Tumgik
eelhound · 3 days
Text
Tumblr media
Gouache painting (Calcutta, 19th century) of Artocarpus integer, also known as Chempedak or Champadha.
© The Trustees of the British Museum.
Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0) license.
87 notes · View notes
eelhound · 5 days
Text
I do love the way dnd wizards are so often basically doomed by the very nature of their class.
Sorcerers draw upon inherited magic for casting and all else. Usually passed down along their bloodline and sometimes gifted to them, the magic is innate. It's an intrinsic part of the very essence of who & what they are. To achieve deeper understanding of the power available to them, they have to search within for a better understanding of themselves, an inward journey of self discovery.
Warlocks are granted magic by their patrons, often in some sort of deal or pact. The potential and limits of their magic is determined by their patrons, their relationship, and perhaps the fine print of their initial agreement. To expand their power, they have to work in partnership with their patron, whether that means earning rewards or negotiating new deals.
But Wizards are academics. Their power is learned through study and exploration. To progress, they have to be the best student, the hardest working, the most diligent, the most ambitious. They have to want "it" more than their peers. They have to push boundaries again and again. They have to pursue esoteric knowledge and magic that may be unsafe or unstable with no reference, but they won't know until it goes wrong.
So they're taught that nigh constant quests for knowledge and continual growth is good, it's what's expected, what's necessary. So where are they supposed to stop? Where is the limit? If there is one, would they even recognize it after being trained--even raised--to continually surpass previous limits? How are they supposed to see & understand and accept that those last 15 "limits" were "good" to surpass but THIS one isn't?
And if they do recognize that, will they adhere? Will they be humble and satisfied and settle down to a life with the magic they've already mastered? Score some sweet tenure so they never have to do research ever again?
No!!! They're predisposed and doomed to endless hunger and hubristic downfall by their own mentors and the lives they lead and the very nature of their acquired power.
They're all fucked and I find that so sexy of them.
6K notes · View notes
eelhound · 5 days
Photo
Tumblr media Tumblr media
Hope less, Lee Madgwick (prints!)
350 notes · View notes
eelhound · 5 days
Text
you know, I've been thinking, after this trail of carnage, I might just hang my sword up. just gotta slay these last few villains and I'll have evil solved, and there will be a place for me in this peaceful world I've created. with the sword.
21K notes · View notes
eelhound · 12 days
Photo
Tumblr media
1M notes · View notes
eelhound · 13 days
Text
happy “et tu brute” to all who celebrate
4K notes · View notes
eelhound · 13 days
Photo
Tumblr media
Pyotr Konchalovsky (Russian,1876-1956)
Apples and a dog-keeper, 1939
Oil on canvas
190 notes · View notes
eelhound · 13 days
Text
Tumblr media
22K notes · View notes
eelhound · 13 days
Photo
Tumblr media
69K notes · View notes
eelhound · 13 days
Text
Tumblr media
53K notes · View notes
eelhound · 1 month
Text
"While love promises us relief from aloneness, it also heightens our dependence on one person. It is inherently vulnerable. We tend to assuage our anxieties through control. We feel safer if we can contract the distance between us, maximize the certainty, minimize the threats, and contain the unknown. Yet some of us defend against the uncertainties of love with such zeal that we cut ourselves off from its richness.
There's a powerful tendency in long-term relationships to favor the predictable over the unpredictable. Yet eroticism thrives on the unpredictable. Desire butts heads with habit and repetition. It is unruly, and it defies our attempts at control. So where does that leave us? We don't want to throw away the security, because our relationship depends on it. A sense of physical and emotional safety is basic to healthy pleasure and connection. Yet without an element of uncertainty there is no longing, no anticipation, no frisson. The motivational expert Anthony Robbins put it succinctly when he explained that passion in a relationship is commensurate with the amount of uncertainty you can tolerate."
- Esther Perel, from Mating in Captivity: Unlocking Erotic Intelligence, 2006.
12 notes · View notes
eelhound · 1 month
Text
Tumblr media
Elsa Sroka - Boudoir, 2023
612 notes · View notes
eelhound · 2 months
Text
"It doesn’t have to be the way it is is a playful statement, made in the context of fiction, with no claim to 'being real.' Yet it is a subversive statement.
Subversion doesn’t suit people who, feeling their adjustment to life has been successful, want things to go on just as they are, or people who need support from authority assuring them that things are as they have to be. Fantasy not only asks 'What if things didn’t go on just as they do?' but demonstrates what they might be like if they went otherwise — thus gnawing at the very foundation of the belief that things have to be the way they are.
