Guys do u know that one meme where there's a girl and like a bodyguard (???) ordering drinks and the waiter give them the wrong drinks so they switch them on the last panel,???????? BECAUSE I C1NT FING IT^
I FUCKIBG GOT IT RAAAAAHHHHHHH 💥💥💥💥💥
a small Texture Tutorial
I’ve been asked a few times about how I use textures, especially gold textures, so I’ve decided to try and do a little tutorial about it. I’ve never really done a tutorial, but I hope it’s easy to understand, since it’s not difficult to apply :)
There are a hundred ways of doing the same thing, this is just one of those ways. For other (BETTER) tutorials explaining more about textures and other ways to use them, I point you all towards the 3 tutorials that taught ME the basics!
“I’d kill for you. Please ask me to kill for you.” “No.” Is a top tier ship dynamic no I do not take criticism
The idea of a person being capable of incredibly immoral acts but held in check but their love of their partner sends me every time
yes
pairs well with this one
I have this this dialogue worm in my head I can’t get rid of (16x08 spoilers) so Carolina eventually tells Wash what’s been going on (”Carolina, are you okay?” “Am I okay?” “Yeah, I mean, you’ve been acting weird lately.”) and she tells him pretty much what she told Dr. Grey: how he’s always been the one to bounce back, the unbreakable one, the guy who pulls through everything, and she’s been afraid to tell him that he’s finally broken. And maybe he’s quiet for a minute, some things in the past few months suddenly make sense, and he says, “Is that really what you think?” And she’s ready for the worst. She’s prepared to comfort him, to get him through this, and it catches completely off guard when he gives her a small, sad, smile, like he’s wondering if she’s the one with brain damage, and he says, “Carolina, I’ve been broken for years.” And she has no idea what to say to that So he keeps talking like, “Carolina, I spent… I’m actually not sure how long I spent in a mental hospital. I got an article 12, I spent a couple weeks walking around with a sociopathic shell of my friend and killing pretty much everyone we saw, and now you’re worried about me? Because I forgot that I told you about my cat?” And he’s the one telling her “I’m gonna be fine.” (Not that he thinks he can run back into combat without making some new plans and fail-safes in case he starts doing something stupid, but, hey, now he’s got something to plan about)
And Carolina has no idea how to tell him that he just proved the “strongest freelancer rubber band” point, and she and five other dead assholes still owe North $70 about it.
and I’d gone into writing this as just a blurb for someone else to maybe expand on/run farther with (the idea that Wash is actually gonna take this whole short-term memory scramble issue in stride and thinks this whole “unbreakable Wash” thing is ridiculous “like, have you met me? yikes”. it’s not that he doesn’t break, he just puts himself back together. eventually. even as Carolina and the rest of us wanna just shake him (but don’t, his head’s got enough problems)) because I believe in the power of OPTIMISM and pulling yourself out of the angst by your freakin BOOSTRAPS and how everything’s gonna be okay because Washington is a money maker and they know it it always is
in middle school during my Intense Greek Mythology Phase, Artemis was, as you can likely guess, my best girl. Iphigenia was my OTHER best girl. Yes at the same time.
The story of Iphigenia always gets to me when it's not presented as a story of Artemis being capricious and having arbitrary rules about where you can and can't hunt, but instead, making a point about war.
Artemis was, among other things--patron of hunting, wild places, the moon, singlehood--the protector of young girls. That's a really important aspect she was worshipped as: she protected girls and young women. But she was the one who demanded Agamemnon sacrifice his daughter in order for his fleet to be able to sail on for Troy.
There's no contradiction, though, when it's framed as, Artemis making Agamemnon face what he’s doing to the women and children of Troy. His children are not in danger. His son will not be thrown off the ramparts, his daughters will not be taken captive as sex slaves and dragged off to foreign lands, his wife will not have to watch her husband and brothers and children killed. Yet this is what he’s sailing off to Troy to inevitably do. That’s what happens in war. He’s going to go kill other people’s daughters; can he stand to do that to his own? As long as the answer is no—he can kill other people’s children, but not his own—he can’t sail off to war.
