I helped make a Baldur's Gate 3 Gloom Weaver class mod! Most of the custom icons are my work, and everything else is my badass partner HighlyCurious. They put soSOsoooo much time and care into crafting THE iconically spooky core class experience. You want multiple ravens? Check. You want spiked chains? Check. You want to teleport between shadows? Check. Currently available for PC on mod.io at the link below!!
Introducing the Gloom Weaver class: An all new class with 3 unique subclasses inspired by the monsters of the same name, incorporating aspec
If Maou ever had a heart, it’s gone now. Disintegrated under the lance of Lucifer’s magic, leaving a perfect hole in its wake—a hole big enough that Emi’s arm could pass right through with room to spare.
Nausea is hot in her throat.
No, not again. Not again.
She hadn’t been present for her father’s death, hadn’t witnessed the limp collapse with her own eyes, but the icy creep of grief is the same. “Maou? Snap out of it, okay?”
She can’t even look at the enemy. Lucifer hovers in the air above her like a vengeful spirit, still a clear and present danger to her and Chiho, hanging like a ragdoll under his arm, but all Emi can do is stare at the still body of her arch nemesis. He’s bleeding at her feet like she had always wanted, but there’s no relief in it. No joy. That she ever thought there could be seems laughable now—a lie plastered over the pain of her father’s death, rendered by Olba and people like him.
The man who trained her to be the warrior that she was had branded a gun at her moments ago, and the devil, riddled with holes, had used his last shreds of magic to transport them away. Emi, prepare yourself, he’d said. She was never prepared for Maou to save her, but in the scant time since their reunion, she’d begun to rely on it, perhaps too much. Or, definitely too much, if the concrete filling her lungs and hardening in her throat at the sight of a dead demon is any indication.
She forces herself to breathe—it’s a shaky, pitiful effort, but she does it anyway. “Get up,” she begs, knowing it’s futile.
Lucifer laughs, and that’s just enough to flip the switch within Emi from devastation to devastated fury. “Hate to break it to ya, but he’s not gonna bounce back like he did in Shinjuku. So, now that he’s out of the way, I suppose I don’t need her anymore.”
With that, he flings Chiho from his grasp like a child tossing aside a toy they’ve grown tired of—head-first toward the pavement. Emi’s legs are moving before she makes the conscious decision. There’s a fleeting thought as she runs, arms outstretched.
It’s her fault Chiho’s here. Hers and Maou’s. But only one of them can make amends for that now.
She snatches Chiho’s limp body from the air, skidding to the asphalt on her knees, shredding her tights and the skin beneath. A scream rips from her throat—layers of pain echoing in the sound.
Lucifer wings higher above the bridge over her head, calling out to Olba to finish their show. Maou would have called his words “B movie worthy,” but Maou’s days of mocking enemies for her are over.
She resorts to pleading with the angel Lucifer once was. “Stop it, Lucifer! Don’t do this! Please!”
It’s as useless as she should’ve known it would be. Instead, she could have used those precious seconds to summon the last of her celestial force and close the distance with Better Half. So what if it didn’t take the first time? She could kill him again.
But she’d squandered her moment, dazed by the physical and emotional pain of the preceding minutes. The purple magic circles arc across the sky in a menacing dance, and she knows that it’s over. She failed. Not much of a hero, in the end.
Lucifer strikes the bridge with the sound of cannon-fire, and the massive concrete structure comes apart above her head. In a final act of defiance, Emi curls her body over Chiho’s…and waits.
But the crush she had been anticipating never comes, and the grinding collapse of the rubble slows to a halt instead. The smoke begins to clear, and she raises wide eyes to the slabs of bridge hovering above her with the threatening promise of an executioner’s axe.
No, Emi was never prepared for Maou to save her, this time most of all.
“That’s a B Movie for ya. Predictable,” comes the drawl of a deep voice she knows all too well. “I guess I owe ya one, Lucifer. Thanks to you, I managed to get my true form back.”
She turns to see Satan in his eight foot tall, heavily muscled form, one horn on his head cut short from a past altercation with her. Emi should be concerned, suspicious, furious even, since he clearly manipulated the emotions of all the humans in the area, including her, to restore his power. Instead, the exclamation that tears out of her is far more revealing than she intends for it to be.
Scientists in weather and climate are live streaming for 100 hours to make their case to the American public.
They are live streaming, but engagement is necessary for it to work. SHARE THIS WITH PEOPLE, RECORD THE STREAM, POST CLIPS OF IT THAT ARE FUNNY, if you can tune in, PLEASE DO!
This is something that has to be heard by as many people as possible. Put it on in the background! See if you can get other people to watch it! Do whatever you can do support those who are trying to be supported! Anything and everything helps!
At Ellipsus, we don’t just celebrate Pride in June—we live it every day. 🌈
As a queer-founded company building a space for our very, very gay (🙌) creative community, we know how much this month matters.
Words and books are being banned. Rights are under attack. Pride Month is erased from calendars by our arch-nemesis (and yours). Big tech grovels for power in a race to the bottom (oof, their knees must be raw).
But Pride persists, and queer stories won’t be erased.
