Richard stark parker novels in order
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2023.03.29 06:04 Learn_the_Lore Crimes Against VRAM Usage - Technical Blind-Spots and What the Game Maker Profiler Doesn't Tell You
Note: Adapted from a devlog posted to itch.io. Edited for clarity, specificity, and usefulness.
Hello again, gamemaker. As part of the ongoing development efforts for my project, Reality Layer Zero, I've been tinkering around with optimization and profiling recently. I wanted to share some of my personal discoveries here, on the off-chance they're remotely useful to anyone other than me.
To preface matters, this post will largely be talking about diagnostic techniques. When you know you've got a problem and you don't know what it is, you might employ some of these steps to figure things out. The appropriate optimizations to apply, once appropriate diagnosis has occurred, tends to be a somewhat obvious thing, so that side of development is of lesser interest to us for the duration of this write-up. We'll still talk about it a little bit, in-brief, but not to any satisfactory degree if you're not yet totally comfortable with common optimization techniques and why they work. Just a little bit of optimization talk, as a treat.
I should also mention that, while much of this post will be spent discussing very "3D graphics"-related topics, the techniques outlined here should be fairly universal across all Game Maker projects (2D and 3D) and, indeed, game development in general. The only difference will be what numbers you think are acceptable, depending on what your target platforms are and how your game "ought" to run.
So, about two weeks ago, a friend of mine tried to run my game on a 10-year-old laptop with a 2GB VRAM discrete graphics card. This was the result:
Hey... That's not the usual crash message box...
After doing a real quick Google, I found that this error is (usually) caused by the DirectX application-- in this case, my game-- allocating more texture memory than is available on the host device.
To be honest, at the time, I dismissed this as being not a very critical issue-- after all, the hardware was old, probably not representative of a typical modern system, and could have had untold other problems of its own that caused the crash.
However, something kept bugging me about it and, after about 2 weeks of sitting on it, I decided to properly investigate.
As it turns out, this wasn't exactly the first sign that not all was well with the game's VRAM usage. The first time happened almost a month prior when a different friend recorded this clip of the game running on a GTX1050. There's a stutter in the framerate that occurs once every three seconds or so, and, curiously, only in "exterior" scenes. The GTX1050, for reference, has 4GB of VRAM.
On first brush with this footage, I couldn't even hazard a guess as to what was going on-- after all, the profiler said the game was running fine! The framerate was comfortably in the middle-hundreds, and memory usage was reported at around... 900MB. Well, okay, I guess that sounds a little bit high, but it's a 3D game with real-time lighting and shadows! Besides that, RAM is cheap! It... it is 900 MB of RAM, isn't it?
So, the only answer I can give is... Maybe? The documentation is somewhat vague on this point. I'm actually still not sure whether the memory usage displayed in the debugger graph is RAM, VRAM, or a lump sum of both.
After applying the optimizations I'll talk about in a moment, the profiler reports memory usage as being <= 500 MB (or 300 MB less than the control) under the same conditions. I'm not sure if this was a product of the optimizations to VRAM usage or of a separate, unrelated effort wherein I applied compression to some of the internal audio files (thus reducing their memory footprint when loaded by the game). I'm leaning toward the latter as the explanation, which would indicate that the debugger graph only shows RAM usage. This... Seems like, possibly, not the best thing in the world for video game diagnostic purposes. However, I'm unwilling to say that I've confirmed this to be the case definitively.
My favorite corner of the screen.
In a similar information deficit, the more in-depth profiler view only shows call count and execution time. This is great for figuring out certain performance bottlenecks-- stuff that isn't executing as efficiently as it could be-- but not so good for figuring out when you've, say, allocated an unreasonable amount of texture memory for a shadow map that, in truth, just doesn't need to be that nice in the first place. Not to spoil the punch-line or anything.
First place is good, right?
So, VRAM, right? There's something going on with the VRAM, according to the DirectX error in the first image. Furthermore, it might have something to do with exterior scenes, judging by the video clip. However, the Game Maker debugger isn't doing a very good job of telling me how much VRAM the game is using-- I can't, using the built-in tools, watch the game and see how the memory reacts to figure out what's going on (at least, I don't think I can-- would love to be proven wrong, though).
To give me a little bit more insight, I enlisted the help of a 3rd party profiling tool-- GPU-Z, in case you're interested. Then, I cracked open my IDE and started tweaking areas of the code that seemed memory-inefficient.
At first, I thought the overuse of VRAM was related to the way I'm rendering text-- I'm actually using multiple surfaces at 1080p to render nice outlines and drop-shadows underneath the letters in a reasonably-fast manner at runtime (and then simply downsampling to lower resolutions, which results in some pretty nice-looking words, I think). However, whenever I reduced the size of these text surfaces, I noticed that GPU-Z was only reporting a very slight reduction in VRAM usage-- like, between 30-50MB. That's not nothing, but it's not really "make-or-break" numbers for a GPU, either. So, what gives? What's the real problem?
To borrow the words of Tetsuya Nomura, it was the darkness.
... Or more specifically, the shadows.
Angry duck noises.
The effect pictured above is accomplished using fairly traditional texture mapping as described in this excellent thread. The summary explanation of how it works is that, to figure out what parts of the scene should be "shaded" and what parts should be "lit", we basically snap a photograph from the perspective of the light that's casting a shadow, and anything that shows up in that photograph gets lit up-- everything else remains tinted by only the "ambient" color of the scene, which determines the darkness (and color) of the shadows that remain.
In order to accomplish this, though, you need paper to print the photograph onto-- virtual paper, of course, for virtual photos. In Game Maker, this is accomplished by rendering the snapshot to a surface and then converting that surface to a texture. There are simpler ways to do this in more recent versions of GMS2-- surface formats-- but I'm still running version 2.3.0.529, so I can't use 'em!
The smaller the shadow map surface, the worse the "quality" of the shadows. If you don't know what I mean by "quality", take a look at this:
Chunky pixel shadows!
See how the shadows become kind of boxy and deformed? That's the "quality" I'm talking about.
Now, the above image, admittedly, looks kind of cool, in a stylized sort of way-- but, low-quality shadows can introduce some weird-looking visual artifacts due to, I think, rounding errors-- one of the main offenders being "shadow acne" that jitters around and is, overall, not quite as aesthetically pleasing as the shadows in the above image.
So, you don't want to go too low-- avoid the artifacts. However, you also don't want to go too high. Every time you create a texture, you need somewhere to put it, after all. Further, since it's a texture we're talking about, the only place for it is in texture memory. What happens if the texture you create is just way way way too big to fit into the available texture memory on the host device? May I refer you back to the image at the top of this post?
So, yeah, basically the problem was that the shadow map quality in the exterior scenes was turned up absurdly high, resulting in absurdly large textures that 2GB graphics cards (and below) simply couldn't deal with. I figured this out when I, by total chance, entered an exterior scene and noticed GPU-Z reading-out these numbers:
<_>
Your eyes might go cross-eyed looking at this image at first, but the important row is the one labelled "Memory Used". It's reading out 3481 megabytes! That's over 3 gigabytes of texture memory! That's not just eye-crossing, that's eye-popping!
Mind, it's not 3 gigabytes from the game alone. My GPU (yours, too, probably) allocates what I'm gonna call "ambient memory" for basic system tasks, other open applications, and all of those Google Chrome tabs you're keeping open for whatever reason. For my development PC, this ambient usage is usually between 500 MB to 1 GB, and at the time this number was recorded, was close to 1GB.
In other words, the shadow map for this exterior scene required around 2 gigabytes to store in memory. That's, put simply, excessive!!
This was caused entirely by turning the quality of the shadow map up too high, which resulted in a texture that was unnecessarily large being generated and subsequently taking up far too much space on the GPU. I cut the quality of the shadow map in half, which bought back about 1.5 GB of texture memory without resulting in... really, any noticeable visual difference. Huh. Well how about that.
I should mention here that this isn't something unique to shadows or my implementation of them. Any time you create a surface, that surface is stored in texture memory. Create one that's too large, and you'll quickly exceed the limits of many GPU's. This is something important to keep in mind, both because it might not be intuitively obvious and because Game Maker (and your own development hardware) might not do a good job of warning you when you've done something unreasonable.
While I was testing all of this, I noticed that VRAM would also creep up turn-by-turn in the debate mode until the debate ended (at which point, the allocated memory would be freed)-- a kind of "localized" memory leak, so-to-speak. This, too, was related to shadow maps-- or, specifically, to the class which manages all of the shadow maps. Turns out, it wasn't cleaning up the maps associated with the temporary spotlights created by card effects in the debate mode. In effect, that means you'd play a card, and then the pretty lighting effect would flash, and then the shadow map that the light generated would just hang out in memory for the rest of the debate, taking up valuable space! Fixing this problem was simple, but I wouldn't have ever noticed it if I wasn't looking. Since this could potentially result in progressively terrible performance or even a hard crash if a debate goes on long enough on a small-enough GPU, I'm rather glad I managed to catch this problem when I did. Even if it was a, uh, a month after the first public release...
In the interest of not doing anything halfway, I added a graphics option in the options menu to allow the player to further reduce the shadow map quality if desired (all the option does is modify a scalar "shadow quality" global). This can save a respectable amount of VRAM as well, although the majority of the performance gains here came from the reduction on my end.
- To Wrap Up -
At this time of writing, I can confirm that the fix I applied here did fix the crash that kicked off this post. The 10-year-old laptop in question is now able to run Reality Layer Zero largely without complaint... At between, usually, 30 and 50 FPS on the lowest settings. So... It's not perfect, but it's a fair measure better than it used to be! I wonder if it'll run on a 1GB card...
In conclusion, test early, test often, and make sure you profile your VRAM usage in addition to your RAM. And, perhaps most importantly... Remember to play Reality Layer Zero on Steam or Itch, since it's both a really cool demonstration of what you can do with GM and, if I'm allowed to say so, a pretty cool game in its own right!
submitted by Learn_the_Lore to gamemaker [link] [comments]
Hello again, gamemaker. As part of the ongoing development efforts for my project, Reality Layer Zero, I've been tinkering around with optimization and profiling recently. I wanted to share some of my personal discoveries here, on the off-chance they're remotely useful to anyone other than me.
To preface matters, this post will largely be talking about diagnostic techniques. When you know you've got a problem and you don't know what it is, you might employ some of these steps to figure things out. The appropriate optimizations to apply, once appropriate diagnosis has occurred, tends to be a somewhat obvious thing, so that side of development is of lesser interest to us for the duration of this write-up. We'll still talk about it a little bit, in-brief, but not to any satisfactory degree if you're not yet totally comfortable with common optimization techniques and why they work. Just a little bit of optimization talk, as a treat.
I should also mention that, while much of this post will be spent discussing very "3D graphics"-related topics, the techniques outlined here should be fairly universal across all Game Maker projects (2D and 3D) and, indeed, game development in general. The only difference will be what numbers you think are acceptable, depending on what your target platforms are and how your game "ought" to run.
So, about two weeks ago, a friend of mine tried to run my game on a 10-year-old laptop with a 2GB VRAM discrete graphics card. This was the result:
Hey... That's not the usual crash message box...
After doing a real quick Google, I found that this error is (usually) caused by the DirectX application-- in this case, my game-- allocating more texture memory than is available on the host device.
To be honest, at the time, I dismissed this as being not a very critical issue-- after all, the hardware was old, probably not representative of a typical modern system, and could have had untold other problems of its own that caused the crash.
However, something kept bugging me about it and, after about 2 weeks of sitting on it, I decided to properly investigate.
As it turns out, this wasn't exactly the first sign that not all was well with the game's VRAM usage. The first time happened almost a month prior when a different friend recorded this clip of the game running on a GTX1050. There's a stutter in the framerate that occurs once every three seconds or so, and, curiously, only in "exterior" scenes. The GTX1050, for reference, has 4GB of VRAM.
On first brush with this footage, I couldn't even hazard a guess as to what was going on-- after all, the profiler said the game was running fine! The framerate was comfortably in the middle-hundreds, and memory usage was reported at around... 900MB. Well, okay, I guess that sounds a little bit high, but it's a 3D game with real-time lighting and shadows! Besides that, RAM is cheap! It... it is 900 MB of RAM, isn't it?
So, the only answer I can give is... Maybe? The documentation is somewhat vague on this point. I'm actually still not sure whether the memory usage displayed in the debugger graph is RAM, VRAM, or a lump sum of both.
After applying the optimizations I'll talk about in a moment, the profiler reports memory usage as being <= 500 MB (or 300 MB less than the control) under the same conditions. I'm not sure if this was a product of the optimizations to VRAM usage or of a separate, unrelated effort wherein I applied compression to some of the internal audio files (thus reducing their memory footprint when loaded by the game). I'm leaning toward the latter as the explanation, which would indicate that the debugger graph only shows RAM usage. This... Seems like, possibly, not the best thing in the world for video game diagnostic purposes. However, I'm unwilling to say that I've confirmed this to be the case definitively.
My favorite corner of the screen.
In a similar information deficit, the more in-depth profiler view only shows call count and execution time. This is great for figuring out certain performance bottlenecks-- stuff that isn't executing as efficiently as it could be-- but not so good for figuring out when you've, say, allocated an unreasonable amount of texture memory for a shadow map that, in truth, just doesn't need to be that nice in the first place. Not to spoil the punch-line or anything.
First place is good, right?
So, VRAM, right? There's something going on with the VRAM, according to the DirectX error in the first image. Furthermore, it might have something to do with exterior scenes, judging by the video clip. However, the Game Maker debugger isn't doing a very good job of telling me how much VRAM the game is using-- I can't, using the built-in tools, watch the game and see how the memory reacts to figure out what's going on (at least, I don't think I can-- would love to be proven wrong, though).
To give me a little bit more insight, I enlisted the help of a 3rd party profiling tool-- GPU-Z, in case you're interested. Then, I cracked open my IDE and started tweaking areas of the code that seemed memory-inefficient.
At first, I thought the overuse of VRAM was related to the way I'm rendering text-- I'm actually using multiple surfaces at 1080p to render nice outlines and drop-shadows underneath the letters in a reasonably-fast manner at runtime (and then simply downsampling to lower resolutions, which results in some pretty nice-looking words, I think). However, whenever I reduced the size of these text surfaces, I noticed that GPU-Z was only reporting a very slight reduction in VRAM usage-- like, between 30-50MB. That's not nothing, but it's not really "make-or-break" numbers for a GPU, either. So, what gives? What's the real problem?
To borrow the words of Tetsuya Nomura, it was the darkness.
... Or more specifically, the shadows.
Angry duck noises.
The effect pictured above is accomplished using fairly traditional texture mapping as described in this excellent thread. The summary explanation of how it works is that, to figure out what parts of the scene should be "shaded" and what parts should be "lit", we basically snap a photograph from the perspective of the light that's casting a shadow, and anything that shows up in that photograph gets lit up-- everything else remains tinted by only the "ambient" color of the scene, which determines the darkness (and color) of the shadows that remain.
In order to accomplish this, though, you need paper to print the photograph onto-- virtual paper, of course, for virtual photos. In Game Maker, this is accomplished by rendering the snapshot to a surface and then converting that surface to a texture. There are simpler ways to do this in more recent versions of GMS2-- surface formats-- but I'm still running version 2.3.0.529, so I can't use 'em!
The smaller the shadow map surface, the worse the "quality" of the shadows. If you don't know what I mean by "quality", take a look at this:
Chunky pixel shadows!
See how the shadows become kind of boxy and deformed? That's the "quality" I'm talking about.
Now, the above image, admittedly, looks kind of cool, in a stylized sort of way-- but, low-quality shadows can introduce some weird-looking visual artifacts due to, I think, rounding errors-- one of the main offenders being "shadow acne" that jitters around and is, overall, not quite as aesthetically pleasing as the shadows in the above image.
So, you don't want to go too low-- avoid the artifacts. However, you also don't want to go too high. Every time you create a texture, you need somewhere to put it, after all. Further, since it's a texture we're talking about, the only place for it is in texture memory. What happens if the texture you create is just way way way too big to fit into the available texture memory on the host device? May I refer you back to the image at the top of this post?
So, yeah, basically the problem was that the shadow map quality in the exterior scenes was turned up absurdly high, resulting in absurdly large textures that 2GB graphics cards (and below) simply couldn't deal with. I figured this out when I, by total chance, entered an exterior scene and noticed GPU-Z reading-out these numbers:
<_>
Your eyes might go cross-eyed looking at this image at first, but the important row is the one labelled "Memory Used". It's reading out 3481 megabytes! That's over 3 gigabytes of texture memory! That's not just eye-crossing, that's eye-popping!
Mind, it's not 3 gigabytes from the game alone. My GPU (yours, too, probably) allocates what I'm gonna call "ambient memory" for basic system tasks, other open applications, and all of those Google Chrome tabs you're keeping open for whatever reason. For my development PC, this ambient usage is usually between 500 MB to 1 GB, and at the time this number was recorded, was close to 1GB.
In other words, the shadow map for this exterior scene required around 2 gigabytes to store in memory. That's, put simply, excessive!!
This was caused entirely by turning the quality of the shadow map up too high, which resulted in a texture that was unnecessarily large being generated and subsequently taking up far too much space on the GPU. I cut the quality of the shadow map in half, which bought back about 1.5 GB of texture memory without resulting in... really, any noticeable visual difference. Huh. Well how about that.
I should mention here that this isn't something unique to shadows or my implementation of them. Any time you create a surface, that surface is stored in texture memory. Create one that's too large, and you'll quickly exceed the limits of many GPU's. This is something important to keep in mind, both because it might not be intuitively obvious and because Game Maker (and your own development hardware) might not do a good job of warning you when you've done something unreasonable.
