#i still went to church while participating in voltron | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

eloquenceassassinated · 5 years

Text

I’m Leaving Tumblr: A Farewell to my Followers

I haven't been very active on this blog lately. If you're observant, you've probably noticed it. If I really wanted to, I could probably just leave it that way; everyone would eventually take me off their followed list as an inactive blog and absently wonder where I went. But I don't really want to do that.

In his poem “The Hollow Men,” T. S. Elliot wrote, “This is how the world ends: not with a bang, but with a whimper.” In my case, though I'm not a popular blog by any stretch, and though this arguably isn't a website that deserves the fanfare, I don't want to leave with a bang, but at least with a whisper: “Thanks for the memories. I'll be on my way now.”

To do that properly, I have to take you on a little ride.

In my time on this website, I:

Joined tumblr in June of 2017 for the purposes of posting art.

Proceeded to not post a lot of art.

Found the Captain America, Voltron, and Ninjago fandoms on here and got swept up in those instead.

Got my first 100 notes on a post about Dr. Julien. Dabbed in celebration.

Made a post about Shiro and Bucky maybe being friends.

Bought a mug from mintmintdoodles—and liked it!

Went on a missions trip. Came back.

Reblogged a LOT of fandom stuff.

Saw Wonder Woman, which was good.

Celebrated my first Steve's Birthday—I mean Fourth of July on the site.

Made lots of Clone!Shiro theory posts.

Made a dumb “who in Voltron likes anime?” post.

Fell in love with Matt Holt.

Started posting “Grass Whistle”, my first multi-chapter fanfic.

Got a job, which kinda put the kabosh on the fanfic for a bit.

Bought a print from mechinaries.

Found a bunch of my other fandoms on this site including Lord of the Rings, How to Train Your Dragon, and Hamilton.

Celebrated my first Christmas on the site.

Participated in the Ninjago Secret Santa, where I actually got my friend Candaru's prompt and it was hilarious.

Kinda ghosted through the first winter months of 2018 as my job occupied more and more of my time.

Resumed posting Grass Whistle in the spring of 2018 and finally finished it, to a wonderful reception.

Saw Black Panther and loved it!

Started posting “The Run and Go”, to a better reception on FF.net than this site.

Saw Thor: Ragnarok and wished we got to see that hug.

Witnessed the best season of Voltron (S6) before everything went downhill.

Went on vacation. Came back.

Wrote and posted “Brother”.

Posted art celebrating Candaru's story “Several Dead LEGOs Play Cards”.

Went on the missions trip again. Came back.

Saw Infinity War and was in DENIAL.

Reconnected with a friend with whom I'd been through a really rough patch over the past couple of years, and began to mend our friendship.

Posted a really long queue of LotR stuff for no particular reason.

Watched Voltron end; it was terrible.

Started a new year and continued to keep the blog busy with lots of queues.

Watched Alita: Battle Angel and it was AMAZING.

Posted a really long How to Train Your Dragon queue for no particular reason.

Continued to dread Endgame.

Watched Endgame. Stayed in denial.

Fell behind on Ninjago seasons.

Watched the Voltron and Ninjago blogs I follow fade into inactivity until I was left with nothing but gifs of Endgame and my own sadness.

Kept the charade going until the summer of 2019 hit and I realized that I'm doing out of obligation what should be for fun.

I don't really know how to state this in a kind way, but neither the circumstances that brought me here nor the conditions that kept me here exist any longer. This is a fandom blog, and it's a tough break when you've fallen either out of step or out of love with your fandoms. Keeping up the queue is the only way that my blog stays active on my work days, but it isn't fun. This blog stays inactive because upkeeping it is a chore—a chore that I keep putting off, and a chore that no one asked me to do.

2 Timothy 2:20-21 says, “In a large house there are articles not only of gold and silver, but also of wood and clay; some are for special purposes and some for common use. Those who cleanse themselves from the latter will be instruments for special purposes, made holy, useful to the Master and prepared to do any good work.”

I never really understood that. What does Paul have against common things? Does he have beef with clay? But I think I get it now—it's a simple matter of removing clutter. Cleaning out what's unnecessary so that the only things that remain are the best ones.

I'm not leaving tumblr because I have any anger against the site or any one person or fandom or whatever. I'm not leaving because something cataclysmic happened, or because I was abducted by aliens and their planet has bad wifi. I'm leaving because I've had some time to think, and I've decided that it's for my best mental health that I leave this chapter behind. Plain and simple.

Those who know me personally probably know that my prayer for 2019 has been centered around a single word: Restoration. The past few years have been hard ones for me, and it's time to rebuild and restore what's been broken. Sometimes repairing a house means tearing out the moldy walls first. Sometimes being your best self means eliminating distractions.

Because that's what these are—distractions, layered on distractions. Marvel distracted me from the real world, and Voltron distracted me between Marvel movies, and Ninjago distracted me when Voltron turned sour. When those fell through, I turned to old fandoms to distract myself. And when I finally extricated myself from that mess, made amends with some people, looked up, and faced my situation for what it is, I realized that it's not something I can maintain.

