#porous flow

[fuckyeahfluiddynamics]

Venus Flower Basket Sponges

Venus flower basket sponges have an elaborate, vase-like skeleton pocked with holes that allow water to pass through the organism. A recent numerical study looked at how the sponge's shape deflects incoming (horizontal) ocean currents into a vertical flow the sponge can use to filter out food. (Image credit: sponges - NOAA, simulation - G. Falcucci et al.; research credit: G. Falcucci et al.; via APS Physics) Read the full article

[literaryvein-reblogs]

A List of "Ugly" Words

to try to include in your next poem/story. This is a compilation of words mentioned in articles and polls I found online deemed "ugly" or "gross", or are the "most hated".

Bulbous - fat, round, or bulging.

Chunky - bulky and solid.

Curd - a soft, white substance formed when milk sours, used as the basis for cheese.

Engorge - cause to swell with blood, water, or another fluid.

Fester - to become septic; suppurate. To become rotten and offensive to the senses. To become worse or more intense, especially through long-term neglect or indifference.

Hurl - to throw (an object) with great force.

Lugubrious - looking or sounding sad and dismal.

Maggot - a soft-bodied legless larva, especially that of a fly found in decaying matter.

Moist - slightly wet; damp or humid.

Mucus - a slimy substance secreted by mucous membranes and glands for lubrication, protection, etc.

Ooze - to slowly trickle or seep out of something; flow in a very gradual way.

Phlegm - the thick viscous substance secreted by the mucous membranes of the respiratory passages, especially when produced in excessive or abnormal quantities.

Pus - a thick yellowish or greenish opaque liquid produced in infected tissue, consisting of dead white blood cells and bacteria with tissue debris and serum.

Putrid - decaying or rotting and emitting a fetid smell.

Seepage - the slow escape of a liquid or gas through porous material or small holes.

Slobber - have saliva dripping copiously from the mouth.

Slurp - to eat or drink (something) with a loud sloppy sucking noise.

Squelch - to make a soft sucking sound such as that made by walking heavily through mud.

Squirt - cause (a liquid) to be ejected from a small opening in a thin, fast stream or jet.

Yolk - the yellow internal part of a bird's egg, which is surrounded by the white, is rich in protein and fat, and nourishes the developing embryo.

If any of these words make it into your poem/story, please tag me. Or leave a link in the replies. I'd love to read them!

More: Word Lists

[naffeclipse]

The Eel's Hips

Vigilante Mer!Reader x Detective Mer!Sun and Moon

Commission Info

My dear friend @o-cinnamonstickz was so lovely to commission me for a little scenario from Pearl Eye! I adored writing this one. A little chase and a few tricks and smooches are just what a little fishie needs, right?

Content Warning for suggestive themes.

———

You don’t mind the narrow chasms that spill and cut through the depths just beyond the coral reef where sunlight and twilight mers mingle and swim side by side, but it is not your favorite place to escape to. The only good thing is that you’re not alone. You slip away from your two favorite mers as they pursue you through the darkness. Slivers of moonlight reach slender fingers down into these depths, and when you glance upwards, the rocky edges of the chasm catch the slightest light. 

Always, you are at a disadvantage. Their eyes are sharpened in the darkness where your vision is dulled, and their senses seek out every ripple in the water while you twist and snap your tail to escape.

They are not pleased with you, which is a strange occurrence—you’ve only ever been greeted with love and adoration. Who could resist you? Still, they hunt to catch you like a net scooping up fish.

You have never known defeat when you are still breathing. Blood pumps hot through your veins and your fins flicker with determination. You cut between a tight press of oceanic walls and keep swimming. 

A smile spreads over your lips. Now, where to make your little rendezvous with the protectors of the Reef? There are so many scenic places down here in the darkness and the full moon is romantic if the depths let you catch a glimpse of it.

Where indeed. Your hair spills down your back, tied up in red algae leaves with a pair of golden seashells that softly click together. Flicking your head, you spy a passageway. Water flows through you. Almost breathless far under the surface, you dart towards the opportunity and lead your boys along with a flick of your dark, translucent fins. Wherever you go, they follow. They can’t help it. You are simply too precious.

A flash of deep blue and silver scales catch on the brief light falling from the darkness—one of your favorite mers. You stow yourself away into a chamber with one narrow exit, tucking yourself against the rough, porous stone. Briefly, you wonder if perhaps these chasms were formed by volcanic vents spewing molten earth into the sea. 

Your eyes catch movement. A dark, long but lithe shape floating into your hiding spot. You close your mouth and hold your sleek white tail, smaller than your pursuers, very still. Through the blue haze of the deep, one of your favorite mers slips inside the rocky chamber. A gaze of crimson pierces the darkness. You can’t help but admire the deep blue photophores dotted upon his chest.

For a heartbeat, his head swivels while he combs the darkness. Your watch, your pulse beating in your throat. Can he feel it through the water? 

Then he stops.

Moon says your name in a soft growl, angry but deep underneath, you taste his relief in how he snaps his tail. In one moment, he’s upon you. You inhale water sharply when his hands find your shoulders and pis you to the chamber water. A devilish smile plays along your lips. His tail floats above your own as if to remind you how much bigger and stronger he is than your pretty little fins.

“Did you think you could hide from me?” His teeth flash in the darkness. Shark-like incisors gleam like pearls and trigger a skip in the rhythm of your heart. But you are no minnow and he only wishes to take a bite, not devour you whole.

Unlike his eldest brother.

“Me? No, never,” you gasp dramatically. Slowly, you smirk at how tightly he holds you in place like he needs to get the best look at you in the darkness. “I could have only hoped to have been captured by such a handsome mer as yourself. Did you follow little old me into the depths?”

He snarls a low sound which vibrates throughout the chamber. Your eyes widen for the briefest moment before you draw them half-lidded, seductive.

“This is where you fled. Of course, I followed.” His claws are sharp and long but he draws his touch slowly down your arms. Less restrictive, less forceful, but no less domineering. His looming pose is clear: you are not leaving.

So you must improvise.

“Of course,” you simper. Moon glowers at your low, suggestive tone. “How could you not, squid?”

“Where were you going?” He asks, eyeing you as if you might pull a trident from behind your back and strike, but you would never do such a thing to him. 

“Somewhere more private for just you, and me,” you drawl blithely. You reach up a hand and find the end of his nautilus shell. It conceals the back of his head and his tentacles behind the pearly shell. You have seen them before. You have even felt them before, and they did not leave you with sucker-shaped bruises. “Let me see you.”

He says your name in a warning but his body betrays him while you gently slip back the shell and find one deep blue tendril to twirl around your finger. The slender, sensitive appendage wraps around your palm, caressing the lines that decorate it. A single row of bright yellow suckers touches your flesh, muscular and slippery.

“So dishy,” you hum and feel him shudder when you caress his tentacle. “And to think you were trying to hide from me.”

“I was hunting you,” he counters, but he falls silent when you press your lips to the curled coil of himself. You feel his muscles tighten and squeeze as if you found a sweet spot. 

You slowly lift your head. His expression has gradually softened in the darkness. Slowly, he leans in closer, his eyes on your mouth. You lift your other hand as his grip loosens on your arms. Trailing the edge of his nautilus shell, you lean in closer, your tongue drawing along your mouth and keeping his gaze locked right there. 

You flash a wicked grin then pull his nautilus shell down over his eyes and make a dive for it. He grunts in surprise. You snap your fins and in moments, wriggle through the narrow escape through the other end of the chamber. 

A bubble of laughter fills your chest, hot and boiling at the escape, and you look towards another opening in the chasm. The silver light is ethereal and ghostly, but it unfortunately catches on a large, bright mer in the darkness. Before you can stop yourself, you slip right into the arms of your other favorite mer.

“There you are,” Sun says, and he holds you tightly. You glance up and down his beautiful form. His body is rich with gold and scarlet scales, and his frills span out in brilliant arrays like flares of sunlight across the surface of the sea. “I thought I almost lost you.”

Twisting upon the rapid turn of events, you tilt your head and offer a dazzling smile worth many, many undersea riches.

“Here I am,” you spread your arms enough to ease out of his tight clasp. Immediately, his blue eyes narrow in suspicion while you lightly flick your tail to begin circling. Though he is much more your size and far more deadly with his teeth and claws, you’re not unlike a shark circling a bleeding fish. You brush your scales against his. He twists, his expression catching with a burning heat before he cools himself as you slide back within his reach. “What are you going to do with me now?”

“Take you back to the Reef,” he says, his voice firm and serious. You chuckle at his intensity which still lingers with the burn of your touch. “It’s not safe outside of it. Come back with us.”

“Oh, this little chase was just so you and your brother could take me home?” You grin and swim up to him. He freezes under the closeness of your batting eyelashes. “You only had to say ‘please’.”

His lips part, soundless for a moment. Preening, you softly flick your hair over your shoulder and start to twist away from him.

Before you can slip out of the chasm and into another hiding hole, his voice softly touches you.

“Please.” Sun takes you by the wrist to drag you gently back against him. You fall still when his tail brushes against yours, his many frilled adornments tickling your scales and waist. “Stay.”

“How sweet,” you murmur, fighting the shiver that threatens to run through your body and expose just how much you love the press of his chest to your back. You free his fingers from your arm. Turning his hand open to face the moonlight, you draw circles in his palm. “Much to your disappointment, I must decline.”

“It’s dangerous,” he argues gently, his lips nearing the shell of your ear. He carefully tucks himself against your shoulder, mindful of his spiky frills adorning his head filled with venom. “You shouldn’t be out here, picking fights you can’t win.”

