A collection of Xenk Yendar’s (don’t know if it’s ill-gotten)booty. And those sword fighting spinnings😍

Ummm!!! Is anyone else getting comments like these? I wouldn't have noticed anything off about the comments themselves, but check out those usernames. And then in that context, those comments are very generic.

What's happening? What's even the point of spam like this? Is it worth reporting or would it just create unnecessary work for volunteers?

( @naryrising tagging for likelihood of you being more in the loop)

Yes, it's just spam. What's the point: spammers presumably trying to build up some 'realistic' comment history so they don't immediately get detected as spam, before they start spamming for real. You can simply mark them as spam, that doesn't cause any work for us at all because it's an automated system, and marking them helps better train that system to recognize this type of spam.

I know, I know, gatekeeping the outdoors, that's supposedly bad, right, but I think if you show up to do a hike and you brought a portable speaker with you to play music while you hike, I think, like hear me out, there should be a gate, and someone at the gate should keep you from doing the hike.

playing music in public should get strong social disapproval

Recorded music, anyway. Live music is different rules. If you want to lug an entire cello up a mountain you can do whatever the hell you want.

Carrying a speaker on a hike to make everyone listen to your bullshit, and simply sitting under a tree and playing a fiddle in the woods, are two activities so different they may as well not exist in the same world.

I think the critical difference is that the bringing of recorded music with you ties the space to Elsewhere, whereas the creation of live music with an instrument you brought both binds you to the space, and drags everyone who hears you play into it as well.

I think you're right.

Yeah I'll accept this into my belief system.

For a while now I've been wanting to try painting over the Pillars of Creation photo taken by the Webb telescope.

When I was a kid I thought the earlier version looked like a bunch of dragons racing to the sky, and I think the new pic looks even more like it, so, here they are~

For reference, same crop of the photo down here:

This is SO stunning 😍😍

I am going crazy for the 2023 QuiltCon winners

I’m very tired. you probably heard that Russia destroyed the Kakhovka Dam to slow Ukraine’s counter offensive. here’s something I didn’t quite realize: since this February, the Russians operated the dam in juuuuust the right way so that as much water would build up as possible when the snow melted and spring showers started. and then they blew the whole thing up.

40,000 people may need to be evacuated. I don’t really have the energy to say anything else right now.

Hospitallers Medical Battalion: actual angels can confirm. they’re combat-zone medical services - you know how humanitarian groups like MFS and Red Cross have to pause operations due to the Russians fucking shooting at humanitarian zones? yeah, these guys don’t pause for bullets, they fucking walk into them and they bring out anyone they can.

Serhiy Prytula Charity Foundation: you can choose from a number of various fundraiser projects here, if you’re feeling particularly picky. for those of you who balk at the idea of supporting anything military just please remember that things like vehicles and drones aren’t just for military use, they’re also for evacuation and finding the wounded and they’re fucking vital.

KSE Foundation: similar to the above, KSE has multiple projects you can choose from to donate to. looking at it right now, one of the projects with the lowest amounts of money raised thus far - despite being started in April - is Seeds for Ukraine, which will help Ukraine recover from the ecological devastation Russia has been wreaking (and with Ukraine, the countries that rely on Ukraine’s grain exports that Russia keeps trying to steal).

Come Back Alive: do these guys even need the introduction? they’re Come Back Alive. I’m kissing all of them.

United24: Zelenskyy’s brain child, and the official fundraising platform of Ukraine. Mark Hamill recommends the fundraisers for drones in particular.

UAnimals: Nova Kakhovka’s zoo got… pretty much completely swept away. all zoo residents except the birds have drowned. UAnimals has tried throughout the occupation to keep the animals safe, and they’ve been reporting on the status of the zoo. I don’t really know what to say except that I hope they’re able to save the pets and strays in the towns along the river.

You can find NGOs specific to evacuation efforts in this post; please signal boost it as well. I’ve listed them but am leaving the links for the op post.

