Alistair

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❣ Chile in a Photography ❣

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Sweet Seals For You, Always
d e v o n
dirt enthusiast
Mike Driver

Janaina Medeiros
Xuebing Du

titsay
AnasAbdin
Cosmic Funnies

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Acquired Stardust
almost home
RMH
I'd rather be in outer space 🛸
let's talk about Bridgerton tea, my ask is open
Peter Solarz
🪼

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@rileylefae
Alistair
More mechs should eat their pilots. The process of getting into the pilot seat should look like vore fetish art.
btw it's so fucking stupid you can be anxious physically in your body even after you've decided mentally you don't care. I'm supposed to be in charge here
FUCK. honestly just FUCK. We missed a very important day yesterday.
what was yesterday, cat?
I’m not missing it this year.
Happy Birthday buddy!
NOT THIS TIME.
i am massively overdue for a very very good week where not a single bad thing happens and everything is easy
reblog to give prev a very good week where not a single bad thing happens and everything is easy
Genuinely wish i could drop paragraphs to people about how they make me feel(in a not good way) and then never have to continue that conversation again but still be friends.
I do not have the energy to debate back and forth with people i genuinely like that sometimes hurt me accidently because we are all people who make mistakes. But also
Praying that $1500 randomly comes to you when you need it the most this year.
Okay inflation is crazy.
We bumping up the price to $15,000 for 2026.
love it when characters do a sacrifice play ostensibly to save others but mostly so they don't have to face themselves
If only there were some sort of facility where teenagers could be taught new skills.
Anyway, here's a helpful diagram. When I was hit on the temple this was one of the harder things I had to reteach myself. Don't be shamed into not asking questions, and it's alright if it takes you a while to figure it out. Don't let someone make you feel bad for learning new things, or relearning old ones.
Sometimes, unfortunately, you have to teach yourself. YouTube is a valid option.
yeah okay ill reblog that :]
If you don't know...here it is.
a story about grief
song: world spins madly on by the weepies
rb to tell prev they're being so brave right now and pat their head a little please
Everything I read about recovering from burnout is like “it takes months or even years to fully recover” and it’s like okay…. I have a weekend before I gotta clock in on Monday
i know shes beyonce han solo but i Neeeded to see her on a charli xcx style album cover. the thumbnails for this have been collecting dust in my files since literally 2022 lmao. 8x8 prints coming to tafcon!
my summer son || repainted this ephrim-as-gdragon piece from (checks dates) oh my god, 8 years ago. original versions under the cut. thank god i learned to stylize. prints coming to tafcon with me!
unfortunately i can never hate on a "power of friendship" narrative no matter how corny because the thing is it's literally real
Short Story Recommendations
These all fuck me up to a varying degree of emotions
Crime
Philomel Cottage - Agatha Christie
Lamb to the Slaughter - Roald Dahl
Death and the Compass - Jorge Luis Borges
Horror
The Landlady - Roald Dahl
A Walk in the Dark - Arthur C Clarke
The Wife’s Story - Ursula K Le Guin
The Veldt - Ray Bradbury
The Hanging Stranger - Philip K Dick
The Colour out of Space - H P Lovecraft
The Spider - Hanns Heinz Ewers
Sad
The Life You Save May Be Your Own - Flannery O’Connor
A Small, Good Thing - Raymond Carver
Cathedral - Raymond Carver
The Haunted Boy - Carson McCullers
The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas - Ursula K. Le Guin
The Chef - Andy Weir
The Martyr - Ngugi Wa Thiong’o
Jambula Tree - Monica Arak de Nyeko
The Rats Do Sleep At Night - Wolfgang Borchert
Sci-Fi
Love is the Plan the Plan is Death - James Tiptree Jr
The Last Question - Isaac Asimov
The Nine Billion Names of God - Arthur C Clarke
The Star - Arthur C Clarke
Reunion - Arthur C Clarke
The Commuter - Philip K Dick
Exhibit Piece - Philip K Dick
To Serve Man - Damon Knight
Brothers Beyond the Void - Paul W Fairman
What the Fuck?!
The Lottery - Shirley Jackson
A Collapse of Horses - Brian Evenson
Some of Us Had Been Threatening Our Friend Colby - Donald Barthelme
Hopeful Monsters - Hiromi Goto
The Box Social - James Reaney
He-y come on ou-t - shinichi hoshi