You lift your head high. Your hair sweeps around your other shoulder and the weight of seashells in your hair remind you why you stole them from your two favorite mers in the first place.

They mean too much to you.

“I’m hurt, starfish,” you pout your lips. “Have a little faith in me! Who else could have gotten as deep as I have?”

He parts his lips to argue, and when he does, you press your kiss to his mouth and silence him. A soft sound catches in his throat. Interrupted, much to your pleasure, he holds to your affection as if you hooked him, bait, line, and sinker.

Breaking his hold, you dart away and swim backward. Your tail flows down in front of you while you flick away from his reaching hands. His blue eyes widen in your swift departure. Strangely, however, he floats in place without pursuing. As if there’s no need. 

Smugly, you flash a smile at him in the dark of the chasm.

“Don’t worry, you can’t get enough of me so we’ll meet again soon enough—”

A cool set of hands, large and clawed, wrap around your wrists, holding them up as if to spin you in a dance. He stops you dead in the water. A quiet gasp leaves you as your eyes flicker back to Moon. He glowers down at you, his eyes fierce and scarlet. A brilliant silver light outlines him sharply like he sliced out bits of moonbeams and set them into his scales.

“Going somewhere?” he rasps dangerously.

A chuckle falls from your lips that may echo with the slightest bit of nervousness. He looms over you, holding you firmly despite the slight flick of resistance you give.

“Caught you.” Sun laughs a hearty, cheerful sound. You shouldn’t enjoy it so much when he claims victory. 

He gently flicks his tail and glides closer. The moonlight catches on his many frills but a gentle, golden light sweeps up his body and chases away the dark as he swims towards you. His hands glide up the base of your tail and sweep slowly to your waist, where his hands find purchase around your hips. Against your will, a pleasant shudder rolls down your spine. Sun grins.

The consequences you sow are more often pain-inducing and life-threatening, but for once, you don’t mind being so out of your depth. So long as it is where your two favorite mers are at.

“Oh no,” you breathe, “whatever will you two do with poor little me? I’m just a small fish in a big ocean!”

You curl your fingers, your wrists caught tight in Moon’s grasp. The deep blue mer leans close to the nape of your neck. His teeth graze the sensitive flesh just below your hairline until your shoulders shiver. 

“Come back with us,” he rasps.

The end of your tailfins brush against Sun as he holds you in place. His thumbs draw circles along the skin above your scales, and he admires your small body. All the while, his grin presses in closer. You part your lips to throw out a few teases, but he hooks your mouth in a kiss, and you sink deeper into their affection.

Sun pulls back just enough to say, “Please.”

Your insides have turned molten and their light mingles over you, dousing you in beautiful brilliance.

Perhaps you can stay, just for a little while with your two favorite mers.

[teaboot]

Yo I haven't done it in forever so I forgot that working at a sex shop gives you superpowers

1. The We-Vibe Tango is a low frequency and fully waterproof rechargeable bullet vibrator that we used to sell for about $150. A new model came out about a year ago so it's on sale now online for $47. Can confirm that shipping is discreet and they have a really good warranty, just keep the packaging.

*(I'm not sponsored to say that and nobody is paying me rn, it's just a legit good deal.)

2. There are essentially three bases used for lube: Water, Oil, and Silicone. Oil breaks down any materials other than glass or metal, and Silicone breaks down Silicone toys and sometimes condoms. Water is safe for everything but tends to dry out, so people don't like it- but if you add water or spit, drying water-based lube will slick right back up.

3. If your water-based lube has given you any itching, tightening, or burning sensations, you probably have a chemical sensitivity. Obviously everyone has different preferences, but my number one recommendation is Water Slide- it's a super reasonable price compared to other lubes, it feels natural, it's incredibly gentle on the skin, and it doesn't stain sheets.

**(Again, I'm not being paid for this. By anyone. At all. I'm just sick of hearing people come in and tell me they don't use lube cause it hurts, or that they're using fucking coconut oil in their vagina. Please, God, don't put coconut oil in your vagina.)

4. A lot of massage oils use almond oil to suspend other ingredients, and warming products sometimes use cinnamon. Always, always, always check people's allergies.

5. You can buy toys off cheap sites if you want, just be wary of quality and ALWAYS read the product description. I personally wouldn't buy anything that isn't Silicone, stainless steel, or glass, because unlike jelly, plastic, "fantaflesh", and Silicon, (which is NOT Silicone!!!) They are non-porous, sterile, and don't melt in contact with each other. This means that as long as you clean them properly and don't use the wrong lubes, they will not hold bacteria or break down, which makes them safe for both you to reuse and your partner/s to share. (And to switch between front door/back door, so long as you wash before going back to front.)

6. Cotton and polyester bondage rope are cheap and great to practice with. Silk sounds fancy and is very strong but be advised that a lot of silk rope is "Silk(TM)", not actual silk. Read the product description. (I personally am reluctant to spend more than about $2 per foot for mass-produced synthetic rope, but could be persuaded to pay more for ACTUAL silk, nylon, handmade ropes, or especially attractive colors/patterns/textures.) You want your rope to be at least as thick as your thumb and layered to avoid lacerations, and taut (not stretchy) to be sure you're in control of how much pressure you're putting on.

7. Choking someone by pressing on the windpipe is painful and inefficient. If you want to, stay very, very light, as it's a very delicate area. If you want a head rush, press down on the sides of the windpipe, just below the corners of their lower jaw. You will feel a pulse there. That's the carotid artery. It carries oxygen to the brain. Pressing there will allow them to breathe, but will still "choke" the air going to their head. It's faster and painless. Only hold this for 3-4 seconds if you lack experience. It takes just under 15 seconds to make someone pass out from a blood choke, and after that you risk causing *permanent brain damage*. If your partner passes out, release pressure immediately and keep their airways clear. If you're the one being choked, know that your only warning will be spotty vision and a dizzy sensation. Communicate with your partner/s and for the love of God, do your research first. I'm not a doctor. Please God, please do your research.

8. Don't reduce blood flow to any part of the body for more than 20 minutes. This includes cock rings. Take a break for an hour between uses.

9. Most 'dick pills' are just a stimulant, a mild vasodilator, and a placebo. Usually mostly caffeine. They are not worth $20 apiece. Take a minute to meditate, have a hot shower, drink some black tea, have a coffee, go for a run, whatever- you'll get the same effect. And no, there is not a single ethical and legal sex shop in the country that can sell you viagra. You would have better luck on Facebook. Do not buy viagra on Facebook.

10. There are no "male toys" and "female toys". Your only limitations are safety and creativity. If youre sticking something into something else, just make sure everything is clean, not too big, not sharp or abrasive, and can be taken back out.

11. If something "goes missing" in your vagina and you panic, you muscles will tense up and it'll it'll harder to get back. Relax and stand up. Wait a minute. Chill. Calm down. Jump a couple times. There's nowhere for it to go and worst case scenario, I promise the emergency walk-in has seen something weirder or worse in the past hour or so.

12. You cannot return toys that you buy and don't like and I swear to God if you come into my store with an opened product and try to give it back I will lose my shit

13. Actually while I'm at it, people who work at sex shops are more often than not not sex workers and even if they were, it would still not be appropriate to flash or grope them or ask them "what they use", I will run you over in the fucking parking lot

[theoutcastrogue]

Cold Iron in folklore, fiction, and RPGs

'Gold is for the mistress—silver for the maid! Copper for the craftsman cunning at his trade.' 'Good!' said the Baron, sitting in his hall, 'But Iron—Cold Iron—is master of them all!' — Rudyard Kipling, “Cold Iron”

Folklore

Drudenmesser, or "witch-knife", an apotropaic folding knife from Germany

The notion that iron (or steel) can ward against evil spirits, witches, fairies, etc is very widespread in folklore. You hang a horseshoe over your threshold to deny entry to evil spirits, you carry an iron tool with you to make sure devils won't assault you, you place a small knife under the baby's crib to ward it from witches, and so on. Iron is apotropaic in many many cultures.

In English, we often come across passages that refer to apotropaic cold iron (or cold steel). "All uncouth, unknown Wights are terrifyed by nothing earthly so much as by cold Iron", says Robert Kirk in 1691, which I believe is the earliest example. "Evil spirits cannot bear the touch of cold steel. Iron, or preferably steel, in any form is a protection", says John Gregorson Campbell in 1901.

Words

So what is cold iron? In this context, it’s just iron. The “cold” part is poetic, especially – but not only – if we’re talking about either blades (or swords, weapons, the force of arms) or manacles and the like. It just sounds more ominous. There are “cold yron chaines” in The Fairie Queene (1596), and a 1638 book of travels tells us that a Georgian general (in the Caucasus) vowed “to make the Turk to eat cold iron”.

Green’s Dictionary of Slang defines “cold iron” as a sword, and dates the term to 1698. From 1725 it appears in Cant dictionaries (could this sense be thieves’ cant, originally? why not, plenty of words and expressions started as underworld slang and then entered the mainstream), and from ~1750 its use becomes much more common.

NGram Viewer diagram for 1600-2019.

In other contexts, cold iron is (surprise!) iron that’s not hot. So let’s talk a bit about metallurgy.

