Oh Hi

Sam Personal blog where I throw all of my interests. Right now its mostly DA

[ellipsus-writes]

Today is the biggest day for Ellipsus since we launched in 2023... 👀

Back then, we began building Ellipsus out of a simple belief: writers deserve a place to create, collaborate, and share their work without handing over their words, their data, or their creative process to bad actors and Big Tech—a promise that matters now, more than ever.

Nearly 600k writers and counting are writing on Ellipsus because of this promise. We see everyday how writers are rejecting Big Tech's data mining model in favor of tools that respect user privacy and reflect our values.

We’re a small full-time team building, maintaining, supporting, and improving the tool every day. And to keep doing that sustainably—without compromising the promises that brought people here—we’re introducing Ellipsus Plus.

Plus is a set of optional features on top of free Ellipsus, designed to help fund the continued development of Ellipsus for everyone, free and paid; while helping us stay independent, ad-free, and working to improve the tool well into the future.

That means the Ellipsus you know is staying free: you can keep writing with unlimited documents, drafts, collaborators, and core features. Free Ellipsus will continue to receive updates, improvements, and new features too, including major work already planned (like offline syncing and native apps).

Plus features have been designed alongside community feedback, our pricing shaped by our users around what felt fair and sustainable.

Every Plus subscription leads to ultimate ownership of the tool. Not metaphorical ownership, but real ownership, including all future updates to the Plus plan. No endless subscriptions. Once you’ve paid, it’s yours. Really.

Our introductory Plus features are designed to be fun, creative, practical, and help you get the most out of the tool! We really hope you enjoy them. Here’s a quick overview:

Custom themes

Make your writing space feel like home with custom themes! Use any colors, gradients, images, or .gifs you love. Share with friends and readers. The choices are infinite.

Writing Insights

See insights into your writing process and spot patterns faster across ten AI-free metrics—like vocabulary diversity, sentence length, sentence rhythm, word frequency, and more. Writing insights are opt-in only, and run on local data, so your text never leaves the editor. 

Customizable Snippets

We all love snippets! Now you can give your words an extra personal touch. Customize your snippets with media backgrounds (GIFs, images), fonts, text colors, and custom themes—you can even add byline credits for authors and characters!

Emboss

Emboss is our AI-free proof-of-work layer for human writing. Show your readers the time, labor, and love that went into your work. Instead of relying on unreliable “AI-powered” “verifiers” that judge a piece after the fact, share your writing journey, with authorship metrics that help inspire trust. You can also show how your work evolved with snapshots of your version history. Emboss is fully opt-in.

We hope you’re as excited about Plus as we are! Try Plus free for 7 days, no payment required. You can read more (and sign up!) on our Plus page.

Again, there’s tons more to come, and we can’t wait to build it for you. Free or paid, Ellipsus is going to keep getting better. Thank you for your support.

Have questions about Plus? We’re hosting an “Ask the Team” doc where we’ll be answering your burning questions. Please make comments there! Now please, go forth and explore!

- the Ellipsus Team xo

[nipuni]

Wolves!

many Solas sketches 📣💕💕💕

PSD lines of these will be available at my Patreon on march 1st!

[memewhore]

[spleenyz]

[fallout-lou-begas]

[closet-keys]

Israel systematically targets the health of pregnant mothers and infants in Gaza. This is a reality every parent in Gaza knows. It has also been confirmed repeatedly by others. Pediatric healthcare professionals in Gaza have been bravely speaking out about how Israel is currently using restrictions of formula into Gaza to torture and kill Palestinian babies.

[closet-keys]

My friend Nader recently became an uncle to his newborn baby niece, Masa. Due to the traumatic stress and malnutrition experienced under genocidal conditions, many mothers cannot produce breast-milk. Masa, like tens of thousands of other babies in Gaza, relies on formula to survive. Today, Nader told me that this little girl is in the hospital now due to a severe chest infection. She is only 8 days old. Please help her.

