#journey before destination

[spookiest-semic]

“honor is not dead so long as he lives in the hearts of men”

“life before death, strength before weakness, journey before destination”

“You are not worse for your association with the world, but it is better for its association with you”

Three stormlight quotes that genuinely help me move in my day to day life

[authorofcelesti]

Pros of writing a Sky:CotL x Stormlight archive crossover: funny skykids interacting with the spren, Adolin bonding with them over fashion, Stormlight translates really well into sustenance for the skykids.

Cons: eight new Skykid OC's, trying to balance out just how much they can interfere without completely derailing the plot, language barrier maybe defeated by the Spren, maybe not.

[darthmatthewtwihard]

“Life before death, strength before weakness, journey before destination.”

“I will remember those who have been forgotten.”

“I will listen to those who have been ignored.”

Oath of the Knights Radiant + the #Edgedancer Ideals - #TheStormlightArchive by Brandon Sanderson.

[unkalaki]

The Seduction of Nihilism and why its stupid

Nihilism. Oh, thy poison is sweet, thy fruit most succulent, thy scent the soporific musk of death. Please forgive me this little indulgence, being flowery and poetic is something of a yearning and if I don’t indulge in it from time to time it becomes quite painful. Let us however turn to nihilism and look at it. Let us really look at it.

Nihilism. I always liked the word. Not the concept. The word itself. It sounds so … threatening. It has such finality. It invokes feelings of destruction and endings. Or perhaps that is what I think of the idea and thus translate onto the word. Who knows and frankly who cares? It is a word. A deep and meaningful one perhaps but it is still a word. Let us try to delve into the meaning behind the concept. The idea that is there. That is far more interesting. However, the idea of nihilism is one that does not really have a universal definition. At least I don’t think it can. I think due to the ideas and themes it invokes it is a highly personal thing. It will change from person to person. So today we are going to be venturing into my personalised hell scape and look at what nihilism means to me. Welcome aboard. Next stop futility.

Futility. That is the core concept behind this idea. Useless. Doesn’t matter. Without effect. That is what nihilism is to me. That no matter what we do, no matter what we try, no matter what our achievements, what our goals, it doesn’t matter. It never did. You were a fool to try to do anything. Your efforts, for any stated goal, are useless. Why are you trying in the face of an inescapable, uncaring and, most importantly, unchanging world? Your perceptions of the good in life and the evil in others is an illusion of meaning that you created to see the world through. It is all banal, hopeless and without meaning. Why help someone? It won’t change anything. In a weeks time you will be forgotten. In a decades time you might all be dead. In a century your existence on earth will be erased and in a longer span of time earth itself will cease to be. You do not matter. Not really. Nothing you do is able to actually really help. Your efforts are a patchwork, a poultice applied onto a wound that might soothe the pain for a while but that pain is not banished, it is merely biding its time. It will return. In its waiting it is just growing more potent. In fact, the pain will be worsened by the fact that you have provided a contrast now. You were merely a tool of the world. However, even that is wrong. A tool presumes a wielder, a wielder presumes intent, intent presumes awareness and awareness presumes importance. You are not important. Your presence is not notes by anything. Your life is not a speck of dust. It just might as well not be. Remove yourself from the cycle of existence and you will see that there is no change. Remove your species and in a few centuries you will never have been. In fact, in this time period there will be no centuries. For that is a word you have given to the passage of time to mark your place in it. The chiming of a clock is important for he who wishes to know where they are in the river of time. The river does not care to be measured and when you are gone it will just flood up and be itself again, without your stubbornness in trying to create bounds for it.

I don’t claim to know what the true academic definition of nihilism is. I never studied it. The above words are just my feeble attempt of evoking the same feelings and thoughts that I have passed through. They have failed to do so but then they have to fail. Words in themselves are, at least for me, never enough to convey what emotions and thoughts are. Words are limited by a linearity of structure that thoughts do not have. The human imagination just leaps from one idea to another and does this constantly and we just get glimpses of it. True understanding is not possible, for me at least. It is a chorus of voices, sometimes talking to each other, sometimes to the part that I identify as the self and sometimes just screaming. In joy, in horror or just because they are bored, it is difficult to parse the reason why.

