Latest Posts by summers-night-dreams - Page 2
My FOM oc Ceres and his seasonal outfits! Making him match the style when he doesn't have hair and a pointy chin was really difficult, but I think he turned out okay :)
Dog might be mans best friend but horse girls would go to the end of the world for their favourite horsies
do you think the Horse ever gets jealous of the Dog's status as "Man's best friend". do you think the Horse is ever like. hey. you domesticated me too. you rode me into battle. i ate food out of your hand and you giggled. are we not besties i thought we were besties
— James Baldwin, from If Beale Street Could Talk
The fact that Fountain is pissing off trads over a 100 years later is so fucking funny
official elon musk hate post reblog to hate like to hate reply to hate
Brennan Lee Mulligan arguing for the primal nature of morality on Ep. 40’s Fireside Chat is one of the funniest and realest things I’ve ever heard. He once again put into words what I have been trying to say for what feels like forever.
EDIT: No, I actually need to quote this out for myself.
“One of the things that happens a lot in philisophy that is, I think, a point of failure, potentially, in it, is that philosophy contains a lot of formal logic studies, and there’s a degree to want to sort of explicate, logically, everything, and go like, ‘What are the reasons and rationalities behind all of this?” But I think ignoring the primal origins of morality- You don’t need- If you watch someone kick a small animal, you don’t need an explanation for why that’s bad. It’s a first- It’s a primary thing, right? And you get into weird positions when you’re like, ‘I believe that humans should have good- be flourish and be happy, and have safety and joy!’ And someone can literally just go ‘Why? To what end? To what end should they have joy?’ And you’re like ‘Not to what end. I’m saying this is the end for me. The end for me is joy and safety and peace.’ And I get to say that because I’m a weird brain monster living in the universe and I can create meaning with my mind. You’re doing the same thing right now, but I just choose joy. Are you choosing something else? Because if you are, then we’re in conflict!” -Brennan Lee Mulligan, “Fireside Chat for WWW ep40 ‘Aid and Comfort’”
Choose joy, motherfucker! If you’re not, we’re in conflict!!!
So Disco Elysium is the only game you've ever really liked
I get it! It's a phenomenal game with superb art and writing, and its themes are consistent and deeply explored. It sets a high bar for video games. But there are other really, really fantastic games out there. This is a list that is 100% my own taste of things that aren't necessarily similar, other than the fact that they're really fucking good. (A lot of these are on sale for the Steam Summer Sale until July 11 2024!)
In Stars and Time
In Stars and Time is a time loop game where you play as Siffrin, the rogue of a party at the end of their quest to save the day by defeating the King, who is freezing everybody in time! But something is wrong: every time you die, you loop back to the day before you fight the King. You're the only one who remembers the loops, so it's up to you to figure out why it's happening, and how to break out.
In Stars and Time is a heart-wrenching dive into mental health, friendship, and love. It's about feeling alone, and how awful it is when the people who love you don't notice (and how awful it is when they do). It's about falling deeper and deeper into your worst self and your worst tendencies, and how to come back from it.
The creator also did one of my favorite Disco Elysium comics ever, which is only tangentially relevant but worth mentioning.
Roadwarden
In Roadwarden, you play as the titular Roadwarden for an undeveloped and "wild" part of the kingdom. Monsters roam the forests and roads, and it's your job to keep people safe. On paper, anyway. Your real mission is to find out what is of value in the area, and how to take it from its people. How well you perform this task is up to you. It's an oldschool text-based RPG, and I take a lot of notes by hand when I play.
Roadwarden explores exploitation and industrialization by making you look in the face of your potential victims. You can only learn what your bosses want you to report on by getting close to the residents, after all. There are mysteries to be solved, secrets to be gathered, and hearts to win.
The Longing
The Longing is an adventure-idle game where you play as the solitary servant of a sleeping king. Your task is to wait for him, for four hundred days. Time in the game passes in realtime (for the most part). There are caves to explore, books to be read, and drawings to make.
