"I wish I was called Lulubelle"

say what you will about the Habsburgs but I really appreciate how many of them created massive baroque synecdoches of their own neuroses. Charles V drove himself crazy trying to manage an intercontinental empire in the 1500s and then spent his final years in a monastery surrounded by clocks, obsessed with trying to get all of the clocks ticking in unison. Philip II was a meticulous and obsessively pious introvert and he turned his palace into a bureaucratic warehouse with him sitting at the top floor, correcting the grammar of his advisors’s letters like he was grading essays. Rudolf II was completely checked out of his role as emperor, obsessively collecting foreign curiosities while wars and religious revolts slowly devoured the Holy Roman Empire, just like the live lions and tigers wandering the halls of Prague Castle and attacking servants at random. All of them (the Habsburgs not the lions and tigers) had debilitating prognathism from centuries of inbreeding to keep their ‘noble blood’ (and to keep their territories consolidated), their bodies falling apart from the sheer weight of their dynastic history and endless pursuit of purity and centralization. It’s bizarrely and tragically beautiful.

I hate cigarettes so much I hate that smoking is becoming cool again I hate that we're becoming contrarian hipsters about this disgusting habit that has literally killed so many people and destroyed so many lives I'm so serious we need to become absolute killjoys about this again it's time to go 90s scolds on cigarettes until the scourge is wiped out entirely.

Genuinely I just don't think people younger than 35 know how good they have it. I distinctly remember the year in my childhood that it became illegal to smoke in restaurants, I remember what it was like when people used to smoke indoors everywhere, you all think it's cool because it's this illicit fun thing people are doing drunk outside bars now, you don't remember what it was like when fucking everything reeked all the time and you couldn't get away from it and how life changing it was when you could suddenly go out to eat and everything didn't taste like ash and all your clothes and hair didn't stink for days when you got home.

what they don’t tell you about being a writer is that returning to a long fic you haven’t touched in a while means rereading 50k words first because you don’t actually remember your own fics that well

*Trying to do small talk with a gay incestous couple* So which one of you was more hung up on being related and which one was more hung up on being gay?

it's not impossible that the tardis simply doesn't have bathrooms and you have to wait until it lands. we've seen no evidence on screen to contradict this.

this isn't a problem for time lords bcos they can hold it for a really long time

sometimes Dr Who is doing extended TARDIS maintenance and their human companions have to be like please please please can you land so I can piss and they're like UGH fine and land the TARDIS on a bathroom planet where everything is bathrooms and their companion is like this place makes me very uncomfortable

Number one TARDIS team bonding activity is not in fact Looking Down The Barrel Of Death Alongside You, but the mercifully entirely offscreen Holding You As You Dangle Your Arse Out The Door Mid-Flight To Piss.

no i actually cant fit doing this thing that takes 5 minutes into my schedule sorry :/ i only have the entire day free i just cant

@sandstonesunspear

Jesus Tapdancing Christ... THIS is a good welt pocket and the people who designed Simplicity 2895 ought to be blasted well ASHAMED of themselves for the crap way THEY wanted a welt pocket made. *SNARLS*

I've said it before and I'll say it again - tailor the pocket you're making to what you're going to put in it. Keys, tools, and other hard objects that will grate on the skin, need a sturdy, thicker fabric between them and your skin.

in case folk outside the UK aren't abreast of our news, the British press just hounded a black academic to death

Oh my god damn

a bra and a hijab are the same thing in many ways

Hijab is not much different from many different hair coverings which used to be extremely common throughout the world. All of those had their own religious connections with them. Hair coverings were often a tool of both religion and "modesty", the loaded gendered concept. Nowadays it's most commonly associated with Islam therefore it strikes out as Abnormal. A bra too serves the same purpose, yet its considered the "acceptable" tool of Modesty with no loaded baggage whatsoever while Hijab is the "backwards" tool of modesty with Evil Baggage. The same concept, when it's Muslim racialized, is Backwards and Violent, yet the violence of the bra, because it is accepted among White people too, is acceptable and invisible

Can you imagine if tomorrow wearing a bra was seen as completely backwards, but nothing else changed socially for women, yet the new policy was to force women to take their bras off in public? What, that sounds like the wrong way to go about it to you because it would be humiliating and misogynistic? Now lets apply that humanity to other people's cultures

"something other than mere bloodlust." [nods knowingly] regular lust.

The oncoming storm, everybody.