pts-fic-notes-and-blog

[pts-fic-notes-and-blog]

Willard is SUCH a funny character because like, he’s explicitly a wish fulfillment OC for three seperate people for six different reasons

[pts-fic-notes-and-blog]

Babylonian era problems. (photo via tbc34)

[pts-fic-notes-and-blog]

Oh guys I think I’ve really hit something. I think i’ve got something. its bad. Its coming and it’s bad

[pts-fic-notes-and-blog]

Good morning. This is the best fic comment I have ever received.

[pts-fic-notes-and-blog]

So Percy is definitely in like All the government databases.

I like to think the real reason that he and Sally faced like zero legal consequences for anything in TLT (Gabe, the Arch)—or, frankly, from any of Percy’s school mishaps and destruction of property—is that Poseidon managed to register Sally and Percy under some sort of confusing diplomatic immunity.

I mean, Poseidon is the literal king of all the oceans. I feel like his family should get a little diplomatic immunity. He’s been on-board with making both of them immortal. Legal protection just seems to fit that vibe.

I can imagine Percy’s file showing up during The Arch incident and some agent being like

Agent J: Wait a minute. Prosecuting this kid might get messy.

Agent S: What? He just committed an act of terrorism, Bill.

Agent J: Yeah, but here he’s listed as qualifying for— what is this? diplomatic immunity? This is crazy. Do you know who his dad is?

Agent S: No. Why?

Agent J: Neither do I. I can’t find it in the paperwork.

Honestly the real reason they’re never prosecuted has less to do with the status and more to do with the fact that the paperwork is So Confusing. Basically everything is redacted by the Mist and no one can figure out where any of the paperwork came from. —Teams of people getting headaches from reading over the paper trail for too long and experiencing bouts of temporary amnesia where they can’t remember what they were looking at and why —Agents determined to stay late at work only to get home and realize that they’ve left the office and can’t remember looking over the files

There’s a whole office of agents and a legal team that have dedicated themselves to working their way around the problem so that something like this Never Happens Again with their paperwork. They’ll draw straws to see who gets to pour over the paperwork today. They try taking notes but they all turn out as gibberish and foreign letters. They have a tally keeping track of how many times Steve drives home during lunch or Nancy ends up with a migraine or Emmy finds herself napping on the office couch, or how many legal documents Greg has accidentally shredded right after he filled them out.

Their office has garnered so much attention that it’s become a government-funded psych experiment. The national defense office wants to get its hands on whatever crazy voodoo they’re using to cover up the Jackson history.

There’s also a betting pool going on about what makes this kid so important and who wants to keep him off the radar.

Let’s not even start on the foreign agencies that get involved after the Giant War.

They all learned pretty quickly that technology wasn’t going to help them. Any footage they get of Percy Jackson winds up scrambled and confusing. So the best solution is resorting back to grass-root methods:

Field agents.

Sadie: Guys, I think we’re being followed.

Percy: *grabbing for his pocket* What?

Annabeth: Oh, I see what you’re looking it. No it’s alright. Weapon down, Percy. It’s the NSA.

Percy: Todd? *his eyes scan the crowd*

Annabeth: Yeah

Percy: *waves at a man in a baseball cap who freezes and ducks behind a kiosk in the mall*

Percy: It’s ok. It’s just Todd.

Sadie: Ok. Hold up. You have an NSA agent?

Sadie: Don’t they usually use phones or something?

Annabeth: Percy doesn’t have a phone

Percy: Too much bad demigod juju

Percy: I thought Todd was FBI

Annabeth: No, Seaweed Brain. FBI checks in on alternating Thursdays

Percy: Right

Annabeth: *to Sadie* FBI are the worst, honestly. I feel like we spend all day saving their asses.

Percy: Remember Vince? And the corn dog incident?

Sadie: I mean that doesn’t sound too bad.

Annabeth: There were empousai. Venom, right in the corn dogs. I’ve never seen a mortal drop that fast.

Percy: Or Elise and the subway scramble

Annabeth: That mishap with Randy on the 58th floor

Percy: *Looking back at Todd* You know, I miss Jamie.

Annabeth: Yeah, Jamie was nice.

Sadie: What happened to Jamie?

Annabeth: Oh, no. Nothing like that. They took her off the case.

Percy: She was too friendly.

Annabeth: She always waved back.

Sadie: . . . Right. And why are they following you again?

Percy: Annabeth has a theory.

Annabeth: We think it has something to do with Percy’s stint as a domestic terrorist.

Sadie: A wat now?

Percy: I blew up an arch.

[pts-fic-notes-and-blog]

Hard at work at the yaoi factory

[pts-fic-notes-and-blog]

AITA for realizing that my best friend is actually a ghost and not telling him because i'm worried that if he realizes he's dead he'll finally be able to accept it and fully pass on and i won't be able to hang out with him anymore?

[pts-fic-notes-and-blog]

it fucks me up that tolkien only died in 1973. dude has the vibe of a victorian scholar who wrote all his manuscripts by candlelight but then you look him up and realise that he knew what color tv was. what the fuck.

