go into the woodland if you seek peace of mind-- as this time when Nature's mood is gentle, quiet and kind, when soft winds fan the trembling leaves about the cloistered glade-- and paths go winding deep into the green and breathless shade.

#48 for malarkey and #93 for renee 💞💞💞

I'm back and I'm better than ever baby, let's go!!!

54. Don't Worry 'Bout Me - Ella Fitzgerald and her Savoy Eight [Listen on Youtube]

Ozzer’s doing fine just the way she is. Waz goes off to live in the General’s Household, which is the right place for her. She sends Ozzer a letter, where she sounds happy, in small, spiky handwriting. She’ll be taken care of there. “I’m going to re-enlist,” Oz tells herself, looking in the mirror, the night before she writes the letter to her father. “And I’m going to be fine. And she’s going to be fine.” They were never very close friends anyway, she reminds herself, as she dresses and runs hands over the places where her uniform has wrinkled and folded over the spring. No one would give Waz any trouble, just because they wanted to give Ozzer some. She’ll be happy. Of course, she’s safe, she’s in clean clothes, in a warm room… she’ll have to be happy. Hopefully, she isn’t worrying about Oz.

48. Changes - Phil Ochs [Listen on Youtube]

The first hour in the car is relatively quiet. Dawn watches the road fly by, impassively staring at roads that were always terrible to navigate, choked with traffic and foul with exhaust. She doesn’t have the feeling that she’s going to start crying until Buck accelerates onto the highway, and suddenly everything is whipping by at real speed. The speed limit is, what, 60? Shocking, a really unbelievable speed. Five years ago, you couldn’t even get a car up to that. It’s amazing what changes. Buck puts a hand on her knee. “Oh, stop,” she says, much more wetly than she’d intended to, “you don’t have to treat me like a woman, you know.” “I know,” he says. “It’s just the hormones,” she tells him, which is sort of true. The premarin makes her quite squishy in a way she knows she never was before. “They make me cry all the time for no reason at all.” “I know,” he says. She sniffs, and clears her throat, and almost snaps at him when he passes her a tissue. But she’d rather not be sticky, so she blows her nose instead and wrings her mouth to the left and the right. Somehow, it does her some good. She clears right up. California will be better. Well, California will be different. “I always hated New York,” she tells him, which isn’t true. But he says “I know” anyway, and goes on driving.

93. Love Bomb - Seb Lowe [Listen on Youtube]

The first time Renee heard one of the shells go screaming low over the church, she’d flung herself onto the ground with her arms over her head. That was standard during an air raid. Little children have to practice doing it in school. She hasn’t done that for a while now. Augusta had given her a hard time about it—a harder time than any of the soldiers did. “You shouldn’t scold me, you know,” Renee had told her, “even the men don’t think it’s silly. It’s good sense.” “Hah,” Augusta had replied, dipping soaked rags into their pot. “They like seeing a woman scared. It makes them feel necessary.” Renee had wanted to say, well, aren’t they? But she had held her tongue. It’s hard to justify defending them, after everything she’s heard them say. Augusta might not have been delicate with them, but she is their caretaker, and they’re awful to her. Renee can’t stand it.

My three aaaaaaangel girls i LOVE them. I missed all of them so bad. AUGH i love WOMEN!!!

so glad it worked for you! isn't it such a night and day difference?? in case you're interested though, i've actually stopped using handbrake and have started to just create & export my videos in 720p (tumblr's standard). contrary to how it might sound—or what i believed at least— this doesn't fuck with the quality at all and basically works exactly like handbrake, just without the need for that extra step! for example:

this is an upload without handbrake and at as high a resolution as i was able to export it (more than 1080p) and it ended up looking pretty dark and pixelated

this is that same video re-uploaded and handbraked

this is a video i did where i just made & exported it in 720p (i switched editing programs some time back & no longer have the file for the 1st video, but it's another sledge-focused one so similar scenes for comparison purposes). i think this one is pretty on par with the handbraked one if not a little better and it was way easier to just have to export it one time.

i use davinci resolve and i see that you do as well, so it's really easy to set the project settings one time and not have to worry about it again. i still have handbrake as a backup, but after i tested out two versions of the same 720p video with and without, there was really no difference, so i haven't used it since!

