#the long dark Finds

[sunderwight]

Bingqiu AU where Luo Binghe's the chosen village sacrifice to the evil deity who lives up the mountain.

Normally the village sends maidens, but they've more or less run out of expendable girls of the right age and, ahem, "virtues". So of course Luo Binghe's early life bad luck kicks in. In the wake of his mother's death there's no one to really care about what happens to him, he's fairly pretty, and the village leaders decide that if they dress him up like a girl the teenaged homeless kid should pass well enough. And hey, y'know, he's probably got a hard life ahead for him anyway -- dying in a brothel of some venereal disease or on the streets of exposure or starvation. At least as a sacrifice, everyone else gets to benefit from his loss! And the kid will get added to a shrine and be remembered as a hero! If anything, he should be happy about this!

Binghe is not happy about this.

But he's also a skinny underfed nobody who is easily overpowered, dressed up like a bride, and tied to a post. So. Not much he can do but wait for the evil deity to come and do whatever horrible thing he's gonna do to him.

Meanwhile, Shen Yuan is pretty sure he's been isekai'd into the over-powered hero of some kind of supernatural adventure story? He's not totally sure because he doesn't recognize the setting, but the signs are there. He's got a shrine-like base of operations (though it seems to have become corrupted/ruined, probably he has to restore it somehow), he has a very resilient and handsome new body with spiritual energy of some kind flowing through him, and a very clearly magical sword. Plus lots of neat starter powers! Though it feels like he has other abilities that have been blocked somehow? Probably he has to level up in order to access them.

When he treks out of his "base" and finds what seems to be a distressed maiden, he takes it for his beginner hero mission. The girl claims that she's been doomed to be sacrificed to an evil god. That sounds a little above Shen Yuan's pay grade for dealing with, so he unties her and decides that they had better just get out of the whole region altogether. He already packed up anything useful from his base, anticipating he might get caught up in an adventure once he left, so they follow the river away from the settlement until they reach another one.

While they travel, Luo Binghe tells Shen Yuan about the cursed deity, Shen Qingqiu, who was cast out of the heavens for slaughtering one of his brethren and has apparently being do-who-knows what to maidens from the local village in exchange for his "protection" ever since. Sounds like a real asshole! And also mid-level boss type bad guy at least. Shen Yuan hopes he doesn't have to fight him, but he probably will.

Thank goodness he found Binghe, though! Clearly the helpful little sister type! He's definitely going to require her assistance if he's going to figure out how to navigate this world and level up his skills enough to take on a god.

[kettlefire]

Prepare for the unexpected. (DPxDC)

Everyone knew about the reign of Pariah Dark. Even those who did not dabble in those realms have heard the tale of the tyrant. A power-hungry man who ruled over the dead with an iron fist.

Following the rise of Pariah Dark, his realm had been effectively cut off from communication. Many mystics and magic users knew better than to open the door of nightmares that could arise if Pariah Dark's reach went further than his own realm.

Except, the universe had plans to bring the realm of the dead back into the cards.

A new opponent, one that had all of Earth's heroes scrambling for options. A being with powers of a god over weather, destruction was on the horizon. A world ending threat.

It's the only reason the Justice League was doing this. In a deep bunker, far from close civilization as a precaution, the heroes looked on with grim expressions.

The world was already being threatened. It would be destroyed regardless of what the league did. So it only made sense to make the last ditch effort. To summon someone strong enough to defeat the threat.

No one wanted to do it. No one wanted to be the one to pull the realm of the dead back to the living. The consequences were untold if this succeeded. If Pariah Dark was freed and defeated the threat, whose to say he won't want control?

That was a problem for later. For the aftermath. For now, the league could only watch on with bated breath as Constantine completely the summon ritual.

They watched on as the shadows in the room seemed to darken and grow. As the sigil sputtered to life with a glow that was growing increasingly brighter. A sudden gust of wind rushed through the room, the temperature began to drop with eaching ticking second.

And then it was all gone.

The room stood perfectly still. Just as it had been moments before. Nothing changed. No giant king standing before them, no sign that the ritual worked.

The room stood deadly still for another beat before the murmurs started. The team trying to make sense of the situation, figure out what went wrong.

Constantine swore up and down that this was the correct ritual, taking offense that they would even think the problem was on his end. It only made it better when it finally happened.

A loud sound ripped through the room, pulling everyone's attention back to the summoning circle. Just in time to see a tear appear in the space above the circle.

A thin tear that ran the length of eight feet. The fabric of the dimension seems to curl at the edges, pulling back to reveal a deep glowing swirl of greens. A dark gloved hand reached through, fingers curling around the edge of the tear, stretching it even further.

