The Rose Garden's Wall

Sure! 

Mantis is completely hollow! There is no body inside her armour, she IS the armour! She does like to store skulls she finds in her helmet though.

She is also a complete brainlet, and refers to herself in the third person. She is a simple creature and I love her so much.

She will challenge everything and everyone to a fight. She lives for the battle. She doesnt care if she wins or loses, she will throw herself at an opponent until they get tired, or she slays them :D

Bead Embroidered Art Hoops

Discourse on Colonialism (Aimé Césaire) - this is more a focus on colonization, but I feel it's a necessary read in my opinion as in order to understand decolonization I believe it's important to first understand colonization.

Wretched of the Earth (Franz Fanon)

Decolonization is Not a Metaphor (Tuck, Yang)

The Wretched of the Earth (PDF, ebook)

Decolonization is Not a Metaphor (PDF)

an important lesson about making mistakes:

for the self-conscious beginner: No one makes great things until the world intimately knows their mediocrity. Don’t think of your writing as terrible; think of it as preparing to contribute something great.

for the self-conscious late bloomer: Look at old writing as how far you’ve come. You can’t get to where you are today without covering all that past ground. For that, be proud.

for the perfectionist: Think about how much you complain about things you love—the mistakes and retcons in all your favorite series—and how you still love them anyway. Give yourself that same space.

for the realist: There will be people who hate your story even if it’s considered a classic. But there will be people who love your story, even if it strange and unpopular.

for the fanfic writer: Your work is not lesser for not following canon. When you write, you’ve created a new work on its own. It can be, but does not have to be, limited by the source material. Canon is not the end-all, be-all. 

for the writer’s blocked: It doesn’t need to be perfect. Sometimes you have to move on and commit a few writing sins if it means you can create better things out of it.

So far I’ve got

ladder letters: A, E, F, H, T

humpback B’s and P’s get as many bumps as you think they need

circle O’s, you just keep spiraling in til you feel like you’ve made your point

tree letters branch into smaller versions of themselves ad nauseum: X, Y

spider Q’s, so many legs

New alphabet dropped!

But I think i’ve taken a real shine to it! 

The writer of two of the most well known stories worldwide, The Three Musketeers and The Count of Monte Cristo was a black man. 

chose to take on his slave grandmother’s last name, Dumas, like his father did before him.

grew up too poor for formal education, so was largely self-taught, including becoming a prolific reader, multilingual, well-travelled, and a foodie, resulting in his writing both a combination encyclopedia/cookbook (which just— is fucking outrageous to me) AND the adaptation of The Nutcracker on which Tchaikovsky based his ballet

he also wrote a LOOOOT of nonfiction and fiction about history, politics, and revolution, bc he was pro-monarchy, but a radical cuss, and that got him in a lot of hot water at home and abroad.

even beyond that, he generally put up with a lot of racist bullshit in France, so he went and wrote a novel about colonialism and a BLATANTLY self-insert anti-slavery vigilante hero (which he then cribbed from to write the Count of Monte Cristo, the main character of which, Edmond Dantés, Dumas also based on himself).

(…a novel which also features a LOAD of PoC beyond the Count, and at LEAST one queer character, btw, bc EVERY MOVIE ADAPTATION OF ANYTHING BY DUMAS IS A LIE; seriously, at LEAST one of the four Musketeers is Black, y'all.)

famously, when some fuckshit or other wanted to come at Dumas with some anti-Black foolishness, Dumas replied, “My father was a mulatto, my grandfather was a Negro, and my great-grandfather a monkey. You see, Sir, my family starts where yours ends.”

for the bicentennial of his birthday, Pres. Jacques Cirac was like, “…sorry about the hella racism,” and had Dumas’s ashes reinterred at the Panthéon of Paris, bc if you’re gonna keep the corpses of the cream of the crop all together, Dumas’s more widely read and translated than literally everybody else.

and they are still finding stuff old dude wrote, seriously; like discovering “lost” works as recently as 2002, publishing stuff for the first time as recently as 2005.

ALSO IMPORTANT:

She got fired for being Anti-Semitic.

Her being Transphobic is not at all okay either but,

Anti-Semitism is not talked about enough.

She basically just compared Holocaust victims to being a Republican. Do you realize how fucked up that is?!

I’m Jewish. I really don’t like when someone compares the genocide of 6 million of my people to being a Republican. When was the last time 6 million Republicans were murdered via gas chambers?

People need to know that this was why she got fired. Don’t you dare just like this post!

there is delaware (state) and delaware (river) 

both are equally strange

the state is a tiny little cryptid thing

the rive is a monster that spans new york, pennsylvania, new jersey and delaware. also washington crossed it once and that was like kinda a big deal i guess. like crossing the rubicon in rome.