luthienebonyx

[luthienebonyx]

🐱 🐦

#cats #birds

[luthienebonyx]

What's your favorite piece of vintage media that's NOT a movie?

There's these old Sherlock Holmes radio plays I used to binge—I think maybe they were these ones, though I wouldn't have guessed Basil Rathbone's involvement because the show’s defining features were (1) not being very good and (2) segueing into an ad for Clippercraft Shirts every five minutes. The only story I really remember has Moriarty hiding a bomb inside a chicken at the diamond jubilee, which is cleverly foiled by Sherlock Holmes taking the chicken bomb and jumping into a lake with it. People in the 40s really knew how to write a gripping yarn.

#sherlock holmes #chicken bombs

[luthienebonyx]

fell asleep while writing and

#writing

[luthienebonyx]

healing power of time🤍

[luthienebonyx]

totally normal cat behavior

#cats

[luthienebonyx]

[Yes, I had to do it. Yes, all the voices are me. Lyrics under the cut.]

Keep reading

#the muppets #more or less

[luthienebonyx]

[luthienebonyx]

#chronic illness is evil #a friend of mine has lived with CFS/ME for a couple of decades now #it has blighted her life but there is around her this whole mindset of her illness just being part of her #and she should just get on with things #HOWEVER #a year or two back she had a double mastectomy #and the people around her could not get over how EASILY she was coping with recovering from major surgery #why? #because recovering from major surgery was NOTHING compared to living with that fucking chronic illness that they routinely dismissed #think about that #something significantly worse than recovering from major surgery #every single fucking day #and yet she should just get on with things because how bad can an invisible illness be?

[luthienebonyx]

Glory be to God for dappled things—    For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow;        For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim; Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches’ wings;    Landscape plotted and pieced—fold, fallow, and plough;        And all trades, their gear and tackle and trim.

All things counter, original, spare, strange;    Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)        With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim; He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change:                                      Praise Him

Pied Beauty Gerard Manley Hopkins

I cannot express how much I adore dappled shadows formed by sunlight in paintings and photography and in real life

#dappled things #art #poetry #gerard manley hopkins

[luthienebonyx]

the true asylum is even worse than this, how did we all survive it

#ouat

[luthienebonyx]

"low support needs disabled people are often not believed to have a disability at all and therefore struggle to get accommodations."

"high support needs disabled people's accommodations are often seen as 'too much' and therefore are not met."

"neurodivergent people's needs are often dismissed because nothing is physically wrong with them."

"physically disabled people people often cannot physically access buildings and people refuse to do anything about it."

"invisibly disabled people are seen as lazy by society."

"visibly disabled people are ostracized from society."

IT'S ALMOST LIKE THERE'S NO SUCH THING AS A SOCIALLY ACCEPTABLE DISABILITY

[luthienebonyx]

#cats #sausages (not pictured)

[luthienebonyx]

[luthienebonyx]

#cats #of course it's a bengal #the colouring and the body language and the paranoia #all just like the suspicious little spotty cat sitting next to me right now

[luthienebonyx]

[luthienebonyx]

Okay, buckle up buckaroos, because today I met an honest-to-goodness cryptid.

I was out running errands and I made a stop at Intimate Books (…for a friend), and on my way out I realized that the bookshop next door was open.

This bookshop has existed for more than a hundred years, and in all my life it has NEVER BEEN OPEN. I mean, I assume it has to be open sometimes, but never at any normal, reasonable hour. Everyone says it’s a front for the mob or something.

So what do you do when the weird mafia bookshop is open? You go the fuck inside.

The first thing I noticed was the smell. You know that smell when you accidentally leave your towel on the bathroom floor all day and you come back to that mildew funk? The shop smelled like that times a thousand. I expected to see stuff growing on the walls, but the books were pristine. We’re talking first editions, rare editions, weird Bibles and books inscribed to really famous dead people. Librarians would weep for the chance to accession this place. In the first two minutes I found a signed copy of The Crucible and what I think was a first edition of Blake’s Book of Thel.

Then a clerk showed up out of nowhere—honestly nowhere. He looked EXACTLY like a bookseller should look, kind of fluffy and bewildered and really, really gay.

“Are you lost?” was the first thing he said to me.

“Nope. Just browsing, thanks.”

“Browsing, I see. Erm. How do you feel about snakes?” he asked. And without waiting for me to answer, he just walked away and vanished around a shelf.

I figured it was a metaphor, or a code phrase for the mafia. Until I turned a corner like ten minutes later and found a little reading nook. It was really pretty, although I feel like that particular window should have been on an interior wall? Anyway, curled up in an armchair in a patch of sunlight was the biggest fuck-off black snake I have ever seen.

Like, I don’t mind snakes in general. But in their normal context, right? Outside. On the ground. Not six feet long and sitting on a threadbare velvet armchair like it owns the place.

I was about to turn around and leave, but I saw a gorgeous first-edition copy of Leaves of Grass on a shelf, a little too close to the snake for comfort. But I had never needed anything so badly in my life.

So I went back to the counter to buy it, but the clerk was nowhere to be found.

While I was waiting, I noticed a collection of pictures hanging on the wall behind the counter, dating back to the very dawn of photography. A couple were of this rock-star looking guy from the 70s that I should probably have recognized, but there were authors and landscapes and stuff, too. There was even an old tintype portrait of Oscar freaking Wilde, sitting in this very shop with a guy that I would ACTUALLY SWEAR was the clerk from before. Like, I know my family all has the same nose, but this guy had the same everything.

After approximately one year of waiting, the clerk came back out to the desk. By now I’ve realized that he’s too bad at his job to be anything but the owner of the shop.

“I saw your snake,” I told him.

“Did you? Was he behaving himself?”

“He was sleeping.”

“Yes, he enjoys that.”

“Does he just stay out in the open like that? What if he gets out?”

He shrugged and smiled. “He always comes home again, the dear boy.”

Right, a homing snake. That’s totally normal.

Then he cleared his throat and asked, in a weirdly reluctant voice, if I was going to buy the Whitman.

“Yes, please,” I told him. “I saw it on a shelf by the snake, and it was just too tempting.”

He sighed. “Oh, yes, I expect it was.”

When I started to hand him my card, he went all fluttery and said that they didn’t take cards.

All right, fine. I had some cash on me, but I told him that he’d sell a lot more books if he got a Square or something.

He got this scandalized look on his face and went, “Why would I want to do that?”

Oookay. I handed over the cash and he popped open the ancient till and started making change.

In shillings. Shillings! I swear to god I saw Queen Anne’s face on one of them. The silver value of the coins was probably as much as I paid for the book.

But I had to have proof that this happened—at that point, all I had was a book in a plain brown wrapper, not appreciably different from what I bought next door. So I asked him for a receipt.

He looked delighted and wrote one up for me.

By hand.

With a fountain pen.

And that’s the story of how I met a bookseller cryptid and his pet snake.

#good omens

[luthienebonyx]

I must not mock Gen Alpha. Mocking Gen Alpha is the mind killer. Mocking Gen Alpha is the little-death that brings total generational solidarity obliteration. I will engage with Gen Alpha lovingly. I will permit them to be cringe. And when they grow up I will turn my eye to their accomplishments. Where mocking has gone there will be nothing. Only generational solidarity remains