Merry Christmas? No, Merry NONDESCRIPT WINTER HOLIDAY 2023!

Someone's going to be out there doing mischief in Roman's name ✨

I have SO many thoughts about everything and they are in no kind of order yet, so here's just some quick little bits in the meantime!

I am not normal about any of these characters!

I had a scrap piece of paper and drew the little freakish dog 👍 I have been silently enjoying your art for like a couple months now? I found it randomly on uploaded Pinterest and was like “oh huh that’s rad” and yeah he’s such a lovely sad little beast

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hi

idk if it's obvious but the background was kind of an afterthought

examining a seemingly normal image only to slowly realize the clear signs of AI generated art.... i know what you are... you cannot hide your true nature from me... go back where you came from... out of my sight with haste, wretched and vile husk

working retail is making me remember how much i hate stupid customers btw

I try not to get mad when people interpret shows differently than me or that they have different feelings about writing/pacing/etc, but I do get mad when people show emotional depth so shallow I couldn't drown in it face down and that some people aren't taught how to take a piece of media apart and look at it through different lenses and that we've become so used to shows and movies and even books that are designed not for quality but to rake in cash that people no longer feel safe trusting an author/director/actor/etc to make choices that are true to character and true to theme. so now people see writing decisions that they don't necessarily agree with at first glance and immediately think this is garbage and awful and they ruined it, how dare they.

like babygirl I am begging you, take a second and ask yourself a few things.

are you mad about this because it genuinely feels out of place or because it isn't what you wanted to be feeling? (that last part is important: how you wanted this to make you feel often colors your interpretations, especially when it comes to favorite or comfort media.)

are you considering this through your own perceptions and experiences, or through what the characters have been shown to have experienced? (separate the things you have learned through your life experiences vs what this character would have learned through theirs, including the negative things.)

has this author/director/platform/etc previously demonstrated an inconsistency in characterization or theme? (sometimes a show really does have shitty characterization, but if the writer/studio/whatever is solid, you have to trust that there is a reason and that you can find it if you look.)

how are you feeling in general while reading/watching? (I often find my own mood affects how I interpret a story. for example, something that seems choppy or unclear can be much less so on a second watch a few days later.)

Does Loki/Brad have a ship name? Asking for a friend 👀

i saw the tags you put on the mongolian tea video and i'm mega intrigued (i love hearing about food from other cultures!!): googling rondijzhu yields no results, and laghman comes up as a type of noodle dish? would you mind talking a bit abt the breakfast from chitral? :D

@albertinesimonet I'm so, so, so sorry for how long it's taken me to answer this 😭 University's been hell, I really want to give this answer the detail it deserves, so I hope you can forgive the fact that it's, like, a month late.

Anyway! I'm so happy someone on Tumblr's taken interest in my tiny river-valley hometown! This entire answer is going to function as me gushing about it now lol. Some context on what I'm about to say is that while Chitral is in Pakistan, it's in the far, far north of it, bordering the Tajik-majority area of Afghanistan and very, very close to Tajikistan. So while Chitral is, through borders, considered part of South Asia, its culture and cuisine is much more similar to more Central Asian ones.

(There's Chitral on a map of Pakistan!)

Another thing worth mentioning is that 'Chitral' itself is a bit of a catch-all term for the general part of Pakistan that speaks a language called 'Khowar' and its dialects, not taking into account the fact that the cultures within the Chitral district vary wildly based on where exactly in the mountains you are. Just saying that so you know to take what I say with a grain of salt, and just know that it's applicable to a specific part in this specific region of the district (think somewhere in the green portion on the map below).

With that said, breakfast in Chitral can be anything, as long as it's hearty! People generally don't have a solid 'lunch', as midday is the best time to get outdoor work done, so big breakfasts are the norm. In summer, it's butter tea (tea with butter and salt boiled into the milk) with dried fruits (I'm a fan of apricots, but dried grapes, peaches and assorted berries are common too) and Chitrali bread (which is very, very thick; I think some people call it tikki but we've just always called it 'Chitrali bread' lol), usually with cottage cheese. You can stuff the Chitrali bread with minced meat (goat or lamb, mostly), cottage cheese or milk curds too!

Winter, though, is where breakfast becomes key, and which is where the foods you asked about come in– in summer, at least, the weather is better so you do have time to eat in the afternoon, but in winter? No chance. In Chitral, winter breakfasts are massive, warm and hearty as hell. Salty butter tea is still a must, coupled with Chitrali bread which, in winter, is usually stuffed. A lot of people choose to add milk curds into the tea, but I never liked doing that, so. Rip.

Other people add dried rondijzhu (which is a very, very rough Anglicisation of a Khowar word so I'm not surprised nothing came up when you Googled it!) to their tea too. Rondijzhu, which is also served generally at breakfast in the winters, is basically just portions of spit-roasted lamb or goat that are really, really heavily salted (Chitral isn't the place to go if you have cholesterol issues) to make sure they last. A lot of people take aside parts of the freshly spit-roasted meat to slice it up into little chunks and dry it seperately to the rest of the rondijzhu, so they can use it as stuffing, in tea, in mantu (steamed dumplings– pretty similar to Chinese bao!), et cetera.

Another use for rondijzhu, and a way to heat it up for breakfast, is by boiling it with khalli, or laghman (they're both the same thing– we call it laghman but I know people in the vicinity of Chitral city call it khalli). It is indeed a type of noodle dish! It's basically just soft wheat noodle soup cooked with usually either minced meat or chunks of mutton or beef and a shitton of herbs. It's more on the brothy side, and so is super warming, especially when served alongside Chitrali bread. Something people (or, at least, we) tend to do is, when boiling the wheat noodles that were cut the night before for the morning laghman, adding rondijzhu to the noodles. This both warms up the rondijzhu and acts kind-of like stock for the laghman broth. You can take the rondijzhu out and eat is seperately, or keep it in the laghman, your choice (I personally prefer having it seperately, but I'm a picky eater by mountain village standards).

That said, laghman isn't strictly a breakfast food. Hell, none of these are. Chitrali bread is eaten with salty butter tea in the afternoon, laghman and rondijzhu are eaten for dinner too, and a lot of other Chitrali food that I haven't mentioned (like harisa, which we stole from the Armenians, or pilau or any variation of taaw meat– meat cooked on a gridle– et cetera) can also work as 'breakfast' food. As long as it fills you up, keeps you warm, and allows you to not die of various vitamin deficiencies, it's perfect as Chitrali breakfast or dinner.

tl;dr: breakfast is a social construct and, in Chitral, food is food no matter what time of the day it is 💖

happy birf @gracefullilyofthevalley :]

also a silly bonus bc they do help sdbdj:

back at it again with the gay shit except i’m over a week late and i kind of gave up

1.01 First You Dream, Then You Die

quite literally giggling at the thought of bringing eddie home and him seeing my room and him just going “WHY IS EVERYTHING PINK?!?!”

Why I chose to doodle instead of trying to get to sleep, I have no idea, but not gonna lie, I think that I have peaked artistically if I do say so myself-

i dont even use my japanese keyboard anymore it just exists so every so often i can look back to my taskbar and say 'when the hell did i switch keyboards?'