Baba Yaga's Flying Mortar

DA | TES | Baldur's Gate | Fic | Meta | Nonsense | AO3: paraparadigm | 18+

[paraparadigm]

Whomst?

Your resident corvid in a human suit, likes shiny objects and biting annoying critters’ tails for the entertainment value. Occasionally will help a hedgehog cross the road. Mostly too old for this crap. Asks always open, however starting Discourse will likely result in being whacked with Foucault, as it should be. Blog run by an adult, proceed accordingly. I write stuff for fun, and sometimes profit. Wordsmithing below the cut. General writing tag is #parawrites. My linguist shitposts can be found under #linguist humor or #linguist fun. Screenarchery under #parashoots

LONGFIC

~~~ Skyrim TES V ~~~

Gathering Souls

Rating: E/M (GDV and occasional smut, CW in chapters) Pairings: OC x OC; Teldryn Sero x OC World state: Game Timeline, Canon-Divergent Genre: Adventure, Romance, Lore nerdery and chaos Style: 3rd person limited, Ensemble, Rotating POV, Collab writing Status: In Progress

Summary: The dragons are rising, just as foretold, but prophecies are known to be a bit vague on the details. Only those who’ve been touched by the gods are given the power to defy fate, but using it forces them down narrow paths…and that’s doubly ironic for those touched twice. In short? The Dragonborn is busy, and Skyrim is fucked. In the year 4E 201, it’s up to a band of misfits—a Blade without a leader, a priestess without a temple, an outlander without a soul, and a merc without a choice—to stop the world from careening off its axis. The Wheel certainly turns…but with souls serving as the favored currency between mortals and the planes, one gets caught in the spokes.

Always Read the Fine Print

Rating: E/M (GDV; occasional smut, tagged accordingly) Pairings: Teldryn Sero x OC World state: Prequel to Skyrim Genre: Adventure, Romance, Grimdark Style: 3rd person limited, past tense Status: Completed

Summary: Vera’s world ended not with a bang, but with a whimper: the year is 2095, the world in the throes of late-stage climate change. The Earth will keep going, the humans - not so much. As it turns out, the apocalypse is contagious: either that, or she has spectacularly bad luck. Waking up naked on a bloody altar isn’t the best introduction to a new place, but you make do with what life hands you. After a rocky start, Vera finds herself in Markarth, trying to make a new home for herself amidst the violence, corruption, and Thalmor zealotry. But just when things are finally settling down - as much as they can in the city of blood and silver - a Nord and a Dunmer roll into town with the mother of all bad deals. Always read the fine print.

SHORT WRITINGS:

Whispers (TES:V/Skyrim); T The Demands of the Genre (Varric; DA:I); G Flat White (DAI Modern AU; Coffee and Rage Series); Gen, T  Memories of the Gray (Cadash/Blackwall DAI); E Honey and Pitch (BG3; Astarion/F!CharName); M The Penitent (DAI; Barris/F!Trevelyan); E From Bitter Roots (DOS2; Ifan/Sybille); E Uncertainty Principle (Pathfinder WOTR; Regill/Commander); M

General writing tag at #Parawrites

Please note: the DA side of this blog is by and large inactive. I do not currently write for the DA fandom, though I might return to it some day. My current active fandoms are Skyrim, BG3, and recently Pathfinder.

STALLED WIPS 

~~~ Dragon Age Inquisition ~~~

Recipes for Disaster Series (Reluctant Alchemist)

Banner by @eranehn​ Rating: Mature (occasionally explicit, tagged accordingly) Pairings: Solas/OC and other minor relationships. World state: Dark Timeline Thedas/AU Genre: Humor/adventure/drama/romance, long, slowest of builds, slow burn, MCIT Style: single POV, 3rd person limited, present tense Status: Vol 1 Completed, Vol 2 WIP on hiatus

Summary: A modern-day historian tries to survive Thedas by wit, chance, and the skin of her teeth at the questionable edges of the Inquisition. Featuring weird cosmology, philosophical romps, wild takes on the canon, and lots of original content.

