Tag unneccicary, they say it with their eyes

On the one hand, it's true that the way Dungeons & Dragons defines terms like "sorcerer" and "warlock" and "wizard" is really only relevant to Dungeons & Dragons and its associated media – indeed, how these terms are used isn't even consistent between editions of D&D! – and trying to apply them in other contexts is rarely productive.

On the other hand, it's not true that these sorts of fine-grained taxonomies of types of magic are strictly a D&D-ism and never occur elsewhere. That folks make this argument is typically a symptom of being unfamiliar with Dungeons & Dragons' source material. D&D's main inspirations are American literary sword and sorcery fantasy spanning roughly the 1930s through the early 1980s, and fine-grained taxonomies of magic users absolutely do appear in these sources; they just aren't anything like as consistent as the folks who try to cram everything into the sorcerer/warlock/wizard model would prefer.

For example, in Lydon Hardy's "Five Magics" series, the five types of magical practitioners are:

Alchemists: Drawing forth the hidden virtues of common materials to craft magic potions; limited by the fact that the outcomes of their formulas are partially random.

Magicians: Crafting enchanted items through complex manufacturing procedures; limited by the fact that each step in the procedure must be performed perfectly with no margin for error.

Sorcerers: Speaking verbal formulas to basically hack other people's minds, permitting illusion-craft and mind control; limited by the fact that the exercise of their art eventually kills them.

Thaumaturges: Shaping matter by manipulating miniature models; limited by the need to draw on outside sources like fires or flywheels to make up the resulting kinetic energy deficit.

Wizards: Summoning and binding demons from other dimensions; limited by the fact that the binding ritual exposes them to mental domination by the summoned demon if their will is weak.

"Warlock", meanwhile, isn't a type of practitioner, but does appear as pejorative term for a wizard who's lost a contest of wills with one of their own summoned demons.

Conversely, Lawrence Watt-Evans' "Legends of Ethshar" series includes such types of magic-users as:

Sorcerers: Channelling power through metal talismans to produce fixed effects; in the time of the novels, talisman-craft is largely a lost art, and most sorcerers use found or inherited talismans.

Theurges: Summoning gods; the setting's gods have no interest in human worship, but are bound not to interfere in the mortal world unless summoned, and are thus amenable to cutting deals.

Warlocks: Wielding X-Men style psychokinesis by virtue of their attunement to the telepathic whispers emanating from the wreckage of a crashed alien starship. (They're the edgy ones!)

Witches: Producing improvisational effects mostly related to healing, telepathy, precognition, and minor telekinesis by drawing on their own internal energy.

Wizards: Drawing down the infinite power of Chaos and shaping it with complex rituals. Basically D&D wizards, albeit with a much greater propensity for exploding.

You'll note that both taxonomies include something called a "sorcerer", something called a "warlock", and something called a "wizard", but what those terms mean in their respective contexts agrees neither with the Dungeons & Dragons definitions, nor with each other.

(Admittedly, these examples are from the 1980s, and are thus not free of D&D's influence; I picked them because they both happened to use all three of the terms in question in ways that are at odds with how D&D uses them. You can find similar taxonomies of magic use in earlier works, but I would have had to use many more examples to offer multiple competing definitions of each of "sorcerer", "warlock" and "wizard", and this post is already long enough!)

So basically what I'm saying is giving people a hard time about using these terms "wrong" – particularly if your objection is that they're not using them in a way that's congruent with however D&D's flavour of the week uses them – makes you a dick, but simply having this sort of taxonomy has a rich history within the genre. Wizard phylogeny is a time-honoured tradition!

fanfic where they both turn into coniferous trees. mutual pining

Slop

Dude that is too much slop for him

cunty DS9 magazine covers save me

You're gonna carry that weight

I'm watching Cowboy Bebop for the second time and I just realized something

You know, there are some episodes of Cowboy Bebop that I don't really pay much mind to because while I can clearly see the journey of all of the members, at the end of the day each episode is it's own story so I enjoy them individually. But right now as I'm watching the series for the second time (this time with the english dub) I feel like I finally understood that final part of the episode 'Sympathy for the Devil'

(Spoiler Warning, I know this came out like 26 years ago but still lol)

This episode pretty much foreshadows Spike's death right then and there. In the final moments when Spike shoots that prodigy kid and he ages up until his final moments he says that he can finally die and feels so heavy, but so at ease at the same time and Spike doesn't understand at the moment because he still feels heavily chained to the past, and as we know, that goes for the majority of the series with Spike pretty much avoiding making any connection with anyone consciously. He knows that the last time he had a connection with other people he ended up on the very verge of death and even having to escape, to the point that the few people he knew that are still alive thought of him as a dead man for years. He doesn't want to make a deep connection with anyone again to avoid hurting himself and the closest ones to him again, I think the only person in the Bebop he truly considered close was Jet and mostly because they were together for who know how much time now (and even then Jet would feel more like a sort of distant friend to Spike, they care about each other but don't delve too much into each other's personal stuff)

If you've watched Cowboy Bebop before you would know that every adult member there is chained to the past in some way. Jet with his exgirlfriend in Ganymede; Faye with her memory loss; and Spike with his time at the Red Dragon and with Julia. They're all chained to the past and over the course of the series they learn to move on from it and they start having a deeper connection with one another, everyone except for Spike, who is still chained back to it until the final moments of the show when he meets Julia again and he sees her die with his own eyes.

