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raymondshields · 1 minute

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First you start knitting, then you try crochet (or the other way around) because that cool project requires it, then you see all that marvelous embroidery and you think why not? At a certain point you wonder, is it so hard to sew clothes? Maybe you could try, and you start thinking about that old sewing machine in the attics. Then you see a video of someone spinning wool and you feel your hands itching, but wool is so expensive, how much does keeping alpacas costs, then

#bigger idiots than queue have done it

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raymondshields · 32 minutes

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#bigger idiots than queue have done it

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raymondshields · 1 hour

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#bigger idiots than queue have done it

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raymondshields · 2 hours

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8!!

#bigger idiots than queue have done it

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raymondshields · 2 hours

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Any chance we could see a Godot and Raymond Shields swap?

wahoo

-it was really hard to make godot look different x') like I sort of wanted him to look Normal (bc ray is kind of a normal guy who also eats paper) so he couldn't stand out too much, but it's godot so he couldn't be too plain either

so I settled on making his hair a little different, and he has a medium-sized scar on his forehead that's mostly covered by his bangs. idk how he got it but it was probably some accident. and he gets to keep his earrings (i forgot to draw them but he wears a couple of rings too)

-also he really likes coffee candy

-ray was more straightforward; I originally made his visor shape more like a chevron to resemble a shield, but then I decided to lean into a knight-themed design so now it looks like a helmet visor. I don't think he can actually wear a hat with the visor but let's pretend it works lmao

I didn't draw it but he would probably wear a black trench coat on his shoulders. like a cape :] also idk how obvious it is but most of the ray's design was inspired by ren akiyama/kr knight and zenkichi hasegawa

#bigger idiots than queue have done it

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raymondshields · 3 hours

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hey very self-indulgent sketches because I just felt like drawing rooms...

klavier's vibes don't change too much from his office's...when in doubt, add more guitars and gaudy stuff I guess.

blackquill's could be described as minimalistic but also has a vibe of "bitch you live like this". understandable but still a bit of judgement here

#bigger idiots than queue have done it

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raymondshields · 3 hours

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[ID: A screenshot of Klavier Gavin from the 3D video in Turnabout Serenade. He is falling backwards as his guitar catches fire. Edited over the image is a Dark Souls death screen edit reading “Twink Obliterated” in all caps. /End ID]

#bigger idiots than queue have done it

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raymondshields · 3 hours

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Thoughts on what each TGAA Character would be like when drunk?

Ohhhhh boy, this is a fun one. Gonna try to keep these short and sweet!

Ryunosuke: Probably has a better tolerance for alcohol than you'd think, but gets chattier when he's drunk. He'll tell you all about his shrimp tank. You're gonna learn so much about the perfect environment to raise sea creatures in. Unfortunately, he's also totally uncoordinated when drunk so he'll probably knock over at least some of your furniture.

Kazuma: No alcohol tolerance whatsoever. He can handle a beer or two, but if you give him whiskey, it's naptime. Usually falls asleep on Ryunosuke as he talks animatedly about shrimps and gets grumpy when you try to move him. Fully convinced he can win a drinking contest against Barok. He's wrong.

Susato: Absolutely not. Someone's got to stop Sholmes from punching the furniture and get everyone home safely.

Sholmes: He's trying to fistfight a chair. Somebody stop him before he injures himself. The chair will likely be unharmed.

Barok: Drunk? Is he capable of such a thing? The man can down an entire bottle of wine and still prosecute a case. His liver has been through so much already. Hard liquor will still wreck him though, and that's when you can probably persuade him to sing. He has a beautiful baritone, and if you tell him so, you're liable to become the Reaper's next victim.

Gina: Either she's taking advantage of this rare opportunity to pickpocket everyone without them ever noticing, or she's stealing their food. Probably riveted by Ryunosuke's shrimp tales, and taking photos of Barok singing as blackmail material a memento of a lovely evening out with friends!

Let me know if you'd like me to do anybody else!

#yeah that's exactly it!!!!!!#bigger idiots than queue have done it

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raymondshields · 4 hours

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Headcanons for Sholmes and Iris?

A lot of my headcanons for both of them are very, very Sagiverse, but I'm gonna restrict it to canon-compliant stuff for the sake of these asks!

Ironically, when my partner and I RP, they're both my muses. However, I think I'm terrible at playing them. :p Maybe the process of writing these headcanons will give me some inspiration in that regard and inform my portrayals. Who knows?