And another good list, every name here will put your money to good use.

@copperbadge, this is the general “help for Ukraine for ppl that don’t know where to donate outside of Ukraine”.

Had a rare request to reblog outside of RFM and the issue seemed urgent enough I wanted to do so. This is post two of two; thanks for notifying me and collecting these resources!

The litany against getting Mad Online

I must not reply. Replying is the mind-killer. Replying is the little death that brings total obliteration.

for anyone who needs it or might enjoy it, here are the pearls i gathered after spending a couple days going through all the fics in the edgin darvis/xenk yendar ao3 tag. you’re welcome. <3

Sunlight is a Kind of Burning by letmetellyouaboutmyfeels E 23k Ed’s excited to get his life back on track in the wake of saving Neverwinter. He’s less excited at how a certain paladin keeps popping up everywhere he goes.

Except for how he’s starting to miss the guy when he’s not around.

Yeah, let’s not think about that too hard.

Braided Threads by stele3 M 13k “Xenk?”

Turning, Xenk watched Edgin enter the stables at a jog, then stumble to a halt. He looked at Xenk’s face and visibly blanched. It had been some time since he had done thus; Xenk could hardly blame him. The mark on his forehead had caused so many to recoil from him over the years.

“Nice, uh, nice horse,” Edgin said after a moment.

“Greetings, Edgin Darvis,” Tyr said aloud.

“Nice talking horse.”

Xenk wiped tears from his face. “Edgin, I present to you my god: Tyr, the Sword Above the Clouds, Keeper of the Door.”

“Your god is a horse?”

Curse of the Green Hag by Moorishflower E 16k “For the crime of attempting to parlay, the hag has cursed me to fall prey to my most bestial urges. Either to secret myself to the woods and there lose my mind, or else to succumb to overwhelming desire for the first creature to touch me. It is why…” Here, a spark of Xenk’s old self-righteousness flares in his eyes. “…I begged you not to touch me. And now here we are.”  

“In my defense, you weren’t really coherent,” Ed says weakly.

Three months after the defeat of Sofina, Xenk shows up on Ed’s new doorstep needing help with a very specific curse.

tys hard to be a seinte in the cytie by indigostohelit E 4k “The Material Planes are not realms of punishment,” said Xenk. “The gods no more deny us the warmth of physical pleasure than they would the warmth of the sun. They only warn us, through each, of the dangers that lie in excess.”

“…Huh,” said Ed again, and, lacking further retort, grabbed up the new tankard and swigged deeply. Then he spat it across the bar.

“This is water, though,” said Xenk peacefully. “You are going to have a hangover in the morning.”

Hero of Another Story by Banhus M 11k The largely accidental courtship of Edgin Darvis, or: Edgin and Xenk negotiate over a question of genre.

To the Ends of the Earth by Moorishflower M 20k “It is done,” Xenk says. He holds up his own right hand to demonstrate, displaying the golden light that is already sinking into his gauntlet and disappearing beneath. “We are bound, you and I, until the magic is dispelled.”  

“What the fuck,” Edgin whispers. He scrabbles at his sleeve, yanking it up to examine the faintly-glowing runes that have encircled his wrist. “What the fuck? What do you mean, bound?”

Sent by the High Harpers to retrieve a criminal to aid in a desperate mission, and authorized to use binding magic to ensure his cooperation, Xenk comes to understand and long for the former Harper agent Edgin Darvis during the tenday they spend in Icewind Dale, surrounded on all sides by ice, and cold, and endless lonely nothingness.

Mark of the Thay by BlankPersonality E 93k WIP Edgin didn’t escape the Beckoning Death untouched. He survived, yes, but it left him with a familiar mark. The visions of Zia that had haunted him since that day complicated things too. And now Xenk is at his door…?