[dalishiousmods]

Harding's Casual Clothes for Rook

A remesh of Harding's casual outfit to fit Rook. Replaces the Tunic Noir outfit (the default Shadow Dragon one) - will only work on fem bodies, sorry. Should work with retextures of Harding's outfit as long as they're loaded after this mod.

[DOWNLOAD FROM NEXUSMODS]

[tempesthawke]

Emmrich "It's a Rich Topic!" Volkarin

[yorgen-sh]

[sister-lucifer]

i would trust weird al with my drink at a party. granted he may put one of those capsules that expands into a sponge animal in it,

[rhyme-plus-zombie]

sorry i had a vision and i just had to draw it

[sunsetbuddie]

i am being so fucking serious when i say a lot of people need to free themselves and queer characters from the shackles of the idea of "good representation" you are stifling and limiting and shrinking queer characters down just so you can fit them into a "good representation" box and it's so. exhausting. queer characters are not a monolith. free yourselves. and them.

[riding-with-the-wild-hunt]

you do not have to want to be a parent or caretaker. but you do have to see children as full human beings with an indisputable and universal right to a safe, healthy, and loving environment in which to grow up. and to be in all the public spaces you are. including the crying baby on the bus, and the toddler on the ipad in the restaurant, and the group of teenagers at the shops who may not be buying anything. and you have to be prepared to be a safe adult in whatever way you can. if you support any social-justice-oriented movement whatsoever—if you profess to be a feminist, or an environmentalist, or anti-carceral, or land back, or antiracist, or anything else—and then say you hate kids, your support for your cause has a great big hole at its center. and this is non-negotiable.

[edralis]

source

[flowersforthemachines]

Useless Veilguard fact of the day: Day 428

The possibility to romance Neve is not immediately cut off if you choose to sacrifice Minrathous. However, you still need to make certain choices in your interactions with Neve in order not to lock yourself out of a possible romance.

Those choices include:

Bringing Neve with you to Solas's ritual

Supporting Neve in choosing the careful approach towards looking for the gods during the first conversation in the Lighthouse (dialogue option: Neve is right)

Completing the Study of Dock Town

Encouraging Neve to accept the Threads blackmail at the end of the Cobbled Swan Case (Neve will accept the blackmail either way on the Treviso path, but will disapprove if Rook tries to dissuade her from the deal)

Each choice grants you 1 point in the "Rook Backs Neve" counter.

If you get two or more points, Neve will note that Rook has shown up for her multiple times before and the romance will be available:

Rook: I want to be someone who shows up for you. Rook: I don't want to lose… I worry I've lost something. Neve: Rook, you turning up today… it's not the first time. Neve: Maybe you're not that lost. More likely we both are. Rook: How do we get found? Neve: Maybe we'll figure it out.

If you only have one point, Neve will say that they hardly see eye to eye, but Rook will insist they want to get to know her better (and the romance will also remain available):

Rook: I don't want to lose… I worry I've lost something. Neve: How much could you lose? We barely see eye-to-eye. Rook: I won't pretend to know you. But I want to. After everything, I don't know if you'll let me… Neve: But maybe we'll see.

However, if you scored zero points, the romance will be cut off:

Rook: I don't want to lose… I worry I've lost something. Neve: Likely nothing good for you. Neve: You don't know me, Rook. We barely see eye-to-eye. Neve: But we're together in a fight against the gods. You need a friend, you know where to find me.

Check out the tag for more useless facts: #useless davg fact of the day!

[omghotmemes]

At night the beast sleeps

[nn-ee-zz]

The first depiction of Mary and Jesus

[nn-ee-zz]

Before thousands of artworks made by hundreds of masters in the span of centuries, it’s clear that the first drawing was made by the hands of a child who just loved his mom

[vhen-harel]

Vhenan - A Sacred Term

I think of the term vhenan as quite sacred a word - to me it has always felt like a declaration of commitment, like a vow. And so I researched the use of it in Thedas and found it was a very rare term indeed.

There are only three instances across Dragon Age where the term vhenan is used for someone.

Merrill to a romanced Hawke.

Solas to a romanced Lavellan and vice-versa (Lavellan is the only protagonist to use this term)

The spirit preserving Telana's memories crying out for Ameridan.