A portal. The ritual had worked, but there had been a delay. A delay that had every hero nerves on edge. Each team member tensed, weapons at the ready as they watched the being stretch the portal to the right size.

Then, a foot stepped out with a heavy thud. A dark boot that looked otherworldly despite its similarity to mortal clothing. A deep black that seemed never-ending. A second foot quickly followed before a full body emerged from the portal.

Not many people in the room have ever seen Pariah Dark, let alone know what to expect. Based on what Constantine and Zatara had said, this wasn't Pariah Dark.

A man had stepped out of the portal, standing at almost seven feet tall, and built like a brick house. One glance at the glowing white hair, deadly red eyes, and shard teeth was enough to know this being was not to be messed with.

But there was no giant show of armor or royal garbs. There is no large crown at the top of his head or jewelry from the infinite realms laced around his neck.

Instead, the man stood before them in combat boots, worn-in ripped jeans, a graphic t-shirt, and a spiked leather jacket. Despite his almost normal clothing choice, the man's jacket seemed to be a never-ending depth of the dark night sky. If one was to look closely enough, the cosmos could almost be made out in the sea of darkness.

None of that would have prepared them for when the man spoke. His tone sounded more bored than anything as he took a step forward.

"Oh, so now you need the help of the dead." The man had spoken, running a hand through his hair. When Batman took a step forward to speak, the man raised a hand. Immediately commanding silence in the single gesture. "I'm on babysitting duty and have yet to have a cup of coffee. I'll be right back."

Just like that, both the man and portal vanished into thin air. Leaving behind a group of stunned heroes. Not only was the man not Pariah Dark, but he was also supposedly babysitting.

"Did that just-"

The Flash had been the first voice to speak up, his eyes trained on where the man had once stood. Except he had barely made it through the first few words before the man was suddenly back.

The man that now had a child hanging off his shoulders and another teen being held up by his scruff. Unlike the man, these kids looked human.

Too human for Bruce's liking. The dark black hair and bright blue eyes had every heroes eyes flickering to Batman for just the briefest moment.

"This isn't fair! I'm not even the king. Why do I have to be here!" The teenager had been complaining the moment the man had reappeared. Arms crossed tight over his chest and seemingly used to being held dangling. "Besides, who brings kids to a show down! Wait til I tell mom about this."

"Aw, come on, Danny. This is gonna be fun!!" The younger girl seemed in much better spirits than the teen, Danny. She had climbed up the large man, sitting on his shoulders and resting her arms on the mess of glowing hair. "It's like take your kids to work day! Ooo, Dan! Can we fight too!?"

Unlike the two kids, the man looked purely exhausted and annoyed. The man, Dan, dropped Danny like a sack of potatoes as he took a long drink from the travel cup in his hand.

It didn't take a genius to recognize the look of an exhausted parent in Dan's expression. A look many of the league members were well acquainted to. A look that even had Batman grimacing with sympathy.

"Can it, little shits. You two were grounded, remember." Dan had growled at the kids before shifting his focus back on the team of heroes before them. His glowing eyes set in a deadly glare. "Pariah Dark isn't coming, and he never will. He's been dethroned and banished. We're the best you've got."

A summoning that started with a group of on edge and scared heroes looking for the ghost king, ended in a way no one expected.

No one was even sure if it made any sense. They weren't sure if they should feel hopeful or in despair.

Because truly, what was a ghostly man with two seemingly human children against a godlike foe with the control over the weather?

The unspoken question of power and ability seemed to vanish following Dan downing the metal travel cup of coffee, and crushing it in his fist.

He tossed it to the side, straighting up his posture as he looked over the heroes. Dan might not be a hero, but he's been playing family for too long.

An almost feral, bloodhungry grin spread across the man's face, sharp fangs on full display. The look made the man suddenly look even less human. He looked closer to a demon from the pits of hell rather than the exhausted parent he looked just a few seconds ago.

"Point me in the direction of this bastard. It's been too long since I let loose and had some fun."

