Monterey Bay Aquarium
Cosmic Funnies
Cosimo Galluzzi
TVSTRANGERTHINGS
Love Begins
untitled
Xuebing Du
$LAYYYTER
cherry valley forever
RMH
KIROKAZE
PR's Tumblrdome
The Stonewall Inn
No title available
trying on a metaphor
pixel skylines
tumblr dot com
ojovivo
Lint Roller? I Barely Know Her
One Nice Bug Per Day
seen from Jordan
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@winterpinetrees
An Archive of Our Own, a project of the Organization for Transformative Works
A diegetic review of KoTher'ai, written by a sixty-something year old Rungjani theater critic who probably has long and complicated drama with Hal but it's professional drama and they both want the Creed OUT of this town.
If she saw any ghosts she is not telling.
Some of my absolute favorite dialogues in tcomc are when the characters are just barely getting to know the Count and they're instantly seduced by his effortless charisma before the Count, unprompted, gets started on a supervillain fucking joker rant about how humanity is inherently cruel and that he thinks torture is awesome and believes he is an angel sent by God to punish sinners, and the rest of the characters get a sudden revelation that this man's wallet is only the tip of the iceberg of whatever the fuck is wrong with him.
"Have you suffered a great deal, Monsieur?" is only five minutes into their conversation and Franz completely slams the Count with this single sentence.
the tendency of making Fernand the main villain in The Count of Monte-Cristo adaptations speaks to the (mostly American) willingness to see bad things as something that individuals bring to life. meanwhile, in the book, Fernand has the least presence compared to Danglars (the evil of capitalism) and especially to Villefort (the evil of state corruption and the penal system). even Cadrousse, the silent bystander, gets more attention in text than Fernand as a person. Dumas' book is not about a personal tragedy, it's about the ease with which a random person can fall victim to the machine of the state. that's why the book is always relevant.
do the people know that jack kirby created the best characters of all time in 1971 when he created the new gods. do they know about how deeply beautiful his exploration of personal freedom and anti-fascism and nature v nurture and the value of good in the world is. do they know
Tbh, I think everyone getting very attached to Tall Adrian™️ kinda makes them miss the potential of the canon reality that Eridians average at 50cm tall.
Grace is living on a planet of toddler sized rocks with twice his strength. If at ANY point he forgets to look where he’s going he is Going Trip Over An Ambassador. Unstoppable force vs. immovable object except Grace is very much stoppable.
Eridians either get used to talking to his shins, craning on their tippy toes to get a good look at his face, or begin forcing him to sit criss-cross applesauce for literally any important meeting. Picture him joining the Erid equivalent of a UN press conference and having to curl up his awkward water body and hug his knees for the whole thing.
He can conceivably be picked up by an alien the size of a hard helmet against his will. He’s surrounded by space roombas with perfect memories and attention spans shorter than his San Francisco classroom who can’t believe he’s incapable of solving complex math in three seconds. He has step stools around his house for them to climb so he can feel like he’s “looking them in the eye” even though Eridians think that’s stupid since they lack both eyes and directional perception.
His students are probably all palm sized. Once he starts teaching he’s fighting cuteness aggression all day every day. They could all break his fingers with hands the size of a button. That knowledge does not stop his cuteness aggression. THIS IS GRACE’S REALITY.
Attacking a stranger on artfight: I had a blast drawing your character. Your designs are super charming and fun. Have a good artfight! ☺️
Attacking your friends on artfight: I GET YOU I GET GIU I GET YOU AND THEN I KILL YOU 🔥🔥🔥🔥 KILL YOU 🌋🌋 YOU WILL NEVER WIN AGAINST ME. my fr iend 🫂
Rewatching episode 4, and Shadia talks about it being a hurdle to overcome to make people aware that the Hallowed Round is even in use again. And it did strike me as another layer of healing that's happening with Kother'ai. The reclamation of this space of trauma and the actual magic are obviously the more notable acts of healing happening. But also, abandoned buildings do often feel like wounds in cities (and in smaller communities too, maybe more so). Eventually, nature will fully reclaim them, but in the meantime, they feel like feel like testaments to ways in which a city might be failing to provide homes/gathering places/safety/comfort/spaces for dreams to flourish. And even if none of the magical stuff had happened, there would still have been something beautiful in making this massive amphitheater, sitting abandoned and vandalized at the bottom of the city a place for people to gather and see art together. And I just love how layered the execution of everything to do with The Round and Kother'ai have been
Did Thjazi ever say where he wanted to be buried?