Metals

In nature, we can find only one kind of iron that’s pure enough to work with: meteoritic iron. It has to literally fall from the sky. Barring that very rare occurrence, people have to mine the earth for iron ore, which is not workable as is. To separate the iron from the ore we have to smelt it, and for that we need heat, in the form of hot charcoals. Throwing the ore on the coals won’t do much of anything, it’s not hot enough. But if we enclose the coals in a little tower built of clay, leaving holes for air flow, the temperature rises enough to smelt the ore. That’s called a bloomery.

clay bloomery / medieval bloomery / beating the bloom to get rid of the slag

What comes out of the bloomery is a bloom: a porous, malleable mass of iron (that we need) and slag (byproducts that we don’t need). But now we can get rid of the slag and turn the porous mass to something solid, by hammering the hot bloom over and over. And once the slag is off, by the same process we can give it a desired shape in the forge, reheating it as needed. This is called “working” the iron, hence “wrought iron” objects, i.e. forged.

a blacksmith in his forge, with bellows, fire, and anvil (English woodcut, 1603)

This is the lowest-tech version, possibly going back to ~2000 BCE in Nigeria. If we add bellows, the improved air flow will raise the temperature. So smelting happens faster and more efficiently in the bloomery, and so does heating the iron in the forge, making it easier to work with. And that’s the standard process from the Iron Age all through the middle ages and beyond (although in China they may have skipped this stage and gone straight to the next one).

If we make the bloomery bigger and bigger, with stronger and stronger bellows, we end up with a blast furnace, a construction so efficient that the temperature outright melts the iron, and it’s liquified enough to be poured into a mould and acquire the desired shape when it cools off. This is “cast iron”.

a blast furnace

So in all of this, what’s cold iron? Well, it’s iron that went though the heat and cooled off. (No heat = no iron, all you got is ore.) If it came out of a bloomery, or if it wasn’t cast, it’s by definition worked, hammered, beaten, wrought, and that happened while it was still hot.

Is there such a thing as “cold-wrought” iron? No. In fact, “working cold iron” was a simile for something foolish or pointless. A smith who beats cold iron instead of putting it in the fire shows folly, says a 1694 book on religion, so you too should choose your best tools, piety and good decorum, to educate your children and servants, instead of beating them. When Don Quixote (1605) declares he’ll go knight-erranting again, Sancho Panza tries to dissuade him, but it’s like “preaching in the desert and hammering on cold iron” (a direct translation of martillar en hierro frío).

Minor work can be done on cold iron. A 1710 dictionary of technical terms tells us that a rivetting-hammer is “chiefly used for rivetting or setting straight cold iron, or for crooking of small work; but ’tis seldom used at the forge”. Fully fashioning an object out of cold iron is not a real process – though a 1659 History of the World would claim that in Arabia it’s so hot that “smiths work nails and horseshoes out of cold iron, softened only by the vigorous heat of the sun, and the hard hammering of hands on the anvil”. [I declare myself unqualified to judge the veracity of this statement, let's just say I have doubts.] And there is of course such a thing as “cold wrought-iron”, as in wrought iron after it’s cooled off.

Either way, in the context of pre-20th century English texts which refer to apotropaic “cold iron”, it’s definitely not “cold-wrought”, or meteoritic, or a special alloy of any kind. It’s just iron.

Fiction

The old superstition kept coming up in fantasy fiction. In 1910 Rudyard Kipling wrote the very influential short story “Cold Iron” (in the collection Rewards and Fairies), where he explains invents the details of the fairies’ aversion to iron. They can’t bewitch a child wearing boots, because the boots have nails in the soles. They can’t pass under a doorway guarded by a horseshoe, but they can slip through the backdoor that people neglected to guard. Mortals live “on the near side of Cold Iron”, because there’s iron in every house, while fairies live “on the far side of Cold Iron”, and want nothing to do with it. And changelings brought up by fairies will go back to the world of mortals as soon they touch cold iron for the first time.

In Poul Anderson’s The Broken Sword (1954), we read:

“Let me tell you, boy, that you humans, weak and short-lived and unwitting, are nonetheless more strong than elves and trolls, aye, than giants and gods. And that you can touch cold iron is only one reason.”

In Peter S. Beagle’s The Last Unicorn (1968) the unicorn is imprisoned in an iron cage:

“She turned and turned in her prison, her body shrinking from the touch of the iron bars all around her. No creature of man’s night loves cold iron, and while the unicorn could endure its presence, the murderous smell of it seemed to turn her bones to sand and her blood to rain.”

Poul Anderson would come back to that idea in Operation Chaos (1971), where the worldbuilding’s premise is that magic and magical creatures have been reintroduced into the modern world, because a scientist “discovered he could degauss the effects of cold iron and release the goetic forces”. And that until then, they had been steadily declining, ever since the Iron Age came along.

There are a million examples, I’m just focusing on those that would have had a more direct influence on roleplaying games. However, I should note that all these say “cold iron” but mean “iron”. Yes, the fey call it cold, but they are a poetic bunch. You can’t expect Robin Goodfellow’s words to be pedestrian, now can you?

RPGs

And from there, fantasy roleplaying systems got the idea that Cold Iron is a special material that fey are vulnerable to. The term had been floating around since the early D&D days, but inconsistently, scattered in random sourcebooks, and not necessarily meaning anything else than iron. In 1st Edition’s Monster Manual (1977) it’s ghasts and quasits who are vulnerable to it, not any fey creature. Devils and/or fiends might dislike iron, powdered cold iron is a component in Magic Circle Against Evil, and “cold-wrought iron” makes a couple of appearances. For example, in AD&D it can strike Fool’s Gold and turn it back to its natural state, revealing the illusion.

Then Changeling: The Dreaming came along and made it a big deal, a fundamental rule, and an anathema to all fae:

Cold iron is the ultimate sign of Banality to changelings. ... Its presence makes changelings ill at ease, and cold iron weapons cause horrible, smoking wounds that rob changelings of Glamour and threaten their very existence.... The best way to think about cold iron is not as a thing, but as a process, a very low-tech process. It must be produced from iron ore over a charcoal fire. The resulting lump of black-gray material can then be forged (hammered) into useful shapes. — Changeling: The Dreaming (2nd Edition, 1997)

So now that we know how iron works, does that description make sense? Well, if we assume that the iron ore is unceremoniously dumped on coals, it does not. You can’t smelt iron like that. If we assume that a bloomery is involved even though it’s not mentioned, then yes, this is broadly speaking how iron’s been made since the Iron Age, and until blast furnaces came into the picture. But the World of Darkness isn’t a pseudo-medieval setting, it’s modern urban fantasy. So the implication here is that “cold iron” is iron made the old way: you can’t buy it in the store, someone has to replicate ye olde process and do the whole thing by hand. Now, this is NOT how the term “cold iron” has been used in real life or fiction thus far, but hey, fantasy games are allowed to invent things.

Regardless, 3.5 borrowed the idea, and for the first time D&D made this a core rule. Now most fey creatures had damage reduction and took less damage from weapons and natural attacks, unless the weapon was made of Cold Iron:

“This iron, mined deep underground, known for its effectiveness against fey creatures, is forged at a lower temperature to preserve its delicate properties.” — Player’s Handbook (3.5 Edition, 2003)

Pathfinder kept the rule, though 5e did not. And unlike Changeling, this definition left it somewhat ambiguous if we’re talking about a material with special composition (i.e. not iron) or made with a special process (i.e. iron but). The community was divided, threads were locked over this!

So until someone points me to new evidence, I’ll assume that the invention of cold iron as a special material, distinct from plain iron, should be attributed to TTRPGs.

[petaltexturedskies]

I will sit by the river's trembling edge and look at the water-lilies, broad and bright, which lit the oak that overhung the hedge with moonlight beams of their own watery light. I will pick flowers; I will bind flowers in one garland and clasp them and present them—Oh! to whom? There is some check in the flow of my being; a deep stream presses on some obstacle; it jerks; it tugs; some knot in the centre resists. Oh, this is pain, this is anguish! I faint, I fail. Now my body thaws; I am unsealed, I am incandescent. Now the stream pours in a deep tide fertilising, opening the shut, forcing the tight-folded, flooding free. To whom shall I give all that now flows through me, from my warm, porous body? I will gather my flowers and present them—Oh! to whom?

Virginia Woolf, The Waves

[etirabys]

When I started translating my notes on Nick Lane's book on abiogenesis into an blog post, I felt like I'd woken up from an ultra detailed dream with an amazing plot, only to discover it makes no sense when I describe the twists. I kept reducing my ambitions until I succeeded in writing a rather muzzy and exasperated five paragraph summary for friends. Since I don't want to say nothing about my partial understanding of a partial account of abiogenesis, one of the most interesting questions ever, I will paste those paragraphs.

(Note: he chooses not to touch the major question of how DNA and DNA replication arose. This book is about how reality might have solved the other significant challenges.)

--

Nick Lane's bet on the location of the origin of life is underwater alkaline hydrothermal vents, which are formed when water sinks underwater, reacts with certain common rocks like olivine, and comes back hot & alkaline & also holding a lot of rock stuff like metals and sulfur. When this re-meets the ocean, the rock stuff precipitates out into a "mineralized sponge" riddled with labyrinthine interconnected pores, throughout which the pH difference can be dramatically different. Like 3-5 pH units.

This rock offers a bit of natural inside/outside protection for a protocell putting itself together. Organics naturally concentrate in small spaces due to thermophoresis, which is the phenomenon where larger molecules accumulate in the colder regions of a small space (because they're worse at randomly bouncing back to a hot region than a small molecule). So you have an environment full of CO2, hydrogen gas, metal catalysts, as well as a natural gentle flow of water carrying out waste. Promising!