omg please this sounds incredible, i'm glad to have inspired it!! but man i feel you they just do NOT want to stop talking, usually my one-shots are in the 2k wheelhouse but mcdanno keep pushing my word counts higher, it's soooo annoying lmao

3. If you write chaptered fics, what’s your ideal chapter length to write? Is it different from your ideal chapter length to read? 

i think around 5k is the sweet spot, reading AND writing. but a. i love a long ass chapter because i am like a shark and i need to read to breathe, and b. i feel like a failure if i post anything under 2k, so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

47. If drenched and stained was a pair of shoes, what kind would it be? Describe the shoes.

leather work boots. functional, not fashionable, they’ve been reliable but now they’re busted beyond repair. covered in blood, obviously.

like so.

48. What’s the last fic you read? Do you recommend it?

currently reading He prefers to hunt for it by @hummingbee-o0o​ [hope the @ is okay!] and loving it. Reverse Devil’s Minion Chase is my favorite iwtv fandom trope and i cannot get enough of it, and the way daniel’s internal monologue is all “i’m not hurt! i’m angry! grrr vampire rage!” is SO good and so in character and armand being so remote is scratching my itch for more danmand tension than the show's giving me just yet :P highly recommend!

ohhhhhh man. okay so. the redtails in general are even more of a challenge than the bomber crews because there's even LESS space in the cockpit of a mustang especially—thunderbolt cockpits were apparently considered pretty roomy, but if the whole unit's getting upgraded to mustang's everyone's gonna have even tighter size/weight restrictions than the bomber crews.

[side note: for this AU to work i'm just pretending the laws of physics have a little more flex to them wrt How Heavy Things That Will Fly In The Air Can Be. i am not a physicist but the dust has to have some impact on the laws of physics probably, and i am NOT interested in reworking the entire universe to be exclusively aeronauts flying balloons. but there still have to be SOME limits, and the maximum width of a mustang cockpit is like 21 inches, so the fighter pilots have stricter rules on size and weight.]

SO! all the redtails are getting smaller daemons—let's say they top out at fox-sized or so. small enough to sit on your lap and be strapped to your front if you have to bail, and i think fighters are more likely to keep their daemons strapped to them or in a pocket/pouch at all times for quicker bailouts.

for alex specifically i'm inclined to give him some variety of builder bird, for his drawing creativity and model plane building. it's a pretty wide category; there's a lot of animals that construct their nests/dens/whatever, and birds still pose the same issue for fighter pilots as they do for bomber crews on the bailout question, but birds tend to have the most impressive structures, and i don't want to shortchange him just because it's a little silly to have to essentially do this to your bird daemon when you have to bail:

the indignity. alas.

as far as specific species go, i'm torn between two: the baya weaver and the hamerkop.

baya weavers have the benefit of being VERY pretty, and being a fairly gregarious species, usually nesting in colonies overhanging water. their nests are pretty elaborate, being literally woven together and they also court and mate during monsoon season, which seems pretty daredevilish to me in terms of tolerating risky weather.

the downside is, that pretty coloration is only for the males, and they're also a fairly promiscuous species, with both males and females having multiple partners every breeding season. i don't think it fits with alex being extremely loyal to both della AND his fellow redtails AND his country, even when maybe he shouldn't be because his country treats him like shit.

[the somewhat less striking female inside the nest there. sorry, ma'am, it's just that your boy is Very Vibrant.]

the hamerkop, on the other hand, is fairly sexually monomorphic, but striking in a different way: the head shape is very distinct and is what it's named for—hamerkop means hammerhead in afrikaans.

so they're not as vibrant but i still think they're really beautiful and unique-looking! i also find their nest construction equally impressive, if not more so: the male and female both contribute to the building of it, and it can be up to five feet long and can support a grown man's weight.

they're fucking huge! it's really cool!!! as kind of implied, they're monogamous within the breeding season at least, and both parents contribute to brooding and raising the chicks, but they're not territorial amongst themselves and they're very flexible hunters, which i think fits well with alex's adaptability to circumstances i.e. selling pinup drawings to white boys for cigarettes in the stalag.