smartblondesandsarcasm:

typhoidmeri:

iconuk01:

writing-prompt-s:

firemageking:

nerdygayholtz:

prismatic-bell:

writing-prompt-s:

Valhalla does not discriminate against the kind of fight you lost. Did you lose the battle with cancer? Maybe you died in a fist fight. Even facing addiction. After taking a deep drink from his flagon, Odin slams his cup down and asks for the glorious tale of your demise!

Oh my god, this is beautiful.

A small child enters Valhalla. The battle they lost was “hiding from an alcoholic father.” Odin sees the flinch when he slams the cup and refrains from doing it again. He hears the child’s pain; no glorious battle this, but one of fear and wretched survival.

He invites the child to sit with him, offers the choicest mead and instructs his men to bring a sword and shield, a bow and arrow, of the very best materials and appropriate size. “Here,” he says, “you will find no man who dares to harm you. But so you will know your own strength, and be happy all your days in Valhalla, I will teach you to use these weapons.”

The sad day comes when another child enters the hall. Odin does not slam his cup; he simply beams with pride as the first child approaches the newcomer, and holds out her bow and quiver, and says “nobody here will hurt you. Everyone will be so proud you did your best, and I’ll teach you to use these, so you always know how strong you are.”

————

A young man enters the hall. He hesitates when Odin asks his story, but at long last, it ekes out: skinheads after the Pride parade. His partner got into a building and called for help. The police took a little longer than perhaps they really needed to, and two of those selfsame skinheads are in the hospital now with broken bones that need setting, but six against one is no fair match. The fear in his face is obvious: here, among men large enough to break him in two, will he face an eternity of torment for the man he left behind?

Odin rumbles with anger. Curses the low worms who brought this man to his table, and regales him with tales of Loki so to show him his own welcome. “A day will come, my friend, when you seek to be reunited, and so you shall,” Odin tells him. “To request the aid of your comrades in battle is no shameful thing.”

———-

A woman in pink sits near the head of the table. She’s very nearly skin and bones, and has no hair. This will not last; health returns in Valhalla, and joy, and light, and merrymaking. But now her soul remembers the battle of her life, and it must heal.

Odin asks.

And asks again.

And the words pour out like poisoned water, things she couldn’t tell her husband or children. The pain of chemotherapy. The agony of a mastectomy, the pain still deeper of “we found a tumor in your lymph nodes. I’m so sorry.” And at last, the tortured question: what is left of her?

Odin raises his flagon high. “What is left of you, fair warrior queen, is a spirit bright as fire; a will as strong as any forged iron; a life as great as any sea. Your battle was hard-fought, and lost in the glory only such furor can bring, and now the pain and fight are behind you.“

In the months to come, she becomes a scop of the hall–no demotion, but simple choice. She tells the stories of the great healers, Agnes and Tanya, who fought alongside her and thousands of others, who turn from no battle in the belief that one day, one day, the war may be won; the warriors Jessie and Mabel and Jeri and Monique, still battling on; the queens and soldiers and great women of yore.

The day comes when she calls a familiar name, and another small, scarred woman, eyes sunken and dark, limbs frail, curly black hair shaved close to her head, looks up and sees her across the hall. Odin descends from his throne, a tall and foaming goblet in his hands, and stuns the hall entire into silence as he kneels before the newcomer and holds up the goblet between her small dark hands and bids her to drink.

“All-Father!” the feasting multitudes cry. “What brings great Odin, Spear-Shaker, Ancient One, Wand-Bearer, Teacher of Gods, to his knees for this lone waif?”

He waves them off with a hand.

“This woman, LaTeesha, Destroyer of Cancer, from whom the great tumors fly in fear, has fought that greatest battle,” he says, his voice rolling across the hall. “She has fought not another body, but her own; traded blows not with other limbs but with her own flesh; has allowed herself to be pierced with needles and scored with knives, taken poison into her very veins to defeat this enemy, and at long last it is time for her to put her weapons down. Do you think for a moment this fight is less glorious for being in silence, her deeds the less for having been aided by others who provided her weapons? She has a place in this great hall; indeed, the highest place.”

And the children perform feats of archery for the entertainment of all, and the women sing as the young man who still awaits his beloved plays a lute–which, after all, is not so different from the guitar he once used to break a man’s face in that great final fight.

Valhalla is a place of joy, of glory, of great feasting and merrymaking.

And it is a place for the soul and mind to heal.

I’M NOT CRYING YOU’RE CRYING

THIS IS GLORIOUS

Beautiful.

Well I AM crying and have no shame in admitting it. Absoutely beautiful!

A woman enters the hall, arms wrapped tight around her. Her hair is dirty, red rimmed eyes hollow. Her clothes are worn, her soul is shadowed and grey.

Odin asks and all she says is ‘I’m sorry.’

Odin asks again, voice low and warm like the embers of a fire.

‘I’m tired,’ the woman says.

‘Then drink and rest,’ Odin says offering up a goblet filled to the very brim.

The woman shakes her head, tears welling from some deep place echoing with the cold and salt of bitter waves. It takes time before the woman speaks of a life lived on the edge, the battle each day from morning to night, the dark thoughts that dwell within.

‘You have long fought the twin demons of Depression and Anxiety, Warrior Maiden. The darkness is all consuming, with thoughts sharp as blades, and tongues of acid to wrap around your soul. There is no shame in the help you needed, with words and healing potions. It is time to lay down your weapons, your fight is over. You have a place in this hall, to rest and heal from the demons that fed on your soul.’