While I was testing all of this, I noticed that VRAM would also creep up turn-by-turn in the debate mode until the debate ended (at which point, the allocated memory would be freed)-- a kind of "localized" memory leak, so-to-speak. This, too, was related to shadow maps-- or, specifically, to the class which manages all of the shadow maps. Turns out, it wasn't cleaning up the maps associated with the temporary spotlights created by card effects in the debate mode. In effect, that means you'd play a card, and then the pretty lighting effect would flash, and then the shadow map that the light generated would just hang out in memory for the rest of the debate, taking up valuable space! Fixing this problem was simple, but I wouldn't have ever noticed it if I wasn't looking. Since this could potentially result in progressively terrible performance or even a hard crash if a debate goes on long enough on a small-enough GPU, I'm rather glad I managed to catch this problem when I did. Even if it was a, uh, a month after the first public release...
In the interest of not doing anything halfway, I added a graphics option in the options menu to allow the player to further reduce the shadow map quality if desired (all the option does is modify a scalar "shadow quality" global). This can save a respectable amount of VRAM as well, although the majority of the performance gains here came from the reduction on my end.
- To Wrap Up -
At this time of writing, I can confirm that the fix I applied here did fix the crash that kicked off this post. The 10-year-old laptop in question is now able to run Reality Layer Zero largely without complaint... At between, usually, 30 and 50 FPS on the lowest settings. So... It's not perfect, but it's a fair measure better than it used to be! I wonder if it'll run on a 1GB card...
In conclusion, test early, test often, and make sure you profile your VRAM usage in addition to your RAM. And, perhaps most importantly... Remember to play Reality Layer Zero on Steam or Itch, since it's both a really cool demonstration of what you can do with GM and, if I'm allowed to say so, a pretty cool game in its own right!
2023.03.29 05:59 ssube another UI for Stable Diffusion for Windows and AMD, now with LoRA and Textual Inversions
 | I've been working on another UI for Stable Diffusion on Windows and AMD, and recently added support for blending LoRA and Textual Inversions using the prompt: https://github.com/ssube/onnx-web/releases/tag/v0.9.0 submitted by ssube to StableDiffusion [link] [comments] The API needs Python 3, a few libraries, and about 50GB of disk space to get started (although it will share models from the HuggingFace cache, if you have one). You can download and convert models from the HuggingFace hub and Civitai: https://github.com/ssube/onnx-web/blob/main/docs/user-guide.md#adding-your-own-models The GUI is hosted on Github Pages and runs in most modern browsers, including on mobile: https://www.onnx-web.ai/v0.9.0/index.html It has a tab for each mode, persistent and private image history using localStorage, and some basic internationalization. This is using ONNX for hardware acceleration, so it works on all combinations of AMD and Nvidia, Windows and Linux, FP16 and FP32 - even FP16 on AMD on Windows. I found a way to blend the LoRA and Textual Inversion models in-memory so you can include them in the prompt, with different weights, and tweak them as you go. It also supports hardware acceleration for SD upscaling, which should land upstream in the next release of diffusers: https://github.com/huggingface/diffusers/pull/2158 Once a model has been blended and loaded, it stays in VRAM and can be pretty fast. There are a few downsides, FP32 memory usage is a little bit higher and you have to convert the SD models to ONNX ahead of time, but you can load the LoRAs and Textual Inversions directly from the safetensors, no conversion needed there. There are containers available for CPU, CUDA, and ROCm - I couldn't find the right packages for a DirectML container. I've run it on RunPod and it should work on HuggingFace as well, but you may want to convert the models ahead of time and copy them up/from S3. Please give it a try and let me know how it works! https://preview.redd.it/xocbh788plqa1.png?width=1204&format=png&auto=webp&s=a77e0594a71125c0b714f353e4581584d21acd32 https://preview.redd.it/trjby788plqa1.png?width=1204&format=png&auto=webp&s=07907b103a6fcf0e7ee77116f3cb20156b3e5755 https://preview.redd.it/7il5h788plqa1.png?width=1203&format=png&auto=webp&s=19b98556f5a91c10006a5fd9ba4d015a69e5dcc8 https://preview.redd.it/rysqs988plqa1.png?width=1202&format=png&auto=webp&s=ec3bce0019bbdd7947275f581dbff544351dd019 https://preview.redd.it/a9w2h688plqa1.png?width=1203&format=png&auto=webp&s=ef897777f3a9029f7ebf4d1f50548bbb025af969 |
2023.03.29 05:43 Mundane-Pepper4926 AITA for telling my friend how shitty she makes me feel ?
AITA for blowing up at my friend and telling her how shitty she makes me feel? A couple of month ago I (25F) went on a trip to celebrate my friend Ria (25 F)s birthday. It's important to note I am short and on the chubbier side while Ria and all other girls invited are tall and skinny.
During the trip Ria, myself and another girl, Jamie (24 F) went our for pizza to a local place in town. The owner was very nice and made conversation with all of us. We all ordered an individual pizza and I also ordered a side of fries for all of us to share.
It was one of those places where you order and pick up then seat yourself. We sat down at a nearby table and waited for our food while we all shared the fries. Jamie's name was called and I overheard the owner tell her he made hers bigger on the house. A couple of minutes later Ria's name was called. Once more the owner told her he made hers a bit bigger on the house.
Finally my name is called, I go up to the counter and the owner hands me my food. When I sit down I notice my pizza is indeed smaller than everyone else's but it is the size I ordered and paid for. None of the girls seem to notice and i dont bring it up.
Before we leave Jamie orders another personal pizza to go and I notice that one more the owner has given her a larger size. This crushed me, not because I didn't get a larger pizza but rather because I was clearly being singled out as the ugly friend. No one else seemed to notice so I let it be. Now Ria begins to talk about how great it is that we all got upgraded to a larger size. I felt too embarrassed to say i was not upgraded.
Throughout the trip Ria makes jabs at me about the chiche romance novel I am reading. And that only girls who cant find love and middle schoolers read those books. By the fourth jab I just give up on the book in order to avoid further teasing.
Two months ago while hanging out with a group of friends Ria told us all about her new book obsession and how it is the best book ever written. Turns out the book she is obsessed with is not only a cliche romance novel but it is the exact same book she made fun of me for reading during her birthday trip. This hurt me deeply but I did not know how to confront her about it.
Throughout the next few weeks she continues to rave about the book, completely ignoring the fact that she made fun of me for reading it. And arguing with anyone who tries to say the book is trashy or cliche. The whole time all I can hear are her jabs at me from a couple of months ago.
Last week after a couple of drinks I was scrolling through social media and saw she made a post about the book series. With the help of liquid courage I decided to send Ria a long message telling her she had been a bad friend for the book situation and I brought up the pizza incident during her birthday and how both combined make me feel unappreciated and ugly.
I woke up the next morning to a message from Ria telling me she was sorry she made me feel that way. She then proceeded to ignore all of my messages and had been ignoring me for the past week until last night she finally called me up and said i was an asshole.
Ria says I came out of nowhere with these accusations and had expressed no prior issues before and thay it was unfair to blame her when she didn't know how I was feeling and that I should have talked to her about it in person instead of attacking her through text messages. AITA for telling Ria she makes me feel shitty and unwanted?
submitted by Mundane-Pepper4926 to AmItheAsshole [link] [comments]
During the trip Ria, myself and another girl, Jamie (24 F) went our for pizza to a local place in town. The owner was very nice and made conversation with all of us. We all ordered an individual pizza and I also ordered a side of fries for all of us to share.
It was one of those places where you order and pick up then seat yourself. We sat down at a nearby table and waited for our food while we all shared the fries. Jamie's name was called and I overheard the owner tell her he made hers bigger on the house. A couple of minutes later Ria's name was called. Once more the owner told her he made hers a bit bigger on the house.
Finally my name is called, I go up to the counter and the owner hands me my food. When I sit down I notice my pizza is indeed smaller than everyone else's but it is the size I ordered and paid for. None of the girls seem to notice and i dont bring it up.
Before we leave Jamie orders another personal pizza to go and I notice that one more the owner has given her a larger size. This crushed me, not because I didn't get a larger pizza but rather because I was clearly being singled out as the ugly friend. No one else seemed to notice so I let it be. Now Ria begins to talk about how great it is that we all got upgraded to a larger size. I felt too embarrassed to say i was not upgraded.
Throughout the trip Ria makes jabs at me about the chiche romance novel I am reading. And that only girls who cant find love and middle schoolers read those books. By the fourth jab I just give up on the book in order to avoid further teasing.
Two months ago while hanging out with a group of friends Ria told us all about her new book obsession and how it is the best book ever written. Turns out the book she is obsessed with is not only a cliche romance novel but it is the exact same book she made fun of me for reading during her birthday trip. This hurt me deeply but I did not know how to confront her about it.
Throughout the next few weeks she continues to rave about the book, completely ignoring the fact that she made fun of me for reading it. And arguing with anyone who tries to say the book is trashy or cliche. The whole time all I can hear are her jabs at me from a couple of months ago.
Last week after a couple of drinks I was scrolling through social media and saw she made a post about the book series. With the help of liquid courage I decided to send Ria a long message telling her she had been a bad friend for the book situation and I brought up the pizza incident during her birthday and how both combined make me feel unappreciated and ugly.
I woke up the next morning to a message from Ria telling me she was sorry she made me feel that way. She then proceeded to ignore all of my messages and had been ignoring me for the past week until last night she finally called me up and said i was an asshole.
Ria says I came out of nowhere with these accusations and had expressed no prior issues before and thay it was unfair to blame her when she didn't know how I was feeling and that I should have talked to her about it in person instead of attacking her through text messages. AITA for telling Ria she makes me feel shitty and unwanted?
2023.03.29 04:39 clone33 Spider-man 4 / Back in Black idea
There have been a lot of great Spider-man 4 theories that I have read lately and I am excited to see that many of them have some of the same elements that I was thinking. I think across the board a lot of people are on the same page and can guess what's coming next in some way. Here are my thoughts on what the movie will be...
So, for starters, it'll be called Spider-man: Back In Black. A lot of other people are predicting this. Here's why I think it's going to be the case...
It starts off really simple IMO. Based on the tag in NWH, Eddie / Venom are in earth-616 briefly and the last thing they are talking about w/ the bartender is Spider-man, before getting zapped back into their universe, leaving behind a piece of themselves in the 616. Peter, himself, is at his most loneliest time in his life, so that felt like an amplifier for the symbiote to seek him out, traveling all the way from Mexico to New York. That's the end of Act 1, but leading up to that is the following...
Movie opens with Spider-man in the midst of a fight w/ Scorpion (Mac Gargan) robbing a bank (or something). Spidey gets the best of Scorpion, so it seems, but then realizes he needs to take photos of this event, so he slaps a camera (phone?) to a wall and tries to recreate Scorpion's capture. As a result, Scorpion gets free and almost bests Spider-man. But at the last second Daredevil shows up to help Spidey thwart off Scorpion.
Cut to: Daily Bugle offices. Peter is trying to sell to the Bugle these recent photos of Spider-man & DD fighting Scorpion at the bank. It's reminiscent of the first Sam Raimi Spider-man movie where Jameson is trying to short-change / low ball Peter for a handful of brilliant photos. Peter leaves Jameson's office deflated. Robbie Robertson follows him outside. As they pass the desk closest to Jameson's office Peter says 'hi' real quick to Betty Brandt whose now working as a protege to Jonah. She looks at him weird and they move on.
Meanwhile, Matt Murdock is in the office on the same floor meeting with his friend Karen Page who just took a job there covering Wilson Fisk. She confesses to Matt that she got the job because the only person Jameson admits that he hates more than Spider-man is Wilson Fisk. And because of her previous work with the Bulletin on Fisk, she's just thankful she has a job after a long break from journalism. They are planning to go to lunch together. But Matt suddenly overhears something elsewhere in the office. Matt overhears all of Robbie and Peter's conversation and because he heard Spider-man's voice earlier in the same day as he's heard Peter's voice, he realizes that the two are the same person and suddenly it all comes back to him. Matt remembers Peter Parker is Spider-man. He quickly makes up an excuse to Karen and cancels lunch so that he can go confront Peter. Matt gives Peter a compelling reason to come and meet him on the rooftop of the Bugle and the two let all their cards on the table.
After each has revealed their secret identities to each other, Matt informs Peter that Fisk funded the construction of Scorpion's suit and he needs his help taking them down tonight. Apparently, Fisk stole much of the tech used to make the suit from Stark Tech. This immediately enrages Peter. However, Mac Gargon needs to take time in a warehouse near a pier in the east river to separate himself from the suit and then send it to an undisclosed location so that he can return to his neighborhood with an alibi of his whereabouts during the bank heist. So Matt insists they must crash the party before Mac fully separates himself from the suit, thus placing them both in the same place for the DA to prosecute. Which will then force Mac into a plea bargain that would incriminate Fisk.
The two meet as Daredevil and Spider-man later that same night at the pier mentioned earlier. DD tells Spidey to take out the truck carrying the suit. He'll take out Gargon in his getaway car. It all goes south as the two heroes get separated and Spidey finds himself face-to-face with Black Cat, while DD is off elsewhere fighting Scorpion alone. Spidey & BC fight for a bit before she stops to make him an interesting offer. She says they've only ran into each other tonight because she is trying to steal from Fisk to expose his corruption in the field of philanthropy. He and his wife Vanessa are fanatics about the fine arts. That's what has helped put him in the position for Mayor let's just say. She is trying to expose Fisk in a way that the newspapers haven't tried yet. Spidey says he'll think about it & then reconvenes with DD elsewhere who barely survived his face-off w/ Scorpion.
DD lectures Spider-man on what he did wrong in that operation and starts to sound like Stark or Strange who have done the same thing before to Peter. Spidey tells him he may be on to another way to take down Fisk that DD hasn't thought of yet and begs for him to be given a chance to see it through.
Next day, Peter is attending ESU and Felicia Hardy sits next to him in their Nano-Technology class. His spider-sense goes off the second she sits down. It calms and they bond for a beat. Then, his spider-sense goes off again when their professor Alister Smythe comes out in wheelchair and begins the lecture. Somehow Peter knows that Felecia is Black Cat and Alister Smythe built the Scorpion costume for Fisk (and Gargon).
In another scene between Fisk and Black Cat, it is revealed that he is blackmailing her to do his bidding in order to repay a debt. It turns out her father, who was once a cat-burglar, happened to steal Fisk's painting of 'Rabbit In A Snowstorm' right before the blip, then disappeared with no one knowing of it's whereabouts. Fisk knows her father is out there somewhere once again with that knowledge, so he's strong-arming Felecia's father to come forward and reveal how he can recover his most coveted prize.
Later, Spidey learns that Black Cat and him aren't stealing from Fisk, but rather are stealing FOR Fisk. He calls her on it and the two have a quarrel / go their separate ways.
Peter gets home. Crashes in bed. Symbiote seeps in through his window and creeps its way into his bed with him which leads to a twisted nightmare. Peter then soon wakes up on the side of a skyscraper upside down as Symbiote Spider-man.
And that's all I have for now. Thoughts?
submitted by clone33 to MCUTheories [link] [comments]
So, for starters, it'll be called Spider-man: Back In Black. A lot of other people are predicting this. Here's why I think it's going to be the case...
It starts off really simple IMO. Based on the tag in NWH, Eddie / Venom are in earth-616 briefly and the last thing they are talking about w/ the bartender is Spider-man, before getting zapped back into their universe, leaving behind a piece of themselves in the 616. Peter, himself, is at his most loneliest time in his life, so that felt like an amplifier for the symbiote to seek him out, traveling all the way from Mexico to New York. That's the end of Act 1, but leading up to that is the following...
Movie opens with Spider-man in the midst of a fight w/ Scorpion (Mac Gargan) robbing a bank (or something). Spidey gets the best of Scorpion, so it seems, but then realizes he needs to take photos of this event, so he slaps a camera (phone?) to a wall and tries to recreate Scorpion's capture. As a result, Scorpion gets free and almost bests Spider-man. But at the last second Daredevil shows up to help Spidey thwart off Scorpion.
Cut to: Daily Bugle offices. Peter is trying to sell to the Bugle these recent photos of Spider-man & DD fighting Scorpion at the bank. It's reminiscent of the first Sam Raimi Spider-man movie where Jameson is trying to short-change / low ball Peter for a handful of brilliant photos. Peter leaves Jameson's office deflated. Robbie Robertson follows him outside. As they pass the desk closest to Jameson's office Peter says 'hi' real quick to Betty Brandt whose now working as a protege to Jonah. She looks at him weird and they move on.
Meanwhile, Matt Murdock is in the office on the same floor meeting with his friend Karen Page who just took a job there covering Wilson Fisk. She confesses to Matt that she got the job because the only person Jameson admits that he hates more than Spider-man is Wilson Fisk. And because of her previous work with the Bulletin on Fisk, she's just thankful she has a job after a long break from journalism. They are planning to go to lunch together. But Matt suddenly overhears something elsewhere in the office. Matt overhears all of Robbie and Peter's conversation and because he heard Spider-man's voice earlier in the same day as he's heard Peter's voice, he realizes that the two are the same person and suddenly it all comes back to him. Matt remembers Peter Parker is Spider-man. He quickly makes up an excuse to Karen and cancels lunch so that he can go confront Peter. Matt gives Peter a compelling reason to come and meet him on the rooftop of the Bugle and the two let all their cards on the table.
After each has revealed their secret identities to each other, Matt informs Peter that Fisk funded the construction of Scorpion's suit and he needs his help taking them down tonight. Apparently, Fisk stole much of the tech used to make the suit from Stark Tech. This immediately enrages Peter. However, Mac Gargon needs to take time in a warehouse near a pier in the east river to separate himself from the suit and then send it to an undisclosed location so that he can return to his neighborhood with an alibi of his whereabouts during the bank heist. So Matt insists they must crash the party before Mac fully separates himself from the suit, thus placing them both in the same place for the DA to prosecute. Which will then force Mac into a plea bargain that would incriminate Fisk.
