#project sponsor

[amethystaurawriting]

Sponsorship Opportunity!

Link to the post from Inverness Chamber of Commerce Facebook - https://www.facebook.com/100063545803729/posts/pfbid0Wc2eRg7Xvx11szgDzBXmsBu4kFk3aToKhJ34KmyA8nEcWKk7DoiGeXo3qTM8NyCdl/?app=fbl (might not work, I’m testing a theory)

To quote:

“✨| SPONSORSHIP OPPORTUNITY | ✨

This year’s BA (Hons) Creative Writing students at @thinkuhi are looking for funding to help them self-publish an anthology of their creative work over the last year. They require around £2000 to self-publish, and any profits from sales will go to The Leanne Fund. Any sponsor will be credited in the publication, in marketing, and across social media.

Could you help? Email Dawn at 08005618@uhi.ac.uk to find out more!

#invernesschamber#icsupporting "

also featured on instagram @amethystaurawriting

[amargos-tent]

Commission for StorytellingHyena on twitter!

OK, this one is a special one.

Project N: Unexpected Results is one of my favorite fanfics of all time (I've read it several times already), so imagine my face when Hyena contacted me to draw one of my favorite scenes!!?!?! I'm still in shock

So please, PLEASE, if you're a Machine Herald fan, please give this fanfic an oportunity

Imagine Viktor Machine Herald, grumpy "old" ass man using a sunshine-like teenager as a test subject for a new augmentation

[fly-sky-high-bug-games]

I'll take awhile before I can make this into a full proper post with explanation (and sketch illustration) of each segment, as well as the bird view from the market, entrance and a better view of the smithing corner buuuut have this for now~!

[coralchoral]

honestly thinking about the sonadow twitter takeover and how the plummeting to earth thing very much affected Sonic a lot more than it affected Shadow. like in a previous takeover Shadow even made it a positive memory about Sonic trying to save him.

Meanwhile in Prime, Sonic has a moment of saving Shadow from falling into the void that's very reminiscent of that other fall (in the same way Prime has a lot of motivations and references that only make sense from a fandom insider perspective).

Sonic also gets repeatedly tilted, loud and anxious, (which I'm pinning more on RCS's/whatever writer's sense of humor, as is all the voice acting gags) and is coping badly any time Shadow comes out ahead. I think Sonic's insistence on his ability to grow chest fur is as big a Cope as floaties=fashion statement.

But really, Sonic's repeat date suggestions and Shadow's own descriptions of Sonic's behavior (dragging out their races, etc "just to annoy me") reads, whether romantically or platonically, that Sonic just really wants to spend time with Shadow.

He feels he needs to justify it, though, insisting that he and Shadow have something other than occasionally getting in each other's way ("two sides of the same coin") (friendly competition being "why you keep me around-" seemed like odd wording to me).

Needing to make it meaningful, because that's what Shadow wants out of a relationship- Shadow /says/ he dislikes Sonic for being frivolous and inauthentic, that (for instance) his hugs don't mean anything, and that he doesn't want "(Sonic's) kind of hug."

Sonic really wants to spend time with Shadow because he's also intimately aware that that time is limited. Either Shadow's patience (and/or social battery) is limited and he's liable to make a batman exit if he doesn't want to be somewhere (not that we've ever seen Shadow do this in canon, he seems to awkwardly/quietly hang around as if he doesn't realize he can just hit the bricks (or he likes being there and has no idea how to express it re: smiling at Big the Cat) ), Or Sonic and Shadow will get caught up in their own lives again and not see each other until Fate Deigns to Allow Them to Cross Paths Once More.

And Sonic misses him.

(This ties in with my Sonic Frontiers is the Saddest Game Ever posting from a while back, too. Sonic is lonely AF and Needs Other People to Talk To or he'll start talking to the walls and robots, and Shadow will almost always either talk back or groan in exasperation, which is as good a reaction as any.)

All this, plus Sonic's opinion flip-flops (shopping with Amy vs shopping with Shadow, opinion on Orbot) could be either (Sonadow Optimist) Sonic is Down Bad and not even conscious of his mirroring Shadow/trying to appeal to Shadow, or (Sonadow/overall Pessimist) Sonic trying to appeal to the Most Popular Character Right Now and getting increasingly desperate as he is rebuffed.

A few of these Twitter Takeovers have had moments of Sonic in particular getting thrown off and not really able to recover. (which makes me question what the writing is like, if there's any at all and these VA's aren't just riffing on an outline. Considering they don't talk over each other constantly, there must be something like a script, but it also does occasionally feel like a bad roleplay (and I've been a bad roleplayer).) It leads to a Something Is Wrong feeling in the "We're doing this for fun" question-answering joke show. Sonic needs therapy. (We all need therapy.)

Meanwhile, Shadow really is pulling out all the grunts, groans, and whines with Sonic that, if scripted, would be egregious as hell to read or write. He doesn't make these noises in the games (or shows, really?) mostly because there's a sort of efficiency necessary to production that cuts out that interpersonal realism and partly because it's annoying? Shadow, you're the annoying one?

