#bell gift
Explore tagged Tumblr posts
nellylevinstudio · 3 months ago
Text
Ceramic magic bell hanging
https://nellylevinstudio.etsy.com/listing/1767780094
Tumblr media
0 notes
oddthesungod · 7 months ago
Text
Tumblr media
the sillies <333
1K notes · View notes
undead-knick-knack · 1 year ago
Text
Tumblr media
And of course he fucking loved it 😭🖤💜
3K notes · View notes
senvurii · 4 months ago
Text
Tumblr media
real ones remember dsmp festival ctommy
475 notes · View notes
sincerely-sofie · 1 month ago
Text
Narinder has some things to say about the reply on this post:
Tumblr media
Oops! I accidentally dropped implications and foreshadowing into my goofy silly fun-times post! Oh no! Oh dear! Whatever will I do!
Tumblr media
286 notes · View notes
swordmaid · 1 year ago
Text
Tumblr media
brienne but she's wearing 1949 cocteau's beauty and the beast inspired fit!!! this is the inspo pic i used if ur curious.
gonna be posting more of this redesign thing (and also jaime's ver) some time in the future but i just wanted to share this one <3
#brienne of tarth#asoiaf#mine.#u know literally just as i finished colouring this i found that some theater made an opera version of this batb#and they made belle's dress BLUE...which is a win for me and also not bc they made it light blue#but here it's supposed to be velvet.. idk if it comes across as velvet but that's the fabric of choice lol.#but im gonna ramble because i really like the concept... i love brienne in pearls!! i feel like pearls will be her jewellery of choice#and i talked abt this before in some post but i think tarth regalia would have a lot of pearls just bc they're an island#and i think they would export pearls alongside marble lol#i love brienne in silver and pearls BUT the reason why the flower thing on her cape is gold bc in the film#the pearl chain was actually a gift from the beast. so she's wearing jaime's gift. and i made the cape more silvery white (leaning on white#to resemble his cloak so it's like... jaime gifting her his white cloak..... hihihIHIHIhhihihihihi......#tbh i drew that concept before too BUT I JUST LIKE IT!!!!!!!! i want it to happen actually....please....thank u..#also the feathers in her hair is bc i want to accessorize her in a brienne way BUT ALSO supposed to be like the plumes knights wore in thei#helm. she's wearing trousers in the fit btw only the upper half of the design is based on beauty but the silhouette mimics beasts' more.#but anyway i really like this design!! bc it's a bit ott but also not in a way that seems out of character for her? idk LOL
1K notes · View notes
edelgarfield · 7 months ago
Text
i can't wait until Essek sees Mister fire the gun Bell's Hells gave him.
Essek: Excuse me, does that monkey have a gun? Fearne: Our friend Percy made it for him. Essek: Percy? Percival de Rolo, of Vox Machina, Lord of Whitestone who invented the firearm? THAT Percy? Laudna: He's Pâté's cousin!
I think Essek will just have an aneurysm on the spot.
304 notes · View notes
vanderlindepounder · 6 months ago
Text
Tumblr media Tumblr media Tumblr media
he treats his nuts like a scratch n' sniff
149 notes · View notes
swordy-da-goat · 1 year ago
Text
Tumblr media
My osc gift exchange for @mumpsetc
Very neat character 🖥️🌼
265 notes · View notes
delysartfanart · 3 months ago
Text
Tumblr media
For his birthday, Belle thought a lot what should gift to him. Then she remembered that she can actually sing and play guitar. So she dedicated to him a song which is wrote by herself.
HAPPY BIRTHDAY LYCAON!