[lotus-pear]

whatever happens, please don’t break

[dkniade]

🌌💫🌒

Fan art of @kianamaiart’s characters from I Don’t Want To Be A Magical Girl! (with glasses, ft misc glasses characters & two IDWTBAMG universe fan characters)

I’ve been following this project from the start so it’s been great seeing interactions between the characters and how the fandom is so excited for it. ^^

I tried to draw the cast from memory and, while Miss seems a little different from canon, at least I got the dark hair roots and strands sticking out lol. But details aside they’re all recognizable! Which means they’re lovely designs that are unique from one another✨

Eclipse’s shades are a combination of his usual eye mask and the shades from this artwork, and Hoshi’s glasses are inspired by this one!🌒⭐️

Designs… (I don’t have a name for her yet but) the pigtails girl’s shapes are a combination of curves pointing downwards and curves pointing upwards. The idea ended up being that she’s on Eclipse and Lady DeVoid’s side so (after reading this post by Kiana about how most of the characters had Aika’s design as the springboard and are designed to complement eachother) I wanted her design to complement those two’s, with some influence from Zira. I like that the strands of hair on her forehead and the shape around them mirror both Zira’s hair and DeVoid’s horns haha. Plus, I was trying to figure out how to design her glasses and they ended up being kind of the inverse of Eclipse’s eye mask, which is very nice. Eclipse and DeVoid seem to be associated with sharp curves and circle shapes; maybe her outfit could be a lot fancier…

As for what her role might be in the story… I dunno, if she works with Eclipse and DeVoid, and Eclipse is all ~theatric and grand~ then maybe she could be like… his assistant… or something? Who knows. Or, I say “observer from afar” so perhaps she actually gets along with Zira well and they’d watch on the sidelines while Aika and Eclipse duke it out…?

Eclipse… Moon… Umbra… man what if I just name the pigtails girl Yueshi (月食, lunar eclipse)(for both the moon motif that Zira and Eclipse have, and the darkness motif that Eclipse and DeVoid have haha)

Shooting star and telescope don’t feel quite right, but with the circular shapes and the lunar eclipse, I could kind of see her having some star trail motifs with her sweater…

I guess Umbra would be the same type of elf (? darkness/concept personified?) as Lady DeVoid but I’m not sure haha. We don’t have much information on DeVoid other than the fact that she is darkness itself and that she lost most of her powers which she can’t remember how to use. Banished by a Star Guardian, revenge, recruiting Eclipse to help spread the darkness particles to destroy the Star Guardian… If she has a similar backstory to MLP:FIM’s Princess Luna then does that mean she was originally Aika’s teammate or something? haha

About Umbra’s hair… (Feel free to correct me for any inaccuracies.) I think from the reference photos I was trying to draw box braids but got so focused on also making the braids look like moon phases that I’m not sure if it’d still be box braids in the end? They seem more like cornrows now, at least for the side ones?

Here are some earlier versions of the OCs! and more rambling about designs

Well, initially I scribbled down Yueshi so I could experiment with values because I was thinking about how light-coloured pants draw the eye too much if the outfit or the top half of the character is darker. (Half way through she ended up looking like a IDWTBAMG character so I tried to match the proportions with Aika’s turnaround.) But I suppose if there’s enough contrast for the upper half (and IDWTBAMG’s stark black design style gives a lot of contrast) then it works out better. I think the combination of making Yueshi’s hair and the top half of her sweater black and the circle shape white worked out okay. Initially she had large round eyes so I tried giving her round glasses too but since she ended up being a fan character in the universe, it was too similar to Aika and Zira.

Umbra’s design kind of popped into my mind today so I tried to scribble it down and experimented with hairstyles. But green and purple are already associated with Zira, and that shade of lavender is more like Eclipse so I guess I’ll fiddle around with her colour scheme more. Maybe there’s not enough of the signature black there, and both could use some more details to match the level of details in the canon designs… (If Yueshi works under DeVoid then she’d probably get a fancy outfit too.) Then again, Umbra is more like Miss in terms of detail so it seems she’d be a background/supporting character or something…🤔

(I can’t seem to escape the puffy sleeves/cone shape silhouette🤔 Gotta diversify. Also, not sure if it’s ‘cause of the project’s style or if I just really love circles in character design haha)

[fatehbaz]

patience being tested. being forced by a bizarre unfortunate situation to adhere to university requirement technicality by taking this simple basic elementary "introduction to environmental history" class.