Headcanons under the cut, for reason of spoilers~

Herlock Sholmes

We've already talked at length about the Lupin connection with his name, but the fact that TGAA continues a brilliant legacy of dodging the very litigious Conan-Doyle estate by swapping some letters around will never not be funny to me. It fits him so well, and makes me desperately want to write a Lupin-esque character into my fanfics involving him. The world needs more Lupin adaptations!

I think one of the best things about Sholmes is that he's a mess of contradictions. He's a great detective who gets almost all of his deductions wrong. He's a brilliant violinist who no one wants to listen to, and who can't tell the difference between his violin and a random viola. He's known throughout London, but the state of his finances is so staggeringly precarious that he takes a job as a waxwork. He's an absolute disaster of a man, yet forms a legendary duo with one of the most competent men in the whole duology. They dance together and solve crimes. It's fantastic.

I often think about what's underneath the boundless energy and incessant- often situationally inappropriate- cheerfulness that he presents to the world. We see glimpses of it periodically, both in his exaggerated bouts of depression and his very genuine reactions of frustration and pain when he cannot solve a case. His reaction to Gregson's death particularly sticks out for me, because he's clearly angry with himself that someone he cared about died and he could do nothing to prevent it.

His emotions swing between the extremes, the highest of highs and the lowest of lows, and honestly? I think that's why he and Yujin make such a good team. Yujin balances him out and steadies him and that's important for someone who moves through the world with all the ferocity and swiftness of a natural disaster. He's brilliant, yes, but he's more brilliant when there's someone practical making sure he doesn't, say, try to fight an inanimate object or play with a live bomb.

I'm a big fan of Sherlock Holmes adaptations in general, and he's a really fun take on the character. Psych is still one of my favorite comedic takes on Holmes, and there's quite a resemblance between Shawn Spencer's exaggerated "psychic visions" and a Dance of Deduction. It's probably why I like both of them so much. :p

(Obligatory note that Psych came out in the aughts and some episodes have aged pretty poorly since then. On the whole, it's a good series, but there are some exceedingly skippable episodes and your mileage may vary.)

Also, I- like so many other fans- have a Mycroft OC! I won't go into too many details about him, but I'm happy to answer questions about him as well. I've also got a Moriarty and an Irene Adler, if that's your speed! They all take a heavy left turn into Sagiverse, but I love talking about them. --

Iris Wilson

Iris is adorable, and so are her voice lines. I audibly awwed the first time I listened to them. She also just has a really fun character design, even if it's anachronistic. I love her, and I love her little mascot characters, and I want nothing but the best for her in life.

That being said, prepare for a short rant about degrees that nobody asked for. Feel free to skip the next few paragraphs....

[BEGIN RANT]

The way I bristled when she announced she had a medical degree at the age of ten was almost comical to witness. I readily admit I have trouble with suspension of disbelief in this particular area, largely because I spent a period of time working with kids who were pretty close in age to Iris. It's not that I don't think they're capable of something like that, because some of the things kids can do under the right circumstances are astounding. It's that I don't think they should- not in the sense of doing the work to attain an advanced degree.

I'm 24 years old, and have a BA in English- or Literary Studies, to avoid confusion with the study of the language itself. I graduated magna cum laude from my university in 2022, and have been vacillating on going to grad school ever since. My program was four years long, had no lab requirements, and wasn't considered "accelerated". I almost dropped out on six separate occasions because my stress levels were through the roof. When some of my former students talked to me about early graduation and loading themselves up with college-level classes in high school to try and get a degree faster, I told them to chill the heck out.

It's not the difficulty of the work, I explained to them, but the volume and the depth. The kind of work you're expected to produce in a high school core curriculum class is much less specific and comes at you in lower quantities than university work, and your uni professors generally won't move the due date of something just because you have another huge project due on that day for another class. It's hard to accelerate your courseload to that degree not just because the work is hard, but because at a certain point, you're going to have more work to do than time to do it- even if you do nothing else.

A graduate degree, followed by a PhD is more work, and any kind of medical study is going to take longer than a Bachelor's degree, particularly a BA such as mine. A PhD can take as long as six years, although the number varies based on your program and what other requirements are attached. That's over half of Iris' lifespan!

[END RANT]

That being said, I really don't think Iris completed a PhD program in the traditional sense. More than likely, she had an honorary doctorate conferred upon her by a particular university in London in honor of a particularly significant discovery, and does not actually have a license to practice medicine. Still pretty wild at the age of ten, but a little more believable for insufferable people like me. :p

Iris is also a character filled with contradictions, mainly the interplay between her hypercompetence and the fact that we can't really forget she's just a kid. She creates all these wonderful devices, cooks, writes stories, and keeps 221-B from descending into chaos... but she also longs for familial connection and an understanding of where she comes from. Her yearning to know who her parents are is heartbreaking on so many levels, because the only thing we know with any certainty is that whoever they are, they aren't around anymore. Whatever Iris finds out, it's likely to be tragic, and she's so excited about meeting them that it's hard to watch knowing that she's going to be disappointed in some fashion.

