John Hazard

A Conversation with Terence McKenna (Hawaii, October 1998)

Saturday, August 12, 2023

“What we call imagination is actually the universal library of what's real. You couldn't imagine it if it weren't real somewhere, sometime.” ⍆ Terence McKenna ⍅

and to think some people believed harry styles would be a feature on the 1989 vault

saw someone trying to make fun of URLs with hyphens in them of all fucking things. get a life

god I live for media that drags a dry and stoic character out of their depth into a scenario where they're dangerously on the cusp of looking silly or flustered. put that phlegmatic little person in a situation immediately.

speaking of your coming of age movie that never happens & your narrative non-narratives, shoutout to the arcs that’d be supposedly “worse” lmfao like posts about people-pleasers being like “i’m in my villain era” when it’s just consciously prioritizing themselves at all / noting when boundaries for their own wellbeing are being trampled, and the like. wherein i’m like, well i like talking to people i suppose, i can do the hours of monologue at a wall for one mode, got chatterbox mode, funny guy theatrical mode, etc, but in actuality also, i do not like talking to people lmao. the “yeah, that’s me” movie ending with another voiceover while upbeat music plays & you’re cheerfully walking along in 0.75x speed through some picturesque arena filled with socializing people like =) putting on headphones, turning up the volume, ignoring everyone, dodging people according to the berth one wants to maintain,

Aubree just bought a pipe of smoke monsters, because she's been wanting a new pipe anyway and Justin said the town we were in would probably have common magic items if we wanted anything in particular so I asked for them to have one of those please, but now I can't decide whether, design-wise, it should look like something with Aubree Vibes that she would usually be inclined to pick out and use or whether it should look, you know, like a novelty magic item crafted by an elf

Overly systematic approaches are characterized by mindlessness.

bored today so here’s a picture of me trying to figure out who subwoolfer is

Art and Originality | Free Thoughts | Gregorius Advena

Consider: idw tailgate has the sexiest mouth canonically. Gotta know why please tell me

Unfortunately no more wine in my system but the answer to this one is pretty obvious.

Pencil sharpener.

Hey I want to throw out a theory/headcanon out there, especially since discourse around Astarion's relationship with sex is in danger of becoming a little reductive.

So, if you dump Astarion early and tell him that that night with him was a one-time thing, he gets genuinely sad and admits that it was special and memorable.

So idk, that opens up some interesting implications and tells me that, at least starting that first night with Tav, sex isn't just transactional. At the very least, Tav is the first time he's fully consenting to sex, regardless of his motives. That alone is going to make it special. But that special-ness wouldn't be so noteworthy if he was completely sex-averse. This was a new experience and he found himself enjoying it to some degree when it happened--HOWEVER the reason for that enjoyment could be any number of things. The "transaction" may have been more pleasurable than he expected, he could have been enjoying the novelty of being free and playful with sex, Tav was someone actually attractive to him, or he could have just simply felt cared for and treated with the tenderness he never knew he needed.

Don't get me wrong, his view on sex was still warped and damaged/damaging, and based on survival. And he absolutely did need to step back from having sex and reevaluate his views, feelings, and boundaries. But I also think that his first time with Tav planted the seed of "oh shit, this is different!" and he slowly realizes that sex is not supposed to be what it's always been for him, finally culminating in his confession in Act 2. (And if you fail to fully gain his trust by Act 3, that seed never grows and you get dumped when he no longer "needs" you.)

So at least for me, I can't get behind the "he's just pretending to enjoy it" or "it's just a transaction to him"or "hes in it for blood." Like sure, *before* he sleeps with Tav he sees it that way, but he's not that great an actor, either, and the shift is obvious to me.

((Also I want to note that while I'm not super into AceAstarion, that interpretation is totally valid and imo compatible with this headcanon. Sexuality and Asexuality are complicated things, and Astarion portrays that complexity so well.))

I really like your theory about Spamton basically haunting a mannequin after death. Have you ever touched upon the reaction from Jevil (or anyone, really) upon seeing the new Spamton? Especially considering Spamton isn't even aware he 'died'.

^ how i think jevil's first sight of Spamton would go. i love this ask. this is referring to some headcanons I made a while back, I'll link it here for the one post and the general ghost spamton theory is linked in that one as well. Going to elaborate on it more under the cut for those interested + more art.

In general I think that people from Spamton's past wouldn't really care if they notice at all, since he wasn't in the business of making close friends with anyone. With the Addisons, in my interpretation he had a "weird co-worker" relationship with them, and while Addisons in general treated each other like potential business competitors that they had to make-nice with, Spamton is especially easy to single out for being visibly and temperamentally different. His altered, current state is something they'd feel at least uncomfortable by, but many wouldn't have been too close with him to begin with for them to talk about it with him directly. Would get whispered about between each other for sure, like we saw with them talking about Spamton after the NEO fight. It moves him from the "disgraced guy I used to know" category to the "actually unpleasant to look at or think about" territory. This goes for Swatch, Queen, and Seam (less so), who seem to buy heavily into the Lightner and Darkner dynamic, with Spamton corrupting the Lightner's dream being a strong taboo against what it means to be a Darkner.

