#much to think about much to ponder

[sunder-soul]

(wrong blog wrong character etc etc but is anyone else out there finding the wig they put sebastian stan in for the new bucky/winter soldier thing like one of the most laughable things they've ever seen. Gotta be the worst wig I've seen since sir sam winchesters legendary old man glow down)

[naiad-r]

https://www.tumblr.com/braimin/762716544873758720?source=share

My hc is that he uses corsets as back support because he has chronic back pain ever since Drum Island ← chronic back pain haver

Anon, your mind??

Please don't mind me, I'm adopting your headcanon.

[redwoodforestwiki]

i cant believe im breaking my not using tumblr streak for this but its 4am and im so emotionally bamboozled by yesterday i cant sleep

im just so PERPLEXED and CONFUSED like im just overthinking everything i guess but what was THAT like am i crazy. am i CRAZY. probably but the question is if i am what do i do about it

[h3ck]

I finally made a goodreads account bc my memory is so bad I will immediately forget any books I have read (or want to read) and once I remove them from kindle app they cease to exist because I have not mastered object permanence and my mind is an abyss

[athousandsuns2010]

thinking about the name kerry....

[anetherealpoetess]

the fact ... the fact (!!!!!) when annatar shifts into halbrand he is kneeling ... literally kneeling .... before galadriel. the first time she sees sauron in his halbrand form again, he is on his knees before her. devout. worshipful.

[egg24108]

i want a fic about them on my desk by thursday. capiche? /j

[dipperscavern]

let's talk about warming cregan's cock 😇👫

like you have so keenly established, mf can not sit still. this is the warden of the north we are referring to. the wolf of the north. he is well experienced in battle, a brilliant swordsman and lord of his house. he's used to abstaining during battle and experiencing dire circumstances over patience. surely he'd be able to let his pretty girl warm his cock?

WRONG 🙅‍♀️ someone, please fetch me a comedically large red buzzer to slam. thank you.

he's so restless. your stoic, burly, reserved, and patient man - reduced to ragged breaths and gritting his teeth because he can't sit still. here sits his pretty girl, batting her lashes at him, "cregan, can i please?" and it starts out well enough.

but you're so warm. so sweet. maybe he should be working on something - battle plans or lordy duties that define his bloodline. cregan's got an active mind, ever analyzing and preparing. he's hyperaware of everything in that moment - the way you slightly move your hips, wriggling in his lap. when he makes a comment about it, you just pout, telling him you were "adjusting." 🙄 yeah girl okay you just wanted to feel the godly girth 3000

the way you softly sigh admist the quiet chamber. maybe you do something as simple as sneeze - but when you do, you clench around cregan. and he's losing his shitttt.

can someone please find the meme of the guy sitting at a desk with his blood vessels about to burst as he's sweating? because that is our lord stark.

he tries breathing through it, for your sake. i imagine you would be the one to propose it, for whatever desire and circumstance brought you to the moment. cregan is trying :(( it's just so hard. like him, TEHE. all he wants to do is flip you over and ravage you. just leave little bites and nicks along his pretty girl's flesh :((

this is torture for him.

- 🔄❄️

reverse. elsa. anon. WHERE HAVE YOU BEEN? BED EMPTY, NO NOTE, WINTER GONE.

okay but seriously i am so so so sorry you got lost in my inbox. please i beg of you, come back!! the ponderer has returned, and we miss u!! REVERSE ELSA ANON IF U CSN HEAR US PLEASE SAVE US i call out to the winds. if you return, you shall never be lost again. this i swear to you 💔✊

ANYWAYS. CREGAN STARK COCKWARMING. here’s your buzzer m’dear 🚨 when you suggest the idea, cregan is a bit perplexed. you don’t want him to make you cum as many times as you want? but you bat your lashes and ask so sweetly, and you don’t ask for much. plus, cregan is a warrior. a hardened, battle surviving lord — he can stay still for his pretty wife.

or so he thinks.

because once you sink down on him, his grip on your hips is like iron. you’re warm and wet and so inviting, and you don’t want cregan to move? gods have mercy. cregan is usually pretty held together, but his breathing turns all ragged and his gaze is glued to where his [REDACTED] meets your [CONTENT DELETED]. and even worse, you’re relishing in his loss of self control.

even so, he tries to be so good for you.

it gets easier over time, and when cregan feels you relax and sigh against him, he thinks it’s not so bad after all. cregan is in control, and things are okay. until a few minutes later, you sneeze. you clench around him, and he grits his teeth, lax grip on your hips tightening once more as he fights the urge to move.

