#or maybe 2 months... yeah

[xitsensunmoon]

I'm finally almost done with my finals and I'm stresinnnnn🥲

This semester really made my hair turn grey and it's not even over yet I'm crying... Also universe thinks it was really funny to make my final deadline my birthday date💀 hilarious. Not like I'm partying or anything but damn ok...

[lucabyte]

monologue

[itsafreetrialofdeath]

multiclassed!

[buttercupshands]

rewatched Kurogiri's holiday story from ultra impact (not related to sketch at all)

(but it did inspire me)

on another note

finally!!

[ishikawayukis]

wonwoo - BOOmily outing #3

[lovesickeros]

☆ you sow; & thus you shall reap what you are owed

{☆} characters tsaritsa {☆} notes cult au, imposter au, drabble, gender neutral reader {☆} warnings blood, violence {☆} word count 0.8k

You are dying.

Gold melts into the dirt, bleeds into the very earth that you'd molded by your own hands – a familiarity you do not understand the source of – you know it to be true, yet you do not remember it as Teyvat does. It weeps, in turn, for the way you bleed upon it, the way your lungs strain for breath.

It is fury and sorrow and fear and hatred so raw that your mind buckles.

You will die.

"A dying godling and its judge, it's jury – it's executioners," The voice is hollow and cold, sweeps across your broken body like the first chill of winter, "Archons who saw themselves Gods, now brought to heel by their own hubris."

A cold hand upon your cheek, the brush of a thumb across your lip, the gentle caress of cold across your skin. You know her – you don't remember, you shouldn't recognize her but you do – and she knows you. The cold beckons and you follow, let her kindness settle in the hollow space of your chest. You want to speak, to cry and scream and rage, let the world burn around you in a fit of flames so hot even she cannot contain it – but she silences you, quiets the anger seeping into your blood, quiets Teyvat itself.

"Do not speak, little godling. Guide my hand," She is cold; her hands are not gentle, yet it is bliss compared to the callous, cruel hands that have shattered you. She is cruel and cold and brutal but she is love in the way she kisses the crown of your head. She is love in the way she is the bulwark between you and the world that has scorned you – she is fury in the way she brings them to their knees. "And I shall enact judgement most divine."

They will pray for forgiveness, and they shall find themselves wanting.

"It wasn't our fault!" They cry, but you cannot recognize the voice – it breaks and cracks like glass. "They were too human. How were we meant to know? We– we thought they were.."

Silence.

You watch your judge – the executioner, the blade that shall carve their sins into the very marrow of Teyvat, stand above you like death. As cold as winter and just as brutal. Your temple has been painted in the gold of your divine blood, and she shall complete the masterpiece with their own. The Archons shall become the grandest art in the world – this temple the canvas, their blood the paint and their bodies the palette. The cold that cuts sinew cradles you – it sings to you, whispers sweetly in your ear and carves bone from body in the same breath. The cold presses it's lips to your wrist and it cradles a heart within it's palm – judges them and finds them guilty.

It is her spear that rests between their ribs, her sword that dissects and her dagger that carves – the cold devours.

In the breadth of this divine sanctuary, the Archons dwindle. They become the pieces of a divine work of art, they bleed and bend and break upon her hands. She shakes the heavens and carves mortality into the bones of the divine – your word is Law, and you weave their deaths into the roots of Teyvat itself.

They shall know of their grand folly in every moment henceforth and longer still and they shall weep.

And as the curtain falls, as the world crumbles beneath fist and blade, she cradles your face between hands too cold – as gentle as a shard of ice between your ribs, as brutal as the kiss of gentle snowfall. The world buckles at the loss of six, but she alone does not allow it to break – you will have to mend the wounds of the world when you are well, but today you weep and Teyvat weeps with you.

And alone, the cold remains.

Stone has eroded, the wind has ceased, the flames have been extinguished, the storm has been silenced, the forests have gone quiet and the seas go still.

But the cold remains, bathed in gold.

It wraps you in thick furs, cradles you against the winter storm that brews beneath a veneer of composure. It brings you home – lets the world settle into a stillness and silence that inspires only dread and still she presses a kiss to your brow.

