#Wall's End

[xamitras]

For many of years I had this tradition of drawing Wirt and the beast once a year to see how much I have improved, then depression hit in 2023 and couldn't continue, but it left so really amazing art in the process

[dknuth]

Hadrian's Wall - Wall's End

We started our first day of the Hadrian's Wall Tour at the eastern end in Newcastle. In the middle of a city, not much of the wall is left, but the foundations of the eastern fort, Segedunum, are visible.

A model showed more clearly the layout of the fort, which was standardized, except they all had variations from the standard. Since Segedunum has few differences from the standard, it was an excellent place to start.

Each of the forts we will see has differences, and the modern excavations and displays are different. Here they have reconstructed the bathhouse.

One thing you realize from a reconstruction is how big the buildings were. It's tough to get an impression of size from lines on the ground.

They also learned different things from each fort. Here, they found the ground floor of the cavalry barracks. Since the fort didn't have stables, researchers couldn't figure out where they kept the horses.

Here, they could see the impression of a sump in a space where two horses could stand. They could see that the soldiers' rooms were on one side of the building, and facing them was the room for the horses, which could easily be mucked out. Roman cavalrymen had to buy their own horses, so keeping such a big investment close would have been important.

The fort's location was later the Newcastle shipyards. In the early 20th century, half of the British ships were built in Newcastle, and Britain had half the world's ships. The presence of the shipyard was both a blessing and a curse for the ruins. They built on top of them, destroying a lot, but as the shipyards shrunk, the ruins became visible again and could be studied.

A small section of the wall remains nearby.

The ground was boggy, so the wall settled severely. The bogginess, though, preserved organic materials, including the ends of wooden posts outside the wall. They've determined the Romans stuck dead shrubbery in the ground at the outside base of the wall to make a thicket to keep people away from the wall. Outside the thicket, there was a substantial ditch. They really didn't want people near the wall..

We visited the municipal museum, which has an entire section on The Wall. One interesting area was on Roman religion. The troops based in Britain were from all over them empire, and many of them continued to worship their local god from home. But the local Celtic gods were worshipped too. And sometimes the gods seem to be a blend of a local god and one from far away. Interestingly the classic Roman gods like Jupiter and Juno don't seem to have shrines.

Mithras was popular here, as in the rest of the empire. I continue to find the Mithras religion interesting. It was of Persian origin but became very Roman over time. It was completely different than the classic polytheistic Roman religion. It had one god, Mithras, created by the supreme creator to bring organization to the world. It was a secretive religion, with rites taking place in private locations and membership by invitation only. You advanced through different levels of membership based in part on trials.

Christians really disliked it because they felt it stole their traditions, but really it was much older than Christianity and if anyone stole ideas it was Christians stealing from the Mithraic.

Many Roman sites had Mithraic temples, which often had images in addition to the altars. The one above shows Mithras killing the great bull that was wreaking havoc worldwide.

Some people have wanted to argue about whether Hadrian was really responsible for the wall's construction. This plaque seems to settle the issue.

It clearly names Hadrian as responsible for a section of construction and the Legion that did the work.

Our last stop for the day was Arbeia, on the south side of the Tyne. It was practically built over and lost before someone saved it. Then, the local council really got into protecting it and using it to develop an understanding of the wall. To do that, they build reconstructions of crucial parts of the site.

The first thing you notice is the reconstructed gatehouse.

It's huge—it looks so much larger in three dimensions! The reconstructions help educate the public and help historians and archeologists understand whether their ideas of what the buildings looked like really worked. They certainly helped me have a better idea of their size.

Arbeia is also a strange fort, modified to be very different from the standard. After a while, most of the barracks were demolished and replaced by granneries. It went from two to 24 granneries. At the same time many of the buildings in the fort were demolished. But the commander's house became larger and grander.

It became the central supply depot for all the soldiers on the wall. Ocean-going ships could unload here before the supplies were distributed. Obviously the commander of such a unit would be highly ranked and get a bigger than normal house.

My first reaction to the changes in fort layouts was to think the Romans couldn't decide. But then I remembered that this was over several hundred years of fort occupation. How many of our forts look like they did 50 years ago, let alone a couple hundred.

I was starting to realize that a large part of the program of this tour was to understand the design and use of the forts over centuries and try to understand how the changing conditions could lead to those changes.

[mllenugget]

The exact opposite of being doomed by the narrative

I discovered this game while playing with a group of friends on Halloween, and I must say it was quiet immersive because we each wanted different things so we always had to argue together on what to do before the Voices would Took 3 days to complete a single run

[taitavva]

tired of running (tired of hunting. my own kind)

[peachymune]

✶ You called for help. . .

