🌙
Sephora
🌙 20
🌙 she/her
🌙 pagan witch
🌙 bisexual
🌙 devotee of Nyx
🌙
This is my main blog, an amalgamation of my interests which tend to include: witchcraft, animals, virtual pet sites like Flight Rising and Chicken Smoothie, writing, reading, crystals, biology, divination, art and animation, and Greek mythology. Oh and you'll likely see the occasional post about school tips, politics, and memes. I don't bite so feel free to message me :)
you’re not falling behind. you are still young and have a whole life ahead of you. you have enough time to explore things u love and experience your life and make your goals come true and find reasons to live. take things one day at a time and don’t let the fear of falling behind stop you because life isn’t a race.
you know i hate tumblrs “i hope they do something problematic” shit so much? its not only with people like thomas sanders or john mulaney or that comic guy with the bike, but with whole ass shows and projects? like nobody ever said b99 is cop propaganda. nobody was saying that until one single person mentioned it and suddenly its the worst show you could watch because of one aspect of their show, while ignoring the shows diversity and political stances.
same happened to dream daddy, like you cant deny that that game was groundbreaking for the lgbt society, but suddlenly some people started shit like ‘uhhh but 5 years ago the game grumps made transphobic jokes’ and ‘you know that joesph is actually a satanist, right?’ and suddenly no one talked about the game anymore?
everytime someone tries their fucking best to be inclusive, diverse etc. people are digging through everything they can find just to justify that they dont like it? overwatch recently hosted a huge event to raise money for breast cancer research in association with the BCRF and without even doing one second of research people accused them of working with the susan g. komen foundation (which wasnt true) and tried to boycott a fucking charity event?
what im saying is, dont let tumblr ruin everything you love because they are bitter
Romantic opium binges and fainting couches are all well and good but kids these days just don’t appreciate the late 19th century occultism aesthetic. Get some ceremonial robes, take up pipe-smoking and radical political views, wave some hyssop branches around and claim to have received revelation from mysterious higher beings. Transliterate your name into a Semitic language or sign all your letters with a mysterious Latin abbreviations; schism from your secret society to form a new, even more secret society! Paint a circle on your wealthy parent’s library floor and summon up spirits of indeterminate origin!
in my house we call that friday night
ah my children, gaze in wonder at the surprisingly accurate history of western witchcraft😊
It’s an extremely popular opinion among middle and upper class white people.
Also, aside from this completely uneducated reasoning as to why minimum wage was created…
I can guarantee that there are tens of thousands of teenagers who have to pay bills and help support their families or are the only financial supporter to their family.
I find it kinda odd how people talk about writing “flawed” characters like the flaws are an afterthought
Like “cool cool we’ve got this perfect hero now to just sprinkle on some Irritability and Trust Issues then microwave for 6 minutes on high until Done”
But I’ve personally found it feels a lot more useful to just… think of the flaws as the Good Traits except bad this time
The protagonist is loyal? Maybe that means they have a hard time recognizing toxic relationships and are easily manipulated by those they want to trust
The hero is compassionate? Maybe they work too hard and overextend themselves trying to help people and then they refuse to ask for help when they need it themselves for fear of burdening others
They’re dedicated to their ideals? Maybe they’re also too stubborn to know when to quit and they have trouble apologizing for their mistakes
If they’re creative, they can also be flighty. If they’re confident, they can be arrogant. If they’re brave, they might be reckless. If they’re smart, they could be condescending. Protective can become controlling, and someone who’s carefree could very well also be emotionally distant
In my opinion, the best “flaws” aren’t just added on afterwards. The best flaws are baked in deep, ‘cause they’re really just virtues turned upside down
YEEESSS! This is what real people are like! Treat your characters as real people!….because until this book is published and on someone’s shelf, these characters are your best fucking friends. Your only friends. You should know them better than you know yourself.
Ok I’m going a bit over board. Just treat your characters like real people and you should be bueno.
i know that it’s a witchy thing but it’s so underrated!!! talking to the moon at night is soooo calming and it’s a good way to get anything off my mind and ask nature to help me with things that are out of my control! usually i’ll ground myself and then tell the moon anything that’s on my mind and meditate. i lovelovelovelovelove doing this and it makes me feel a lot closer to the earth around me, i hope other witches do it too!
BIG DISCLAIMER: i was 9 when 9/11 happened, so this might be more about my own crystalizing tastes than anything else. i think it’s a pretty darn good theory tho and other people have validated it.
BIGGER DISCLAIMER: i am not saying that country music prior to 9/11 was free from nationalist, racist, misogynist undertones - i just think that these themes became more the norm!
