My Own Desert Places

today on neat hozier retweets: disappearing birds!

Ooh, invisible bird glitch. That's a rare one, also known to happen to owls.

These are very unsorted thoughts but. Ok I kind of get a surface level reaction to Beacon of “not another paid streaming service,” but I think that’s a pretty misplaced complaint. Firstly, the main show is still free on YouTube and Twitch, they aren’t paywalling formerly free content. Second of all, I don’t think you can emphasize enough just how restrictive and unstable YouTube and Twitch are as platforms. For any content creator, but especially a business which is trying to stand on it’s own, control where their money goes, and pay staff that rely on them. Those platforms are monetarily unstable, artistically suffocating, and what they allow/can do to you can change overnight and totally fuck you and years of your work over, and there’s nothing you can do about it. It’s a fucking guessing game to figure out what you’re allowed to do and how you can keep yourself monetized, and you’re always losing. From what I understand it’s a bit like being stuck living at your parents house. No matter how much you grow and change, there will always be restrictions on what you can do that suffocate who you are and control what you’re allowed to do.

For an artist or a company to be able to stand on their own, they should have their own space that doesn’t fall under another site’s rules. For the sake of their security as a business, for the sake of their freedom as artists to make content without censorship, and for the sake of deciding exactly where the money they make goes. Did I mention unstable again? YouTube or Twitch could just get nuked overnight, or choose to remove your channel and not give it back, or change guidelines that totally axes your content, and then where would you be? There’s a reason sites like Dropout and Nebula exist, these platforms do not support most of their creators. Obviously the cast had no idea what critical role was going to turn into when the show started, but once they became their own company, and especially once they started expanding, this was never going to be sustainable. CR creating something like Beacon is WILDLY different from HBO or some other network making another one word title streaming service and putting a bunch of content there. And yeah if CR started paywalling the main show I’d be fucking pissed. But they aren’t, they’re just taking control of the way in which people can directly choose to give them money, and making new content.

Beauyasha bicep meme

Tree Swallow

After the conversation with Liliana this last episode, it is so obvious that the 'the gods are bad! we're getting rid of them!' argument has absolutely nothing going for it. We now have confirmation that Predathos is doing EVERYTHING that people criticize the gods for doing. He directly communicates with his chosen and not others, he directs those people to do violence to achieve his ends, and he has the ability to possess the bodies of any and all of his chosen. He is already doing all this. What makes you think he will stop once he destroys all the other gods?

There is no freedom in their plans; just a sole tyrant and the delusion that he's one of the good ones.

Imogen is really just walking proof that the things Liliana did were not “necessary.” And I kind of think Liliana’s deference to her daughter in their last conversation is indicative that she is slowly realizing this. Being confronted with the essentially younger version of herself who also left home to seek out answers, who has pretty successfully avoided the pull of Perdathos (something Liliana told her to do, weird that), and who is proof that Ruidiusborn can successfully work with those on Exandria aligned with the gods and not be “persecuted,” like Ludinus told her, all really shines a light on how weak her justifications to herself have been. 

And that's the tragedy here! Liliana thinks she's made this huge sacrifice for her daughter and for people like her, but she's been taking the easier path this whole time. And now she is seeing that! Imogen is making the bigger sacrifice by fighting to keep Perdathos at bay, despite the pull and the welcoming feeling and it (possibly) being a literal part of her. So like, if we want to talk about why Imogen is a counter to a lot of great CR villains because she choses to do good, well, we need to acknowledge that Liliana is one those villains. And Orym and Ashton and the rest of BH have every right to dunk on her because they see someone just like her make better choices every day.

Linocut prints by William Hays. ~ Dawn ~ After the Storm, 2016.

I’m on this guy’s mailing list and I have to say it’s real good old school fun, like having an uncle who emails you slightly misspelled emails and then there’s a print.

Ahhhhhhh!!! THE CROWN KEEPERS! HI BABIES!

Level 13 too? Oh nice.

@quiddie HELLO???