#and of apoplexy

[y-rhywbeth2]

The most important thing I've learnt recently is that I'm now pretty sure that Bane canonically thinks pissing Bhaal off is funny, is 100% willing to seduce his own followers (I mean, he does canonically have at least one child with one), as well as use flirting (with a side of threats and bribery) to sway people to convert to his faith.

Which means that I believe he would be willing to seduce (or at least flirt with) the Dark Urge, Kelemvor style, purely because it would piss Bhaal off and also piss Myrkul off because he's the one who has to mediate whenever Bane starts pulling this shit.

I only wonder whether he would do it via dream, manifest an avatar (which considering Bane's favouring of demonic looking avatars when he's not possessing people, kinda counts as monsterfucking?) or if he uses Gortash as an avatar to do it (or possess one of his other Banites as a "fuck you" to Gortash if his Chosen has displeased him recently, maybe? Watch your god make out with your not-partner Enver: that's what you get for developing "feelings". Or maybe he'd be into that idk)

If it works, on any level, then Durge is probably going to be incapacitated by religious guilt for the remainder of forever.

[phatburd]

Bessières and the 600,000+ Franc Question

For @josefavomjaaga

While going over sources and material related to Jean-Baptiste Bessières, there's one thing that keeps twigging my journalist Spidey sense, and I don't like that.

Always, without fail, it's presented as a fait accompli that Bessières blew anywhere between 600,000 to one million francs on his mistress, a Paris opera dancer named Virginie. The fact he had a mistress isn't actually unusual by itself, when compared to the affairs his peers carried on. The exceptions were probably the Davouts and the Lefebvres.

Furthermore, his wife, Marie-Jeanne, discovered the affair after his death when his personal affects were returned to her from the battlefield.

The massive debts the Marshal left behind bankrupted his family, necessitating that Marie-Jeanne into selling their estate, Chateau de Grignon, to cover some of it. Napoleon also paid down some of Bessières' debts and set up a yearly pension for Marie-Jeanne her son. According to some accounts, she struggled financially for the rest of her life.

This is what I don't like about it, and why it doesn't completely pass the sniff test.

I accept that Bessières died flat broke and in debt. In debt to whom, however? Who were his creditors?

When did he meet his mistress? Was that fortune spent over a period of years, or in a fairly short time?

Even as a Marshal of France he had to pay his officers out of his own pocket, and provide his own carriages and some supplies on campaign. If he was flat broke, how did he continue to pay his officers?

Bessières was also bad with money to begin with. He was known to be generous and charitable, to the point where he'd be giving away money to anyone whom he thought was more in need than he was with it. Allegedly, Virginie was in debt herself, and he paid down all of them out of the apparent goodness of his heart.

(This raises even more questions. Was she a gold digger, was she blackmailing him, was he totally besotted with her that he didn't realize what the hell he was doing? Was he just lonely? Did they have genuine feelings for one another? There's a lot of there there, but no real answers.)

My conclusion is, no, Bessières did not spend 600,000 to one million francs on his mistress. Her presence, however, was not helpful to his situation.

He paid down Virginie's debts, however much they were. Being terrible with money, he kept putting himself in a financial hole, and then he kept digging. The upkeep on Chateau de Grignon had to be ridiculous. He still had to pay his officers and his staff. He was probably borrowing and burning through money and racking up the debt. Like that meme goes, "This is fine" while everything's burning down around him. A bit like using a credit card to pay down a credit card, as one might do in the modern parlance.

(His financial problems may have contributed to his increasing depression towards the end of his life as well. Was someone blackmailing him with his debts? Another interesting question that can never be adequately addressed.)

From what I've gathered, he hid all his problems from pretty much everyone. Even Napoleon seemed caught off guard with how bad Bessières' finances were. I argue that the 600,000 to one million francs he owed upon his death were cumulative and not to a single person as the historical narrative wants people to believe.

It seems a small thing to be annoyed with, but there seems to be more than a bit of misogyny to lay all of Bessières' troubles on a single woman as the historical narrative seems to want to do.

Another thing ... if Bessières burned a lot of his recent correspondence towards the end of his life, what exactly was the evidence Marie-Jeanne discovered as proof of the affair. How did she prove it? Did other people know about the affair and kept her in the dark? If so, who was that?

In the novel, "The Battle" by Patrick Rimbaud, a semi-fictionalized account of the Battle of Aspern-Essling, Rimbaud's characterization of Bessières has him wear two gold lockets under his Marshal's uniform. One for Marie-Jeanne, the other for Virginie. I don't know if Rimbaud based that on an actual account, or if it was something he made up. I have a lot of problems with that book though, probably because the translation seems somewhat robotic and not great. It's an interesting idea, however, and maybe worth keeping around as a headcanon.