I cannot get over how expensive modern Game Changer eps must be. I mean the staff costs for the latest episode alone.
Remember during lockdown when they were sending contestants random boxes of scraps and skyping them
'why is so much politically-focused genre fiction centred on monarchies' many reasons, but one which I think deserves attention: monarchy is an obvious way of tying together the dysfunctions of the domestic to those of the state
the grip that this fake play within a dungeons and dragons game has on my mind is unreal. i'm mentally blocking choreography. weighing the pros and cons of different sizes for the Azgra puppet.
I'm no true theater fan and yet I want to write a diegetic review of the show. I don't write critical role fanfic. We haven't even 'seen' the second act yet.
I am a not a Thursday watcher, but I am thrilled to hear that it seems like KoTher’ai was able to finish a performance without being shut down by the police.
Operation: write an in-universe review of KoTher’ai as told by an absolutely thrilled Rungjani theater critic is GO.
An Archive of Our Own, a project of the Organization for Transformative Works
It is done. Diegetic review of KoTher’ai as written by a orc theater critic who is not going to tell you whether or not she saw the ghosts.
so grace is probably alarming to most eridians at first because he's a lanky wet alien with too few limbs, yes--but what if he ends up being terrifying in a sort of divine way instead of a repulsive one?
like. a creature that perceives the intangible? a creature that walks with thin permeable membranes bared to the air, whose blood contains elixir that can destroy pathogens without heat? a creature that is impossibly fragile yet resilient? a creature that breathes potently flammable gas to survive? a creature that is loud all over and speaks in a strange and frightening monotone, who thought it would die for you? who gave up its home in the heavens for you without meeting you first, whose first words to your people were probably something along the lines of We saved your star. It's gonna be okay. Don't be afraid.
grace is such an interesting bundle of contradictions! he breathes an incredibly flammable gas because he lives at such a cold temperature the gas can't ignite except he burns it very slowly inside the delicate gauzy cage of his body. his meat is basically a delicate water-and-protein foam because he lives in a very tiny fraction of normal atmospheric pressure. his planet has almost no air, no atmosphere. they're so gauzy, so frail, living underneath a whisker-fine sky, that to get to space in a couple seconds by exploding towards it. they can't build a space elevator because all their materials are just various attempts to do anything whatsoever with shitty frozen metals and various hydrocarbon meshes. their spaceship is a tiny refrigerator, the most expensive thing they ever built, and controled by a impossibly complex calculation engine they knitted out of silicates. it contains all human knowledge, if it doesn't catch on fire.
they knew that space was there because they can perceive it directly. it's literally right overhead all the time for their entire evolution. they know the faces of thousands, millions of stars, as soon as they tip their faces up. eridani is a name from two thousand years ago. all their stars have been named and known and watched and sung about for longer than any individual human civilization. they have always known the eridian star was there.
they live to be seventy.
The whole "Primus asking Wick to kill someone was supposed to be a way of giving Sam agency in Wick's death" thing really does highlight what a fascinating medium actual play is. Like, Sam and Brennan clearly collaborate very well. And have done great work together both in C4 and Calamity (and possibly other places I haven't watched yet). But it highlights such a stark difference in their storytelling instincts for Brennan to be like "ah yes, a chance for this heroic, good person character to get a heroic death" and Sam to go "nope, time for my character who's trying to figure out what being a good person means without the structure of his religion to make a harsh choice." And the fact that they don't have to come to a compromise, that Brennan offers Sam a choice to respond to, and then Sam makes a choice Brennan will have to respond to is so cool! It's definitely something that can cause problems; if a DM and player really aren't on the same page about how to tell a story, the story risks falling apart. But most versions of collaboration on art would require the two of them to find a compromise on their instinct before presenting it to an audience. And actual play instead allows us to see how storytellers respond to each other's instincts. I've said it before, I'll say it again: a major part of the appeal of actual play is that we aren't just watching a story, but watching the process of telling a story. And this was such a fun example of that
At some point on the journey back to Erid, Rocky gets around to asking Grace exactly why he was so mesmerised by seeing the astrophage in the Petrova line.
Grace describes it as best he can, but all he can really manage to get across to Rocky is that he was surrounded by small floating lights.
Later on, Grace is talking about the stars and how important they've been to human cultures for millennia. “What do the stars look like, question?” Rocky wants to know.
Oh, y'know, they're a bunch of small floating lights.
There's a disco ball on the Hail Mary. Grace says it's there because it “makes me happy”. “How does it make Grace happy, question?” Rocky wants to know.