this class is from facilitators/program which do, like, "history of the American frontier" or "history of fishing and hunting" and still basically subscribe to that old-school twentieth-century idealization and celebration of characters like Teddy Roosevelt and reverence for a mythical arc-of-history-bent-towards-justice narrative of the often-clumsy but ultimately-benevolent US federal government and its mission to "save nature" through the miracle of "sustained yield," while heroic federal land management agencies and "heritage" institutions lead to way, staffed by exceptional individuals (appeals to nostalgia for the frontier and an imagined landscape of the American West; ego-stroking appeals to flattering self-image that center the environmentalist or academic). where they invoke, y'know, ideas like "ecology is important because don't you enjoy cross-country skiing in The Woods with your niece and nephew? don't you like hunting and fishing?" which makes it feel like a time capsule of appeals and discourses from the 1970s. and it invokes concept of "untouched wilderness" (while eliding scale of historical Indigenous environmental relationships and current ongoing colonial violence/extractivism). but just ever-so-slightly updated with a little bit of chic twenty-first-century flair like a superficial land acknowledgement or a reference to "labor histories" or "history from below," which is extra aggravating when the old ideologies/institutions are still in power but they're muddying the water and diluting the language/frameworks (it's been strange, watching words like "multispecies" and "Anthropocene" over the years slowly but surely show-up on the posters, fliers, course descriptions, by now even appearing adjacent to the agri-business and resource extraction feeder programs, like a recuperation or appropriation.) even from a humanities angle, it's still, they're talking at me like "You probably didn't know this, but environmental history is actually pretty entangled with political and social events. In fact, we can synthesize sources and glean environmental info from wacky places like workers' rolls in factories, ship's logs, and poetry from the era." and i'm nodding like YEP.

the first homework assignment is respond to this: "Define and describe 'the Anthropocene'. Do you think 'the Anthropocene' is a useful concept? Why or why not?" Respond in 300 words.

so for fun, right now in class, going to see how fast i can pull up discussion of Anthropocene-as-concept solely from my old posts on this microblogging site.

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ok, found some

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I think that the danger in any universal narrative or epoch or principle is exactly that it can itself become a colonizing force. [...] I’m suspicious of the Anthropocene as concept for the very reason that it subsumes so many peoples, nations, histories, geographies, political orders. For that reason, I think ideas like the Anthropocene can be a useful short-hand for a cluster of tangible things going on with the Earth at the moment, but we have to be very careful about how fluid and dynamic ideas become concretized into hegemonic principles in the hands of researchers, policymakers, and politicians. There’s so much diversity in histories and experiences and environmental realities even between relatively linked geographies here in Canada [...]. Imagine what happens when we try to do that on a global scale - and a lot of euro-western Anthropocene, climate change and resilience research risks doing that - eliding local specificities and appropriating knowledge to serve a broader euro-western narrative without attending to the inherent colonial and imperial realities of science and policy processes, or even attending to the ways that colonial capitalist expansion has created these environmental crises to begin with. While we, as a collective humanity, are struggling with the realities of the Anthropocene, it is dangerous to erase the specific histories, power-relations, political orders that created the crisis to begin with. So, I’m glad that a robust critique of the Anthropocene as a concept is emerging.

Text by: Words of Zoe Todd, as interviewed and transcribed by Caroline Picard. “The Future is Elastic (But it Depends): An Interview with Zoe Todd.” 23 August 2016.

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The Great Acceleration is the latest in a series of human-driven planetary changes that constitute what a rising chorus of scientists, social scientists, and humanists have labeled the Anthropocene - a new Age of Humans. [...] But what the Anthropocene label masks, and what the litany of graphs documenting the Great Acceleration hide, is a history of racial oppression and violence, along with wealth inequality, that has built and sustained engines of economic growth and consumption over the last four centuries. [...] The plantation, Sidney Mintz long ago observed, was a “synthesis of field and factory,” an agro-industrial system of enterprise [...]. Plantation legacies, along with accompanying strategies of survival and resistance, dwell in the racialized geographies of the United States’ and Brazil’s prison systems. They surface in the inequitable toxic burdens experienced by impoverished communities of color in places like Cancer Alley, an industrial corridor of petrochemical plants running along the Mississippi River from New Orleans to Baton Rouge, where cotton was once king. And they appear in patterns of foreign direct investment and debt servitude that structure many land deals in the Caribbean, Brazil, and sub-Saharan Africa [...]. [C]limatologists and global change scientists from the University of London, propose instead 1610 as a date for the golden spike of the Anthropocene. The date marked a detectable global dip in carbon dioxide concentrations, precipitated, they argue, by the death of nearly 50 million indigenous human inhabitants [...]. The degradation of soils in the tobacco and cotton-growing regions in the American South, or in the sugarcane growing fields of many Caribbean islands, for example, was a consequence of an economic and social system that inflicted violence upon the land and the people enslaved to work it. Such violent histories are not so readily evident in genealogies that date the Anthropocene’s emergence to the Neolithic Revolution 12,000 years ago, the onset of Europe’s industrial revolution circa 1800, or the Trinity nuclear test of 1945. Sugarcane plantations were already prevalent throughout the Mediterranean basin during the late middle ages. But it was during the early modern era, and specifically in the Caribbean, where the intersection of emerging proto-capitalist economic models based on migratory forced labor (first indentured servitude, and later slavery), intensive land usage, globalized commerce, and colonial regimes sustained on the basis of relentless racialized violence, gave rise to the transformative models of plantations that reshaped the lives and livelihoods of human and non-human beings on a planetary scale. [...] We might, following the lead of science studies scholar Donna Haraway and anthropologist Anna Tsing, more aptly designate this era the Plantationocene. [...] It is also an invitation to see, in the words of geographer Laura Pulido, “the Anthropocene as a racial process,” one that has and will continue to produce “racially uneven vulnerability and death." [...] And how have such material transformations sustained global flows of knowledge and capital that continue to reproduce the plantation in enduring ways?

