The Brockway Record, Pennsylvania, February 3, 1933

It’s okay to not want to have sex ever. It’s okay to never even try it.

Red squirrel/ekorre. Värmland, Sweden (February 6, 2022). 

┏┓  ┃┃╱╲ in this  ┃╱╱╲╲  house ╱╱╭╮╲╲  we ▔▏┗┛▕▔    appreciate ╱▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔╲       Keeping terfs out of the witchblr community because our fellow trans, nonbinary, and male witches deserve respect ╱╱┏┳┓╭╮┏┳┓ ╲╲ ▔▏┗┻┛┃┃┗┻┛▕▔

More golden willow leaves etched in chilly frost: Sylvan Lake Series

(c) riverwindphotography, September 2023

a lot of pieces of media will show characters catching fireflies with just their bare hands. in some cases they will just land on the persons fingers. to gently be placed inside of a jar..

for people who live in areas who don’t have fireflies, i want you to know that is not made up or exaggerated for those scenes. fireflies are really like that. they are slow and not cautious at all. while camping i would just walk up to one flying in the air and grab it. and it would sit on my hands like “oh ok.” they are my friends.

Seabeck, WA

Fungi collected on a fall weekend of mushroom walks led by John Michelotti of Catskill Fungi

If they just let people burn the goat it wouldn't be a good ritual sacrifice. People that burn the goat are legitimately risking jailtime but they do it anyway. That's what makes the goatburning so powerful.

There is no easy way out of learning to be literate when it comes to fiction.

You cannot say "An author is never what they write".

You cannot say "An author is always what they write".

Authors who are completely normal people with healthy understandings of every dark topic in our work can write extremely fucked up shit about topics including bigotry, rape, you name it. If you think writing about those topics at all is "glorifying" it, then you will falsely believe those authors are horrible people.

But horrible people can actually be authors - and sometimes they hide their horribleness in ways you can't recognize. Sometimes they don't - sometimes they are just fully and openly bigoted.

But if you can't tell the difference between "A story that has fucked up shit in it because those things fit the mood, motifs, message, or genre" vs "A story with fucked up shit in it because the author thinks those things are morally good", you are going to fucking struggle in life and you will in fact be very susceptible to bigoted propaganda.

And no, I won't sit here and say it's always easy to tell the difference. But with practice, you can in fact tell the difference between a story where the author is writing about the main character being ravaged and raped in a sexy way because it's a safe way to explore that fantasy, VS, an author who clearly just thinks women should be raped and subjugated because that's their actual worldview.

That can involve examining the individual piece of media, other things that author has written, who the author is, etc.