em > Recent Status Updates

“many of the gotland hoards contain silver arm-rings—sometimes dozens of them—both decorated and completely plain. much work has been done on the economics of such ‘ring money’, a portable form of payment you could both wear and spend.”

“it is not our part to master all the tides of the world, but to do what is in us for the succour of those years wherein we are set, uprooting the evil in the fields that we know, so that those who live after may have clean earth to till.”

“much ink has been spilled in vain attempts to classify or define norse magic, which overlooks the fact that its practitioners probably never really did so, and therefore neither should we.”

“such individuals crossed the borders between people and animals. we do not know how they were really perceived by their contemporaries, but in our terms, they perhaps formed a very special kind of gender.”

“he’s got the bloody heads of his enemies on his chariot, and a flock of wild birds overhead, and a wild stag hitched behind. he’ll spill the blood of every soldier in the fort unless you act quickly and send the naked women out to meet him.”

this book has a truly overwhelming villainess character 🥵

“thorhall’s farm was haunted, which made it very difficult for him to get a satisfactory shepherd.”

done 2 towers

this might be the worst book i've ever read, you guys.

“the thing about working with time, instead of against it, he thought, is that it is not wasted. even pain counts.”

“we know that there is no help for us but from one another, that no hand will save us if we do not reach out our hand. and the hand that you reach out is empty, as mine is. you have nothing. you possess nothing. you own nothing. you are free. all you have is what you are, and what you give.”

“it is useless work that darkens the heart. the delight of the nursing mother, of the scholar, of the successful hunter, of the good cook, of the skillful maker, of anyone doing needed work and doing it well — this durable joy is perhaps the deepest source of human affection, and of sociality as a whole.”

“he tried to read an elementary economics text; it bored him past endurance, it was like listening to somebody interminably recounting a long and stupid dream. he could not force himself to understand how banks functioned and so forth, because all the operations of capitalism were as meaningless to him as the rites of a primitive religion, as barbaric, as elaborate, and as unnecessary.”

“men and women have often found/that the evil they plan can rebound/and strike them down who intended to strike./it’s poetic justice or something like.”

“mortality was the only relief he could think of for his ailment”

done fellowship!

the brave dykes who went before us did not incite riots for our rights so we could go around writing lesbian romance novels with fade to black sex scenes, CAMILLE

“yet such is oft the course of deeds that move the wheels of the world: small hands do them because they must, while the eyes of the great are elsewhere.”

i didn’t get it when i was 18 but I Get It Now

“you really must be sexy to successfully land such a nakedly mercantile wink on a target like reese. but this woman lands it, and reese, despite all her cynicism and familiarity with informal sex work, can’t help but experience a moment of involuntary relief and gratitude that she will be losing her dōTERRA virginity to such an amazing woman.”

santa claus?!

oh my godddddd

lovisa is a brat and i’m living for it

“...suddenly, savagely, death/destroys us, all of us, old or young./and yet we build houses, make contracts, brothers/divide their inheritance, conflicts occur—/as though this human life lasted forever./the river rises, flows over its banks/and carries us all away, like mayflies/floating downstream: they stare at the sun,/then all at once there is nothing.”

“when he heard the death rattle, gilgamesh moaned/like a dove. his face grew dark. ‘beloved,/wait, don’t leave me. dearest of men,/don’t die, don’t let them take you from me.’”

“the mouser was inclined to take on faith the reality of anything fafhrd got mixed up with, certainly anything that fafhrd got physically into—the near-seven-foot northerner was much too huge a hulk of solid matter to be picturable as strolling arm-in-arm with illusions.”

“literally viewed it was hardly an edifying spectacle—a large god stumbling after a small gray demon and grasping at a tankard of beer that just kept eluding him—but the lankhmarians were already viewing it under the guise of two dozen different allegories and symbolisms, several of which were later written up in learned scrolls.”

“i already smell dead fish, burnt fat, horse dung, tickly lint, lankhmar sausage gone stale, cheap temple incense burnt by the ten-pound cake, rancid oil, moldy grain, slaves’ barracks, embalmers’ tanks crowded to the black brim, and the stink of a cathedral full of unwashed carters and trulls celebrating orgiastic rites—and now you tell me of a taint!”