The Doomsday Chronicles

Rating: Explicit Pairings: Blackwall x OC and other relationships. World state: Post-Apocalyptic AU Genre: Horror, Adventure, Grimdark Style: 3rd person limited, shifting POV Status: Hiatus

Summary: The Inquisition was gathering momentum – until something went terribly wrong with closing the Breach. Inquisitor Levellan is dead or worse, the Veil is in tatters, the laws of magic are upended, and Corypheus stands unopposed. Not even the Dread Wolf wanted this mess.

~~~ Dragon Age 2 ~~~ 

Apocrypha.

Rating: Explicit (rated for body horror) Pairings: F!Cousland x Loghain; F!Cousland x Architect World state: Post-Awakening Genre: Horror, MCIT, Epistolary Style: first person epistolary, past tense Status: Hiatus

Summary: A strange journal in an unreadable language surfaces in the Inquisition’s archive. Just one more dubious discard rescued from the rubble of the Kirkwall Circle, it is filed away and promptly forgotten. Until someone takes up the task of deciphering it.

META

Trope detector

Solas, Corypheus, and the Inquisitor

Solavellan Deconstruction

Solasmance through archetypes

Modern Character in Thedas and the “Popadanets”

Chasind and Cultural Archetypes

Tevinter Nights

The Dread Wolf Take You

[valtsv]

i don't even gaf about shipping discourse because i'm a big boy and a bad person for other worse reasons but if i can be real for a moment "proship DNI" in bio means nothing to me. if you want to keep me out you're going to need to line your blog with salt and iron or rat poison or something.

[valtsv]

actually if i were to be less flippant and more brutally honest with you all my disdain for it stems from how much of it is just a thinly veiled excuse for people to fight about their fictional relationship preferences or simply for the sake of arguing without any investment in the reality of what they're claiming to represent and then take pride in their empty, performative activism. i still recommend the rat poison though.

[valtsv]

girl help they are calling me a pedophile sympathiser in the notes for trying to point out that being disgusted by something is not the same as meaningfully working to prevent and safeguard against it by critically engaging with the complex reality of it. can i please just have the rat poison.

[weshallbekind]

I'm still astounded that anyone reads bios. I don't read them. I don't give a fuck. Block me if you don't like me but I'm not fucking going to a blog and reading a bio before I reblog something is everyone insane

[smute]

i think the most upsetting thing about american-flavor puritanism is how fucking patronizing it is. it's 2026 but the whole world still has to deal with a cultural hegemony grown from the gnarled vestiges of victorian-era paternalism. tax-paying adults with passports and the right to vote are treated like wayward children because of the antiquated idea that authorities must protect the weak minds of the unwashed masses from depravity and corruption. the average american can send a fellow citizen to the chair, but they can't piss in a ditch without being declared an outlaw. american entertainment media is saturated with sex, but you can't talk about it online without getting your account suspended. it's such blatant censorship at a universal scale, but because sexual content is framed as inherently dangerous, this restriction on basic adult autonomy, this blanket denial of moral and intellectual adulthood, can be reframed as protection, an expression of care, a moral duty. "won't someone think of the children!" I AM A GROWN MAN! I AM A GROWN MAN! I AM A GROWN MAN! I AM A GROWN MAN! I AM A GROWN MAN! I AM A GROWN MAN! I AM A GROWN MAN! I AM A GROWN MAN! I AM A GROWN MAN! I AM A GROWN MAN! I AM A GROWN MAN! I AM A GROWN MAN! I AM A GROWN MAN! I AM A GROWN MAN! I AM A GROWN MAN! I AM A GROWN MAN! I AM A GROWN MAN! I AM A GROWN MAN! I AM A GROWN MAN! I AM A GROWN MAN!

[smute]

thank god that the video game that features slow motion animations of graphic gunshot wounds and is rated 18+ has a profanity filter in single player offline mode. thank you for protecting this 33 year old mind from the corrupting influence that is a horse named apple slut

[stjohnstarling]

I think the battle is long since lost on what the “-coded” suffix means, but I (old movie guy specifically invested in queer coding) seem to be unable to let go of how annoying I find the fuzzy popular use of the term. This is probably a flaw in my character.

[stjohnstarling]