91 notes · View notes
miramelindamusings · 1 year ago
Text
Tumblr media Tumblr media Tumblr media Tumblr media Tumblr media
The moment there is a bit of cool weather where I live, all I can think about is rumbelle. I've been thinking alot about Lacey too so here are a few of the sketches I've done :)
#rumbelle#ouat#golden lace#mr. gold#rumplestiltskin#belle ouat#lacey french#lacey x gold#my art#my fanart#digital art#A day of cold weather after all this heat and I'm thrown back to late August/September of 2013#I've just watched OUAT and I am heading to my first year of college and the other first year girls are just as nervous but they're nice#and some watched OUAT and when season 3 started that September we huddled on the couch and watched the episodes as they aired#the cold makes me remember that first year watching OUAT in the dorms with those girls and how cold it could get in winter#after the first year we mostly went separate ways-not for any bad reason just naturally. I have such good memories of those girls though#we celebrated birthdays and holidays together-I still have the shirt of Captain Hook they gifted me#I hope they're happy wherever they are#I found OUAT and Rumbelle when I was discovering myself#those first three seasons hold such nostalgia and magic for me#on another note#Lacey was such an interesting character that I wish they did a little more with#I've been sketching some things out and little doodles about her#like who were her friends? who did she talk to? what are some subtle similarities to Belle but the curse distorted?#I can't imagine having someone look at me but want someone else and other people in town say who you are is wrong/incorrect#I've just been thinking about Lacey bristling at the thought and I remember feeling a little bad that no one really wanted her but Belle#and what about intimacy? perhaps Belle's and Lacey's preferences could be similar but Lacey is more overt about it#anyways just some things I've been thinking about lately :)#I couldn't decide with the golden lace pic if there should be lipstick stains or not so here's both :)#used refs for some posing and hand gestures
425 notes · View notes
revvethasmythh · 7 months ago
Text
I love Dorian this episode referring to Ishta as "clearly a threat." In the previous episode, his argument was that the sword was just a sword, a tool, an inert object that only has meaning if you give it one. Additionally, he advocated for Orym to keep the sword, which is certainly interesting in light of his opinion that it was a threat. But I also wonder exactly in what manner Dorian regarded the sword as a threat. Because it was explicitly noted as not being cursed, just having a dark history, and Dorian's own argument hinged on it being nothing more than object.
But, re: some of his character details revealed back in the EXU wrap-up, I wonder if it wasn't a reference to the sword as threat to the group dynamic. Dorian's sense of morality is notoriously insular to his group and this seems to still hold true. We saw it in 95--Dorian floated the idea of killing the Pumats in order to obtain all the magical items the party wanted in case they didn't have enough money to cover it legitimately. And in regards to circlet, he was intent that the party in EXU keep the item, not because he wanted to use it, but because he didn't trust anyone else to have it. But the specific detail from the EXU wrap-up I find most significant here is Dorian's plan regarding the crown, should it have proved to create undeniable, irreparable damage to the group dynamic: "I had ideas of what to do about [the crown] if it ever came between us, though. That's something that I'd been planning the whole time after I realized that was that, 'If this gets in the way of the group, how do I get rid of the crown?'" That singular "I" really stands out to me. Not, "how do we get rid of this as a group?" but how do I specifically, singularly, get rid of it to spare the group dynamic?
It all really falls in line with his character and the way he's previously reacted to powerful magical items. It's a powerful item that could be a threat, either magically or to the group. Who should have it? Orym, who clearly wants it a great deal and from whom taking it could cause damage to the group, and who also happens to be the person Dorian trusts the most. It's not actually cursed, so it's just an item and the meaning it has is only what we allow it to have. But it's still a threat because it could tear the party apart. I wonder if that old thought ever occurred to him ("if this gets in the way of the group, how do I get rid of it?") or if letting Orym keep the blade was, in fact, the thing he decided would cause the least group friction of all the options they had.
115 notes · View notes
wandering-trader-joes · 2 months ago
Text
Based on the conversations that both Keyleth and Caleb have had with Imogen recently, I’m gonna need the three of them to form a support group for “super powerful yet narratively-cursed individuals with a dash of parental trauma” after this is all over.
52 notes · View notes
poorly-drawn-mdzs · 1 year ago
Text
Tumblr media
Jingles a little bell in front of you to convince you to do tasks.
[First] Prev <--> Next
822 notes · View notes
start0uched · 5 months ago
Text
Tumblr media
sharing this piece from january in celebration of reki’s birthday ……. i miss them your honor
98 notes · View notes
mostlysignssomeportents · 5 months ago
Text
Richard R John’s “Network Nation”
Tumblr media
THIS SATURDAY (July 20), I'm appearing in CHICAGO at Exile in Bookville.
Tumblr media
The telegraph and the telephone have a special place in the history and future of competition and Big Tech. After all, they were the original tech monopolists. Every discussion of tech and monopoly takes place in their shadow.
Back in 2010, Tim Wu published The Master Switch, his bestselling, wildly influential history of "The Bell System" and the struggle to de-monopolize America from its first telecoms barons:
https://memex.craphound.com/2010/11/01/the-master-switch-tim-net-neutrality-wu-explains-whats-at-stake-in-the-battle-for-net-freedom/
Wu is a brilliant writer and theoretician. Best known for coining the term "Net Neutrality," Wu went on to serve in both the Obama and Biden administrations as a tech trustbuster. He accomplished much in those years. Most notably, Wu wrote the 2021 executive order on competition, laying out a 72-point program for using existing powers vested in the administrative agencies to break up corporate power and get the monopolist's boot off Americans' necks:
https://www.eff.org/de/deeplinks/2021/08/party-its-1979-og-antitrust-back-baby
The Competition EO is basically a checklist, and Biden's agency heads have been racing down it, ticking off box after box on or ahead of schedule, making meaningful technical changes in how companies are allowed to operate, each one designed to make material improvements to the lives of Americans.