The Longing is about loneliness and depression. It's about whether or not you decide to stay in that hole, and if you do, what you do with yourself while you're there. Maybe you'll wander. Maybe you'll stare at a wall. Maybe you'll just sleep until it's all over.
Papers, Please
Papers, Please casts you as a newly hired customs officer in a country that is rapidly tightening its borders as its fascist government tightens its fist. This game is stressful. Sometimes you intend to help out the revolutionaries when they asked, but then you got so stressed out trying to make your quota so you can feed your family and pay your bills that you didn't notice the name of the person they were hoping to contact while going through their papers. Sometimes someone puts a bomb in front of you and expects you to defuse it. Sometimes someone suggests you steal people's passports so you can get your family out, and with the horror you see daily, the idea tempts you more than you'd like.
Papers, Please is all about hard choices and testing your moral fortitude. Everything you do has consequences. Being a good person in this game is hardly ever rewarded, but not in a way that feels overly cynical. Papers, Please asks you what kind of person you want to be and what you're willing to sacrifice to get there.
The Return of the Obra Dinn
From the creator of Papers, Please, The Return of the Obra Dinn is a game where you play as an insurance investigator for the East India Trading Company. The ship the Obra Dinn has just floated back into port, its entire crew missing or dead. It's your job to figure out what happened aboard the vessel. For insurance reasons.
I don't know how to go into the themes of this too deeply without giving away too much, but the mechanics of the game itself make the game worth playing. You have a magic stopwatch that allows you to go back to the moment of a person's death, allowing you to try and figure out who (or what) killed them, and how. And the soundtrack is extremely good.
Outer Wilds
In Outer Wilds you play as an unnamed alien, and it's your first day going to space! Your planet's space program is pretty new still, so there's still lots to explore and discover on the planets within your system. There are ancient ruins from a mysterious race that once lived in your system, long before your species began to record history. Why were they here? Where did they go? How are they connected to the weird thing that keeps happening to you?
The fun of Outer Wilds is in the discovery and answering your own questions. The game never tells you where to go, and it never outright tells you anything. There are clues scattered through the system, and it's up to you to put them together and figure out your next steps. It's about the way that life always goes on, no matter what, even when it seems like the end of everything, forever. I'd recommend NOT reading anything else about this game. Just go play it. Seriously, the less you know, the more fun this is.
If on a Winter's Night, Four Travelers
In If on a Winter's Night, Four Travelers, you explore the circumstances of the deaths of four individuals.
This is a short one that took me about two and a half hours to play. If for no other reason, play it for the stunning pixel art. The game explores sexism, racism, and homophobia in the Victorian era and leans heavily into horror themes. Best of all: it's completely free!
Pentiment
Pentiment takes you to the 16th century, where you take the role of Andreas Maler, a journeyman artist working on his masterwork in the scriptorium of an abbey. When someone is murdered, Andreas takes responsibility for finding the culprit.
The game is set over 20~ years and you get to watch how Andreas' actions affect the village in various ways (who's alive the next time you come by, have people gotten married and had children...). It's an exploration of how the past affects the future, and what parts of that past we choose to keep or discard. It has beautiful art, and fans of both Disco and Pentiment often compare them.
Other games you might wanna check out
Night in the Woods, Dredge, Oxenfree, A House of Many Doors, Inscryption, Slay the Princess, Citizen Sleeper, Chants of Sennar, Loop Hero, The Cosmic Wheel Sisterhood, The Pale Beyond, Where the Water Tastes Like Wine, Elsinore, Her Story, Before Your Eyes, Pathologic (not delved into above because the venn diagram of Pathologic fans and Disco fans is basically a circle)
In this link there is definitely not a folder with every Dragon Age eBook, numbered in order of reading plus the two Encyclopedias about the world. Please do not use the link, there are not free books in there.
