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Translated from Middle English

@arthoure / arthoure.tumblr.com

I write video games and make people cry. Personal blog. Fandom stuff, medieval lit, baby sloths.

Another perk of libraries is that when I check out an audiobook and predictably fail to listen to it, it gets returned and I can rest easy knowing that checking it out at all has already benefited my local library. I can even do it again later and it will only bring further good things, for free, forever

VS buying an audiobook, failing to listen to it, and having to stare at it in my audible collection knowing I spent $10 on something I never used. And then imagine doing that again. Hellish. Get a library card and download the libby app

A note to all creatives:

Right now, you have to be a team player. You cannot complain about AI being used to fuck over your industry and then turn around and use it on somebody else’s industry.

No AI book covers. No making funny little videos using deepfakes to make an actor say stuff they never did. No AI translation of your book. No AI audiobooks. No AI generated moodboards or fancasts or any of that shit. No feeding someone else’s unfinished work into Chat GPT “because you just want to know how it ends*” (what the fuck is wrong with you?). No playing around with AI generated 3D assets you can’t ascertain the origin of. None of it. And stop using AI filters on your selfies or ESPECIALLY using AI on somebody else’s photo or artwork.

We are at a crossroad and at a time of historically shitty conditions for working artists across ALL creative fields, and we gotta stick together. And you know what? Not only is standing up for other artists against exploitation and theft the morally correct thing to do, it’s also the professionally smartest thing to do, too. Because the corporations will fuck you over too, and then they do it’s your peers that will hold you up. And we have a long memory.

Don’t make the mistake of thinking “your peers” are only the people in your own industry. Writers can’t succeed without artists, editors, translators, etc making their books a reality. Illustrators depend on writers and editors for work. Video creators co-exist with voice actors and animators and people who do 3D rendering etc. If you piss off everyone else but the ones who do the exact same job you do, congratulations! You’ve just sunk your career.

Always remember: the artists who succeed in this career path, the ones who get hired or are sought after for commissions or collaboration, they aren’t the super talented “fuck you I got mine” types. They’re the one who show up to do the work and are easy to get along with.

And they especially are not scabs.

*that’s not even how it ends that’s a statistically likely and creatively boring way for it to end. Why would you even want to read that.

I understand why Edmund Narnia sold out all his siblings for Turkish delight. A coworker brought us a bunch from Türkiye and I'd never had the real stuff before and you know what, I'd throw my siblings under a bus for this too. Just an irresponsible amount of lokum consumed this week. Pistachios on pistachios. Hazelnuts. Rose petals. Marshmallowy kind, gel kind, with chocolate, with coconut. AND baklava. I've been in heaven

The black areas represent the remaining natural dark skies in the United States

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I’ve been in the middle of the ocean at night and now live in texas and it is so hard to explain to people that no, they have not ever seen the night sky. It is so hard to explain to people that what they think is a proper night sky is fucking pathetic. A disgrace.

People talk about how you can’t see stars in the city and yeah, that’s true, but their concept of “seeing stars” is being able to make out orion’s belt.

So, so few people have see the sky in all its glory and it’s not sad. It’s a fucking crime. Seeing a perfectly dark night, no clouds, not a hint of light pollution? That’s a fucking religious experience.

The sky the vast vast majority of us grew up with is not the sky that inspired us to look up. It is not the sky that inspired constellations. You can’t even see most constellations.

Your ancestors looked at the night sky and said “surely, that is where the gods must live.” And you might be lucky if you can see hardly more than a handful of stars.

The sky is full, fucking FULL, of stars, and you’ve never seen them.

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I remember the first time I saw a properly dark sky and was like ‘oh that’s why it’s called the milky way’ and promptly started to cry

When we were on a field trip to the middle of the red sea, I remember us all crowding at the end of the boat that didn’t have lights and just lying on our backs and staring

When you see a properly dark starscape

You understand why people wrote poems and made up legends and built rockets and said heaven’s in the sky

The universe is infinite. So are the stars

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I’m trying to find a picture on google images to show you what I mean and I can’t find any

You think of the night sky like fairy lights on black velvet, but it’s not it’s not it’s like, like, dust in sunlight, like - I can’t find the words.

The stars are everywhere, like sugar, like glitter, like dust. You can’t find the constellations at first, not because you can’t recognise them, but because there’s so many stars you can’t pick out the familiar line of Orion’s belt. The North star has gone from bright familiarity to almost vanishing among a thousand, a hundred thousand, a million other lights. The milky way is a line of light arcing across the sky like a moon-trail on water only infinitely, infinitely bigger.

And for the first time in your life you’ll understand why people call it a dome, because it is, it’s three dimensional in exactly the way a city skyscape isn’t.

You’ll understand why Luthien Tinúviel danced under starlight, not moonlight, why people in a time before we knew the earth was round still looked up and wondered and built telescopes and dreamed about the stars.

The stars are endless and ancient and infinite and you will stand with your head craned back and your rucksack forgotten at your feet and you’ll feel like you’re falling upwards into that great bright sky like it’s calling you home and you’ll wonder how you ever thought the stars were beautiful before tonight when all you’d ever seen were the naked empty skyscapes of your home. And you’ll cry and you’ll spend the rest of your time there gazing up and wondering and imagining what it would be like to stand among those bright silver flecks

And then you’ll come home, and look up, and fall in a different kind of love with that handful of blazing stars to stubborn to be outdone by the whole of human invention, leading you home despite the light pollution and the clouds and the endless bustle of this shrinking planet.

“It hugely inflates its stomach and sings a mysterious melody. If you hear this melody, you’ll become sleepy right away.”
“The body is soft and rubbery. When angered, it will suck in air and inflate itself to an enormous size.”

blood is basically the most normal thing for a sword to hunger for. if a sword gained sentience and started asking me for blood i'd be like yeah i thought you might say that

For anyone who wants one last taste of Campbell and Justine, I have a short story with them published in Sapphic Blooms, which released yesterday! This collection is entirely made up of erotic sapphic scenarios across genres and tastes.

Note: this is purely an erotic story rather than plot-based, and touches on some (pre-arranged) CNC themes.

Available for purchase here at the platform of your choice: LINK

whenever you ask your friend who’s really into JRPGs “hey which one do i start with is the newest one fine” they always go “no, what you gotta do is head on over to ebay and look up the entry that completely bombed commercially. You’ll see that it goes for $800. Close ebay. Download an emulator for a console no younger than 17 years old. Download the ROM, and also this laundry list of various tweaks, retextures, and QoL tweaks. Pull up this exact spoiler-free guide put up a decade ago from GameFAQs, and you’ll experience the best game this series has to offer.” Like???