It is cold, but there has never been something so warm.

Where hands have broken you, she drapes you in furs, wipes away the thick gold that clings to your skin. She pieces you back together where you have been shattered, reshapes you where you have been bent – makes of you something new. Not a god and not a mortal but something wedged between them.

But you are yourself.

And you are where you belong.

They shall put you back together and you shall know only the worship worthy of the divine. They shall carve this world into your image, tear out and burn away the rot that festers.

All you need to do is say the word and they shall be your tools to make this world your own.

One word and those who wronged you shall burn, too.

Just one word. That's all it takes, and they shall take away your pain.

[fraternum-momentum]

WE'RE GETTING EVICTED FROM OUR APARTMENT.

[yourpalpothos]

ANXIETY!!!! I get enough of her on the daily lol

[glacier-shrimp]

Done with our favorite Spider-Boy! Spiderling? Spider... What was his name again?

Avengers paper cutout 6/?

[burningfaith]

ok, I tried.

[pixelatedraindrops]

Yuma Month: Day 6: Comfort

Keep nice and warm when you’re recovering 💜

[imgonnagetyoubacktv]

it's not sinking in that today might be the last day in my house and town for many months to come

[heynhay]

just saw ur post. UR QUEUED OUT UNTIL MARCH?? HOLY SHIT yesssssss (i very much enjoy ur work)

yes I’m a freak of a different nature

[i3utterflyeffect]

Unfortunately for Purple, it's going to be hard to inconspicuously wear wings in stick city. A poncho and a jacket blend in well enough, but Purple is gonna have a bit more difficulty with that.

oh purple is very aware! fortunately after they shed they can just take their wings off.

beforehand though...

let's just say they were both under the impression that purple was just gonna have to deal with being a beetle

[pwippy]

the penultimate goal is to become the matpat of tumblr alien stage. the ultimate goal is to actually be right with my theories

[sydney-carton-of-sour-milk]

The Many Illustrators of A Tale of Two Cities 7: A. A. Dixon

"'Collins' Clear-Type Press, let me ask you a question.'"

This is a very long post.

This week's edition has, in my research, become quite the edition.

Sadly, this image is the best source for the cover wrapper illustration that I could find.

You are likely familiar with Arthur Augustus Dixon's illustrations for the 1905 Collins Pocket Edition of A Tale of Two Cities. Several of them are very common to find in Internet searches and articles about the book, if not other editions of the book itself.

But the question raised by my research for this week's edition is: Are you familiar with all of them?

Thing is, as the source above states (read the whole article if you have the time, it's very interesting!), Dixon created twelve illustrations for this novel.

And sure enough, this source from the Internet Archive and this source from @oldillustrations (hello!) both have eleven of the same illustrations - with the twelfth presumably being for the wrapper, as seen in this source (previously cited) from the Victorian Web.

Alright, so that's three separate sources, all with (effectively) the same set of elaborate illustrations from 1905. Neat!

...

...but if you start counting...

...you'll notice that this seems...

...like a lot more than twelve!

Basically, there are five illustrations by A. A. Dixon that are completely unaccounted for in any of the three sources previously cited.

For the purposes of this post, the cover wrapper is considered #0 and is not pictured in these banners.

In full-size set of illustrations in this post, this source from Google Books is the source of four of those mystery illustrations:

#3: "'He stared at her with a fearful look.'" #6: "'Drive him fast to his tomb.'" #7: "He said, 'Farewell!'" #12: "'She appeared with folded arms.'" #9 ("'Patriots and friends, we are ready!'") and #11 ("'You are consigned to La Force.'") are sourced from Google Books in the full-size versions in this post simply because the Internet Archive versions of those two illustrations had cropping issues.

To me, this is mystery enough on its own. Why would another version of the book suddenly have more than the originally-stated number of illustrations by this artist? Especially considering that the Google Books source does not have #13 ("''I know you, Evremonde!''") - why would it be missing one of the "main" set?

It gets even more interesting.

