tw: body horror, blood

vin and human

Exactly 20 years ago (give or take a few days) like most French schoolchildren I was given a piggy bank to collect yellow coins (small change). It was a charity campaign called Opération Pièces Jaunes, to help hospitalised children, but my classmates & I were quite indifferent to the charity aspect because all we cared about was the fact that our teacher started giving us a candle in the shape of President Jacques Chirac every time we returned our little box filled with coins. 

We were completely enraptured by those candles and the way the president’s face would start melting hideously if we let them burn long enough. Without any kind of deliberation among ourselves we turned it into a class-wide contest—it was obvious to everyone that the point of the Yellow Coins charity campaign was to win many little Chiracs and melt them to make the face of our president as freakishly deformed as possible. We exchanged them for pogs and marbles. We had recently learnt about the Plague in history class, with great relish, hence one lucky girl who managed to obtain a particularly monstrous half-melted face with a big wax bubble reminiscent of a bubo sold it way above the going rate, for 12 galaxy marbles—a fortune. (I was among the losers of this auction, and commented in my diary, with deep regret, “It’s just what it would look like if the President had the bubonic plague!”) Every day after school we went round town begging passersby for coins with something akin to mania in order to get more Chiracs to burn into ever ghastlier shapes. An old lady we ambushed in front of the church praised us warmly for our charitable spirit.

Eventually our teacher ran out of candles and this odd chapter of my childhood ended as abruptly as it had started. Our class was congratulated in front of the whole school for being by far the most ardently devoted to the cause (we got ~15kg of coins.) I wonder if the principal asked our teacher what her secret was to make us collect a truly astonishing amount of coins compared to the other classes, and how he reacted when she replied that she motivated us with busts of the President. One teacher gave a Carambar for a full box of coins, another believed that helping sick children should be incentive enough, but our teacher, an expert in child psychology, was alone in her conviction that the best way to go about this was to hand out human wax effigies for her students to burn.

“Palestinian girls wearing traditional Palestinian clothes participate in the olive harvest season on a farm in Deir al Balah in the central Gaza Strip.”

October 23rd, 2022.

Photographed by Yousef Masoud.

if she’s your girl why is she. Oh god that’s not her I don’t know what that is we need to leave

From the river to the sea (من النهر الى البحر) oil on canvas Sliman Mansour

ID: A waist-up colour portrait of Dalinar and Adolin Kholin from The Stormlight Archive. Dalinar has tan skin and short black hair. He is wearing a dishevelled uniform with sleeves rolled to the elbows. He is holding Adolin, a baby. Adolin is reaching up towards Dalinar's face while Dalinar looks down with a thoughtful expression. end ID.

Born unto Light

kaladin stormblessed the man you are

Oathbringer Part 3: communion of snacks

I kind of love when the oldest and the youngest of the Knights Radiant silently bonded over a bowl of dried fruit…

my elite tumblr clique of mutuals who i don't talk to and who don't talk to me and we're just nasty stuck up bitches who don't talk to anyone and just keep making posts

I hate it when I talk wistfully about the ancient world and then people are like “you wouldn’t survive back then” yeah obviously I would die immediately but do you think achilles would be able to survive in the modern world if he had to send one polite email? no

What goes on at Frankie's Diner?

i believe shallan is actually low-empathy but like so many things she was told she is or has to be she convinced herself she is a deeply empathetic person (for that is a feminine trait after all)

captain kaladin- who knows if ill actually render this haha

The Extraction by Lee Petty

what has hector ever done to me?

feeling emotionally vulnerable so ill be walking around with a sword for the rest of the day

Jasnah, Ace of Hearts by Clarinking