Carbon fixation is the process of stripping carbon from inorganics like CO2 to tack them onto organic molecules like RNA. Every living cell has to do this. The simplest carbon fixation pathway only requires CO2 and H2, so let's assume it's the first pathway that was used. The pH difference comes into play twice, here: (1) Stripping an electron from H2 to give it to CO2 to make an organic molecule is hard in any pH, but not hard if the electron crosses a semiconducting mineral like FeS in a thin wall, from a more alkaline environment to a more acidic one. (2) Where does the energy to run these carbon fixation reactions come from? Simple membranes are by default porous to protons, which are small. Simple cells wedged between two areas with differences in pH can exploit the flow of protons, which go through (something like) ATP synthase to generate ATP, which can perform work in the cell much as they do now. (Actually, probably not ATP, but acetyl phosphate, which is much simpler but can do the same thing.)

But howww do you go from passively exploiting the proton gradient to producing it yourself by pumping protons out, as modern cells do? As a hint, we notice that all cells seem adapted to an internal concentration of Na+ that's weirdly lower than the ocean concentration. Na+ can also be used for energy production, and lipid membranes are much less permeable to Na+ than H+. So while there's no point in pumping H+ that'll come back immediately, there is an advantage to pumping Na+, since it'll stay out and increase the energy gradient you're using to live. The additional Na+ gradient can give the cell 60% more power than relying on protons alone, meaning cells with the Na+ pump can colonize areas of the vent with a smaller pH difference. Once you have an Na+ pump, there's an advantage to tightening the membrane against protons since… I didn't believe the logic here :/ but the endpoint is that you have an impermeable membrane studded all over with proton pumps, at which point you're ready to leave the vents.

Even this relatively plausible account is so implausible I don't think life actually arose...

Archaea and bacteria probably diverged before attaining independence, and left the vents separately. We think this because their cell membranes and cell walls are so different. Like, they both use glycerol to make their membrane impermeable to protons, but they use different stereoisomers of glycerol to do so. Both of them use the same fundamental energy converting membrane protein, but oriented in opposite directions, which led to different design constraints. Which I do not understand well enough to relay to you.

[cleansingreflections]

you were secretly a physics expert and you never told me im appalled......

today in geomorphology class we talked about darcy's law and i was like. darcy my friend darcy made a law that describes the flow of fluid on a porous medium? did you know anything about this?

yeas I wrote this I know many thinks about rocks and porous mediums and don’t even get me STARTED on fluids

[littjara-mirrorlake]

D&D 5e Homebrew Lineage: Core-Born Phyrexian

This lineage is part of my in-progress homebrew supplement Plane Shift: Mirrodin/New Phyrexia for D&D 5e.

The core-born Phyrexian is the build-it-yourself choice out of the supplement's options, similarly to its fellow MtG crossover, the Simic hybrid. Included with this version are a short list of sample modifications, which will be expanded as time and playtesting go on. Many are duplicates of existing racials in 5e, but others will be original, such as PS:MNP's weirdest modification so far: Metamorph. Something to look forward to!

Though the stat block here states a set ASI (+2 Con/+1 any), I'm actually a strong proponent of rearranging ability scores as in Tasha's, and the pre-set ASI is really more flavor text than anything.

The text here alludes to the phyresis mechanic, which will be posted in the future. In short, taking necrotic damage from Phyrexians will cause a Con save with DC equal to the damage taken, and on a failed save, you will gain one phyresis level. Phyresis advances in ten stages, with compleation being the end result. The minimum DC of this save is 5. Uniquely, a natural 1 always fails, and a natural 20 always succeeds.

Text from the images under the cut. (It's quite a lot.)

Core-Born Phyrexian

Though Phyrexians’ most well-known method of reproduction is through the compleation of other creatures, fully Phyrexian offspring can also be grown in glistening oil, tended by vat-priests. Germs are most often born from the oil of a single Phyrexian parent and take after that parent’s morphological features, including the type and color of their metal plates. Such Phyrexians are known as “core-born”, even though the laboratories that create them have expanded all over the surface and interior of Mirrodin.

Type. You are a Humanoid. You are also considered a Phyrexian for any prerequisite or effect that requires you to be a Phyrexian.

Ability Score Increase. Your Constitution score increases by 2, and one other ability score of your choice increases by 1.

Age. Owing to your combined construction of flesh and metal, the Phyrexian definition of life is porous at best. Phyrexian beings have the potential to live indefinitely. You are immune to magical aging effects.

Size. As a player character, your size can be either Small or Medium. Either way, Phyrexians tend to be heavier than organic creatures of equivalent size.

Speed. Your base walking speed is 30 feet.

Darkvision. Your constructed senses grant you superior vision in dark and dim conditions. You can see in dim light within 60 feet of you as if it were bright light, and in darkness as if it were dim light. You can’t discern color in darkness, only shades of gray.

Necrotic Resistance. The glistening oil flowing through your body protects you from the tainted attacks of your kind. You have resistance to necrotic damage.

Tainted Strike. Your claws are natural weapons, which you can use to make unarmed strikes. If you hit with them, you deal 1d4 + your Strength modifier of slashing damage, plus 1 additional necrotic damage, instead of the bludgeoning damage normal for an unarmed strike.

Phyrexian Modification. You begin with one modification (presented later in this document) as a result of the Phyrexian work done on your body, and you gain an additional one at 5th level.

Languages. You can speak, read, and write Phyrexian and one other language of your choice.

Phyrexian Modifications

These modifications are presented in alphabetical order along with their prerequisites and associated factions. They are intended for use both as-is and as inspiration for individually customized features. Modifications are gained at 1st and 5th level by the core-born race, but are also obtainable by any character who has Phyrexian work done on their body or gains 8 or more levels of phyresis.

Unless stated otherwise in its description, each modification can only be taken once and has no prerequisites.

At the DM’s discretion, a character may exchange one of their modifications for another by undergoing a surgical procedure. A character must still meet any prerequisites for a new modification they take this way.

Constructed Resilience Faction: Any Prerequisite: does not already have the Constructed Resilience feature

Even among Phyrexians, you are unusually mechanized, forfeiting the majority of your organic components for the resilience of a true machine. You have resistance to poison damage and immunity to disease, and you have advantage on saving throws against being poisoned. You don’t need to eat, drink, or breathe. You also don’t need to sleep, and magic can’t put you to sleep.

To gain the benefits of a long rest, you must spend all 8 hours staying still or doing light activity, such as keeping watch.

Extra Arms Faction: Any Prerequisite: does not already have the Extra Arms feature

You gain an extra pair of arms that function normally, with the following exceptions:

You can use a secondary arm to wield a weapon that has the light property, but you can’t use a secondary arm to wield other kinds of weapons.

You can’t wield a shield with a secondary arm.

Incendiary Breath Faction: Quiet Furnace

When you take the Attack action on your turn, you can replace one of your attacks with an exhalation of fire in a 15-foot cone. Each creature in that area must make a Dexterity saving throw (DC = 8 + your Constitution modifier + your proficiency bonus). On a failed save, the creature takes 1d10 fire damage. On a successful save, it takes half as much damage. This damage increases by 1d10 when you reach 5th level (2d10), 11th level (3d10), and 17th level (4d10).

You can use this ability a number of times equal to your proficiency bonus, and you regain all expended uses when you finish a long rest.

Necrogen Vents Faction: Steel Thanes Prerequisite: 5th level

As an action, you can release a poisonous aura of necrogen in a 10-foot-radius sphere centered on yourself. It lasts for 1 minute, moves with you, and ends early if you are incapacitated or die. Each other creature of your choice that starts its turn in the necrogen or enters it for the first time on its turn must succeed on a Constitution saving throw (DC 8 + your proficiency bonus + your Constitution modifier) or be poisoned until the beginning of its next turn. Creatures that don’t need to breathe automatically succeed on this saving throw.

Once you use this trait, you can’t use it again until you finish a short or long rest.

Reactive Spines Faction: Any

As a reaction when a creature you can see within 5 feet of you hits you with a melee attack, you can make metallic spines erupt from your body in retaliation, causing the attacker to take 1d6 piercing damage. This damage increases by 1d6 when you reach 5th level (2d6), 11th level (3d6), and 17th level (4d6).

You can use this reaction a number of times equal to your proficiency bonus, regaining all expended uses when you finish a long rest.

Reinforced Carapace Faction: Any Prerequisite: does not already have a racial bonus to AC, such as Iron Skin or Natural Armor

The metal of your body grows tougher, deflecting mortal blows. You gain a +1 bonus to your AC when you aren’t wearing heavy armor.

Resistance Faction: Any

You gain resistance to one of the following damage types of your choice: acid, fire, poison, psychic, or radiant.

Though any Phyrexian may receive this modification, each damage resistance is most commonly associated with a specific faction (see “Phyrexian Factions” earlier in this document).

Spider Climb Faction: Any Prerequisite: does not already have the Spider Climb feature

You gain a climbing speed equal to your walking speed, and you can climb walls and other difficult surfaces without needing to make an ability check. In addition, at 3rd level, you can move up, down, and across vertical surfaces and upside down along ceilings, while leaving your hands free.

[amandacanwrite]

The Violet Thread of Fate ||

Reluctant Mentor Gale x Unskilled Wizard F!Tav

Length || About 4,000 Words

POV || Dual Narration, Third Person

Warnings || Descriptions of viscera, age gap (about ten years, both adults)

Summary || After waking up on the craggy shoreline of the sword coast, Elinna and Gale reunite with a new common ground.