No wonder Dungeons and Dragons Honor Among Thieves hasn’t taken over the collective hive mind of Tumblr, there are so many tag variations to keep track of and even I think it’s a ridiculous amount of work to sift through them all. Just in the reblogs of my own post I’ve seen people interpret it as dndhat, d&d hat, honor among thieves, dungeons and dragons honor among thieves, dungeons & dragons: honor among thieves, D&D movie just to name a few

welcome to my nightmare

But the right tag is CLEARLY dndhat, I don't understand why this is even in question. It's D&D, but who can be bothered hitting the shift key while typing a tag so obviously that has to be dnd, and half the movie is about a really important hat.

Go read an old fic.

There’s such recency bias in fandom. As an author you post something, get a few reactions, and then it goes off into the bin. As a reader you check the tags, see what’s new, and move on. But a lot of old stuff is really good. It’s just sitting there, gathering dust, waiting for someone to take a peek.

So go on. Treat yourself.

Read an old fic.

I’d argue there’s a bias against like… middle-aged fics in particular. A lot of people sort by kudos or bookmarks, but that’s going to be strongly biased toward older fics, which have had more time to accumulate them. Then there’s people that sort by date and read the newest. But there’s so much good material in that middle area.

A friend taught me her trick for smaller fandoms, which is to sort by kudos and use the published date filters to go through the fandom in 6-month increments. Within a 6-month time span, you’re not really going to get the kudos-over-time bias. Basically, you end up reading the best fics of each 6-month period until you start hitting fics below your quality threshold, wherever that is. You’ll find so much good material that way that would never have crossed your line of sight otherwise.

This is a clever idea, and I’m reblogging it so I remember to do it.

vc insp

a few hours in the dark when you did not yet love me

I decided to make a partner piece for the Brienne art nouveau picture. I tried to keep the symmetry as high as possible, I know that Jaime is smaller than Brienne so he is a bit smaller in this pic than her, but not too small to break the symmetry.

I included additional flowers with the general meaning of “Forgive me” “I am sorry” “Don’t forget me”…

The sword he holds is the one he knighted her with ;)

The second pic is both of them in one view. I switched the color palettes for them, symbolizing the exchange in values and experiences, that they’re part of each other now. Brienne got Lannister like colors whereas Jaime got a few of the Tarth colors and some of the North. I like that the swords are almost on the same height, giving them somewhat the look of merging, underlining my symbolism here. both available for art prints (only): https://www.inprnt.com/gallery/sansho/

Needless to say, I am HORRIFIED.

‘All that you need to know about boars can be summed up in the fact that if you wish to hunt them, you must have a specially made boar spear. This spear has a crosspiece on it to prevent the boar from charging the length of the spear, driving it all the way through his own body, to savage the human holding the other end.’

-Boar and Apples, T. Kingfisher

fuck OFF

Note that pigs are also HUGE. So, yes, they ARE slightly larger pigs.

So I grew up in the city and have never seen a pig in real life and I just googled it and WHAT THE FUCK IS THIS

I thought they were like labrador sized, like, fat labradors, not mini-cows.

every time I see this post there are more people discovering how fuck off huge pigs actually are and I love it I thought this was a thing everyone knew but clearly not and I’m laughing 

This is me with our Tamworth boar, a heritage breed closer to their wild cousins than the Yorkshire above. I am a fully grown, average sized human. He was a gentle sweetie who, sadly, is no longer with us. His name was Mr. Big. 

FUCK OFF

Forever laffin’ at people who don’t understand how enormous, terrifying, and tenacious wild boar are. 

They’re like if bears had knives protruding from their closed mouths and Didn’t Know When To Quit. Their survival instincts when they’re wounded aren’t “run away and minimize injury” it’s “take the thing that hurt you down with you” They also make sounds like someone crossed a pig with an alligator.

Their head and neck alone can be like the size of an entire human torso.

Also forever laffin’ at people who think pigs are tiny, ‘cause we designed those things can get in the neighbourhood of a thousand pounds in ideal circumstances. 