Which casts Artemis is a fascinating light, compared to the other gods of the Trojan War. The Trojan War is really a squabble of pride and insults within the Olympian family; Eris decided to cause problems on purpose, leaving Aphrodite smug and Hera and Athena snubbed, and all of this was kinda Zeus’s fault in the first place for not being able to keep it in his pants. And out of this fight mortal men were their game pieces and mortal cities their prizes in restoring their pride. And if hundreds of people die and hundred more lives are ruined, well, that’s what happens when gods fight. Mortals pay the price for gods’ whims and the gods move on in time and the mortals don’t and that’s how it is.
And women especially—Zeus wanted Leda, so he took her. Paris wanted Helen, so he took her. There’s a reason “the Trojan women” even since ancient times were the emblems of victims of a war they never wanted, never asked for, and never had a say in choosing, but was brought down on their heads anyway.
Artemis, in the way of gods, is still acting through human proxies. But it seems notable to me to cast her as the one god to look at the destruction the war is about to wreak on people, and challenge Agamemnon: are you ready to kill innocents? Kill children? Destroy families, leave grieving wives and mothers? Are you? Prove it.
It reminds me of that idea about nuclear codes, the concept of implanting the key in the heart of one of the Oval Office staffers who holds the briefcase, so the president would have to stab a man with a knife to get the key to launch the nukes. “That’s horrible!,” it’s said the response was. “If he had to do that, he might never press the button!” And it’s interesting to see Artemis offering Agamemnon the same choice. You want to burn Troy? Kill your own daughter first. Show me you understand what it means that you’re about to do.
it’s the way every yellowjacket has reacted with the exact same incredulousness to lottie being out of the institution which is making me think abt the intensity of them finding out she’d been institutionalized in the first place . what do you do when you make a prophet of a girl and then return to civilization and find that civilization has deemed her clinically insane. what do you do if you believed her and did everything she did but no one deemed you clinically insane. what do you do if you find out she’s not there anymore. she’s in the wider world again and people trust her and rely on her and you want to trust her again , so badly. what do you do if immediately on returning from the wilderness, it is recontexualized as madness and you lock onto that, and it changes how you look at everything you did, and if she’s back what does that mean about how you understood your own actions, your own belief in her, your own love of her, your own fear of how you love and fear and want to love and want to fear her
furthermore !!!! It’s the way they all know her exact diagnosis too. who told them. Did Lottie’s parents let her friends know she was being sent to the mental hospital. Was Lottie communicating with the other yellowjackets before she was sent away even though she wasn’t physically speaking to anyone else. did Lottie just vanish one day and they went to her house only for her maid to tell them she was gone. did Lottie’s parents tell the yellowjackets about her diagnosis . what was the tone of the conversation. was it anger or grief or disgust or sadness. what do Lottie’s parents think of the girls who made their daughter a prophet. do they know they did that. do they resent that the other girls came back quote unquote normal. what’s it like when they all return to wiskayok. sitting up late at night in their beds at their parents’ houses all alone remembering how they used to sleep in a big pile together on the floor clinging to the warmth of their friends. if you can call them friends. more and less than that all at once. do they hang out before they all start to drift away into the next phase of their lives. do they meet in the woods to sit and talk and drink and dance and scream and cry and fight. does lottie come to meet them until one day she’s just gone. and then one by one they all stop coming too. what’s holding them together if their girl god is gone across the ocean and they’re saying she was mad the whole time. what then!!!! what then!!!!!!!
Sister of Peter, daughter of Eve; how deep is the well in your eyes? If your teacher took a stone and dropped it into your pupils, how long until it makes a sound? If she smiles at you with rouge-dark lips, do you imagine your mouth matched with hers?
Your mother bought weed killer, today, and left the bottle open on the kitchen counter. The garden is a mess, she says. Her petunias, ruined. Her pansies, drained. It has been left untended for too long, and now the roots are too deep in the soil.
As long as there is a root, the rot will come back. Between one blink and the next, it might start devouring the house, instead. So, really, what choice is there but to take a shovel and dig?
Don't touch that, Lucy.
