There's a harpy out there, perched on a rooftop in a city somewhere. Her face and her chest are like that of a beautiful woman, yet her feet and claws are talons, and her teeth fangs, and her back sprouting bat like wings. She's known many roads, many cities, many empires. Once she was a warroir of Athena, yet now her temples are in ruins, and now the songs of the gods are so rarely sung.

She has seen empires fall like ash in the winds. Heard great epics sung that no record of now exist. She knows who the greatest poet of all time was, and knows why nobody will ever know her name. She knows of a man who thought of the theory of natural selection during the sixteenth century, and who died peasant nonetheless. She has known of people who saw her and thought she was an angel, and times they saw her and thought she was a devil, and she's known reasons to tell them she was both.

And if you find her at your doorstep, or standing on your terrace or fire escape, you may choose to let in. And she can sit by your bed, and ever so gently run her claw against your hair, and tell you things nobody else has known. Of cities that are only footnotes in your history books. Of how beautiful the summer sun looked over Carthage before it burnt. She'll tell you folktales the world never wrote down, and the things written in the lost books between the iliad and odyssey. And of words of wisdom, from philosophers who never got a chance to tell their thoughts to the world.

And in the morning she'll be gone, like a brief memory, of a long dead world.

Effloresce snippet

Buried in hinterlands long abandoned by high fae, shrouded in a magic so thick it had changed the land and stilled the day: what their foremother had called Mist for the fog, an estate large enough for an entire royal court, trapped forever in the same night and day of late harvest season. A lost, cursed, forgotten kingdom. It was as safe a place Lucien could imagine. If it hadn’t been within the boundaries of the Court of Night. “I could make even better wards out of Rhysands bones,” Lucien murmured, curved down to her temple, before pressing a kiss to her soft skin. “But it will feed and house a damned nation, given the chance.” They’d be a nation, too, if they survived long enough. Honeysuckle sweet, smoke stinging dangerous, Lucien breathed in the grounding, perfect scent of her right up until it changed. Gold and bone. Moss and blood. Eyes cracked open, there it was- the crown of Autumn, shining alongside twisting vermillion ribbons in her curling hair, like it had always been and always would be a part of her. “Elain.” She didn’t startle, but the bond burst like a door, Elain responding to Lucien’s panic like it was her own. He didn’t- couldn’t- Lucien simply picked up her hand and molded it, careful not to burn himself, over gilded bone, pollen teeming into the air. She shook her head. Met his gaze with more question that horror. “I didn’t call it.” Fire flared, a quick crackle of crimson light, the single leaf it carried falling on phantom wind directly in front of her. Smoldering, it burned nothing it touched, fire only further illustration to the single word punched through green. RUN A dozen, a hundred, tree fall itself a wrongness in Lucien’s heart, green leaves and red leaves and crunching oak, a forest filling the air, the entire empty hall, piling on benches, covering stone: RUN RUN RUN RUN RUN RUN RUN RUN RUN RUN RUN RUN RUN-

"Lost Skills, Lost Workers" (2024)

poem by R.J.C.

Metal plate photograph (ferrotype?), roughly 2 1/2" X 3 1/2" in size; nothing on reverse. Digital image made 9/14/2023, at Blue Island Public Library

Help us identify this image! Who it is; where it was taken, and when. Any information is greatly appreciated, even if only for conversation!

The hardest thing about living in Romania (an eastern european country with a romantic language) is that we have no history and we have no language of our own

We did not have the time for a sexual revolution, for a feminist movement, not when the president was treating our country like his little dollhouse and the party masqueraded more servitude as equality. We simply did not have the space to breathe. No one did. Not unless you were part of the party or had a well paying job. Homosexuality was criminalized and people assigned female at birth were everything short of state sanctioned incubators. We were cut off from the world, everything was rationalized for a decade, television was not allowed after 8 pm so ppl would go to sleep earlier and work better the next day

We have queer elders, they are few and far between, and I had the joy of meeting some of them, their existence gives me strength

There are no gender neutral pronouns, everything is gendered from people, to animals, to objects, to ideas, you can't even express how tired you are in the company of certain people without putting yourself in danger. So we have to adapt. Non-binary people have to choose between 2 sets of pronouns that are equally wrong

We have to use queer, gay, lesbian, bisexual, non-binary, asexual and other borrowed terms, because we have nothing else. Just like we did at every step in our history we fell behind the west and now we are trying desperately to catch up by taking everything we can from them and trying to make it ours

