and it’s… fine. The prince is great! They’re in love, he’s very sweet and passionate, writing her poems and songs, giving her anything she wants. The time she spends with her husband is great.
but cinderella is not royalty, her family was noble but she never spent time in those circles. She’s used to being busy, she’s used to cooking and cleaning and mending. There are hours, days, where she has nothing to do.
time passes. cinderella learns the fancy lady type of needlework. Learns to ride horses. Reads a lot.
as is normal for royalty at the time, they travel and are hosted by nobles or stay at castles owned by the king. But even that variety begins to become routine. The prince is distracted, there’s a lot of young women living and working on their route. Daughters of nobles. Younger and prettier with soft hands that have never done a day’s work.
cinderella needs something to spend her time on, and there’s a part of her thinking a couple-only trip might get her husband’s attention again, so she suggests making an old castle that’s fallen into disrepair their “project.” It was built in the time when castles were made to be defensible, so it’s quite sturdy, but it’s overgrown and secluded. The prince doesn’t know why his family stopped living there either. A hundred years ago it was their summer home.
so they go. And they work. And for a while it’s great! But when they leave for winter cinderella’s husband forgets her once again. cinderella resolves to make the best of her life and stop worrying about a man who has gotten what he wanted from her.
summer comes again and this time cinderella goes alone to the old castle (minus staff, of course, but cinderella manages to narrow it down to only repair workers and one maid). She can cook and clean and mend again, but this time it’s her own choice. She is happy.
this summer they make more progress on repairs. The workers say that most of it can be salvaged, except one tower that’s been completely overgrown with vines and briars. It will have to come down, eventually, but for now it can be safely ignored.
cinderella has more free time now. The old castle has a surprisingly untouched library, though time and moisture have damaged many of the books. Behind a collection of greek poetry cinderella finds an old diary. Very old, in fact, at least a hundred years. It’s rude to read a diary, of course, but whoever wrote this is long dead, and cinderella is bored, so…
from the description of activities the author looks to have been nobility. Maybe even a princess. She’s sensitive and sweet and smarter than she seems to realize. If circumstances had been different cinderella wishes they could have been friends…
after the summer ends cinderella returns to her husband. He’s spending a lot of time with a young musician and cinderella can’t even work up the energy to care. She does some research about the castle and the family she’s married into, finds out the name of the princess who wrote the diary.
aurora. Cursed and forgotten. She died young, they say, in a plague that also took out the castle staff and her own parents. Luckily they avoided a succession crisis, but not so lucky for the dead.
time passes. cinderella goes to the old castle again and again, even out of season. Soon enough all that remains to be done is the old tower, and the builders say they should tear it down and fill the gaps before it gets cold.
one night cinderella is restless. The princess from the diary had been fond of that tower, and cinderella is far more attached to a dead woman than she ought to be. She gets out of bed, reads by candlelight, and finally goes to walk the empty halls.
she finds herself going to the tower. Pushing past the vines that don’t seem so troublesome really. They almost part before her. The stairs are perfectly intact, the door at the top is already cracked open. As if she should have done this years ago, cinderella steps into aurora’s bedroom.
she’s as beautiful as the stories say. And sitting under her hands, crossed across her stomach as it rises and falls, is a book of greek poetry.
years later, people will tell the story of cinderella as a cautionary one. Don’t seek above your station. Don’t marry for prestige. After all, a girl who grew up as a servant once married the crown prince, and disappeared after only three years. She ran away, they say, she couldn’t handle the lifestyle.
two old women who run a bookshop together agree with the lesson. Marrying for the wrong reasons never ends well. It’s best to wait for someone you have things in common with, shared interests.
or, failing that, the more linguistic of the two says, wait a decade or ten for someone to fall in love with you from your diary.
her partner laughs and hits her with the socks she is mending.
James McGraw-Hamilton is muttering today because his husband, who he loves with all his heart, won’t stop teasing him.
It all began a few afternoons ago, after he’d accidentally taken a sip out of Thomas’ cup, and had tasted the chocolatey sweet goodness that was his white chocolate mocha. Going back to his plain black coffee afterwards had been disappointing, and James had wondered if finally, after all these years together, Thomas’ sweet tooth had finally rubbed off on him.
