intent and invention

My new favourite archery image!

This painting is located in the Church of the Nativity in Prague, and is dated to 1663. It is also the basis of at least 3 D&D character concepts that are stuck in my head now.

If you want more info, art references, and tutorials, check my Patreon!

You know every show that the premise is like “people find out ghosts/monsters/demons are real and are charged with stopping them” appeal to me way more now as a post-graduate not because I believe in ghosts more or whatever but because can you IMAGINE just being handed a job that you don’t even need to apply for? Like just being told “basically there’s this bad thing and all you do is make sure it doesn’t do what it wants” that’s just customer service baby and I worked that for 6 goddamn years! Just TRY getting past “I have a job to offer you” before I can jump down your throat agreeing.

some idiot with a dumb ghost-hunting name who joined the Cause because they love the paranormal: oh fuck oh shit this is really scary guys I’m having second thoughts

me, who knows that if we run away I have to apply to like, a real actual Jobbe again: wakey wakey demons it’s this or retail so guess who’s got nothing to lose

Naturalists have got to be one of the groups of people most susceptible to being tricked by the fae. Travellers these days are much less likely to follow a mysterious light or the smell of roast beef into the forest. Meanwhile, find me a naturalist who would not completely lose themself in pursuit of:

The Fae better be fuckin ready to be tagged and fitted with a Radio Collar for Science then, I got new hiking boots and no other ideas for research grant money.

it’s called fashion, sweaty

He’s never living this down

reminder that coming up with some fake little dudes and creating intricate storylines in your head is a completely free and fun way to pass the time and the government can't stop you

Getting a weird little hobby is actually so important bc it opens your eyes up to the world. You start crocheting or knitting, and now you see scarves and sweaters differently. You try identifying plants, now you’re seeing opposite and alternate leaf pattern. Bird watching? Every chirp draws attention and interest.

Get into weird little hobbies.

dear people with OCD: the next time you have spiraling & intrusive thoughts, what-ifs, or catastrophizing scenarios, I am sending a cardigan-wearing 46-year old NYU professor directly into your brain and he says "Aaaaand scene!!!" and he claps his hands slowly. and he says "Wow. Wow. Powerful stuff. Evocative imagery. A little bit post-modern, a little bit hysterical realism in the vein of Don Delilo but let's pause right here." and you will recognize your thoughts as a perplexing avant-garde film shown to an audience of 15 liberal arts students who are now trying to get a good grade and sleep with their professor.

I almost posted this without the professor-fucking part but I decided that it is in fact crucial to combating OCD. sometimes you have to fight fire with fire i.e. spiraling thoughts with strong negative emotions get countered with strongly emotive surprise, cringe, and humor

sometimes the OCD brain can't just be stopped from fantasizing completely, but you can redirect that anxious mental energy toward crafting a fictional setup and story that doesn't involve you or your fears at all

another thing I do is interrupt intrusive thoughts with a very conscious and deliberate "and then an elephant walks in." and I'd make myself commit to the bit. it would force me to reframe everything and specifically understand it in an absurdist context, make me confront how ridiculous the initial thoughts even were, and there is honestly no way to keep being serious and distraught about your what-if scenarios when you've introduced a fucking elephant into the mix. film studies professor is also that elephant.

so it goes from scary thoughts about my life -> step back. this is a weird fictional film now. -> characters are analyzing the film -> those characters are super messy and have their own problems, and I'm watching them now and eating popcorn at this soap opera

ok but like. there are two different types of privilege. there's type a "everybody should have this, but some people don't" and type b "nobody should have this, but some people do"

there's having parents who can pay for your application to any college, and then there's having parents who can bribe your way into any college. there's owning your own home, and then there's owning 50 houses and getting rich off hoarding a vital resource. there's not fearing for your life whenever cops are around, and then there's being the cop and being allowed to murder anyone at any time.

idk i just feel like that's an important distinction to make.

has this been done

(inspired by this post)

"tumblr thinks this" "tumblr users act like that" the only thing all tumblr users do is look at posts.

some of them don't even read posts.

That’s actually incredibly sad.

The solution here is to remind them to look at different sources. If one source claims X, but every other source claims Y, that says a lot. Of course, it is still possible that X is true and all sources claiming Y are wrong. But 1) it's not very likely and 2) in such cases, one must look at motive and context;

etc

Another thing here is the importance of tech ltieracy, and teaching children the difference between a web browser (Chrome, Edge, Firefox, etc), a search engine (Google search, DuckDuckGo, etc), and LLMs such as ChatGPT. Children HAVE to be taught that an LLM cannot tell them fact. It is essentially a text predictor, like the thing in your phone that guesses what your next word is gonna, but with a bigger database and more computing power - which do not give it the ability to distinguish fact and invention.

I had the exact same type of conversation as OP. with a grown-ass adult. who works at an organisation that makes billions of dollars. who was doing research for said organisation. using their internal version of chatGPT.

ChatGPT is a very cool computer program but everyone implicitly or explicitly selling it as a search engine, personal assistant, or in any other capacity a source of knowledge about the world should probably be executed.

And Yet...

Here's a painting I made for the ImagineFX art challenge "Mystical Meets Machines".

The theme was too intriguing to pass by - especially after I got the idea of some unicorns grazing by the remnants of an ancient, mechanical dragon. Someone in the past were keen on acquiring the great powers of a dragon for themselves, leading to a bitter end. Now it has rested peacefully for centuries, becoming part of the landscape.

Lots of fun painting this one, especially all that moss!

Photoshop, April 2024. And as always, no AI used.