So here imagination and fundamentalism come into conflict.
A fully created imaginary world is a mental construct similar in many respects to a religious or other cosmology. This similarity, if noticed, can be deeply disturbing to the orthodox mind.
When a fundamental belief is threatened the response is likely to be angry or dismissive — either 'Abomination!' or 'Nonsense!' Fantasy gets the abomination treatment from religious fundamentalists, whose rigid reality-constructs shudder at contact with question, and the nonsense treatment from pragmatic fundamentalists, who want to restrict reality to the immediately perceptible and the immediately profitable. All fundamentalisms set strict limits to the uses of imagination, outside which the fundamentalist’s imagination itself runs riot, fancying dreadful deserts where God and Reason and the capitalist way of life are lost, forests of the night where tigers hang from trees by the tail, lighting the way to madness with their bright burning.
Those who dismiss fantasy less fiercely, from a less absolutist stance, usually call it dreaming, or escapism.
Dream and fantastic literature are related only on a very deep, usually inaccessible level of the mind. Dream is free of intellectual control; its narratives are irrational and unstable, and its aesthetic value is mostly accidental. Fantastic literature, like all the verbal arts, must satisfy the intellectual as well as the aesthetic faculty. Fantasy, odd as it sounds to say so, is a perfectly rational undertaking.
As for the charge of escapism, what does 'escape' mean? Escape from real life, responsibility, order, duty, piety, is what the charge implies. But nobody, except the most criminally irresponsible or pitifully incompetent, escapes to jail. The direction of escape is toward freedom. So what is 'escapism' an accusation of?
'Why are things as they are? Must they be as they are? What might they be like if they were otherwise?' To ask these questions is to admit the contingency of reality, or at least to allow that our perception of reality may be incomplete, our interpretation of it arbitrary or mistaken.
I know that to philosophers what I’m saying is childishly naive, but my mind cannot or will not follow philosophical argument, so I must remain naive. To an ordinary mind not trained in philosophy, the question — do things have to be the way they are / the way they are here and now / the way I’ve been told they are? — may be an important one. To open a door that has been kept closed is an important act.
Upholders and defenders of a status quo, political, social, economic, religious, or literary, may denigrate or diabolize or dismiss imaginative literature, because it is — more than any other kind of writing — subversive by nature. It has proved, over many centuries, a useful instrument of resistance to oppression.
Yet as Chesterton pointed out, fantasy stops short of nihilist violence, of destroying all the laws and burning all the boats. (Like Tolkien, Chesterton was an imaginative writer and a practicing Catholic, and thus perhaps particularly aware of tensions and boundaries.) Two and one make three. Two of the brothers fail the quest, the third carries it through. Action is met with reaction. Fate, Luck, Necessity are as inexorable in Middle-earth as in Colonus or South Dakota. The fantasy tale begins here and ends there (or back here), where the subtle and ineluctable obligations and responsibilities of narrative art have taken it. Down on the bedrock, things are as they have to be. It’s only everywhere above the bedrock that nothing has to be the way it is.
There really is nothing to fear in fantasy unless you are afraid of the freedom of uncertainty. This is why it’s hard for me to imagine that anyone who likes science can dislike fantasy. Both are based so profoundly on the admission of uncertainty, the welcoming acceptance of unanswered questions. Of course the scientist seeks to ask how things are the way they are, not to imagine how they might be otherwise. But are the two operations opposed, or related? We can’t question reality directly, only by questioning our conventions, our belief, our orthodoxy, our construction of reality. All Galileo said, all Darwin said, was, 'It doesn’t have to be the way we thought it was.'"
- Ursula K. Le Guin, from her blog entry "It Doesn’t Have To Be the Way It Is," June 2011.
30 notes · View notes
eelhound · 2 months
Text
Tumblr media Tumblr media Tumblr media Tumblr media
the meeting: my favorite embraces of 2023
3K notes · View notes
eelhound · 2 months
Text
"For decades, the governing cry of our cities has been 'Never speak to strangers.' I propose that in a democratic city it is imperative that we speak to strangers, live next to them, and learn how to relate to them on many levels, from the political to the sexual. City venues must be designed to allow these multiple interactions to occur easily, with a minimum of danger, comfortably and conveniently. This is what politics--the way of living in the polis--is about."
-Samuel R. Delany, Times Square Red, Times Square Blue, 1993
4K notes · View notes
eelhound · 2 months
Text
Tumblr media
3K notes · View notes
eelhound · 2 months
Text
well have you considered that maybe the unstoppable force is in love with the immovable object
55K notes · View notes