Blokzezdjenciami - Omujbozeata

Temples are built for gods. Knowing this a farmer builds a small temple to see what kind of god turns up.

Russian school slang

📌 Камча́тка. Kamchatka Krai (Rus. Камчатский край, Камчатка) is this part of Russia –

At schools “камчатка” is also the last rows of tables in the classroom, where the rowdy and the D-students sit. 

(There is a joke that Kamchatka teachers call those rows “калининград” (see that tiny exclave on the far left of the map? That’s Kaliningrad Oblast), but they apparently don’t)

📌 Шпарга́лка/шпо́ра – a cheatnote/crib. Cheating is pretty widespread in Russian schools and colleges and isn’t a big deal (except for state exams and certain teachers). Usually called шпора for short (literally “spur”, as in something you put on boots)

📌 Бота́ник – a geek/nerd/swot, literally “a botanist”. Also отли́чник/зубри́ла – “an excellent student” (neutral, not slang)/”one who learns everything by heart” (a bit derogatory, as is the first one)

📌 Дво́ечник. In Russia a mark you get in class is a digit from 0 (lowest) to 5 (highest) (0 to 10 in Belarus, 0 to 12 in the Ukraine). A D-students are called двоечник – “one who gets twos”, a C-student is тро́ечник/середнячо́к – “one who gets threes (the lowest grade you need to pass)”/”average”, and a B-student is хороши́ст – “a good student” (just because четвёрочник and пятёрочник don’t sound good)

📌 Кол. Единица (the mark one out of five) is often called кол even by teachers – “stake/pole”. Двойка is sometimes па́ра – “pair”, тройка – троя́к.

📌 Зубри́ть/зубрёжка. Learning things by heart is expressed in a few words and phrases:

учить (несов. в.)/выучить (сов. в.) наизусть – to learn (smth) by heart

зубрить – to learn something without understanding, to cram; зубрёжка – cramming 

I had a dream that I lived in a town on the edge of reality. There was a map showing the location of the town in spacetime, and it was depicted as teetering on the edge of the event horizon of a funnel-shaped warp in reality. Like light a certain distance away from a black hole, we were unable to escape the influence of the warp, but not drawn in by it completely, either.

Our proximity to Unreality conferred many advantages, and we were able to do things in our town that weren’t actually possible. We could survive fatal accidents and walk away without a scratch. Things that were lost forever were found again, and sometimes, if you didn’t think about it too directly, failures transformed into successes just like that. It was as though thought itself was a physical substance that could bend the shape of the world in our favor. Life was good in the little town of Event Horizon, where things always seemed to work out and Lady Luck lived on our side.

But Event Horizon also experienced “reality-quakes”. Now and then the fabric of spacetime would ripple, and shockwaves would rock our little town violently. Sometimes things would shake loose and get drawn in to the Unreality, and even people could be lost this way. They quakes weren’t common, but they seemed to be occurring with more frequency, leading to fears that we were becoming unmoored in spacetime and might lose the equilibrium that allowed us to survive and take advantage of the flexibility of reality.

Thought could stabilize things, if we projected our minds as physical forces to hold things in place. You could cast your thoughts out as a net and pull against the draw of Unreality. But that only worked if we were prepared and braced ourselves against the quake ahead of time, and people needed to work and eat and sleep and go to school. There was no way that everyone could be on anchoring duty all the time.

That’s why we had a lottery. Every twenty years, one among us would be selected to by the community to be the Achor for the entire town—a full-time psychic resistance against entropy. The Anchor would enter a trance state and project their mind out to touch every structure, every tree, every pebble, every person in Event Horizon, and hold them there. Constantly. For twenty years.

People would come to tend to the Anchor, to feed and bathe them and keep them comfortable, but the Anchor rarely became lucid enough to recognize them. It was a vital, respected, honorable position, but there was no glory in it. If you found out you had been selected to be the next Anchor, your family would grieve for you as though you had died. If you had children, they would be taken care of in a princely fashion as wards of the state, and your family would be honored and want for nothing, because even though your assignment was only twenty years, former Anchors did not tend to live for very long. They’d be made comfortable and lavished with good things, but their life energy would be sapped, and they’d fade away quickly.

My dream was 90% exposition and very little in-the-moment action, but I had just discovered that I would be the new Anchor, and I was not happy about it. The most vivid action scene I remember was standing in my kitchen staring at breakfast cereal boxes on a shelf and touching them with my mind, feeling every grain of cereal within and thinking, “Even this? Even this?”

Anyway, thanks brain, that was cool.

Over the Garden Wall Analysis: The Beast

So I’m planning to post a few of these. I’ve gone through and watched the miniseries several times now and me and my friends have been talking about pretty frequently in the past month or so. We have a lot of ideas of symbolism and what do certain aspects of the shows represent.