Text by: Sophie Sapp Moore, Monique Allewaert, Pablo F. Gomez, and Gregg Mitman. "Plantation Legacies." Edge Effects. 22 January 2019. Updated 15 May 2021. [Bold emphasis added by me.]

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Geologists and other scientists will fight over [the definition of the beginning start-date of the Anthropocene] in scientific language, seeking traces of carbon dioxide that index the worst offenses of European empire which rent and violated the flesh, bodies, and governance structures of Indigenous and other sovereign peoples in the name of gold, lumber, trade, land, and power. [...] The stories we tell about the origins of the Anthropocene implicate how we understand the relations we have with our surrounds. In other words, the naming of the Anthropocene epoch and its start date have implications not just for how we understand the world, but this understanding will have material consequences, consequences that affect body and land.

Text by: Heather Davis and Zoe Todd. On the Importance of a Date, or Decolonizing the Anthropocene. ACME An International Journal for Critical Geographies. December 2017. [Bold emphasis added by me.]

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From Aime and Suzanne Cesaire, C. L. R. James, Claudia Jones, Eduoard Glissant, through Sylvia Wynter, Christina Sharpe, and so many others, critical anticolonial and race theory has been written from the specific histories that marked the Black Atlantic. [...] Glissant also reminds us, secondly, of how cunning the absorptive powers of [...] liberal capitalism are - how quickly specific relations are remade as relations-erasing universal abstractions. [...] This absorptive, relations-erasing universalism is especially apparent in some contemporary discourses of […] liberalism and climate collapse - what some call the Anthropocene - especially those that anchor the crisis in a general Human calamity which, as Sylvia Wynter has noted, is merely the name of an overdetermined and specific [White] European man. […] [T]he condition of creating this new common European world was the destruction of a multitude of existing black and brown worlds. The tsunami of colonialism was not seen as affecting humanity, but [...] these specific people. They were specific - what happened to them may have been necessary, regrettable, intentional, accidental - but it is always them. It is only when these ancestral histories became present for some, for those who had long benefitted from the dispossession [...], that suddenly the problem is all of us, as human catastrophe.

Text by: Elizabeth Povinelli. “The Ancestral Present of Oceanic Illusions: Connected and Differentiated in Late Toxic Liberalism.” e-flux Journal Issue #112. October 2020.

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The narrative arc [of White "liberal humanism"] [...] is often told as a kind of European coming-of-age story. […] The Anthropocene discourse follows the same coming-of-age [...] script, searching for a material origin story that would explain the newly identified trajectory of the Anthropos […]. Sylvia Wynter, W.E.B. DuBois, and Achille Mbembe all showed how that genealogy of [White subjecthood] was [...] articulated through sixteenth- through nineteenth-century [historiographies and discourses] in the context of colonialism, [...] as well as forming the material praxis of their rearrangement (through mining, ecological rearrangements and extractions, and forms of geologic displacements such as plantations, dams, fertilizers, crops, and introduction of “alien” animals). […] As Wynter (2000) commented, “The degradation of concrete humans, that was/is the price of empire, of the kind of [Eurocentric epistemology] that underlies it” (154).

Text by: Kathryn Yusoff. “The Inhumanities.” Annals of the American Association of Geographers, Volume 11, Issue 3. November 2020.

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As Yarimar Bonilla suggests in regard to post-Irma-and-Maria Puerto Rico, “vulnerability is not simply a product of natural conditions; it is a political state and a colonial condition.” Many in the Caribbean therefore speak about the coloniality of disaster, and the unnaturalness of these “natural” disasters [...]. Others describe this temporality by shifting [...] toward an idea of the Plantationocene [...]. As Moore and her colleagues write, “Plantation worlds, both past and present, offer a powerful reminder that environmental problems cannot be decoupled from histories of colonialism, capitalism, and racism that have made some human beings more vulnerable [...].” [W]e see that contemporary uneven socioecologies associated with the rise of the industrial world ["the Anthropocene"] are based [...] also on the racialized denial and foreshortening of life for the sacrificial majority of black, brown, and Indigenous people and their relegation to the “sacrifice zones” of extractive industry. [...] [A]ny appropriate response to the contemporary climate emergency must first appreciate its foundations in the past history of the violent, coercive, transatlantic system of plantation slavery; in the present global uneven development, antiblackness, and border regimes that shape human vulnerability [...] that continues to influence who has access to resources, safety, and preferable ecologies [...] and who will be relegated to the “plantation archipelagoes” (as Sylvia Wynter called them) [...].