Coding is intentional, it’s a way of communicating indirectly with the audience through a shared language of signs. That’s why it’s called coding, because it’s communicating in code. It isn’t when a thing reminds you of another thing.

[what-even-is-thiss]

I refer to the protagonist of fallout 4 as NateNora because both the man and woman versions of the character are essentially the same person.

Because they gave this game a voiced protagonist, Bethesda has invited me to analyze the sole survivor NateNora as a person and my analysis says that because it doesn’t really matter much which spouse you choose to literally fridge that they’re one of those couples who have been together since high school and as a result are basically two halves of the same braincell.

Same sense of humor, same homicidal tendencies, same compulsion to collect random magazines.

[what-even-is-thiss]

If you knew Nate and Nora before the apocalypse you probably couldn’t invite one without inviting the other and both of them probably kept the exact same pictures of baby Shaun in their wallets. Not exactly the same person per se, but they’ve been together for so long that if you remove one of them the other basically doesn’t know who they are.

Which is my theory as to why one of the possible first thoughts they have upon being unfrozen to a dead spouse is violence. You killed their other braincell, Kellogg. That was all of their impulse control and you’re about to pay the price for that. They actually have to develop a personality now and it’s all your fault.

[pulsingvoid]

i can't do this anymore guys. dostoevsky never wrote this. please. can anyone hear me. if you do proper research the earliest version of this quote is from like a 2010 facebook quote with a magenta flower on it. it's gotten so bad that it's even credited to him on goodreads but nobody can source where he wrote it because he fucking didn't. i can't keep seeing this in your web weaves. dostoevsky the author of crime and punishment did not in fact write "you were destined for me. perhaps as a punishment". that is just simply not true. please nod and tell me you understand

[foggyeyes]

"this quote was attributed to me. perhaps as a punishment." -dostoevsky

[animentality]

[lyraaorion]

i’m losing it omg LOOK AT HIM…he even looks like M’aiq

[maiqtheliars]

M'aiq is innocent of any wicked crime

[paraparadigm]

ok, this is lkinda silly but I've been thinking a lot about the Reluctant Alchemist's Guide to Thedas these days and of how much work and detail and love you poured into it and I just wanted to say thank you for sharing it with us. I hope Margo is doing well somewhere in the multiverse and that whatever plans you had for her were badass and just a little silly, but mainly satisfying for you as a writer. Anyway, sending lots of love your way and I wish you all the creativity in future and current projects <3

Thank you for your kind words, Nonnie! <3 I still think of Margo's adventures fondly, and writing that fic brought me a lot of delight at the time. I'm always happy to learn that she brought joy to others too.

[rlyehtaxidermist]

one of the best academic paper titles

[rlyehtaxidermist]

for those who don't speak academia: "according to our MRI machine, dead fish can recognise human emotions. this suggests we probably should look at the results of our MRI machine a bit more carefully"

[derinthescarletpescatarian]

I hope everyone realises how incredibly important this dead fish study is. This was SO fucking important.

[imightbeobsessedwithsocks]

I still don’t understand

[derinthescarletpescatarian]

So basically, in the psych and social science fields, researchers would (I don't know if they still do this, I've been out of science for awhile) sling around MRIs like microbiolosts sling around metagenomic analyses. MRIs can measure a lot but people would use them to measure 'activity' in the brain which is like... it's basically the machine doing a fuckload of statistics on brain images of your blood vessels while you do or think about stuff. So you throw a dude in the machine and take a scan, then give him a piece of chocolate cake and throw him back in and the pleasure centres light up. Bam! Eating chocolate makes you happy, proven with MRI! Simple!

These tests get used for all kinds of stuff, and they get used by a lot of people who don't actually know what they're doing, how to interpret the data, or whether there's any real link between what they're measuring and what they're claiming. It's why you see shit going around like "men think of women as objects because when they look at a woman, the same part of their brain is active as when they look at a tool!" and "if you play Mozart for your baby for twenty minutes then their imagination improves, we imaged the brain to prove it!" and "we found where God is in the brain! Christians have more brain activity in this region than atheists!"

