The most insane take on anything I’ve ever heard is that The Magnus Archives is a fan fiction Alice wrote about Chester and norris.
congrats sam for dooming yourself
Blades of the Cavalier Primaries Displayed for your Appreciation
In house order from top to bottom. I’d be happy to explain the choices if anyone is interested!
I only had to be asked once—
Marta’s rapier and dagger are standard issue Second House, and Jody carries an identical one. The hilt is based on modern naval standard issue rapiers and the pommel is red anodized steel rather than a more frivolous stone or design. The entire weapon is hard metal. Two lines mark the house on the ricasso.
Naberius’s weapons are form over function, and I went out of my way to make it look painful to hold (after all, the Princesses regularly eat him) every element from the precious stones to the filigree basket come in three, but the third spike on the knuckle guard breaks off from the other two. Made of gold, enamel, and a gold-washed steel blade both weapons are meticulously engraved with even further small details that were hard to render at this scale. The dagger is based on split parrying daggers, sometimes called trident gauches of the Renaissance.
For Jeannemary, there are elements of the standard issue as the fourth is extremely militaristic like the second, but has a blue cabochon in both hilts and wrapped leather and cord hilt. The basket on the rapier and partying loop on the dagger reflect the fourths talents fkr wards and Jeannemary’s relationship to Magnus. It is the smallest rapier on the board because she is just 14 and looking at it in scale makes me sad (which makes it a good design choice). Four lines down the ricasso show the house, and including the cross guard there are four horizontal elements to the basket.
Magnus’s blade I designed as a wedding or anniversary gift from Abigail, based on old books about Celtic love knots and necromantic theory about interwoven souls. Each flat band of filigree is engraved with their vows or necromantic theorems. It has brown carved and inlaid cabochons on each pommel and brown leather wrapped hilt for comfort. The blade is white steel.
Cam’s twin blades are based on Turkish scimitars and Persian kukris, but in a sleek all metal form reflective of the Sixth’s functional vibes. The only decorative marks are the three lines on each blade totaling 6. The swords are smaller allowing for Cam’s aggressive and effective fighting style. The heavy metal pommels are super effective for bludgeoning whoever she needs to.
Protesilaus one ups Babs with form over function, with a copper washed rapier with elaborate filigree sweepings in loops, swirled, and vines. There’s a carved and inlaid jade hilt on both weapons with designs a mishmash of ocean and floral Greek, Chinese, and art deco motifs. The chain is based on Chinese weapons called kau sin ke, with the weight shaped after a flower bud.
I’m stark contrast is Colum’s straight forward rapier and sidearm based on medieval Templar weapons and simple rapiers. The small shield is between a targe and a buckler. The cruciform details repeat, I think John just reused the cross as his own symbol when rebuilding his church. Unlike the other rapiers, it is more like a short sword with a long fuller.
Finally, Gideon Nav’s mass produced two handed sword with a perfunctory leather wrapped hilt and basic machined metal pommel. The pommel is similar in shape to the pommels on the second and fourth rapiers. It is in dark steel, reflecting the Ninth house. Despite its huge function in the story, it is the most basic shaped weapon with no decoration in hard contrast to the overblown decoration of other ninth custom made weapons (I imagine Ortus’s was wild with skulls and bones!) I gave it a concave ricasso to make it more separate from the rapiers.
Let me know if there’s anything specific you want info on that I didn’t hit!
You’ve done it, you’ve boiled the nine houses down to their bare essentials!
Thumbnails for actually drawing them all.
how did Lou stay so straight faced that is a fucking skill
Lou put so much energy into showing absolutely nothing that he had nothing left to make a joke with and just asked politely.
If the USA is so great then why did they make a USB?
you will feel so alive again.. like so incredibly alive. i dont know when that will be but it will be. u are gonna feel so alive that ur cheeks hurt from smiling oh man oh man i promise that day is coming. you do have a future, you do have good things coming, and you’ll survive everything that’s thrown at you until you reach that day
i do promise
(they were right)
excerpts on sexuality and homoeroticism in baz luhrmann’s romeo + juliet from harold perrineau’s interview with rachel handler of vulture magazine
hello to the other five ppl in here, the premise is 'we got reincarnated and we're inexplicably drawn to each other and we hate each other and we're best friends and we're a weird-atmospheric-dreampop-electronic-house musical duo'
i love how in the first book of the radiant emperor, zhu and ouyang's relationship is basically:
zhu: me and general ouyang are like substances. twin strings. we are connected. i delivered him to his destiny, and he delivered me to mine. we are tidally locked in this existence, and it is wretched but comforting to know ourselves not alone, but rather united by something so unique, something so sweet,
ouyang: i hate you. ugly bald cockroach. die
Goddamn. Okay
Did you have a kid in your neighborhood who always hid so good, nobody could find him? We did. After a while we would give up on him and go off, leaving him to rot wherever he was. Sooner or later he would show up, all mad because we didn't keep looking for him. And we would get mad back because he wasn't playing the game the way it was supposed to be played.
