unfinished drabble regarding: mirmulnir & the dragon waking.
through her spiritual connection and faith in the gods, maesena’s dreams were always quite vivid. the general palette and flavor of them never truly changed: clouds of golds and pinks hazed over fields of color, lakes shimmering in sunlight. few words were ever exchanged and instead she found peace in what she dreamt —— quiet days in the sun, contentment in her mother’s arm draped over her shoulder in the cold.
in the first months spent in skyrim, that hadn’t changed in any substantial way. her dreams seemed more anchored ( she liked to believe it was both her father’s connection to this land and the new amulet always hung on her neck, a parting gift from her mother ) and grey, somber in more ways yet more exhilarating in others.
the last she remembered of mirmulnir, his head reared towards the sky and his bloody, slashed maw opened in a scream. the words clashing between his teeth seemed disbelieving and she didn’t yet realize that the dovahkiin he called to was her. suddenly from the very root of his being a spectrum of energy rushed her —— just as the world became dark around the edges, just as she felt her bones grow too weak to hold her skin. the gash in her skull and blood running down her torso seemed all too damning until the energy of the dragon’s soul rushed into her being. it hit her skin in a hot, almost unbearable blaze and she fell to her back, knowing nothing but that she felt not quite so weak once it filled her.
by the time they got her to the temple of kynareth, she was almost to the state she’d been in before. the soul that entered her had revitalized her enough for her to be carried back to the city without incident, but not enough to undo what damage had been caused. still she bled, still she was torn. the guards gave out when the temple doors swung open and their arms, jelly from the fight and the fear, dropped her to the stone. she slept.
and she dreamt of the sky. the open blue twisted with white and golden pink at the edges of the horizon, the wind tangled under her arms. her wings. she looked back and saw them, stretched wide as the sky itself. blue and gold poured into each other and mixed through the fabric of her wings, across the muscles that lead to her back —— ridged and horned, scaled.
like a dragon. she remembered briefly, somewhere in the very back of her mind, what it felt to grasp mirmulnir by the neck; his hard scales unforgiving and unmoving beneath her fingers, her feet leaving the ground as he through his head to the air and dropped her onto his back. the impenetrable strength and the blazing heat brewing inside him seemed all so familiar now that it was what she was made of.
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thinking about in episode three when percy is seated directly across from the briarwoods. when he realizes he is going to have to have dinner with them [again] you can see this despair, feel the pit in his belly as he remembers the last feast he attended with them in towe. the bloodshed, the betrayal, he can never forget how easily the arrows tore through his mother's neck. but then you see that despair immediately twist into this divine rage. this rage that has defined him for years, that has driven him to make a pact with a demon, to feed it souls in order to have access to the power he thinks is necessary to exact his revenge. thinking about when he see's them he grabs his side, remembering how that meat hook felt against his skin.
thinking also about the tunnel vision he has, how he insists he's fine. but when he does he is thinking, relentlessly, of how he is going to kill the briarwoods. how a quick death is too merciful for them. probably considers grog's suggestion of just getting up & throwing his fist in their faces. but he knows better, to his dismay. like usually he is decent at social situations, he can handle himself among nobility but these not-so-subtle prods at him just cause him to lose it.
' have we met before ' is a literal challenge. delilah is pushing percy, she wants to vilify him i just fucking know it & he knows it too. i am thinking, very constantly, about the moment he breaks the wine glass in his hand. how he doesn't even have the capacity to realize he's bleeding onto this very fancy dinner table, he's totally lost his usually hard-to-break cool. across from him are the people who took everything from him & he can't say a damn word. he can't do a damn thing. but all he can think about is taking his gun out & spraying the wall with their brains.
thinking about the moment they start insulting the de rolos & percy literally cannot stand it anymore. he loses his cool, he stands up as if he's going to do it because he wants to. he just might, consequences be damned. if she is claiming he abandoned his people, he is going to show her precisely how much he thinks of them. precisely how much he thinks of her & powerful a bullet can be against flesh.
fucking obsessed with delilah's >:3 energy when she finally gets percy to break, also. i am just obsessed with this episode overall i will 11/10 have more thoughts on this but it is 6am & i am so tired.
also thinking about scanlan's distraction. thinking about the pie. thinking about the pie. thinking about the pie.
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An open letter to @staff
I already submitted this to Support under "Feedback," but I'm sharing it here too as I don't expect it to get a response, and I feel like putting in out in public may be more effective than sending it off into the void.
The recent post on the Staff blog about changing tumblr to an algorithmic feed features a large amount of misinformation that I feel staff needs to address, openly and honestly, with information on where this data was sourced at the very least.
Claim 1: Algorithms help small creators.
This is false, as algorithms are designed to push content that gets engagement in order to get it more engagement, thereby assuring that the popular remain popular and the small remain small except in instances of extreme luck.
This can already be seen on the tumblr radar, which is a combination of staff picks (usually the same half-dozen fandoms or niche special interests like Lego photography) which already have a ton of engagement, or posts that are getting enough engagement to hit the radar organically. Tumblr has an algorithm that runs like every other socmed algorithm on the planet, and it will decimate the reach of small creators just like every other platform before it.
Claim 2: Only a small portion of users utilize the chronological feed.
You can find a poll by user @darkwood-sleddog here that at the time of writing this, sits at over 40 THOUSAND responses showing that over 96 percent of them use the chronological feed*. Claiming otherwise isn't just a misstatement, it's a lie. You are lying to your core userbase and expecting them to accept it as fact. It's not just unethical, it's insulting to people who have been supporting your platform for over a decade.
Claim 3: Tumblr is not easy to use.
This is also 100% false and you ABSOLUTELY know it. Tumblr is EXTREMELY easy to use, the issue is that the documentation, the explanations of features, and often even the stability of the service is subpar. All of this would be very easy for staff to fix, if they would invest in the creation of walkthroughs and clear explanations of how various site features work, as well as finally fixing the search function. Your inability to explain how your service works should not result in completely ignoring the needs and wants of your core long-term userbase. The fact that you're more willing to invest in the very systems that have made every other form of social media so horrifically toxic than in trying to make it easier for people to use the service AS IT WORKS NOW and fixing the parts that don't work as well speaks volumes toward what tumblr staff actually cares about.
You will not get a paycheck if your platform becomes defunct, and the thing that makes it special right now is that it is the ONLY large-scale socmed platform on THE ENTIRE INTERNET with a true chronological feed and no aggressive algorithmic content serving. The recent post from staff indicates that you are going to kill that, and are insisting that it's what we want. It is not. I'd hazard to guess that most of the dev team knows it isn't what we want, but I assume the money people don't care. The user base isn't relevant, just how much money they can bring in.
The CEO stated he wanted this to remain as sort of the last bastion of the Old Internet, and yet here we are, watching you declare you intend to burn it to the ground.
You can do so much better than this.
Response to the Update
Under the cut for readability, because everything said above still applies.
I already said this in a reblog on the post itself, but I'm adding it to this one for easy access: people read it that way because that's what you said.
Staff considers the main feed as it exists to be "outdated," to the point that you literally used that word to describe it, and the main goals expressed in this announcement is to figure out what makes "high-quality content" and serve that to users moving forward.
People read it that way because that is what you said.
*The final results of the poll, after 24 hours:
136,635 votes breaks down thusly:
An algorithm based feed where I get "the best of tumblr." @ 1.3% (roughly 1,776 votes)
Chronological feed that only features blogs I follow. @ 95.2% (roughly 130,077 votes)
This doesn't affect me personally. @ 3.5% (roughly 4,782 votes)
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