There are numerous problems with this kind of science, but the most pressing issue is the validity of the scans themselves. As I said, there's a fair bit of stats to turn an MRI image into 'brain activity', and then you do even more stats on that to get your results. Bennett et. al.'s work ran one of these sorts of experiments, with one difference -- they used a dead salmon instead of living human subjects. And they got positive results. The same sort of experiment, the same methodology, the same results that people were bandying about as positive results. According to the methodology in common use, dead salmon can distinguish human facial expressions. Meaning one of two things:

Dead salmon can recognise human facial expressions. OR

Everyone else's results are garbage also, none of you have data for any of this junk.

I cannot overstate just how many papers were completely fucking destroyed by this experiment. Entire careers of particularly lazy scientists were built on these sorts of experiments. A decent chunk of modern experimental neuropsychology was resting on it. Which shows that science is like everything else -- the best advances are motivated by spite.

[leonkennedysprostate]

"don't assign human morality to non human things" is so true except when it comes to printers. they know what they are, they understand dilemmas and ethics and morality. they choose to be how they are, they choose to be evil, at their very core they are rotten

[mixelation]

things ppl often get wrong in academia AUs (specifically ones in modern university settings with focus on graduate students & professors):

no one is spending enough time complaining about writing

hierarchy is wrong. your grad student TA is not a professor or faculty and might not even be considered an employee. that 32 year old man is not a full professor no matter how talented he is or how old you think 30+ is, and he should be talking more about "the tenure clock"

grad students only ever taking or TAing classes & never doing research or working on their thesis/dissertation. there are masters programs with no thesis component so i'm sure there are ones that have no research requirement, but you can't get a PhD only taking classes

everyone has too much money. but also if it's set in the US there's an obsession with accumulating student debt for positions that generally you would not have to take out loans for

relationship with academic advisor never sufficiently unhinged

not enough discussion of stats where it's obvious everyone only barely understands what's happening

[mixelation]

"what is a sufficiently unhinged student-advisor relationship?"

link to the article

[specialagentartemis]

being an archaeologist in tumblr is so funny because I see so many text posts and go. Imperialism pre-dates capitalism. Rebellion against empires pre-dates capitalism. Money pre-dates capitalism. Social inequality pre-dates capitalism. Misogyny pre-dates capitalism. Wealth inequality pre-dates capitalism. Unilateral rule by oppressive rulers pre-dates capitalism. People’s dependence on their job for their survival pre-dates capitalism. Capitalism as an economic system is about 200-250 years old max but these problems are much, much older, and capitalism supports, entrenches, or exacerbates many of these problems… doesn’t mean it invented them and doesn’t mean they will simply cease to be problems After Capitalism.

[derinthescarletpescatarian]

#saw a post the other day that referred to paying taxes as a ‘modern problem’#sorry man but that’s like one of the oldest problems in the book

[paxamericana]

[official-kircheis]

As per my last clay tablet,

[lurking-latinist]

CCing Ibbi-Ilabrat on this one just to make sure we’re all on the same page!

[ariaste]

“The sesame is visibly dying” makes me lose it every time. My sesame #mysesame

[its-funnytwittertweets]

[ginny-lala]

[prokopetz]

Maintaining a diversity of ongoing personal projects is important because it enables you to procrastinate on one by aimlessly tinkering with another, thereby creating the possibility that you'll finish one of them by accident.

[ramblaac]

"I asked ChatGPT" well I asked M'aiq and he knows much, tells some. M'aiq knows many things others do not