Text by: Mimi Sheller. “Thinking Beyond Coloniality: Toward Radical Caribbean Futures.” Small Axe (2021), 25 (2 (65)), pages 169-170. Published 1 July 2021. [Bold emphasis added by me.]

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Indigenous genocide and removal from land and enslavement are prerequisites for power becoming operationalized in premodernity [...]; it was/is a means to operationalize extraction (therefore race should be considered as foundational rather than as periphery to the production of those structures and of global space). [...] Wynter suggests that we […] consider 1452 as the beginning of the New World, as African slaves are put to work on the first plantations on the Portuguese island of Madeira, initiating the “sugar-slave” complex - a massive replantation of ecologies and forced relocation of people […]. Wynter argues that the invention of the figure of Man in 1492 as the Portuguese [and Spanish] travel to the Americas instigates at the same time “a refiguring of humanness” in the idea of race. [...] The natal moment of the 1800 Industrial Revolution, […] [apparently] locates Anthropocene origination in […] the "new" metabolisms of technology and matter enabled by the combination of fossil fuels, new engines, and the world as market. […] The racialization of epistemologies of life and nonlife is important to note here […]. While [this industrialization in the nineteenth century] […] undoubtedly transformed the atmosphere with […] coal, the creation of another kind of weather had already established its salient forms in the mine and on the plantation. Paying attention to the prehistory of capital and its bodily labor, both within coal cultures and on plantations that literally put “sugar in the bowl” (as Nina Simone sings) […]. The new modes of material accumulation and production in the Industrial Revolution are relational to and dependent on their preproductive forms in slavery […]. In 1833, Parliament finally abolished slavery in the British Caribbean, and the taxpayer payout of £20 million in “compensation” [paid by the government to slave owners for their lost "property"] built the material, geophysical (railways, mines, factories), and imperial infrastructures of Britain and its colonial enterprises and empire. [...] A significant proportion of funds were invested in the railway system connecting London and Birmingham (home of cotton production and […] manufacturing for plantations), Cambridge and Oxford, and Wales and the Midlands (for coal). Insurance companies flourished [...]. The slave-sugar-coal nexus both substantially enriched Britain and made it possible for it to transition into a colonial industrialized power […]. The slave trade […] fashioned the economic conditions (and institutions, such as the insurance and finance industries) for industrialization.

Text by: Kathryn Yusoff. "White Utopia/Black Inferno: Life on a Geologic Spike". e-flux Journal Issue #97. February 2019. [Bold emphasis added by me.]

[puppetmaster13u]

Prompt 262

Pondering Ghosts are Dragons, and just rotating each design in my head I have for them. That is the ghosts we see in the show more than just once or twice lol. Just pondering each of them and potential types and descriptions and how the people of Amity see them, as they’re used to the dragons around, vs say someone from Outside, crossover or no, who are Not used to the maybe slightly eldritch undeath interdimensional dragons around everywhere. 

That is not normal for other people. 

To the Amity Parkers? Boxy is simply a chonky dragon with small boxy wings and covered in blue scales. To people just coming into the city, it’s like seeing a giant komodo dragon when you’re just walking home- not something you exactly want to see and something that is dangerous. 

Kitty’s and Johnny’s weekly relationship tussle? Par for the course really. But to visitors? Two giant wyverns tearing into each other, shimmering greens that could be scales, could be tendrils, and shadows lengthening and thrashing like a living beast all its own. 

And this is just the small dragonlings, not even beginning with larger ones like Pandora and Fright Knight, chill as they may be. 

Outsiders don’t understand that they’re more than just animals. Amity is used to this, but people who have no clue what’s going on? They don’t.

They call the police, the heroes, the government, for help, for answers. And that? That the GIW can use. 

[weaselle]

There have been several things in my everyday life that i have just, "decided to not let bother me". And that seemed to work really well for me. Like, well if i can't seem to change that then i guess i'll just accept the fact that i'm a person whose life is like that, and be at peace with it.

years later i'm finding out that while i thought i was not letting it bother me, what i was actually doing was ignoring that it was bothering me the whole time. And, wow, are those two things different.