From MichelleTolo

I feel like witches are sedentary and wizards are migratory. A witch has a home, a cauldron, herbs, you go to them with your problem. A wizard wanders, disappears, shows up at inconvenient times to fix nothing. am i making sense

some good theories in the notes but I choose to believe those are made by a village or perhaps king as an artificial home, to attract and keep a wizard. like a beehive

While artificially built towers do attract wild wizards a wizard will naturally build their own tower as they enter the later stage of their life cycle. For the first couple hundred years of their lives wizards are extremely mobile and may travel almost anywhere in the world or even beyond. A tower usually begins as a workshop which the wizard returns to during their migration in order to store trinkets and artifacts which they collect during their travels. As the collection outgrows the available space in the workshop a combination of the concentration of volatile magical energy and the wizards natural desire to build secret passageways causes them to begin expanding the workshop. This usually starts with basic "bigger on the inside" magic but due to constraints around energy usage for sustained large scale spacetime warping they will eventually turn to more traditional methods of building. There are some documented cases of wizards whose workshops expanded outward instead of upwards, resulting in labyrinth structures rather than the more traditional tower. It is still unclear what environmental pressure causes these divergent structures. As the wizard ages and their exploratory phase winds down their travels will focus on a progressively more narrow subset of arcane knowledge until they find one secret of the universe complex enough to prompt their transition into the final stage of the wizard lifestyle. By this point they will almost certainly have a fully fledged tower or have settled into one they've found already existing. Their desire to travel is generally severely reduced by this point and outside of quests to discover certain highly specific items related to their studies it's possible that they might not leave their tower for months or years at a time. In some cases they may begin this phase several times if the secret they started pursuing is less challenging or less fundamental to the operations of the universe than expected. When they do find their final subject of study and find the answers they sought, they will finally reach the end of the wizard life cycle, either via death caused by hubris, merging with a larger consciousness, ascendence to a different plane or to godhood, or metamorphosis into a litch. Other wizards may sometimes occupy the abandoned towers of a former wizard but most will move on in order to build their own before entering into these later stages. Very rarely a particularly social variety of wizard may build several connected towers and share resources, these are called schools and over time they will tend to attract a large number of younger and weaker wizards seeking shelter.

Absolutely brilliant analysis of wizards and their migratory patterns through the ages. I can personally verify that this is accurate, and you may now consider this properly peer reviewed and accepted.

There are two basic arguments for shutting the fuck up about cishets at Pride.

First: What if a trans kid asks their parents to show their support by attending Pride with them? What if a lesbian can only attend pride if she gets a ride from someone and the only person willing and able to drive her is her straight brother? What if a bi disabled person can't attend a large outdoor event without hands-on assistance from their straight partner? What if someone just wants to bring their fucking friends? What if, contrary to popular tumblr discourse, most queers don't inhabit perfectly pure social bubbles populated only by other queers?

Second and perhaps more important: If you think you can tell that someone is CIS, let alone HET, by LOOKING at them, you are a cop and an idiot.

You can't ever tell is someone is queer just by looking at them, and if you claim to be able to in order to exclude people you're just as bad as the people you claim are harmful. Someone called it gay/queer phrenology and it's quite accurate. This unnecessary policing only ever hurts the queer people you claim to care about. If you care more about excluding people than anything else, you shouldn't be there. I would much rather have a well-meaning cishet ally at pride than you performative and exclusionary miserable people.

It's worth noting that much of the policing of "the evil cishet at pride!!!" is based on how masculine someone looks. It's never "a bi guy's cishet girlfriend", despite the fact that cishet women can do just as much harm, if not more, than cishet men. This hurts all masc queer people, especially ppl who have masculinity as a central part of their identity, such as trans men and butches (and transmasc butches as well). This rhetoric inevitably also plays into transmisogyny, no matter how many times you repeat "trans women are women!!!!" If you constantly go around talking about how "obviously we have to exclude everyone with a deep voice and facial hair who looks too masculine because they're all out to prey on innocent feminine queer women" you're going to end up hurting trans women. When so many queer and trans people are pressured to be hyperfeminine and punished severely if they are not, demonizing masculinity only helps further that oppression.

But let's say they actually are cishet. So what? As long as they aren't rude then what the hell is the issue? Cishet people aren't inherently bad. Cishet men aren't inherently evil and predatory. Masculinity is not inherently anti-queer, femininity isn't inherently queer or progressive. You can't just write off entire groups of people to feel better about a group to hate while doing nothing constructive.

Is this America? If so, how did y'all fuck up so hard that somebody felt the need to draw this beautiful comic to represent this shitty situation?

Actually the English govt is consulting on doing exactly this right now because (paraphrased) "children can't legally change gender so we don't want to ruin their 'childhood innocence' with the contested theory of gender identity". Teaching kids about revenge porn, up skirting and abusive relationships (as they should) apparently won't ruin their childhood innocence but the suggestion that gender identity exists will corrupt them beyond all ken. Idk how on earth they think they're gonna stop Gen Z and Gen Alpha from existing however the heck they want to, but apparently they're going to try.

Blood loss? No I know exactly where it is

Mercutio energy.

No matter how progressive or well-read you are, there are always going to be moments in your life where somebody pushes back against something that's so culturally ingrained you never even considered it before. And you'll say "Huh, it never occurred to me to challenge this but you're right" and that doesn't mean you were "morally toxic" before, it means you're a non-omniscient human capable of growth.

U.S. conservatives always talk about creating jobs but get SO MAD whenever anyone mentions banning prison labor like imagine the insane ammout of jobs that would be created literally overnight if companies in your country had to actually employ people instead of using slave labor from people that got caught with weed 10 years ago.

Daily reminder that the US, who love to scaremonger about "communist labour camps," have legal slave labour if you're in prison