You will stain your little hands. You will make a mess of your mother's counters, and the taste of it won't leave the grooves in your fingertips for months to come. Every tree you touch will be sick with it, white streaks across sapping bark. For days, the smell will cling to your nose.
Didn't you know?
Helen Pevensie's children were left in the wild for too long and now Susan has thorns. Peter has teeth, and Edmund has roots. Lucy drips poison. They have, the four of them, grown into one another as weeds do, too tangled now to dig through their roots and take them from the ground they've claimed.
Daughter of Helen, how deep is the chasm in your lungs? If you tore yourself open, might you fill it with everything that floods from your siblings' palms? Susan curls her hair every morning, and stands straighter now than she ever has. Peter's obedience is an edged thing hung by the corners of his mouth.
Your mother won't let either of them see the paper. Peter's hands are bloodied, most days, and bruised at the knuckles. Fit them, each, underneath your lips. Until your golden brother weeps, his face in your hair, and his hands a shaking mess.
Hold him.
Watch Susan paint rouge on lips too small to hold it. Her hair falls to her shoulders and when she dances, she stumbles. She laughs, then, and it's a heaving, ugly sound that tears itself from her stomach or maybe the muscles in her back that are by now withered. Let her hold you, like this, painted nails dug deep in human flesh that has never seen a dagger. Drink from the crook of her neck each of her sobs.
Watch her file away her thorns.
Edmund drinks honeyed tea like a damned thing put on holy soil for communion. Trembling hands and a blood-red mouth, he has long since stopped pulling on your braids. From the well of your eyes, a sullen boy holds onto his siblings as though they might emerge from school changed to the bones. Cup his face in the hollows of your palms, brush each of his freckles in turn, until the hard line of his throat softens and his mouth goes slack.
Helen, mother of four, brings home turkish delight, heavy with rationed stamps. Watch how the sugar stains Susan's fingers and how it settles on Peter's lips. See the line between Edmund's eyes.
For hours, his breath smells of rosewater.
Oh, Lucy. You valiant woman. You reckless girl. Don't take the weedkiller. Don't pour it down the drain. The garden needs tending, see. So, child of Adam, is there still bone lodged in your chest? Are you, still, more sea than you have ever been girl?
Come, now. Behold your teacher's mouth. Could you fit, still, your needle-teeth around the sharpness of her?
Smile.
Wait.
you have invited strangers into your home, helen pevensie, mother of four.
without the blurred sight of joy and relief, it has become impossible to ignore. all the love inside you cannot keep you from seeing the truth. your children are strangers to you. the country has seen them grow taller, your youngest daughter’s hair much longer than you would have it all years past. their hands have more strength in them, their voices ring with an odd lilt and their eyes—it has become hard to look at them straight on, hasn’t it? your children have changed, helen, and as much as you knew they would grow a little in the time away from you, your children have become strangers.
your youngest sings songs you do not know in a language that makes your chest twist in odd ways. you watch her dance in floating steps, bare feet barely touching the dewy grass. when you try and make her wear her sister’s old shoes—growing out of her own faster than you think she ought to—, she looks at you as though you are the child instead of her. her fingers brush leaves with tenderness, and you swear your daughter’s gentle hum makes the drooping plant stand taller than before. you follow her eager leaps to her siblings, her enthusiasm the only thing you still recognise from before the country. yet, she laughs strangely, no longer the giggling girl she used to be but free in a way you have never seen. her smile can drop so fast now, her now-old eyes can turn distant and glassy, and her tears, now rarer, are always silent. it scares you to wonder what robbed her of the heaving sobs a child ought to make use of in the face of upset.
your other daughter—older than your youngest yet still at an age that she cannot be anything but a child—smiles with all the knowledge in the world sitting in the corner of her mouth. her voice is even, without all traces of the desperate importance her peers carry still, that she used to fill her siblings’ ears with at all hours of the day. she folds her hands in her lap with patience and soothes the ache of war in your mind before you even realise she has started speaking. you watch her curl her hair with careful, steady fingers and a straight back, her words a melody as she tells your eldest which move to make without so much a glance at the board off to her right. she reads still, and what a relief you find this sliver of normalcy, even if she’s started taking notes in a shorthand you couldn’t even think to decipher. even if you feel her slipping away, now more like one of the young, confident women in town than a child desperately wishing for a mother’s approval.
