it’s something. And to a person at the very end of their rope, to those who might sing of their trials and tribulations and torments and tragedies, something can be everything. It doesn’t need to be grand, or golden, or even great. It just needs to be better. And that is something everyone should be able to get behind.

Hope is famously that thing with feathers, the creature at the bottom of Pandora’s box, the last feeling humanity will ever have. It will drive us on through the deep, dark night, be our guiding lantern in the shadow of the dragon, and when we see the light of the sun shatter over the eastern horizon, we’ll think, yes. One more day. One more day to live and to learn, one more chance at making things better. There will always be nights; times of death and destruction will come again and again for the foreseeable future. But the night is always followed by the day, by hope and a new chance to take another step towards a better future.

Never stop fighting to see that next dawn, to once again behold the sun declaring that a new day has risen.

Never stop working to make things better.

#the crane wives #mutuals my beloved #hope

[writer-of-random-things]

To the Nightingale

This was supposed to be for a school activity, and then it spiraled into something else completely (by 'something else' I mean I made it about Good Omens).

Therefore, I present a little thing I wrote in the style of romantic-era poets (though said poets probably had a much better rhyme scheme than me):

To the Nightingale To the nightingale  That tells the tale In the star-dappled canvas of night  Tell me, of whom do you sing? Your tone so sorrow-steeped and bright  There must be someone wandering the lonely earth That weeps at your warbling ring. Even if you trilled your tune from the brimstone depths of unforgiving hell There would be an sympathetic angel in the marble heaven In which tears would untimely well. And the crystal tears of the angel would fall  Upon cottages, park benches, bookshops of any size  Descending like rain that graced the garden wall  On the lovers and the dreamers, the demons in disguise. What the angel cannot see  Amidst all his mournful sighs  Is that down on the lonely earth Sits a lonesome being with head raised up high  Looking for a sweet-throated bird  That might grace the sky.  And in that being tears will start  even without a song;  For the nightingale once entered his heart with promises of love But left it scratched and torn for winters long.  So the earth cries below And the heaven above  As deep down the hellfire blazes with sorrow;  Oh nightingale!  Of whom do you sing?  Whether you sing of the blooming rose Or the blackened thorn  Please remember, nightingale, to spare a note for the lost and the unforgivable  Cursed to always mourn. 

#good omens #nightingales #my terrible poetry #good omens fanwork i guess? Although it was never intended as such

[writer-of-random-things]

So. As a person who got bored and decided to check out Nimona like two hours ago, after hearing on Tumblr that they had uploaded the whole thing to YouTube... everything OP said. Absolutely everything.

Nimona, I think, is what children's media should be.

Hadn't watched Nimona until tonight. I had heard bits and pieces about it but was otherwise blind to the plot of the film. I honestly was not expecting the movie to go THAT hard with its themes, and the fact that it hits closer to home now than when it was released is quite haunting.

#nimona #everybody go watch it now please #pretty please #Before Netflix takes it down again #me rambling

[writer-of-random-things]

Mycena subcyanocephala for Funguary!

[writer-of-random-things]

Skating mush!!!

[writer-of-random-things]

Let's see if Tumblr knows their twisted classical texts. (I mean, Shakespeare isn't classical but Titus Andronicus was too good of an option to pass on).

Reblog for a larger sample size!

#tagamemnon #shakespeare #sophocles #aristophanes #yes I just put thesmophoriazusae in there for the sillies

[writer-of-random-things]

Everybody look at this please and give @activatebutterflyshield some love. I'm begging you. Screaming under the cut.

AAAAAAAAA SNEK CROWLEY IS SO ADORABLE THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU

A little something for @writer-of-random-things. It’s intended to be a profile pic, but I hope you like it no matter how you use it!

#I'm at a family gathering how dare you make me scream out loud #thank you!!!!! #SNEK #don't get me started about the feather pen

[writer-of-random-things]

happy year of the dragon!

#新年快樂！ #the bunnies are adorable #春節

[writer-of-random-things]

hey amtrak, quick question can u give us the empty template for ur pfp and do a competition of who can make u the best pfp

Okay, if you can make a good edit, you will win my admiration. I can't wait to see the results

#renewable energy + public transportation reeeee #anyway #yay