light & shadow & beauty & ash

me leaving my 9-5 job which barely covers my bills just to see silver the hedgehog throw my car at sonic and miss

when i was 8 i had a very intimidating russian woman as a music teacher- she was both my opera instructor and piano teacher. about a month into piano, she sat me down and said to my mother and i "this child- very beautiful voice, good for singing. i will not allow this child to continue piano. god did not want this child to play an instrument. he told me this in dreams. that is all."

[Image description: a medieval illustration of a corpse with a skull face climbing out of its tomb. A caption in Old English reads, "Hwonne þu dead eart ac þu hyrst mann nathwylcne secgan, "Sceacespere spræc Eald Englisc", which in modern English means, "When you are dead but you hear an unknown person say Shakespeare spoke Old English".

like, the moral panic about age gaps in dating is one thing but this reddit thread was literally about Being Online Friends. you can be online friends with a teenager. they are actually people you can talk to. i promise.

When I was sixteen, I and my boyfriend (eighteen) and his little brother (fourteen) all belonged to the same gaming group, which had been started by his father's friend Steve. We played twice a week with a bunch of people twice and even three times our age, and we learned that adults weren't aliens, they were people with their own feelings and fears and they weren't always right about everything.

Here's the truth: when you grow up, as you go through the various developmental stages, there are things which are vital to happen for proper psychological and cognitive development. For example, when you're very young it is absolutely vital that you are exposed to language. A lot of language. Of varying levels of complexity and formality. That's vital for the healthy development of the language centers of the brain and for early socializing. It must happen. If it does not, you see severe dysfunction as they get older.

Behold the progression of how Howl talks about/to Sophie

not to be a sap or anything but this particular piece of little mermaid trivia does something to me