The two meet as Daredevil and Spider-man later that same night at the pier mentioned earlier. DD tells Spidey to take out the truck carrying the suit. He'll take out Gargon in his getaway car. It all goes south as the two heroes get separated and Spidey finds himself face-to-face with Black Cat, while DD is off elsewhere fighting Scorpion alone. Spidey & BC fight for a bit before she stops to make him an interesting offer. She says they've only ran into each other tonight because she is trying to steal from Fisk to expose his corruption in the field of philanthropy. He and his wife Vanessa are fanatics about the fine arts. That's what has helped put him in the position for Mayor let's just say. She is trying to expose Fisk in a way that the newspapers haven't tried yet. Spidey says he'll think about it & then reconvenes with DD elsewhere who barely survived his face-off w/ Scorpion.
DD lectures Spider-man on what he did wrong in that operation and starts to sound like Stark or Strange who have done the same thing before to Peter. Spidey tells him he may be on to another way to take down Fisk that DD hasn't thought of yet and begs for him to be given a chance to see it through.
Next day, Peter is attending ESU and Felicia Hardy sits next to him in their Nano-Technology class. His spider-sense goes off the second she sits down. It calms and they bond for a beat. Then, his spider-sense goes off again when their professor Alister Smythe comes out in wheelchair and begins the lecture. Somehow Peter knows that Felecia is Black Cat and Alister Smythe built the Scorpion costume for Fisk (and Gargon).
In another scene between Fisk and Black Cat, it is revealed that he is blackmailing her to do his bidding in order to repay a debt. It turns out her father, who was once a cat-burglar, happened to steal Fisk's painting of 'Rabbit In A Snowstorm' right before the blip, then disappeared with no one knowing of it's whereabouts. Fisk knows her father is out there somewhere once again with that knowledge, so he's strong-arming Felecia's father to come forward and reveal how he can recover his most coveted prize.
Later, Spidey learns that Black Cat and him aren't stealing from Fisk, but rather are stealing FOR Fisk. He calls her on it and the two have a quarrel / go their separate ways.
Peter gets home. Crashes in bed. Symbiote seeps in through his window and creeps its way into his bed with him which leads to a twisted nightmare. Peter then soon wakes up on the side of a skyscraper upside down as Symbiote Spider-man.
And that's all I have for now. Thoughts?
2023.03.29 04:34 DasRitter Why do so many people hate Karen Travis?
I don't get the hate guys. She is, to be honest along with Zhan, Karpyshyn, and Luciano, Miller and Jan and Dan one of my favorite Star Wars authors ever.
Let's go over everything. Her departure from Star wars over a pay dispute. wasn't helped by The Clone Wars series, in which she wrote the Novel for the movie adaptation I might add, retconning stuff she was authorized to write (She had no problem with it as a whole.) Though to be fair she left mostly over DEATH STAR Day from what I hear, along with the pay dispute.
Second, I see people whine and complain about her making the Mandalorians mary sues.
Jango and Boba are known to have killed multiple Jedi. Jango killed six WITH HIS BARE HANDS AND A ROCK. The True Mandalorians killed HALF of Dooku's strike team. Cleary Mandalorians have trained to kill Jedi since the Great Sith War 4000 BBY. Boba Keeps Lighsabers as trophies from his kills like Grevious. (Robert Chicken was not as far from reality as you think)
People complain about her portraying the Jedi badly.
Uh, they have flaws, not every Jedi is as good a leader and Officer as say Obi-Wan, Anakin, Mace, Ki-Adi Mundi, Yoda, or Plo, etc. Some were either complete bastards like Krell, distrustful of them like Quinlan Vos, or Bigotts like Rahm Kota. I know everyone loves Kota (myself included), especially as he saved himself during Order 66. But he was being a bigot and looked down on them like Pong Krell did as if they were less than human because they were born in a laboratory. Also, They were trained by Jango and his MANDALORIAN Drill Sergeants. AFTER Galadran. I know Jango trained his ARCs to be Loyal to the Republic and the Jedi as a matter of professionalism, but Walon Vau, on other hand hated the Jedi and cheered when Order 66 came down from Palpatine. Certain Mandalorian characters despising the Jedi after the True Mandalorians were slaughtered make sense.
The Slave/Child Soldier debate.
Jusik makes a good point I will just use his quote.
"So how do we justify what we are doing now? Breeding men without choice, and freedom, to fight and die for us? When do the means cease to justify the end? Where is our society heading? Where are our ideals, and what are we without them? If we give in to expedience in this way, where do we draw the line between ourselves and those we find unacceptably evil? I have no answer, Masters. Do you?" ―Bardan Jusik, as a Jedi Knight, addressing the Jedi Council on the matter of clone troopers[
She is more blunt than Dave Filoni. Though they both make the same point. They are not droids. They are men. Being used as slaves. And I don't think most Star Wars fans want to look at the ugliness of it. The Kamiminoans put defective clones down like animals. Jango, his DSs , many of the Jedi, and the people of the Republic and birth born Auxilary Troops (Formerly the Judicial Forces) of the GAR are the only people who cared about them. Even if Palpatine respected them, he still just viewed them as expendable.
Mandalorians being honorable.
Even Knost Dural respected the Mandalorians back in the old days. While, if it is true that the post-Travis books in FOJ were trying to fuck her over, which is a despicable thing to do if they did that; having Amoral Mercenary Mandos is totally fine too, they are not a monolith. Look at Satine or Tor Viszla. She seems kind of like Bill Shatner, maybe a bit prickly but has die-hard fans who she gets along with really well. I would be afraid to meet her lest my view pisses her off LOL. (I think the New Mandalorians fit nearly into the lore if they say that the western Hemisphere is where Keldabe is and the east is where the glassed deserts are with the weakling pacifists. it makes sense with Jaster leaving to found the True Mandalorians and Tor being the father of Pre Visla as the running theory that many go with, and Paz Viszla being Pre's son. I use that in my fan works that work the Best New canon stuff into the EU lore.)
Now, on to IRL stuff.
Fighting with the fans.
Look, going berserk because of Toxic fans,( yes I know wokies use that term as a mislabel to complain when we say KK's stuff is sh*t but they are indeed real) is understandable. I do feel bad when who a guy was a fan was treated badly by her on the official star forum when he was 12 back in 2005 or so, but to be fair, was she aware he was only a kid? She likely would have been more understanding. (He got certain Mandalorian terms wrong and she accused him of skimming irritably) But I know some dudes from Mandalorian Mercs who had a great time with her and even did the Der Wherrda Verda in front of her. They had a lot of fun.
Her introduction of gay Mandos
I personally think this ridiculous for a hyper-heterosexual and Manly culture with traditional gender roles to be openly okay with gays. It would be possible for Naboo or Alderaan. But Mandalore? Nah man. Much more likely for them to be like Ancient Rome which TOLERATED Gays. But never liked them. The Death Watch is probably like the Spartans who killed or exiled gays.
Accusing her of being partial to Moari men.
So?. Why on earth would that be a problem? If she likes Moari men as her personal preference for men that is totally fine. I like Moari women as my preference, along with Latinas, Northern European Women, etc. I like the women I like. She likes the men she likes. No problem if she wants a Maorai Chad to sweep her off her feet and take her to the Polynesian spa. XD A non issue.
Her not wanting to share my characters.
That's understandable. I would only want these above-mentioned authors along with Jon Favreau and Dave Filoni to be able to use my characters. Certainly not the hacks at the Lucasfilm story group. George is the Boss man. But I probably would rather have these two look after my stuff since he can make mistakes (The Love Scenes in Attack of the Clones.) Personally, I hope Jon and Dave can give out an olive branch to her to bring back on board when KK is shown the door..She worked on Clone Wars Content before. She needs to have some guardrails in place to keep from going overboard like Jon and Dave working to over see her content. Like George himself needs a moderating influence to not go crazy. A lot of movies have directors who go wild without some guidance who are still good directors, Zach Snyder comes to mind.
Her arguing with other veterans on military matters on the Star Wars Forums.
She served at least one term as a British enlisted woman, maybe more, then became a war correspondent, so her arguments with US and other Commonwealth troops over her Military tactics in the books is kind of silly. They also had a former Navy Seal train the Motion Capture and writers for the game so....
Her use of British terminology. Not an issue.
Feel free to comment.
submitted by DasRitter to StarWarsEU [link] [comments]
Let's go over everything. Her departure from Star wars over a pay dispute. wasn't helped by The Clone Wars series, in which she wrote the Novel for the movie adaptation I might add, retconning stuff she was authorized to write (She had no problem with it as a whole.) Though to be fair she left mostly over DEATH STAR Day from what I hear, along with the pay dispute.
Second, I see people whine and complain about her making the Mandalorians mary sues.
Jango and Boba are known to have killed multiple Jedi. Jango killed six WITH HIS BARE HANDS AND A ROCK. The True Mandalorians killed HALF of Dooku's strike team. Cleary Mandalorians have trained to kill Jedi since the Great Sith War 4000 BBY. Boba Keeps Lighsabers as trophies from his kills like Grevious. (Robert Chicken was not as far from reality as you think)
People complain about her portraying the Jedi badly.
Uh, they have flaws, not every Jedi is as good a leader and Officer as say Obi-Wan, Anakin, Mace, Ki-Adi Mundi, Yoda, or Plo, etc. Some were either complete bastards like Krell, distrustful of them like Quinlan Vos, or Bigotts like Rahm Kota. I know everyone loves Kota (myself included), especially as he saved himself during Order 66. But he was being a bigot and looked down on them like Pong Krell did as if they were less than human because they were born in a laboratory. Also, They were trained by Jango and his MANDALORIAN Drill Sergeants. AFTER Galadran. I know Jango trained his ARCs to be Loyal to the Republic and the Jedi as a matter of professionalism, but Walon Vau, on other hand hated the Jedi and cheered when Order 66 came down from Palpatine. Certain Mandalorian characters despising the Jedi after the True Mandalorians were slaughtered make sense.
The Slave/Child Soldier debate.
Jusik makes a good point I will just use his quote.
"So how do we justify what we are doing now? Breeding men without choice, and freedom, to fight and die for us? When do the means cease to justify the end? Where is our society heading? Where are our ideals, and what are we without them? If we give in to expedience in this way, where do we draw the line between ourselves and those we find unacceptably evil? I have no answer, Masters. Do you?" ―Bardan Jusik, as a Jedi Knight, addressing the Jedi Council on the matter of clone troopers[
She is more blunt than Dave Filoni. Though they both make the same point. They are not droids. They are men. Being used as slaves. And I don't think most Star Wars fans want to look at the ugliness of it. The Kamiminoans put defective clones down like animals. Jango, his DSs , many of the Jedi, and the people of the Republic and birth born Auxilary Troops (Formerly the Judicial Forces) of the GAR are the only people who cared about them. Even if Palpatine respected them, he still just viewed them as expendable.
Mandalorians being honorable.
Even Knost Dural respected the Mandalorians back in the old days. While, if it is true that the post-Travis books in FOJ were trying to fuck her over, which is a despicable thing to do if they did that; having Amoral Mercenary Mandos is totally fine too, they are not a monolith. Look at Satine or Tor Viszla. She seems kind of like Bill Shatner, maybe a bit prickly but has die-hard fans who she gets along with really well. I would be afraid to meet her lest my view pisses her off LOL. (I think the New Mandalorians fit nearly into the lore if they say that the western Hemisphere is where Keldabe is and the east is where the glassed deserts are with the weakling pacifists. it makes sense with Jaster leaving to found the True Mandalorians and Tor being the father of Pre Visla as the running theory that many go with, and Paz Viszla being Pre's son. I use that in my fan works that work the Best New canon stuff into the EU lore.)
Now, on to IRL stuff.
Fighting with the fans.
Look, going berserk because of Toxic fans,( yes I know wokies use that term as a mislabel to complain when we say KK's stuff is sh*t but they are indeed real) is understandable. I do feel bad when who a guy was a fan was treated badly by her on the official star forum when he was 12 back in 2005 or so, but to be fair, was she aware he was only a kid? She likely would have been more understanding. (He got certain Mandalorian terms wrong and she accused him of skimming irritably) But I know some dudes from Mandalorian Mercs who had a great time with her and even did the Der Wherrda Verda in front of her. They had a lot of fun.
Her introduction of gay Mandos
I personally think this ridiculous for a hyper-heterosexual and Manly culture with traditional gender roles to be openly okay with gays. It would be possible for Naboo or Alderaan. But Mandalore? Nah man. Much more likely for them to be like Ancient Rome which TOLERATED Gays. But never liked them. The Death Watch is probably like the Spartans who killed or exiled gays.
Accusing her of being partial to Moari men.
So?. Why on earth would that be a problem? If she likes Moari men as her personal preference for men that is totally fine. I like Moari women as my preference, along with Latinas, Northern European Women, etc. I like the women I like. She likes the men she likes. No problem if she wants a Maorai Chad to sweep her off her feet and take her to the Polynesian spa. XD A non issue.
Her not wanting to share my characters.
That's understandable. I would only want these above-mentioned authors along with Jon Favreau and Dave Filoni to be able to use my characters. Certainly not the hacks at the Lucasfilm story group. George is the Boss man. But I probably would rather have these two look after my stuff since he can make mistakes (The Love Scenes in Attack of the Clones.) Personally, I hope Jon and Dave can give out an olive branch to her to bring back on board when KK is shown the door..She worked on Clone Wars Content before. She needs to have some guardrails in place to keep from going overboard like Jon and Dave working to over see her content. Like George himself needs a moderating influence to not go crazy. A lot of movies have directors who go wild without some guidance who are still good directors, Zach Snyder comes to mind.
Her arguing with other veterans on military matters on the Star Wars Forums.
She served at least one term as a British enlisted woman, maybe more, then became a war correspondent, so her arguments with US and other Commonwealth troops over her Military tactics in the books is kind of silly. They also had a former Navy Seal train the Motion Capture and writers for the game so....
Her use of British terminology. Not an issue.
Feel free to comment.
2023.03.29 04:14 TheCatholicBatman 32[M] NYC - Looking for a email or reddit pen pal
I'm a 32 year old New York City man.
I recently smoked pipe tobacco and some cigars in my backyard. I have a mustache again, as usual. Recently shaved my beard, grown after a clean-shaven period.
I'm interested in history, menswear, dressing up, foreign languages. I'm a classic car owner. I have a lifetime Babbel subcription. I love the smell of old comic books (And everything else about old comic books too, especially classic Batman and Spider-Man).
I'm reading many books slowly, including fiction and non-fiction. I keep my place with bookmarks. I'm going to be visiting five countries in Europe soon.
I recently watched two black and white films on Turner Classic Movies: The 400 Lashes (French fifties film about a delinquent boy) and Charlie Chaplin's Hitler satire, the Great Dictator. A few nights ago I caught the latter chunk of Thief of Bagdad. The other night I caught Sophie's Choice with Meryl Streep, There Will Be Blood, (Based on the novel Oil! by Upton Sinclair which I'm reading) and Midnight Cowboy. Last night I caught the latter half of The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (With a young Maggie Smith, who played McGonagall in Harry Potter) and the 1980 Alan Parker film Fame.
Have anything you'd like to tell me or ask me? How old are you, and where are you located? Feel free to share your picture. :)
Here's a song from the film Midnight Cowboy.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_3hLMeu7rfY
10:13pm
submitted by TheCatholicBatman to penpals [link] [comments]
I recently smoked pipe tobacco and some cigars in my backyard. I have a mustache again, as usual. Recently shaved my beard, grown after a clean-shaven period.
I'm interested in history, menswear, dressing up, foreign languages. I'm a classic car owner. I have a lifetime Babbel subcription. I love the smell of old comic books (And everything else about old comic books too, especially classic Batman and Spider-Man).
I'm reading many books slowly, including fiction and non-fiction. I keep my place with bookmarks. I'm going to be visiting five countries in Europe soon.
I recently watched two black and white films on Turner Classic Movies: The 400 Lashes (French fifties film about a delinquent boy) and Charlie Chaplin's Hitler satire, the Great Dictator. A few nights ago I caught the latter chunk of Thief of Bagdad. The other night I caught Sophie's Choice with Meryl Streep, There Will Be Blood, (Based on the novel Oil! by Upton Sinclair which I'm reading) and Midnight Cowboy. Last night I caught the latter half of The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (With a young Maggie Smith, who played McGonagall in Harry Potter) and the 1980 Alan Parker film Fame.
Have anything you'd like to tell me or ask me? How old are you, and where are you located? Feel free to share your picture. :)
Here's a song from the film Midnight Cowboy.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_3hLMeu7rfY
10:13pm
2023.03.29 04:10 LostIndustry 26M / USA - Hey you! Let's be friends?
So, I've kind of realized that as I've gotten older it's become a lot harder to meet new people. You don't really find yourself in situations to branch out as much and things can get a little stale or lonely. I'd love to meet some new people to chat with and stay in touch. Looking forward to talking to someone, or having that excitement is a pretty addicting thing. Hopefully I can find that here!
A little bit about me:
submitted by LostIndustry to Needafriend [link] [comments]
A little bit about me:
- East coast bound
- Work as a project manager for a construction company I've worked at since I was 16
- Live on my own with the best pup in the world
- Huge fan of music and always interested in exchanging new stuff! Pretty much listen to everything depending on my mood but I've been on an acoustic/indie kick lately
- Lose way too much sleep watching dumb TikTok videos but I think I'm addicted now
- Ordering food and then binge watching a TV series is an ideal weekend
- Buying stuff on Amazon is a hobby at this point
- If you sleep with socks on, I may judge you slightly (a lot)
2023.03.29 04:10 LostIndustry 26M / USA - Hey you! Let's be friends?
So, I've kind of realized that as I've gotten older it's become a lot harder to meet new people. You don't really find yourself in situations to branch out as much and things can get a little stale or lonely. I'd love to meet some new people to chat with and stay in touch. Looking forward to talking to someone, or having that excitement is a pretty addicting thing. Hopefully I can find that here!
