Oo, A More Detailed Look At Slytherin. Nice! 

Hogwarts kills it with their holiday aesthetics, though. It feels like just yesterday that I was praising their Halloween décor, and now I see these great Christmas gifs going around again. Maybe not everyone at Hogwarts knows what they’re doing, but the decorator sure does! 

(Okay, so like half of these are just snow, but still.)

“One can never have enough socks,” said Dumbledore. “Another Christmas has come and gone and I didn’t get a single pair. People will insist on giving me books.”

Happy day of gratuitous sky fires! 

Currently watching this very cliche (but still decently enjoyable) Christmas movie and it has this horse girl subplot where the older sister is falling in love with horses, but there are these long, lingering shots where she's looking at this female farmhand working with the horses, and she keeps talking about how great and cool that farmhand is, and I can't decide whether it's actually a burgeoning lesbian subplot or just a heavy accidental implication, but it really does feel soooo close to overtly romantic.

Anyways my hot new ship is these two. Time to build it from the ground up ;)

beatrice 6 + 10 thx!

When Violet is born, she’s so perfect and fragile that Beatrice is petrified of her. How can she have been responsible for this soft, unblemished little creature? This creature that needs her - really needs her. And grows up to be so sweet and solemn and clever. Violet doesn’t care what her classmates think of her. This trait amazes Beatrice, she’s enthralled with it. Violet is happy to sit with her mother in the library and look at blueprints quietly for hours, grinning at her when Beatrice brings her green tea. Violet makes her bold enough to start a family.

Klaus is more emotional and excitable, and a grizzlier baby, too. He won’t feed as easily as Violet did, but Beatrice relishes the banality of the challenge. The mundanity of these sleepless nights, the safety of a grumpy baby, it comforts her. Bertrand is better at settling Klaus than she is, and for once, that doesn’t feel like inadequacy. He needs glasses by the time he’s four and he’s got so much to say. Her little conversationalist.

Sunny is still so new, happy and gummy and teething. Surprisingly cheerful, for a teething baby. She doesn’t whine, just chomps on Beatrice’s finger. Rejects the baby food Beatrice lovingly made for her elder two but adores the wooden teething peg that Bertrand whittles her. She crawls so fast that her mother has to skitter across the carpet to keep up with her before the crazy little perfect angel tumbles down the staircase. She’s still so afraid for her children. She never stopped being afraid for them. 

The day Beatrice dies, she sent the three of them to the beach. They’ve always been good at entertaining themselves. She needed them out of the house because she’s so scared for them, and old associates visited, didn’t stay long. She’s waiting for them to return, swaning around upstairs, when Olaf slips in through the unlocked front door. He doesn’t make a sound as he pours out lighter fluid, fumbles with his box of matches. If Beatrice had seen it, she would have been impressed at how quiet this loud, brash man, this boy of hers, could manage to be. Given the right motivation.

She only sees him later, the figure of him, while she’s struggling in the drapery. The smoke is thick, but his tall silhouette is unmistakable. How rude of him, not to even come to say hello, before he did this, finally. It outrages her, the indecency of it. Does the past mean nothing to him? Could he not have throttled her to death, to make it personal? Right for them, befitting of their history. Olaf sets fires when he’s angry with people who have hurt him. Beatrice isn’t just people, is she?

Then everything is dimmer and easier, and breathing seems to matter less. 

I am a peddler of chubby cat pics

I love how a discussion of tropes can turn into an actual, full-length, illustrated story and get me emotionally involved. This was beautiful. Admittedly I could predict the gist of the villain’s motivations from a ways out, but that twist about MC-kun caught me by surprise and definitely gave me feels. I’m not even that familiar with anime tropes, but the mechanics of this story world were fascinating, and that was a quite the battle scene! 

This is exactly the sort of random find that I love about this site. 

You know those anime meta posts along the lines of “I was born with pink hair. The doctors told my parents I was a Main Character and ever since my life has not known peace from demons/spirits/sports competitions/harems who find me”

Well I see that, and I raise you this:

An anime boy whose appearance is, by absolutely anyone’s account, completely and utterly average. Mundane hair. Mundane eyes. Not even glasses to set him the tiniest bit apart. A simple, unmemorable, unrecognizable civilian among a backdrop of millions.

And he has a lot of passions, and a lot of ambitions, which he hones every chance he gets. He’s dabbled in sports and archery and cooking and just about anything you could wrap a competition around. And he’s competed in many of these. Every chance he gets. With all of his passion and all of his might.

He’s crushed by the competition every single time.

Until one day–one day something clicks for him. Something that should have seemed obvious from the start and yet never was–as though everyone, including himself, was unwittingly blind to it. It clicks, when he realizes every kid who’s beaten him in competition, every kid who’s gone on to fame and glory and acclaim, has been some candy-haired gel-spiked ridiculously-dressed fucker. 

There’s some trend there that this Main Character boy can’t explain and can’t understand but he decides, this one time, fuck it. He’ll play along too. He’s got a model train competition in four days, and he’s got nothing more to lose. He hits up the department store, buys the pinkest, noxious-est, fruitiest hair dye he can find, the spikiest hair gel available, and the gaudiest clothes on the thrift rack. He enters the model train competition looking like a bubble gum gijinka.

And he wins.

Suddenly, the other candy-haired contestants notice him. They talk to him. They pledge rivalries. Girls notice him. Judges applaud him. Acclaimed model train aficionados offer him internships across the world. He’s hit on something. 

The main cast expands to cover just about every candy-hair cliche in the book: from the mostly-normal-looking demure school girl with the blue hair to the Naruto-est, yelling-est boy with the red-and-green spiked hair. The cool megane senpais, the purple haired tsunderes, suddenly everyone is interested in him. They’re prodigies and upstarts and underdogs and they truly believe that this main character boy is one of them.

So the main character boy maintains his ruse. He touches up his roots at dawn every morning and carefully attends to his gelled spikes and tells absolutely no one about this great, uncanny, unfathomable secret he’s stumbled upon. He wins his competitions left and right. He racks up the acclaim. He’s hailed as a prodigy of all trades, just now bursting onto the scene, and boils to the top of all his candy-haired peers.

He’s rising up, his every dream within his grasp. Until one day he gets a note under his door, taped to an old picture of his Normal Boring self from middle school, that says “You don’t belong”

Honestly I learned most of what I know from youtube roller skate channels like Indy Jamma Jones and Queer Girl Straight Skates! They have a lot of really helpful videos for beginners. This video from Indy was like my very first starting point; she talks about focusing on shifting your weight with your feet in a V rather than just pushing off, and thinking about it that way really helped me start to move forward without falling over.

Also, PSA, one of the first things a friend on discord told me was to always wear your wrist guards because you're most likely to break your wrist trying to catch yourself if you fall skating. Knee pads are really good too and you can use them for emergency stopping when you're starting out as well. All pads and helmets are useful in their own ways, but even now when I'm pretty comfortable and I sometimes skate without a helmet or knee pads, I still always wear the wrist guards.

Best of luck and I hope you have a fun time! :)

https://youtu.be/P5h0Kv0IJMU

I want to start learning how to roller skate... anyone have any tips for beginners?

Happy March 22 all! 

so do we get sad on the 22nd this year or..?

‘Tis the season for gifs from the one Buffy Christmas episode :) I think I’ve already reblogged these like 5 times on blagueofchaos but I ought to put them on my proper blog. It’s always nice to have festive fandom gifsets :) Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays all! 

Merry Christmas!

I gotta say it's poetic that song #100 on my youtube recap is Saturday by Fall Out Boy. My playlist ends the same way as a Fall Out Boy concert. Couldn't've planned it better.