I'm my own

Arthur has known for a long time that Merlin means more to him than he thought anyone, or anything, ever could. When everything he thought he knew about his manservant changes, Arthur has to decide if he really ever knew Merlin at all, or if everything he dreams of having is going to slip through his fingers.

Read here: You're Woven in My Soul (Never Let Me Go)

art sneak peek (since the post yesterday was behind a mature warning):

I will pay in love?????

Hey Anon, I'm guessing you're talking about this post?

Just for you, ok? :)

Eggs

Butter

Cheese

Look up the percentage of Australia desert for **funsies**

Stiles typed out the list and hit send before sliding his phone back into his jacket pocket. The barista called his name and he scooped the large tray of coffees from the counter with a slight wave and a fiver in the tip jar. Shelly always made sure to add the extra whipped cream on his caramel macchiato frost and that was not to be forgotten.

The Boston air was crisp this morning as he stumbled out of the little coffee shop and towards Roscoe who was parked on the narrow street. While school was in Cambridge, the best coffee was across the river and everyone in his Computational biology department knew it.

Which was why Stiles was always the errand boy.

The entirety of Pritzker's speech today is extremely important, and I highly recommend everyone read it (or listen to it if you prefer), but I would like to share some segments that highlight the overall point of his message.

"I want to speak plainly about the moment that we are in and the actual crisis, not the manufactured one, that we are facing in this city, and as a state, and as a country. If it sounds to you like I am alarmist, that is because I am ringing an alarm, one that I hope every person listening will heed, both here in Illinois and across the country."

"Over the weekend, we learned from the media that Donald Trump has been planning, for quite a while now, to deploy armed military personnel to the streets of Chicago."

"What President Trump is doing is unprecedented and unwarranted. It is illegal. It is unconstitutional. It is un-American."

"If this was really about fighting crime and making the streets safe, what possible justification could the White House have for planning such an exceptional action without any conversations or consultations with the governor, the mayor, or the police?

Let me answer that question: This is not about fighting crime. This is about Donald Trump searching for any justification to deploy the military in a blue city, in a blue state, to try and intimidate his political rivals.

This is about the president of the United States and his complicit lackey, Stephen Miller, searching for ways to lay the groundwork to circumvent our democracy, militarize our cities and end elections."

"There is no emergency in Chicago that calls for armed military intervention."

"So in case there was any doubt as to the motivation behind Trump's military occupations, take note: 13 of the top 20 cities in homicide rate have Republican governors. None of these cities is Chicago.

Eight of the top 10 states with the highest homicide rates are led by Republicans. None of those states is Illinois."

"To the members of the press who are assembled here today, and listening across the country, I am asking for your courage to tell it like it is."

"Donald Trump wants to use the military to occupy a U.S. city, punish his dissidence, and score political points. If this were happening in any other country, we would have no trouble calling it what it is: a dangerous power grab."

"Earlier today in the Oval Office, Donald Trump looked at the assembled cameras and asked for me personally to say, 'Mr. President, can you do us the honor of protecting our city?' Instead, I say, 'Mr. President, do not come to Chicago.'

You are neither wanted here nor needed here. Your remarks about this effort over the last several weeks have betrayed a continuing slip in your mental faculties and are not fit for the auspicious office that you occupy.

Most alarming, you seem to lack any appropriate concern as our commander-in-chief for the members of the military that you would so callously deploy as pawns in your ever-more-alarming grabs for power."

"To my fellow governors across the nation who would consider pulling your National Guards from their duties at home to come into my state against the wishes of its elected representatives and its people, you would be failing your constituents and your country. Cooperation and coordination between our states is vital to the fabric of our nation and it benefits us all. Any action undercutting that and violating the sacred sovereignty of our state to cater to the ego of a dictator will be responded to."

"Finally, to the Trump administration officials who are complicit in this scheme, to the public servants who have forsaken their oath to the Constitution to serve the petty whims of an arrogant little man, to any federal official who would come to Chicago and try to incite my people into violence as a pretext for something darker and more dangerous: we are watching and we are taking names.