[majorasnightmare]

the tadpole/brain damage thing. its like. chekovs gun to me. obviously theres very little mechanical support ingame for having a disabling injury, aside from maybe an optional voluntary decision to drop the INT score, but similarly to choosing to write intention into the lack of dark urge Lore responses from the party, i just like to make mountains out of molehills and force game mechanics into In Universe Character Problems

like when dirge repeatedly mentions that he thinks the tadpole is doing something beneficial for him, that its helping him, it isnt JUST the power-hungry psionic ambition in him. its a parasite, that needs a host. it needs a LIVING host, or its own chances of survival plummet. and dirge gets tadpoled right after a life threatening injury to the tadpoles preferred habitat. neither of them want to die!! dirges body tries to recover, but cant in part BECAUSE of the tadpole (the netherese stasis magic rejecting outside influence and binding it to its host, having an unejectable foreign object in the injury site, etc), but its not like the tadpole WANTS its host to have a life altering injury

its not like its malicious (except when it comes to Hive Activity, and then it can be a right bastard), it just cant live any other way. it cant help what it is. halsin calls the illithid life cycle abberant and unnatural, but brood parasitism exists throughout the natural kingdom. is the wasp egg evil for having been laid in a caterpillar?

its first moments of life outside the brine pool, and its new home, its new life, its host, its caregiver, its food supply, is bleeding and dying and falling apart and trying to fix itself but cant and its trying to heal around you but it cant but if it doesnt do anything youll both die, so this larva, this tiny worm of psionic potential and instinct, does what it can. holds its host together with whatever force it can muster, soft gelatinous body (perfect for compreesing flat and squeezing through small orifice openings) keratinizing outside the acidic environment of the brine, its four oral tentacles (its only source of motion and movement when so young and soft, dragging itself along as best it can) made for interweaving with dense synapse clusters to passively absorb the psionic imprint of its host, now desperately intwined with bleeding meat just to try and hold it all together. driven by survival instict and a vessel of psychic potential, forced into passivity by the commands of the Elder, further forced by circumstance to leverage all its great gifts to keep its host standing long enough to eventually eat

my thought is that the reason why dirge still gets the cutscene of the emperor tadpoling him at the beginning of the game, is that the original tadpole orin forced on him is just so weakened and exhausted by months of effort trying to keep him alive through kressas experiments and meddling, that the emperor, currently in thrall to the absolute, feels the need to replace it with a fresher healthier specimen, which then cannibalizes and absorbs the previous one, and then just has to go back to doing the same shit as the last one.

i think that dirges tadpole isnt as twitchy or squirmy as the others because of it. that when omeluum gives him a psychic MRI, the tadpole is just burrowed down and its tendrils stretched like a dense net throughout dirges brain tissue, only moving or writhing occasionally but definitely not as mobile as usual, its web of tendrils especially twisted near dense scar tissue at the back of his head. this worm is already so fucking weird and the circumstances for this mind flayer MRI have already introduced a bajillion different variables that need accounting for, that i dont think omeluum immediately groks the specifics of whats going on but CAN peg the "you have brain damage and your worm is fucking Weird" situation fairly easily. but i dont think it gets enough time in dirges head to get a full understanding of what the tadpole is doing FOR him

cuz like. imo its definitely objectively helping. its a psychic information bank specifically designed to interface with a human brain. the reason why dirge isnt experiencing too many of the side effects of brain damage is because the parasite is doing its best to mitigate them. memory issues, brain fog, disorientation and balancing issues, theyd all be significantly worse without the parasite. when he brings up how he feels its helping him, objectively hes right and its not even the kickass psychic powers hes right about.

like it doesnt cure EVERYTHING, he has chronic migraines that are sensitive to light, and before he asks halsin to make medicine, he starts every morning puking his guts out when the morning sun makes him so nauseous he cant hold dinner down. even without the Urge Nightmares, he has insomnia and just cant meaningfully sleep. but keeping track of what day it is, remembering what happened a few hours ago or the other day, standing up from a sitting position and not immediately wobbling and/or collapsing, retaining his old muscle memory. all shit the parasite is helping with

which is why i cant help but fixate on those moments immediately after defeating the absolute. like oh thats juicy

[greencheekconure27]

What exactly are you doing to these potatoes OP? Studying the influence of New World crops on 18th century European economy? Botanical research? Teaching them how to correctly reference sources in Chicago 17? Making them write a thesis before they can be used to make fries? Conducting insane and unethical experiments on them to create a superior new race of potato people?

[flutteras]

The Dark Urge and "No Longer You" from Epic the Musical fit so well together.