I went into TGAA with a lot of spoilers already. I knew Kazuma wasn't dead, and I had certain suspicions about how the Professor case wrapped up. I guessed Klint's involvement pretty early, though Genshin's death took me by surprise. The thing I didn't already know?

Who Iris' parents were.

That really took me by surprise, and I think I cried a little bit. Because imagine that being the end of your journey as you try to figure out your identity. "We know who your parents are, but you can't meet them, because they're gone- AND IT GETS WORSE." Pain. Agony. Angst. I want to give her a hug.

The fact she manages to find her own family in spite of all this, though? That is absolutely everything to me. The first time she actually referred to Herlock as her father, I cried. That recognition of their bond is just so important to me, and so is her relationship with Ryunosuke and Susato. She has so many people who love her, and it's so wonderful to see.

Capcom, give me a threequel so we can see her interactions with Barok. I need her to call him "Uncle Barry" and steal his cape. He can't say no, she's Klint's kid and also adorable. Please, Capcom, I need this.

This seems like a good place to stop for a lunch break! As always, it's a delight to go off about headcanons in response to your asks. I love getting questions about everyone! It really makes me think.

#sobbing loudly about iris in the background #bigger idiots than queue have done it

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raymondshields · 5 hours

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Worldbuilding: A culture whose funeral practices involve ritualistically beating the shit out of the corpse while yelling at the deceased, scolding the dead for dying. "If only you had not [___], if only you would have [___], then you would still be with me, then I would not beat you now."

It's culturally understood that blaming the dead isn't blaming them, as much as the anguished structure of the poem is accusatory and clearly in rage. Even if the loved ones of the dead could not see it at the time - as grief wins over reason every time - it's understood that the more absurd the demands of what the dead should have done to avoid dying are, the more obviously it was nobody's fault. Such as accusing the elderly for failing to stop the passage of time, or an infant for not being strong enough to swallow.

"Fine, but I wll beat your corpse if you do", is a common go-to line of guilt-tripping mothers who do not want their children to do something that they've decided is dangerous. The mental image of one's own grieving mother beating the shit out of your corpse after you die of something stupid has a varying success rate in deterring teenagers from doing inadvisable things, but the most important thing is that it's not a threat, it's a promise.

#bigger idiots than queue have done it

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raymondshields · 5 hours

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NOW. We get into a section of binderary I like to call exciting new leathers. So what happened. Well, I read Moby Dick for book club, and frankly, there was a lot more bookbinding content in that book than i EVER would have guessed. Not that much, by volume, but any bookbinding is always a fun surprise! And one detail that SNAGGED me was the mention of a book bound in shark leather. Naturally, i immediately went on a quest to see if I could find 1) affordable and 2) ethically sourced shark leather, and never mind point two, because I struck out hard on one. So in a fit of self-pity, I bought a scattering of snake, fish, and ray leather, and then had to start thinking about how to use it.

I spent a while kind of paralyzed, but the first thing that REALLY caught my eye was this one white and gold snake hide (with purple tones here and there around the scales), and how it made me think of lyctoral robes, and that means it's time for another round of 'It's About The Bones 👌,' babey!! By the incredibly talented @sunderedstar, of course. Benefits of being friends with an incredible writer include the constant supply of gourmet food that's a pleasure to bind and practice with!

And since this fic had been one of my earliest test subjects for a k118 binding, I wanted to keep that going, and try one of my favorite fics in one of my favorite styles, testing out then new leathers in this format! And the book is a success, but the k118 thing, uh, didn't work. A fun feature of the snake leather is that its so thin I'd be afraid to even try paring it further. Which is great, that's the step I'm worst at! But now I wonder if that thinness means that paste isn't able to saturate the hide the way it would with goat, because the first time I opened this book, the spine IMMEDIATELY popped off the text block 🤣

I'm not mad at all, the book still works great, it's just got a breakaway spine now and can't do the k118 360 degree party trick. And the binding came together gorgeous! This is a typeset I'm still proud of, and I think i found the right fabric in my stash to match and contrast to the snake leather colors, and the embossed endpapers gave it a nice weight and elegance, all without losing that locked tomb flavor, but capturing a very different vibe than my prior bindings. All things told, I'm very pleased, this was so fun to work with!