live your lizard dreams

I make mistakes so you don't have to.

For a start, you can only buy these as a three-flavor set on the Bush's Baked Beans website, but to be fair to them it was pretty reasonably priced even for three normal-sized baked bean cans, which is what I thought I was getting. Then they showed up in like, a goddamn GIFT BOX and they're MASSIVE.

They also come with a baked bean can koozie (pictured left) and a branded can opener (pictured right).

So far I've only sampled the Apple Pie flavor.

I had thought -- well, hoped -- that it would be primarily cinnamon flavor, which doesn't actually go badly with the tomato-molasses sauce that canned baked beans normally have. This hope was a mistake.

Eating these beans is like mainlining some kind of legume-based distilled concept of Christmas. My face filled with a powerful dose of cinnamon, as though my sinuses were suddenly potpourri bowls. For a few minutes, as I chewed and swallowed, I lived in a world suffused by pure artificial cinnamon.

Normally when I make baked beans from a can (which is not often anymore, since I have a pressure cooker and like five pounds of dry pinto beans) I drain off some of the sauce and add mustard and barbecue sauce to remix it a little.

After sampling some of the Pure Christmas Bean (tm) I took the second half of the tin I'd reserved, drained it, and added plain yellow mustard; that did actually take the edge off and make them slightly more edible. And it's not that they even tasted bad -- they just tasted overwhelming.

"Passingly, I think that this might always have been inevitable, that perhaps she had always known it but had wanted to hold on for me, for as long as she could."

"We keep ploughing on, through the dark and polluted waters—my prophet and me."

Happy pride month but specifically to the Widow of Wounds and her Rootkeeper! This is a commission piece by the fantastic Stes @anthureums, who took my frenzied powerpoint presentation of vague references and ramblings and turned them into this achingly beautiful masterpiece. Go check out their art on twitter at @/alamangoes!

@thesiltverses remains one of my favorite audio dramas of all time, and the bond between Paige and Hayward has been living in my brain rent-free even years after the story has come to an end. I adore the way they depend on and inspire each other, and Stes captured that awful tenderness between them beautifully.

Some design notes under the read more:

The steps are as high and wide as you remember.  The cellar is as dark as you remember. It’s like you never grew up at all.

And my fragments will swim in the currents of the abyss.

and then in season 3, he’s often in cars (the drive from the Katabasians’ Council to the Gulch, from the radio station to the ruins of Gulch and from there to his dad’s cabin, and once again from his family home to the Grand Aquifer) but all of these times he’s being driven around. not onceeee is he himself behind the wheel. and that, on one hand, is obviously due to the position of power/authority and thus comfort that he’s now occupying—now he has people to perform these kinds of services for him. butttttt i also think that it shows that the reins aren’t fully in his hands and in actuality he’s really not as in control as he’d like to think he is.

when the tide comes home

piece for @zineoftideandflesh