This country has survived darker periods than the one that we are going through right now, and eventually the pendulum will swing back."

it’ll take anywhere from 3 days to a week for it to come to life: it should have the texture of jelly and smell like parmesan cheese with a bit of vinegar and fruit (it should smell “alive”).

it helps to have multiple glass masonry jars to store it in.

if you don’t use it all the time, keep it in the fridge. if you do, make sure you have it in a spot that is regularly 65 - 79° f and you can look at it on a daily basis. make sure to refresh it after 2-3 days.

to refresh it: scoop out half of it, which is the “discard”—there are endless recipes out there that can make use of the discard so you don’t have to completely throw it away. replace that with 100 grams of flour with 100 milliliters of water and stir it in really good.

if you haven’t refreshed it, it’ll form a layer of dark liquid on top. that’s called hooch, and it’s basically an alcohol and a byproduct of the fermentation process (i.e., it’s harmless but a sign that the airborne yeast needs something to eat). you just pour it out or stir it back into the starter after refreshing.

before using it, refresh it and then let it sit so it can be all frothy and jellylike. this will take anywhere from 12 hours to a couple of days—sourdough is one of those things that you work around.

i think he said it so i'd be more morally okay with fishing? i actually dont remember the context.

point was, he told me this, and he understimated (by a very large margin) how much i liked worms. i was a worm boy. very wormy. and after hearing that, i went home, and i dug through the garden, flipped over every rock, did everything i could to gather as many worms as i could, and then i uh.

i cut them all in half. every worm i could find. all of them. with scissors.

i then took this pile of split worms, and i put them in a box with a bit of lettuce and some water and stuff and went to bed expecting to double my worms overnight. i have math autism, so i had a vague understanding that if i did this just a few times in a row, i would eventually have a completely unreasonable amount of worms.

i was very excited to become this plane's worm emperor.

(i think i was...six?)

anyway, i did not become the inheritor of the worm crown. i instead woke up to a box of dead worms and cried. a lot. i got diagnosed with panic attacks as a teenager, but i think i had them as a kid, i just had no idea what they were. i was kind of processing that a.) i had killed what i had assumed was every single worm in my yard, and thus would have no more worms, and b). i was going to like, worm hell.

(six year babylon spent a lot of time worrying about god.)

so i kind of freaked out, and i climbed a tree, because god can only smite you if you're touching the ground (?) and i sat up there mostly inconsolable until my mom came out and asked, hey, what's up? what happened?

so i explained to her that i had killed all of the worms, forever, and was also Damned, and she took me to the compost pile, and we dug for all of five seconds and found like twenty more worms.

the compost pile was full of worms.

and she told me that a). there were more worms, and we could put them back under rocks and stuff and recolonize our yard and b). that one day, i would die, and i would go to heaven, and i would be able to talk to the worms, and i would be able to tell them all that i was very sorry, and that i killed them on accident out of excessive Love, and that they would forgive me, because worms have six hearts and no malice.

at that point, i think i was sixty percent tear-snot by weight, and i had no choice but to gather enough worms that i could hug them. which my mom helped with. and then after that she helped me put some worms back under each rock.

and for my epilogue: i spent a significant portion of my childhood in trees. and for many years after, even when my mom didnt know i was watching, i would catch her giving the space under the rocks a light spritz with the hose. not because she loved worms.

yes these goats really exist! in most ways they are normal goats, except for how they secrete spider silk in their milk

(or rather, they secrete a special protein in their milk, which is then extracted and woven into silk fibers)

their DNA contains transplanted genes taken from the Golden Orb Weaver Spider, whose silk is incredibly strong–but can’t be naturally produced in large quantities. because…spiders are tiny ya’ll.

these superpowered web-slinging spidergoats genetically modified but otherwise normal and healthy goats can produce much larger amounts of this material (marketed as BioSteel), which is stronger than steel and more bulletproof than kevlar. plus it’s lightweight, elastic, and bio-compatible (compatible with living tissue), meaning it has a ton of potential industrial and medical applications.

(imagine 40 years from now you need knee surgery, and your doctor sits you down and explains that your shiny new anterior cruciate ligament was actually artificially woven out of SPIDER GOAT MILK SILK. also in this magical hypothetical future we have universal healthcare. and the wealth of all billionaires has been globally redistributed. this is my hypothetical scenario, i do what i want.)

like i said. pretty nifty!

and here is a photo of one such genetically modified BioSteel™ Goat, her name is Freckles

site for when you can only remember part of a word/its definition 

site that gives you words that rhyme with a word

Do you want a better world, or do you want revenge on those you think aren’t doing enough to improve it?

Do you want a more just world, or do you want to see bad people suffer merciless punishment?

Do you want a less oppressive world, or do you want the reins of power for yourself?