A little bit about me:
submitted by LostIndustry to MakeNewFriendsHere [link] [comments]
A little bit about me:
- East coast bound
- Work as a project manager for a construction company I've worked at since I was 16
- Live on my own with the best pup in the world
- Huge fan of music and always interested in exchanging new stuff! Pretty much listen to everything depending on my mood but I've been on an acoustic/indie kick lately
- Lose way too much sleep watching dumb TikTok videos but I think I'm addicted now
- Ordering food and then binge watching a TV series is an ideal weekend
- Buying stuff on Amazon is a hobby at this point
- If you sleep with socks on, I may judge you slightly (a lot)
2023.03.29 04:10 LostIndustry 26M / USA - Hey you! Let's be friends? [Chat]
So, I've kind of realized that as I've gotten older it's become a lot harder to meet new people. You don't really find yourself in situations to branch out as much and things can get a little stale or lonely. I'd love to meet some new people to chat with and stay in touch. Looking forward to talking to someone, or having that excitement is a pretty addicting thing. Hopefully I can find that here!
A little bit about me:
submitted by LostIndustry to MeetPeople [link] [comments]
A little bit about me:
- East coast bound
- Work as a project manager for a construction company I've worked at since I was 16
- Live on my own with the best pup in the world
- Huge fan of music and always interested in exchanging new stuff! Pretty much listen to everything depending on my mood but I've been on an acoustic/indie kick lately
- Lose way too much sleep watching dumb TikTok videos but I think I'm addicted now
- Ordering food and then binge watching a TV series is an ideal weekend
- Buying stuff on Amazon is a hobby at this point
- If you sleep with socks on, I may judge you slightly (a lot)
2023.03.29 03:35 psycosulu March 2023 Contest Voting Thread: Cast Your Votes by April 1st, 1700 PDT
IMPORTANT INFO:
Like last year, instead of the top 10 + honorable mentions system, we will do a strict top 15 vote. This means you must vote for 15 people in order of most to least liked. Failure to comply with this format will result in your vote NOT COUNTING.
How To Vote:
Write a comment to this thread in the following format:
Remember, you MUST vote for 15 people, otherwise your vote WILL NOT COUNT.
After the votes have been tallied, I will update the 2022 Contest Championship Spreadsheet with this month's results.
I'll include a handy countdown clock to let you know how much time you have left. https://countingdownto.com/?c=4649576
Youtube Playlist here
Soundcloud Playlist here
Please check Stycky Keys's soundcloud track, it was set to private and couldn't be added to the playlist: https://soundcloud.com/stycky_keys-237375336/dp-1/s-YoOfh8TgutB?si=2c6facb604d64816aaeba880614c9045&utm_source=clipboard&utm_medium=text&utm_campaign=social_sharing
Current submissions:
submitted by psycosulu to PixelMixers [link] [comments]
Like last year, instead of the top 10 + honorable mentions system, we will do a strict top 15 vote. This means you must vote for 15 people in order of most to least liked. Failure to comply with this format will result in your vote NOT COUNTING.
How To Vote:
Write a comment to this thread in the following format:
- Artist Name: Game Name – Song Name
- Artist Name: Game Name – Song Name
…13) Artist Name: Game Name – Song NameYou can not vote for a track you were a part of. (Either as the main arrangeperformer, or a guest/collaborator.)
14) Artist Name: Game Name – Song Name
15) Artist Name: Game Name – Song Name
Remember, you MUST vote for 15 people, otherwise your vote WILL NOT COUNT.
After the votes have been tallied, I will update the 2022 Contest Championship Spreadsheet with this month's results.
I'll include a handy countdown clock to let you know how much time you have left. https://countingdownto.com/?c=4649576
Soundcloud Playlist here
Please check Stycky Keys's soundcloud track, it was set to private and couldn't be added to the playlist: https://soundcloud.com/stycky_keys-237375336/dp-1/s-YoOfh8TgutB?si=2c6facb604d64816aaeba880614c9045&utm_source=clipboard&utm_medium=text&utm_campaign=social_sharing
- Evan Carville (ft. Ben Penta): Animal Crossing: New Leaf - 7 P.M. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9iDv_SDbicA
- zmand97: Super Mario 3D Land - Beach Theme https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cw9Rk4_av38
- Warp Whistles Music (ft. Lucas Cooper): Zelda: A Link Between Worlds - Hilda's Theme https://youtu.be/lZp0JuHRsmg
- Shea's Violin: Pokemon Super Mystery Dungeon - Serene Village https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H4_sbLm_ZFQ
- The Nimon: Shin Megami Tensei IV - Lucifer's Palace https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xA9b12ULrJg
- E-Sarge: Fire Emblem Fates: Conquest - Dusk Falls https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fVIL4_rW0aw
- Sam Automatic: Yoshi's New Island - The Yoshi Clan https://youtu.be/UBj8cCtwjYQ
- Psycosulu: Pokemon X & Y - Kalos Power Plant https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ji9nRu8iCnI
- iCrescendo: Pokémon Omega Ruby & Alpha Sapphire - The Lament of Falling Stars https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bIOZ_V5GnBo
- Wurtzel: Fire Emblem Awakening - Id (Purpose) https://youtu.be/ExeTNKvXVt0
- EndlessRepeat: The Alliance Alive – "Hot Spring" https://youtu.be/xsN2vCIYsJk
- Lucas Guimaraes: Pokemon X & Y - Snowbelle City https://soundcloud.com/thirdkoopa/snowbelle-city-but-its-a-house-song?si=ee87c77ff5dd408193669309b81e5faa&utm_source=clipboard&utm_medium=text&utm_campaign=social_sharing
- 2-TONE 64 (ft. Mike Matarazzo, Lucas Guimaraes, & Calem Destiny): Shovel Knight - In The Hall Of The Usurper (Pridemoor Keep) - https://youtu.be/KML_4bw8jjg
- Justin Thornburgh (ft. William Sandberg): Professor Layton and the Miracle Mask - Monte d'Or - City of Miracles https://youtu.be/g9okwuzEP64
- Erika Richards (ft. Earth Kid, Lucas Guimaraes, and Kalen Scott Thomas): Pokemon X&Y - Kalos Power Plant https://on.soundcloud.com/gwAa9
- Drakeld (ft. Hyper Light Drummer, GameroftheWinds, Bobbie Jane Desforges): Fantasy Life - Battle with formidable enemy / Bravely Default - Into enemy territory https://soundcloud.com/drakeld_official/battle-in-formidable-enemy-territory
- ThatJamOnToast (ft V-Ron Media) Animal Crossing New Leaf - 4 AM https://youtu.be/gYJyfXFjtAk
- Stycky Keys: Kid Icarus: Uprising - Dark Pit https://soundcloud.com/stycky_keys-237375336/dp-1/s-YoOfh8TgutB?si=2c6facb604d64816aaeba880614c9045&utm_source=clipboard&utm_medium=text&utm_campaign=social_sharing
- Siolfor the Jackal & Serrin's Toes: 3DS Mii Plaza Theme https://youtu.be/7W92dXbBHLc
- Sean R. Hanson (ft. Becca Michaelson, oboejdub, Matt Brandl, Andrew Gossett, Jordan Moore): Pokemon Sun and Moon - Ancient Poni Path https://soundcloud.com/user-974238329/sm-ancient-poni-path-sean-r-hanson-ft-friends
2023.03.29 03:14 TheCatholicBatman 32[M4F] NYC Man looking to preferably chat with a NYC woman to possibly meet up with IRL [Chat][Friendship][Relationship]
I'm a 32 year old New York City man looking for a woman to chat with, preferably from NYC as well.
I recently smoked pipe tobacco and some cigars in my backyard. I have a mustache again, as usual. Recently shaved my beard, grown after a clean-shaven period.
I'm interested in history, menswear, dressing up, foreign languages. I'm a classic car owner. I have a lifetime Babbel subcription. I love the smell of old comic books (And everything else about old comic books too, especially classic Batman and Spider-Man).
I'm reading many books slowly, including fiction and non-fiction. I keep my place with bookmarks. I'm going to be visiting five countries in Europe soon.
I recently watched two black and white films on Turner Classic Movies: The 400 Lashes (French fifties film about a delinquent boy) and Charlie Chaplin's Hitler satire, the Great Dictator. A few nights ago I caught the latter chunk of Thief of Bagdad. The other night I caught Sophie's Choice with Meryl Streep, There Will Be Blood, (Based on the novel Oil! by Upton Sinclair which I'm reading) and Midnight Cowboy. Last night I caught the latter half of The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (With a young Maggie Smith, who played McGonagall in Harry Potter) and the 1980 Alan Parker film Fame.
Have anything you'd like to tell me or ask me? How old are you, and where are you located? Feel free to share your picture. :)
Here's a song from the film Midnight Cowboy.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_3hLMeu7rfY
9:14pm
submitted by TheCatholicBatman to MeetPeople [link] [comments]
I recently smoked pipe tobacco and some cigars in my backyard. I have a mustache again, as usual. Recently shaved my beard, grown after a clean-shaven period.
I'm interested in history, menswear, dressing up, foreign languages. I'm a classic car owner. I have a lifetime Babbel subcription. I love the smell of old comic books (And everything else about old comic books too, especially classic Batman and Spider-Man).
I'm reading many books slowly, including fiction and non-fiction. I keep my place with bookmarks. I'm going to be visiting five countries in Europe soon.
I recently watched two black and white films on Turner Classic Movies: The 400 Lashes (French fifties film about a delinquent boy) and Charlie Chaplin's Hitler satire, the Great Dictator. A few nights ago I caught the latter chunk of Thief of Bagdad. The other night I caught Sophie's Choice with Meryl Streep, There Will Be Blood, (Based on the novel Oil! by Upton Sinclair which I'm reading) and Midnight Cowboy. Last night I caught the latter half of The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (With a young Maggie Smith, who played McGonagall in Harry Potter) and the 1980 Alan Parker film Fame.
Have anything you'd like to tell me or ask me? How old are you, and where are you located? Feel free to share your picture. :)
Here's a song from the film Midnight Cowboy.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_3hLMeu7rfY
9:14pm
2023.03.29 03:12 TheCatholicBatman 32[M4F] NYC Man looking to preferably chat with a NYC woman to possibly meet up with IRL
I'm a 32 year old New York City man looking for a woman to chat with, preferably from NYC as well.
I recently smoked pipe tobacco and some cigars in my backyard. I have a mustache again, as usual. Recently shaved my beard, grown after a clean-shaven period.
I'm interested in history, menswear, dressing up, foreign languages. I'm a classic car owner. I have a lifetime Babbel subcription. I love the smell of old comic books (And everything else about old comic books too, especially classic Batman and Spider-Man).
I'm reading many books slowly, including fiction and non-fiction. I keep my place with bookmarks. I'm going to be visiting five countries in Europe soon.
I recently watched two black and white films on Turner Classic Movies: The 400 Lashes (French fifties film about a delinquent boy) and Charlie Chaplin's Hitler satire, the Great Dictator. A few nights ago I caught the latter chunk of Thief of Bagdad. The other night I caught Sophie's Choice with Meryl Streep, There Will Be Blood, (Based on the novel Oil! by Upton Sinclair which I'm reading) and Midnight Cowboy. Last night I caught the latter half of The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (With a young Maggie Smith, who played McGonagall in Harry Potter) and the 1980 Alan Parker film Fame.
Have anything you'd like to tell me or ask me? How old are you, and where are you located? Feel free to share your picture. :)
Here's a song from the film Midnight Cowboy.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_3hLMeu7rfY
9:12pm
submitted by TheCatholicBatman to r4r [link] [comments]
I recently smoked pipe tobacco and some cigars in my backyard. I have a mustache again, as usual. Recently shaved my beard, grown after a clean-shaven period.
I'm interested in history, menswear, dressing up, foreign languages. I'm a classic car owner. I have a lifetime Babbel subcription. I love the smell of old comic books (And everything else about old comic books too, especially classic Batman and Spider-Man).
I'm reading many books slowly, including fiction and non-fiction. I keep my place with bookmarks. I'm going to be visiting five countries in Europe soon.
I recently watched two black and white films on Turner Classic Movies: The 400 Lashes (French fifties film about a delinquent boy) and Charlie Chaplin's Hitler satire, the Great Dictator. A few nights ago I caught the latter chunk of Thief of Bagdad. The other night I caught Sophie's Choice with Meryl Streep, There Will Be Blood, (Based on the novel Oil! by Upton Sinclair which I'm reading) and Midnight Cowboy. Last night I caught the latter half of The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (With a young Maggie Smith, who played McGonagall in Harry Potter) and the 1980 Alan Parker film Fame.
Have anything you'd like to tell me or ask me? How old are you, and where are you located? Feel free to share your picture. :)
Here's a song from the film Midnight Cowboy.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_3hLMeu7rfY
9:12pm
2023.03.29 03:04 correcthorse666 Secret Identity Battle Royale
A bunch of superheroes have somehow gotten into brawl on a press conference stage. The catch? They're in civilian identities, and revealing the fact they are superheroes is an instant loss. Even worse, the audience is bunch of reporters familiar with the superheroes but not their secret identities (assume that if the secret identity became public, the reporters don't know it). Assume that people who know other's secret identities have that knowledge stripped from their head.
The contenders:
Bruce Wayne (Batman, DC comics)
Clark Kent (Superman, DC comics)
Peter Parker (Spiderman, Marvel 616)
Charanko (Saitama, OPM)
Tony Stark (Iron man, Marvel 616)
Rebecca Costa-Brown (Alexandria, Worm)
Taylor Herbert (Weaver, Worm)
Who can win the brawl without getting found out?
Round 1: Everyone's purely in civilian clothes, no superhero gear is anywhere to be found.
Round 2: Everyone's wearing civilian clothes over their superhero outfits. Stuff that can't be easily concealed (helmets and such) are hastily shoved in pockets or bags being that are being worn or carried.
Round 3: Round 2, but prime Mike Tyson joins the fray, and he doesn't have a secret identity to protect.
Bonus Round: It's round 1 again, but the reporters have been replaced Sherlock Holmes, another Batman, and Tattletail all working together with access to the internet of every verse involved. Who's identity stays secret the longest?
submitted by correcthorse666 to whowouldwin [link] [comments]
The contenders:
Bruce Wayne (Batman, DC comics)
Clark Kent (Superman, DC comics)
Peter Parker (Spiderman, Marvel 616)
Charanko (Saitama, OPM)
Tony Stark (Iron man, Marvel 616)
Rebecca Costa-Brown (Alexandria, Worm)
Taylor Herbert (Weaver, Worm)
Who can win the brawl without getting found out?
Round 1: Everyone's purely in civilian clothes, no superhero gear is anywhere to be found.
Round 2: Everyone's wearing civilian clothes over their superhero outfits. Stuff that can't be easily concealed (helmets and such) are hastily shoved in pockets or bags being that are being worn or carried.
Round 3: Round 2, but prime Mike Tyson joins the fray, and he doesn't have a secret identity to protect.
Bonus Round: It's round 1 again, but the reporters have been replaced Sherlock Holmes, another Batman, and Tattletail all working together with access to the internet of every verse involved. Who's identity stays secret the longest?
2023.03.29 02:56 kayenano The Villainess Is An SS+ Rank Adventurer: Chapter 13
[<< First] [< Previous] [Next >]
Synopsis:
Juliette Contzen is a lazy, good-for-nothing princess. Overshadowed by her siblings, she's left with little to do but nap, read … and occasionally cut the falling raindrops with her sword. Spotted one day by an astonished adventurer, he insists on grading Juliette's swordsmanship, then promptly has a mental breakdown at the result.
Soon after, Juliette is given the news that her kingdom is on the brink of bankruptcy. At threat of being married off, the lazy princess vows to do whatever it takes to maintain her current lifestyle, and taking matters into her own hands, escapes in the middle of the night in order to restore her kingdom's finances.
Tags: Comedy, Adventure, Action, Fantasy, Copious Ohohohohos.
Chapter 13: Clockwork Doll
Apple let out a snort as he plodded along the uneven dirt lane. Whether it was the rapidly degrading quality of the roads or the new company he found himself in that was the source of his ire, I would never know.
Beside us was Coppelia, walking at an easy pace despite the many sacks she was swinging. Swinging. Not carrying. She didn't sling those sacks of loot over her back like some overworked mule, but swung them as she walked like a young girl toying with a basket of flowers in the meadows.
It was a ridiculous sight. A girl keeping up with a trotting horse while also carrying more than the animal's burden. Granted, as a work horse, Apple was no galloping steed. He went as fast as he wanted. And that was very slow.
Still, I had to accept the slight on Apple's image. The horse could not have carried the extra weight. He lacked the bridle necessary to pull a cart. And while I'm certain I would have fashioned a solution, I wasn't one to reject the appeasement of commoners.
Thus, girl on foot.
Or rather, a clockwork doll.
“You know, you've been staring for a while,” said Coppelia, turning to show the giant golden key sticking out of her back. “Go on. Want to touch it?”
She didn't look the slightest bit shy. And I didn't act the slightest bit incurious.
It'd take a level of ignorance neither of us possessed to pretend that she wasn't an extreme rarity in this kingdom. Only a few workshops possessed the knowledge, technical and magical expertise to build clockwork dolls. And none of them were in Tirea.
The fabrication process required to create one was said to be so demanding that it was always clear when a doll was being built. Sales of coffee beans boomed.
And now I fully understood why.
A girl whose beauty almost rivalled mine. Almost. She looked my age, or perhaps a year younger. A sweet and dignified appearance, yet she had a spritely smile full of mischief … as well as cogs, sprockets and gears.
Seeing such a marvel of engineering before me, I now fully understood what I had to do.
… I had to build my own!
What was this?! Not only was she pretty. But she was strong! She couldn't just carry tea cups. She could carry me! With someone like that by my side, I wouldn't need to work an extra day in my life!
“M-May I?” I replied, urging Apple to slide over as I reached down for the golden key. “Do I just … touch it?”
“Sure. Just make sure you don't turn it.”
“I see … and what would occur should I accidentally turn it?”
Coppelia puffed up her cheeks, then popped the air.
“Boom.”