There's hiding and there's finding, we'd say. And he'd say it was hide-and-seek, not hide-and-give-UP, and we'd all yell about who made the rules and who cared about who, anyway, and how we wouldn't play with him anymore if he didn't get it straight and who needed him anyhow, and things like that. Hide-and-seek-and-yell. No matter what, though, the next time he would hide too good again. He's probably still hidden somewhere, for all I know.
As I write this, the neighborhood game goes on, and there is a kid under a pile of leaves in the yard just under my window. He has been there a long time now, and everybody else is found and they are about to give up on him over at the base. I considered going out to the base and telling them where he is hiding. And I thought about setting the leaves on fire to drive him out. Finally, I just yelled, "GET FOUND, KID!" out the window. And scared him so bad he probably wet his pants and started crying and ran home to tell his mother. It's real hard to know how to be helpful sometimes.
A man I know found out last year he had terminal cancer. He was a doctor. And knew about dying, and he didn't want to make his family and friends suffer through that with him. So he kept his secret. And died. Everybody said how brave he was to bear his suffering in silence and not tell everybody, and so on and so forth. But privately his family and friends said how angry they were that he didn't need them, didn't trust their strength. And it hurt that he didn't say good-bye.
He hid too well. Getting found would have kept him in the game. Hide-and-seek, grown-up style. Wanting to hide. Needing to be sought. Confused about being found. "I don't want anyone to know." "What will people think?" "I don't want to bother anyone."
Better than hide-and-seek, I like the game called Sardines. In Sardines the person who is It goes and hides, and everybody goes looking for him. When you find him, you get in with him and hide there with him. Pretty soon everybody is hiding together, all stacked in a small space like puppies in a pile. And pretty soon somebody giggles and somebody laughs and everybody gets found.
Medieval theologians even described God in hide-and-seek terms, calling him Deus Absconditus. But me, I think old God is a Sardine player. And will be found the same way everybody gets found in Sardines - by the sound of laughter of those heaped together at the end.
"Olly-olly-oxen-free." The kids out in the street are hollering the cry that says "Come on in, wherever you are. It's a new game." And so say I. To all those who have hid too good. Get found, kid! Olly-olly-oxen-free.
— Robert Fulghum, "All I Really Need To Know I Learned In Kindergarten"
you dont like doctor who???
dont like ooo woo ooooo?????
Word of mouth really kept me away from Scott Pilgrim for like a decade cause I was told it's this shitty book aimed at incels and he's a pedo and then I read it recently cause of the netflix anime and it's like "this guy sucks and all his friends barely tolerate him and he's trying to feel like a big man by leading on a 17 year old girl he's not actually interested in and everyone including the narrative acknowledges that that's pathetic and he should grow up. anyway let's explore how men see women as a means to their own self actualization but fail to acknowledge that they have lives of their own" like wow this is the book yall were talking about?
Canadian Breaking Bad
Listen he's very busy, leave him alone 😌
my favorite thing about tma has always been the avatars who love the fears they serve, who show that love so vibrantly that, for just a moment, they sway you into feeling like you could learn to love that fear the way they do. when jane prentiss said "not loved as you would understand it, a deeper, more primal love, a need as much as a feeling" and when jude perry said "as the heat warped my bones and bubbled my flesh, all i heard was the loving exaltation of my god" and when mike crew said "falling had always held a special place in my heart, that wonderful border between terror and delight" and when manuela dominguez said "and at his words i felt afraid, and my heart soared in terror and elation as my eyes brimmed with tears, for i knew he spoke the truth" and when hezekiah wakely said "i had never felt such safety as within the crushing weight of earth all around me, the pressing embrace of the buried." do you get me
(grabbing your face) do you remember simon fairchild's statement about how he became an avatar. how he fell and the sky embraced him. i think about it all the time. how it would feel to be embraced by the vast. the entity that is about how you are insignificant before the endless void, holding you. the fact that being an avatar of the vast means loving a contradiction: you are insignificant and the entity of the vastness of everything else holds you in its embrace and takes away your mortality.
i wonder if when simon told that one guy enjoy sky blue if the reason he laughed while saying it was because he was sharing his own joy. if in his own way he wasn't being generous, sharing the experience that changed him forever. i wonder if as much as he spreads terror, maybe what he really wanted was to share that experience, and that's why he picked someone who loves sky-diving, someone who was also in love with the sky.
i wonder if that guy who was eaten by the sky isn't out there now, saying the sky held him gently in the huge jaws of endless blue, and he cried with joy as he understood. if what for his mother was a horrible experience that killed her son, for him wasn't the liberation from his mortal life and worries before the realization that we are nothing.
i wonder if simon was afraid, too, before he was in love or while he was in love with it, if he can even distinguish his love for the vast from his fear from it or it's just another facet of his adoration, something he can offer to it, if when he said he loved the sky he meant it like that, like we often love a god, with fear as strong as our adoration.
The holy trinity of outsiders finding out stuff about TMA