It’s like when people assume Tuna must be small because they’ve only ever experienced them in hockey puck form.

Like seriously why the fuck y'all think everyone FREAKED THE HELL OUT when Dorothy fell into the pig pen in Wizard of Oz? It’s because pigs are HUGE and weigh a shitton and would crush her in an instant.

also dont they eat like, basically anything?

YUP. Pigs will eat people, if given the chance. They dgaf.

That’s why boar hunters use a team of very tenacious dogs to hold the boar so they can be speared without fucking you up. The dogs wear body armour. 

I’ve heard stories of people shooting boars, and if it didn’t kill them, it just pissed them off. 

how the hell did we ever domesticate these things?

…“how the hell did we ever domesticate these things?”

Very carefully, I would imagine.

WIld boar babies are rather cute, like living humbugs…

…but the adults and their ferocity have been associated with warriors for thousands of years, from Mycenaean Greece (a helmet made from sections of boar tusk)…

…through Celtic Europe (reconstructed carnyx war-horns and standards)…

…Ancient Rome (the crest of Legion 20 “Valeria Victrix”). A couple more legions also used a boar as their crest - I wonder did they squabble over which was the “right” one the way a couple of Swiss cantons had a little war over whose bear was best…?

…then Anglo-Saxon and pre-Viking helmet crests…

…right up to the late Middle Ages (here the white boar badge of Richard Duke of Gloucester, later Richard III of England)…

…and the blue boar badge of the Earl of Oxford, more usually represented by the De Vere arms, quarterly gules and or, in the first a molet argent.

After Richard was defeated at Bosworth in 1485, there was a run on blue paint as inn-signs were changed to reflect new loyalties since Oxford was on the winning side…

And pigs will definitely eat people.

It gets mentioned in the movie “Snatch”, the book/movie “Hannibal” and the webcomic “Lackadaisy Cats”, among numerous other fictional sources, and IRL it’s suspected to be the reason why numerous missing persons have stayed missing.

More here (another comment to this same OP) and here (slightly different).

Here’s some boar-hunting armour for dogs, ancient…

…and modern…

…and the modern one looks very like a simple style of ancient…

So when Odysseus’s old nurse recognizes him by the scar he got from the boar-tusk slash that almost killed him… now you get the resonance.

This post…it just really went places on me.

amateur poetry checklist

◘ start your poem with the word “and”

◘ speak exclusively in first and second person as if every poem is a personal letter

◘ use coffee and cigarettes and whiskey to denote pain and maturity

◘ throw in as many over-the-top words as possible, like "ethereal” or “wanderlust”

◘ mention greek figures like apollo or icarus to add depth and culture

◘ continuously start lines with “listen” to make sure your reader is still paying attention

◘ avoid using capitalization or punctuation in any situation

◘ put line breaks completely at random to break the reader’s concentration

◘ finish your poem by repeating the same line three times

◘ if you can’t think of a title, just use a line from a song from your favorite band

and that’s it! if you follow these simple steps, you too can have an excerpt from a book you’ll never write

WHO THE FUCK CARES!!!! WHO CARES!!!!! WRITING IS HARD!!! ART IS HARD!!! STOP FUCKING GATEKEEPING ART BECAUSE YOU THINK YOU’RE BETTER THAN EVERYONE ELSE!!! OF COURSE NEW ARTISTS ARE GOING TO BE INSPIRED BY THE MEDIA THEY’RE EXPOSED TO, THAT’S HOW YOU LEARN!!! I GET IT YOUR HEAD IS SO FAR UP YOUR AESTHETIC ASSHOLE THAT YOU HONESTLY BELIEVE YOU’RE PROTECTING US SAD PLEBEIAN FARMERS WHO ARE STILL LEARNING!! I DON’T GIVE A SHIT IF IT USES ALL OF THESE NOT ONLY CAN IT STILL BE A GOOD POEM BUT GUESS WHAT!!!! AS LONG AS THAT PERSON FEELS GOOD ABOUT IT WHO THE FUCK CARES!!!!! i’m so fucking sick of shit like this go jack off on a Polaroid picture of your manuscript in a typewriter somewhere else, i don’t need to hear any of your faux-enlightened bullshit; not everybody has the same education or abilities as you do!! not everybody !!! has to be perfect at art when they try it!!! who cares they use the same format as a poet they look up to!!! just because they’re not copying your elitist bullshit doesn’t mean they’re not making good art!!! 

