#The Pulps

[stealthrockdamage]

need to post my favourite tweet in the entire world

[the-evil-clergyman]

Illustration from A. Merritt's The Ship of Ishtar by Virgil Finlay (1949)

[browsethestacks]

Arthouse Muppets

Art by Bruce McCorkindale

[somethingbrightly]

things have got so bad i've resorted to britpop

[victusinveritas]

Art by Alessandro Biffignandi

[ghostsberry]

demoman!!

[greentea-and-cookies]

Gasp! 🍿🫢

[mychemicalraymance]

LOCK UP YOUR SONS AND DAUGHTERS! HERE THEY COME!

[jcwdrawskinda]

@rad-roche and @chadfallout76podcast gave me permission to animate her lovely art! This is for the upcoming VoiceAPalooza charity drive for the Alzheimer's Association, there will be a lot amazing voices, new and old, and I am personally hyped to sit down for another radio special!

I had a lot of time to theorize what this special might be about--I'm excited to see if I've hit the mark or strayed far from it ✪ ω ✪

A short breakdown of the process below~

Usually I would share a timelapse with y'all but I forgot to press record :'D

I went back and made some gifs though that hopefully show what I did! It's pretty simple! I took Rad's art and copy-pasted all the parts I wanted to move, then painted under to try and match what would be exposed under that movement. Following that, I had fun adding jolts, smoke, and a little tween! The hardest part for me was nailing down the timing of the gun; that took some tries to make it look natural.

[where-your-eyes-dont-go]

It feels odd that while Lovecraft's racism is often the first thing the mind jumps to when discussing him, the same isn't really true for other prominent pulp authors. Especially considering Edgar Rice Burroughs whole oeuvre is a celebration of white supremacy and eugenics. Tarzan boasts that he's a "killer of beasts and many black men." Utopias that have bred out crime through execution or sterilization of criminals' families are a repeated staple of his fiction. It wasn't just his fiction either; the man wrote a newspaper column calling for the killing of "moral imbeciles" and their families [source].

Its not like they were writing in wildly different times; the first Tarzan book came out only seven years before Lovecraft's Dagon. And they both were incredibly influential and celebrated figures in specific genre niches that still command wide attention. But while his racism isn't unknown, it doesn't seem to be attached to Burrough's public character in the same way it is for Lovecraft. Why doesn't he have multiple generations of pulp fans coming to terms with how the author they idolize is awful? Are there just not enough people reading A Princess of Mars these days?

[candyassmum]

Sometimes 🤭 mhmmm! It’s cute when you guys check my diapers! Though you caught me at a bad time with this one - it leaked 😆

[weirdlookindog]

"There on the river bank lay a lovely girl of twenty . . ."

Virgil Finlay (1914-1971) - Illustration for Warren A. Reed's 'Little Yowlie'

(Fantastic Adventures Vol.5 #7, July, 1943)

[the-evil-clergyman]

Illustration from The Ship of Ishtar by Virgil Finlay (1949)

[that-butch-archivist]

"rockstar" by Chloë Brushwood Rose, 2000

source: Brazen Femme: Queering Femininity, edited by Chloë Brushwood Rose & Anna Camilleri

[lizah-aart]

Save me, I fell down the Mass Effect Rabbithole.

[starcurtain]

Teyvat's "Most Down Bad" Award Goes to Alhaitham for a Second Year Running

Seeing everyone making fun of Alhaitham for his "stalkerish" tendencies in this event is funny, because I feel like a lot of people missed that "Be literally everywhere Kaveh is" has been Alhaitham's MO from the day Kaveh appeared in the game.

From only grabbing his house keys after Kaveh returned from the desert (he couldn't have had both sets of keys at the end of the Archon Quest unless he went home and got Kaveh's copy) to ditching conversations to get back to his house only after Kaveh came home, to showing up without any warning or explanation in Kaveh's hangout with some ridiculous excuse about hearing his voice through noise-cancelling headphones... Refusing to offer any help in the Temple of Silence story quest other than staying in the library with Kaveh...

Since when does Alhaitham willingly cover anyone else's duties?

But this trend of "Be everywhere Kaveh is" didn't start when they were adults. It was already in place when they were still Akademiya students--and it's a trend that didn't end even when they had their fight.

Even when they weren't speaking, Alhaitham dogged Kaveh's every step through published responses to Kaveh's research articles in academic journals. He insisted on keeping a line of communication between himself and Kaveh open, even if the only way to do that was through very public ideological clashes. Pulling Kaveh's pigtails to get his attention lolol. It's implied that, for at least the few years between their fight and Kaveh moving in, this was the only communication between them--Alhaitham's refusal to allow their connection to entirely fade away. (And the fact that this is revealed in Kaveh's character stories--through his precious journal that records the moments of his life that had the most impact on him--shows just how deeply he values the fact that Alhaitham didn't give up.)

Another relevant side note: Alhaitham never asked Kaveh to give up his half of their house. Knowing half of it belonged to Kaveh, knowing that Kaveh may one day want to reclaim his part of it, knowing that it was listed as theirs, Alhaitham moved into the house and made zero effort to change its ownership. He was completely fine with living in "his and Kaveh's house." The stories suggest it was only months later (or even longer) that Kaveh even noticed he had the house, and he transferred away ownership of his portion without Alhaitham ever asking him (or even seemingly wanting him) to do so.

Please, let that sink in. Alhaitham actively left his grandmother's (presumably comfortable) house to move into "his and Kaveh's house," with no apparent explanation for why, and after doing so, he made no attempt to change that "his and Kaveh's" label. He moved into the house with no promise that Kaveh wouldn't show up on the doorstep the very next day and move in too. It almost feels like another deliberate provocation--I've moved into our house, are you going to come stop me? LBR, if Alhaitham had had his way, Kaveh would have been living there with him from Day 1...

There's also the fact that Kaveh literally can't write on a single message board anywhere in the entire nation of Sumeru without Alhaitham hunting his messages down and responding to them (which absolutely no one else does, by the way).

"NUH-UH!" "UH-HUH." "NUH-UH!"

Alhaitham's own character stories tell us explicitly that one of Alhaitham's defining character traits is "He is never where you need him to be," yet somehow...

Shot, and chaser:

Any time Kaveh is in the slightest bit of need or danger or just wants Alhaitham near, Alhaitham is "coincidentally" exactly where Kaveh needs him to be, whenever Kaveh needs him to be there.

Alhaitham didn't just "happen" to run into Kaveh in Port Ormos, an entirely different city from where he was supposed to be working. He didn't just "happen" to read the same terrible book as Kaveh when we know he otherwise would not waste a moment of his time on poorly-written literature...

He didn't just "happen" to appear when Kaveh was upset and needed a distraction in the House of Daena during Kaveh's hangout. He didn't just "happen" to be sitting around waiting when Kaveh needed answers after the Archon Quest. He didn't just "happen" to find Kaveh's academic publications and every single message board posting and respond to them at length and in public.

The only person for whom Alhaitham just "happens" to be available is Kaveh, over and over and over again--because he is very deliberately making himself a constant presence in Kaveh's life.

Which is exactly what Kaveh's mother told Kaveh he needed.

(Like, out of all things, I think people really underestimate the devs deliberately paralleling the romantic relationship between Kaveh's mother and father with Kaveh and Alhaitham's relationship. If you want to point to one thing that says "These two characters are intentionally queer-coded," it doesn't get any more obvious than this.)

Alhaitham, are you not embarrassed to be this transparent??? 🫣