Sera never uses it for a romanced Inquisitor, Veilguard gives us two elven companions who don’t use it and even elven Rook never uses it for their LI. A non-elf Rook acts as though they have never heard of the term before when talking to a romanced Lavellan - so rare indeed.

And naturally my brain started looking for patterns between Merrill, Solas, and Telana (aside from all being mages and elves) and why, do they reserve it for only one person in their romanced narratives?

The first thing that stood out is that all three are stubborn people. Once they've decided something is worth pursuing, they're incredibly difficult to sway. Merrill obsessed with restoring the eluvian, Telana refusing to leave Ameridan and Solas spending years pursuing veilfall.

The second thing they share is that love and loyalty sit at the centre of many of their choices. None of them are primarily motivated by power, status, or personal gain. Their lives are shaped by devotion, whether that's to a person, a cause, their people, or a belief.

The third is their willingness to go it alone. Merrill becomes clanless and is willing to endure solitude for her goals. Telana dies alone searching for Ameridan. Solas repeatedly chooses paths that leave him apart from the people he cares about (ending the relationship with a romanced Lavellan to walk the din’anshiral).

Merrill, Telana, and Solas are all characters whose stories revolve around holding onto something despite great cost, and all three choose someone they remain devoted to through hardship, distance, pain, and time. (And yes, I include Solas in this. Even after years of separation, he writes to Lavellan, vows never to forget her, and slips right back into calling Lavellan vhenan.)

Considering vhenan is 'my heart' there is very strong symbolism. We may love many people throughout our lives, but we only have one 'heart' and it's required for living.

Solas seems most 'alive' when he's with Lavellan. Lavellan draws him into the present moment, out of the Fade and into the physical world, a world he’s trying to deny. Lavellan is someone who pulls Solas back toward living rather than merely existing or heading down a path of death. There is a second layer of symbolism as well: Solas refuses to let Lavellan witness what he will become. In a sense, it’s almost as though he leaves his heart behind for safekeeping, that Solas, who he wants to be, can remain beating with Lavellan.

When Ameridan disappears, Telana refuses to let him go. She waits, enters uthenera in the hope of finding him through dreams, and dies still searching for him. The heart is the organ that sustains life, and Telana spends her final days searching for the person she considers hers. She dies with her search unfinished, her body unable to live without her heart.

For Merrill the heart symbolism is a bit different, I think it lies in what a heart does. A heart sustains the body by continually sending blood through it. Hawke occupies a similar role in Merrill's life. Her ambitions, and pursuit of the eluvian remain unchanged, yet Hawke becomes woven through it, a constant presence that helps sustain the life she's chosen to live.

Merrill's use of the word is particularly interesting to me because she's one of the modern elven characters most invested in recovering the knowledge and traditions of ancient Elvhenan. She also recites In Uthenera, an elven ballad that contains one of the only other uses of vhenan in the series. Given her fascination with preserving the past, it feels fitting she'd use a word for Hawke that appears so rarely and carries significance.

For an ancient culture that was both spirit and form, there may have been few declarations more intimate and more sacred than telling another person: you are my heart. You are the thing that keeps me living in this biological form. In this sense, Solas' denial of Lavellan almost feels like a denial of himself, he regrets manifesting so much that to accept his love for Lavellan is also to accept the world and himself physically in it.

In all three cases, vhenan is given to someone who is so woven into the speaker's life despite distance, hardship, pain, or time. That's why the word feels sacred to me. Much like the heart itself, they have become so woven into the being of the person who bears them.

Note: I understand vhenan is probably used more often in-universe than the games show us. But when a term appears this rarely in officially written narratives, I can't help looking for patterns and symbolism in who uses it and why. Whether that was the writers' intent or not, those patterns become part of how I interpret the word and then integrate it into my own world state.

2nd Note: In Uthenera is about loss, mortality, separation, and the approach of death, which I find fascinating given that those same themes run through these 3 relationships associated with the word.

*Also if I'm missing any use of vhenan elsewhere in the universe please let me know.

[overclassy]

[anna-antoshchenkova]

Time