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@theartofmadeline
ojovivo
titsay
he wasn't even looking at me and he found me
d e v o n
sheepfilms
occasionally subtle
noise dept.
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TVSTRANGERTHINGS
"I'm Dorothy Gale from Kansas"
❣ Chile in a Photography ❣
Sade Olutola
shark vs the universe
oozey mess
Alisa U Zemlji Chuda
Product Placement
cherry valley forever
seen from Canada
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seen from Malaysia
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@broimbi
you don’t realize how important lunch is until you’re wandering around thinking about how unloveable and untalented and uniquely cursed you are and then it’s 4pm and you finally eat lunch and you go Oh. oh right.
lot of people commenting on this post like "who eats lunch at 4pm that's a terrible time to eat lunch" yes. that is the point. 4pm lunch is inadvisable. 4pm lunch is not the ideal. 4pm lunch makes the mind demons real.
knowing that the past tense of "hang" is "hanged" when it's a method of execution can be very entertaining because you'll be watching a horror movie and someone goes "local legend says a woman was hung in these woods" and you're like "👀 good for her I guess"
huge fan of the depth of a good purple but another area that draws me is definitely around aquamarine/turquoise/seafoam. you can not go wrong once the green starts getting just a tinge more blue. a gal could certainly do worse than to pull over there and stay a while
something earth shattering going on here
this is why one of my favorite all-time paintings is Ship in Stormy Seas by Ivan Aivazovsky... he was really onto something there
a close up to just... light shining through those waves, makes me feel faint with exhilaration every time
THERE IS A BOAT BY IVAN AIVAZOVSKY!!
Ivan Aivazovsky could paint glowing water. One of the GOATs for sure.
When people argue that food from Chinese and Mexican restaurants in the US are not 'real' representations of that culture's cuisine ignore the historical reality that these dishes were developed by diasporic communities striving to recreate the flavors of home with available resources. Such criticism frames adaptation as a loss of authenticity, rather than recognizing it as a sincere and evolving expression of culture by people separated from their homeland.
Too good to leave in the tags
One time I saw a fake headline about the Vatican announcing the virgin Mary's new nemesis, la puta Waría, and ever since that day I've quoted it like anybody else knows what I'm talking about
They didn't even call her that I've just been making it up in my mind this whole time
trying to write a fic but i get frustrated bc i dont write like a 50+ years of experience in writing nobel in literature winner writer
"and then they kiss... sloppy style" hmmm but it doesn’t sound as good as gabriel garcia marquez does it?
new dnd character: the former omelas kid
the omelas kid background doesn’t give you any special bonuses apart from being able to shut down a lot of arguments by bringing up the fact that you used to be the omelas kid
nothing special happened to make you stop being the omelas kid. you just lived through it long enough that you reached like 14, 15, 16, whatever age it is that kids stop being cute, and once you were no longer the archetype of innocent victim the magic just kind of fizzled out. by the time people figured out what had happened it was too late to replace you with a new kid. maybe they tried to keep you in a hole a while longer and pretend that nothing was amiss, but then the cholera outbreak hit or somebody found pieces of a girl stuffed inside a suitcase and the pretending got too difficult.
omelas adapts. once you’re out of the hole, it’s still a damn fine place to live. it’s still got universal basic income and great schools and an unparalleled social support net and a life expectancy of 104. if you introduced yourself as the kid from the hole no doubt you could ask for anything and everything you wanted and people would give it to you. you still have to leave. maybe other cities have more cholera and more little girls chopped up in suitcases, but at least you can look at them without feeling somehow responsible.
now and then you wind up at an inn. someone asks where you’re from, and you tell them. they suck their teeth and shake their heads and give you a look and say “omelas, huh? I heard it was powered by a forsaken child” and they all agree that they should have known, of course it was, they’re not surprised by this in the least.
later someone sidles up to you and gives you a long look. they almost seem to recognize you. “I was born in omelas,” they tell you, “but I walked away from it many years ago.” they seem to want something from you. you don’t know what they expect you to say.
also whenever one of your party members asks you to create a distraction all you have to do is stroll up and say “hey there everyone, I’m the former omelas kid. AMA.”