Let us leave that to the side though. Nihilism. What is it? It is in simple, a sweet seductive call. Leading you to the rock-strewn shore of cynicism where the broken husk of hope lies and asking you, pleading you, don’t. Just don’t. That is where the beauty and horror of nihilism lies. It asks you to simply refrain. Refrain from all that is hard, that is painful, that is burdensome. Throw all that weight into the sea and just lie down. Close your eyes and become oblivion. If nothing matters why try. Why spend a lifetime trying when in the end it is fated to be erased, so as to never have been? If the work of your bruised and bloodied hands is fated to be forgotten, to be destroyed then why hurt your hands. The end is predestined, why struggle against it. This is when it asks of you the ultimate question. If you are going to be consigned to the uncaring care of oblivion in the future then why wait. Oblivion is retrospective. It doesn’t just erase you from the future, it reaches back into the past and erases all signs of your existence there. Time will ravage the land so that the witnesses of the future will be unable to even think that you ever existed and they will be right, you never did. So why wait? Just take the leap now. If after a lifetime of struggle, you are going to be erased then why wait. Why continue the struggle, just wade into the waters and drown your existence, that is its ultimate destination anyways isn’t it?

Thus, you are wooed and thus you are conquered.

Nihilism is stupid though. I know, I spent so many words and so much effort to describe it but now I say that its stupid. What the hell do I mean? I mean what I say. It is stupid. It is so bafflingly stupid because the simple answer is “So what?”. The world is fated to end. I am fated to be forgotten. My memory, my existence, it won’t matter in a given period of time. SO WHAT? I am real. My pain is real. The pain of those that are around me is real. This world is real. Even if we get into the argument that love, pain and all other emotions are just perceptions that chemicals in our brains create to explain the inputs that those around us have, SO WHAT? Does that make this any less? If this is all an illusion, if we are all in the matrix, SO WHAT?

The pain is real. It is real because of the very simple fact that we feel it. The cause, the effect, the phenomena that explain its existence, those are secondary. The pain is here and the pain is felt. That is enough to make it real. That is enough to make it important. Actions taken to soothe it are important because they affect the now and here. In a hundred years no one will remember you. Who cares? Remembrance of others is not what makes me real. I lived, I loved, I cried and I laughed. That is what makes me real. The aim in life is not to make an indelible imprint on existence, it is to make an impression on something far more important, the lives of those around us. The world is important because it contains those that see its beauty. That give purpose to its existence by theirs. The world without us, and us here is not just humans but all those that live. Its longevity is not a curse that should break us down because without those that see, this longevity may as well not be. A world unwitnessed does not exist. The world came into being when the first being with senses felt its being.

So why struggle in this world? Why continue to rebuild towers that fall to ruin, that will always fall to ruin? Because while ruination is the end. It is not the whole of the story. It is notable only because of its finality but that finality only brings greater contrast to all that follows. The existence, though a blip on the radar is beautiful and meaningful in itself. For that single blip it was. It pierced the heavens. Should we not celebrate it because it fell down? What doesn’t? One must imagine Icarus happy. For he fell down, for a moment there he flew alongside the stars. The fall may come, the fall may be inevitable but the life before it still matters. Just because we all fall does not mean we should cease the flight.

Sorry for the length.

[spookiest-semic]

I forgor how much I hate amaram, storming man

[authorofcelesti]

Out of Orbit and Into the Storm designs!

Names and descriptions:

Melody: She/Her, Rhythm-born, Bird Call. Veteran/parent

Hikari: They/She, Prophecy-born, Standard Call

Helena & Kiran: She/ They &He/Him. Dreams-born, Manta Call

Sparrow: He/Him, Assembly-born, Nightbird Call

Rose: They/Them, Prince-born, Memory Manta, Chibi

Cryal (pronounced Krill): He/they, Abyss-born, Crab Call

Moth: They/She, Duet-born, Standard Call

[epicmilly]

kaladin and syl sticker! finally finished after hours of work x) i'm decently happy with it though!

i hope my dad likes it lol

if i were to sell stickers with various fanart.. who would be interested? 👀

[habunshu]

“I can’t believe you guys are bringing up his tweets from 2014 🙄he was a minor and neurodivergent 🙄 he’s changed”

[crzyimp]

So a friend discovered Black Myth Wukong for sale on Aliexpress for about $15 and showed it to me. Both of us thought it wasn't legit(it isn't) with official photos of the real deal and the last one....well the last one is the pictures above.