As you'll notice in the banner, we're still one off: Keen-eyed observers of the full-size set of illustrations might have already noticed that #14 ("'Carton and the spy returned.'") looks a bit different than the rest of them - a bit like what happened in the previous edition of this series!

That's because that Dixon illustration comes from this completely random source - a post from a blog called the Paperback Palette dating back to 2018 - that I happened across on Google Images of all places while sitting on an airplane trying to set up this post last week!

And to top it all off, that source is missing #6!

At this point, if your first instinct is, reasonably, that perhaps Dixon didn't actually illustrate these extra five and that it was someone imitating him for later editions, then know that that was my instinct too - until I (dare I say it again) checked those signatures!!!

(I edited the colors to prevent flashing.)

All five of those illustrations bear Dixon's signature, so it's safe to assume that they are A. A. Dixon originals - from 1905, even.

Interestingly, #s 1, 10, 13, 15, and 16 don't have signatures! Does this mean anything? Probably not - as an artist myself, I often forget to put my own signature - but still, I can't resist mentioning it!

So the most likely explanation here is simply that the publishing house originally commissioned A. A. Dixon for more than twelve illustrations and then held on to some of them, eventually choosing to publish them in other editions. Still, we can't say for sure.

And as to why some are missing from the more "complete" sets - human error, most likely!

If you scrub through the Google Books source, you'll notice that #s 11 and 12 actually repeat (one even changes color, which I have no explanation for) - it's most likely either that the book was accidentally printed with repeats of #s 11 and 12 where 13 and 14 were supposed to go or that the person scanning this edition made a similar error.

As an aside, it's so interesting that the illustrations are evenly spaced throughout the book - I had not noticed that until now!

And as for the Paperback Palette source, it's most likely that the blogger accidentally skipped over an image while combing through their edition or just glossed over it when posting the batch (I understand that from experience!) We can see this by adding up the letters in some of the illustrations' captions - doing so reveals that the letters are meant to go to P, the sixteenth letter of the alphabet.

Thus, one must be missing! Case closed!

Except... It's actually (going by both the chronology of the book and the order in which this set was found in Google Books) missing the wrong letter! Here, it seems that In the Google Books source, #7 in the full set is given the seventh letter in the alphabet, G - whereas in the Paperback Palette source, "#7" is labeled as the sixth, F:

This implies not only that #6 is absent from the Paperback Palette source but also that there is a missing mystery illustration located between this source's H and K - that is to say, before or after #9!

EXCEPT... For one, this isn't the only inconsistency I've noticed - there are several places where the letters seem shifted in a strange way. I've seen #2 listed as "C" and #9 listed both as "H" and "I2i" (???), just as two examples. (My theory is that the cover wrapper and the frontispiece may be at play here, but who knows?)

More importantly, though, it seems that, for some mysterious reason, all of the sources with relatively consistent use of these letters (i.e. all but the Victorian Web) - even the sources with only eleven interior illustrations - still give #15 in the full set the fifteenth letter, O. Which, of course, may make all of this pretty moot anyway.

Dare I say..."Oh."

Suffice it to say, just as much as major sources like the Internet Archive and Google Books are vital to this sort of research and preservation work, so are smaller websites and bloggers! After all, without the Victorian Web and the Paperback Palette, we as collective netizens likely wouldn't have ever known about the cover wrapper or illustration #14 (not to mention that the versions of the illustrations from the set posted by @oldillustrations have by far the best image quality and standardization that I've found! Please go check them out if you haven't yet!).

As for the reasons behind Collins' Clear-Type Press not publishing all of the illustrations from the beginning (if that's the explanation we're to go with here), I suppose the question I'd like to ask is:

why? why would you put us through this?

& the standard endnote for all posts in this series:

This post is intended to act as the start of a forum on the given illustrator, so if anyone has anything to add - requests to see certain drawings in higher definition (since Tumblr compresses images), corrections to factual errors, sources for better-quality versions of the illustrations, further reading, fun facts, any questions, or just general commentary - simply do so on this post, be it in a comment/tags or the replies!💫