Unrelated, everybody latched on to Sonic's "Go off, King" but nobody even noticed Shadow's "Deal With It."(sunglasses drop) How soon we forget the sacred texts and/or the deep magic, I guess? (It's an old meme, but it checks out!)

[fatehbaz]

"The most fashionable bathing station in all Europe". British industrialists and American mining investors plotting the colonization of the Congo, while mingling at Ostend's seaside vacation resorts. Extracting African life to build European railways, hotels, palaces, suburbs, and other modern(ist) infrastructure. "Towards infinity!"

---

In 1885, King Leopold II achieved an astonishing and improbable goal: he claimed a vast new realm of his own devising, a conjury on a map called [...] the Congo Free State. [...] [A] fictional state owned by the king, ruled by decree, and run from Brussels from 1885 to 1908. [...] This was [...] a private entrepreneurial venture [for the king]. The abundance of ivory, timber, and wild rubber found in this enormous territory brought sudden and spectacular profits to Belgium, the king, and a web of interlocking concession companies. The frenzy to amass these precious resources unleashed a regime of forced labor, violence [millions of deaths], and unchecked atrocities for Congolese people. These same two and a half decades of contact with the Congo Free State remade Belgium [...] into a global powerhouse, vitalized by an economic boom, architectural burst, and imperial surge.

Congo profits supplied King Leopold II with funds for a series of monumental building projects [...]. Indeed, Belgian Art Nouveau exploded after 1895, created from Congolese raw materials and inspired by Congolese motifs. Contemporaries called it “Style Congo,” [...]. The inventory of this royal architecture is astonishing [...]. [H]istorical research [...] recovers Leopold’s formative ideas of architecture as power, his unrelenting efforts to implement them [...]. King Leopold II harbored lifelong ambitions to “embellish” and beautify the nation [...]. [W]ith his personal treasury flush with Congo revenue, [...] Leopold - now the Roi Batisseur ("Builder King") he long aimed to be - planned renovations explicitly designed to outdo Louis XIV's Versailles. Enormous greenhouses contained flora from every corner of the globe, with a dedicated soaring structure completed specifically to house the oversize palms of the Congolese jungles. [...]

---

The Tervuren Congo palace [...]. Electric tramways were built and a wide swath of avenue emerged. [...] [In and around Brussels] real estate developers began to break up lots [...] for suburban mansions and gardens. Between 1902 and 1910, new neighborhoods with luxury homes appeared along the Avenue [...]. By 1892, Antwerp was not only the port of call for trade but also the headquarters of the most profitable of an interlinking set of banks and Congo investment companies [...]. As Antwerp in the 1890s became once again the “Queen of the Scheldt,” the city was also the home of what was referred to as the “Queen of Congo companies.” This was the ABIR, or Anglo-Belgian India Rubber Company, founded in 1892 with funds from British businessman “Colonel” John Thomas North [...].

Set on the seaside coast, Belgium’s Ostend was the third imperial cityscape to be remade by King Leopold [...] [in a] transformation [that] was concentrated between 1899 and 1905 [...]. Ostend encompassed a boomtown not of harbor and trade, like Antwerp, but of beachfront and leisure [...] [developed] as a "British-style" seaside resort. [...] Leopold [...] [w]as said to spend "as much time in Ostend as he did in Brussels," [...]. Ostend underwent a dramatic population expansion in a short period, tripling its inhabitants from 1870–1900. [...] Networks of steamers, trams, and railway lines coordinated to bring seasonal visitors in, and hotels and paved walkways were completed. [...] [A]nd Leopold’s favorite spot, the 1883 state-of-the-art racetracks, the Wellington Hippodrome. Referred to with an eye-wink as “the king incognito” (generating an entire genre of photography), visitors to the seaside could often see Leopold in his top hat and summer suit [...], riding his customized three-wheeled bicycle [...]. By 1900, Ostend’s expansion and enhancement made it known as “the Queen of the Belgian seaside resorts” and “the most fashionable bathing station in all Europe.” Opulence, convenience, and spectacle brought the Shah of Persia, American tycoons, European aristocrats, and Belgian elites, among others, to Ostend.

---

Leopold’s interventions and the Congo Free State personnel and proceeds played three pivotal and understudied roles in this transformation, all of which involved ABIR [British industrialists].

First, it was at Ostend that an early and decisive action was taken to structure the “red rubber” regime and set it in motion. In 1892, jurists such as [E.P.] had ruled, contravening [...] trade laws, that the king was entitled to claim the Congo as his domanial property [...]. Leopold [...] devised one part of that royal domain as a zone for private company concessions [...] to extract and export wild rubber.

