wormin’ @sweaterregrets - Tumblr Blog

made a new york sirens horse (sorse) to celebrate/mourn my favorite horse girls! thanks for the incredible season! wee woo 🚨 🩵🧡🩵

ft my little keychain :)

#my hockey horse :)#fibre arts #pwhl #pwhlblr

collegefootballplayoffs

hometowns

x x x x x x x x

bestiolin

maarten inghels

animate-mush

@sherbertilluminated there's a line somewhere in Ursula Vernon's Digger that goes something like "it is difficult to be metaphysical around the truly geologically minded"

fuckyoubaker

FEELIN' PRETTY NOW OR NEVER TO ME

theaudientvoid

Shit man, this parahuman war is fucked. just saw a guy slam back a Cauldron vial and say "sample F-one-six-one-one 'Deus'" or some similar shit, and summon an invulnerable naked projection of his dead daughter that proceed to eat a man alive. The camera didn’t even go onto him, that’s how common shit like this is. My ass is out here controlling insects. think I just heard “path to victory" two groups over. I gotta get the fuck outta here.

coffeepeople

when my boss found out that I’m bi he said “I knew it had to be something, you knew way too much about art and shit” and I was like “do you think straight people can’t know things about art?” and he was just like “yeah.”

mizeliza

au where the cetagandans see an opportunity and reward miles by giving him a haut wife, which he can't refuse without wrecking the fragile barrayaran-cetagandan diplomatic relations, and chaos and hilarity ensues when miles brings her home to barrayar

cookie-nom-nom

Ekaterin: *blink. blink.*

Miles: I CAN EXP- actually I can’t

Ekaterin: I suppose I’ll prepare a guest room for our new wife.

mala-taste

Aral and Cordelia grab the opportunity to soft launch Jole since throuples are already the topic du jour

cookie-nom-nom

on the one hand I imagine Miles would be rather relieved at the secondary scandal to deflect some attention. On the other I think he deeply Doesn’t want an example of How to Make a Throuple work while he’s actively wracking his brains for a Scheme to get rid of the new wife who is probably a spy right???? Miles is TRYING to use his barbarian background to justify Floundering and thus his various gambits. They are Not Helping.

Ivan keeps giving terrible tips on how to deeeeefinitely escape a fake marriage that toootally worked for him and Tej. Yup the fake dates are very necessary for diplomatic relations between Cetaganda and Barrayar, cos.

mala-taste

Everyone actually wants things between Miles and Ekaterin and the new wife to work out, they just disagree on what that means.

Cordelia gives a space power point presentation on polycules and queerplatonic relationships, the latter because the haut wife likes Miles and especially Ekaterin well enough but is absolutely disgusted by the concept of romance or having sex under any circumstances. In typical Cordelia fashion, she is very Invested into fixing other people's love problems.

Aral is torn because on the one hand the wife is a likely security threat, but on the other hand Cordelia's proselytizing means he no longer has to hide some parts of himself from his family. So he's just staying quiet and hoping for the best. His Honour tells him he'd be a hypocrite if he protested against a throuple while being in one himself. Also, chiming in means talking about himself and his personal life, and he hates that.

Ivan, a newly converted Romantic after things worked out with Tej, is also convinced that the wife is a spy, but Tej was keeping secrets too and that only made their romance cooler and more dramatic. He is a firm believer that their relationship can overcome the wife being a Cetagandan spy. However, both he and Tej cannot comprehend that the wife is completely uninterested in sex, and keep having foot-in-mouth incidents where they imply she'll change her mind eventually. Ivan however is the only one subtle enough to try to push Miles towards keeping the wife while pretending to give advice on how to divorce her. Secretly he's baffled that Miles wants to divorce her in the first place, because imagine having not one but two hot wives. The B plot is him blurting this out to Tej and Tej kicking him out to sleep on the couch. Cordelia tries to give a space power point presentation on polyamory to Tej, but Tej tells her to fuck off. Tej ends up getting drunk and having a heart-to-heart with Aral, whose POV on love vs. monogamy she manages to comprehend much better.

Ekaterin is the only one who actually bothers to spend enough time with the wife without talking over her. She discovers they're both really into gardening, and they start developing an interstellar-competition-winning Barrayaran-Cetagandan hybrid garden. Kitten trees may or may not be involved. The wife is actually a spy, but she's a spy that's out to gather samples of Barrayaran flora and fauna for scientific purposes, after the Barrayaran government has repeatedly refused to give Cetagandan scientists visas that allow them to do fieldwork.

Upon learning this, Mark sees a Business Opportunity and proposes a business partnership between some Cetagandan R&D institutions and his bug business. He's technically not breaking any laws because he's doing it through a subsidiary that operates out of Jackson's Whole. Mark's business thus gets access to Cetagandan genetics innovations while the Cetagandans get access to brilliant innovative Barrayaran fauna. The deal is heavily yet unnoticeably skewed in Barrayar's direction, because not even beings with genetically enhanced superintelligence can cut a better business deal than Mark.

mala-taste

Mark weasels out of it because they find an antique Barrayaran legal precedent that says that, in case of excess wives, the eldest brother can legally pass on some of them to the cadets. So Mark ends up legally Cetagandan through marriage and in possession of inalienable legal rights that the Cetagandan government can't go against.

Miles's old-fashioned soul is content because after all the soul-searching he decides he is after all monogamous at heart (another subplot is Ekaterin finding out about the period when he was double-timing Quinn and Taura and him having a bit of reflection about that), and Karen and Mark don't mind because with all of Mark's alters they consider themselves a polycule anyway.

The sociological storytelling aspect is about international trade and development as a vector of cooperation and cultural tolerance.

cookie-nom-nom

and of course Ekaterin emphasizing the scientific and cultural value of sharing information about Barrayaran plants. There’s got to be loads of Barrayaran cultural touch stones tied up in the native species; plant dyes of various regions influencing what vor crests could be made, various songs/poetry incorporating their symbolism, a Sleeping Beauty knock off that paints the Horrors of the Barrayaran flora so vividly, etc. Ekaterin first rallied those arguments (under the guise of helping spy work ofc) in convincing the haut wife to be a little less rigidly wary. Since she doesn’t exactly consider being married off to a Barrayaran a dream come true, either. A way of letting her know what her new home is like, framed in her biology interest.

Ekaterin rallies the argument again when the rest of the lot figure out about the spy work. Albeit adjusted to things like Cetagandan scientists discovering better itch creams for poisonous weed hell #48. Or learning to appreciate the loveliness of Barrayaran flora (get that look off your face miles if you’d spend an hour with your hackles lowered enough to actually talk to our new wife you’d see how possible it is). Ends up somehow increasing national barrayaran pride in their native flora, though likely less for the beauty and biodiversity angle and more ‘if the Cetagandans see value in it we should hold it over their heads as a cultural export’. Close enough? At least the haut wife means there’s finally someone else on the planet that finds as much beauty and fascination in Barrayaran flora as she does!

So that side plot also reinforces the Mark-trade-cultural tolerance angle.

mothcub

On the same wavelength.

klexos

Gen Meets the Magus

I leaned farther into the feather pillows on the seat and back of the chair. It was almost as good as clean clothes, and I couldn’t have gotten up if I had tried.

I'm working on a personal project to create a series of ink illustrations based on scenes from The Thief this year, here's the first :)