[mnemo-li]

this is my main blog. i have several sideblogs, some of which are:

@nightcity-slut

@ivy-kissobryos

@ivy-arikel

@hothian-snow

@beloved-sanguine

[searockwell]

Maekar throughout the years

[jiabisu]

[beholdingslut]

in absolute tears about the pride module at my work

[dikdikpronouncedxylophone]

[bigfoots-biggest-fan]

HOLY SHIT GUYS, I WAS INSPIRED BY THIS POST TO TRY MAKE THE SONG AND YOU WOULD NOT BELIEVE THE SCREAM I SCRUMPT WHEN I DRAGGED THE TRAINING AUDIO OVER THE BACKING TRACK AND IT LINED UP PERFECTLY

Visit Original Link

Tempted to actually put this on spotify so I can secretly stream it at work...

Tagging @batshit-auspol because as an Australian you're the only big account I know who might share (sorry).

[skyrim-forever]

The worst characters are the ones were you only get like three pieces of lore about them but the lore is so fascinating and hits your brain at just the right angle to have you behaving like a feral dog in front of your conspiracy theory cork board

[blahbeau]

greebus

[embrace-your-illithid]

from some lovely and sweet dialog from the epilogue party that I am sad they cut from the game

[rukafais]

Biting and gnawing every single dnd drow sourcebook writer who conspicuously left out the severe indoctrination that is a cornerstone of why menzoberranzan drow society works the way it does (because it’s a cult that teaches its members to fear an out group) and then inserts some chucklefuck excuse like “oh haha this society shouldn’t work, lolth just makes it work” (YOU REMOVED ONE OF THE KEY CONTROL POINTS FOR A CULT. BECAUSE IT’S A CULT)

[imperial--orthodoxy-deactivated]

It’s partially indoctrination but tbf you do have to remember that in universe Lolth and her followers *do* have a certain degree of actual power, otherwise Menzoberranzan couldn’t ever survive outside contact the way it does. No amount of indoctrination can explain the fact that when their version of uh…justice …happens, it actually happens and follows through. There’s no quiet “disappearances” because there’s no need for such deceptions as in most cults - the driders themselves are probably the most powerful example of it. The matriarchs of Drow society only are able to keep their position because of Lolth. Without her their society would likely change, although I doubt it would become a paradise overnight.

[bramblepatch]

Menzoberranzan is perfectly capable of holding its own against outside threats with or without divine intervention - if it wasn’t, it wouldn’t be under Lolthite control anymore, because divine magic has straight up failed twice in the past two hundred years of Forgotten Realms canon. During the Time of Troubles the biggest threat the city faced was an internal coup attempt by House Oblodra (which is why there is no longer a House Oblodra) and during the Silence of Lolth - which lasted for months - they put down a slave revolt and then withstood a siege from a coalition of the duergar of Gracklstugh and the forces of the cambion Kaanyr Vhok, while simultaneously putting down House Agrach Dyrr’s Vhauraunite-backed coup. Menzoberranyr martial and arcane forces are nothing to sneeze at, even when their divine casters are out of commission.

For that matter, even when the priestesses are operating a peak favor, it’s still the indoctrination that keeps everyone else in line. They’re not immortal or omniscient. Look at Zaknafein as a character: he obviously knows it’s possible to kill a priestess. It’s a large part of his job and his sole joy in life to murder priestesses of Lolth. Why doesn’t he kill Malice, grab his kids, and make a run for it? Because he has been taught and sincerely believes that there’s nowhere to run to. He thinks that the outside world is so hostile that drow society is the only place he can survive. So he stays, in a deeply abusive situation, helping perpetuate a system he hates and resents. It’s not fear of Lolth that’s keeping Zak in line; it’s fear of everything else, a fear that was drummed into him during his first fifty days at Melee-Magthere.

[lawful-evil-novelist]

I want to notate that even if they are not actually divinely done, actual cults operate where their forms of “divine justice” do follow through. Yeah, it’s not wizards summoning demons or priestesses turning people into driders but like, cults fucking drug and poison people and gaslight their victims and followers into thinking it’s divinely ordained justice. That’s happened, several times, it still happens. It doesn’t matter if real divine power backs up their punishment or not. If it looks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it’s probably a duck.

The thing is, the Silence of Lolth established very quickly that a drow wizard can do the job of a Lolthite priestess pretty admirably; they just can’t heal. Lolthite society doesn’t just hold its own, the Siege of Menzoberranzan was failing when Lolth returned. It was making a damn admirable show of it and the Army of the Black Spider was genuinely pretty pressed given the circumstances, but the only successful leg of the siege up until that point was Nimor and Lichdrow Dyrr posing a genuine threat during a wizard duel with Gromph Baenre.