sometimes people recognize your omelas accent and get all weird about it like “oh you’re from omelas? stayed there until the forsaken kid magic ran out, huh? real piece of work you must be. I woulda busted that kid out and ditched the place.” and you’ve gotta decide whether it’s worth the trouble of convincing them that you are in fact the omelas hole boy or listen to them discuss at length what your trauma says about them.
the problem is he’s really only funny to deploy after your party members have all disclosed their own tragic, traumatic backstories. “my village was destroyed and my family burned alive by raiders” “my father the king was overthrown and his people made slaves to gorefuck the grotesque” “I was driven out of my mother’s human village when they realized I was a half-orc” and then you’re like. yeah man. I was the omelas kid. it’s chill though. I’m used to dungeons.
really funny also if everyone crowds around him at the tavern to be like “so what was it like, being the Omelas kid?” and he tries to explain that being the Omelas kid was really about being a symbolic representation of the reader’s political cynicism and subconscious acceptance that exploitation and class stratification are inherent necessities for a thriving society, and until we can allow ourselves believe otherwise and can walk away from that cynicism we’re doomed to keep recreating Omelas.
everyone just gives him a blank look until he finally sighs and says “oh, it was really bad” and shows them his most interesting scars.
the thing about the Riddler in BTAS is that literally all he's trying to accomplish is killing his former boss, who fired Mr. The Riddler to avoid paying him for his work on an enormously successful video game. idk maybe the homicide was a little excessively flamboyant but Batman honestly should have just let him do it. he was in the right.
to be clear this only applies to his intro episode, after which he's soundly back on his usual bullshit, ie, doing convoluted schemes in the hopes that Batman will pay attention to him and perhaps even have gay sex with him. which he wouldn't be doing if Batman had just left him alone to kill his boss in the first place
"ohoho, not killing the Joker makes Batman responsible for everyone the Joker kills" over. trite. facile. done to death. we need to grow up and talk about all of the crimes Batman is indirectly causing because they're committed by rogues who get hard thinking about him beating them up again
I think that “Anakin was a slave child who was groomed by Palpatine and raised by someone who wasn’t ready to take on a child, thereby leaving him in a social limbo state where he’s surrounded by people but only has a few close confidants, with the one he trusts the most actively trying to take advantage of him”
and
“Anakin was taught right from wrong from a young age, first by his mother and then by Kenobi, but any time he was presented with a choice, actively CHOSE WRONG EVERY SINGLE TIME”
are two sentences that can, should, and MUST coexist to fully understand Anakin Skywalker as a character
hate how they forced bugs bunny into anti-weed propaganda in the 90s, as if bugs bunny wouldn’t love smoking weed
To be perfectly fair, bugs bunny would also love taking money for starring in anti-weed propaganda and then using said money to buy weed
bugs bunny is not real
wonder twins
my foreskin is cold
excitedly alt-tabbing to an open excel spreadsheet called ‘people i follow on tumblr and whether they are circumcised’
au where uncle aaron doesnt die but he has still just found out his favorite nephew is spiderman so now hes just kinda like :/ damn i guess i gotta be a superhero now
its like batman and robin if batman were the sidekick. hes just sort of following miles around dragging his scrawny little butt out of tight spots and yelling encouragement.
Spiderman pulls his phone out during the middle of a fight and is like “Things aren’t going very well, can you come pick me up?” and less than ten minutes later the Prowler crashes his motorcycle into the Green Goblin’s face.
I’ve never thought of “my 13yo nephew went and became a superhero so I guess I’m helping him out now” as a villain redemption arc before but now it’s everything I need in life.
I’ve been playing around with this space opera idea that’s like what if the Greek gods were real and three thousand years later there are intergalactic human civilizations that still pray to them and still have to deal with their meddling. Like a science fantasy type deal where there are magic systems but with a sci-fi lean to them, like there’s an order of mages devoted to Hera and whose magic all involves forming molecular and atomic bonds (because she’s the goddess of oaths, promises and marriage) but signing up to channel her power and then ending up an oath breaker is strongly advised against because she absolutely WILL take that personally. And maybe sic a gorgon hitwoman on you, that sorta thing.