Inspired by @sledgehammer-to-a-discoball's post

[wangxianficrecs]

Follower Recs

~*~

Life is Very Long

by Vamillepudding

T, 12k, Wangxian

Summary: Wei Wuxian is a good for nothing, possibly evil, possibly fake uncle. But he's Jin Ling's good for nothing, possibly evil, possibly fake uncle. So it stands to reason that when Jin Ling starts to suspect that Hanguang-jun is mistreating his husband, he immediately recruits Jiang Cheng for a rescue mission.

~*~

Clothes Like Clouds, Face Like Flowers, Half Soaked in Tears and Blood.

by JaenysBloodcourt

T, 9k, Jin Guangshan has a harem including Wei Wuxian, Lan Wangji, Meng Shi, Wen Ning | Wangxian

Summary: At the time, the Forbidden City seemed like the perfect place to escape Yu-furen and not earn her wrath. Or, the one where WWX is a concubine in Jin Guangshan's harem, he hates it, and Lan-Pin's pretty face finished rocking his world.

~*~

Flowers Blooming in the Dark

by TheLegendOfChel

T, 64k, Wangxian

Summary: When Wei Wuxian, the god of death, meets Lan Wangji, the god of vegetation, the last thing he expects is to be swept off his feet. Unfortunately, the rest of the world is less accepting of their courtship. Denied permission to marry, Wei Wuxian and Lan Wangji elope. The other gods, furious with this blatant act of disobedience, declare war on the underworld, and vow to punish Wei Wuxian for kidnapping the honorable Hanguang-jun. Wei Wuxian finds this rather unfair. If anything, Lan Wangji is the one who kidnapped him!

~*~

bespoke

by cafecliche

G, 3k, Wangxian

Summary: The bundle of mail from the Qinghe Nie Sect arrives in Cloud Recesses late one evening. All but one piece of the pile is a stack of invitations to this year’s Cultivation Conference, wrapped in light blue string. The last is a short, handwritten list wedged between two envelopes, unnoticeable until it flutters to the floor. (Or: the juniors stage a tiny, benevolent rebellion.)

~*~

🔒 you've got to find a way, say what you want to say

by Quixiote

T, 12k, Wangxian

Summary: Every month, a man comes into the post office with a letter that cannot be sent to the person they are intended for. Or: The Saga of The Letters To The YiLing Patriarch as told by DushanYou sect Post-ivator Bai Ju

~*~

(Please REBLOG as a signal boost for these hard-working authors if you like – or think others might like – these stories.)

[luck-of-the-drawings]

OH ARTHUR BENNETT.. such a gorgeous and intriguing character. terribly burdened by a GRUESOME set of crimes, his light suffocated by a HEAVY century of GUILT. so tragic, so dark and broody, and yet PAINFULLY awkward in any social setting ever

[kats-randomology]

I've had Mephiles brainrot and been doodling stuff for a lil AU I made 🤪

Mephiles escapes the timeless void but well. He's a few grains short of a full hourglass. He knows his name....and nothing else.

He gets into some trouble with locals due to his social awkwardness (aka lashing out at anyone in a 5 foot radius) and since he's in the area, Sonic drops in to assist-- and also doesn't really know who this guy is. Seems familiar but can't quite place why.

Meanwhile, time anomalies seems to be popping up all over. Perhaps a consequence of the Time Eater? Or perhaps something else...

[imerian]

My (very old) loscar brooch (?) that i just now made doodles for

More pictures under cut

[foxyfexyll]

give, give, give, and take

i was reading a lotta interesting posts about sydney’s dynamic with the player, so it inspired a title that i wanted to draw something for

it has two interpretations. the second is about how much sydney devotes and sacrifices herself in the service of others. they are so kind and selfless that they bring themselves to overwork, be it with the church, the library, their parent’s business, or even what the player asks of them. the only instance in which they allow themselves to be greedy is when it comes to the pc. there are cases when sydney shows a different, more dominant side to themself to the player. this is specifically about a point in the player room where they refuse to stop and instead allow themselves to take

the other interpretation is the juxtaposition between syndey and rowan. when sydney sacrifices herself for others, rowan evaluates the situation to make sure they always come out ahead. he uses kylar for free pepper charges (balancing their relationship), avery for spare change, and would put up any front to make ends meet. when robin was missing for two months, rowan only only helped after his christmas present would have been a waste (true story, sorry robin). however, the church barely gives any returns and the rates at sirris’ shop were not impressive considering rowan’s skill. so why did he spend all of those lunch periods and afterschools hanging out with syd? he’d like to know the answer himself

[wikitpowers]

i just know for a fact that the moment ty finds out about kit being the first heir, he’ll be with him at every step, never for a second leaving his side, protecting kit like his life depends on it