We Are Beguiler

The truth is all a matter of perception

[princenkings]

Fae suggest: cause Problems on Purpose

[we-are-knight]

@wearebeguiler

[wearebeguiler]

*What* I would *never*

[wearebeguiler]

Well, fancy that

[we-are-knight]

I'm unsure if it's lockdown 3.0, the general state of the US and UK, or various other issues right now, but since my anxiety has returned from it's sabbatical from 2019, let me show you all the one good thing I actually did recently.

Since COVID has led to weird hobbies (transitioning from reading HEMA books for fencing to taking up baking, to calligraphy), I decided to try and make French Onion Soup. The ideal evening food to warm your soul against the crushing reality of a malicious late-stage capitalist dystopia.

First, onions. So many onions. I haven't attended any of the protests that have taken place in the past 2 years, being in a remote part of England, but it's nice to be able to still find ways to tear gas myself in my own home to appreciate a modicum of what people are going through elsewhere.

I'm just really really sensitive to onions, why did I think this was a good idea?

After cooking these asshole alliums long enough to stop making my eyes become watery pain orbs, caramelisation kicks in, and I can actually have time away from the pain of spiteful vegetables to be alone with my thoughts. Nothing quite beats the pleasure of cooking a meal, and filling the intervals between preparing ingredients with the existential crisis you are having coming from spending a year inside as the world burns.

Drown said thoughts with wine from a friend. Return to burning the evil out of those spiteful vegetables.

Between drowing the existential void in wine long enough to create the alcoholic equivalent of the Mariana's Trench, your onions are now a husk of their former selves, much like many of us being at the mercy of capricious powers that would happily see us all dead. Time to add the stock; in this case, duck stock made from the remains of Christmas dinner!

Leave unsupervised and allowed to simmer. Return after 30 minutes, add toasted bread of choice, layer with solidified cow extract, roast one more time under broiler to ensure hell vegetables are truly dead.

End product.

10/10, would contemplate dread reality while cooking again.

[wearebeguiler]

I don’t even like French onion soup that much but this was *good*

[diioonysus]

greek mythology | gods & goddesses | Δολος

→ dolos was the god or personified spirit of trickery, cunning deception, craftiness, treachery and guile. he was an apprentice to prometheus. he was known to even trick the gods, and his skill was made known when he made a copy statue of alethia in order to trick people into thinking they were seeing the real statue.

[wearebeguiler]

“A society that gets rid of all its troublemakers goes downhill.”

— Robert A. Heinlein, Time Enough for Love

[wearebeguiler]

Sinner's Prayer

Sinner's Prayer, a song by Slaid Cleaves on Spotify

When people see me on the street They think they see an honest man They don’t know what lies beneath But some of them would understand They know the soul and what it hides You sometimes see it in their eyes

[sartorialadventure]

Pamella Roland, pre-fall 2019

[wearebeguiler]

I would lie of course. I lied a lot and with good reason: to protect the truth—safeguard it like wearing fake gems to keep the real ones from getting stolen or cheapened by overuse. I guarded what truths I possessed because information was not a thing—it was colorless odorless shapeless and therefore indestructible. There was no way to retrieve or void it no way to halt its proliferation. Telling someone a secret was like storing plutonium inside a sandwich bag the information would inevitably outlive the friendship or love or trust in which you’d placed it. And then you would have given it away.

Jennifer Egan, Look at Me

[pt-anderson]

–You feel like that? –Yeah. Yeah, I do. I definitely know that. — American Hustle (2013, dir. David O. Russell)

[wearebeguiler]

Truth is a naked and open daylight, that does not show the masques, and mummeries, and triumphs of the world, half so stately and daintily as candle-lights. . . A mixture of a lie doth ever add pleasure

Francis Bacon

[wearebeguiler]

There have been stories and messages delivered across different media every since the Cro-Magnon man figured out that mineral pigments like iron oxide and black manganese could be applied to the sides of rocks and caves. Whether chronicling life, communicating with others, or creating an inspirational image, there were stories being told.

[wearebeguiler]

But keeping secrets is a discipline. I never use to think of myself as a good liar, but after having had some practice I had adopted the prevaricator's credo that one doesn't so much fabricate a lie as marry it. A successful lie cannot be brought into this world and capriciously abandoned; like any committed relationship it must be maintained, and with far more devotion than the truth, which carries on being carelessly true without any help. By contrast, my lie needed me as much as I needed it, and so demanded the constancy of wedlock: Till death do us part.

Lionel Shriver

[wearebeguiler]

Neuroscientist Uri Hasson researches the basis of human communication, and experiments from his lab reveal that even across different languages, our brains show similar activity, or become "aligned," when we hear the same idea or story. This amazing neural mechanism allows us to transmit brain patterns, sharing memories and knowledge. "We can communicate because we have a common code that presents meaning," Hasson says.

[wearebeguiler]

...as he discovered in the course of his uncountable years that a lie is more comfortable than doubt, more useful than love, more lasting than truth...

Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez, The Autumn of the Patriarch

[wearebeguiler]

This is a conversion of the Beguiler class from D&D 3.5 edition's "Player's Handbook II". Instead of creating an entire base class, it seemed to have a lot of similarities already to the Wizard class. So, making it an Arcane Tradition felt like the easiest conversion for it.

Another 5e Beguiler conversion! This one presents the beguiler as a Wizard Tradition. Courtesy of  The Adamantine Ace

[wearebeguiler]

The young gentlemen who came calling seemed especially puzzling. They sat in their velvet shirts and their leather boots, nibbling burnt cakes and praising Diamond's mind, and all the while their eyes said other things. Now, their eyes said. Now. Then: Patience, patience. 'You are flowers,' their mouths said, 'You are jewels, you are golden dreams.' Their eyes said: I eat flowers, I burn with dreams, I have a tower without a door in my heart, and I will keep you there...

Patricia A. McKillip, Harrowing the Dragon

[prettygirlthatsparkles]