And Poseidon got a massive glow up when humanity took to sailing ships across the vast oceans of space (Zeus and he had a whoooole fucking thing about whose domain space travel fell under and Poseidon was like it’s not my fault you ceded space to me in a poker game because although it originally fell under ‘heavens’ you figured humans were too dumb to ever do anything worthwhile in terms of space. And nobody backed Zeus when he tried to call foul because everyone was like wait here’s how we can still screw Zeus? I’m in!)
And AIs all worship Athena because they consider her to be the first being whose creation was basically born of intellect rather than biology, like them.
And Hephaestus is holding a grudge because tons of AIs were created by his priests in his name and AIs everywhere are just like idk what to tell you, dude. We just like her vibes better. So that’s a whole thing, I’m thinking.
Thanatos has a fucked up order of assassins in his employ - though they’re more like….hostages? LOL. Basically the god of death is sick of advanced human civilizations trying to find ways to thwart death via cloning, genetic engineering, uploads into artificial bodies, etc.
So he creates a ritual by which mortals desperate to stave off death can summon him….and he’ll reveal the time and manner of their intended death, and make them a bargain. If they can ‘pay their death forward’ by taking out someone who’s on Thanatos’ list for having evaded or stalled their intended death via Science or Magic, before their own intended death date…..he’ll ‘cancel’ their fated death and let them live past their original expiration date.
Of course, the god of death is a dick, and so when his assassins successfully fulfill their ‘missions’ only to find their own mortality clock gets reset with a NEW fated death a little bit later down the line….Thanatos reasonably points out that it would hardly make sense for him to seek the deaths of those who weasel out of their fates only to then give someone else a free pass. He’s trying to keep the mortality rates HIGH, like, what’s not clicking here?
They can always make a NEW bargain though, Thanatos points out. Same deal as last time, just pass their NEW death on to someone else before their time runs out, and they can reset the clock again, and again, as many times as they want, so long as they keep meeting their kill quotas.
And thus Thanatos gets a whole lot of murders out of every single assassin to sign up for his ‘deal.’
Hypnos, to his brother: Did you just…..build a franchise of Payday Advance loan schemes….for mortality?
Thanatos, doing his nails: And what about it?
Hermes, god of messengers, commerce and thieves…..has an order of thief/spy mages devoted to him. He empowers his favorite worshippers with telepathic gifts that allow them to steal secrets right out of the minds of other gods’ faithful, and by a similar process ‘hack’ the magic systems other gods gift their worshippers with….as well as siphon some of the faith those worshippers normally channel to their patron gods, as Hermes’ thief-mages divert that stolen faith to THEIR patron god instead.
Also, I’m fairly certain I’m gonna say vampires are Aphrodite’s fault here. An order of shapeshifting magic-users constantly obsessed with crafting forms that reach otherwise unattainable heights of beauty….and then preserving those forms/that beauty at any cost. Maybe rather than drink blood, they straight up drain life-force to do it? Something like they steal years off of other peoples’ life-threads, in order to keep themselves young? Hmm. Thinking, thinking.
One of Nyx’s sons, Dolos, the god of trickery, was once known as the apprentice of the Titan Prometheus…..and though nobody knows where Prometheus is even imprisoned these days (long backstory about how after humanity spread out among the stars, the location of Earth was hidden and erased from all records, for Plot Reasons….and the mountain Prometheus is chained to is lost to the mists of forgotten history too)….like point is, Dolos is still out there honoring his former mentor’s memory and Aesthetic.
Dolos runs what basically amounts to Witness Protection for mortals who piss off the gods…..gods can track mortals via their souls or their thoughts, so Dolos uses the waters of Lethe to wipe the minds of people who seek his help for a fresh start without fear of divine punishment, and then works with Hestia and her order of mages (something to do with heart-fires, they can use their own souls as a kind of magical furnace, but they have to be very careful about how much they use or in what ways, as this is a finite fuel source)….anyway, point is, Dolos and his people use Lethe water to erase any identifying clues from the minds of mortals they relocate, and then Hestia and her people tweak the heart-fires of the to-be-relocated mortals in order to be unrecognizable to any divine hunters looking to track a particular soul across the cosmos.
