✨ rowan s. littlefingies ✨

Hi @petrichorca! You've received a lovely letter. 💌

It is a shame to fight over terminology, especially when there is a perfectly accurate and precise term that could be used: personal collections. Not only is “personal collections” more accurate, in my experience it also draws students’ attention to a number of questions that they don’t ask about the term “archive.” When I discuss personal or special collections with students, they begin asking questions that “archive” does not inspire, such as: Collected by whom? Collected why? For what purpose? These are the questions we are trying to teach as historians.

Hi @merryfinches! You've received a lovely letter. 💌

The whole setup of the scene has me feeling incredibly not-normal. Both these characters are good at presenting the face they want other people to see, but the scene is blocked so they go through this entire conversation without once looking each other in the eye. So they keep their voices as steady as they can while a completely different story plays out on their faces. :flails: God, I love it!

I still find it really interesting that Frenchie seeks Ed out in the first place, given that he clearly doesn’t want to be first mate. Aside from the larger narrative purpose of giving Ed a screen partner, is this Frenchie playing the part he needs to, wanting to do a good job so he stays on Ed’s good side? Is it his discreet way of checking in on Ed? Either way, it intrigues me.

Ed is depressed and in pain, and he’s been isolating himself from the crew while he plans his own destruction, but when Frenchie comes along, what does Ed do? He opens up!!! In a roundabout way, through metaphor, like Ed often does, but this isn’t the businesslike Ed post-shooting of, “Throw this shit overboard and get suited up.” Frenchie asks what the plan is, and Ed doesn’t give him an order. No, Ed tells him a story that’s an expression of this pain. (Coming right on the heels of Jim telling Fang the wooden boy story to ease his sadness and fear??? THIS SHOW!!!)

This moment isn’t enough to make him express any hope for the future—they’re “never going back to land,” after all—but some tiny flicker of Ed wants to reach out, wants to tell someone what it feels like in his head and his heart. Is this the same part of Ed that will wrestle to untie the rope when Hornigold says he’s already made up his mind?

After Ed tells him about the impossible bird, I adore Frenchie’s response so much: "Sounds like something that maybe actually can't exist, captain." It’s the smallest, most cautious nudge imaginable, gently intimating to Ed that a bird couldn’t live like that. He just saw Ed shoot his previous first mate for speaking out of turn (and doesn’t have the full context of everything that had been loaded into that moment,) but Frenchie still makes this slight overture. As with Ed’s story, it’s not enough to change things, not enough to right the ship. But it’s there, and that matters to me.

Just a feast of a scene, wow! While 1x05’s superb “what’d they do to you, man?”/“they’re such dicks about spoons!” will always be my favorite Ed-Frenchie interaction (my thoughts on this are well documented, lol,) this one is incredible too. They’re so different from one another—in 1x05, they’re both being quite open, while in 2x01, everything they’re saying is much more veiled—but both scenes do such a wonderful job of showing how they understand and relate to each other.

It was suchhhh a good show! And so well done! I love it. No wonder it got me back into fandom, looking up blogs on here for gifs and art and even just stills from the show too and back into reading fic! That season 1 ending even got me back into writing fic! I never finished my whole 2 (3?) ideas, but I had them, I started them!

And now I have lovely fandom friends for two different fandoms, and I write more regularly-and have fun doing so- than I had in the 15ish years before OFMD came along, and I even have some fandom events to my name now too.

I did answer 20, so:

25. would you rather own a dishwasher or a laundry machine if you could only have one or the other?

Easy one: laundry! I have a dishwasher, and have had in the last two places before that, and I barely use it -- I live alone, I work from home where I can take breaks during the day to wash dishes, and my regular use "big" plates are my grandmother's china, which can't go in the dishwasher. (the china itself is tough as hell, but I did discover that the dishwasher wears off the painting.) And per the other question in that previous ask ("biggest purchase"), I didn't have a dishwasher* in the house I owned for most of the time that I owned it, so I got used to handwashing anyway.

*(there is a Whole Story about the dishwasher; we did in fact own a dishwasher but it never got installed, and that is a nice little synedoche for what it was like to try to fix up that house with my ex)

Whereas, I haven't lived without a washer and dryer in my space since........... 1998? I lived in a studio apartment 96-97 where the building didn't have one, but the laundromat was literally two doors down, and then 97-98 we lived in a building that had laundry in the basement. Since then, everywhere I've ever lived has had laundry.

Actually, my place now, they had to take out the washer and dryer for a bit to do some electrical work, and dude. Hated that so much. I rotated through so many clothes (got lucky on season switch!) to avoid going to the laundromat lol.

(I changed the hands position 15 times.)

Today's Nonbinary Character Is:

Jim Jimenez from Our Flag Means Death!

Hey TealOranges & Garlic Soup fans!! Announcing TealOranges & Garlic Soup Week 2026 - a Bluesky OFMD fan event celebrating all things Jim/Oluwande and Archie/Jim/Oluwande/Zheng!!

This year we've made the decision to only run Garlic Soup Week on Bluesky, we just don't have enough engagement on Tumblr to run it here again. But we wanted to share the announcement so that any Tumblr folks who would like to join know to follow us on Bluesky for this year's event!

You can find us on Bluesky here.

Come share some soup with us!

[ID copied from alt text: A graphic reading: Save the Date! TealOranges & Garlic Soup Week 2026, October 4-10. Join us on Bluesky for a celebration of all things Archie, Jim, Oluwande, and Zheng.

you would receive the supply once a month

the brand/type will vary so you could