Sometimes it feels like we have no past and no future, like it's not worth fighting. Sometimes I think about how much our elders have suffered hiding away? How many have died because of Ceausescu's draconian abortion laws, how many had their deaths reported as something else to cover up the Government's shame, how many didn't have their deaths reported at all? How many stayed in hiding, received their heroine certificates and never spoke their truth to a single soul? How many left elsewhere and never came back home? Seeing how many leave now and come back, fighting the state to recognize their marriages with the weight of the EU behind them but still have to watch the state dragging it's feet, probably a lot

Sometimes I wonder if it's worth it, to try to fight for a change I'll never see in my lifetime. It's slightly better now, not by a lot. I want to believe it can be better, but idk if I have the strength to

This is Gabrielle d’Estrées, the one on the right

It’s rare that I come across a historical figure that has a really famous painting of her and that there are just no historical podcasts about her, and she’s so interesting

And I quote:

Even when heavily pregnant, she insisted on living inside his tent near the battlefield, making sure his clothing was clean and that he ate well after a battle, handling the day-to-day correspondence while he fought. As she was intelligent and practical, Henry confided his secrets to her and followed her advice.

Born a Catholic, Gabrielle knew that the best way to conclude the religious wars was for Hbenry himself to become a Catholic. Recognizing the wisdom in her argument, on 25 July 1593, Henry declared that "Paris is well worth a Mass" and permanently renounced Protestantism.

Gabrielle became Henry's most important diplomat, using her female friends amongst the various Catholic League families to bring about peace.

"My mistress has become an orator of unequaled brilliance, so fiercely does she argue the cause of the new Edict."

Here’s the only podcast I’ve found and a video deconstructing the symbology of the famous painting

Edgar Allen Poe made fun of us for liking thicc women.

Yes, that’s right. Edgar Allen Poe, one of the most famous and influential horror and mystery authors, took time out of his busy schedule writing some of the greatest American literary works, to have a laugh at our sexual preferences.

In his story “The Thousand-And-Second Tale of Scheherazade”, Poe wrote about Scheherazade telling the Sultan a story about real events and locations that would seem impossible to people of that time period. It’s an interesting story concept, but for our purposes, we don’t care. At the very end of the story, Scheherazade talks about a land were “one of the evil genii” has convinced the populace that the “perfection of loveliness” is “the protuberance of the region which lies not very far below the small of the back”. She implies that women use pillows to artificially enlarge such regions, and compares them to a music note and a camel.

Edit: Sorry to spread misinformation. Upon rereading, I realized that Scheherazade stated that women alone were disillusioned, and that men had no interest whatsoever. Just when I thought this was a fun little story about how perverted we are, Poe had to get all misogynistic. Sorry guys.

And once again I put my trust into the wrong person, I told my deepest darkest secrets to the wrong person, I thought after having no faith and distrust in people it would be easy to pick up on anything unauthentic or anything that wasn’t genuine, I finally thought I had found a deep connection with someone which is so rare & now they’ve abandoned me without any reason or excuse

I already hate this world & everyone in it why the few people I like end up leaving with no explanation, my abandonment issues & trust issues have had enough that’s it I can’t do this anymore I won’t ever put my trust into another person again 😪 I am just a shell of emptiness with a broken heart 💔

(Elaborate on your answers in the comments/ tags if you like, I wanna know what you think)

newest writing project

Just finished the second chapter of my Swiftwind and Adora series continuation.

Swiftwind's Adventure - Chapter 2 - CyberWolf_1013 - She-Ra and the Princesses of Power (2018) [Archive of Our Own]

What does Swifty get up to while the BFS is fooling around in space? Maybe he finds a lost island. Maybe he finds love. Maybe he finds a new mystery between Etheria and the First Ones.

Who knows?

Not the author.

Kulkalgal Women and child of Tudu Island, Zenadth Kes (Torres Strait Islands), so called “Australia”.

How long have humans been on earth? Well we gotta learn some ahit about the past first

When could humans first breath the atmosphere?

Let's look at human evolution how did we adapt to the environment

Some indigenous ancestors adapted to the cold (their eyes)

Some to the air (their lungs)

And some to the sea (their spleen and lung)

We also have to look back at how continents were connected (pangea and ice sheets-ice age)

Which climates existed when and where (Sahara desert was a forest, so was Antarctica)