A/n || I am feeling sort of on the fence about Gale's eagerness in his attraction to Elinna, but I also feel like it's still at least somewhat in character for him--after all in any playthrough you can wind up being blindsided by his feelings for you since he is usually so subtle about his affections. I also just think it's so fun to get the internal narration of Gale's attraction. He always seems so put together, polite and proper. I just love to see a man precariously balancing his carnal desires with his conscience and desire to be a good man. I hope you like it, I know things feel a little slow right now, but I'm planning on taking some creative liberties in the next couple parts. Please also lemme know what you think if you read it! I am absolutely tinkerbell and need the dopamine to live

Chapter Two: A Nightmare, An Awakening

Read Part One Here • Join Tag List Here

A Nightmare

Elinna thought she had died; thought the disintegration of her bodily form was the end of her short, unremarkable life. Much to her surprise, though when her vision once again returned to her she realized she had merely been spirited away somehow.

It took a few moments for her eyes to properly focus. When they finally did, she almost wished that the contact with the tentacle had killed her. It would have been far preferable to where she had wound up.

She found herself locked in a great chitinous pod, looking through smeared membranous glass at what she could only suppose was the nautiloid she had tried to escape from. 

Yes…death would have been a far preferable fate to becoming a mindless thrall on a mindflayer ship. As she squinted through the clear panel in front of her and saw what appeared to be a brain walking on four spindly limbs, she realized that her fate could be even worse than regular enthrallment. 

The minutes she spent entrapped in the pod felt like hours. A miserable limbo of wondering what would be coming next for her. What if she was already marked for turning into an intellect devourer? What if the enthrallment had already been put in place and she could simply be ordered to do something whenever a mindflayer so wished it?

She couldn’t just stay here. She had to move.

She tried, in vain, to wrench her arms free of the fleshy brindings within the pod. The sinuous tendrils only tightened more and more, leaving her fingertips throbbing and tingling from the blood flow being cut off. She tried to move her feet next and her boots sloshed in some sort of viscera at the base of the pod. She did her best not to vomit as the viscera eked some ichorous fluid into the fibers of her clothing and through the porous leather of her soft-soled shoes. 

The last thing she needed in addition to all of this was to be covered in the contents of her own stomach–empty as it was.

The shock of panic cinched tight around her ribcage, making it hard to breathe. And as she struggled to get her lungs to fill, she also struggled to think. 

“Calm down, Elinna,” she told herself. “Think about what you’ve read. Think about what you know.”

What did she know about Illithids? They were hivemind organisms. They required high-moisture, high-humidity environments to protect the mucosal membranes of their skin. They primarily fed on the brains of their prey and used psionic energy not only to fight but to control their biomechanical machinery. 

She craned her head forward to look for some sort of control panel–something that could get her out of this cocoon of horror. 

As she did, a valve-like door opened on the far side of the room, revealing a dizzying network of corridors. And…and one of them. A mind flayer. 

Elinna went dizzy as her heart thumped in her temples. She watched in horror and sickly anticipation as it levitated toward something in the center of the room; a cistern of sorts from what she could see. It waved a four-fingered hand and the vessel opened, revealing a golden, glowing brine pool that may have been beautiful if Elinna didn’t know precisely what it was. 

The mindflayer coaxed one of those disgusting tadpoles out of the amber liquid and levitated over to Elinna’s pod. She recoiled away from it as the pod opened, turning her face away from the creature and squeezing her eyes shut. She knew exactly how mindflayers reproduced, and she was not interested in getting a first hand experience with ceremorphosis. 

She didn’t have much of a choice, though. Even without the parasite, the illithid was able to compel her to stillness. 

It was an atrocious violation of her agency; surreal and nightmarish in the worst ways. Her mind was fully intact as the creature made her muscles release the tension they held and coerced her eyes to open. Her body was still and calm, but her heart was racing like a trapped rabbit’s. She watched uselessly as the tiny creature floated closer to her. She cried to cry out as it latched onto the orb of her eye and started to wriggle and squirm until it could find purchase beneath her eyelid. 

She was silent. Infuriatingly, horribly silent as the creature continued to burrow its way into her skull. 

Her pulse hammered in her ears as she screamed inside her own body, begging herself to fight, to tear her own eye out rather than let the process of ceremorphosis take place. 

But her body was still as the tiny parasite worked its way into her eye socket and back into her brain. 

Elinna lost consciousness as she felt the unsettling pressure of her brain matter being displaced to accommodate her unwelcome guest. 

When she awoke next, she didn’t immediately know where she was. She only knew that it was loud and it was cold. The sound of air ripping past her pointed ears is what brought her back into full consciousness, and though her eyes were open, she wasn’t actually seeing at first. 

There was a vast expanse of stars above her, the smell of salty air, the lingering cling of something far more acrid–like the smell of burnt sulfur woven into her clothes. 

She tried to parse what was going on, it felt like she was sinking into the ocean–but if that were the case, shouldn’t she not be able to breathe? 

Then she saw the burning wreckage of the Nautiloid and everything came back to her. 

The travel to Waterdeep, the encounter with Mr. Dekarios, the parasite and…

And she was falling through the sky! 

“Not again!” she cried as she stared at the ground rising to meet her with startling velocity. “No, no, no! I will not–This is not how I die!”

It didn’t go very well the last time, but it wasn’t as if she had any other ideas of what to do. She scoped out the approaching shoreline, selecting one spot and earmarking it. After choosing a point on a craggy cliffside, she shut her eyes and tried to gulp in a breath before it was whipped out of her mouth. 

“Inveniam Viam!” she shouted. 

That strange, surreal feeling of not moving, yet being in a different place came again, only this time it was followed very quickly by the feeling smashing into the ground beneath her, square onto her back. It wasn’t a far drop, perhaps only a few feet, but it was enough to hurt her. She blinked up at the sky above her, the glow of the stars somewhat dampened by the flaming wreckage of the nautiloid as it loudly crashed into the earth just a few moments after her.

She ached as she stood and looked out over the cliffside she’d misty stepped to, seeing the vast expanse of an unfamiliar coast crawling with intellect devourers and the blazing with fires choking out great plumes of black smoke. She dropped to her knees, feeling utterly defeated. 

She had no idea where she was. She had no money. No food. Not even a change of clothes with her. She didn’t even know where she was–and she knew she was more than a little directionally challenged. 

Her keepers at The Scribes Nest had told her not to leave; had warned her that there were dangers in the world. That she couldn’t hope to survive on the knowledge she’d amassed from books alone. That the lives of wizards often ended in folly. 

She knew this, of course. She’d read extensively about every wizard she could find and more than half of them were done in by their own curiosity. 

But the ones who hadn’t been rendered themselves undone…they were amazing. Elminster and Blackstaff. Lorroikan and Sammaster. Karsus and Dekarios.

Wait….

Gale Dekarios–he’d been touched by the tentacles, too!

And if she hadn’t died, then that meant he probably hadn’t either. If she could find him, if she could just appeal to him for one favor…maybe he could help her get back to Waterdeep. Maybe she would have an opportunity to prove to him that she could be a good apprentice; that she was worth the trouble of taking on as a student. Maybe he would know how to get rid of the tadpole squirming in her brain. 

But none of that would happen if she just sat there on her knees and despaired. 

She would need to get back up and put one bloody boot in front of the other. 

She would have to be brave and she would have to trust that Mystra would guide her to what came next. 

An Awakening

Hells…it just had to be a pocket dimension that saved him, didn’t it?

They were tricky little things–a slice of wild magic that functioned like an oubliette; a place to put things to be forgotten, or to be summoned at a different point in time. He’d used a few in his time, but never for more than storage during travel or to hide the occasional failed potion. He’d thought once that he might use one when it was clear that the orb would no longer be sated by the magic artifacts he consumed; discussed the idea with Tara before she requested not to speak of it until necessary. 

“I don’t like think of that eventuality, Mr. Dekarios,” Tara had said to him. “I know I tend to be pragmatic…but it makes me far too sad.”

“Focus,” he scolded himself as he looked around the darkened pocket. He needed to find an opening–or at least find a way to make one, failing that. 

It was a mistake that he’d even ended up in one in the first place. A mistake that stemmed from the first mistake when he’d tried to help that girl. 

If he’d had any sense, he would have let her run and gone straight to help his mother and make sure Tara would be okay. He could only hope that they were still safely nestled at his childhood home in Waterdeep. At least he’d not seen either of them during his wanderings about the ship. 

But then the spelljammer had lurched and started falling out of the sky, and he’d grabbed onto the strongest strand of weave he could find and followed it here. The unfortunate side of that, of course, was that the strength of that thread is precisely what made this particular pocket realm exceedingly hard to get out of. And the parasite so rudely deposited into his brain was not doing wonders for his ability to concentrate. 

He held his hands up and closed his eyes, attempting to feel out the strands of weave in this darkened place. Wherever he’d been transported to, it felt very far away from Mystra indeed. Like whatever reality he’d blipped into was one almost entirely devoid of magic at all. 

He focused a bit harder, the tadpole in his head wriggling with the effort. He continued to focus, trying not to think too hard about the unnerving sensation. Finally, with some challenge, he managed to pool some magic together. It felt similar to trying to collect enough morning dew on a leaf to drink.

There came a crackle, then a tear. Not nearly large enough to fit himself entirely through, but enough that he could get an arm out. 

Perhaps with at least one hand in Faerun, he could channel whatever remaining weave he needed to fully escape this dark corner of nothing. 