The Garden of Forking Paths - Jorge Luis Borges
Stories of Your Life and Others - Ted Chiang (just the entire collection bro)
Other
Broken Routine - Jeffrey Archer
A Man Who Had No Eyes - Mackinlay Kantor
Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been - Joyce Carol Oates
The Lady, or the Tiger - Frank R Stockton
The Continuity of Parks - Julio Cortázar
The Dinner Party - Mona Gardner
A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings - Gabriel García Márquez
On Exactitude in Science - Jorge Luis Borges
FFXIV: Shadowbringers as Reproductive Horror
Content warning: discussion of reproductive horror and all its implications, including forced pregnancy Spoilers for all of Shadowbringers 5.0, long post
Okay so. Shadowbringers is the most horror-genre expansion FFXIV has ever had. Endwalker has significant moments, but it's not as complete. And specifically, a lot of the horror that Shadowbringers evokes is reproductive horror, though it is less visually unsubtle than, say, Alien. A major theme of Shadowbringers is parenting, new generations, and childbirth... and the rejection of such. Eulmore, allying itself with the sin eaters, rejects the possibility of a future, even ceasing to engage in creative labor altogether in favor of outsourcing that duty to the bonded. Even the very land of Kholusia is presented as particularly unfertile, despite not being desert like Amh Araeng. Eulmore is, of course, like this because, behind the scenes, Emet-Selch is pulling their strings. Emet-Selch has entirely refused the future presented by the Reflections, one where the Sundered replace his people, though the Sundered are compared, by him, implicitly to children. (And, as he himself points out, some of them literally are his children. "Look at me! I have lived a thousand thousand of your lives! I have broken bread with you, fought with you, grown ill, grown old! Sired children and yes, welcomed death's sweet embrace." Yet he rejects them all. He may be Hades, but he is also Kronos devouring his young.) The Crystarium, in opposition to Eulmore, has carved out a space dedicated to a potential future. They preserve the knowledge of the old world so that it might serve to guide the new. Parents and heirs, in contrast to Eulmore's unthinking infantile consumption. I think it's also worth touching on the Night's Blessed here, who hide from the Light, parents using their very identities as shields for their children, using heartstones to symbolize the souls of their past generations... heartstones which they later sacrifice to fuel the Talos.
Now. Sin eaters. Malformed creatures born from cocoons formed of the bodies and souls of the living... though as easily as cocoons, one might say "eggs." When Light enters a living being, it is planted, "like seeds in soil," and this combines with a living body to produce something un-living, "triggers the birth of new monstrosities." Tesleen's mother became a sin eater. The Forgiven Dissonance that turns her into one in turn is not explicitly identified as her mother, but it is connected with her nonetheless. It has a feminine figure, and Tesleen's last words as a human are "Mother... mother, I..." As a human, Tesleen sacrificed herself to save a child and passed to Halric the last human words her mother gave to her. She uses her humanity to affirm the new generation, but the world of the First is conspiring to reject the possibility of its own heirs. As a sin eater, Tesleen is not named as a forgiven sin. She is simply "Tesleen, the Forgiven." Her sin in this dying world, in the ideology espoused by Eulmore, was attempting to act as a mother. A sin eater exists to feed and multiply, but it is not a living child. It is a stillbirth.
Let's go back to Emet-Selch for a moment. He is, in the world of Shadowbringers, the ultimate Patriarch in every sense. He is an invading emperor, a past generation, a literal father and grandfather and great-grandfather. He creates Vauthry to be a dead end, an un-heir... and in genuinely one of his worst single acts, he does this by negotiating with Vauthry's father about impregnating Vauthry's mother with a monster, while she can only stand there, silent and despairing. Vauthry will eventually kill her, along with his father. I also think it's worth noting that Vauthry's mother shares the color scheme of the Minfilias. Blonde hair, light eyes, a hairstyle with a pink ribbon, and a pink dress. Upon Vauthry's ascension, the Minfilias are imprisoned. Minfilia tried to create a line of daughters to create a future for the First, but she and her successors cannot do it alone, especially not once the world has rejected the possibility she tries to create. All the Minfilias after the Minfilia of the Source and before Ryne die as children. Even at best, they are exploited and used up by the world they are born into, even as Minfilia refuses to simply overwrite them with herself, as an Ascian would. Ryne thinks she has to die for the crime of only existing at the death of her "mother," but all Minfilia wants for her is that Ryne be allowed to live her own life, to choose her own future. Minfilia is the opposite of Emet-Selch, narratively speaking.