We’re here to stand by our community, protect freedom of expression, and keep queer voices writing loud—not just for a month; for as long as it takes.
So, here’s our first little offering: a fancy schmancy Pride theme! ✨
There’s much more to come, so stay tuned all month long!
- the Ellipsus Team xo
oopsie i tripped and spilled my link to archive dot org's downloadable copy of Microsoft office suite for 2007, which features no AI tools and is a powerful word processor that still holds up just fine on windows 10!
"El," Byleth said her name like a prayer. "I can't. You deserve whatever semblance of safety and innocence I can cobble together within this mire. You deserve role models who don't take advantage of you. I can give you that much, for now, at least."
"Do not hide behind the lies we tell the Church and claim it's for my sake," Edelgard said, as gently as she could muster, "when you can merely admit to being intimidated by what comes next, instead."
Excerpt from the newest chapter of my 100k+ poly fix-it fic on AO3! Link below:
"I have a bathtub." She says this as if it's all the additional explanation that's required, meeting his open mouth with a reproachful scowl, like he's the one behaving strangely. "Relax, Maou. I'm not going to sponge you clean, if that's where your mind is headed."
"Why would you think my mind would be headed there?" he snipes, stepping fully into the room with the slow, careful movements of someone who hurts almost everywhere.
Emi rises to her feet, a cat-like gleam in jade eyes, almost glowing in the candlelight. "You're blushing." A small, private smile follows, then morphs into another look of intense worry. "And I know it's worse than you want to let on. Why do you think I brought you here, idiot?"
"I don't know, maybe so you could slice me up and eat me where no one would see?" Maou's sarcasm falls flat opposite the slightly disappointed frown she directs at him—almost a pout. She's unacceptably captivating in this light, even smattered with his blood.
Perhaps, especially smattered with his blood. Maou is still working that part out.
"What about you?" he blurts, feeling the words land like an anvil, waiting for a crash that doesn't come.
"Me?" she says softly, a little surprised. "I cleaned off well enough in the clinic restroom. I'm hardly the priority, now."
Most of what is left stains only her clothes—that's true enough—but the smudge of rust on her collarbone and the dried smear over her right eye remain. He reaches out and brushes the mark on the dip of her clavicle, imagining replacing his fingers with his mouth. Emi not only allows the contact, but leans into it ever so slightly, and his momentary fantasy pulses in his lower abdomen, threatening a repeat performance from the organ beneath.
"What do you want, Emi?" He's asked the question before, a hundred different ways, but never like this. Never with a dare folded into the words, a challenge he knows she won't rise to. So it's really no harm to extend the offer, prop open the door, and let Emi be the one to slam it shut as she usually did...
---
Excerpted from Ch. 7 of "treacherous fondness" on AO3:
Trump’s staff hides negative news from him to keep him happy. Musk was so affected by getting booed at Dave Chappelle's performance he had a mental breakdown. Their egos are horribly weak. This is how we defeat them—unyielding insults and mockery.
This is what we trained for. This is our moment. We need to get a lot louder and way more petty.
You know what I think is really cool about language (English in this case)? It’s the way you can express “I don’t know” without opening your mouth. All you have to do is hum a low note, a high note, then another lower note. The same goes for yes and no. Does anyone know what this is called?
These are called vocables, a form of non-lexical utterance - that is, wordlike sounds that aren’t strictly words, have flexible meaning depending on context, and reflect the speakers emotional reaction to the context rather than stating something specific. They also include uh-oh! (that’s not good!), uh-huh and mm-hmm (yes), uhn-uhn (no), huh? (what?), huh… (oh, I see…), hmmn… (I wonder… / maybe…), awww! (that’s cute!), aww… (darn it…), um? (excuse me; that doesn’t seem right?), ugh and guh (expressions of alarm, disgust, or sympathy toward somebody else’s displeasure or distress), etc.
Every natural human language has at least a few vocables in it, and filler words like “um” and “erm” are also part of this overall class of utterances. Technically “vocable” itself refers to a wider category of utterances, but these types of sounds are the ones most frequently being referred to, when the word is used.
It’s so significant too that this narrative was collected by Zora Neale Hurston, one of the greatest authors and anthropologists of her time. She was shunned by the “gatekeepers” of both of these professions, largely because of her Blackness, her womanhood, and her uncompromising commitment to honoring and showcasing both in her works. She died penniless and alone in a state-run institution in 1960. All of her works had gone out of publication by then. It took more than a decade before she was rediscovered. A young author by the name of Alice Walker had come across her work and was deeply inspired by it. “In 1973, after an exhaustive search, Walker came across Hurston’s unmarked grave in Ft. Pierce, Fla. She purchased a headstone for Hurston’s tomb and had it inscribed “A Genius of the South.“”
It is through Zora Neale Hurston’s pioneering sacrifice, and the acceptance of that inheritance by Alice Walker that we have found this missing piece of our history. Without the courageous and unfailing work of Black women, we wouldn’t have Cudjo Lewis’s story. We are slowly regaining a narrative that’s been hidden from us, one that continues to be lied about. Trust Black women to lead the way.