Also, just point blank: Gromph could’ve overthrown Lolth’s matriarchy during the Silence. He had the ability, motive, and opportunity. He didn’t, he very deliberately said “there is no place for me in that world” and rejected it. He’s the most powerful male in the city; that is how deep the indoctrination goes.

[snacobie]

baja blast you to smithereens

[luthierscurse]

[luthierscurse]

Little bonus painting of when Menzo finds out how bad of an idea it is to turn a half-frostwind virago into a drider.

[stormweavers]

Garlan & Willas thoughts I cannot longer contain to myself

Garlan took Willas' accident the worst.

He refused to leave his brother's bedside, going as far as biting his father when he tried to remove him.

Afterwards, he felt it was his duty to protect his brother and siblings — and put all his energy into the sword.

Knowing how difficult the healing process was for Willas and having seen his brother in so much pain, Garlan developed a rather short temper in regards to mockery of his brother. He learned how to control his outbursts over the years, but Garlan's veiled threats leave people terrified.

Willas threatened Garlan with several nicknames before he finally settled on the Gallant. The Gloomy. The Grumpy. The gossip. Galling, greedy, god-awful Garlan. He still throws those at him when Garlan is being a nuisance.

In fact, Willas humour is far more dry and deadpan than anyone expects, paired with some truly awful puns. Garlan is one of the few that can tell when his brother is attempting to jest.

Willas and Leonette are both older than Garlan and have often teased him together.

In fact, Willas considers his sister in law a dear friend.

Willas encouraged Garlan to properly court Nette.

Willas took care of their wedding expenses and much of the planning, a splendid wedding held in Highgarden.

Garlan & Leonette are working hard on finding a fitting match for Willas. He's a hopeless case, far more picky than he lets on.

Any person that shows interest in Willas has to suffer under Garlan's heavy scrutiny and undergo a thorough investigation.

Willas & Garlan co-manage a lot of the responsibilities in Highgarden and the Reach. They are usually each other's first counsel.

As children, they often wrangled over toys. Even nowadays, that childish notion sometimes resurfaces.

Garlan would see the letter of a maiden on his brother's desk. They would stare at each other with Willas daring him not to, before Garlan suddenly lurches forward to steal it, while Willas tries to stop him.

If Willas were to genuinely show interest in someone, his brother would delight in humouring her when his brother has to attend important matters.

They can have conversations with nothing more than a few looks.

Willas often goes into long monologues about his interests or political matters. Garlan pretends to hate it, but he always listens to his brother's ramblings.

When Garlan is feeling mischievous, he starts arguing against the topic at hand. He finds it hilarious how stubborn Will can get when defending his point.

Garlan bickers regularly with Willas' eagle. It might or might not have tried to pick at him before.

[prokopetz]

I understand why a lot of fantasy settings with Ambiguously Catholic organised religions go the old "the Church officially forbids magic while practising it in secret in order to monopolise its power" route, but it's almost a shame because the reality of the situation was much funnier.

Like, yes, a lot of Catholic clergy during the Middle Ages did practice magic in secret, but they weren't keeping it secret as some sort of sinister top-down conspiracy to deny magic to the Common People: they were mostly keeping it secret from their own superiors. It wasn't one of those "well, it's okay when we do it" deals: the Church very much did not want its local priests doing wizard shit. We have official records of local priests being disciplined for getting caught doing wizard shit. And the preponderance of evidence is that most of them would take their lumps, promise to stop doing wizard shit, then go right back to doing wizard shit.

It turns out that if you give a bunch of dudes education, literacy, and a lot of time on their hands, some non-zero percentage of them are going to decide to be wizards, no matter how hard you try to stop them from being wizards.

[prokopetz]

It wasn't just the hoity-toity ritual magic stuff, either. Popular media often frames a fundamental opposition between the Church and practitioners of the Old Ways™, but on the ground, any given medieval European community's foremost practitioner of traditional folk magic was likely to be the village priest. And again, they very much were not supposed to be doing this. There were some very pointed letters going around reminding people to cut that shit out, not that we're naming any names, Jeremy, and no, "if you invoke the saints first it's fine" is not going to fly with the bishop.

[prokopetz]

I feel like a lot of folks in the notes are missing a critical piece of context here because they're not clear on what the Church's official position toward magic actually was during the Medieval period.

In brief, the idea that magic is a. real and b. Satanic was not the party line for the greater part of the Middle Ages. Obviously the particulars varied both regionally and over time, but for the most part, the official position of the Church was that there is no power but God's and magic is fake. The Church's principal objection to the practices of divination, spirit-binding, etc. was that they were fraudulent, not that they imperilled one's soul. Sometimes this was even carried to the point that accusations of witchcraft would result in the accuser getting in trouble rather than the accused; after all, if your neighbour is pretending to do wizard shit, that's fraud, but if you actually believe your neighbour is capable of wizard shit, that's heresy!