This one in particular however I have to give credit to my friend Sydney because it took her one watch to crack this baby open. I hadn’t even thought of it and I haven’t seen one person to take this conclusion away even after multiple re-watches. Looking back on it though, it seems fairly obvious. 

It has to do with the beast and the idea of just what the heck is it?

The most common fan interpretation going around is that the beast resembles the devil, or something along those lines. A monster that feeds on dying souls. However, as a few of my friends pointed out, that interpretation doesn’t really make much sense.  If The Unknown is the Afterlife, then how would dying be of any real concern? Are you double dead at that point? Does your soul cease to exist? Double Dying is not a particularly novel idea and it does provide stakes to a story, but why does the Beast feed indiscriminately on children? And how does the Woodsman’s daughter come back at the end. There are some missing elements.  However, when we start to consider other elements of the show, the beast’s true identity becomes clear.  First things first, let’s take a look at an element nobody seems to be able to make sense of. That being the turtles. 

The Black Turtles are all over this show and most people who’ve tried to interpret them can’t really say that they are much more than a motif. But we know that isn’t true considering what they do to Beatrice’s Dog.

Beatrice’s Dog, smelling the candy Greg put on a turtle, eats it and then becomes a hideous monster with glowing eyes, hellbent on chasing the boys and devouring the entirety of Greg’s candy. The monster it becomes is terrifying and comes pretty close to ripping Greg and Wirt to shreds. So we know without a doubt the turtles have some kind of evil magic. 

Without the turtle, Beatrice’s dog is just a sweet puppy who even helps get Greg out of the river. The turtles make him malicious, and interestingly enough, obsessed with a thing he did when he ate the turtle in the first place. Getting all of Greg’s candy is all it cares about, to the point it jumps off of a house. 

The next time we see the Turtles is in The Ringing of the Bell, when Greg and Wirt encounter bunches of them kept in barrels. This is where people get confused about the turtles because we see Auntie Whispers eat them but without going through any kind of transformation. We assume Auntie Whispers initially is evil but later discover she’s a kind old woman just trying to protect Lorna, and she even warns the boys about Adelaide. However there is one character in the show who is corrupted by evil. 

We don’t know if Lorna ate a turtle or not, but it is interesting she’s another good person turned crazy after being in close proximity to them. I’m going to say she didn’t eat them though, as when Wirt commands the spirit to leave, Lorna isn’t coughing up any black turtles. Auntie Wither’s also mentions it’s Greg and Wirt’s influence that has made her wicked again. But what does Lorna affectionately refer to them as? Her turtles. They are a corrupting force just like the turtles, something Lorna would know, and they corrupt her in the same way the turtles corrupt Beatrice’s Dog. Why then does Auntie Whisper’s have all these turtles? Well, we know Auntie Whisper’s is a good woman, if a bit strange looking, and also has magical abilities. Perhaps she’s eating the turtles as a way of disposing of them to keep them from hurting other people, and over the years it’s taken its toll on her physical appearance. Either way, this is sort of where we begin to see how evil corrupts souls in The Unknown. Unlike Beatrice’s Dog, the spirit possessing Lorna is a lot more conniving of an evil monster. It uses her voice to speak to Greg and Wirt to try and convince them to let her eat them. It’s a bit more plotting.  So now let’s look at the beast. A strange monster running around in the woods lying and manipulating people into keeping its lantern lit. However, interestingly enough, we have no idea how long the Beast has been around. It could be generations, or it could be a few months. We have no idea. The woodsman and the tavern people let us know what the Beast does, but it could be the Beast has only been doing it for a few weeks. The warning would be the same either way.  Let’s say a person, or rather a child, curiously wandered out into the woods and got lost in the dark. Frightened, they ran out of oil for the lamp, and were caught wandering blindly through the forest. Now let’s say that person somehow wound up eating a turtle, or maybe, considering their oily appearance, tried to use the turtle as lantern fuel.  Of course that’s just a theory, but the give away that the Beast has eaten a turtle comes when Wirt proposes that the Lantern actually contains the Beast’s soul. The Beast immediately evaporates all the light around him, and Wirt frightened, looks into the dark, but then notices the Beast’s eyes.

They’re the same beautiful eyes of Beatrice’s Dog when it ate a turtle and became a monster. Wirt then get’s a look on his face as if he understands something, and he realizes the Beast has no power, and that he can just take Greg and go. 

So if this was the case, then who was the Beast before it ate the turtle? From it’s appearance, it looks distinctly like a tree from the forest. But what I always notice is the Beast’s cape that he wears almost like a shawl. The Beast also has an interesting connection with the Woodsman too. Since the Woodsman carries the Beast’s lantern. But the Beast knows interesting details about the Woodsman’s life, like the fact the Woodsman strayed from his cabin because he couldn’t stand coming home to find it empty. The Woodsman in turn seems to be the person in the wood to know the most about the Beast having wrestled the lantern away from it. They both share a motif connection with tree’s as the Woodsman chops them down for Lumber, and the Beast creates the trees out of souls.  Who then is the Beast?