My hand froze. I looked at Coppelia.
She didn't correct herself.
“Per … Perhaps it's better if I don't,” I said, swiftly uprighting myself on the saddle. “Besides, you're hardly some plaything to be prodded and poked. I apologise for my less than discreet ogling. Clockwork dolls are not known to visit Tirea.”
“I bet. I mean, who'd want to visit this tiny kingdom out in the boonies?”
I almost choked on my response, such was the speed at which my indignation sought to leave my lips.
No matter how wonderful this invention of engineering was, that didn't give her a blank cheque to disregard my kingdom like some downtrodden restaurant!
“T-Tiny?! The … The boonies?! Miss—”
“Coppelia.”
“Coppelia! This is a majestic kingdom, graced with verdant fields and enterprising scholars! I assure you, there is nothing tiny or … or boonie-like about this rich land!”
“Really? My memory core must be out of whack. It says the Kingdom of Tirea is the second smallest independent nation-state by surface area on this continent, and that it's gross economic output—”
“Shhshhshhshh!! This … This kingdom holds treasures beyond the definition of crowns and industry. We measure prosperity in different ways. In culture. In harmony. And in peace.”
“You were attacked by bandits five minutes ago.”
“A most unfortunate and poorly timed coincidence that doesn't reflect the safe and harmonious nature of this kingdom.”
Coppelia giggled, delicately bringing up the back of her hand to hide her lips … all the while still gripping those huge sacks.
Such brutish strength! It was … marvellous!
Imagine if I had such a useful attendant by my side! The next time Roland hid behind a door to frighten me, I could order her to rip the door off and launch it and him through the nearest window! The possibilities were endless!
“Unfortunate and poorly timed coincidences are the domain of Ouzelia, actually. It's pretty much our trademark, and we guard it zealously. I'm afraid you can't have that.”
Her words could have been written as jest, but her tone was anything but.
“I see. My tutors always said that Ouzelia was a land of splendour and opportunity, and that its freedoms exceeded even that of Tirea.”
“A rotten lie. What did they actually say?”
“That it was full of oddballs and I should stay away.”
“Much better.” Coppelia twirled as she took her next steps forwards, swinging the sacks perilously close to Apple's side as she spun. “Ah, Ouzelia, where dragons roam the skies and there exists no fiction in fairytales. Humans live with ogres. Ogres live with goblins. Goblins live with … well, nobody since they're kinda grouchy. How are the ones here?”
I gave it a moment's thought, then decided to answer honestly.
“Still grouchy.”
“Goblins, eh?”
“Goblins.”
I nodded, needing to say little else.
At least ours were fiercely isolationist. As were our ogre clans. Such a mixing of cultures could never be considered in Tirea, where few non-natives other than the odd troll caravan or questing minotaur could be found passing through our towns and villages.
Then again—
As I stole a glance at the girl alternating between walking and skipping beside me, at the heavy sacks in her hands, and the large golden key protruding from her back, I couldn't help but think that even a dragon probably wasn't as rare as a princess and a clockwork doll passing through our streets together, either.
“Have you been searching for this missing book for long? I'm curious how much time you've spent wandering the kingdom.”
“Waaay too long. These shoes weren't made for walking. But books are hard to find. Especially the one I'm after. Alas, if only I had a different job. My sisters, they got jobs like cleaning bookcases. How wonderful is that? Books always get lost. But bookcases? If that's all I had to do, I'd be able to relax at the—”
“I understand!”
“Eh?”
A flush of excitement ran through me as I seized on the opportunity at once.
Ohhoho! Indeed, rejoice, fair clockwork maiden! No insinuation was lost on me!
As a princess trained in the art of reading cues and desires, I was adept at understanding the words between the lines as keenly as a conductor sensed the notes weaving amongst a grand sonata.
And my instincts were telling me ... that she wished to serve under me as my personal attendant!
“A-Ahem, if cleaning is something you wish to experience, I can offer you a position as attendant. You see, I happen to have left my previous residence without any. Therefore, you may be at ease, as from now, I will declare you to be my sole—”
“I refuse.”
“Geh?!”
My jaw dropped at the abruptness of her rejection.
Could … Could it be that I was wrong? Or perhaps I'd pressed her too suddenly? True, it was only natural to react with inappropriate modesty when presented with such an envied position as the personal attendant to a princess. There were rivalries to consider. New enemies to watch. Old allies to turn. To become my sole attendant was to make one's social debut in high society. Even a maid could be elevated to the lowest rungs of lower nobility by adopting such an exclusive role.
Hmm?
But wasn't I forgetting something?
Ah, but of course! She didn't know I was a princess!
“I refuse,” she repeated cheerfully. “Thank you for the offer. But I've no need for a mistress. My loyalty is to my library.”
A bizarre croak exited my mouth as a thousand responses amalgamated into one.
I … I couldn't tell her!
I was supposed to be incognito, not hiring new employees!
“Sooo, well-dressed, haughty girl who wants an attendant ... is it just 'Juliette'? Or is there a 'High Ladyship' or 'Her Revered Countess, Holy Destroyer of Unwanted Beetles' title somewhere in there as well?”
I winced.
Partly because my masterful disguise as a titleless 'Juliette' was clearly not enough to hide the fact I was simply far too dignified to pass as anything less than nobility. But also because she'd just butchered our entire peerage system in one single sentence.
“Those are not titles.”
“My cunning word trap worked. So, nobility?”
“Undisclosed.”
Coppelia raised an eyebrow.
“Royalty?”
“............”
Hmm?
What … What was that?
Was that … sweat? Why was I sweating? How long had I been riding for? When had sitting in a saddle been such a taxing activity on me?
“U-Undisclosed ...”
For a moment, Coppelia had the look of someone who wished to make an unnecessary comment. I was relieved when she didn't.
… She didn't suspect!
Really now. That was too close. And the fault lay entirely with me.
It was vexing, but the truth is that I didn't enjoy parading myself as anything less than a princess. To do away with my title was difficult enough. But to adopt another was quite another. I needed to find a compromise … eventually.
Eventually.
Meaning ... there was no rush!
I had no need to dive straight into the details of my subterfuge, did I? Once I picked an identity, I'd need to actively utilise it or risk being outed. I couldn't have that. A poor identity was more suspicious than having none. It'd undermine everything!
Therefore, the best thing to do was to disclose nothing. The less I spoke about my background, the less anyone would suspect I was a princess. If anyone asked me if I was Juliette Contzen, 3rd Princess to the Kingdom of Tirea, I could simply refuse to answer and they'd be none the wiser.
Ohohoho! Genius.
Why make things harder? Sometimes, less truly was more.
“To answer slightly more, I can't offer myself for any role other than that which I'm already sworn to do. My purpose is to search for unreturned books. That means I'm forbidden from washing the dishes of any ladies of high standing. Or putting on their socks. That one is specifically ruled out.”
I nodded, taking the loss of a potential handmaiden with good grace.
… Ohhhohoho!! Until next time, of course!
Fortunes waver and ambitions stir. When this girl wished to seek a rewarding new career path in the exciting world of courtly backstabbing, treachery and betrayal, I'd ensure that the door remained open.
“I see. A terrible shame. Nevertheless, I applaud your loyalty to your library. Indeed, by refusing my first offer, you passed the first test to becoming my personal attendant. Should you wish to continue this application, you may do so at any time.”
She connected her thumb and index finger into a circle and smiled lazily.
“O-kay~”
I contented myself with that somewhat lackadaisical response. It lacked the dirt eating grovelling that I usually received when overseeing prospective hires … but I was nothing if not mildly flexible!
When it came to receiving a promising new attendant who could carry my extensive wardrobe wherever I pleased, I was willing to bide my time.
In fact, if she could display such wonderful strength, would that not also make her an excellent candidate to be a bodyguard? If so, that'd make her a two-for-one attendant! I'd be the envy of the soirée!
“By any chance, does your prodigious ability to carry large weights hint towards how you defend yourself in this peaceful and harmonious land?”
“Hmm?” Coppelia looked down, then blinked at the sacks in her hands. “Oh, this? This is nothing.”
“I disagree! … Hence why I note that you carry no weapons on your person, and yet you're able to traverse the perilous wilds that exist between Ouzelia and Tirea. Tell me, would you happen to be proficient in overcoming physical confrontations?”
“My, my, my … what are you implying? I have my feminine wiles and girlish charms. What else do I need to travel the wide world?”
Coppelia flicked her fluffy golden hair and gave a smile as radiant as the sunshine.
I was appalled.
Who did this girl think she was? Me?
Clearly, she had to boast martial skill or magical ability. Not everyone possessed a princess's charisma. And for all the confidence in her smile, that also included her.
“Charm and wit is not enough to negotiate the dangers that pervade this world, unless you're me. Everyone else requires the knowledge of a scholar and the intuition of a rogue. To challenge, to compromise, or to flee based on coldly evaluating every morsel of insight available to you. This is the trifecta of choices one must continually master in order to overcome foes who wish to force victory through brute force alone.”
Coppelia nodded, interest sparkling in her turquoise eyes as she had the politeness to feign the correct amount of being intrigued. A valuable skill set. My tutors would be pleased.
“I see, I see … but what if your foe isn't someone who wants to talk or fight?”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, what if it's say, a blight? How would you overcome that?”
“A blight?”
“A blight affecting crops and pastures, a faceless enemy with no notion of negotiation or belligerence. That'd be pretty tricky, wouldn't it? I just want to know where on the manual that is.”
I tilted my head slightly.
It was a concept I had to wrap my head around. To be frank, something which didn't try to sully my reputation or outright assassinate me wouldn't truly count as a foe.
At least not until I saw the first inklings of withering intruding upon the corner of my eye.
Apple came to a stop as I tugged back his reins.
Turning my gaze slowly, I took in the sight of the fields that lay ahead.
Appalling parched fields crept down from across the horizon. Beyond half-wilted lines of hedgerows and trees, a scene of death and decay promised to wait for me. The contrast to the green fields to my sides were stark.
Beyond a rotting demarcation as clear as lines in the sand, I saw a vision of the fine pastures fit for napping replaced by a barren stretch of broken livelihoods.
I couldn't believe it. Was this what was meant by failing crops?
This was beyond what I had imagined! We hadn't even entered the lowlands yet! Was this some disease in the soil? How far did it stretch? How much of our farmland was lost?
It was more morbid than anything I could have envisaged. I could literally see the trail of tax income from yield percentages to stall revenues collapsing in front of me! Each fallen stalk of wheat was another feather snatched from my pillow!
It was horrible!
Beside me, Coppelia was cheerfully humming an unknown melody.
Judging from the brightness of her tune, the state of the kingdom's collapsing grain reserves and the riots that were certain to follow ranked lower on her reasons to be concerned list than it did mine. It was not, after all, my fate that she shared. Even now, I could see a grim future where my family was forced to sell our gold framed portraits and ruby inlaid candlesticks just to appease the peasant masses.
The indignity almost knocked me off my saddle.
Awakening from my stupor, I clenched my fists and spurred Apple onwards.
It was time for Juliette Contzen, the Third Princess of the Kingdom of Tirea, to do her duty. No matter what, I would prevent a future where I was forced to degrade my quality of life. To live as though I were mere nobility.
Or worse, common-born nobility.
No blight would stand in my way.
This, I solemnly vowed.
[<< First] [< Previous] [Next >]
submitted by kayenano to HFY [link] [comments]
Synopsis:
Juliette Contzen is a lazy, good-for-nothing princess. Overshadowed by her siblings, she's left with little to do but nap, read … and occasionally cut the falling raindrops with her sword. Spotted one day by an astonished adventurer, he insists on grading Juliette's swordsmanship, then promptly has a mental breakdown at the result.
Soon after, Juliette is given the news that her kingdom is on the brink of bankruptcy. At threat of being married off, the lazy princess vows to do whatever it takes to maintain her current lifestyle, and taking matters into her own hands, escapes in the middle of the night in order to restore her kingdom's finances.
Tags: Comedy, Adventure, Action, Fantasy, Copious Ohohohohos.
Chapter 13: Clockwork Doll
Apple let out a snort as he plodded along the uneven dirt lane. Whether it was the rapidly degrading quality of the roads or the new company he found himself in that was the source of his ire, I would never know.
Beside us was Coppelia, walking at an easy pace despite the many sacks she was swinging. Swinging. Not carrying. She didn't sling those sacks of loot over her back like some overworked mule, but swung them as she walked like a young girl toying with a basket of flowers in the meadows.
It was a ridiculous sight. A girl keeping up with a trotting horse while also carrying more than the animal's burden. Granted, as a work horse, Apple was no galloping steed. He went as fast as he wanted. And that was very slow.
Still, I had to accept the slight on Apple's image. The horse could not have carried the extra weight. He lacked the bridle necessary to pull a cart. And while I'm certain I would have fashioned a solution, I wasn't one to reject the appeasement of commoners.
Thus, girl on foot.
Or rather, a clockwork doll.
“You know, you've been staring for a while,” said Coppelia, turning to show the giant golden key sticking out of her back. “Go on. Want to touch it?”
She didn't look the slightest bit shy. And I didn't act the slightest bit incurious.
It'd take a level of ignorance neither of us possessed to pretend that she wasn't an extreme rarity in this kingdom. Only a few workshops possessed the knowledge, technical and magical expertise to build clockwork dolls. And none of them were in Tirea.
The fabrication process required to create one was said to be so demanding that it was always clear when a doll was being built. Sales of coffee beans boomed.
And now I fully understood why.
A girl whose beauty almost rivalled mine. Almost. She looked my age, or perhaps a year younger. A sweet and dignified appearance, yet she had a spritely smile full of mischief … as well as cogs, sprockets and gears.
Seeing such a marvel of engineering before me, I now fully understood what I had to do.
… I had to build my own!
What was this?! Not only was she pretty. But she was strong! She couldn't just carry tea cups. She could carry me! With someone like that by my side, I wouldn't need to work an extra day in my life!
“M-May I?” I replied, urging Apple to slide over as I reached down for the golden key. “Do I just … touch it?”
“Sure. Just make sure you don't turn it.”
“I see … and what would occur should I accidentally turn it?”
Coppelia puffed up her cheeks, then popped the air.
“Boom.”
My hand froze. I looked at Coppelia.
She didn't correct herself.
“Per … Perhaps it's better if I don't,” I said, swiftly uprighting myself on the saddle. “Besides, you're hardly some plaything to be prodded and poked. I apologise for my less than discreet ogling. Clockwork dolls are not known to visit Tirea.”
“I bet. I mean, who'd want to visit this tiny kingdom out in the boonies?”
I almost choked on my response, such was the speed at which my indignation sought to leave my lips.
No matter how wonderful this invention of engineering was, that didn't give her a blank cheque to disregard my kingdom like some downtrodden restaurant!
“T-Tiny?! The … The boonies?! Miss—”
“Coppelia.”
“Coppelia! This is a majestic kingdom, graced with verdant fields and enterprising scholars! I assure you, there is nothing tiny or … or boonie-like about this rich land!”
“Really? My memory core must be out of whack. It says the Kingdom of Tirea is the second smallest independent nation-state by surface area on this continent, and that it's gross economic output—”
“Shhshhshhshh!! This … This kingdom holds treasures beyond the definition of crowns and industry. We measure prosperity in different ways. In culture. In harmony. And in peace.”
“You were attacked by bandits five minutes ago.”
“A most unfortunate and poorly timed coincidence that doesn't reflect the safe and harmonious nature of this kingdom.”
Coppelia giggled, delicately bringing up the back of her hand to hide her lips … all the while still gripping those huge sacks.
Such brutish strength! It was … marvellous!
Imagine if I had such a useful attendant by my side! The next time Roland hid behind a door to frighten me, I could order her to rip the door off and launch it and him through the nearest window! The possibilities were endless!
“Unfortunate and poorly timed coincidences are the domain of Ouzelia, actually. It's pretty much our trademark, and we guard it zealously. I'm afraid you can't have that.”
Her words could have been written as jest, but her tone was anything but.
“I see. My tutors always said that Ouzelia was a land of splendour and opportunity, and that its freedoms exceeded even that of Tirea.”
“A rotten lie. What did they actually say?”
“That it was full of oddballs and I should stay away.”
“Much better.” Coppelia twirled as she took her next steps forwards, swinging the sacks perilously close to Apple's side as she spun. “Ah, Ouzelia, where dragons roam the skies and there exists no fiction in fairytales. Humans live with ogres. Ogres live with goblins. Goblins live with … well, nobody since they're kinda grouchy. How are the ones here?”
I gave it a moment's thought, then decided to answer honestly.
“Still grouchy.”
“Goblins, eh?”
“Goblins.”
I nodded, needing to say little else.
At least ours were fiercely isolationist. As were our ogre clans. Such a mixing of cultures could never be considered in Tirea, where few non-natives other than the odd troll caravan or questing minotaur could be found passing through our towns and villages.
Then again—
As I stole a glance at the girl alternating between walking and skipping beside me, at the heavy sacks in her hands, and the large golden key protruding from her back, I couldn't help but think that even a dragon probably wasn't as rare as a princess and a clockwork doll passing through our streets together, either.
“Have you been searching for this missing book for long? I'm curious how much time you've spent wandering the kingdom.”
“Waaay too long. These shoes weren't made for walking. But books are hard to find. Especially the one I'm after. Alas, if only I had a different job. My sisters, they got jobs like cleaning bookcases. How wonderful is that? Books always get lost. But bookcases? If that's all I had to do, I'd be able to relax at the—”
“I understand!”
“Eh?”
A flush of excitement ran through me as I seized on the opportunity at once.
Ohhoho! Indeed, rejoice, fair clockwork maiden! No insinuation was lost on me!
As a princess trained in the art of reading cues and desires, I was adept at understanding the words between the lines as keenly as a conductor sensed the notes weaving amongst a grand sonata.
And my instincts were telling me ... that she wished to serve under me as my personal attendant!