The hardline "magic is the work of Satan" stance that most folks are thinking of when they think of magic and the Church wasn't particularly widespread until very late in the Medieval period, and is really more characteristic of the post-Reformation era – which adds an extra layer of hilarity to the aforementioned local clergy doing wizard shit, because from the perspective of their superiors, the problem was less "oh no, our priests are consorting with Satan" and more "god fucking damn it, our priests keep scamming people with this wizard shit".

[redsparrow12]

The Catholic Church, desperately penning their 500th letter to local clergy:

FOR THE LOVE OF GOD STOP TELLING PEOPLE MAGIC IS REAL

[prokopetz]

The really funny part is that, by all accounts, some of the priests involved didn't even want to be doing wizard shit. Allegedly, they more or less got pressured into it by their congregations, who expected wizard shit of them and wouldn't take "no" for an answer.

[qqueenofhades]

I've been summoned by @artielu to vet this post, and I'm happy to confirm that it is, in fact, fairly accurate and does represent many of the ways in which medieval people did (and did not) think about gender, witchcraft, religion, magic, and practice. I've written quite a bit on this topic before, probably back when I was teaching a class on magic and the supernatural in the Middle Ages, but it's been a while.

The boring stereotypical Bad Middle Ages take is that medieval people were all howling misogynists and thus were burning Female Witches (and also midwives, out of an idea that medieval people saw all female-led intellectual practice as inherently bad, which is also uh, questionable) at the stake left and right. As I have carped about many times, Witch Trials (TM) as most people think of them were decidedly an early modern invention. The idea of witchcraft as both a) real and b) specifically and evilly female was also in fact a very late medieval invention; it was most explicitly codified in the infamous Malleus maleficarum of 1485. However its author, Heinrich Kramer, was already a raging misogynist and had been chased out of his parish the year before when for some reason, people got tired of him randomly accusing their wives and daughters of witchcraft. The Malleus is well known as a "witch hunting handbook," but people then tend to generalize its late 15th-century conclusions, written by one tiresome misogynist, as completely representative of The Middle Ages Everywhere. The Malleus also contains some anti-sodomitic polemicals, so there are just a whole stew of gender, queer, and other anxieties being represented here in a late medieval context. See i.e.:

Bailey, M. D., ‘From Sorcery to Witchcraft: Clerical Conceptions of Magic in the Middle Ages’, Speculum, 76 (2001), 960-90.

Bailey, M.D., ‘The feminization of magic and the emerging idea of the female witch in the late Middle Ages’, Essays in Medieval Studies 19 (2002), 120-134

Broedel, H.P., 'To preserve the manly form from so vile a crime: ecclesiastical anti-sodomitic rhetoric and the gendering of witchcraft in the Malleus Maleficarum', Essays in Medieval Studies 19 (2002), 136-148

Broedel, H.P., The Malleus Maleficarum and the Construction of Witchcraft: Theology and Popular Belief (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003)

Harley, D. ‘Historians as Demonologists: The Myth of the Midwife-Witch’, Social History of Medicine, 3 (1990), 1-26

Katajala-Peltomaa, S. ‘A good wife? Demonic Possession and Discourses of Gender in Late Medieval Culture’, in Gender in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe, ed. by M.G. Muravyeva and R.M. Tovio (New York, NY: Routledge, 2013), pp. 73-88

Stephens, W., ‘Witches who steal penises: impotence and illusion in the Malleus Maleficarum’, Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 28 (1998), 495-529

It's true that some of the most dedicated practitioners of ritual magic, and scholars and conservationists of magical texts, were monks, churchmen, and other religious figures. Some of them started from the position that God possessed the only supernatural power and any claim of other magic was wrong, but many others did believe that magical power was accessible from a variety of sources, even as this interacted uneasily with related notions of heresy, religion, blasphemy, and (demonic) sin. This represented the complex and shifting interaction between institutional Catholic and traditional/folk magic beliefs, which were never fully assimilated or "erased." It was in fact also popular among laypeople, as magical amulets or charms were highly valued for their supposedly protective capacities. Magic and ritual magic was also widely used in medicine and yes, for sex (people have always been people etc. etc.). See i.e.:

Bailey, M. D., Battling Demons: Witchcraft, Heresy and Reform in the Later Middle Ages (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University, 2003)

Boureau, A., Satan the Heretic: The Birth of Demonology in the Medieval West, trans. by Teresa Lavender Fagan (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago, 2006)

Collins, D., ed., Cambridge History of Magic and Witchcraft in the West (New York, NY and Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015)

Fanger, C., ed. Conjuring Spirits: Texts and Traditions of Medieval Ritual Magic (Stroud: Sutton, 1998)

Flint, V. I. J., The Rise of Magic in Early Medieval Europe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991)

Kieckhefer, R., Magic in the Middle Ages (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000)