I decided to test fate and bought it(shipping was SUPER cheap for me) and it came a week earlier than expected! Downside though...I'm missing the base and the second feather for the headgear. It's clearly and sloppily painted with spray paint so my new project to add to my list is to repaint this guy. I have one or two options I can go for which is:

1. I can repaint him as lego monkie kid Macaque since I have one feather

Or

2. I can attempt to make another feather and repaint him as Sun Wukong/Destined One as planned.

Since I'm on the fence, I'm letting the fandom(s) decide in a poll.

[drbtinglecannon]

oTL

HIMMEL AND FRIEREN WERE PERFECT FOR EACH OTHER BUT BEING DOOMED IS THE FUCKING POINT OF THEIR RELATIONSHIP.

IT BEING BEAUTIFUL AND IT BEING IMPOSSIBLE ARE INTRINSICALLY INTERTWINED. FUCKING. AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH

[dearherondale]

I'm afraid that I'm such a Stormlight FanTM that nowadays it's difficult for me to love other Sanderson books that aren't 1000 pages long full of build up. I may enjoy them, but damn I now am realizing how high the bar actually is.

I'm reading Tress of the Emerald See and it's so okay for me. Same with Yumi, I thought it was mid at best

send help local girlie forgot how to have fun !!!!!!!!!!!!!!

[epicmilly]

working on a sticker for my dad for father's day! after doing the lineart like 15 different times i finally was sort of happy with it but still doubting myself, but then BOOM i added color and now i'm stunned-

that goes to say, trust the process!! sometimes the journey might be hard, but if you let failure scare you off, you'll make your failure be your destination, not part of the journey. journey before destination, radiants!! *bridge four salute*

now on to shading and rendering :') oh and also syl. for some reason I'm failing to draw her for this 😭

[elishevashadow]

Not wrong. Aging is a beautiful treasure, some folks just don't see it. I didn't think I'd make it this far, and I'm still mid-20s. Maybe it's just that so many people see life as little more than a treadmill inevitably drawing them to an inescapable end. They try to run, to cling to the distance they had from the perceived end of the road. This does not work.

There is nothing wrong with aging. Aging is simply experiencing life as we journey through it. In this case as in many other cases, it's the journey that matters far more than the destination.

the older i get and the closer i am to reaching 30, the more the people around me try to deny me my age. it’s a constant ‘oh you’re just turning 29 again teehee 🤭’ or ‘dont tell your SO that, he’ll leave you for a younger model 😉’ and i just???? hate it?????????

i spent my entire teenaged years fighting for my life. i crawled through the deepest pits of my depression to cling to the promise of a life beyond that pain. i was so convinced that i was going to die young, that i would never see the grace of my age starting with a 2, let alone 3.

so im going to turn 30, and there’s not a damn thing anyone can do to stop me from loving it.

[eerna]

every few months I am legally required to go on an unhinged Noragami blogging binge just to remind you all of how deep my connection to this stupid manga runs

[cosmereplay]

Poll for current, former, or future Stormlight fanartists!

It seems that many fanartists (and even artists who make canon Stormlight art) go through a period where they've assumed that the characters are basically Fantasy White, and then there's a period of relearning what the characters look like from WoBs or other sources, and maybe even having to learn how to draw epicanthic folds and different skin tones. Judging by the stormlight tag, it's a big learning curve for a lot of people, and I'm curious what that curve is like for artists!

Since tumblr polls are anonymous, please be honest what it's been like for you as a current, former, or future Stormlight fanartist:

If none of these apply, hit reblog, then stick another copy in your drafts to see the results next week!

Please note this isn't the place to complain about whitewashed fanart (though Ash knows we also need that, just elsewhere, not here). This is specifically about the experiences of artists, and at the same time raising awareness of the features of these canonical fantasy ethnicities.

If you're an artist and you'd like to share about your own learning curve in the replies, notes, or privately via DM, go ahead!

And if this doesn't end up with at least 50% in the yeses then I'm throwing it out for self-selection bias😂😂😂

[peprallyataroogas]

Regarding the new Hazbin Hotel trailer

There's good pacing

Then there's bad pacing

Then there's "Give away your midseason twist in the first official trailer for your cartoon coming out in a month" pacing