Reblogging this because Lily and I had the idea of doing this with the Val’kyr months ago and in case I ever get around to it.

(via telzin1924)

wild–mountain–thyme:

hellyeahincorrecthazbinquotes:

This is a terrible idea for a few reasons.

• Riot shields are super heavy and if you try to grab one without wearing anything to protect your hands, your fingers are gonna get crushed.
• The cops aren’t just going to let you grab their shit. Unless you have a physique like Brock Lesnar and you know how to fight somebody dressed up in full riot gear, if you try this, you are absolutely going to get your ass kicked.
• Even if you are able to knock the cop to the ground, chances are you’ll be flanked by at least two of their comrades. 

I get that the person who made this post had good intentions, and all they wanted to do was find ways to help the protesters fight back against cops, but that doesn’t make this okay. There are probably a bunch of people who have read this post and are planning on pulling this stunt at the next protest they go to. Every single one of those people will at best get beaten within an inch of their lives and thrown in jail, and at worst get beaten to death. To quote @sam_kriss on twitter: “Don’t give advice that will kill people.”

One of my worst uncles is an ex-Marine, ex-police, ex-prison guard, who since his back went out and forced him to retire sits around all day watching Hoarders and trying to terrorise the people around him into giving him “enough respect”. When I was about 14, and he thought he was detecting the signs of a “future protest attendee” in me, he got out the riot shield he still kept in the garage, stood behind it and braced himself, then challenged myself, my two brothers, and two of my cousins to try to shift him even a little bit. All five of us did our best to turn it over, break it, or kick it hard enough (three of us regularly broke boards at our taekwondo classes, which we foolishly thought might help) to budge him even a little bit. None of it worked. We failed to even get a grip on it without him immediately turning the shield into a blunt weapon to shove us off, hard enough for us to be left on our backs in the dirt. The intended lesson was “even in a group, you will never be stronger or better defended than even a very restrained riot cop, so don’t even bother going to protests”.

Of course, there are other factors in why he laid all 5 of us on the floor using only a riot shield, the biggest one (besides being a grown man and all 5 us all being teenagers or preteens) being real combat experience. You get good at fighting by getting into real fights. The cops may be ex-military or involved in prison security. If you do not regularly, seriously, physically fight people, you will not beat someone who has been in a whole bunch of real fights, especially not someone with a riot shield. Especially not with a tactic like “just lift from the bottom”. “Five cool hacks to get good at fighting cops” do not exist. What does exist is plenty of resources for recognising cop tactics, things like “earliest warning signs police are forming a kettle”, that do help you to make the best tactical retreats you can when the time comes. There are further resources - look up the most local ones possible - for supplies to have on hand and contacts to make, to survive being kettled and/or arrested, and resources for helping provide first aid in the field. They are not as sexy and cool as the idea of ending up in a viral video of someone decking a cop, but as a general rule, the less “sexy” the tactic the more likely it is to be something people are saying because it’s actually useful. Real protest advice is not likely to make you look cool! If something seems like it will bring you personal glory in a protest, it’s 99% likely just a stupid idea that will get you and others hurt, and probably being deliberately spread for that reason.

(via saccharinesinger)

crane-among-celandines:

dancinbutterfly:

softbrah:

Trump is going to get re-elected.

Get comfortable saying it. Get comfortable hearing it and thinking it. Because if we don’t collectively get our fucking shit together, it’s gonna happen.

It’s gonna happen because his supporters still love him. It’s gonna happen because even people who don’t love him are thinking to themselves, “well this hasn’t been so bad, the economy is good, we didn’t actually go to war, that’s way better than taking a chance on some newfangled progressive.”

Nevermind the fact that the stock market takes a plunge almost every time Trump does something crazy and the economy is doing well due to Obama-era policies.

It’s gonna happen because I’m already seeing “I wanna take my toys and go home” rhetoric among Democrats who don’t want to vote for anyone who isn’t their fave.

I’m exasperated and tired and stressed and I should not have read the comments on a WaPo article, I know, I get it, but people — kids at the border. The Supreme Court. The stacking of the lower courts. The complete inaction on climate change. The uninformed “stick first, think later” approach to foreign policy. Even if you’re privileged or ignorant enough to sit there and think that none of this has touched your life, that doesn’t mean it won’t. Reading some of the things people are saying about the state of politics in the US has me feeling like I’ve taken crazy pills over here.

Do I have a favorite in the primary? Sure. Does it matter if she doesn’t win the nomination? No. I’ll go to the fucking bat for Joe Biden if I have to because people’s lives are more important than my ego or my principles. I don’t know how else to put that.

Other people’s lives are more important than your ego or your principles. That’s it. That’s the whole fucking thing and I don’t understand how no one has learned their goddamn lesson about this.

Feelings in the primary.

Party in in the fucking big show.

Or the Red will kill us all. Not just queers and brown people and Jews. All because America will flood and burn as rich people destroy our planet. It will. Vote Blue in November or we all burn.

This just happened in the U.K.

People voted for our Conservative party again, after nearly a decade of them consistently fucking over everyone except the rich, partly because they bought into a pile of horseshit about how the radical progressive rival would doom us all to socialist poverty where we eat rats to survive!

Do not make the same mistake. Do not keep voting for the evil party just because you don’t like the other one enough.

(via mikaila-orchard)