“A-Ahem, if cleaning is something you wish to experience, I can offer you a position as attendant. You see, I happen to have left my previous residence without any. Therefore, you may be at ease, as from now, I will declare you to be my sole—”
“I refuse.”
“Geh?!”
My jaw dropped at the abruptness of her rejection.
Could … Could it be that I was wrong? Or perhaps I'd pressed her too suddenly? True, it was only natural to react with inappropriate modesty when presented with such an envied position as the personal attendant to a princess. There were rivalries to consider. New enemies to watch. Old allies to turn. To become my sole attendant was to make one's social debut in high society. Even a maid could be elevated to the lowest rungs of lower nobility by adopting such an exclusive role.
Hmm?
But wasn't I forgetting something?
Ah, but of course! She didn't know I was a princess!
“I refuse,” she repeated cheerfully. “Thank you for the offer. But I've no need for a mistress. My loyalty is to my library.”
A bizarre croak exited my mouth as a thousand responses amalgamated into one.
I … I couldn't tell her!
I was supposed to be incognito, not hiring new employees!
“Sooo, well-dressed, haughty girl who wants an attendant ... is it just 'Juliette'? Or is there a 'High Ladyship' or 'Her Revered Countess, Holy Destroyer of Unwanted Beetles' title somewhere in there as well?”
I winced.
Partly because my masterful disguise as a titleless 'Juliette' was clearly not enough to hide the fact I was simply far too dignified to pass as anything less than nobility. But also because she'd just butchered our entire peerage system in one single sentence.
“Those are not titles.”
“My cunning word trap worked. So, nobility?”
“Undisclosed.”
Coppelia raised an eyebrow.
“Royalty?”
“............”
Hmm?
What … What was that?
Was that … sweat? Why was I sweating? How long had I been riding for? When had sitting in a saddle been such a taxing activity on me?
“U-Undisclosed ...”
For a moment, Coppelia had the look of someone who wished to make an unnecessary comment. I was relieved when she didn't.
… She didn't suspect!
Really now. That was too close. And the fault lay entirely with me.
It was vexing, but the truth is that I didn't enjoy parading myself as anything less than a princess. To do away with my title was difficult enough. But to adopt another was quite another. I needed to find a compromise … eventually.
Eventually.
Meaning ... there was no rush!
I had no need to dive straight into the details of my subterfuge, did I? Once I picked an identity, I'd need to actively utilise it or risk being outed. I couldn't have that. A poor identity was more suspicious than having none. It'd undermine everything!
Therefore, the best thing to do was to disclose nothing. The less I spoke about my background, the less anyone would suspect I was a princess. If anyone asked me if I was Juliette Contzen, 3rd Princess to the Kingdom of Tirea, I could simply refuse to answer and they'd be none the wiser.
Ohohoho! Genius.
Why make things harder? Sometimes, less truly was more.
“To answer slightly more, I can't offer myself for any role other than that which I'm already sworn to do. My purpose is to search for unreturned books. That means I'm forbidden from washing the dishes of any ladies of high standing. Or putting on their socks. That one is specifically ruled out.”
I nodded, taking the loss of a potential handmaiden with good grace.
… Ohhhohoho!! Until next time, of course!
Fortunes waver and ambitions stir. When this girl wished to seek a rewarding new career path in the exciting world of courtly backstabbing, treachery and betrayal, I'd ensure that the door remained open.
“I see. A terrible shame. Nevertheless, I applaud your loyalty to your library. Indeed, by refusing my first offer, you passed the first test to becoming my personal attendant. Should you wish to continue this application, you may do so at any time.”
She connected her thumb and index finger into a circle and smiled lazily.
“O-kay~”
I contented myself with that somewhat lackadaisical response. It lacked the dirt eating grovelling that I usually received when overseeing prospective hires … but I was nothing if not mildly flexible!
When it came to receiving a promising new attendant who could carry my extensive wardrobe wherever I pleased, I was willing to bide my time.
In fact, if she could display such wonderful strength, would that not also make her an excellent candidate to be a bodyguard? If so, that'd make her a two-for-one attendant! I'd be the envy of the soirée!
“By any chance, does your prodigious ability to carry large weights hint towards how you defend yourself in this peaceful and harmonious land?”
“Hmm?” Coppelia looked down, then blinked at the sacks in her hands. “Oh, this? This is nothing.”
“I disagree! … Hence why I note that you carry no weapons on your person, and yet you're able to traverse the perilous wilds that exist between Ouzelia and Tirea. Tell me, would you happen to be proficient in overcoming physical confrontations?”
“My, my, my … what are you implying? I have my feminine wiles and girlish charms. What else do I need to travel the wide world?”
Coppelia flicked her fluffy golden hair and gave a smile as radiant as the sunshine.
I was appalled.
Who did this girl think she was? Me?
Clearly, she had to boast martial skill or magical ability. Not everyone possessed a princess's charisma. And for all the confidence in her smile, that also included her.
“Charm and wit is not enough to negotiate the dangers that pervade this world, unless you're me. Everyone else requires the knowledge of a scholar and the intuition of a rogue. To challenge, to compromise, or to flee based on coldly evaluating every morsel of insight available to you. This is the trifecta of choices one must continually master in order to overcome foes who wish to force victory through brute force alone.”
Coppelia nodded, interest sparkling in her turquoise eyes as she had the politeness to feign the correct amount of being intrigued. A valuable skill set. My tutors would be pleased.
“I see, I see … but what if your foe isn't someone who wants to talk or fight?”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, what if it's say, a blight? How would you overcome that?”
“A blight?”
“A blight affecting crops and pastures, a faceless enemy with no notion of negotiation or belligerence. That'd be pretty tricky, wouldn't it? I just want to know where on the manual that is.”
I tilted my head slightly.
It was a concept I had to wrap my head around. To be frank, something which didn't try to sully my reputation or outright assassinate me wouldn't truly count as a foe.
At least not until I saw the first inklings of withering intruding upon the corner of my eye.
Apple came to a stop as I tugged back his reins.
Turning my gaze slowly, I took in the sight of the fields that lay ahead.
Appalling parched fields crept down from across the horizon. Beyond half-wilted lines of hedgerows and trees, a scene of death and decay promised to wait for me. The contrast to the green fields to my sides were stark.
Beyond a rotting demarcation as clear as lines in the sand, I saw a vision of the fine pastures fit for napping replaced by a barren stretch of broken livelihoods.
I couldn't believe it. Was this what was meant by failing crops?
This was beyond what I had imagined! We hadn't even entered the lowlands yet! Was this some disease in the soil? How far did it stretch? How much of our farmland was lost?
It was more morbid than anything I could have envisaged. I could literally see the trail of tax income from yield percentages to stall revenues collapsing in front of me! Each fallen stalk of wheat was another feather snatched from my pillow!
It was horrible!
Beside me, Coppelia was cheerfully humming an unknown melody.
Judging from the brightness of her tune, the state of the kingdom's collapsing grain reserves and the riots that were certain to follow ranked lower on her reasons to be concerned list than it did mine. It was not, after all, my fate that she shared. Even now, I could see a grim future where my family was forced to sell our gold framed portraits and ruby inlaid candlesticks just to appease the peasant masses.
The indignity almost knocked me off my saddle.
Awakening from my stupor, I clenched my fists and spurred Apple onwards.
It was time for Juliette Contzen, the Third Princess of the Kingdom of Tirea, to do her duty. No matter what, I would prevent a future where I was forced to degrade my quality of life. To live as though I were mere nobility.
Or worse, common-born nobility.
No blight would stand in my way.
This, I solemnly vowed.
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2023.03.29 01:31 Automatic_Hunter7242 Burning babe and the burning tree in Blood Meridian
I recently came across this post and it blew my mind that the scene of the burning tree at night is set on Christmas eve. It occurred to me that this scene is very similar to Robert Southwell's well known poem 'Burning Babe'. We know that McCarthy is very well read in old English poetry. He quotes Shakespeare almost word for word at least once in most of his works. There's Milton in the gunpowder scene and James Shirley in BM p240 'The judge smiled and touched the withered garland at his brow' although this is a bit of a stretch. The more I read this the more I'm beginning to think it has to be an intentional reference by McCarthy. Here's the poem.
This is almost identical to what happens in the novel except there is no babe its just a tree. The kid stumbles upon a burning tree in the cold night. Here, unlike the poem, someone finds the fire and warms himself and kneels and reaches his hands out in a manner of repentance. This is especially poignant keeping in mind it is well past the main movement of the novel where the gang has butchered raped and scalped anyone in their path, innocent and guilty all the same, and are now being hunted by General Elias. Despite the kid's moral greyness in the novel, he's surely committed crimes with the gang and now kneels by the fire, which in accordance with the poem is a symbolic image of Christ that weeps and burns for men's sins and intends to shrink away in order to cleanse their souls in his blood.
Given McCarthy's interest with Christmas (SM spoilerAlicia dies on Christmas), the holiness of blood, and general themes regarding catholicism, this seems too good to be coincidence. The tree scene obviously has parallels to the burning bush in Exodus but I think it's very likely McCarthy had this in mind too. I'm curious to know if anyone has other interpretations of this.
***Robert Southwell was an English catholic priest and after residing in Rome he returned to England as a missionary but was arrested on false charges. He was held captive and tortured for several years before his persecution by Edward Coke. The same Coke that judge Holden name drops when he swindles a lieutenant into thinking that the gang was not responsible for Mr Owen's death in chapter 16 p252 ("He quoted Coke and Blackstone, Anaximander, Thales"). Robert Southwell was sentenced to death and died a martyr in a time when Catholicism in England was waning and being rooted out. Its interesting that McCarthy, a raised Roman Catholic, invokes his poetry at this point of the novel.
submitted by Automatic_Hunter7242 to cormacmccarthy [link] [comments]
AS I in hoary winter’s nightThe poem is a kind of cursed vision of Christmas where despite Christ being newly born he already suffers for man's soul and burns them up in his fire and declares that he will wash away the sins with his blood. An image of repentance through blood.
Stood shivering in the snow,
Surprised I was with sudden heat
Which made my heart to glow;
And lifting up a fearful eye
To view what fire was near,
A pretty babe all burning bright
Did in the air appear;
Who, scorchèd with excessive heat,
Such floods of tears did shed,
As though His floods should quench His flames,
Which with His tears were bred:
‘Alas!’ quoth He, ‘but newly born
In fiery heats I fry,
Yet none approach to warm their hearts
Or feel my fire but I!
‘My faultless breast the furnace is;
The fuel, wounding thorns;
Love is the fire, and sighs the smoke;
The ashes, shames and scorns;
The fuel Justice layeth on,
And Mercy blows the coals,
The metal in this furnace wrought
Are men’s defilèd souls:
For which, as now on fire I am
To work them to their good,
So will I melt into a bath,
To wash them in my blood.’
With this He vanish’d out of sight
And swiftly shrunk away,
And straight I callèd unto mind
That it was Christmas Day.
This is almost identical to what happens in the novel except there is no babe its just a tree. The kid stumbles upon a burning tree in the cold night. Here, unlike the poem, someone finds the fire and warms himself and kneels and reaches his hands out in a manner of repentance. This is especially poignant keeping in mind it is well past the main movement of the novel where the gang has butchered raped and scalped anyone in their path, innocent and guilty all the same, and are now being hunted by General Elias. Despite the kid's moral greyness in the novel, he's surely committed crimes with the gang and now kneels by the fire, which in accordance with the poem is a symbolic image of Christ that weeps and burns for men's sins and intends to shrink away in order to cleanse their souls in his blood.
Given McCarthy's interest with Christmas (SM spoilerAlicia dies on Christmas), the holiness of blood, and general themes regarding catholicism, this seems too good to be coincidence. The tree scene obviously has parallels to the burning bush in Exodus but I think it's very likely McCarthy had this in mind too. I'm curious to know if anyone has other interpretations of this.
***Robert Southwell was an English catholic priest and after residing in Rome he returned to England as a missionary but was arrested on false charges. He was held captive and tortured for several years before his persecution by Edward Coke. The same Coke that judge Holden name drops when he swindles a lieutenant into thinking that the gang was not responsible for Mr Owen's death in chapter 16 p252 ("He quoted Coke and Blackstone, Anaximander, Thales"). Robert Southwell was sentenced to death and died a martyr in a time when Catholicism in England was waning and being rooted out. Its interesting that McCarthy, a raised Roman Catholic, invokes his poetry at this point of the novel.
2023.03.29 01:27 afiresword [SALE] Space Clearing Sale - Mushoku Tensei, Fate, Quintuplets, Fairy Tale, Madoka Magica, and MORE
The pre orders keep coming so I need to make more space again! Kept in a smoke free home and in Detolfs. Shipping is from the US, buyer pays shipping. If you send your zip code I can give a shipping estimate. I can ship internationally, just be prepared for high shipping. Paypal is preferred for payment. Feel free to send any questions or offers.
IMAGES
submitted by afiresword to AnimeFigures [link] [comments]
IMAGES
| Price | Figure Name | MFC Link |
|---|---|---|
| $35 | Gotoubun no Hanayome ∬ - Nakano Ichika - Pop Up Parade (Good Smile Company) NiB | Link |
| $35 | Gotoubun no Hanayome ∬ - Nakano Nino - Pop Up Parade (Good Smile Company) NiB | Link |
| $110 | Gotoubun no Hanayome - Nakano Nino - 1/8 (Kotobukiya) BONUS FACE INCLUDED | Link |
| $90 | Gotoubun no Hanayome - Nakano Ichika - 1/8 (Kotobukiya) | Link |
| $90 | Gotoubun no Hanayome - Nakano Yotsuba - 1/8 (Kotobukiya) | Link |
| $90 | Gotoubun no Hanayome - Nakano Itsuki - 1/8 (Kotobukiya) | Link |
| $90 | Gotoubun no Hanayome - Nakano Nino - 1/8 (Kotobukiya) | Link |
| $165 | Mushoku Tensei ~Isekai Ittara Honki Dasu~ - Roxy Migurdia - 1/8 (Kotobukiya)WITH BONUS FACE NiB | Link |
| $200 | Yofukashi no Uta - Nanakusa Nazuna | Link |
| $165 | Kobayashi-san chi no Maid Dragon S - Tohru - 1/7 - Maid Cafe Ver. (Apex Innovation) NiB | Link |
| $95 | Shingeki no Kyojin - Eren Yeager - ARTFX J - 1/8 (Kotobukiya) | Link |
| $160 | Kaifuku Jutsushi no Yarinaoshi - Setsuna - KDcolle - 1/7 - Light Novel Ver. (Kadokawa) | Link |
| $65 | Yahari Ore no Seishun Love Comedy wa Machigatteiru. Zoku - Yukinoshita Yukino - 1/8 (Kotobukiya) | Link |
| $65 | Yahari Ore no Seishun Love Comedy wa Machigatteiru. Zoku - Yuigahama Yui - 1/8 (Kotobukiya) | Link |
| $40 | Madoka★Magica: Hangyaku no Monogatari - Akuma Homura - Ichiban Kuji | Link |
| $55 | Mahou Shoujo Madoka☆Magica - Akemi Homura - 1/8 (Good Smile Company) | Link |
| $110 | Fate/Grand Order - Jeanne d'Arc (Alter) - 1/7 - 2nd Ascension (Aniplex) | Link |
| $115 | Enn Enn no Shouboutai - Tamaki Kotatsu - ARTFX J - 1/8 (Kotobukiya) | Link |
| $150 | Fate/Grand Order - Elizabeth Báthory - 1/7 - Saber, Brave (Ques Q) | Link |
| $250 | Quiz Magic Academy MAXIVCORD - Grim Aloe - 1/6 (Wing) NiB | Link |
| $160 | Jahy-sama wa Kujikenai! - Jahy BUNDLE - 1/7 (Medicos Entertainment) NiB | Link 1 Link 2 |
| $180 | Fairy Tail Final Season - Lucy Heartfilia - Pop Up Parade - XL (Good Smile Company) | Link |
| $500 | Fairy Tail - Erza Scarlet - B-style - 1/4 - Bunny Ver. (FREEing) MISSING BASE | Link |
| $140 | Fate/kaleid liner PRISMA☆ILLYA 3rei!! - Illyasviel von Einzbern - 1/6 - China Dress Ver. (Phat Company) | Link |
| $100 | Tengen Toppa Gurren-Lagann - Kamina - Nendoroid (#935) (Good Smile Company) | Link |
2023.03.29 01:20 sleepymandrake Show recommendations?
I love the magicians and honestly I miss falling in love with a TV show, or rather a world, as much as I did with this, to the point where I wanted to live in it. I read the books, graphic novels, rewatch the show regularly but I really would love to have something new. A lot of people here have talked about the order but three episodes in and I felt no connection whatsoever, whereas with the magicians it was pretty much instant. Ironically, I found it when the first episode aired for the first time in my country while I was skipping through channels. Somehow I got to SyFy and that nostalgic overview of New York from the beginning of the ep was playing.
I'd really appreciate recommendations. Some of the other shows I have become obsessed with in the past are Sense8, Over the Garden Wall, Barry, Harlots, Fleabag and oop that's all that comes to my mind at the moment.
I'd really like something with magic as well but so far I haven't found much that I really enjoy.
submitted by sleepymandrake to brakebills [link] [comments]
I'd really appreciate recommendations. Some of the other shows I have become obsessed with in the past are Sense8, Over the Garden Wall, Barry, Harlots, Fleabag and oop that's all that comes to my mind at the moment.
I'd really like something with magic as well but so far I haven't found much that I really enjoy.
2023.03.29 00:48 theMothman1966 March 25 was John keels 93 birthday RIP
From John Keel.com
Alva John Kiehle was born on March 25, 1930, in Hornell, NY. His father was a singer and bandleader; his mother a “lively, pretty girl with a strong sense of humor.” The marriage was a brief one; John was raised by his grandparents in the nearby town of Perry.
