Avatar

the heart, that doth but crave more, having fed

@simaethae / simaethae.tumblr.com

33, she/her, english. mostly silmarillion fandom. simaetha on ao3 / admin for @historiesofmiddleearth
Avatar
Reblogged

I’m still alive.

I’m in the UK at last with my fiancee @simaethae, which is lovely!

What’s unfortunate is the part where UK real estate agents are utterly fucking useless.  Nothing infuriates me like people who are paid very comfortable money and still refuse to Do! Their! Fucking! Job!  I want to buy a house!  For God’s sake someone let me give you money, why is this so difficult.  

There’s other stuff that’s frustrating me about house-hunting, like all the ugly retrofitted windows and other terrible design decisions people make, pedestal sinks instead of vanities and no bathroom electrical outlets, but useless, disorganized estate agents are the number one frustration and the rest would be much more manageable if any of the agents were competent.  

Edit: anyway this is why I briefly started posting again and then promptly disappeared.  Hopefully when you hear from me again I’ll be in a bit better frame of mind, but if not I might be on the news for murdering my way through real estate agent offices.

Continuing to play catchup on posting art I’ve done this past year. This is, of course, Sauron and Celebrimbor yet again. =P This was actually done as an engagement present, and I was asked to do the scene in @thearrogantemu‘s In Full Measure I Return To You where Celebrimbor returned to Sauron the first gift he’d given him. I am extraordinarily pleased with how well this came out.

This was done almost entirely in watercolor (pen for the linework, lil bit of colored pencil for final detail touchups) on cold press paper, which let me tell you, was very difficult to execute the lines cleanly on, but boy did it pay off in how the watercolor flowed and sat on the page.

Lord,            when you send the rain,            think about it, please,            a little?     Do            not get carried away            by the sound of falling water,            the marvelous light            on the falling water.        I            am beneath that water.            It falls with great force            and the light Blinds            me to the light.                   — James Baldwin

Avatar
Reblogged
Anonymous asked:

there’s no turning back / your restless soul / wants to see, wants to know

There was really no choice except to go.

Before we were Noldor, we were Quendi, and what made us Quendi was our curiosity. We roamed beneath the trees and through the valleys, finding and discovering and puzzling and questioning, and what we found we named. Stars became themselves, and trees awoke to our voices, and the world arranged itself at a word.

We were the first to speak, to call to order what had been made by mightier hands than our own, and what we found enamored and enraptured us.

I don’t blame my brethren who stayed behind for their reticence. Not every member of our race ought to chase after novelty and change for its own sake - some of us, logically, must be slower and more careful. And perhaps departure from these once-intoxicating shores is an error in and of itself. Perhaps we were never meant to dwell in strange, timeless bliss, or so the more heterodox philosophers say. But what were we to do? Remain behind when knowledge stretched unchecked before us? We at last had a chance at answers, and teaching, and endless days spent in study and learning. We are a careful, cautious, thorough people, even those of us who are impulsive and brash by our own standards. We lose years in the glory of light on water and the pearlescent sheen of an oyster’s shell, and yards of paper are spent calculating the angles needed for our homes to cast the best shadows. Who are we to say no to an adventure beyond all possible imagining?

No, I won’t regret. We chase after such things as education. We are Noldor, and that is our binding creed.

We made the right decision.

Avatar
The year is indeterminate. There is a war, with no end in sight, fought mainly by machines. Until recently, industrial-scale chassis, military frames and android bodies alike have been the exclusive domain of human operators, a highly specialized and intensely competitive field. A single highly qualified candidate, recently graduated from the ranks of an intensive program at a high-tier piloting academy, has been selected for an experimental project that promises to change history. As it turns out, this project will never require the candidate to pilot a frame. By scanning and uploading copies of the candidate’s memories, the project’s manager — a visionary AI psychologist — plans to create a strong, conscious AI. This AI pilot, named PYTHIA, will have access to all the candidate’s experience and talent, with no risk of being killed in action; in the event of death, a new copy of PYTHIA can be loaded from secure backups. In theory, once finalized, an AI cannot legally have their machine-mind reprogrammed without their consent. In practice, the nature of the project means that only the candidate is in a position to notice or object as PYTHIA — who shares many of their formative memories, and whose personality is consequently very much like their own — is rebuilt, memory by artificial memory, to serve the interests of the state. PYTHIA is a game about watching this happen. 

PYTHIA is a two-player psychological horror tabletop game, about negotiating over which of your memories you can afford to have rewritten, and whether you’re willing to live with that at all. Will you learn to live with what they’ve made from the scraps of your mind? Or would you rather destroy PYTHIA’s backups, and with them, the person they’ve become?

You are using an unsupported browser and things might not work as intended. Please make sure you're using the latest version of Chrome, Firefox, Safari, or Edge.