As for what Jevil thinks, Spamton during the NEO fight is both a beautiful and horrifying display. Jevil at this point hasn't seen him in years since his imprisonment, and in their time apart Jevil has grown to find novelty in the cage that everyone else besides him is in since he's created huge emotional distance between him and the reality he lives in. Seeing the fact that Spamton had corrupted an abandoned dream of a Lightner and was causing so much chaos to the established order of the world would be exhilarating, but at the same time seeing that Spamton had accomplished this and still had his strings visible (and changed to a marionette puppet with no symbolic agency), it'd be a painful confirmation of his worldview that even Spamton, who deep down he still cares for, could never have been free.

Jevil would think at first he'd just gone through some nebulous situation to change what he looks like, since ofc he himself has toy-like traits (arguable if that happened with Gasterfication or not), Seam is a plushie cat, and other Card Castle Darkners are based on toys, but feeling the lack of life combined with the symbolic body of Spamton would mean to him something bigger had went wrong. He wouldn't dare to bring it up in an empathetic way, stuck in his mindset that it doesn't matter, but it'd still hit a part of him he doesn't like to think still exists. It's something he gets over quickly, almost performatively going back to fucking with him and taking advantage of his fear for entertainment, but it didn't sit well at first.

To me, the fact Spamton "died" isn't really a huge deal, kind of like with the ghosts in Undertale where no one really cares they're just ghosts. They're just doing their thing. To me it'd be fine if neither of them find out what happened for certain, but it's something that adds Flavor to his character.

Here we go! I have some smaller books to share as well, but I've been absolutely VIBRATING with excitement to share a BIG one, and I'm going to indulge myself and post that today, then figure out words for the rest. Because I bound a new cnovel. Check it out, guys, I bound jwqs/clear and muddy loss of love :D

Let me indulge myself and backtrack a little! First, these are quarto books, so they're short. But I think these average a little under 500 pages each, and jwqs is a LONG book (my beloved), and this adds up to a total eleven inches of lesbians. More like twelve once they're in their cases. It's over a million characters in Chinese and I think the English translation comes in somewhere around 890k, it's HUGE

Making these books was SO FUN, I hadn't read jwqs and still haven't, and will probably read on my phone when I do. I don't have any exciting photos of the typesetting, but I knew this was an imperial succession story, and that made me nervous, those stories don't always click for me. Well, the process of typesetting and adding footnotes for this beast definitely confirmed that I'm going to have a good time with this thing when I have the time to read it, but there was also so much going on that only the vaguest of spoilers sank in. I went into an absolute FRENZY of typesetting, and after I printed, cut and folded it, well. That was one afternoon of sewing. You're looking at the reason I'm scrambling to make up a few hours of missed work, hahaha

After that, I needed cases. At the very beginning of march, I received a shipment of some FASCINATING bookcloth. It's called Duo, and it's made by layering a thin gauzy fabric of one color over paper of a different color. Depending on the combos, you get a really cool range of color-shifting effects. And they've gone out of production! But I was part of a group order to get some of the goods, and hadn't yet finished a new project. Reader, I went for it.

That purple and green is bananas!!!! It's so hard to photograph, this midnight picture of a few cases is one of my most successful attempts to capture the full range up close. Originally I'd been thinking of trying to evoke imperial gold, but I figured this was still the kind of drama and luxury suited the book, and also something something the hidden colors suited Qi Yan's character. I tied it back a little to the imperial gold with the endpapers, then titled them in silver foil, since the endpapers had silver in them.

But once the books were made, I felt like it wanted something... more. Something like a BOX!

And me, I chase novelty. A set this large would be tricky for anything clamshell, but a slipcase for all seven would leave books tipping all over if it was wide open, but putting walls between slots would be demanding in terms of precision and would risk similarly-sized books getting stuck in the wrong slots. Then I remembered learning about slipcases where you could put in a little insert to support the weight of the text block, and the concept SNAPPED into place.

Colors aren't going to photograph well at midnight, but I made the supports using the scraps and off-cuts from my endpapers, to tie it back into the bindings. The back of the case is lined in more of the duo, and the walls are lined with a faux leather bookcloth I like a lot, it feels buttery smooth and seemed like a good neutral material to tie the papers and bookcloth together. I listened to some of the DEEPEST layers from the nine-hour conspiracy theory iceberg video while I was working on this, haha, it was a TRIP.

And in the end, each of the supports is sized to comfortably sit in the smallest of the volumes, and evenly spaced, so I believe it will take the books in any order with no problems. It's easy to grab the books without having to cut notches into the walls to grab them from. And even though weight is less of an issue for quarto sizing, the books in here have their weight supported no matter what angle the box is at! I'm so, so pleased with how this concept worked out and definitely plan to do more with it in the future.

So there we are! Jing Wei Qing Shang! I had such a fabulous time with this project, and I'm so excited to get to share it with all of you. The story was fun to work with, the bindings and box were fun to make, and everything here came together just as well as I could possibly have hoped. I'm so proud of this, and incredibly, incredibly excited to show it to you!

couldn't remember whether raccoon bacula were supposedly good luck charms or folk magic love charms (or both) so I went to look it up and I