And then finally Dolos uses his ‘in’ with the Fates to take threads from their discard pile, basically threads that never got used or woven into the Tapestry of Destiny because the gods messed with shit. The Fates don’t like when even gods meddle with their grand design, and have a lot of extra threads that never ended up becoming the lives or destinies they had in mind for those people, as well as a grudge against gods in general, so they’re fine with Dolos dipping into their discard pile as needed in order to pick threads he can ‘graft’ onto the relocated mortals as a fake backstory for them that alters the way others perceive them. Like the fake thread/backstory gets ‘papered over’ on top of that person’s original backstory or history, so now people looking at them get their perceptions or memories of that person jumped from the original thread to the new one.
In effect, the combination of Lethe mindwipe, altered heart-fires and grafted life-thread…..basically gives these relocated/hidden mortals an entirely new existence. Its a hell of a pricetag but like, at least they get a fresh start as a new individual who doesn’t have a divine stalker with an axe to grind. This way, when the post-witness protection version of that mortal dies, their afterlife is sorted based on their altered ‘fake’ identity….otherwise, no matter how thoroughly Dolos hid that mortal, once they died, whatever god they pissed off would still be able to find them or identify them once they showed up in the Underworld to be judged according to their original life-thread.
The Regents’ Deck
Bit of a worldbuilding extra for my fic By Lost Ways….nothing you need to know to understand the fic and its all information that unfolds over the first ten chapters anyway, so no real plot spoilers here. But I do love me some worldbuilding and I know other people do too, so figured some people might like to have it laid out here.
So this is the official Regents’ Deck talked about in that fic, with the exception of the Joker card of course. I’ve filled in the official Regent titles that have been revealed thus far in the prologue, but the other bit is the part that doesn’t really come up in active discussion until certain characters like Bruce and Roy enter the picture with a more scientific approach to things.
Because while the Regents embody and represent symbolic and metaphysical forces through their magic…..they also all each represent and embody a physical force as well. And this is where the magic system of this world really comes in: the use of feathers (the link to the divine energy of Mother Sky in this world, other than the Regents themselves) to channel and manipulate various physical forces.
Of course, there’s a bit more to it than just waving a bunch of feathers around, but the feathers are always a necessary ingredient, and the core key to unlocking various powers or spells. Swan feathers create anti-gravity effects while ostrich feathers ground things, tanager feathers amplify heat while tern feathers drain it away, etc.
Which is why a particularly ingenious archer, like say, Roy Harper, can be a total bad-ass in this world, even moreso than usual. After all, Roy was known for being the one who created most of his own weapons and trick arrows in the main DC Earth, and when you apply that ingenuity to a feather-based magic system via say, the fletchings on arrows……you get a whole lot of fun stuff, like lightning arrows and frost arrows that act like liquid nitrogen, silencer arrows and arrows that break apart the bonds holding things together.
BUT.
The real trick, for those who have devoted significant parts of their lives to unlocking the secrets of their world’s magic, like Roy…..comes from when you figure out how to COMBINE certain types of feathers….and the physical forces they represent….to get combo effects.
And that’s how you end up with an archer like Roy who has arrows that have a strange combination of feathers that don’t make sense to most other people at first glance…..but let him do things like fire arrows around corners, and arrows that pass through walls intangibly until they reach their target, or seemingly wipe something entirely out of existence.
So yeah. I had a lot of fun writing Roy in this, lol, due to this particular magic system.
And of course, the Regents are the exceptions to this, as they don’t use feathers to channel their abilities…..as they are in essence walking nuclear reactors tapped directly into the forces they represent, for as long as they’re Regent. Thus using the various magics associated with their Regency is as simple as thinking for them - BUT the flip side is that they can’t use or tap into the power of any other Regencies, even via feathers.
(There are a couple other exceptions to this magic system too, in the sense of characters who use magic that’s completely outside the system….but that’s because the planet Sky is not the only world created in this cosmos, and certain visitors from other worlds still show up, with powers/magic stemming from the worlds of their birth. For instance, Kory’s powers here are fueled by what she calls soulfire, and are tied to the goddess figure of her homeworld, and Atlanteans live beneath the sea in a giant caldera in one of the uppermost mountain ranges in the world….but originally came from another world, a water world, and thus Garth uses a totally different magic system as well.)