MY HOT TAKE:
with very few exceptions, including goodbye earl, before he cheats, and daddy Iessons (side note - all women!) 9/11 ruined country music. around 2014 onward we’ve got margo price, sturgill simpson, jason isbell etc., who are making country music great again (wink), but those folks are mostly considered “alternative” country. the mainstream country music for well over a decade now is a glut of trash performative patriotic / working-class-but-not-really lab-crafted budweiser-sponsored nonsense that has managed to sound rebellious (or has convinced its fans that it sounds rebellious) without ever actually questioning any power structure. so much so that artists who ACTUALLY criticized the government were literally blacklisted for nearly a decade (the dixie chicks)
pre-9/11 country music, though not perfect or ideologically pure by any stretch, did not have the raging american flag painted truck boner that comes to mind for a lot of people who say “i like everything except rap and country”
SPECIFICALLY, toby keith’s “courtesy of the red, white, and blue (the angry american)” (2002) literally destroyed country music. it was a direct answer to the 9/11 attacks and war song in support of the invasion of afghanistan. the lyrics read like a disjointed feverish email chain letter forwarded from your great uncle sprinkled with glittering american flag gifs and heavily saturated pictures of bald eagles. the entire song is lifted from an estimated 248 peeling bumper stickers collected from rusted trucks on cinder blocks in overgrown yards, cut up and arranged to fit a catchy, formulaic tune that is almost certainly the background music playing in george w. bush’s head at all times.
“we’ll put a boot in your ass, it’s the american way
and uncle sam put your name at the top of his list
and the statue of liberty started shakin’ her fist
and the eagle will fly, and it’s gonna be hell, when you hear mother freedom start a'ringin’ her bell”
country music and the new country musicians that toby keith paved the way for became so pro establishment and so unquestioningly nationalistic that, again, the dixie chicks who went against this grain were blacklisted by the industry and received death threats from country music fans. hell, there are folks who STILL froth at the mouth at the mere mention of the dixie chicks.
9/11 killed outlaw country - how can you sing the praises of law breakers when your main circuit consists of singing to troops? there are some great classic country songs critiquing the police state - especially from johnny cash and merle haggard - now country music artists hold fundraisers for FOPs. new country music is basically in-law country music.
you don’t have to write a pro-bush patriotic anthem to be part of this post-9/11 ruination. playing meaningless songs about living in the heart of (read: white) america, eschewing the city (read: not white), and cracking open a cold one with the boys for “authentic” country music is also important to the war effort.
there’s a progression of themes here:
post 9/11 top tier: war anthem, vocally patriotic, directly used as pro war propaganda;
which paved the way for: “things used to be so much better” thinly veiled racist laments, good for campaign ads;
which paved the way for meaningless party anthems - attempts to make things “like they used to be” and craft a reality that neither the artist nor listener likely ever experience.
that brings us to what most people think of today when they say they hate country music: the country party anthem - “tiny hot gal in tight jean shorts who can drink beer like the guys, she doesn’t like beyoncé Like Other Girls, oh she’s so into me and my truck, i’m gonna take her fishing after i finish sowing my corn - sung by a guy who’s never touched a tractor” - has overtaken the tragic, done me wrong, despairing country ballads of tammy wynette, george jones, and even up into pre-9/11 contemporaries like reba mcentire and george strait. you didn’t necessarily have to be country to relate to their pain. now you have to perform suburban redneckness to enjoy luke bryan.
when was the last time you heard a sad country song?
after 9/11, cowboys (whether or not they had ever been near a cow) weren’t allowed to be sad anymore (no more done me wrong country), and they certainly weren’t allowed to question authority (no more outlaw country). partying hardy became the most important American Thing and if you don’t sing about that, our Enemies Will Win.
so - understanding that country music has always had bad stuff, and that like any genre it suffers from commercialization, 9/11 DESTROYED COUNTRY MUSIC. and toby keith gleefully helped destroy it.
for some further evidence of the decline of country music, please listen to the dixie chicks’ “long time gone” which is an indictment of the industry (i believe it was written before 9/11 but my point still stands - the genre was on the decline and 9/11 was the major cultural event that hastened the decline).
maybe i am a curmudgeon - almost every generation of country music has had its own “country music is not what it used to be” anthem, but i really think something distinct happened with 9/11.
Can confirm. Alan Jackson and Toby Keith, the blacklisting of Dixie Chicks, literally the only singer I can think of that ever spoke out against anything from 2001-2010 was Johnny Cash. I’d also say that the uber-patriotic stance lead to the shiny, vapid County Boy® nonsense that lead to so many of the solo artists all sounding and looking the same.
and it’s a zeugma where one of the words is literal and one is metaphorical which is the BEST KIND
I didn’t know about zeugmas until just now! That is so awesome, everybody:
zeug·ma
ˈzo͞oɡmə/
noun
a figure of speech in which a word applies to two others in different senses (e.g.,John and his license expired last week ) or to two others of which it semantically suits only one (e.g., with weeping eyes and hearts ).
so the cah pride pack has options for buying it “with glitter" and “without glitter” and knowing cards against humanity they just tip like 3 tablespoons of fucking glitter into the pack of cards and send it out