As a child he read insatiably (he remembered himself as a “reading machine”), especially anything about magic, humor, science, travel, and aviation. By the time he was 14, he was determined to be a writer: he wrote a column, “Scraping the Keel,” for the Perry Herald; published his own science fiction fanzine, The Lunarite; and was routinely sending out submissions to magazines.
In 1947, he hitch-hiked to Manhattan — or, more specifically, to Greenwich Village. He became associate editor of the quarterly magazine Poets of America (1947-1949), and editor of the weekly newspaper Limelight (1949-1951). At this time, he was also writing for comic books, contributing poetry to various magazines, and turning out scripts for the early TV station WABD. He also wrote scripts for radio shows, including Grand Central Station and First Nighter.
When he was 18, he had a strange (but classic) illumination experience in his furnished room off Times Square. He remembered the room “filled with an indescribable light, a pinkish glow”; and his mind “flooded with a torrent of information.”
In 1951, he was drafted. He spent his military years in Frankfurt, working mostly for the American Forces Network. Some of his programming ideas — a remote broadcast from the Great Pyramid, another from Frankenstein’s Castle — earned him a great deal of publicity.
When he left the army in 1954, he was restless, and determined to see more of the world. He spent the next year wandering throughout the Middle East, supporting himself by sending back stories and articles to his agent, who then placed them in men’s adventure magazines. In Singapore, he was deported as an “adventurer,” and moved to Barcelona, where he turned his experiences into a book, Jadoo.
When Jadoo was published in 1957, he moved back to NYC, and promoted it by performing with cobras in the window of the Midtown Aquarium at Times Square, and with many TV and radio appearances. He suffered a bit of writer’s block after this, and turned to editing the magazine Echo. Funk & Wagnall’s also hired him as a science and geography editor (1959-1960).
In the ’60s, he worked a great deal in television: he was the head writer for the game show Play Your Hunch; and turned out many scripts for such shows as Mack and Myer for Hire, the Chuck McCann Show, and the Clay Cole Show. He also wrote a couple of novels, under his preferred pseudonym, Harry Gibbs.
In 1966, Playboy commissioned him to write an article on UFOs. The resultant piece was rejected (the assignment was turned over to J. Allen Hynek, and published in the December 1967 issue). But he had become hooked on the subject; and traveled around the country, interviewing witnesses, and writing dozens of articles. The phenomenon, he learned, took its toll on its investigators: he entered a shadowy world where black cars vanished on country roads, meaningless messages turned up in hotel rooms, and his phone and mail suffered strange interceptions. In 1966, he made repeated visits to Point Pleasant, West Virginia, then the site of a particularly active monster and UFO flap; the result was one of his most popular books, The Mothman Prophecies. Along the way, he also put out a lively newsletter, Anomaly; wrote a regular column for Saga; and published several classic books on forteana.
He was a technical advisor to the Library of Congress (1968-69), and special consultant to the office of Scientific Research and Bureau of Radiology (1968-71), before becoming a consultant to the Department of Health, Education and Welfare, for whom he produced a prototype for a magazine, You. He also fulfilled a boyhood dream by earning his pilot’s license.
In the 1980s, he attempted a number of plays and novels, none of which made it to the page or stage. He devoted his time to various mail order projects, and revived the dormant New York Fortean Society. And he contributed a regular column to Fate magazine, “Beyond the Known.”
In his later years, he was slowed down considerably by diabetes and its complications. He had some lean times, particularly when cataracts, and the resultant eye surgery, made writing difficult. His luck turned when The Mothman Prophecies was made into a movie in 2002; he was particularly delighted at being portrayed by Richard Gere, whom he referred to as a “John Keel look-alike.” The publicity sparked several new editions of the book, including numerous foreign editions. He bought a car, which he dubbed the Mothmobile, and often disappeared on solo road trips.
With age, his health declined, and he spent several years in and out of hospitals and nursing homes; his friends pitched in to keep him going. He died July 3, 2009, at Mt. Sinai Hospital in Manhattan.
Despite reports to the contrary, he did not die alone and abandoned. Larry “Ratso” Sloman and I were his medical proxies, and very active in helping him in his final years. Many friends visited him in his various hospitals and homes. I was at his bedside the day he died, to give the final directives, and to tell him goodbye. Despite other reports, his papers were saved by his friends and family.
submitted by theMothman1966 to Cryptozoology [link] [comments]
Alva John Kiehle was born on March 25, 1930, in Hornell, NY. His father was a singer and bandleader; his mother a “lively, pretty girl with a strong sense of humor.” The marriage was a brief one; John was raised by his grandparents in the nearby town of Perry.
As a child he read insatiably (he remembered himself as a “reading machine”), especially anything about magic, humor, science, travel, and aviation. By the time he was 14, he was determined to be a writer: he wrote a column, “Scraping the Keel,” for the Perry Herald; published his own science fiction fanzine, The Lunarite; and was routinely sending out submissions to magazines.
In 1947, he hitch-hiked to Manhattan — or, more specifically, to Greenwich Village. He became associate editor of the quarterly magazine Poets of America (1947-1949), and editor of the weekly newspaper Limelight (1949-1951). At this time, he was also writing for comic books, contributing poetry to various magazines, and turning out scripts for the early TV station WABD. He also wrote scripts for radio shows, including Grand Central Station and First Nighter.
When he was 18, he had a strange (but classic) illumination experience in his furnished room off Times Square. He remembered the room “filled with an indescribable light, a pinkish glow”; and his mind “flooded with a torrent of information.”
In 1951, he was drafted. He spent his military years in Frankfurt, working mostly for the American Forces Network. Some of his programming ideas — a remote broadcast from the Great Pyramid, another from Frankenstein’s Castle — earned him a great deal of publicity.
When he left the army in 1954, he was restless, and determined to see more of the world. He spent the next year wandering throughout the Middle East, supporting himself by sending back stories and articles to his agent, who then placed them in men’s adventure magazines. In Singapore, he was deported as an “adventurer,” and moved to Barcelona, where he turned his experiences into a book, Jadoo.
When Jadoo was published in 1957, he moved back to NYC, and promoted it by performing with cobras in the window of the Midtown Aquarium at Times Square, and with many TV and radio appearances. He suffered a bit of writer’s block after this, and turned to editing the magazine Echo. Funk & Wagnall’s also hired him as a science and geography editor (1959-1960).
In the ’60s, he worked a great deal in television: he was the head writer for the game show Play Your Hunch; and turned out many scripts for such shows as Mack and Myer for Hire, the Chuck McCann Show, and the Clay Cole Show. He also wrote a couple of novels, under his preferred pseudonym, Harry Gibbs.
In 1966, Playboy commissioned him to write an article on UFOs. The resultant piece was rejected (the assignment was turned over to J. Allen Hynek, and published in the December 1967 issue). But he had become hooked on the subject; and traveled around the country, interviewing witnesses, and writing dozens of articles. The phenomenon, he learned, took its toll on its investigators: he entered a shadowy world where black cars vanished on country roads, meaningless messages turned up in hotel rooms, and his phone and mail suffered strange interceptions. In 1966, he made repeated visits to Point Pleasant, West Virginia, then the site of a particularly active monster and UFO flap; the result was one of his most popular books, The Mothman Prophecies. Along the way, he also put out a lively newsletter, Anomaly; wrote a regular column for Saga; and published several classic books on forteana.
He was a technical advisor to the Library of Congress (1968-69), and special consultant to the office of Scientific Research and Bureau of Radiology (1968-71), before becoming a consultant to the Department of Health, Education and Welfare, for whom he produced a prototype for a magazine, You. He also fulfilled a boyhood dream by earning his pilot’s license.
In the 1980s, he attempted a number of plays and novels, none of which made it to the page or stage. He devoted his time to various mail order projects, and revived the dormant New York Fortean Society. And he contributed a regular column to Fate magazine, “Beyond the Known.”
In his later years, he was slowed down considerably by diabetes and its complications. He had some lean times, particularly when cataracts, and the resultant eye surgery, made writing difficult. His luck turned when The Mothman Prophecies was made into a movie in 2002; he was particularly delighted at being portrayed by Richard Gere, whom he referred to as a “John Keel look-alike.” The publicity sparked several new editions of the book, including numerous foreign editions. He bought a car, which he dubbed the Mothmobile, and often disappeared on solo road trips.
With age, his health declined, and he spent several years in and out of hospitals and nursing homes; his friends pitched in to keep him going. He died July 3, 2009, at Mt. Sinai Hospital in Manhattan.
Despite reports to the contrary, he did not die alone and abandoned. Larry “Ratso” Sloman and I were his medical proxies, and very active in helping him in his final years. Many friends visited him in his various hospitals and homes. I was at his bedside the day he died, to give the final directives, and to tell him goodbye. Despite other reports, his papers were saved by his friends and family.
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Cling! Clang! Cling! Clang! The warning bells tolled ceaselessly throughout the human city, screaming out the portent of doom in their tintinnabulation.
And yet, no one hue-and-cry could be heard. Not one speech was given. No announcements or calls to action were made; not to shelter, nor to rally, nor even to evacuate. What good would it do? Everyone already knew what had happened, and no one could find recourse from it. What safety was there from the very laws of the world, the foundations of all societies, changing without warning in the span of a single heartbeat?
In the blink of an eye, the system itself had gone out.
In the city’s heart, a young man clad in ivory burst through the war room doors. “Captain General!” he addressed with a salute.
A wizened knight regarded him as he arrived. “Sir William, good. I take it you’ve noticed?”
“It was hard not to,” Sir William replied. “I don’t suppose you know why the system isn’t working?”
“No,” the commander answered. “We’re going to have to work with our best guess. Right now, I’m concerned with how the other nations will react.”
“Other nations? The problem is that widespread?”
“We don’t have any way to confirm that, but if it isn’t then the Vulpes have managed a ritual magic on a scale I’ve never heard of. If you look at it from the others’ perspectives, however, the people with the most motive to disable the system…” the Captain General left off.
“… would be us,” William finished, earning a nod from his superior.
The system had given certain bonuses to the abilities of the various sentients that lived within it. Faster growth in certain stats, racial skills, unique magics. Every group had been given certain advantages.
While this was true of the Humans as well, it was far less so than the others. Better stamina improvement through cardio, and a modest bonus to projectile accuracy were all they had been granted. Everything they had was a struggle, biting, clawing, and scraping to carve a place for themselves in this world.
If that playing field had been leveled, that would make them the primary suspects as far as the other races were concerned.
“We had nothing to do with it though, right?” the young man asked.
“Of course not!” the Captain-General scolded. He curled his lip and twirled his grayed moustache. “The system is a divine construct beyond human understanding. No, this was someone else. As I said, we’re going with our best guess.”
“What’s that, sir?”
“The best ritualists are the Vulpus,” he said, raising a finger. “They’re possibility one. If this is targeted at us, that leaves no other suspects. I doubt that’s the case, though. Their ire has been aimed at the Wolven for the last twenty years, and the fact that our commands aren’t working at all leads me to believe this is far worse than a jamming ritual.
The second possibility,” he explained as he raised another finger, “is the demons. I’m not sure how they’d manage it, but the system really has been destroyed, there is no other race with a penchant and a knack for destruction on such a level that it could damage the system itself. Of course, I doubt any mindless brute would be able to do such a thing. ”
William swallowed hard, fighting the urge to bring his hand to his shield to combat his unease. “So, the nobility?”
“Not the ordinary nobility, no. The only ones that could pull this off are demon gods,” the Captain-General answered. “A lesser god might have the power to destroy the system if that god had an affinity for destruction. There are two types of monsters born from destruction, the dragons and the demons.
"The Dragons deny there being lesser gods among their number. As such, I believe we are looking at the work of the Three Devils: The Marquis of Cruelty, the Baron of Fire, and the Marquis of Fate.”
William placed his hand on his chin in contemplation. “Couldn’t the problem be temporary, sir? If not, then you might be on the right track. The Devils might be able to pull this off. The Marquis of Fate is the most likely of the three, but I don’t know. I don’t see the motive for Laplace, and I’m not sure I agree that De Sade or Richthofen have the power to do it.”
The young man grimaced, looking up at the commander. “I think we need to consider the worst-case scenario, sir: not a lesser god, a true divinity.”
“Be very careful with your words, paladin, lest you fall,” the old knight warned. “Regardless, if that is the case then either the greater gods want the system gone, in which case the system is at its end, or the gods have gone to war, in which case the world is in trouble.”
“A grim thought,” William agreed. “What are your orders, sir?”
“For now, we must scramble to get our defenses back up, in case this is the first stage of an attack. You let me worry about that. I want you to find the underlying cause of this, hero. Track the demons’ latest movements. Even if this wasn’t their doing, there might be a clue to find there.”
“Is there no other way, mother?” a young woman asked.
This was a hasty decision. Too hasty, perhaps, but the situation demanded urgency. If they dawdled, the entire city-state of Mirage could be blown to dust, quite literally.
A legendary illusion magic, affecting every sense and turning any stranger away, kept the city safe, or it was supposed to. They said the magic was a ritual devised by their peoples’ god of trickery, who fooled the great god of order into giving his people the control of it. If so, then that trickster was no longer there to answer questions.
Some said he was dead, slain in a conflict with another deity, perhaps that very same god of order. Most, however, believed that was a deception, and that he had faked his death long ago, as the master of illusions he was.
To ask the Vulpes, while their patron may have taken inspiration from the fae, only he could have come up with fueling such an illusion directly from a leyline. Monitoring and maintaining it was a simple matter for the fox therianthropes, the foremost experts of ritual magic.
Or, at least, it was.
“We’ve lost the system, Cadmea” the voice of the head of the ritualists’ clan reminded her daughter through. “We no longer have an interface to check the mana flow. Every moment we linger, we run the risk of losing control of it. We live over a wind leyline, and wind magic, above all other kinds, likes to move freely.”
Cadmea swallowed hard. Any moment could lead to an irreversible cascade failure that could raze their nation. Even in the best-case scenario, their land’s only strategic defense would be stripped from them; Mirage didn’t even have walls, for pity’s sake.
Time was of the essence, she knew that, but by its very nature there was no predicting how this ritual would turn out.
The ritual itself was crude, to say the least. The runic arrays were slapdash, made by dragging her tails through the sand in an exceptionally rough “circle” that she could barely make out in dusk’s light. The incantation was unusually short and sounded like an elder asking a favor using outdated slang while baby talking. For crying out loud, the ritual’s focus was a “sandwich” that didn’t even fit the definition of one!
And of course, the intended result itself was unpredictable, and had potential to be far more disastrous than the swift ablative end the leyline would bring.
It was a wild guess, but they had to take it.
“Okay,” Cadmea said. With that, she tossed “sandwich” onto the mound of sand off-center of the array with a splat. For a moment the young ritualist felt she wouldn’t mind a swift death by leyline rupture; it would be better than dying of embarrassment. She spoke the words.
“Yo, Tetra, god ob magic, pwease put yo ears on” she loudly announced. Her cheeks flushed. “It would be gwoovy if could ya pwease do us a sowid and hewp us out, ya dig, home swice?”
“Wow, you actually said all that?” a voice rang out over the dunes.
Cadmea looked around and saw nothing. Something was wrong. No, if by some miracle this ritual had actually worked, then…
She brought her hand up to her ear. “Mother, I think it worked. What do I say?” No response came through the enchanted earpiece.
“Ah ah ah!” the voice laughed. “No speaking to mommy dearest now. You thought yourself significant enough to summon me, so you can speak for yourself. I’ve gone ahead and jammed that little trinket of yours for now. Understand, mortal?”
The vixen nodded, sweat dripping down her brow. “Y-yes. I thank you for allowing me to summon you.”
“Oh, you didn’t summon me, I was already in the neighborhood checking something… interesting. Ooh, speaking of interesting, thanks for the offering.” A hand reached out and grabbed the Frankenfood monstrosity from above the podium. Cadmea looked up around to a short, strange woman floating in midair.
She looked strange, like a cross between a human and a wingless pixie. She was short; 86, 87 centimeters. Her hair shimmered with every color of the rainbow and more; her eye colors shifted unpredictably from moment to moment.
She wore a multicolor robe and carried an ornate staff on her back. It was tipped with a glowing violet crystal, and on its base rested a blade. Cadmea could just make out the handle of a wand on her hip.
The way she materialized was sudden, like she’d been there all along, but the vulpine woman hadn’t been able to recognize it.
“What… are you?” Cadmea asked, only for the entity to give her a crooked grin.
“Oh, I’m a lot of things. The Force of Chaos, Tetra the Fourth, the Goddess of Magic, a rule breaker, a 3D projection, an eldritch abomination, part of a web novel, a reality warper, on and on and on. If you mean my appearance, I’m an elf, but not a high elf. This is what my original form looked like,” she answered. She took a large bite out of the slope in her hand.
“Mm, that’s good for mortal fare! Jackfruit, cave-aged cheese, cucumbers, peppermint, and tomato sauce!” she observed, then took a bite of the handful of slop. Cadmea fought to restrain her turning stomach. “So,” Tetra asked with her mouth full, “what exactly do you think you deserve my help with?”
Cadmea took a deep breath to settle her nerves. Despite the chills running down her spine like a parade of spiders, she had to stay calm. There was no predicting this… woman anyway, so she may as well get straight to the point. Waffling about just wasted time and increased the chances for things to go awry.
“We need your help controlling the leyline tap we use to fuel our city’s grand illusion spell. If you could-“
Tetra shoved a messy finger in her face. “I’m going to cut you off right there and say ‘no,’” she said. “I’m sure that stick-in-the-mud Tri’s got you thinking magic is something to be harnessed and follows your little rules and regulations, but again: no. Magic doesn’t follow the rules, it breaks them! Otherwise, it’s just boring old natural law! Physics and math! Yuck!”
The elf’s smile grew unnaturally wide, ear to ear. Suddenly, a teal flash lit up the sky. Cadmea wheeled around to see a colossal pillar of light shooting up out of the sands and into the sky, growing wider and wider at the speed of sound, ripping the land apart. “NOOO!” she screamed as she helplessly watched the magic engulf the city. She fell to her knees. She was too late.