[pts-fic-notes-and-blog]

[pts-fic-notes-and-blog]

Hallowed Knights: Black Pyramid was probably my favourite Age of Sigmar thing, all in all. I got to do all sorts of nitty-gritty world-building, show some non-battletome compliant units and introduce some great side-characters.

It tied up a bunch of loose ends, connected to dang near every other AoS book and short story I wrote, and had some actual pathos towards the end.

All that said, I did have to chop out a few things, including a scene where the Hallowed Knights debate killing beastmen cubs vs adopting them, and a novice warrior priest decides to take the decision out of their hands and raise the vicious toddlers himself.

The third book (tentatively titled Hallowed Knights: Steel Soul) would have followed on twenty years or so from this one, and found the Steel Souls (aided by the Twelfth Cohort of the Golden Gryphons freeguild - last seen in Black Pyramid) in Aqshy, mediating a cultural dispute between duardin settlers (descendants of the expatriate Firewalk duardin, mentioned in several of my books) and the fyreslayers they're inadvertently displacing, while simultaneously dealing with a first contact scenario that involves a remote mountain kingdom ruled by an infant godling under threat from an encroaching ogor afrostun.

Complications would ensue (of course) in the form of a Khornate cult of strategists hoping to transform said city into the bastion of an eternal war by assassinating the aforementioned godling.

Long story short, we'd get sub-plots and story-threads of: Gardus and an ogor prince breaking out of prison in order to save both their peoples from disaster; a wounded Cadoc Kel being forced into a 'Lone Wolf and Cub' situation with the infant godling; the last stand of Aetius Shieldborn; Serena Sunstrike vs the Eightfold Sword; duardin politics; Aqshian politics; Azyrite politics; discussions of colonialism and the introduction of a species of magmatic kangaroo-lizard that young fyreslayers like to ride in races.

But, obviously, this didn't happen. Ah well.

Anyway, you can still grab a digital or audio copy of Black Pyramid from Games Workshop and Black Library, if you're interested.

[pts-fic-notes-and-blog]

Iconic

[pts-fic-notes-and-blog]

[pts-fic-notes-and-blog]

Today it’s a cinch to Google Amazon’s customer service number (888-280-4331), but that ease is illusory, because once you dial it you enter an automated-menu labyrinth that would put the Minotaur to shame. To press the correct sequence of phone buttons necessary to locate a human being is beyond the patience of most Amazon customers—especially pissed-off ones—and you can bet Amazon knows that.

From Timothy Noah's 2016 Article

The Death of the Telephone Call

1876–2007.

[pts-fic-notes-and-blog]

Previous tags:

this does not match with an honor bound character exactly

but this poem about education and care and being bad at looking after oneself does resonate with honor bound's concerns

sometimes a poem just hits right

Today, My Students Tell Me from A Geography That Does Not Hurt Us by Carla Sofia Ferreira

[pts-fic-notes-and-blog]

I want to tell a story to the artists and would-be artists out there.

When I was 19, I made a large oil painting of the nerd I would eventually marry. I poured all my attention and care into this painting. It's the only art I have from back then that still holds up as a work I'm proud of today.

I entered it into a judged show at the local art center. It got an honorable mention. I went to see the show with my beloved model. One of the judges came up to talk to me, and highlighted that all the judges really liked the painting. It would have placed, except, you see, the feet were incorrect. They were too wide and short, and if I just studied a bit more anatomy-

I called over my future wife, and asked her to take off her shoe. Being already very used to humoring me, she did. The judge looked at her very short, very wide little foot. Exactly as I'd lovingly rendered it. I would never edit her appearance in any way.

The judge looked me in the eye, and to his credit, he really looked like he meant it when he said "Oh I'm so sorry."

Anyways the moral of the story is that all of those anatomy books that teach you proportions are either showing you averages, or a very specific idea of an idealized body. Actual bodies are much more varied than that.

So don't forget to draw from observation, and remember that humans aren't mass produced mannequins. Delight in our variation. Because it's supposed to be there.

[pts-fic-notes-and-blog]

[pts-fic-notes-and-blog]

Previous tags:

if I think about andreas burning in the library and realising he's scared and doesn't want this after all I become the joker

yeah andreas didn't want to live. but that night in the library he found out he didn't want to die either

what do you do when you don't want your life but aren't ready for death? you become a haunting

andreas as the ghost in the ruins... my beloved

(pentiment spoilers)

do you ever think about how andreas went from being determined to kill himself in act III to surviving in the wild alone for eighteen years? it's not like it takes zero effort to keep a burn victim alive in the 16th century. even with medicine, he would have found it hard to avoid infection or even frostbite. without medical attention, it would have required a huge shift in his will to live. he did not stay alive by accident. he wanted to live. at the very least, he wanted not to die.

andreas went from thinking his life was worth less than books to actively keeping himself alive for 18 years while in pain; alone in the cold and dark of the ruins; scavenging for his food. that's all active survival. if we're talking about the route where caspar pulls him out of the library, you could argue andreas keeps himself alive out of obligation so that caspar's sacrifice wasn't in vain. but when caspar doesn't save him, andreas pulls himself out of the flames. that, to me, implies he decided to live while he was burning.