A sheen of perspiration shone on his brow as he felt around outside of the oubliette. He could feel the familiar moisture of coastal air and it sent a wave of relief through him. He wasn’t far from Waterdeep at all, then. Or at least he’d hoped as much. 

Perhaps he could just appear on the main road and hurry straight to his mother to make sure that she and Tara were alright. 

He was trying to grasp onto the weave when he suddenly felt the soft, almost tentative brush of fingertips on the palm of his hand. 

A person! Perfect! There was no better way to anchor a teleportation spell than to another living soul. It would be a little complex to explain that, though, and he was sure a mysterious arm poking out of wherever he could reach was more than a little unnerving so he settled for simplicity instead. 

“Hello?!” He called through the tear in the fabric of space and time. “Is anyone there? A hand? Please?”

He felt the hand withdraw for a moment, then it returned with what he assumed was the person’s other hand. One closed tightly around his fingers, the other grasped a bit higher, accompanied by the sensation of fingertips curling into the fabric of his sleeve. Small, gentle hands. Not small enough to be a child–but perhaps a woman. 

He closed his eyes once more and took a deep breath, allowing himself to feel the energy of the stranger on the other side of the opening. He tapped into it, smelling the faint, sweetly lactic scent of peaches; tasting on the tip of his tongue the light flavor of…honeyscotch candy. If Mystra’s energy was violet in color…this energy was the color of the sky during sunrise…a gradient of lilac, rose and cerulean.

Pretty… he thought to himself before slamming the heel of his hand to his brow. 

Focus you touch-starved buffoon.

“Whatever you’re doing is working wonders!” he said encouragingly. “I think if you just give me a good pull, I should come right out!”

The stranger pulled and he joined that effort by pushing himself through from the other side with what remained of that pooled bit of magic he’d gathered together. 

Finally, he flew out of the pocket realm like a cork from a bottle, regrettably landing right on top of the poor woman who had helped him. 

He was quick to shift his weight so he didn’t put the entirety of his considerable heft on the poor thing. Yet, his creaky knees slowed him down when it came to properly getting up. Then again…he couldn’t deny a certain reluctance to rise. He hated to admit it, and if anyone ever asked him he would deny it to the grave…but it was pleasant to feel the soft curves of a woman against him. A year was such a long time to be without it, and to feel warmth beneath him again…

It was a lascivious thought not becoming of a gentleman, he remembered, but one that occurred almost automatically much to his chagrin. 

“Hells,” he said. “Forgive me miss. I’m usually much better at this–and usually not so long sedentary that my limbs can’t keep up with my manners. Allow me to–”

He lifted himself up onto his elbows and finally laid eyes on his savior. 

It was the girl from before. What was the name? Elinna Inklynn. 

She stared up at him with wide eyes and a face flushed with exertion. How hard had she needed to work to pull him out of that portal? Seeing her so close now, he picked up on some of the qualities he’d missed in the dim light of the Waterdhavian evening. 

A constellation of mauve-tinged freckles dusted across her flushed nose and cheeks. In the daylight, her skin was almost pale pink. The soft swell of her lips sat slightly parted with a look of surprise. And her eyes…my those eyes were something to behold. Verdant as a sprig of mint and flecked with gold as if she had a vein of ore curling through the irises of her eyes. 

“A-allow me to help you up,” he finally stammered. “You’re not hurt are you?”

“Not by you,” she said somewhat breathlessly. 

He grunted slightly as he got back onto his feet, now allowing himself to think of the way her soft curves shifted beneath him. He reached a hand down and helped her back up to her feet as well, dusting off her theadbare apron and her slightly puffed sleeves. She was still flushed–perhaps dehydration or fever…or…

“You haven’t happened to have been on the receiving end of a rather unwelcome insertion in the ocular region, have you?” he asked. 

The flush could be a sign of the beginning stages of ceremorphosis. 

“I couldn’t have phrased it more repellently myself,” Elinna replied. 

“No use sugarcoating it, is there?” he asked with a smirk. “I don’t suppose you know what these little passengers will cause if left to their own devices?”

“Ceremorphosis,” she answered without missing a beat. “At least–if we don’t get it handled in a few days…”

Well, color him surprised. 

It wasn’t very often that ceremorphosis was talked about among the common man–it was even hard to find books detailing the finer details of the process. The girl may have been a poor magician, but she was clearly learned.

“Suffice to say, it is a process that should be avoided,” he said. 

“Agreed,” she said. 

It occurred to him that she was behaving…a bit stiff; almost aloof. The young woman he’d encountered in front of his tower had a bit more fire to her than this one did. Then again, they’d just gone through quite the harrowing experience. Both of them were covered in mysterious viscera, they’d been taken hostage on a mindflayer ship and well–the poor girl did just have a strange older man on top of her. 

The girl bit down on her lower lip and he found his eyes unconscionably glued to her mouth. She released her lower lip and he watched as the pale pink color returned to it, wondering idly what it would feel like to–

��Are we just—are we just going to pretend that I didn’t beg you to take me on as an apprentice and that you quite sumerilly told me to bugger off?” she asked. “Are we just going to be compatriots now?”

He blinked down at her, his mind catching up with her words. 

Good gods, he really was behaving like a lech. He didn’t know where this was coming from. Perhaps it was an undocumented symptom of ceremorphosis–this…uncommon desire he was feeling. 

Or maybe he was just, well, desperate. 

“Well, I take umbrage with that analysis. I don’t believe I told you to bugger off…At least not verbatim. I do try to not be a miserable ass,” Gale said a bit sheepishly. “But I hasten to point out that we do have a shared problem now–some common ground we didn’t have before. It seems wasteful to part ways at a juncture such as this, don’t you think?”

He looked around in the early morning daylight and frowned realizing that he didn’t recognize anything. “I certainly don’t know the area after all, and judging by the history you disclosed with me, you likely don’t either.”

“Well…no, I don’t. Aside from Waterdeep I’ve not been anywhere other than the Moonshae Islands.” she said. 

“And you seem to not have a very strong sense of location judging by our time in the alleyways,” he pointed out. 

“That’s true…so then… does that mean you’ll do it?” she asked. “You’ll take me on as your student?”

He grimmaced.

“No,” he said with not a moment’s hesitation. “Not a student–an ally. An equal. It’s best that we tackle this issue together, don’t you think? It makes no sense to travel separately when our searching will likely lead us to the same places. And besides that…”

Besides that, if he started to change into a mindflayer, he wanted to be sure he had someone nearby who could…put him out of his misery and get his body somewhere safe before it leveled a city. 

“But I could be more helpful if you teach me,” she pleaded. “I’d just be a liability without your help.”

“I have seen your magic,” Gale said with a bit of a teasing gaze. “And I don’t know if there is much I can do for someone who casts Misty Step with their eyes closed. It seems you’d be more of a liability with the magic than without.”

She blinked up at him like he’d grown a second head. 

“Oh, please,” he said. “You must know that it’s a spell that requires a clear line of sight.”

She shrank a bit. “I…didn’t know. No,” she said. 

“How could you not know such a thing? You must have read a scroll to learn the incantation,” he said. 

“I mean this with the utmost respect, but when is the last time you’ve read a scroll, Mr. Dekarios?”

He inhaled, lifting an index finger. Then he closed his mouth and looked off to the side. 

When was the last time? It must have been ages. 

“Well,” she said without waiting for his answer. “Most spell scrolls assume a certain basis of classical training, or at minimum an innate understanding of how to channel the weave.”

“I see,” he said. “I’m to assume you’re not a sorceress then?”

“Not to my knowledge,” she said with a sigh.

He clenched his jaw as he looked down at the younger woman. Gods, she really did need a teacher. Maybe he could at least talk to her about theory–or give her a few simple exercises for manipulating the–

No. No. 

He had more than enough on his plate without adding a poorly self-taught mage to it.

“Elinna,” he said. “Tell you what. I have a deal to offer–a concession if your like. If we make it through this and…make it out of wherever we are and back to Waterdeep, I promise I will introduce you to some colleagues that will help you get your start as a novice wizard. How does that sound? Fair?”

To his great surprise, she still looked disappointed by that answer. The girl really was an ambitious thing–coming right to his tower to seek his tutelage and no one else's? The poor girl had no idea what she was trying to sign herself up for; a depressed, anti-social, explosive wizard. A depressed, anti-social, explosive and impatient wizard. As far as teachers went, he was not the best candidate for the job.  

“Alright,” she finally said. “Let’s see if we can go find a healer together…or maybe some other survivors…of a bath.”

“Oh, to find a bath,” Gale agreed. “Ah, but–before you think you’re journeying with most ill mannered a man–”

Gale gave the young woman a slight bow. “Thank you for pulling me out of that stone.”

When he stood up to his full height again, the young woman was smiling at him, her pretty viridian eyes crinkling at the edges. She tucked a pale copper strand of hair behind one of her delicately pointed ears and looked a bit sheepishly down the craggy shore. 

“Ah–it’s almost a dead end over here–I think there might be more ground to cover if we cross through the wreckage…but I didn’t want to do that on my own,” she said. 

“A wise choice, I think,” Gale said. “No telling what you would have run into. Not to imply that you can’t hold your own, of course–”

“No, you’re right,” she said, looking away from him a little timidly. “I’ll feel better with you there–it’s nice to have a friend.”

He huffed a soft breath and found himself smiling at how willing she was to call him her friend.  Even after all the ways he had been a bit of an oaf to her, he felt in her he had found a bit of a kindred spirit. Someone else who sought camaraderie in perhaps…unworthy places.