“This is torture,” he breathes, trying with all his might to stay still for you :( <3

[flea-palace]

why does no one talk about how erik plays the resurrection of lazarus to lure christine into his lair...lazarus who was dead & brought back to life...aka the living dead aka a living corpse do you see what im saying here do you understand

[ministarfruit]

salt outfit swap

[royalarchivist]

Pac: Oh, Nenê... How cute... 🥺💕

After dying to an atomic creeper in a cave and stressing over potentially losing all his items, Pac returns home to set his spawn and receives a sweet surprise:

His cat falls asleep on top of him and purrs when he goes to bed :')

[mamawasatesttube]

superboy (1994) #28 // action comics (1938) #767

"You don't understand! This isn't something you're given -- it's something you earn! If you don't know that, you don't deserve to wear the symbol!"

"Please. Let me show the big man... that I deserve the 'S'. Please."

man. mae really did a number on him, huh?

[toomuchracket]

u guys think matty ever ripped the piss out of ross for dating someone who previously dated logan paul or

[lostwords-found]

Oh god. Okay. SO. The Protocol red string board is going places and I am chewing drywall.

Note: I've been working on this post for a few days and nothing in here involves episode 27--I don't talk about episodes before they're out for everyone, so no worries about patreon spoilers.

Quick recap of some suspicions about Protocolverse I've written about previously:

1. I think this universe runs on a kind of balance of good & bad luck (or suffering and happiness), and that it's possible--under certain circumstances--to pawn the bad stuff off on other people and keep the good that arises to balance it out. I suspect a big piece of Protocol's overarching plot is going to be about the different ways people go about trying to come out ahead in that bargain.

2. I think some alchemists figured out how to attach bad luck and/or other similarly abstract ills into physical form.

3. I think they were trying to use this to cast out bad luck to other worlds (including that of Archives) and get good luck back. I think this is how the Fears got to Archives in the first place.

4. I think the books and coin in the tomb from MAG 23 got there this way, probably with the involvement of Protocolverse Albertus Magnus. The year on the coin -- 1279 -- is the year before Albertus Magnus died.

We'll come back to that stuff in a bit.

There's an apparently minor detail that was nagging at me recently: in TMAGP 22 Hans Berger specifically mentions having switched to silver wires in his experiments, and this change enabling his breakthroughs. It's through these silver wires, implanted directly into Herr Schmidt's brain, that he later receives the desperate telegraph signals that appear to be from a previously unheard part of Schmidt's brain.

By itself, that wouldn't ping any alarms. Silver wires are in fact what Berger used in real life; silver's highly conductive so if you're trying to read electrical impulses from the brain, probably a good choice of material. But the writing is very deliberate about mentioning them, and coming only three episodes after another historical letter about a scientist also working with silver -- Newton's tree in TMAGP 19 was a fantastical variant of a Tree of Diana, dendritic silver -- Berger's wires start feeling like maybe they're not just there for accuracy.

If, as it appears from Newton's work, consuming silver in certain forms can cause a new kind of consciousness to arise--and also, uh, turn you into a tree--what might implanting silver wires in a human brain do? Is the silver contacting or awakening something that was already there, or is it putting something there? Was that desperate OUT OUT OUT message really from half of Herr Schmidt's mind--or from something in the wire itself that was trying to get out?

That would be weird though. I mean--what, Protocolverse silver's inherently evil or something? But then I got back to thinking about alchemists trying to transmute things into precious metals. Gold's the one we mostly think of, but silver was also of interest. Which in real life is where you got stuff like the tree of Diana--alchemists thought that was a precursor to the philosopher's stone.

So... then I start thinking, if I was right in my other post that alchemists were figuring out how to put evil / misfortune / suffering into a physical form that could be used to transfer it somewhere else, what if silver was involved in that? What if they were either turning misfortune into silver, or trapping it in silver that already existed?

What if they did that, meaning to send it away, and some of that silver made its way into use?

Then I started looking some stuff up.

Did you know silver used to be mined in the Black Forest, in Germany? One mine there had a name meaning "Blessing of God." That mine dates back to the 1200s--Albertus Magnus's lifetime.

Did you know that starting in the 1600s, the G strings on high quality violins were typically wrapped in silver wire?

Do you know why movies are called the silver screen? In the 1920s, literal silver was used to make cinema screens. This fell out of favor as other cheaper designs were worked out, BUT in the 2000s silver has come back into use a bit because it works well for 3D movies. I would not be surprised at all if the screen that Tom went to see Voyeur on had silver in it.

Did you know that in the early 90s there was a specific plant in the UK that manufactured CDs covered with a layer of silver? This later turned out to cause some problems as the silver reacted with sulfur (oh hai, another alchemically significant substance!) and slowly degraded the discs. In real life these CDs were manufactured up through 1993. Per TMAGP 10, Mr Bonzo made his debut in '96 (the interview is from 2021 and is the 25th anniversary of Mr Bonzo's first appearance). The two times Mr Bonzo has appeared in person he's been summoned by playing a CD of his theme song. I wonder where and when those CDs were manufactured...