The Crystal Exarch, on the other hand, is not the opposite of Emet-Selch. He arrives in this world as the last heir of the Allagan Empire, imposing its great Tower upon the land, though he means to nurture rather than invade. He and Emet-Selch wear deliberately similar outfits, and though they share scenes, they only speak to each other on-screen when not in the company of others. Prospero is the evil magician, the father, and the author of the story all at once, after all. The Exarch as Prospero (rather than just Emet-Selch) is, I think, most clearly illustrated by Feo Ul, the Ariel of this tale, the spirit combining gendered motifs and bound to serve in aid. The Exarch also notably has a magic staff, whereas Emet-Selch does not, at least until his Trial. The Exarch is, narratively, one of the Patriarchs of this world and this story. The benevolent father of the Crystarium, who seeks to let the First stand on its own, but still exerts the control of someone else's agency inherent in the archetype.
Y'shtola is the only adult woman of the Scions (save for possibly the Warrior) in Shadowbringers. She cannot be a Maiden, she will not be a Mother (and cannot be anyway, not in this story), so she is left with the Crone. Master Matoya (the deliberate mixing of masculine title and feminine name), the witch in the woods, who rejects every Patriarch she is presented with. She left the Crystarium because of the Exarch, she is certainly no fan of Emet-Selch, and she immediately lambasts Thancred for his failures as a father figure. She is seeking Ronka, a primordial past that she hopes will provide a better model... but is disappointed to find a village of only women who are nonetheless sworn to a long-dead Emperor, an Emperor whose designs to hide away and control knowledge she is increasingly frustrated with as the Rak'tika story progresses. But the price of becoming the Crone by choice is that she is excluded from the story until the Warrior arrives with the aid the Exarch has prepared for her. It is no accident that Y'shtola is the one to reveal to the Warrior what everyone else who knows has been concealing: something terrible is growing inside them, an anti-life that threatens to kill them and take the world with it.
The Warrior of Light is the designated Mother of this story, and the fate of the world depends on their ability to transmute dead Light into new life. But the path that has been decided for them is inherently flawed. You cannot create a healthy future through the cycle of sacrificing mothers. I'm not sure you can really say that Shadowbringers rejects patriarchy. It is... a FFXIV expansion. And it is still very concerned with Correct Reproduction. Before the Tempest, the Warrior visits the Umbilicus, the room at the heart of the Crystal Tower, named for the point where the umbilical cord connects to a fetus, and then immediately after finishing that quest, one of the sidequests that opens up is "Welcome to the Future," where the Warrior blesses a newborn baby in the Crystarium. But the fact that the Warrior did not have full knowledge of what was going to happen to their body is nonetheless a wrong that was committed against them. Also, I feel like it's worth mentioning here that the ill-effects of the Light include vomiting and the Warrior clutching their stomach. And that the Light enters the Warrior's torso specifically after each Lightwarden-slaying, rather than a more full-body representation.
So: the final confrontation of the Tempest. The Warrior is out of time. A new Lightwarden is going to be born, and there is nothing anyone can do to stop it. The Scions have tried and failed. Emet-Selch is victorious. Enter Ardbert. The Warrior is not, after all, alone. With aid and partnership, they can survive what is happening to their body and reject this engendering of Light, of un-life. There will be no new-begotten sin eater.