Woudlnt You Like Yo Know @andyromida - Tumblr Blog

this is from "research as a leisure activity" by celine nguyen, publs. on stubstack in 2024. it's a very good read

So much this! Coincidentally, one of my leisure research topics is the amateur Victorian researchers who seem to have had more fun than anyone.

andyromida

Savin for later

technicallyaflower

Working on a Song: The Lyrics of HADESTOWN, Anaïs Mitchell

jade-jupiter

new reaction image just dropped

whistle-whisper

papayajuan2019

cruelty is so easy. youre not special for choosing it

ourplague

chilewithcarnage

"The trouble is that we have a bad habit, encouraged by pedants and sophisticates, of considering happiness as something rather stupid. Only pain is intellectual, only evil interesting. This is the treason of the artist; a refusal to admit the banality of evil and the terrible boredom of pain."

-Ursula K. LeGuin, The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas

wizardnuke

"Evil is boring. Right? I kinda believe in the banality and mundaneness of evil. Evil is just selfish impulses, which at the end of the day are really easy to understand. It’s easy to understand why people do bad things. It’s like “yeah, ok, you’re selfish and scared and cruel, I get it”. Being good is complex and beautiful and hard." - Brennan Lee Mulligan

oldshrewsburyian

"How monotonously alike all the great tyrants and conquerors have been: how gloriously different are the saints." --C.S. Lewis

charlataninred

Love how tumblr has its own folk stories. Yeah the God of Arepo we’ve all heard the story and we all still cry about it. Yeah that one about the woman locked up for centuries finally getting free. That one about the witch who would marry anyone who could get her house key from her cat and it’s revealed she IS the cat after the narrator befriends the cat.

meraarts

Might I add:

The defeat of the wizard who made people choose how they’d be to be executed

The woman who raised the changeling alongside her biological child

The human who died of radiation poisoning after repairing the spaceship

eater-of-hopes-and-dreams

The adventures of a space roomba

Cinderella finding Araura (and falling in love)

I don’t know a snappy description but the my nemesis cynthia story certainly lives in my head

blitzlowin

hilariously, these are almost all in my fic tag. so, a compiled list from the notes (and some extras):

The God of Arepo (graphic novel 1 / 2 / 3) (ebook)

The Monster of Sentan

The Witch’s Cat

Raise Both Children

Stabby the Roomba (honorable mention)

Cinderella Marries the Prince (comic)

My Arch Nemesis Cynthia

Pirates and Mermaid

Eindred and the Witch

The Demon King

The Cornerwitch

Grandmother Beetroot

Apocalypse Daycare Worker

Grandmother Accidentally Summons a Demon

New Year Saga

A Story About Changelings

Ranger in the King’s Forest

The Difference Between a Hare and a Rabbit

Goblin Men (Canines)

charlataninred

I am in love with you /p

inkvoices

Adding Faceblind Prince Charming and Cinderella

inkvoices

21. The human who died of radiation poisoning after repairing the spaceship

22. The defeat of the wizard who made people choose how they’d be to be executed

lightningladybug

adding the Doctors Without Borders one

inkvoices

I LOVE tumblr storytime, so here’s a bunch more your weekend reading. Enjoy!

24. The Queen with Three Cursed Children

25. Tiny Dragon with one coin hoard

26. Haunted house

27. Shark hero was about to go rogue

28. Grandma lives in the woods comic

29. A Different Aftermath comic

30. Battery (microstory but I love it so much)

31. It’s A Date comic

32. Supervillian kidnaps rival’s kid and they want to stay

33. Narrative Town

34. I have been hired to clean the wizard tower comic

35. Robot Apocalypse

36. The Statues That Do Not Weather

37. Kushiel

38. Tooth Fairy

39. Alien abduction

40. Felonious wish-granting

41. When humans met actual space orcs

42. Space cousins

dannnnnnnnnnnnex

WAIT REBLOG THIS VERSION INSTEAD

captainpissofff

Who ever added those links without asking is doing lord’s work fs.

captainpissofff

Reblogging this again cause I never want this post to die

fokindiabolical

Making it a tradition to reblog whenever I see it.

akcuervoraven

Reblog to keep it alive

aroacecaduceus

Now I’m thinking about how dope a boss fight against Bolaire would be in a regular campaign.

Party enters a town after getting a letter from a fellow adventurer that a monster has been threatening to attack. Your adventuring friend can’t do it alone. In his letter he says if it looks like the monster will attack before the party arrives there is some magical weapon that may help him… but he doesn’t want to risk it. Worried about a cost.

Party gets to the town after the monster should have attacked and everything is terrifyingly fine. Villagers know the adventurer friend when asked. Yes he wandered into the forest to fight the creature but he never came back. The monster never attacked but he never came back. Please find him he’s proved himself a hero in this town.

The party heads out to the monster’s lair and they discover Friend wearing an odd mask. Instead of eyes, there are just two purple glowing dots that come from far too deep into his head. The mask moves like a face and doesn’t have his voice. It has markings made to look like tear stains but it’s smiling.

Perhaps it pretends to be their friend still. Perhaps it doesn’t. Perhaps it has moved into the monster’s lair. Perhaps it’s making its way to another town. No matter what, the truth comes out: the mask has been used for violence and then forced to sleep and then used for violence and then forced to sleep over and over again. And it’s tired of sleeping. And hey, “I did what he wanted, I killed the monster for him. He would have gotten praise for forcing me to do it. All I ask for, in exchange for doing it willingly, is freedom. He knew the risks of putting me on. He and I made a deal, of sorts.”

Do they attack the body, deciding their friend is already dead? Just to stop the weapon? Do they try to restrain and take the mask off their friend’s face during combat? That’d probably be a grapple check. You’d get your barbarian or fighter to do it.