I'll still keep the blog up. I won't deactivate it, because deactivated blogs make me sad and wonder if there's some tragedy here that I don't know about. Especially since the platonic prompts post continues to make rounds, I want people to be able to come back to this blog if they wish and see what the original poster was like—someone who loves friendship in fandoms, celebrates it, and spent two years creating a safe haven of nothing but positive, pro-bromance content. If this blog was ever a safe haven for anybody, I want them to still have it available in its entirety. Even if it should never have been work, I did work hard on this. I don't want that to go to waste.

As for those I follow, there will still be some blogs that I check on from time to time—particularly the ones that my personal friends run—but I likely won't be interacting with the posts. If you know me in real life, you can still contact me through email or my fanfiction account. I'll be there.

But starting today, I'm taking the tumblr app off of my phone. I might come back sometime, but I don't see it happening. No offense or hard feelings to anybody—I'm just done for now.

If I ever made anyone smile, I think this would all be worth it. If I made someone laugh, or think, or cry, or if I inspired them to write something or draw something or create something that had never existed before, I think it would all be worth it. If I can truly say that I was a positive Christian influence in my short time here—that I touched somebody—I think it would be worth it.

After all, life isn't about followers. It's about friends. It isn't about notes. It's about whose lives you touched, whose day you made just a little bit better. And I know that all of you (except for the pornbots) are real people, and I want you to know that, to the best of my ability, I care about every single one of you. I want all of you to live happy lives, and I hope that God makes Himself very, very real to you and fills you with a love that words can't explain and a joy that our hearts can't contain and a hope that our minds can't imagine in our wildest dreams.

I wish all 119 of you well. I wish everyone who has ever crossed my path through this blog well. I hope I could make you smile. It's been fun, and I've met some great people and made some wonderful friends, and I'm glad to have been here.

Thank you to my friends. Thank you to anyone who ever liked or reblogged my art. Thank you to everyone who reblogs the platonic prompts post—it's just over 3,000 notes as I write this, which is about the size of my church, and while that isn't terribly a lot I guess it's still wild to think about.

I especially want to thank the Ninjago community for always being so enthusiastic, warm, and wholesome my whole time on this website, from giving me my first 100 notes on the Dr. Julien headcanon post just a few days into my time here to your staggering and sincere support of Grass Whistle a year later. Never stop being your wonderful selves—it was wonderful to interact with all of you.

Thanks for the memories. I mean that.

Here's a picture of one of my hermit crabs, Clover, on a tiny boat I got in Michigan. Peace out!

—Sincerely, EA

#ea speaks #mine #my writing #blog maintainence #real life #and so another chapter comes to a close #and i get way too emotional about it

73 notes · View notes

kristallioness · 5 years

Text

December Recap

(+ A typical Estonian Christmas dinner table!)

Merry Christmas, dear followers! I hope you've all enjoyed the holidays, cause I sure have and I'm gonna summarize my entire December month right here (since I've been rather quiet these past few weeks, but that's only because I was so busy doing all of these wonderful things).

First and foremost, I wanna introduce you to some Estonian food that's usually eaten during Christmas (yes, it's okay to reblog this post cause the personal stuff will be under the cut). I took a few photos of all of these delicious meals and am gonna describe what they are exactly. Here is my family's dinner table in its full glory:

So, where do I start?.. The 3 bigger pots on the left contain boiled potatoes, small sausages ('sardellid' in Estonian) and sauerkraut (a type of cabbage, the English name of this food should have a German origin). These combine into one dish and they're eaten together, like this:

The 4th, bigger glass plate on the right contains blood sausages, which is the second typical dish (the kind that we buy come with slices of bacon). They're usually eaten together with lingonberry jam or pumpkin slices (my dad prefers to add some mustard), BUT.. ever since I was a little girl, I've had this quirk of adding ketchup to any kind of meat to make it tastier. So, when I began eating blood sausages, I obviously chose ketchup on the side:

Besides that, Estonians LOVE black bread (note the bag in the background), which is made of rye and completely different from any other kind of bread everywhere. This is where a really good joke about my people comes from: whenever Estonians travel to another country, they can't find their "usual" bread in any grocery store (it's all white!) and it's one of the things they'll miss the most while being away from their homeland:

Now (coming to the foreground), I am in NO way trying to advocate drinking (since I'm a teetotaller myself), but for those of you who are interested in trying a unique brand of alcohol from Estonia, then you should definitely buy a bottle of "Vana Tallinn" ("Old Tallinn").

Since both Estonia and Latvia celebrated their centennials this year, I watched a documentary about the latter's history in November (Latvia's Independence Day is on the 18th). They mentioned the "Riia palsam" ("Riga Balsam") there, which reminded me that I've never tasted our very own "Old Tallinn" before, so I wanted to give it a shot.

It's a liqueur and this was my first time drinking it - I didn't like it (exactly like all the other times when I've taken sips from different kinds of alcohol, I don't think I've tasted wine yet though..). The smell reminded me of that disinfecting liquid that doctors would use to clean wounds. I preferred that box of non-alcoholic glogg on the right more than "Old Tallinn", ha-ha!

