In fairy tales and fantasy, two types of people go in towers:  princesses and wizards.

Princesses are placed there against their will or with the intention of ‘keeping them safe.’ This is very different from wizards, who seek out towers to hone their sorcery in solitude.

I would like a story where a princess is placed in an abandoned tower that used to belong to a wizard, and so she spends long years learning the craft of wizardry from the scraps left behind and becomes the most powerful magic wielder the world has seen in centuries, busts out of the tower and wreaks glorious, bloody vengeance on the fools that imprisoned her. 

That would be my kind of story.

When Princess Talia was fourteen, her eldest sister was placed in a tower.

Princess Adina was eighteen by then, and so of a marriageable age. She had grown quite beautiful, though she was more willful than winsome, and she did not care for the notion of the tower very much at all. Their mother did her best to persuade her on the subject. After all, the queen herself had been eighteen when her own parents had sent her to live in that very same tower, to be safely tucked away until her husband could be chosen, and then ride out to claim her. A tradition going back ages and ages.

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okay tumblr’s exclusion from the twitter social media ban list is hilarious but genuinely we do not belong on there. if a real human person asks “where can i find you on social media” and your choice is a swift death or revealing your tumblr, most of us would simply expire. half of y’all change urls every week like you’re in witness protection. just imagine for one second attaching your wholeass government name to your latest two am clownposting and tell me that didn’t send a cold chill down your spine. the only place i ever want to see the words “connect with me on tumblr!” is on the ao3 profile of an author i’m actively stalking. anyone in the world can follow me except anyone i personally know. antisocial media.

fully obsessed with the people in the notes who are like “i don’t know what y’all are worried about 🙄 i simply curate an entire dummy tumblr account connected to a different email address where i reblog a regular stream of cute animals and aesthetic pictures of old buildings and then give that url out instead” like they’re maintaining a deep cover identity for a cold war spy. completely normal behavior.

reblog for larger sample size

There is so much amazing about this. It's an archeological museum in 530 BCE or so. Also, the exhibits are labeled in three languages. Also they apparently had replicas on display for some things, much like modern museums do.

Humanity has not really changed that much, and some of the ways in which we haven't changed are really good.

Y'all, I am BEGGING you to click through and read that short Wikipedia article. It's the earliest museum we've ever discovered. It was part of the state of Ur.

This is the Ur-Museum!

Some of the artifacts in this museum date as far back as the 20th century BCE, which would have been as long ago to Ennigaldi-Nanna as the fall of the western roman empire is for us

where's that quote abt like. being embarrassed abt the thinness of ur life the way ur embarrassed by a threadbare piece of clothing. bc like yeah

Olivia Laing

I was tagged by @cruulsummer

The rules are simple - find a sentence, or excerpt, that includes the words you’re given and paste it in, and include a link to the finished story if you want. But honestly, these are guidelines at best - do what you want.

I’m tagging: @lunarmoment @scorpioaqua @laestrellapanda @raevenlywrites @blushroomx @fiora-miriel

My words to find: Red - Sleep - Writhe - Shallow - Bet - Safe - Look - Anger - Help

Your words are: Intention - Suit - Dark - Smirk - Heavy - Spread - Music - Stop - Alcohol

Text: We breed koi for the palace fortune tellers, their colors and markings all with different meanings. We lie when we need to, when one black scale on the wrong fish could start a war.

so my roommate is completely straight edge like no drugs no alcohol etc and so im sure y’all can imagine my surprise when i saw she brought home this sign

so i immediately inquired

and now you may ask. what the fuck did my roommate think that sign meant? well

anyways i moved the sign so it’s now front and center in our living room and ive been laughing every time i pass it

what a terrible time for me to remember that my roommate has a tumblr account and could theoretically find this post. *********** if you see this im sorry but it was funny and needed to be shared

I mean, botanically, “sativa” just means “cultivated” and “indica” means “of India”.

Cultivate to change the things I can run off to India

to accept the things I can't

Y’all… what do you guys do for a living… but describe it in the worst way possible.

I'm not talking "to people who know you well" I'm talking "a stranger is checking your id"

i think this is probably true of every office, but there's a middle aged woman working in business who doesn't hold any particular place in the chain of command but is Sovereign. i was running support and she has access to more secure network drives than i do. im pretty sure she has an admin account. i was having trouble with my parking pass and my boss just said to talk to kristen- one day later i had parking in any garage on campus. she's not even in charge of parking in our building

This is also true of academia. In pretty much any department of the university — in my experience at least — there’s a person with a small-but-private office and an unassuming title (probably including a word like “secretary” or “assistant”), usually an older woman, and she actually runs the place. Faculty defer to her; department heads come and go, but Jill has been there for thirty years and knows how everything works, and she’s the person you go to if you want to get anything done. You’ll know her because when a professor directs you to her they won’t say “you need to talk to the Office of So-and-So because this falls under their purview”, but “you need to talk to Jill.” Her official job title is basically irrelevant because her actual role is acting as eminence grise for this whole operation.

I’ve personally had the experience where my advisor told me “you should do such-and-such certification, go talk to Jill,” and I went to talk to Jill & she said “actually you can’t do such-and-such because XYZ,” so I went back to my advisor to relay this, and he just kind of shrugged and was like, “well if Jill says no, then it can’t be done” and that was the end of it. Complete veto power, no higher authority to turn to, because the only reason Jill can’t do something is if it’s literally impossible.

Honestly there’s probably a whole dissertation about invisible labor and gender dynamics in there waiting to be written.

The one in my undergrad department was Linda C, and I think her hypercompetence must have risen to the point of allowing her to manipulate time itself, because in my experience, every time you needed to talk to Ms. C, you would end up chatting with her for at least an hour (which was both enjoyable and informative) and yet she got so much work done--it just didn't seem physically possible.

Take secretaries and administrative assistants out of any organization and you'll see it crumble in no time. They are the holder of the secrets to understanding red tape and other administrative nightmares.

The whole project of corporate IT was trying to get rid of this type of person and it's why nothing works anymore and we're all dying

you ever heard a lightning fucking scream?

youre about to

Sometimes I forget that this isn't a normal July thunderstorm to most people. I've heard it like something was literally rending the sky, like shredding metal, then the big BANG. Storms are big out here.