Oh, it creates the illusion that he's surrounded by small floating lights.
Rocky begins to do some research.
Glitter: a substance invented by humans to make things look like they're covered in small lights.
Human jewellery: mostly involves gemstones or polished metals, designed to reflect small lights.
Christmas lights. Candles. Lanterns. Fireworks. Glowsticks. Glow in the dark paint. Rocky is beginning to notice a pattern here, statement.
It takes Grace a fucking while after getting to Erid to notice that a lot of the gifts he's receiving from grateful Eridians are either a) sparkly, b) incredibly shiny, or c) fitted with lights.
While the last one is obviously a concession for his human light sense, he's confused about the former two. Are Eridian materials usually this shiny? Is there some quality about sparkly or highly polished surfaces that makes them sound better? Or is there something about Eridian geology/metallurgy that makes their materials like this?
He asks Rocky about it.
“Simple. I tell people humans like lots of small lights. Humans are easy to make happy.”
Grace kind of wants to protest that humans are much more complicated than that.
But honestly… it fucking works. Like yeah the polished gemstones, shiny metals and glittery rocks are beautiful. Yes those Christmas lights you put up around the house did markedly improve my mental health, Rocky. Thank you, I hate it.
Grace spends a lot of time trying not to think about whether his species' urge to explore the cosmos (that saved their planet and nearly killed him several times) is tied to the same instinct that made his students like glitter gel pens.
Yes I know you mistrust the banks, milord, and I don't blame you, but their Vault Wizards are specially trained to prevent dragons from detecting large amounts of gold. I cannot emphasize enough that it's a full-time job employing multiple specialists, I'm not trying to be humble here but it's not something that just the court magician and I can set up a couple wards for on the weekends and call it good.
It's, it's just that dragons are the primordial embodiment of avarice wrought into fire and flesh. They are truly, supernaturally good at finding large amounts of valuables, that's why the big mines hire those Dragon Scouts to go sniff out their lairs and mark them on the maps as potential mining ventures. You know, in case someone slays the relevant dragon. Which doesn't happen often because, milord, they are simply not that easily slain.
No I know you've hired many knights, blooded warriors and true. Yes, I was there when you gave the ten most impressive ones their special sashes. Very grand, very high honors, of course. Ehm. It's just, none of them have ever actually faced a dragon. Yes no I know Sir Edbert says he did but Sir Edbert is rather notoriously prone to exaggerated and tragically unverifiable tales---
Well no milord of course I would not doubt the word of a sworn knight. Perhaps his sobriety, but not his word, as such.
The point is that the grand treasury, while surely grand and a very special notion, is just... it is mayhaps not the ideal way of handling the realm's finances? Perhaps a series of smaller vaults, capped well below the dangerous wealth threshold at which gold is known to whet the appetite of colossal winged harbingers of death, in different corners of the realms or...?
No, I, yes well I do realize that will impede anyone's interests in coming into the vault to hurl around the gold coins and go "whee, I'm so rich!" I am aware of its deficiencies as a plan in that regard. No, I see I've misjudged a few things.
Actually, thinking on it, milord, I truly believe what you need is a fresh set of skilled wizards on this job. The court magician and I, we cannot keep up with your visionary thinking. We're too old-fashioned. But the wizards revolutionizing the eldritch academies seem to be more on this sort of level. I hear they've made some truly remarkable choices in terms of outsourcing all of their spellwork to the Ever-Whispering Void, such that it takes mere minutes for them to set up an entire defensive array. That's just the sort of innovative thinking you require.
Though it will grieve the court magician and I to leave your service, perhaps this is a sign that retirement is overdue. So I'll just... be moving further away from the big pile of gold... in the opulent, dome-shaped building with the crystal skylight... best wishes.
People love making fun of Jack Kirby’s Fourth World for having dumb names, but the alternative is actually worse. At least Apokolips is recognizable. The rest of the universe is downright unsearchable on a site like this.
Fourth World? two common words in a common order. New Gods? Even worse, that’s just a phrase. Scott Free? A phrase again. Don’t even get me started on “Orion”. That’s a real person name. Ngozi Ukazu has a new graphic novel out and the title is just “Orion”. Do people online have thoughts? There is simply no way of knowing.
re-reading THE COUNT OF MONTE CRISTO for the third time and DRACULA DAILY girlies for the love of God!!! you MUST read this book you will lose your MINDS. edmond dantes IS pop culture's idea of dracula except his arc is about moving on and getting a different girlfriend. vampire tropes flock about him. 10/10 recommend.
