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Caitlyn probably stares at the only pic of Vi she has :))

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what is THE worst thing you've ever drank. all liquids acceptable. please tell me what it was, bonus points for why

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Do folks outside the Netherlands know that last year Donald Duck officially got new neighbours, who where designed by a nine year old child? Their names are Eva and Lex Hamerslag, single mom and her son, and their very fat cat Oliebol.

The girl who designed them is Eva Hulsman, and she won a design contest held by the weekly Dutch Donald Duck magazine.

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he used ███ to make ████

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The second most interesting thing about Four-Eyed fish is that they have have left and right handed males and females, and mate with the opposite “handedness” as well as sex.

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what kind of man loves like this?

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Yes yes I know this too shall pass but christ alive man it's passing like a gotdamn kidney stone

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spin this wheel of fanfic tags. this will be the theme of your day tomorrow.

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Part 3 of whatever the hell this meme is

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Just one moment of peace.

Part of this was just me wanting a bit of an extra challenge as an art project to take my mind of things, part of it was digging through my bottomless reference folder for something completely different and getting stuck with an idea about Flint and his horse? And, really, the need for small comforts, I guess.

Anyway. I like the idea of him being secretly fond of that horse, of giving it some ridiculous name that nobody would get but Thomas (although Miranda probably does, and just pretends she doesn’t). And of him taking comfort in the warmth and solid presence of another living creature, of him allowing to let the mask slip and be gentle for a moment. It’s a simple comfort, and one I can see him craving when he has so little comfort left.

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Ok here it goes. I hope I do the topic justice.

At first I read Omelas as a typical dystopia, a society that looks perfect but hides a dark underbelly it is reliant on for survival. In this reading the narrarator telling you to imagine the things happening in Omelas or asking you how to even describe this in a way you will understand doesn't really matter. It's just a way to account for personal taste. Or perhaps to compensate for how we already percieve this place because of our exposure to other stories.

But if we take the narrator as an integral part of the story then these lines start telling a somewhat different story.

The line: "Do you believe? Do you accept the festival, the city, the joy?" directly asks you if you believe a good society, without war, without a centralised authority (civic or religious), without adds, civil unrest and outside threats can exist. And not just for "noble savages and uncomplicated people" but for people just like us, with the same dark impulses.

And then only after the narrator hears your presumed "No." they say "No? Then let me describe one more thing." and goes on to explain the Omelas child.

They do not tell you that the following description is real. They even finnish the description with "Now do you believe them? Are they not more credible?"

If we take this additional information as a fabrication meant to sell us on the reality of this world then the quote "The trouble is that we have a bad habit of considering happiness as something rather stupid. Only pain is intellectual, only evil interesting. This is the treason of the artist: a refusal to admit the banality of evil and the terrible boredom of pain" is a condemnation of our willingness to believe that in all these years noone tried to test if the child really has to suffer, or figure out how this process works or say something kind to the child just because over the idea of a good society and goodness of people.

The ones who walk away from Omelas go towards "a place even less imaginable to most of us than the city of happiness. It cannot be described at all. It is possible it does not exist." The narrator acknowledges that we might lack the imagination to see a better world. Acknowledges that it might not be real and the people leaving might be wrong "but they seem to know where they are going, the ones who walk away from Omelas."

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Since I started stalking your blog a bit this morning because of Black Sails this also might mean something to you:

The story viewed this way makes some of the same points as Jack Rackham's "A story is true. A story is untrue. As time extends, it matters less and less. The stories we want to believe... those are the ones that survive, despite the upheaval and transition and progress."

It can be a horrible reminder of how the world will soon see Flint, Silver and the rest as just vile pirate monsters incapable of humanity as presented in Woodes Rodgers's book and A General History of the Pyrates (which Mrs Hudson is seen reading to hear children).

It can be uplifting message reminding you that as long as the real story of Captain Flint and Long John Silver is remembered, not entirely "twisted to fit into their narrative" and allowed to shape us and spur us towards a worthy goal the loss is not total. History is written by the victors so as long as you survive to tell the tale, even if you did not manage to win in a conventional way, you have won a little.

And on a third level it can say that Silver's inability to believe in a wold in which they win the war in any meaningful way a world in which the pirate-maroon revolution can succeed is a self fulfilling prophecy that caused what we now know as history and have to believe.

(This is why I find the idea of Silver as somebody isekaid from the modern world into the story of Treasure Island compelling. His knowledge of the future forces the future into the shape he knows.)

Both, in the end, condemn our inability and unwillingness to imagine a better word as the reason why we do not achieve. We believe we need a leviathan king to keep us in line through terror to insure we do not hurt eachother and so we never try to depose him and realise what life could be like without one.

(This ofcourse as Le Guin herself would point out aren't the only good, correct possible takes, but I like them.)

Guess I’m never going to stop seeing red about the unholy number of times I’ve seen people quote “The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas” out of context in order to condemn stories that focus on dark or troubling subject matter or that don’t end happily (“The trouble is that we have a bad habit, encouraged by pedants and sophisticates, of considering happiness as something rather stupid. Only pain is intellectual, only evil interesting. This is the treason of the artist: a refusal to admit the banality of evil and the terrible boredom of pain”), when THE STORY ITSELF is about a society that closes its eyes to suffering and evil in order to live in comfort and has a hopeful but at best bittersweet ending

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starting a collection. I'm calling it autistic sexting

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Do you like pierogi?

yes

no

never had them

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Losing my mind because I was looking at old wips and found these headshots of Arya and Nasuada from the Inheritance cycle that I made THREE years ago. I feel like my art in 2022 was peak and I really need to bring back that vibe omg. I swear I could not make these again today my style dumbed down sm

anyways where's my eragon fam at

no no i'm serious if you read these books you're legally obliged to tell me exactly who was your favorite character and why. and if it's not eragon well.... we are going to have some problems (jk please i'm begging let me know)

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The way my brain works is constant overlapping thoughts and frequent cross-contamination. I've currently got a small cut on my finger, and trying to wash my hands without getting the bandaid wet, I was thinking about how if I had to explain germ theory to somebody from a pre-modern historical era, it really would be easier to explain them as invisible spirits that inhabit all physical things and sometimes cause disease, than to confuse them further by talking about how there's teeny tiny bugs on your skin and then get distracted into talking about atoms and physics.

And simultaneously on another tab there was another monologue going about how there is also good bacteria on your skin, and apparently some poor misguided teens on TikTok have been convinced that all bacteria on your skin is bad, and are absolutely wrecking their natural skin flora by regularly using antibacterial soap for routine everyday washing.

Then the thought cross contamination jump happened, and a third hybrid thought spontaneously manifested: What if supernatural entities work like bacteria, and doing excessive evil spirit banishing will also get rid of your good spirits that you need to be balanced and healthy? Like you don't have a demon problem because you're not burning enough sage, the problem is that you're doing too many cleanses and purifications, essentially scrubbing your home raw and so sterile that your house guardian decided that it's uninhabitable and fucked off.

And that's why you've got evil spirits in your house. You scrubbed off all the ones that are good for you.

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I just got a reply by someone who apparently namesearches racism (to argue against it existing), sex work (to argue it shouldn't exist), and factorio (to argue for it).

do people just roll dice to pick their three hills to die on?