Did Madame Bessières struggle financially for the rest of her life afterwards? Possibly. I don't have enough information to make a conclusion there, but it's not impossible. She did continue to faithfully visit his tomb for years after his death.

TL;DR Bessières died broke and in debt but it wasn't all because of his mistress. If someone else has something to the contrary, I'd love to read it.

[robin-in-the-tulip-tree]

Raise your hand if you're compiling shaders tonight

[yumaisbored]

my natural anxiety levels are already too high, i fear Malevolent may incite a cardiac incident

[tahopo]

You are sooo right about the found family thing for da4

Me personally, I can’t imagine being friends with all of them I I don’t think we should??

yeah 웃 they really should not have marketed the trope so ad verbum, it comes off as contrived.

i guess they’re trying to drive home the idea of a ragtag party but dao:a did that just fine and near perfectly (imo) without the hard sell.

[eclecticmuses]

Today I started a new fic that I'm co-writing with @sunalsolove! Even though it sprung from a very silly Twitter meme, I'm very excited to explore new realms and themes in my writing with her (it's a Fitzsimmons Regency dark romance!) but it also means I get to do a whole new collection of fun Google searches in the pursuit of my writing! So today I bring y'all:

today in fic writing:

[nightkitchentarot]

Spin that wheel and share what got you.

[fivequartersoftheorange]

The way some of y'all act towards Taylor Zakhar Perez is so fucking disgusting. It's like everyday there's this relentless need to find something to be mad about him.

It's clear to me you don’t know what respect is. Everyone has a right to privacy. Get a job or a new hobby and mind your own fucking business. Don't be a miserable asshole and spend your time digging up other people's personal lives and then post about it.

Leave Taylor Zakhar Perez alone or I'm gonna start blasting!

[triviareads]

—from Sweetest Scoundrel by Elizabeth Hoyt

[gorillaxyz]

why is mickey going on about petes age all of a sudden?? how old is he 😭

[nieithryn]

Calista has appeared ! what to do ?

Grope

Bang

Flirt

Hug

[shen-daozhang]

Ok but like real talk tho.

The pure, untapped potential of Taxian Jun’s “dumb mutt” that’s mentioned once on like page 2 and then never again.

Fellow fic writers where is the dumb chubby puppy??

[power-chords]

Greg texted me to wish me a happy Thanksgiving and a speedy recovery :')

[apocalyptic-dancehall]

i know the cut lines from claptastic voyage were so mean but athena screaming "cLAPTRAP. will you pl eAse pL e ASE SHUT THE HELL UP" is so hysterical

[farmergilesofham]

Dead people are not inherently genius just because they died 100+ years ago

Take Immaneul Kant. Some people say he was a genius, that he was ahead of his time, that he reinvented philosophy.

Kant was an idiot who could barely write to save his life, had to make a heavily abridged version of his main work just so people would actually take his blustering seriously, had NINE FUCKING YEARS in which to edit, streamline, and correct the reasoning of his magnum opus and instead spent THAT ENTIRE TIME WRITING SEQUELS.

His philosophy is based principally on a theory of knowledge which is fundamentally incompatible with both experience and just... regular logic. A priori is great and all BUT WHERE DID YOU GET IT FROM MOTHERFUCKER? It does not come free with your Xbox!

He has moral takes as rancid as the shit you hear out of 'Sigma Male' influencers, and which totally definitely not at all an intentional and heavy inspiration for a certain kind of German nationalism that continued until about, oh, what was it.... the 1930s? Anyway.

It's not that I "just don't get" the arguments or that my interpretation is "not nuanced enough", it's that Kant was a human fucking being who lived 200 years ago, wrote like 15 books, and happened to also be a complete fucking moron. This man read Hume's criticisms of basically everything (which most other philosophers found very off-putting and quite annoying) and went on the miss the entire point.

I'm gonna come out here and say it: Kant is to philosophy what Graham Hancock is to archaeology. A paltry academic spewing a torrent of insidious bullshit and forcing ten times as many actual academics to work ten times as hard to undo the damage he's wrought.

Kant was not a genius, he was a regular guy writing middling-on-bad essays in the 18th century who - I assure you - has not actually been remembered by history on account of his good arguments.

[dullahandyke]

thinking abt the word 'apoplectic'. good adjective