 She looked up at him and bit the swell of her lower lip again. “Shall we go then?” she asked him. 

He gestured to the road ahead. “After you,” he said with a magnanimous smile. “Consider me your ever faithful guard dog, ready at the first sign of trouble.”

She snorted a little laugh and shook her head. 

And as he followed after her, for the first time in the last year, he hoped the pang in his chest was because of the orb.

Taglist || @auroraesmeraldarose @thoughts-of-bear @cherifrog @puckprimrose @drabblesandimagines

[fuckyeahfluiddynamics]

Why Inkjet Paper Curls

Printed pages from inkjet printers tends to curl up over time. Researchers found that this long-term curl correlates with the migration of glycerol -- one of the solvents used in inkjet ink -- through the paper's fiber layers toward the unprinted side.  (Image credit: Lunghammer - TU Graz; research credit: A. Maass and U. Hirn; via Physics World) Read the full article

[fatehbaz]

Mangroves. Estuaries. Shorelines where land meets water. Fluidity and porousness of boundaries. Imposition of imperial, colonial, European property law and the “fiction” of solid borders. Profit extraction from property, the “legal magic” of creating permanent borders, and the destruction of coastal forest-worlds.

---

[T]his tropical coastal ecology is a site of continual refiguration: neither sea nor land, neither river nor sea, bearing neither salty nor fresh water [...]. The mangrove has been prone to confused definitions, [...] also a complex coastal ecosystem in itself. With these hybrid conditions of “belonging,” the mangrove lends itself to helping us think through the present-day schematic of Euro-American crises [...]. Its polymorphous personality as a sediment-carrier, land-builder, defender of numerous life forms [...] renders the mangrove a fascinating study in the biopolitics of selfhood. [...] The Sundarbans covers an area of 10,000 square kilometers of intertidal zones between parts of southwestern Bangladesh and the state of West Bengal in India. The largest mangrove forest in the world [...]. As a landscape, the Sundarbans is marked by unfixity, since its intertidal nature places it between appearance and disappearance -- with islands being submerged overnight. [...] [T]heir porous quality does not allow for clear border-making. In reading [...] satellite image[ry] of the Sundarbans, produced by what is said to be “the most stable, best characterized Earth observation instrument ever placed in orbit,” we are met with the trembling instability of borders. [...] [H]ere the coastline becomes indiscernible as a single entity. The legal vexations of such amphibious and obtuse terrain become pronounced in sea-rights cases, wherein border-making becomes the necessity of tenure. Forming rulings over such zones lays legality prone to paradox. In the Blue Mud Bay case, heard by the High Court of Australia in 2008, a legal body was called upon to make a determination regarding the shifting geography of a mangrove coastal region. In the final ruling the aboriginal Yolgnu claimants were successful, with the court ruling that the column of tidal water lying above land should be regarded no differently from the land itself. Thus the court’s attempt to encompass Dholupuyngu cosmology and “aqueography” occasioned a legal magic transforming water flow into the fixity of “land.” [...] The mangrove line is, hence, one of sedimentary reclamation rather than clear political divisions of terra firma. In mangrove zones, human determinations become ghosts.

Text by: Natasha Ginwala and Vivian Ziherl. “Sensing Grounds: Mangroves, Unauthentic Belonging, Extra-Territoriality.” e-flux Journal Issue #45. May 2013.

---

Traveling through Bengal in the eighteenth century, [...] [travelers] saw a highly sophisticated water-based economy -- the blessing of rivers [...]. The rivers were not just channels of water; they carried a thriving trade, transporting people and goods from one part of the delta to another. [...] Bengal’s essential character as a fluid landscape was changed during the colonial times through legal interventions that were aimed at stabilizing lands and waters, at creating permanent boundaries between them, and at privileging land over water, in a land of shifting river courses, inundated irrigation, and river-based life. Such a separation of land and water was made possible not just by physical constructions but first and foremost by engineering a legal framework. [...] BADA, which stands for the Bengal Alluvion and Diluvion Act, a law passed by the colonial British rulers in 1825 [...]. Nature here represents a borderless world, or at best one in which borders are not fixed lines on the ground demarcating a territory, but are negotiated spaces or zones. Such “liminal spaces” comprise “not [only] lines of separation but zones of interaction…transformation, transgression, and possibility” [...]. Current boundaries of land and water are as much products of history as nature and the colonial rule of Bengal played a key role in changing the ideas and valuations of both. [...] [R]ivers do not always flow along a certain route [...]. The laws that the colonial British brought to Bengal, however, were founded upon the thinking of land as being fixed in place. [...] To entrench the system, the Permanent Settlement of 1793 created zamindars (or landlords) “in perpetuity” -- meaning for good. The system was aimed at reducing the complexities of revenue collection due to erratically shifting lands and unpredictable harvests in a monsoon-dependent area [...]. From a riverine community, within a hundred years, Bengal was transformed into a land-based community.

Text by: Kuntala Lahiri-Dutt. “Commodified Land, Dangerous Water: Colonial Perceptions of Riverine Bengal.” RCC Perspectives, no. 3, 17-22. 2014.

---

[A]t the shore, where the boundary between land and water is so often muddied [...] terrestrial principles of Western private property regimes feel like fictions [...]. Shorelines, indeed, do much to trouble the neat boundaries, borders […] of the colonial imaginary […]. And so thinking about shallows necessitates attention to the multiplicity of water, and the ways that tides, rivers, storm clouds, tide pools, and aquifers converse with the ocean [...]. For Kanaka Maoli, the muliwai, or estuary, best theorizes shoreline dynamics: It is not only where land and water mix, but also where different kinds of waters mix. Sea and river water mingle together to produce the brackish conditions that tenderly support certain plant and aquatic lives. [...] As Philipp Schorch and Noelle M.K.Y. Kahanu explain, the muliwai ebbs and flows with the tide, changing shape and form daily and seasonally. In metaphorical terms, the muliwai is a location and state of dissonance [...], but it is not “a space in between,” rather, it is its own space, a territory unique in each circumstance, depending the size and strength or a recent hard rain. […] [T]he muliwai [...] as a conditional state [...] undoes territorial logics. [...] It is not a space of exception. Rather, it is where we are reminded that places are never fixed or pure or static. Chamorro poet Craig Santos Perez reminds us in his critique of US territorialism that “territorialities are shifting currents, not irreducible elements.” If fixity and containment limit, by design, how futures might be imagined beyond property, then the muliwai envisions decolonial spaces as ones of tenderness, care, and interdependence. [...] Because water has the potential to trouble the boundaries of humanness, it may furthermore push us to think through […] categorical differences […], to consider the colonial mechanisms that produced hierarchies of bodies to begin with [...].

Text by: Hi’ilei Julia Hobart. “On Oceanic Fugitivity.” Ways of Water series, Items, Social Science Research Council. Published online 29 September 2020.

[mightyflamethrower]

California has become a test case of the suicide of the West. Never before has such a state, so rich in natural resources and endowed with such a bountiful human inheritance, self-destructed so rapidly.

How and why did California so utterly consume its unmatched natural and ancestral inheritance and end up as a warning to Western civilization of what might be in store for anyone who followed its nihilism?

The symptoms of the state’s suicide are indisputable.

Governor Gavin Newsom enjoyed a recent $98 billion budget surplus—gifted from multibillion-dollar federal COVID-19 subsidies, the highest income and gas taxes in the nation, and among the country’s steepest sales and property taxes.

Yet in a year, he turned it into a growing $45 billion budget deficit.

At a time of an over-regulated, overtaxed, and sputtering economy, Newsom spent lavishly on new entitlements, illegal immigrants, and untried and inefficient green projects.

Newsom was endowed with two of the wettest years in recent California history. Yet he and radical environmentalists squandered the water bounty—as snowmelts and runoff long designated for agricultural irrigation were drained from aqueducts and reservoirs to flow out to sea.

Newsom transferred millions of dollars designated by a voter referendum to build dams and aqueducts for water storage and instead blew up four historic dams on the Klamath River. For decades, these now-destroyed scenic lakes provided clean, green hydroelectric power, irrigation storage, flood control, and recreation.

California hosts one-third of the nation’s welfare recipients. Over a fifth of the population lives below the property line. Nearly half the nation’s homeless sleep on the streets of its major cities.

The state’s downtowns are dirty, dangerous, and increasingly abandoned by businesses—most recently Google—that cannot rely on a defunded and shackled police.

Newsom’s California has spent billions on homeless relief and subsidizing millions of new illegal migrant arrivals across the state’s porous southern border.

The result was predictably even more homeless and more illegal immigrants, all front-loaded onto the state’s already overtaxed and broken healthcare, housing, and welfare entitlements.

Newsome raised the minimum wage for fast-food workers to $22 an hour. The result was wage inflation rippling out to all service areas, unaffordable food for the poor, and massive shut-downs and bankruptcies of fast food outlets.

Twenty-seven percent of Californians were born outside of the United States. It is a minority-majority state. Yet California has long dropped unifying civic education, while the bankrupt state funds exploratory commissions to consider divisive racial reparations.

California’s universities are hotbeds of ethnic, religious, and racial chauvinism and infighting. State officials, however, did little as its campuses were plagued for months by rampant and violent anti-Semitism.

Almost nightly, the nation watches mass smash-and-grab attacks on California retail stores. Carjackers and thieves own the night. They are rarely caught, even more rarely arrested—and almost never convicted.

