A green poster with plain text on a toilet wall in Edinburgh: "The Brook Advisory Centre helps the unmarried with birth-control and personal problems."

Advert in a public toilet, both vital and coy. Predates 1995 (phone numbers changed then) and the style feels 1980s. The contraceptive pill was available in the UK in 1961, only for married women.
Led me to this intriguing oral history of Scottish contraception: academic.oup.com/shm/article/...

It's a good idea, and would you like my doppelganger workshop notes?

Congrats! There are so few jobs for life, any more.

Yes! And fervour (feels like a girl's name).

Perseverance is a proper find-the-North-West-Passage name. I hope we don't have to embody these, though, rather than aspire to them. Or generate ironic friction.

Enjoy this thread of gig pics.
Also, imagine which of these band titles was the downfall of your decadent royal dynasty. Tag yourself, mine was laid low by Crippling Alcoholism and Bad Breeding and finished off by The Bird Experience.

. -. -.. . .- ...- --- .-. !
Gorgeous name.

An old photograph: a crowd of people outdoors, many with striking but hard to interpret painted faces, surrounding an eight foot tower of foliage which is also a person.

I should mention the early Deptford photographer Thankfull Sturdee, two virtue names for the price of one. Here's his 19th century Jack in the Green.
www.londonremembers.com/subjects/tha...

(Not a judgement on how suitable it is, personality-wise! On any of these!)

Wow yes top choice

That's lovely. (Sounds like it should have been properly Victorian but apparently coined too late for that.)

Ooh nice one, sounds humble but it's got backbone.

Solid, measured, not without poetry!

Oh, that's good - rolls off the tongue, greatly to be desired, good gardening connections.

Maybe the chaps get the attribute nicknames instead: Butch, Slim.

If you had to go by a virtue/value name, what would you pick? Currently in use, or new to you.
Constance, Grace, Felix, Joy, Sophie etc. (Pickings are slimmer for masc names, more scope for invention.)

You, I cannot judge.

"...at the corner of that dreary thoroughfare, for all students to read, poor devils, when their hearts are down.”

Robert Louis Stevenson, 1888

So many years and so much change, and students are still poor devils.

"how I feared I should never have a friend far less a wife, and yet passionately hoped I might; how I hoped (if I did not take to drink) I should possibly write one little book. And then now – what a change! I feel somehow as if I should like the incident set upon a brass plate..."

Dark wordy plaque, outdoors on a wall - text in the posts.

Thinking of students, I revisited this plaque on Drummond Street, Edinburgh.

"and when I remembered all that I hoped and feared as I pickled about Rutherford’s in the rain and the east wind; how I feared I should make a mere shipwreck, and yet timidly hoped not; " 🧵

Mine will be a salacious and sordid workshop, as we explore the sexy side of folk horror. From Machen to Moonflow! Sap's rising!

Totally am, completely smug.

Edinburgh castle seen through a massive window, hot chocolate in foreground, sun, trees, hurrah.

Smug post masquerading as accountability post - snagged the best seat in town and a ludicrously creamy hot chocolate, will now bang out 1000.

Furrowed field, a few trees, and holy island on the horizon.

Train track very close to rocky shoreline.

My hands reflected in the window of a train, trees beyond.

On my favourite train route. Past Lindisfarne the light changes and the gorse becomes a luminous splatter.

Fantasy/SFF fiction academic conference, online and free, 13-15 May. Like a forest of doors.

This was a brilliant evening! Agog that in 1970 Pollack sold her first SF short story (to Moorcock), had her first tarot reading, and did acid and realised she was a woman. Rich foundation-laying.
I'll go back to her fiction - Unquenchable Fire was so good it made me nervous to read more.

Struck by how old-fashioned and familiar this feels.
After the fall of the Berlin Wall, the Stasi's shredders broke down from overuse. Staff tore up docs by hand.
(And even so, destruction was quick in comparison to laborious reconstruction: www.newyorker.com/magazine/202... )

Sympathy. (I really enjoy incense.)

A figure painted on the tarmac to indicate a footpath in a park, but he's kind of lopsided and missing an arm.

This is the footpath for eroded ghosts.

Shaggy grimy heron chick in a nest.

Intermediate heron, blurry grey and reflected in water.

Crisp classic black and white heron.

The young herons are transforming from scruffy grey bundles to sleek monochrome idols, from camouflage to display.