The Beast is not lying when it says the soul of the Woodsman’s daughter is in the lantern, because the Beast is the woodsman’s daughter. The black shawl, the connection with trees, the fact that in the series opener, it is spring and she’s looking curiously off into the woods, as if wondering what exists out there.  When the Woodsman blows out the lantern once and for all, the next time we see him he is home at his cabin, not going inside because we know he can’t stand to see it empty, and who should come out to greet him but his daughter.

She’s even carrying a candle to symbolize the lantern. We don’t see any of the other people the Beast turned into tree’s reappear, so why then does the daughter survive. Because she was the beast. In the very next cut too, we see the fish in the rowboat from episode 8, which we know was in the same area as the Beast since by that pond is where Wirt begins to turn into an Edelwood tree. And what is the fish pulling out of the pond?

A black turtle. Presumably the one the Woodsman’s daughter ate. My theory then is this, the Woodsman’s daughter wandered out into the woods, got lost in the dark and had her lantern go out. She tried to use a turtle as fuel and as a result, became the Beast.  TL;DR: The Beast is the woodsman daughter because she ate/used a turtle as lantern fuel. 

Floor Plans of Famous TV Apartments [nikneuk]

it won’t be like what you imagined. maybe you get the road trip to the beach with coffee in your hand and the radio playing, maybe you don’t. but happy shows up. it’s in a 2 AM game of jenga with your new college friends. it’s curling up for another marathon of netflix. it’s meeting the person who will be your best man at the wedding. it’s 4:45pm in the library when the girl in the study coral across from you quietly whispers “i’m going to set everything on fire” and then turns to you and asks if you wanna take a break for dinner (say yes, she’s very nice and you both need a moment away from the stress). it’s the mornings they have omelettes and in good books and in a puddle that looks cool. it’s sometimes picturesque, but more often it’s full-belly laughter at stupid things on the floor of your friend’s house while in the background someone is debating the best way to win settlers of catan. 

i know it gets dark early now and the tired is setting in and everything sort of feels blank and hazy and you want to spend ages staring at walls thinking of nothing

but happiness will find a way in. it will be small moments. look for them.

Holiday cartoons from Soviet Union - my top 5

“The Last Year’s Snow Was Falling” (1983)

This one is a legend. Packed with phrases that every Russian person recognizes in a conversation. I watch it religiously every year on December 31. I pretty much know it by heart, but I still enjoy watching it! Voiced by the amazing Stanislav Sadalsky. Great music too!

(«Уж послала так послала!» «А вот это мой размерчик.» «Ох уж эти сказочки! Ох уж эти сказочники…»)

(Watch with English subtitles here)

“Father Frost and Summer” (1969)

It’s sooo cute! And those songs! Love love love it. 

(LQ quality but with English subtitles)

“Winter in Prostokvashino” (1984)

Another classic cartoon - the third installment in the story of the little village called Prostokvashino. Check out the Christmas tree decorated in attic-found vintage. :)

(«Фиг вам называется!»)

(with English subtitles)

“The Nutcracker” (1973) 

I remember watching this as a child and being mesmerized with the music. It was long before I knew who Tchaikovsky was! And the scene when Nutcracker turns into boy gave me goose bumps.

This one needs no translation.

“Father Frost and Grey Wolf” (1978)

I mostly include this one for the song - «Тревога! Тревога! Волк унёс зайчат!» - which is an old joke between me and my sister. We watched this one a lot back in the day. :)

(with English subtitles)

Making this list has put me into holiday mood! :)

“It’s often unhealthy to hyper-analyze your sexuality to the point where how you experience it changes where you belong. This is why the idea that broader terms are somehow more restrictive is baffling. Continuously breaking labels down and creating terminology for each facet of one’s identity shrinks communities until it’s just one person convinced that they’re the only one who relates to their experiences. It isolates people and ignores the importance of individuality within a collective identity.”

On Hyperpersonalized Sexual Identity

oooooooh im gonna very selfishly also ask for no.20 then!!! also 13 and 16 bc these also sound fun

20. three songs that remind you of the person who sends this one

dead man’s bones - flowers grow out of my grave

coeur de pirate - fondu au noir

in love with a ghost - healing

13. three songs you want at your funeral

mira kubasińska - wielki ogień

wardruna - helvegen

SDM - opadły mgły, wstaje nowy dzień

16. three favourite songs for sex

nina simone - sinnerman

cigarettes after sex - k

glass animals - black mambo

thank you angel!

[three songs ask set]