A decade and a half after its initial publication, Wu's Master Switch is still considered a canonical account of how the phone monopoly was built – and dismantled.
But somewhat lost in the shadow of The Master Switch is another book, written by the accomplished telecoms historian Richard R John: "Network Nation: Inventing American Telecommunications," published a year after The Master Switch:
https://www.hup.harvard.edu/books/9780674088139
Network Nation flew under my radar until earlier this year, when I found myself speaking at an antitrust conference where both John and Wu were also on the bill:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2VNivXjrU3A
During John's panel – "Case Studies: AT&T & IBM" – he took a good-natured dig at Wu's book, claiming that Wu, not being an historian, had been taken in by AT&T's own self-serving lies about its history. Wu – also on the panel – didn't dispute it, either. That was enough to prick my interest. I ordered a copy of Network Nation and put it on my suitcase during my vacation earlier this month.
Network Nation is an extremely important, brilliantly researched, deep history of America's love/hate affair with not just the telephone, but also the telegraph. It is unmistakably as history book, one that aims at a definitive takedown of various neat stories about the history of American telecommunications. As Wu writes in his New Republic review of John's book:
Generally he describes the failure of competition not so much as a failure of a theory, but rather as the more concrete failure of the men running the competitors, many of whom turned out to be incompetent or unlucky. His story is more like a blow-by-blow account of why Germany lost World War II than a grand theory of why democracy is better than fascism.
https://newrepublic.com/article/88640/review-network-nation-richard-john-tim-wu
In other words, John thinks that the monopolies that emerged in the telegraph and then the telephone weren't down to grand forces that made them inevitable, but rather, to the errors made by regulators and the successful gambits of the telecoms barons. At many junctures, things could have gone another way.
So this is a very complicated story, one that uses a series of contrasts to make the point that history is contingent and owes much to a mix of random chance and the actions of flawed human beings, and not merely great economic or historical laws. For example, John contrasts the telegraph with the telephone, posing them against one another as a kind of natural experiment in different business strategies and regulatory responses.
The telegraph's early promoters, including Samuel Morse (as in "Morse code") believed that the natural way to roll out telegraph was via selling the patents to the federal government and having an agency like the post office operate it. There was a widespread view that the post office as a paragon of excellent technical management and a necessity for knitting together the large American nation. Moreover, everyone could see that when the post office partnered with private sector tech companies (like the railroads that became essential to the postal system), the private sector inevitably figured out how to gouge the American public, leading regulators to ever-more extreme measures to rein in the ripoffs.
The telegraph skated close to federalization on several occasions, but kept getting snatched back from the brink, ending up instead as a privately operated system that primarily served deep-pocketed business customers. This meant that telegraph companies were forever jostling to get the right to string wires along railroad tracks and public roads, creating a "political economy" that tried to balance out highway regulators and rail barons (or play them off against each other).
But the leaders of the telegraph companies were largely uninterested in "popularizing" the telegraph – that is, figuring out how ordinary people could use telegraphs in place of the hand-written letters that were the dominant form of long-distance communications at the time. By turning their backs on "popularization," telegraph companies largely freed themselves from municipal oversight, because they didn't need to get permission to string wires into every home in every major city.
When the telephone emerged, its inventors and investors initially conceived of it as a tool for business as well. But while the telegraph had ushered in a boom in instantaneous, long-distance communications (for example, by joining ports and distant cities where financiers bought and sold the ports' cargo), the telephone proved far more popular as a way of linking businesses within a city limits. Brokers and financiers and businesses that were only a few blocks from one another found the telephone to be vastly superior to the system of dispatching young boys to race around urban downtowns with slips bearing messages.
So from the start, the phone was much more bound up in city politics, and that only deepened with popularization, as phones worked their ways into the homes of affluent families and local merchants like druggists, who offered free phone calls to customers as a way of bringing trade through the door. That created a great number of local phone carriers, who had to fend off Bell's federally enforced patents and aldermen and city councilors who solicited bribes and favors.
To make things even more complex, municipal phone companies had to fight with other sectors that wanted to fill the skies over urban streets with their own wires: streetcar lines and electrical lines. The unregulated, breakneck race to install overhead wires led to an epidemic of electrocutions and fires, and also degraded service, with rival wires interfering with phone calls.
City politicians eventually demanded that lines be buried, creating another source of woe for telephone operators, who had to contend with private or quasi-private operators who acquired a monopoly over the "subways" – tunnels where all these wires eventually ended up.