I think that's about it for what I wanted to say about our food, now onto more personal stuff. I didn't mention any desserts (since there isn't anything unique), but in our family, we like to buy premade gingerbread cookies from the store (not enough time to bake any of our own) and decorate them with colourful frosting (it's still fun!).

You can guess which ones are made by me or my mom (hint: all of the ones in the first photo + I wrote the characters' names from both Avatar series and Voltron + drew some pretty winter-related items/patterns + the little map of Europe and Estonia in the bottom right corner of the last photo):

Besides that, I like to buy an advent calendar filled with little chocolates for the first 25 days of December. Just like last year, I bought a "PAW Patrol"-themed one this year. And on a trip to our capital Tallinn, I finally managed to buy the third pup plush I was missing - Marshall! (I already bought Chase and Skye back in May.)

Speaking of that trip to Tallinn, then I went there together with my dad since we'd bought tickets for the big finale of the 7th (golden) season of "Su nägu kõlab tuttavalt" (which might've been the last, but nobody knows for sure, not until next autumn).

It's a show (the finale was live on TV) where 4 men and 4 women (who are our own local, famous actors/singers) parody or try to mimic an artist/band and one of their songs as well as they can (and they work really hard on tweaking their performances to look amazing + the team behind the cameras and in the make-up/dress room, the back-up dancers and mentors Maiken and Villiko contribute just as much).

There are 8 pre-recorded shows shown each weekend on Sunday, which lead up to the big finale. In each of these shows, the 4 judges give the participants points for their performances, based on how well/accurately they did. The one who receives the most points wins that night and gets to donate 1,000 € for charity (they pick an organization that they'd like to help).

The 4 participants with the highest scores by the end of those 8 pre-recorded shows will be the finalists in the finale (the other 4 will perform, too), where only the audience can vote for them via telephone. Ultimately, their votes will choose the winner of the season, who gets to donate 10,000 € for charity.

This year, the winner was Saara Kadak (on the left, with the show's host, Märt Avandi, on the right). She mimicked ABBA's "The Winner Takes It All" (my mom's favourite band) and did it ever so beautifully (in my opinion, she deserved to win)!

A day after the finale, a lottery-type of competition was held on Facebook. I entered and, for the first time ever in my life, I actually won something! A poster of Saara Kadak (with her golden signature on it) and the cheerleaders of TalTech (my old university, previously known as TUT or TTÜ in Estonian), where she was dressed up as Toni Basil and together they parodied the song "Hey Mickey" in one of the pre-recorded shows (it was awesome!):

Since we're still on the topic of concerts, then I'd like to mention that I also went to a special Christmas concert (which was part of a bigger tour) at our local church, where Koit Toome and Valter Soosalu sang some lovely holiday-themed songs. I enjoyed it very much, exactly like last year when I went to Elina Born and Stig Rästa's concert. (I think this is going to be a new tradition for me, to go to at least 1 Christmas concert before the holidays.)

After that concert, me and my dad drove to a small town called Väätsa to go have a look at their cultural center. That little place has become famous for organizing weird (but in a good way), yet fun events. This winter, the locals had decorated all the windows of the building with pretty installations/decorations, some of which moved around thanks to their mechanisms/reacted when someone walked by (such as these two coffee mugs, where the coffee started to pour down from top to bottom when my dad passed the window):

On our trip to Tallinn (the same day I bought Marshall and we went to the finale of SNKT), my dad and I wanted to visit the annual Christmas market in the Old Town (it's up from the middle of November until the beginning of January). Did you know that it was chosen as the best one in Europe this year? If you happen to visit Estonia next year, why not pop by and have a look for yourself (that's the old Town Hall in the background):

Finally, here's a glimpse of our Christmas tree and the presents I received this year (I checked this Monday and my preordered copy of "Imbalance: Part One" was shipped on the 18th and it should arrive at the beginning of 2019, yay!):

Most importantly, seeing just how much truth has suddenly become public about how weak our healthcare system is when it comes to people with rare diseases/who need their medications financed by the health insurance fund (and how stingy the council can be when making these decisions) and how our own country charges 9% off from all donations made to the Cancer Treatment Fund, I decided to help out by donating 15 € to 3 different charity shows this year:

Donated 5€ to "Jõulutunnel", which raised money to donate to the Children's Fund of the Clinic of Tartu University for helping kids with rare diseases this year.

Donated 5 € to "Jõulusoojus", which raised money so they could buy the physically-impaired children a robot that'd help them learn how to walk (again).

Donated 5€ to "Inglite aeg", which raised money to help specific people who sent them their stories, people who usually don't have enough money to pay for an expensive treatment or cure and can't live a normal life or who are suffering in a different way (such as losing their home to a fire).

*wipes beads of sweat off her forehead* Phew! Writing this post took me like.. 2+ hours! Anyways, I hope you've enjoyed reading about how December went by for me. Thanks for sticking around!

#personal #shards of Kristal

5 notes · View notes