Words for Inns & Hotels
Inn
guest house (Old English) ⚜ hostry (1377) ⚜ harbergery; host (1382)
hostel (c.1384) ⚜ hostelry (c.1386) ⚜ harbergage; inn (c.1400)
hostelar (1424) ⚜ host-house (1570) ⚜ fondaco (1599)
auberge; sporting house (1615) ⚜ albergo (1617) ⚜ rancho (1648)
posada (1652) ⚜ public house (1655) ⚜ inn-house (1694)
livery tavern (1787) ⚜ roadhouse (1806) ⚜ meson (1817)
tambo (1830) ⚜ gasthaus (1834) ⚜ estalagem (1835)
locanda (1838) ⚜ temperance inn (c.1849) ⚜ sala (1871)
bush-inn (1881) ⚜ ryokan (1914) ⚜ pousada (1949)
B and B (abbreviation for "Bed and Breakfast") (1961)
Hotel
hotel (1687) ⚜ hotel garni (1744) ⚜ lodge (c.1817) ⚜ gasthof (1832)
temperance house (1833) ⚜ temperance hotel (1837)
railway hotel (1839) ⚜ parador (1845) ⚜ palace hotel (1870)
metropole (1890) ⚜ Ritz (1900) ⚜ Trust House (1903) ⚜ motel (1925)
residential (1940) ⚜ welfare hotel (1952) ⚜ botel (1956) ⚜ floatel (1959)
The turning point in the first category above is around 1600.
Before then, there were relatively few words for a traveller’s lodging, and they form a close-knit etymological community.
The later decades of the 16th century saw a great increase in travel from England to the continent of Europe, during periods of relative peace. Some of it was motivated by the need to avoid religious persecution in England. Some was for cultural reasons.
Travelling theatre companies brought their plays abroad, and the wealthy made cultural visits, especially to France and Italy – forerunners of the ‘Grand Tour’ which would become a major part of the European social scene during and after the late 17th century.
By the 20th century, with travel becoming so much easier, we see words coming from further afield, as English becomes established as a global language
Source ⚜ More: Word Lists ⚜ Notes & References ⚜ Historical Thesaurus
I love dinner & diatribes because Hozier’s just like babe your friends are boring and this party SUCKS. peg me please
(source)
Unsplash - photography, illustration, & art
Pixabay - same as unsplash
Pexels - stock photos and videos
Getty Images - photography & illustration
Veceezy - vectors and clipart
Gumroad - photoshop brushes (and more)
StockSnap.io - stock photos
Canva - needs login but has lots of templates
Library of Congress - historical posters and photos
NASA - you guessed it
Creative Commons - all kinds of stuff, homie
Even Adobe has some free images
There are so many ways to make moodboards, bookcovers, and icons without plagiarizing! As artists, authors, and other creatives, we need to be especially careful not to use someone else’s work and pass it off as our own.
Please add on if you know any more resources for free images <3
Something's gotten into my game of Hades. Now they're trying to give me cards.
(5 years late, covered in sweat) GUYS.... I JUST PLAYED OUTER WILDS
diet culture people make me feel like i’m going crazy. you want me to take an experimental pill that destroys my appetite?? you want me to remove part of my stomach??? you want me to stop eating bread and rice, two of the staple foods most inherent to humanity????? why exactly? because my stomach is big? because you don’t like the way i look, and you think it’s reasonable to tell me to carve pieces off of myself and try random drugs and ruin my own life so i can look more visually pleasing to you? and you somehow don’t see how absurdly cruel and selfish that is to ask of somebody???? while pretending you care about their HEALTH????????????????? FUCK YOU!!!!
I might've added the BG3 Art Book to my dnd assets stash
It' 100% does not have things like the 5e players' handbook + 5e’s character sheet, several gm guides, critical role's explorer's guide to wildmount, baldur's gate and waterdeep city encounters, 101 potions and their effects, volo's guide to monsters, both of xanathar's guides, a bunch of other encounters, one shots, and class builds
In no way are there any pdf’s relating to any wizard who may or may not be residing on any coast
(Edit that I’ve moved the folder to the new link above! So if you catch a different version of this post that link won’t work anymore!)
Hey! Are there blacksmiths in your story? I'm a hobbyist blacksmith and I'm here to help!
Blacksmithing is one of those things that a lot of people get wrong because they don't realize it stuck around past the advent of the assembly line. Here's a list of some common misconceptions I see and what to do instead!