The telegraph system and the telephone system were very different, but both tended to monopoly, often from opposite directions. Regulations that created some competition in telegraphs extinguished competition when applied to telephones. For example, Canada federalized the regulation of telephones, with the perverse effect that everyday telephone users in cities like Toronto had much less chance of influencing telephone service than Chicagoans, whose phone carrier had to keep local politicians happy.
Nominally, the Canadian Members of Parliament who oversaw Toronto's phone network were big leaguers who understood prudent regulation and were insulated from the daily corruption of municipal politics. And Chicago's aldermen were pretty goddamned corrupt. But Bell starved Toronto of phone network upgrades for years, while Chicago's gladhanding political bosses forced Chicago's phone company to build and build, until Chicago had more phone lines than all of France. Canadian MPs might have been more remote from rough-and-tumble politics, but that made them much less responsive to a random Torontonian's bitter complaint about their inability to get a phone installed.
As the Toronto/Chicago story illustrates, the fact that there were so many different approaches to phone service tried in the US and Canada gives John more opportunities to contrast different business-strategies and regulations. Again, we see how there was never one rule that governments could have used if they wanted to ensure that telecoms were well-run, widely accessible, and reasonably priced. Instead, it was always "horses for courses" – different rules to counter different circumstances and gambits from telecoms operators.
As John traces through the decades during which the telegraph and telephone were established in America, he draws heavily on primary sources to trace the ebb and flow of public and elite sentiment towards public ownership, regulation, and trustbusting. In John's hands, we see some of the most spectacular failures as more than a mismatch of regulatory strategy to corporate gambit – but rather as a mismatch of political will and corporate gambit. If a company's power would be best reined in by public ownership, but the political vogue is for regulation, then lawmakers end up trying to make rules for a company they should simply be buying giving to the post office to buy.
This makes John's history into a history of the Gilded Age and trustbusters. Notorious vulture capitalists like Jay Gould shocked the American conscience by declaring that businesses had no allegiance to the public good, and were put on this Earth to make as much money as possible no matter what the consequences. Gould repeated "raided" Western Union, acquiring shares and forcing the company to buy him out at a premium to end his harassment of the board and the company's managers.
By the time the feds were ready to buy out Western Union, Gould was a massive shareholder, meaning that any buyout of the telegraph would make Gould infinitely wealthier, at public expense, in a move that would have been electoral poison for the lawmakers who presided over it. In this highly contingent way, Western Union lived on as a private company.
Americans – including prominent businesspeople who would be considered "conservatives" by today's standards, were deeply divided on the question of monopoly. The big, successful networks of national telegraph lines and urban telephone lines were marvels, and it was easy to see how they benefited from coordinated management. Monopolists and their apologists weaponized this public excitement about telecoms to defend their monopolies, insisting that their achievement owed its existence to the absence of "wasteful competition."
The economics of monopoly were still nascent. Ideas like "network effects" (where the value of a service increases as it adds users) were still controversial, and the bottlenecks posed by telephone switching and human operators meant that the cost of adding new subscribers sometimes went up as the networks grew, in a weird diseconomy of scale.
Patent rights were controversial, especially patents related to natural phenomena like magnetism and electricity, which were viewed as "natural forces" and not "inventions." Business leaders and rabble-rousers alike decried patents as a federal grant of privilege, leading to monopoly and its ills.
Telecoms monopolists – telephone and telegraph alike – had different ways to address this sentiment at different times (for example, the Bell System's much-vaunted commitment to "universal service" was part of a campaign to normalize the idea of federally protected, privately owned monopolies).
Most striking about this book were the parallels to contemporary fights over Big Tech trustbusting, in our new Gilded Age. Many of the apologies offered for Western Union or AT&T's monopoly could have been uttered by the Renfields who carry water for Facebook, Apple and Google. John's book is a powerful and engrossing reminder that variations on these fights have occurred in the not-so-distant past, and that there's much we can learn from them.
Wu isn't wrong to say that John is engaging with a lot of minutae, and that this makes Network Nation a far less breezy read than Master Switch. I get the impression that John is writing first for other historians, and writers of popular history like Wu, in a bid to create the definitive record of all the complexity that is elided when we create tidy narratives of telecoms monopolies, and tech monopolies in general. Bringing Network Nation on my vacation as a beach-read wasn't the best choice – it demands a lot of serious attention. But it amply rewards that attention, too, and makes an indelible mark on the reader.
Tumblr media
Support me this summer on the Clarion Write-A-Thon and help raise money for the Clarion Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers' Workshop!
Tumblr media
If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
https://pluralistic.net/2024/07/18/the-bell-system/#were-the-phone-company-we-dont-have-to-care
64 notes · View notes