There was no surviving that, no matter how high your level was. There was no barrier they could create. How could there be? This was a leyline, a flow of magic so powerful that it took. And they’d been trying to harness it?
“Well, look at that! Such is the hubris of mortals,” Tetra said as the magic raced to meet them. “Magic is chaos! Imagination given force and form! It wants to be as free as the wind!”
Cadmea squeezed her eyes shut and braced for the end…
… but the end didn’t come.
“I think I’ve made my point,” Tetra declared.
Cadmea slowly opened her eyes. There in the distance stood Mirage, like nothing had happened. “W-what?” she asked, hyperventilating from fear.
“What, did you think there was only one way to use an illusion like yours? Oh, but don’t think that wasn’t real, think of it as a preview. So, now you know I have all the leverage in this little negotiation you want from me. So, what do you think you can offer someone like me?”
“I-I don’t-“
“Of course, you don’t. You’re one person living in one city in one reality out of an infinite number I could hop to, and an infinite number of them could use my help more than you. This is a nexus world, sure, but that doesn’t mean you yourselves are important,” she says. “Normally the answer is ‘absolutely nothing,’ and I don’t answer your little plea in the first place.”
“So… why did you?”
“Ah, that’s the right question!” Tetra replied. “Like I said, I was checking something interesting. Two somethings. So, what is your name?”
“C-Cadmea.”
“Well, Cadmea, I’ll make you a deal.” Her tone became ice cold. “I’m not going put any kind of monitor on your little magic power source, or automatically regulate it for you. I could, but I won’t.
“I will, however, give you, specifically, the ability to sense its flow from any distance so you can know how wide your figurative valves should be from day to day. In exchange, I’m going to have you do a series of tasks for me.”
The elf reached into her pocket and pulled out two polished orbs, one slate grey and the other jade green. “I want you to bring these to the fairy kingdom. Ask for the nightshade twins and deliver these to them, it should be clear who gets which. Wait there for further instructions.”
Cadmea nodded, still shaken. “Okay, I accept,” she said. “But how will I tell my people how to adjust the magic?”
Tetra sighed impatiently. “Give me your earpiece,” she said. Cadmea did as instructed, handing it to the short woman, who pulled the wand out of her robe and tapped it to the implement before handing it back. “There. Unless you bumble into an absolute antimagic field, that should let this communicate with your mother’s copy anywhere in this multiversal supercluster.”
“Multi-what?” Cadmea asked.
“Everywhere, it works everywhere you’ll ever go. Ask the grey twin if you want a detailed explanation,” the goddess said. Her eyes rolled in her sockets, then kept rolling until they fell out. She caught them in her hand and put them back in, magically none the worse for wear. “You can say your goodbyes through your earpiece. You depart in… now.”
A noise came from beneath Cadmea, who looked down and saw a magic portal open beneath her feet. She only had time to yelp before she fell through. She landed in a heap in a rose bush on the other side. “Ow,” she whined, looking back up through the portal at Tetra, who gave one comment before closing it.
“Oh, and welcome to Albion.”
King Finvarra watched as Rocket and the two fairies flew off into the forest. “My king?” a salmon-pink haired fairy asked as he flew up from below. “We’ve moved the wounded to the ground for treatment.”
He nodded. “Tell me, Vera: was the evacuation a success?”
“You mean to ask if we missed the two newblooms, your highness?” Vera asked. “I don’t think so. The gray one, Liandan, said they appeared from their flowers twenty minutes ago. That was after the evacuation was complete. They must have bloomed during the fire itself. Perhaps their mother flowers sought to save them?”
“Indeed,” Finvarra agreed. “And did anyone call me by true name after they arrived?”
“They are small and came in quietly, but I don’t think so.”
“So then,” the Fairy King questioned, “how did they know it?”
“That’s… a very good question, your highness,” Vera admitted.
”What a strange pair,” Finvarra thought. It was rare for a flowering plant to create a fairy in its lifetime. Rarer still would one give rise to siblings. Twins? It was practically unheard of.
Furthermore, understanding English, the common tongue created by the angels, was nothing unusual for a newbloom. Speaking it was an entirely different matter. It took months for a fairy to learn how to make the proper sounds, and yet Liandan was speaking it with total fluency.
And then there were their colors. Belladonna’s name pointed to her mother flower easily enough, and like all True Fairies her colors matched. Her twin, though, was born an ashen gray. Given when she appeared, he could only think of one cause.
“Like a phoenix, born from the ashes,” he mused. He’d suggest that for her false name later.
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And yet, no one hue-and-cry could be heard. Not one speech was given. No announcements or calls to action were made; not to shelter, nor to rally, nor even to evacuate. What good would it do? Everyone already knew what had happened, and no one could find recourse from it. What safety was there from the very laws of the world, the foundations of all societies, changing without warning in the span of a single heartbeat?
In the blink of an eye, the system itself had gone out.
In the city’s heart, a young man clad in ivory burst through the war room doors. “Captain General!” he addressed with a salute.
A wizened knight regarded him as he arrived. “Sir William, good. I take it you’ve noticed?”
“It was hard not to,” Sir William replied. “I don’t suppose you know why the system isn’t working?”
“No,” the commander answered. “We’re going to have to work with our best guess. Right now, I’m concerned with how the other nations will react.”
“Other nations? The problem is that widespread?”
“We don’t have any way to confirm that, but if it isn’t then the Vulpes have managed a ritual magic on a scale I’ve never heard of. If you look at it from the others’ perspectives, however, the people with the most motive to disable the system…” the Captain General left off.
“… would be us,” William finished, earning a nod from his superior.
The system had given certain bonuses to the abilities of the various sentients that lived within it. Faster growth in certain stats, racial skills, unique magics. Every group had been given certain advantages.
While this was true of the Humans as well, it was far less so than the others. Better stamina improvement through cardio, and a modest bonus to projectile accuracy were all they had been granted. Everything they had was a struggle, biting, clawing, and scraping to carve a place for themselves in this world.
If that playing field had been leveled, that would make them the primary suspects as far as the other races were concerned.
“We had nothing to do with it though, right?” the young man asked.
“Of course not!” the Captain-General scolded. He curled his lip and twirled his grayed moustache. “The system is a divine construct beyond human understanding. No, this was someone else. As I said, we’re going with our best guess.”
“What’s that, sir?”
“The best ritualists are the Vulpus,” he said, raising a finger. “They’re possibility one. If this is targeted at us, that leaves no other suspects. I doubt that’s the case, though. Their ire has been aimed at the Wolven for the last twenty years, and the fact that our commands aren’t working at all leads me to believe this is far worse than a jamming ritual.
The second possibility,” he explained as he raised another finger, “is the demons. I’m not sure how they’d manage it, but the system really has been destroyed, there is no other race with a penchant and a knack for destruction on such a level that it could damage the system itself. Of course, I doubt any mindless brute would be able to do such a thing. ”
William swallowed hard, fighting the urge to bring his hand to his shield to combat his unease. “So, the nobility?”
“Not the ordinary nobility, no. The only ones that could pull this off are demon gods,” the Captain-General answered. “A lesser god might have the power to destroy the system if that god had an affinity for destruction. There are two types of monsters born from destruction, the dragons and the demons.
"The Dragons deny there being lesser gods among their number. As such, I believe we are looking at the work of the Three Devils: The Marquis of Cruelty, the Baron of Fire, and the Marquis of Fate.”
William placed his hand on his chin in contemplation. “Couldn’t the problem be temporary, sir? If not, then you might be on the right track. The Devils might be able to pull this off. The Marquis of Fate is the most likely of the three, but I don’t know. I don’t see the motive for Laplace, and I’m not sure I agree that De Sade or Richthofen have the power to do it.”
The young man grimaced, looking up at the commander. “I think we need to consider the worst-case scenario, sir: not a lesser god, a true divinity.”
“Be very careful with your words, paladin, lest you fall,” the old knight warned. “Regardless, if that is the case then either the greater gods want the system gone, in which case the system is at its end, or the gods have gone to war, in which case the world is in trouble.”
“A grim thought,” William agreed. “What are your orders, sir?”
“For now, we must scramble to get our defenses back up, in case this is the first stage of an attack. You let me worry about that. I want you to find the underlying cause of this, hero. Track the demons’ latest movements. Even if this wasn’t their doing, there might be a clue to find there.”
This was a hasty decision. Too hasty, perhaps, but the situation demanded urgency. If they dawdled, the entire city-state of Mirage could be blown to dust, quite literally.
A legendary illusion magic, affecting every sense and turning any stranger away, kept the city safe, or it was supposed to. They said the magic was a ritual devised by their peoples’ god of trickery, who fooled the great god of order into giving his people the control of it. If so, then that trickster was no longer there to answer questions.
Some said he was dead, slain in a conflict with another deity, perhaps that very same god of order. Most, however, believed that was a deception, and that he had faked his death long ago, as the master of illusions he was.
To ask the Vulpes, while their patron may have taken inspiration from the fae, only he could have come up with fueling such an illusion directly from a leyline. Monitoring and maintaining it was a simple matter for the fox therianthropes, the foremost experts of ritual magic.
Or, at least, it was.
“We’ve lost the system, Cadmea” the voice of the head of the ritualists’ clan reminded her daughter through. “We no longer have an interface to check the mana flow. Every moment we linger, we run the risk of losing control of it. We live over a wind leyline, and wind magic, above all other kinds, likes to move freely.”
Cadmea swallowed hard. Any moment could lead to an irreversible cascade failure that could raze their nation. Even in the best-case scenario, their land’s only strategic defense would be stripped from them; Mirage didn’t even have walls, for pity’s sake.
Time was of the essence, she knew that, but by its very nature there was no predicting how this ritual would turn out.
The ritual itself was crude, to say the least. The runic arrays were slapdash, made by dragging her tails through the sand in an exceptionally rough “circle” that she could barely make out in dusk’s light. The incantation was unusually short and sounded like an elder asking a favor using outdated slang while baby talking. For crying out loud, the ritual’s focus was a “sandwich” that didn’t even fit the definition of one!
And of course, the intended result itself was unpredictable, and had potential to be far more disastrous than the swift ablative end the leyline would bring.
It was a wild guess, but they had to take it.
“Okay,” Cadmea said. With that, she tossed “sandwich” onto the mound of sand off-center of the array with a splat. For a moment the young ritualist felt she wouldn’t mind a swift death by leyline rupture; it would be better than dying of embarrassment. She spoke the words.
“Yo, Tetra, god ob magic, pwease put yo ears on” she loudly announced. Her cheeks flushed. “It would be gwoovy if could ya pwease do us a sowid and hewp us out, ya dig, home swice?”
“Wow, you actually said all that?” a voice rang out over the dunes.
Cadmea looked around and saw nothing. Something was wrong. No, if by some miracle this ritual had actually worked, then…
She brought her hand up to her ear. “Mother, I think it worked. What do I say?” No response came through the enchanted earpiece.
“Ah ah ah!” the voice laughed. “No speaking to mommy dearest now. You thought yourself significant enough to summon me, so you can speak for yourself. I’ve gone ahead and jammed that little trinket of yours for now. Understand, mortal?”
The vixen nodded, sweat dripping down her brow. “Y-yes. I thank you for allowing me to summon you.”
“Oh, you didn’t summon me, I was already in the neighborhood checking something… interesting. Ooh, speaking of interesting, thanks for the offering.” A hand reached out and grabbed the Frankenfood monstrosity from above the podium. Cadmea looked up around to a short, strange woman floating in midair.
She looked strange, like a cross between a human and a wingless pixie. She was short; 86, 87 centimeters. Her hair shimmered with every color of the rainbow and more; her eye colors shifted unpredictably from moment to moment.
She wore a multicolor robe and carried an ornate staff on her back. It was tipped with a glowing violet crystal, and on its base rested a blade. Cadmea could just make out the handle of a wand on her hip.
The way she materialized was sudden, like she’d been there all along, but the vulpine woman hadn’t been able to recognize it.
“What… are you?” Cadmea asked, only for the entity to give her a crooked grin.
“Oh, I’m a lot of things. The Force of Chaos, Tetra the Fourth, the Goddess of Magic, a rule breaker, a 3D projection, an eldritch abomination, part of a web novel, a reality warper, on and on and on. If you mean my appearance, I’m an elf, but not a high elf. This is what my original form looked like,” she answered. She took a large bite out of the slope in her hand.
“Mm, that’s good for mortal fare! Jackfruit, cave-aged cheese, cucumbers, peppermint, and tomato sauce!” she observed, then took a bite of the handful of slop. Cadmea fought to restrain her turning stomach. “So,” Tetra asked with her mouth full, “what exactly do you think you deserve my help with?”
Cadmea took a deep breath to settle her nerves. Despite the chills running down her spine like a parade of spiders, she had to stay calm. There was no predicting this… woman anyway, so she may as well get straight to the point. Waffling about just wasted time and increased the chances for things to go awry.
“We need your help controlling the leyline tap we use to fuel our city’s grand illusion spell. If you could-“
Tetra shoved a messy finger in her face. “I’m going to cut you off right there and say ‘no,’” she said. “I’m sure that stick-in-the-mud Tri’s got you thinking magic is something to be harnessed and follows your little rules and regulations, but again: no. Magic doesn’t follow the rules, it breaks them! Otherwise, it’s just boring old natural law! Physics and math! Yuck!”
The elf’s smile grew unnaturally wide, ear to ear. Suddenly, a teal flash lit up the sky. Cadmea wheeled around to see a colossal pillar of light shooting up out of the sands and into the sky, growing wider and wider at the speed of sound, ripping the land apart. “NOOO!” she screamed as she helplessly watched the magic engulf the city. She fell to her knees. She was too late.
There was no surviving that, no matter how high your level was. There was no barrier they could create. How could there be? This was a leyline, a flow of magic so powerful that it took. And they’d been trying to harness it?
“Well, look at that! Such is the hubris of mortals,” Tetra said as the magic raced to meet them. “Magic is chaos! Imagination given force and form! It wants to be as free as the wind!”
Cadmea squeezed her eyes shut and braced for the end…
… but the end didn’t come.
“I think I’ve made my point,” Tetra declared.
Cadmea slowly opened her eyes. There in the distance stood Mirage, like nothing had happened. “W-what?” she asked, hyperventilating from fear.
“What, did you think there was only one way to use an illusion like yours? Oh, but don’t think that wasn’t real, think of it as a preview. So, now you know I have all the leverage in this little negotiation you want from me. So, what do you think you can offer someone like me?”
“I-I don’t-“
“Of course, you don’t. You’re one person living in one city in one reality out of an infinite number I could hop to, and an infinite number of them could use my help more than you. This is a nexus world, sure, but that doesn’t mean you yourselves are important,” she says. “Normally the answer is ‘absolutely nothing,’ and I don’t answer your little plea in the first place.”
“So… why did you?”
“Ah, that’s the right question!” Tetra replied. “Like I said, I was checking something interesting. Two somethings. So, what is your name?”
“C-Cadmea.”
“Well, Cadmea, I’ll make you a deal.” Her tone became ice cold. “I’m not going put any kind of monitor on your little magic power source, or automatically regulate it for you. I could, but I won’t.
“I will, however, give you, specifically, the ability to sense its flow from any distance so you can know how wide your figurative valves should be from day to day. In exchange, I’m going to have you do a series of tasks for me.”
The elf reached into her pocket and pulled out two polished orbs, one slate grey and the other jade green. “I want you to bring these to the fairy kingdom. Ask for the nightshade twins and deliver these to them, it should be clear who gets which. Wait there for further instructions.”
Cadmea nodded, still shaken. “Okay, I accept,” she said. “But how will I tell my people how to adjust the magic?”
Tetra sighed impatiently. “Give me your earpiece,” she said. Cadmea did as instructed, handing it to the short woman, who pulled the wand out of her robe and tapped it to the implement before handing it back. “There. Unless you bumble into an absolute antimagic field, that should let this communicate with your mother’s copy anywhere in this multiversal supercluster.”
“Multi-what?” Cadmea asked.
“Everywhere, it works everywhere you’ll ever go. Ask the grey twin if you want a detailed explanation,” the goddess said. Her eyes rolled in her sockets, then kept rolling until they fell out. She caught them in her hand and put them back in, magically none the worse for wear. “You can say your goodbyes through your earpiece. You depart in… now.”
A noise came from beneath Cadmea, who looked down and saw a magic portal open beneath her feet. She only had time to yelp before she fell through. She landed in a heap in a rose bush on the other side. “Ow,” she whined, looking back up through the portal at Tetra, who gave one comment before closing it.
“Oh, and welcome to Albion.”
He nodded. “Tell me, Vera: was the evacuation a success?”
“You mean to ask if we missed the two newblooms, your highness?” Vera asked. “I don’t think so. The gray one, Liandan, said they appeared from their flowers twenty minutes ago. That was after the evacuation was complete. They must have bloomed during the fire itself. Perhaps their mother flowers sought to save them?”
“Indeed,” Finvarra agreed. “And did anyone call me by true name after they arrived?”
“They are small and came in quietly, but I don’t think so.”
“So then,” the Fairy King questioned, “how did they know it?”
“That’s… a very good question, your highness,” Vera admitted.
”What a strange pair,” Finvarra thought. It was rare for a flowering plant to create a fairy in its lifetime. Rarer still would one give rise to siblings. Twins? It was practically unheard of.
Furthermore, understanding English, the common tongue created by the angels, was nothing unusual for a newbloom. Speaking it was an entirely different matter. It took months for a fairy to learn how to make the proper sounds, and yet Liandan was speaking it with total fluency.
And then there were their colors. Belladonna’s name pointed to her mother flower easily enough, and like all True Fairies her colors matched. Her twin, though, was born an ashen gray. Given when she appeared, he could only think of one cause.
“Like a phoenix, born from the ashes,” he mused. He’d suggest that for her false name later.
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2023.03.29 00:03 Kathy_Gao Can’t wait to see Swan Boi (Lohengrin) again!
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