Then, once the party gets the mask off, they discover their friend is dead or alive depending on how much damage was done to him. He was already injured from the monster fight. The mask forced him to keep going after hitting zero.

As they mourn or tend to their unconscious friend, the party member holding the mask has to make a wisdom save. High DC. Like fifteen at least. Since the barbarian or strength based fighter probably grabbed the mask, let’s be real here. How high is their wisdom? Fight starts again. Cycle continues until party wises up and doesn’t touch the mask.

All attempts to destroy the mask itself are unsuccessful. Party must decide whether to keep it in a bag of holding or special container until they find a means to destroy it or bury it somewhere no one will find it.

redjennies

okay, so I am notably a "wizard oppression plots are fucking stupid" person, but I would like to say that I genuinely love how C4 is using magic as a political aspect and I think it's worth examining why this is working for me where say, Dragon Age's Mage vs Templar plot fails. this distinction is established by allowing magic to be a metaphor for power not people.

first, magic itself is not being outlawed. there are restrictions on how and when you're allowed to do it and while this hasn't been outright confirmed, I heavily suspect it might be an end goal, who's allowed to practice it. still, the structures at play understand it's usefulness and have no interest in stamping it out entirely, only ensuring that they have a monopoly on it. in fact, it's been implied now that two of the most powerful sundered houses are mostly sorcerers with inherited magic and are greatly invested in maintaining that legacy for their families. therefore, every day magic practitioners in Dol-Makjar are more akin to artists and researchers being censored and criminalized by an oppressive government than a systemically oppressed class of people.

it also allows for the classes to have different flavors that mirror real socio-economic circumstances without having to be rigid one-for-one metaphors that quickly come undone under scrutiny. for instance, not every sorcerer needs to be a stand-in for nepo-babies and I'm not holding my breath to find out what Sundered House Azune is secretly descended from, but in a setting where it seems to matter what and where you draw your power from, Azune having a sorcerer dip does give him a noticeably different character beat than Teor and Vaelus, who are currently pure paladins.

we see this in the other classes as well. wizards and bards like Murray and Hal are academics and artisans who have to study and hone their craft and thus, they and their profession are threatened by taking away the places that allow for that education. I find it a very compelling metaphor that Bolaire, a warlock whose access to the arcane presumably relies on a patron, is explicitly described in his first scene as a non-noble who is allowed to move in the spaces of nobility. there's also something that hits right in the diaspora about how the druids of the Old Path had to keep their traditions alive during the time of the gods, and now they are the group that is most familiar practicing divine magic in their absence. I wouldn't be surprised if the Sundered Houses weren't massive fans of the Old Path, but because of the public pressure to honor the Lloys for their place in the revolution, can't move against them in the same way they can move against the Penteveral.

of course, a lot of this is conjecture and my personal interpretations. we're still very early on, after all. still, what remains are the foundations for a story that is well-equipped to truly explore heavy themes of how oppressive systems work in practice instead of lazily find-and-replacing "gay/black/disabled/etc" people for "wizards." again, it matters where the power is coming from and who is wielding it, and I'm deeply excited to see Murray seize the means of conjuration for the wizard proletariat.

protocolmemaybe

So, what do we know about Celia? Tall? Dark hair? Welsh accent?? Jumped dimensions to start a new life???

Howl Jenkins Pendragon you motherfu-

the-august-one

Resources From The Leftist Feminist Philosopher

Google is so powerful that it "hides" other search systems from us. We just don't know the existence of most of them.

Meanwhile, there are still a huge number of excellent searchers in the world who specialize in books, science, other smart information.

Keep a list of sites you never heard of!

www.refseek.com - Academic Resource Search. More than a billion sources: encyclopedia, monographies, magazines.

www.worldcat.org - a search for the contents of 20 thousand worldwide libraries. Find out where lies the nearest rare book you need.

https://link.springer.com - access to more than 10 million scientific documents: books, articles, research protocols.

www.bioline.org.br is a library of scientific bioscience journals published in developing countries.

http://repec.org - volunteers from 102 countries have collected almost 4 million publications on economics and related science.

www.science.gov is an American state search engine on 2200+ scientific sites. More than 200 million articles are indexed.

www.base-search.net is one of the most powerful researches on academic studies texts. More than 100 million scientific documents, 70% of them are free.

what-eats-owls

Hey folks, I'm going to share this here too in case it reaches new folks: I'm fine, but my uncle and aunt lost their home in the Palisades fire. They were in one of the mobile home parks next to the mouth of Temescal canyon, which leases spaces to (mostly senior) residents, so their insurance is only going to pay for the lost house. They're staying with friends currently, but when, where, even if they'll be able to rebuild is completely up in the air.

So I'm going to ask for any help folks can give, but I want you to know who you're helping too. Uncle Sandy is an absurd pianist (I have a video from this past February of him, at a sprightly 72, playing a grand piano and electric keyboard simultaneously, one with each hand), Aunt Laura is a volunteer docent at the Getty and possibly the kindest and most gracious woman imaginable, and one of their ongoing projects has been transcribing the diary of our union medic ancestor, Henry. The diary documents what appears to be a romantic relationship with his fellow medic, and may be one of the few accounts of a same-sex relationship from that period that aren't prison records. They've been working with historical experts to document, analyze, and release the diary with the care it deserves, because of the importance it could have to queer history.

Which is why they made it out of the Palisades with their dog, an antique pocketwatch from my grandmother, the clothes on their backs... and the diary. And not a whole lot else. That's who they are.

If you'd like to help us keep them afloat while we figure out what's next, here's their GoFundMe. Any help is greatly appreciated.