your younger son reads plenty as well these days, and it fills you with pride. he is quiet now, sitting still when you find him bent over a book in the armchair of his father. he looks at you with eyes too knowing for a petulant child on the cusp of puberty, and no longer beats his fists against the furniture when one of his siblings dares approach him. he has settled, you realise one evening when you walk into the living room and find him writing in a looping script you don’t recognise, so different from the scratched signature he carved into the doors of your pantry barely a year ago. he speaks sense to your youngest and eldest, respects their contributions without jest. you watch your two middle children pass a book back and forth, each a pen in hand and sheets of paper bridging the gap between them, his face opening up with a smile rather than a scowl. it freezes you mid-step to find such simple joy in him. remember when you sent them away, helen, and how long it had been since he allowed you to see a smile then?
your eldest doesn’t sleep anymore. none of your children care much for bedtimes these days, but at least sleep still finds them. it’s not restful, you know it from the startled yelps that fill the house each night, but they sleep. your eldest makes sure of it. you have not slept through a night since the war began, so it’s easy to discover the way he wanders the halls like a ghost, silent and persistent in a duty he carries with pride. each door is opened, your children soothed before you can even think to make your own way to their beds. his voice sounds deeper than it used to, deeper still than you think possible for a child his age and size. then again, you are never sure if the notches on his door frame are an accurate way to measure whatever it is that makes you feel like your eldest has grown beyond your reach. you watch him open doors, soothe your children, spend his nights in the kitchen, his hands wrapped around a cup of tea with a weariness not even the war should bring to him, not after all the effort you put into keeping him safe.
your children mostly talk to each other now, in a whispered privacy you cannot hope to be a part of. their arms no longer fit around your waist. your daughters are wilder—even your older one, as she carries herself like royalty, has grown teeth too sharp for polite society— and they no longer lean into your hands. your sons are broad-shouldered even before their shirts start being too small again, filling up space you never thought was up for taking. your eldest doesn’t sleep, your middle children take notes when politicians speak on the wireless and shake their heads as though they know better, and your youngest sings for hours in your garden.
who are your children now, helen pevensie, and who pried their childhood out of your shaking hands?
The Pevensie children are too old for their age.
Their mom notices, at the dinner table. She sees no nagging children, no stupid fights. She sees Lucy eating and speaking with perfect manners, Edmund analysing the economy and war with concerning skill, Susan being gracious but poised, like a diplomat.
Their father sees it in Peters eyes the first time they get into a fight. When he moves to punish Edmund for speaking out of turn, Peter calls him out on it. When his gaze meet his eldest son's, he's leveled by the war he sees behind it, the tensed muscle in his arm, the knuckles white around his knife. He's seen that before, in other soldiers. He doesn't know how to react.
Other children notice, too. Talking to all the Pevensie kids at the same time is like being the only one left out of a secret, and the way they touch and tease each other speaks of a history far deeper than their polite demeneor lets on. And when they walk they fall in line, as if there is a natural hierarchy between them.
The first time anyone picks a fight with Edmund, Peter comes home with a three week suspension and blood around his mouth. He looks more alive than you've seen him in weeks.
When Susan gets back in the pool after Narnia, she wins all the contests. Coaches can't explain how to beat her, because they don't understand how she's doing it, either. She seems to almost disappear when underwater.
Lucy, always gay and golden-haired, starts dancing, and never misses a step. She moves with an elegance that no 10 year old should have, and all the girls want to be friends with her
Edmund soon becomes the best student in his faculty. He always seems to know the right thing to say, and teachers laud his ability to think through complex problems. His mouth does get him in trouble sometimes, but the boy seems uncatchable, always talking his way through the cracks. And if not?