Kieckhefer, R. ‘Erotic Magic in Medieval Europe’, in Sex in the Middle Ages, ed. by J. Salisbury (London and New York, NY: Garland, 1991), 30-55

Olsan, L.T., ‘Charms and Prayers in Medieval Medical Theory and Practice’, Social History of Medicine, 16 (2003), 343-66

Page, S. Magic in the Cloister: Pious Motives, Illicit Interests and Occult Approaches to the Medieval Universe (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University, 2013)

Rider, C. ‘Danger, stupidity and infidelity: magic and discipline in John Bromyard’s Summa for Preachers’, Studies in Church History, 43 (2007), 191-20

I could go on with quite a bit more, but the point is: there is an extensive scholarly literature on this topic, and any depiction of magical and supernatural beliefs in the Middle Ages, especially in popular media, is often the laziest imaginable shorthand for "they all hated women, thought they were witches, and burned anyone who didn't believe in the all-powerful Catholic church." Yet again, this also does vary by time period, as The Middle Ages are not one single undifferentiated block. A twelfth-century author is far more likely to scoff at the credulous fools who think magic is real or can actually compare to the power of God, whereas the early-modern authors, influenced by Kramer, will do far more of the stereotypical "witchcraft is a particularly female-gendered thing and also real, satanic, and evil." And yes, many medieval magic practitioners and enthusiasts were a) monks and the church and b) regular people, because it occupied a complex place in their belief system and was by no means simply evil. This doesn't mean that they were "more" or "less" enlightened according to the also-wildly-erroneous Scale of Perceived Human Progress, but just that they were complicated, stereotypes are stupid, and my kingdom for one (1) single nuanced, thoughtful, or remotely accurate depiction of this in medieval-themed media. The end.

[findingfeather]

Honestly it's hilarious to read about, by the by. Like the very top levels of the Roman Church, in its Official Theology, had no doubt about it: witchcraft was Fake, and it was irrational and stupid and for the love of God, literally, no joke, will you STOP GIVING THE EUCHARIST TO YOUR CONGREGATION TO BLESS THEIR FIELDS WITH THAT'S SUPERSTITIOUS NONSENSE. ;-;

Meanwhile, back in the village, the priest did the mediaeval equivalent of leaving that nonsense on Read, and at planting time of course made sure to help the village people bless their fields, because look planting time is important.

In some cases he also willingly shared a bit of the communion wine to the local cunning woman (who was also probably the midwife), since that was the best thing to mix into ointments and potions for everyday ailments. But only a little, of course, as it was precious stuff.

Sadly I have indeed accepted that if I'm ever going to get this in a work of fiction it's because I've done it myself, but yes.

[backofthebookshelf]

Notoriously this is why we will never have an Irish Pope; the Church in Ireland was so cut off from the rest of the Church after the Roman Empire collapsed that the wizard shit got a little bit out of hand and now Italian cardinals feel about Irish Catholicism the way evangelicals feel about Catholics in general: yeah okay they *say* they're Christian, but are they really??

[luulapants]

Got into a discussion about emergency response at a professional retreat recently and everyone was going on and on about agility, and I was like, "Okay but what about contingency?"

And they were like "What?"

And I was like, "Agility isn't the ultimate form of preparedness. Contingency is. Agility still requires you to flounder and figure out a solution in the moment, but if you have a contingency plan, all you have to do is implement it."

And they were like "But you can't make contingency plans for every situation!"

And I was like, "Yeah, you basically can if you just identify all of your basic dependencies and contingency plan around the loss of any dependency," and then I gave a few examples.

And they all stared at me like I'm an alien.

Anyway, that's how I figured out I'm Batman-coded and also learned how Batman must feel talking to supposedly professional superheroes who never bothered to run disaster scenarios until I pointed out that it's insane that they don't already have a plan for if Superman turns evil.

[todayiwrotenothing]

Batman knows how to do RAID analysis. Risks, assumptions, issues, and dependencies.

[incorrectsmashbrosquotes]

The best piece of writing advice I can give is that you should strive to be sincere rather than original.

You can't force originality. Originality will arise as a natural consequence of sincerity. Make the story completely and apologetically yours, and originality will come by virtue of it being your story.

[werecreature-addicted]

I think people assume being a monster fucker all your fantasies about monsters are sexual. In reality at least half of the time I’m like “if I was fucking a dragon I would NOT have to scrape ice off my windshield like this. This is bull shit”

[werecreature-addicted]

"the fire breathing would crack the glass" Maybe he'd use his claw to scrape the ice off delicately. Maybe he'd bend me over and fuck me on the hood of my car and our hot sweaty sex would melt the ice. Maybe he'd take me to work on his back so i don't even need a car. fucking use your imagination people.

[torchwood-99]

"I love you but you're doing wrong in a way I cannot condone" and "I hate you but you're being wronged in a way I cannot stomach" are top tier and I need more of them.