Currently, Newsom is fighting in the courts to stop the people’s constitutional right to place on the ballot initiatives to restore penalties for violent crime and theft.

Gas prices are the highest in the continental United States, given green mandate formulas and the nation’s highest, and still raising, gasoline taxes—and are scheduled to go well over $6 a gallon.

Yet its ossified roads and highways are among the nation’s most dangerous, as vast sums of transportation funding were siphoned off to the multibillion-dollar high-speed rail boondoggle.

The state imports almost all the costly vitals of modern life, mostly because it prohibits using California’s own vast petroleum, natural gas, timber, and mineral resources.

As California implodes, its embarrassed government turns to the irrelevant, if not ludicrous.

It now outlaws natural gas stoves in new homes. It is adding new income-based surcharges for those who dutifully pay their power bills—to help subsidize the 2.5 million Californians who simply default on their energy bill with impunity.

What happened to the once-beautiful California paradise?

Millions of productive but frustrated, overtaxed, and underserved middle-class residents have fled to low-crime, low-tax, and well-served red states in disgust

In turn, millions of illegal migrants have swarmed the state, given its sanctuary-city policies, refusal to enforce the law, and generous entitlements.

Meanwhile, a tiny coastal elite, empowered by $9 trillion in Silicon Valley market capitalization, fiddled while their state burned.

California became a medieval society of plutocratic barons, subsidized peasants, and a shrinking and fleeing middle class. It is now home to a few rich estates, subsidized apartments, and unaffordable middle-class houses.

California suffers from poorly ranked public schools—but brags about its prestigious private academies. Its highways are lethal—but it hosts the most private jets in the nation.

The fantasies of a protected enclave of Gavin Newsom, Nancy Pelosi, and the masters of the Silicon Valley universe have become the abject nightmares of everyone else.

In sum, a privileged Bay Area elite inherited a California paradise and turned it into purgatory.

[katz-chow]

of apple pies and bloody knives chapter one: a haze in the fields

warnings: pilot to slasher!graves x fem!reader, hallucinations, hauntings, paranoia

word count: 1,000

Amber waves of grains only applied to two parts of the United States, the Midwest, and Texas. Even with being one of the most well-known lines within American patriotism, one must see the image of urban life rather than endless fields of golden. Flat plains rolled by the windows of her small Chevy, the peaked window caused strands of brown hair to dance in the warm, late summer air. Over her shoulder in the back of the Impala, boxes of essentials clinked and clattered whenever the pavement proved to be porous

Sporadically hitting small towns on the way to her destination, fields turned into hills and then back to drier, rougher patches of empty land, a white dot of a house on the horizon. Orange clouds illuminated the sky as she turned on her lights, and a wave of dread washed over her. The rear view mirror showed nothing but sun-bleached tar and rocky hills behind her. For a pretty girl, even in the absence of men, she will never find peace, now or ever.

The familiar glow of a 7-11’s enthralled her like a moth to a flame, welcoming her back to civilization and the safety net of a crowd. The chill of a Montanan night shivered through her, arms tight on her chest as the wind whistled a soft tune. ‘No more than 20 minutes…’ She promised herself, stepping through the blast of air.

It didn’t even take 15 when she was back on the road again, tank full, bladder emptied, and switchblade thankfully still closed. Making good time, she started up her ending journey to Marburn, Montana. Never heard of it? Good. She checks the time on the dash of her car, ‘11:32 PM’ it read. It was late and late is always bad for a girl. She steps on the gas.

“How long you gon’ be here for, Sweetheart?” The extended-stay motel clerk asked as he thumbed the toothpick between his lips. The teal paint smothered the crackled walls behind him mixed with the fluorescent lights made him look greenish, hair flowing from the desk fan not escaping this effect either.

She fished for her credit card from her wallet and slid it across the counter to him, “Hopefully for a while, but let’s just say 2 weeks for now.”

Her eyes darted over his face, taking in his image just in case. His patchy stubble and tired eyes lent the appearance of a raccoon.

The man shrugged and swiped her card, a satisfying ding echoed from the machine. “$79 for the first week, then it’s $65 for the next, you got that?”

She continued to stare at him, her eyes empty and dead set on the space between his eyes, almost as if in a daze. “Yes, sir.” She whispered.

She took back her card from his hand and the small key to her room. The clock hit midnight as she tugged on her luggage into the damp and dingy motel room.

Locking the door behind her, she also closed the blinds, hanging up a tarp covering the windows as well. She hid. The room was small, with a bed, a pull-out couch, a bathroom, and a small kitchenette with a gas stove, fridge, and microwave. It was doable for the next few weeks, until she can confirm her work and boarding. That, however, was a task for the future. It all resembled a college dorm except if the student had paid extra to get a suite; she smiled just knowing she wasn’t back in that dump, but her smiled dropped into a thinned-lipped frown knowing she was never far from him.

She thought about the boxes of dishes and other necessities in the back seat of her car, debating on whether or not to risk the trip. Her fingers opened the blinds, face nearing in on the dust and eyes peaked between the plastic. Her eyes traveled to the white Chevy parked upfront, the diamond frame of her license plate peeled off. The empty voids mixed with the glittering crystals reminded her of the emptiness in beehives; some filled with honey and nectar while others were left abandoned, hollowed out as if only there to just be there. She sympathized with them as she looked away, catching sight of the innate feeling of danger.

A pair of eyes stared at her, a figure just out on the other side of the parking lot. The figure stood, hunched over a car trunk and turned backward towards her, eyes peering in like a mannequin. His face etched an image of a familiarity, a far she could never forget as he wore the faded red hoodie that she had stolen from him just months prior, laughter bubbled up in them both.

Now, even that thick, old hoodie couldn’t shield the chill than sprinted down her spine, her ears pooling with blood as her heart drummed a solid allegro in her chest. Her stomach growled. It was getting too late in the night, she thought, not worth the trip. Her fingers relaxed as she pulled herself away from the empty parking lot, only her white Chevy in front.

If there she could describe the room in one mood, unsettling would be the word. Dim, yellow lights caused all the shadows on the peeling wallpaper to enhance itself with long shadows, always looming over her seemingly small form. Despite this, she still found the warmth and comfort of tight sheets in a made bed. It wasn’t heavy like how she would remember her bed at home–or well, what was home, but it was better than the back of her car.

Sleep cradled her in its arms, rocking her to a blissful, silent slumber–which was appreciated in comparison to the long nights of sweat-drenched nightmares and paranoia. She was okay, she chanted in her head, convincing herself and the monster that is anxiety and intrusive thoughts. New environment, new life, new identity, she is truly scattered to the winds; a field of dandelions. 

[the-bjd-community-confess]

Guys, I was just reminded of this story again:

https://the-bjd-community-confess.tumblr.com/post/660443955665731584/i-got-reminded-of-this-thanks-to-a-confession-i

If you haven't read it... I mean don't bc it's gross, but it's fucking hilarious. (I'll Copy paste it, so if you have time and a strong stomach.)

-

I got reminded of this thanks to a confession.

I shall set the scene. I once visited a doll friend, and it was the first time being over. Spent almost an entire day there. At natures call, they show me their bathroom, to be specific it wasn’t even really a bathroom, just a small toilet room, with a sink, and a tiny milk glass window. They had a doll sitting in the bathroom on a one of those long and thing cabinets. Almost as long as the rooms height, one section almost at the top of this cabinet, was open with no doors, that’s where it sat, dressed in something reminiscent of what old Porcelain, dolls wear, with long flowing locks, and little beret: A BJD. I still curse my curiosity, and lack of impulse control, because I took down the doll after finishing my business, and washing my hands, for I care about hygiene, for a closer look. Folks it was like me touching this doll released years of toiletry torment from the dolls immortal body. It was like walking into a hot Sauna filled with farts, and decay. The unholy smell that came from this doll had me weeping, and I could feel my soul burning as it left my body. I was almost convinced something had crawled inside this doll, and died, and no one found out. 

A public autobahn toilet that hasn’t been cleaned in 20 years would have been a walk in a flowery meadow. I was wondering if maybe this was an unwashed antique toilet brush used through generations of their family dressed in some fineries, but no, this was indeed a BJD, in all her porous resin glory, having turned into the Anti-thesis of an air freshener. I felt disgusting, and with all the care a Biohazard such as this deserved, I simply placed her back on her high seat, to continue being the silent and tortured watcher of this porcelain throne. I gave her some mental apologies for her fate, and sent some prayers to whatever deity might be out there listening, opened the window, washed my hands three times more with extra soap, and simply left, not looking back, never looking back. Moral of the story: Resin, wigs and fabrics take on the smells of whatever they come into contact with, cigarette smoke, perfumes, deodorants, and apparently also really farty assgass. So now I beg of you, please don’t do this to your dolls.

~Anonymous

[petaltexturedskies]

I will sit by the river's trembling edge and look at the water-lilies, broad and bright, which lit the oak that overhung the hedge with moonlight beams of their own watery light. I will pick flowers; I will bind flowers in one garland and clasp them and present them-Oh! to whom? There is some check in the flow of my being; a deep stream presses on some obstacle; it jerks; it tugs; some knot in the centre resists. Oh, this is pain, this is anguish! I faint, I fail. Now my body thaws; I am unsealed, I am incandescent. Now the stream pours in a deep tide fertilising, opening the shut, forcing the tight-folded, flooding free. To whom shall I give all that now flows through me, from my warm, porous body? I will gather my flowers and present them-Oh! to whom?

Virginia Woolf, The Waves