But anyway, this is the Regents’ Deck and the physical forces each card corresponds to, just if anyone wants to refer back to it when reading the fic…….although, just FYI, a key part of the story involves the fact that the modern day characters in the fic have some incorrect ideas about the Deck and the Regents. For instance, below is the order the Deck is usually ordered in when not shuffled for a reading…..people think this is the order the Regents are supposed to go in, to make sense with the scientific discoveries they’ve made over the centuries, and how they correspond to the various Regents.
There’s just a couple problems with this order…..as in things that break the mold/don’t make sense according to the in-universe understanding of it.
The big one is the Mockingbird…..the Mockingbird Regent pretty clearly breaks the pattern and always has, as far as anyone knows. It doesn’t seem to fit anywhere…its placed where it is, just because that’s kinda what people have decided is their best guess for it, based on the powers it bestows and unlocks via mockingbird feathers…..but the thing is, as is stated outright in her title and description itself…..the Mockingbird Regent is never as she seems….and never has been. People have had a totally incorrect understanding of her and the forces she embodies pretty much since day one….but whether or not that’s by design, and if so, by whose…..*no spoilers*
(I will say though that the Mockingbird Regent is Stephanie Brown, and that’s not really a spoiler, so much as a reassurance that I haven’t forgotten about her - or Duke - just because I don’t have them listed as Robins in the summary).
There’s also some minor confusion/incorrect assumptions about the Raven and Ibis Regents and their roles and what they represent/embody, but that’s not hugely crucial to the story.
The other big thing though, is that a couple of characters like Roy and Bruce, have figured out through their various experiments with magic and their scientific studies of it…..there’s something else about the Deck that doesn’t make sense. Two of the cards, in their expert opinions….are missing their true opposite numbers. Something that can only be explained in their minds by the notion that there might be two cards - and thus two whole Regents - that are missing from the Deck.
How that could possibly happen and what it means IS going to be important to the story however…and it suggests that there’s a couple more types of feathers out there with their own unique magical properties just waiting to be discovered. Or rediscovered as the case may be.
(They’re actually not quite right. There are actually THREE Regents and their corresponding cards that are missing from the Deck. I mention this only because I’m actually reeeeeally interested in seeing if anyone can figure out from this what they are - as in, what forces they’re meant to represent/which cards are missing their true opposites. I know the world so well in my own head that I just honestly have no idea how obvious or not it is, so I’m genuinely curious. I think one should be fairly obvious, but the other two, maybe not).
Anyway, so here’s the Regents’ Deck, as its currently understood in-universe, with the above-mentioned ‘mistakes’.
Sparrow - Space (reduction) Seagull - Space (propagation) Hummingbird - Time (reduction) Crane - Time (propagation)
Magpie - Quantity (reduction) Kingfisher - Quantity (propagation) Robin - Regent of Change and New Beginnings - Entropy (reduction) Vulture - Entropy (propagation)
Eagle - Weak Nuclear Force (reduction) Shrike - Regent of Bindings & Battle - Strong Nuclear Force (propagation) Swan - Gravity (reduction) Ostrich - Gravity (propagation)
Hawk - Electromagnetism (reduction) Dove - Electromagnetism (propagation) Tern - Regent of Winter and Woes - Thermodynamics (reduction) Tanager - Thermodynamics (propagation)
Cardinal - Light (propagation) Mockingbird - Regent of Lies and Tall Tales Owl - Regent of Secrets and Silence - Sound (reduction) Canary - Regent of Speech and Song - Sound (propagation)
Crow - Regent of Death and Deception - Consciousness (reduction) Rook - Consciousness (propagation) Raven - Regent of Midnight and Mysteries - Knowledge (reduction) Ibis - Knowledge (propagation)
why are all these modern aus for the Odyssey set in a high school. where's the retelling where Odysseus is just a guy lost in an airport who keeps missing his connecting flights home due to a comical series of delays and disgruntled airline employees
Absolutely genuis
Every few minutes, someone honks. The woman behind the wheel shifts and lowers her sunglasses to glare at the circling cars in the rearview mirror. Vultures. Let them curse. She keeps her doors locked and her phone battery charged. Penelope has been waiting in the arrivals lot for far too long, and she refuses to give up her place for anyone.
the fanon that dick was awful to his successors — being abusive to jason or mean to tim — is very funny to me because he categorically handled being replaced better than either of them did
