books read in 2023: alice hoffman's practical magic series

All the same, there were some things they needed to learn. Do not drink milk after a thunderstorm, for it will certainly be sour. Always leave out seed for the birds when the first snow falls. Wash your hair with rosemary. Drink lavender tea when you cannot sleep. Know that the only remedy for love is to love more.

Each language has kinds of magic it is casts the best

For years, people relied on Ancient Daevic as the go-to language for blood magic. But in recent years people realized that "quarterly shareholder report" business English was even more effective...

"Is it the man you want, or the feeling inside you when someone cares?"

Magic Lessons by Alice Hoffman

Good morning and happy first update day of 2023! There's incredible art at both A GIRL AND HER FED and at SIDE QUESTED! (but writer-me is making weird pointy gestures at this SQ panel which means nothing, I'm sure)

One day, probably several years from now, I'll talk at length about how @alepresser and I came up with the rules for magic in SIDE QUESTED. They are...uh...extremely fucked-up. Ale had to remind me multiple times that this comic is a TEEN ROMANCE COMEDY and DOES NOT CONTAIN MURDER, KB, COME ON, I MEAN REALLY so I toned it down. A lot.

(It's still really fucked up tho.)

"This will be easier than trying to enchant a lock. All I have to do is move the latch, or bolt, or whatever it is." "Without seeing it?" Charles sounded skeptical. "I may not be able to see it, but i know it's there. What it is isn't important. It's what I do with it that is. You've heard Ally say that many times. I'm not enchanting the latch so that it will move. I'm exerting my will to cause the door to do what I want, which is to open. How it chooses to do that is up to it."

Bewitching Season by Marissa Doyle

a day late to my 6 years on t anniversary ✨🏳️‍⚧️ a short comic about looking back

Art by giganticbuddha (here's their ko-fi)

Lore

Gods

What are Gods?

If a being gets enough followers, they become a King. If they get even more followers, they become a Demi-God. If a being transcends reality and is both worshiped and thought of as a God among their subjects, they indeed become one. this can lead to entities such as Devon breaking the system and ascending to Godhood beyond the normal means. Occasionally, Gods are created, Not made, if there is no human basis for the God. The God of Christianity is one of these. Most beings from myth and legend, such as Anubis, Zeus, or Death.

Ideas, on the other hand, are created by people not worshipping a deity, but rather coming up with a concept, such as Society, or Debt. These humanoid entities cannot be killed, have almost no memories of being created, and tend to follow whatever their role dictates, without them knowing.

LET THE BOY HAVE AN EDUCATION

officially at the point where we're starting to see where it's all headed and I am just going NYEEHEEHEE in delight at it all. ahhh...next week can't come soon enough...

alesha, Rule

idk hate on gmmtv all u want but them bringing back an OG couple from a 5yr hiatus to cast them in an extremely risky remake of a show that's highly critically acclaimed, fighting copyright issues for over a year, getting a ban on youtube, STILL releasing the show on live tv with subtitles and THEN end up making the adaption better than the original, fixing the messed up side couple, giving all 3 couples healthy and loving relationships, a proper development with good pacing, not cursing the 11th episode with dumb drama AND making karan and achi the first gay couple to have a wedding on a gmmtv show is highkey iconic say what u want-

See, I think modern vampire fiction that tries to go old-school by focusing on the dirt thing is missing the point.

For the folkloric beasties that literary vampires are based on, there’s nothing special about dirt. Their weakness is that they’re compelled to return to their grave each day. Basically, they’re like sneaky zombies, rising from their grave each night to prey on the living, then returning to their grave each dawn and stealthily re-burying themselves, leaving no sign they’d ever been gone. The art of old school vampire-hunting thus revolves mostly around going down to the graveyard and figuring out which grave has the vampire in it.

(This is also the origin of the stake-through-the-heart business, incidentally: once you figured out which grave had the vampire in it, you’d drive a giant wooden spike through the corpse and into the earth below, preventing it from rising by literally nailing it into its grave!)

With an understanding of the trope’s folkloric origin, it becomes clear that what literary vampires are doing with the coffin-full-of-dirt thing is rules-lawyering their curse. A vampire must return to its grave each dawn, and apparently a coffin with a bit of the vampire’s native soil in the bottom counts as its grave, at least for this particular purpose.

Thus, if our objective is to call back to or modernise that trope, the coffin is not the point. The dirt is not the point. The point is the occult rules-lawyering: what exactly can I convince whatever force or agency governs the vampiric curse counts as “my grave”?

They…

penalized Simone Biles for being better

said Serena Williams looked like a man

applied different standards for Sha’Carri Richards

mocked Naomi Osaka about her mental health

excoriated Angel Reese for competitive taunting

All are BLACK women. All are CHAMPIONS despite the hate.

Well Behaved Women Rarely Make History

Come on guys, nobody becomes a trans woman to gain an advantage at sports.

People become trans woman to have their spells cost one less in MtG silver edged games

or femboys. Femboys will also have their spells cost 1 less