No one actively fears Peter, but everyone is a little scared of him sometimes. He's tall for his age, sure, but there is something else, some other air that seems to give him an authority far beyond what's normal for a teenage boy. He's nice enough, but teachers can't stand it, and bullies learn very quickly that pissing him off means missing teeth and black eyes.
The Pevensies are not quite inhuman, but not fully mortal, either
oh, sister, I am sorry. your eyes are sunken and your skin is bruised. your lips are chapped, your nailbeds bitten raw. your husband's hand on your waist is a ghost's touch held by the band on your left ring finger and I-
I am dead.
I got on the train, Su. Nevermind your tears, nevermind the plea you could not shape with words, nevermind your fingers on the pulse point of my wrist. "stay", you'd said, as you have always done, dictionary in hand and baby teeth yet lodged in your jaw. "don't go where i cannot."
I step through a wardrobe and you follow, damned be reason. I slay a wolf and you follow, I cling to the little ones and you follow, I am crowned and you follow, I am-
I go past a lamp post, and you follow, damned be dread. I go to a train station and you follow, trembling hands and tender heart. I go, and I go, and I go, and you follow. Sun of my skies. Light of my life.
I go. you stop.
are we too old for stories, now? ten-and-four and ten-and-three, budding bodies and steel bones, we are cast from our home. i hold the little ones until i drown in them. you grip your skirts until no iron can press the shape of your palms from them. and you have ever been, cruelly reasonable and logically callous.
say you, glass shard eyes and rouge-red lips: we are english. we are children. she thinks she has found a magical land in the upstairs wardrobe.
say I, trembling hands and coiling guts: we are narnian. we are monarchs. if she's not mad and she's not lying, then logically she must be telling the truth.
my sister Susan, beautiful as folk tales are and twice as sharp, did you intend every invitation you took for me to twist the knife a godly animal once thrust into my guts? perhaps it was the way your eyes turned blue, or the sound of your laughter losing its bells. perhaps it was just my trembling fingers at the back of your legs, drawing stocking lines where no stockings had ever lain.
the line came out shaking, and you rubbed it off until your skin cried red. the hem of your dress still dripped wet when you left that day, turning on heels too narrow for you to walk in.
do you remember? it took you days to come home, and mother wailed for all of them. you crawled into my bed that night, as you did when we were parents to our little ones, those terrible months. your head on my shoulder, your breath in my ear, I held you until morning.
your mouth in my throat, eyes heavy with sleep, tongue heavy with champagne: we are here now. we must make the best of it. he cannot have all our lives, and all our joys. i wish you would laugh again.
doesn't little lucy, shrieking mouth and tumbling legs, laugh enough for us all?
lucy's manic. if she didn't laugh she'd cry.
i think sometimes, in the parts of my guts that are still a schoolboy, and are mean and cruel to match, that the alcohol makes you softer than the daylight ever could. i do not tell you.
i press my lips to your forehead. i wrap my arms around you. the year between us rings heavy, and when I get up in the morning, you do not follow.
I tried, Su. I did. I applied for university, I saw that girl with that smile. with those eyes. I let you take sections from the paper before I ever touched it, I held the little ones in my arms, and I made coffee in the morning. I sat all my exams.
I smiled when the little ones came back smelling of home.
Aslan's wounds, did I try. but-
I have ever been a thing made for stories. brave the way knights are, bloody knuckles and buckling pride. a horse between my calves, a sword in my hands.
I think, sometimes, that I was born for my sword, for the hollow ringing of my heart when I first held it. a part of me, even then, ten-and-three and soaked to the bone.
such bravery is not made for real world boys and real world taunts. there is a map, I think, from the summits of my knuckles to the jaws of every boy who ever looked at me and bared his teeth.
I am sovereign. I am the skies for your sun to burn in.
I am made wrong, for this england, and I cannot take this life you want. I belong, I think, into myths and legend, the star-studded shards of our home.
so I went on the train, Susan. so I died, and I named what you have chosen. so I banned you from their scorning mouths. so you grip your husband's hand, realest of us all, and you cry. you do not follow.
Forgive me.
there's still a week left for the funniest possible thing to happen (charles dying before the coronation) like to charge reblog to cast or whatever