[golden-wires]

Pretty much a direct sequel to this image I did yesterday

[holyblanchett]

We could've had it all

[espeonseal]

horror games yipee!!! (late late halloween art tho..)

[quesocheeso]

MK, or Xiaotian in this AU has three separate type lives he lives, he mainly lives in FFM and considers that his “main” life, but as Megapolis started growing he found a fondness towards the people there and started visiting with Macaque once he was older

At the point in time the AU starts, Xiaotian is 15 years old and has started working part time at Pigsy’s and goes by MK there, he finds it nice to be a nobody just working a normal life,,, not to say he hates his life in FFM, everyone is chill there towards the royal family, but being the son of the emperor of all realms does create a disconnect towards his peers

(Extra note: Since the Brotherhood won the heavenly war, there was no burning of FFM and so all the demon monkeys who lived there are still alive and FFM is not inhabited by only normal monkeys but by actual demon monkeys, making FFM an actual kingdom with subjects)

Xiaotian loves his life both in Megapolis and FFM but he detests his life in the Celestial Realm because of all the properness and the fakeness of it all, Macaque trained him to detect every fake smile and deceit the people in the celestial realm were used to because to them this could mean between life or death, Xiaotian lives on edge every second he is there and doesn’t like being alone in the realm which leads to him clinging to Macaque every second or anyone vaguely familiar,, every time they stay for a few days he would follow his parents to their room and share the nest with them since he’s realized he can’t sleep in his room alone,, which due to their monkey nature isn’t actually a problem

Clothing wise, Xiaotian has a sunrise type of vibe to the color scheme he wears, especially the clothes made for him in the celestial realm, the dressmakers following the sun and moon theme used by his parents to create Xiaotian’s sunrise theme as a sunrise is created by the transition of night to day or the moon to the sun

[chowadoe]

[dark rider au] pre-race ritual

[technically-human]

St. Hilarion's ghost story

[teh-inggris]

pvp civ nation...... this aint much but pls take my contribution for this series bc im going insane i love hate this man so much get him out of my head

[egophiliac]

NEW BIRTHDAY THEME IS OUT!!!!!!!!!!!

BIRTHDAY SLUMBER PARTY, HERE WE COME

I think the theme is more loungewear than straight-up pajamas, but hey, I'm not complaining! (and -- look, we still have the groovies, I'm not giving up hope for animal kigurumi until I gotta)

[buggachat]

im gonna be honest i think the "adrien being a sentimonster was randomly thrown in season 4 with no planning on the writers' part" theory is really funny. like the writers of this show are just so bad at their job and so stupid that they tripped and fell in season 1 episode mr pigeon and accidentally spilled "a strange relationship to feathers" all over adrien by accident. they stubbed their toe on the coffee table and accidentally set up a mystery surrounding emilie's relationship to a feathery miraculous in season 1 volpina before we even knew what its powers were. then they spilled coffee all over their favorite shirts and at the same time spilled more white feathers around adrien in season 2 episode gorizilla. while writing the same episode someone had a really nasty sneeze and got boogers all over the script that said "use the imagery of two twin rings intertwined as the opener for the film of adrien's dead mother". they forgot to look both ways before crossing the street while writing the season 2 finale and were struck by a truck labeled "the peacock miraculous gives life" and then by a second truck with the license plate "it does so using white feathers identical to the white feathers that surround adrien in his ads" at the same time. they plummeted down an open manhole and hit the ground with a loud whack that sounded like "sentimonsters like bugette are just as real as any human..... and isn't bugette so...... perfect?" in season 3. on their way to the hospital they slipped on ice that had frozen in such a way to perfectly resemble the sentence "the word 'perfect' is consistently used throughout the series and by the creator ominously to denote how characters like adrien and kagami are 'different from everyone else', ever since season 1 episode simon says". during season 3 someone on the team got food poisoning and when they threw up felix came out instead and started another whacky series of comedic errors. the answer to the mystery of "how and why did emilie die? what life did adrien's loving mother create that she was willing to die for?" was originally gonna be "idk maybe she just exploded or somehting" probably, but then there was a really painful rock in one of the writers' shoes while walking to work that put them in a mood so bad that they forgot their original plan and instead made some bullshit up that somehow ended up being something that made sense with what we knew and put all the puzzle pieces together and actually made the show even more interesting and impactful on a rewatch because it put a lot of shots that at the time seemed random into a new and logical perspective as clear foreshadowing. it's actually impressive how stupid these silly clown writers are that they put strangely specific things so consistently throughout the entire series that resembled foreshadowing while never actually having intended it a single time! like........... really.......... really impressive............... i think..............

[class1akids]

Always stuck on the other side of the glass. Can never cross paths, except by violence.

[theoldkyokodied]

One wedding and three funerals

Background paintings under the cut