i’m so fucking sick of this shit i gotta go lie down everybody who isn’t this asshole please go write something that uses at least three of these; everybody go make new art no matter how bad other people tell you it is; life is too fucking short to let people keep you from trying new things 

Why in the world would you try to shame people out of writing poetry? A genre that is dying right now because it doesn’t make money because our educational system does a crap job at helping people connect with the pleasure of it and teaches poetry as if it’s a clue-puzzle mystery because that makes standardized tests easier to score?

There are two kinds of poetry that get published now: the kind you find in Hallmark cards and the kind that is only ever read by people in MFA programs. There are a few dead poets who have been ensconced successfully enough in high school curricula that people outside academia sometimes read them for pleasure or consolation or the opportunity to have emotional experiences otherwise unobtainable or, less commonly, to connect to Big Questions in a way that is more pleasurable and meaningful than, say, reading philosophy. Otherwise, the closest contemporary American culture comes to poetry as people interacted with it before the 20th century is song lyrics. Poetry and song have been inseparable since long before English emerged as a language so especially fuck anyone who wants to look down on you for treating song lyrics as something you might put in a poem. There are song lyrics in The Waste Land. Milton imagined “Lycidas” as being composed and sung by a shepherd. Yeats presented many of his poems as songs; and somewhat ironically given the fact that Yeats himself was tone deaf many of his poems have been set to music quite successfully. But I digress.

Not to go all Archibald the All-Right on everyone, but: I write poetry when I need to express something that prose does not allow me to get to. I believe in the value of poetry as a means of evoking or suggesting that which prose will not let us perceive. If you’re writing poetry that’s doing that, even if what you’re evoking or suggesting is your own emotional state, then IMHO you are doing it right.

Form is something you can learn, you will learn it from your models and you can also learn it in an academic setting where you can talk about how your models work and why. I love form, I enjoy learning about it, I encourage poets to do the same, it makes writing more interesting. But write poetry if you want to write it! We are really in the shitter if we lose it! And it is the one genre that AI consistently fails at!

With permission, I present one of my favorite X-Files fanvids: Tainted Love by Katharine Scarritt and Pam Rose. It predates the age of digital fanvids, being made on two VCRs with videocassette tapes.

Pam passed away in March 2021 and Katharine passed away in March 2022.

Edgin and Xenk DUNGEONS & DRAGONS: HONOUR AMONG THIEVES (2023)

I bound another fic by Astolat, the stunning Game of Thrones story “Let the River Run.” (@astolat , if you would like a copy, I would be delighted to make you one.)

This is probably my most complex case so far. I used jute marbled paper for the river, and olive crackled bookcloth for the cover. (In the right light/at the right angle, the crackle in the book cloth matches the blue of the river.) Titling was done with acrylic paint.

Each chapter has a bit of river as a chapter heading—I drew these myself after unsuccessfully trying to find images that did what I wanted. The edges were done with gold acrylic paint, and there’s hand-sewn tri-colored endbands.

Omg look how beautiful *____*

Print version of And I Alone Have Escaped To Tell You by astrolat!

I'm super happy with how this turned out, I used several new techniques for the cover, including making stencils with a borrowed cricut machine. The cover text was made possible by Pixel Sagas, who has multiple cybertronian font styles available for download on FontSpace (I've gone down a rabbit hole of online font files!)

So beautiful! 😍