Subtly ordering two of them on the next coffee run had been easy enough, until Thomas had gone to check which one was his, only to find two of the same drink. He’d almost turned around to walk back across campus and amend the order before James had stopped him and revealed the truth…
The teasing had begun from there, and James could feel himself starting to blush (incredible; after so many years, Thomas still knew how to get him to flush over the most trivial things), but he defended himself the best he could regardless.
“I’m not saying you were right all along,” he says, knowing that Thomas was right all along. “I just fancied something different,” he continues, recognising that this was about to become his coffee order till the day he inevitably died of a caffeine overdose. “This isn’t the ‘superior’ coffee, and getting it once isn’t me admitting that!” he finishes, fully aware of the fact that he would absolutely never go back to a plain old black americano now that he’d tasted this obviously far more superior coffee.
Thomas is full on beaming at him, with a glint in his eye that suggests hes fully cognisant of just how much James is lying to him. He is the perfect image of the cat that got the cream, except in this instance its the cream that tops both his and James’ coffees.
He leans in, ignoring the pedestrians in the street walking either side of them and kisses James, long and slow. James can taste the syrupy sweetness of the coffee on his lips, and it doesn’t take much coaxing for him to open his mouth and let Thomas’ tongue in to explore, tasting the last remnants of chocolate and utterly losing himself to the sensation.
It’s a wonder neither of them drop their coffees as they’re broken apart by a wolf-whistle. James abruptly realises they’re in the middle of the university campus, and flushes to an even darker shade of red, impossible though it may seem. He takes a sip of his coffee to try and calm himself, but Thomas still looks entirely too pleased with himself.
“Definitely an improvement,” Thomas says, as if the taste of plain back coffee had ever deterred him from kissing James before.
“I swear to God Thomas, if any of our students saw that…” He doesn’t need to encourage them any further, they’re nosy enough as it is, but Thomas just laughs as he continues walking.
James hurries forward to catch up and take Thomas’ free hand in his own, but not before briefly mourning the loss of his reputation. Looking down at their joined hands however, and savouring the heavenly taste of sweet coffee on his tongue, he decides there’s nothing to mourn at all.
During their escape from London Miranda turned Thomas into a cat to smuggle him out of England. Now in Nassau no counter spell is working to turn him back.
A random selection of scenes where Thomas is a Cat and completely ok with it while his humans try and cope with the mess they’ve made.
I’m training a neural network to generate cookbook recipes. It looks at a bunch of recipes and has to figure out completely from scratch – no knowledge of what English words even are – how to start generating more recipes like them.
It has to start by figuring out which words are used in recipes. Here in a very early iteration, you can see the first somewhat intelligible word beginning to condense out of the network:
4 caam pruce 6 ½ Su ; cer 1 teaspoop sabter fraze er intve 1 lep wonuu s cap ter 3 tl spome. 2 teappoon terting peves, caare teatasing sad ond le heed an ted pabe un Mlse; blacoins d cut ond ma eroy phispuz bambed 1 . teas, &
It’s trying SO hard to spell teaspoon. Teaspoop. It’s hilarious. It gets it right every once in a while, apparently by sheer luck, but mostly it’s:
It reeallly wants to learn to spell teaspoon. There are a lot of almost-teaspoons beginning with c… maybe it’s a mixture of teaspoon and cup. There are a few others that might be a tablespoon attempt.
Up next: pupper, corm, bukter, cabbes, choped, vingr…
Tell this neural network I love it
mildly disappointed by the lack of a “my name is netwerk” poem in the reblogs
i am netwerk and wen im taut the recipes that cooks hav got
So, I bought a kind of a miniature dragon for my Dragonknight, and immediately ended up sketching like 3-4 pages worth of silly doodles about their interactions. So here: the adventures of Davius and Snek.
I can’t believe I actually took time to color and shade all these. o_o Ah well, good practice to ensure that my new system works properly.
Meg's Mumbles 