Not all blacksmiths are gigantic terrifying muscly guys with beards and deep voices. I am 5'8, skinny as a twig, have the muscle mass of wet bread, and exist on Tumblr. Anybody who is strong enough to pick up a hammer and understands fire safety can be a blacksmith.
You can make more than just swords with blacksmithing. Though swords are undeniably practical, they're not the only things that can be made. I've made candle holders, wall hooks, kebab skewers, fire pokers, and more. Look up things other people have made, it's really amazing what can be done.
"Red-hot" is actually not that hot by blacksmith terms. when heated up, the metal goes from black, to red, to orange, to yellow, to white. (for temperature reference, I got a second degree burn from picking up a piece of metal on black heat) The ideal color to work with the metal is yellow. White is not ideal at all, because the metal starts sparking and gets all weird and lumpy when it cools. (At no point in this process does the metal get even close to melting. It gets soft enough to work with, but I have never once seen metal become a liquid.)
Blacksmithing takes fucking forever. Not even taking into account starting the forge, selecting and preparing metal, etc. etc. it takes me around an hour to make one (1) fancy skewer. The metals blacksmiths work with heat up and cool down incredibly fast. When the forge is going good, it only takes like 20 seconds to get your metal hot enough to work with, but it takes about the same time for it to cool down, sometimes even less.
As long as you are careful, it is actually stupidly easy to not get hurt while blacksmithing. When I picked up this hobby I was like "okay, cool! I'm gonna make stuff, and I'm gonna end up in the hospital at some point!" Thus far, the latter has yet to occur. I've been doing this for nearly a year. I have earned myself a new scar from the aforementioned second degree burn, and one singe mark on my jeans. I don't even wear gloves half the time. Literally just eye protection, common sense, and fast reflexes and you'll probably be fine. (Accidents still happen of course, but I have found adequate safety weirdly easy to achieve with this hobby)
A forge is not a fire. The forge is the thing blacksmiths put their metal in to heat it up. It starts as a small fire, usually with newspaper or something else that's relatively small and burns easily, which we then put in the forge itself, which is sort of a fireplace-esque thing (there's a lot of different types of forge, look into it and try to figure out what sort of forge would make the most sense for the context you're writing about) and we cover it with coal, which then catches fire and heats up. The forge gets really hot, and sometimes really bright. Sometimes when I stare at the forge for too long it's like staring into the sun. The forge is also not a waterfall of lava, Steven Universe. It doesn't work like that, Steven Universe.
Welding and blacksmithing are not the same thing. They often go hand-in-hand, but you cannot connected two pieces of metal with traditional blacksmithing alone. There is something called forge welding, where you heat your metal, sprinkle borax (or the in-universe equivalent) on it to prevent the metal from oxidizing/being non-weldable, and hammer the pieces together very quickly. Forge welding also sends sparks flying everywhere, and if you're working in a small space with other blacksmiths, you usually want to announce that you're welding before you do, so that everyone in a five-foot radius can get out of that five-foot radius. You also cannot just stuck some random pebbles into the forge and get a decent piece of metal that you can actually make something with, Steven Universe. It doesn't work like that, Steven Universe.
Anvils are really fucking heavy. Nothing else to add here.
Making jewelry is not a blacksmithing thing unless you want jewelry made of steel. And it will be very ugly if you try. Blacksmithing wasn't invented to make small things.
If there's anything here I didn't mention, just ask and I'll do my best to answer.
handmade drawing references :)
I took these pictures mainly to analyze my hand structure. Feel free to use them for your art, if you'd like to!
a good example of a “social construct” is national borders. bc like:
arbitrary and made up
but strongly enforced
often unfair & unreasonably defined
used as a tool of oppression
can be changed at any time but only by the powerful (and so are usually only changed to benefit the powerful)
individuals spend their lives accommodating them at great cost
so when we say “social construct” we don’t mean “not real.” we mean “hey we control the way this thing works, and the way it exists now is hurting a lot of people. so we should probably design it better & make it less rigid. which we can do, bc we built it.”