Soon after, in 1892, King Leopold happened to meet the British “Colonel” John Thomas North at the Ostend Hippodrome. North, a Leeds-born mechanic [...] had made a fortune speculating on Chilean nitrates in the 1880s. He owned monopoly shares in nitrate mines and quickly expanded to acquire monopolies in Chilean freight railways, water supplies, and iron and coal mines. By 1890 North was a high-society socialite worth millions [...]. Leopold approached North at the Ostend racecourse to provide the initial investments to set up the Anglo-Belgian India Rubber Company (ABIR). [...]

---

One visible sign of Ostend’s little-known character as Congo boomtown was the Royal Palace Hotel, a lavish property next to the king’s Royal Domain, which opened in 1899. With hundreds of rooms and a broad sweep of acreage along the beachfront, the palace “occupied the largest space of any hotel in Europe.” [...]

King Leopold met American mining magnate Thomas Walsh there, and as with North, the meeting proved beneficial for his Congo enterprise: Leopold enlisted Walsh to provide assessments of some of his own Congo mining prospects. The hotel was part of [...] [a major European association of leisure profiteers] founded in 1894, that began to bundle luxury tourism and dedicated railway travel, and whose major investors were King Leopold, Colonel North [...].

At the height of Congo expansionism, fin-de-siècle Antwerp embodied an exhilarated launch point [...]. Explorers and expeditioners set sail for Matadi after 1887 with the rallying call “Vers l’infini!” (“towards infinity!”) [...].

---

Text above by: Debora Silverman. "Empire as Architecture: Monumental Cities the Congo Built in Belgium". e-flux Architecture (Appropriations series). May 2024. At: e-flux.com/architecture/appropriations/608151/empire-as-architecture-monumental-cities-the-congo-built-in-belgium/ [Bold emphasis and some paragraph breaks/contractions added by me. Italicized first paragraph/heading in this post was added by me. Presented here for commentary, teaching, criticism.]

[shmorp-mcdurgen]

Phone call

[deltasilver64]

[yabutsuba]

[damoclestheone]

One of my favorite things I ever worked on is this piece I did for the developers of Peripeteia.

I highly recommend checking out their game. They post updates at https://x.com/90sGraphics

[murdleandmarot]

GET FRAGGLE-IFIED‼️‼️‼️

So recently I’ve been more than a little obsessed with the 1983 Jim Henson company project called “Fraggle Rock,” about all these silly little muppet creatures having crazy adventures in the cave system in which they live, called, appropriately, Fraggle rock. After watching 3/4 of the seasons, I started doodling some of my fav cats OCs as fraggles, and it just sort of spiraled from there. So if I’ve sent you 🫵 an ask about the kind of clothing your oc would wear, this is why :D. Without further ado:

THE FIRST WAVE‼️‼️‼️

These are the tallest of the bunch, and they are, reading left-right left-right:

@gotham-native’s Calypso, @ernestelm’s Vega, @toki-toro’s Chaumet, and last but certainly not least, @cillyscribbles’s Tin Tin!!!!

[coquelicoq]

tf kinda potent shit did they bake into this kim dokja guy. he's got some of the most compelling parent-child relationships i've ever seen in fiction. kim dokja and his mom...kim dokja and his daughter... nobody warned me. you're all in the doghouse. read orv at own risk i guess.

[butmakeitgayblog]

Christmas Angel 🪽

[goldenpinof]

i don't want to be negative, ignore me if you don't agree but i am the only one thinking something is not right with dnp? that last video has me worried a bit about how far they will go for a paycheck? while a few months ago dan expressed why he quit youtube and why he doesn't want to get his channel another chance, him doing all of this with phil feels a little weird? i don't hate it, just find it contradictary

theory brought to you by @cardsagainstdnpg (and me): he is funding the wad production. so technically, dnpg sponsors are to get money to minimise all the expenses for wad taping (venue booking, staff, editing, equipment, promo, etc.). we will see if they slow down by April-May with sponsorships (or just gonna start choosing them wiser).

but on the other hand, Dan did say that there would be sponsorships on dnpg. he warned us when they came back. i wonder if he already realistically knew/suspected some wad stuff. but until someone buys the rights and Dan gets that fucking cheque for wad, we will have to witness a lot of contradictions, i'm afraid.

(p.s. are we funding dinok by clicking these spon links as well? who knows)

[huntersapprentice]

Dating Ena Shinonome - Headcanons 💘🖌

she leaves you for cheesecake

⚘️⚘️⚘️

[chipped-chimera]

Hey you! Yeah you. It's okay to not feel creative! It's okay to need to take a break from making things! Being a 'content creator' is far too normalised and driven by shitty algorithms that prioritise daily output to stay relevant. If that's not for you, that's fine! You're not a robot! We're humans, we're meant to live and have joy and create out of our expressions, experiment, discover and learn - not become a digital content sweatshop.

So if you need time away to rest, to find that joy again - you're still a creative, whether you passion is writing, music, art etc. They're still a part of you and they'll be waiting for you when you return.

Rest is self care, it is not something you should be ashamed of or apologise for.

[st4rsinthenight]

★rotemntee. rottmnt. rotemntee. rottmnt. guys. guys I think I'm. I'm gonna erh supernova.★