Did you notice the caterer Lady Mowbray hired in TMAGP 15 mentions that his company did silver service events? Betcha that particular feast was served on literal silver platters.

...I'm starting to think it's a really good thing ink5oul didn't end up tattooing Gwen with that silver spoon.

Okay. This all seems like there's maybe a theme here, but let's take a step back. Some materials have just been used for a lot of things throughout history; it could be coincidence. IF the above is actually on the mark--IF these were all intentional majorly-plot-relevant inclusions of Things Wot Involve Silver--where else would we expect to see this cropping up in the story? Because the topic of silver has barely been raised directly at all; I'm extrapolating wildly here, mostly on the basis of a couple episodes.

Well, here's a thought: silver was used in everyday currency for a long, long time. If there was a bunch of Evil Silver floating around surely someone would have stuck it into some money at some point. "Ill fortune" in the most literal possible sense, or whole new meaning to the phrase "bad penny" -- there are various bad jokes there that more or less write themselves. Though whoever was doing this would have had to to mark the bad money somehow so that they could avoid it...

Hey, um, remember how the OIAR's offices are in the building that housed the Royal Mint for like 150 years?

Actually, while we're on that subject, here's a funny little tidbit: Before it moved to Royal Mint Court, the Royal Mint was in the Tower of London for several centuries--its first home after being centralized. Wanna guess what year the Royal Mint was established in the Tower of London? Go on. Guess.

1279.

The same. Fucking. Year. As was on that coin waaaaaay back in MAG 23. Which was a thing I had noticed a while back when looking at the Germany eps, but I hadn't been considering a "what if some metals can be Bad" angle at that point and had just written it off as an odd coincidence.

Which I mean, it's probably still just a weird coincidence, I'm building this entire elaborate framework out of assumptions on top of assumptions on top of -- hang the fuck on, let me look something up real quick, I've gotta be misremembering--

I'm not misremembering! Isaac Newton was the Master of the Royal Mint for the last 30 years of his life.

Cool. Okay. So that's--hm. I think I'm genuinely starting to convince myself none of this is a coincidence.

Then I start poking through Wikipedia, and you wanna know some other interesting things? One, Newton himself apparently saw his work in economics as a continuation of his alchemical work. And two, during his tenure at the Royal Mint, he put limits on how much gold people were allowed to exchange for silver, and this led to a silver shortage. Because apparently, when other countries imported goods to them, the British paid for those goods in silver coins. When they exported goods to other countries, though?

They would only take payment in gold.

And there it is--there's the exact outsourcing scheme I was looking for. Stick all your suffering and pain and misfortune into your money, use that money to pay other countries, and get only the good stuff back. That... sounds really believable for the British Empire, honestly.

So I really think I might have some decent guesses on the historical stuff at play here. That only goes just so far though, because these days, silver doesn't really get used in coinage much.

Know where it does get used? Circuits. Electronics.

Computers.

If I'm right, whatever machinery the Mint used to store the intangible evils of the world in physical coinage for exportation, I would guess the OIAR is now using to instill all of those evils into FR3-D1 instead. One all-containing artifact of misfortune.

What the endgame is there, what the government gets out of it, I'm still not 100% sure--but I can't help thinking about Jonah's line in MAG 160 that Jon is not the Archivist but the Archive. That he is the record of fear, the physical embodiment of it.

There's people wanting to outsource absolutely fucking everything to AI these days, I guess.

SO THAT'S BEEN MY WEEK this is what my brain does when I have to drive all the way across the US alone, apparently. How are you all?

[nyaskitten]

the only things that matter in life are boobs and killing the rich

[shorthaltsjester]

me as an imogen’s selfishness built from her isolation is one of the most interesting things about her truther (which, before someone vagues me on twitter . i don’t think this doesn’t mean she can’t and hasn’t been altruistic but that’s a separate post) + someone who loves when my favourite characters have their lives threatened and/or they die. i am eating well after last night’s ep.

as someone who cares for the world of exandria and despises everytime ashton opens his mouth about the gods and clocked into ashton and ludinus wearing the same hat a while ago . having to listen to them talk about how they’re better than ludinus because (checks notes) they want to do exactly what ludinus wants to but their motives (the exact same kind of trauma that made him tell ludinus to “grow up” . me BEGGING him to take his own advice) are better ??? i’m not eating as well but what can you do.

my grip on this campaign as a completionist who Is enjoying cr even if i don’t think this is a particularly strong campaign is truly resting on the shoulders of imogen impulsive-and-single-minded temult, fearne “if the world’s burning i want a front row seat” calloway, orym “only member of the group capable of a thought for the ‘little guys’ the party claims to stand for” of the air ashari, and chet who is there for vibes (and to protect his family). also shout out to braius for joining the one party where betraying them would make him easily break into the top 3 morally upstanding members of the party.