Until that point he had refused to let go, to break his chains that kept him trapped, but seeing how Julia died in front of him made him understand what that prodigy kid he killed time ago meant about feeling so heavy, yet so at ease at the same time...

The loss of someone you loved is not something that hits lightly, but yet one of the final pieces that kept his time stopped was finally gone, so he was free to let go, his time started moving again but, like that kid, he was already on borrowed time.

He went to face Vicious to see if he was really alive, to prove to himself that he wasn't a ghost that just had been wandering around for so many years, I feel that while Spike understood what that kid meant back then right when Julia died, he felt just like him in this exact moment. That's why he did the same 'Bang' that he did back then. He felt like his time was already gone once, had a second chance, and while he has to carry the weight of the decisions he made on this second chance to the afterlife, for a moment he felt like his time finally moved again, he felt like his chains were broken once and for all

Nice knowing scribes long ago had the similar impulse to moan about long laborious work and also write notes on the work just to get it out there (wish I had an illuminated manuscript though, I had to settle for a whiteboard pen on the wall of a cellar I'd been cleaning for days.)

The best notes written in manuscripts by medieval monks

Colophon: a statement at the end of a book containing the scribe or owner’s name, date of completion, or bitching about how hard it is to write a book in the dark ages

Oh, my hand

The parchment is very hairy

Thank God it will soon be dark

St. Patrick of Armagh, deliver me from writing

Now I’ve written the whole thing; for Christ’s sake give me a drink

Oh d fuckin abbot

Massive hangover

Whoever translated these Gospels did a very poor job

Cursed be the pesty cat that urinated over this book during the night

If someone else would like such a handsome book, come and look me up in Paris, across from the Notre Dame cathedral

I shall remember, O Christ, that I am writing of Thee, because I am wrecked today

Do not reproach me concerning the letters, the ink is bad and the parchment scanty and the day is dark

11 golden letters, 8 shilling each; 700 letters with double shafts, 7 shilling for each hundred; and 35 quires of text, each 16 leaves, at 3 shilling each. For such an amount I won’t write again

Here ends the second part of the title work of Brother Thomas Aquinas of the Dominican Order; very long, very verbose; and very tedious for the scribe; thank God, thank God, and again thank God

If anyone take away this book, let him die the death, let him be fried in a pan; let the falling sickness and fever seize him; let him be broken on the wheel, and hanged. Amen

TIL that Gothic literature makes a distinction between “terror” and “horror.” Terror is the sense of dread and apprehension that precedes an experience, horror is the sense of revulsion after an experience.

via ift.tt

A very important customer- she has a show later and she needs to look *PERFECT*

Man, the flesh sucks. I'm gonna abandon it for the machine.

Imagine The Fellowship all sitting around the campfire halfway up Caradhras retelling the events of the Hobbit to Boromir and Aragorn Rashomon-style with Gimli going "my dad tells it this way" and Legolas going "well, my dad tells it this way" and the Hobbits all going "but Bilbo tells it this way!" and, even though Gandalf was fucking there for half of it, he refuses to weigh in on anything because watching them argue is more fun and also he doesn't remember because it was over 75 years ago.

Ahhahaha fuck,

I got to the bit of Steins;Gate which made me start watching in the first place (there's an honest-to-god trans-fucking-gender character in this show from 2011- *tentive interest*) and... I've still got some more of the show to watch but the episodes about her fumbled the bag SO fukkin' HARD.

At the very least it's nice to see a queen thriving, but they could have made what plot she got so much more complelling by doing pretty much anything other than what they did. Justice for Ruka, man.

This was before they invented the Jar, so they had to just form glass around him

I never got more than a couple of episodes into Steins;Gate but I've gotten into it this time. (Yes I'm behind, there is too damn much to watch)

Feels like watching a decent sci-fi about time travel, but sometimes the more annoying people I knew in university hack into the script to be kinda creepy or misogynist for a bit.

BUT

I'm not at the point where I know if this'll be questioned/come up later on, or if it'll be like Scott Pilgrim, where the main character learns to be minorly less of a lil bitch by the end of it.

And I still enjoy Scott Pilgrim, despite that!

Overall having a good time!