Idle thought for a Spelljammer adventure:

One of the cartoons that defined my childhood was The Pirates of Dark Water, which was about … well, the intro explains it pretty well:

The alien world of Myrr is being devoured by dark water. Only Ren, a young prince, can stop it, by finding the lost thirteen treasures of Rule. At his side is an unlikely but loyal crew of misfits. At his back, the evil pirate lord Bloth, who will stop at nothing to get the treasures for himself. It’s high adventure with the Pirates of Dark Water!

This show seriously shaped a LOT of my views of, say, planetary romance, science fantasy, etc. The explicitly alien but extremely fantasy world of Myrr, plus pirates, really did a lot for me as a kid. And I still adore the concept of the Dark Water itself, this vast, creeping corruption of an oceanic world, this sentient acidic oil slick that corrupts and converts other things into itself. Or just devours them.

And I’m just … I look at the Dark Water now and a bit of me sees an ooze. Specifically, an absolutely gargantuan, globally spreading black pudding. A seed of Juiblex, maybe, a particularly intelligent and sentient and titanic black ooze, with maybe quite a few of Juiblex’ resistances and regeneration, who is seeking to spread across the world for the Faceless Lord and remake it in Juiblex’ image.

And while Myrr and that idea would make an excellent planetary setting for D&D as well, I feel like there’s also a thing you could maybe do by transferring it to the Astral Sea. It is, after all, fully Spelljammer’s vibe. You’ve still got the ships. You’ve still got the pirates. And there’s plenty of eldritch shit knocking around the Astral Sea.

Maybe that’s how the Seed of Juiblex became so powerful and intelligent, because the psychic winds of the Sea imbued it with knowledge and sentience and possibly magic, all of which combined with the endless hunger of Juiblex to create a terrifying threat that seeks to devour everything the Sea touches. And the Faceless Lord sensed it and was pleased, and bestowed further gifts to strength it, delighted by its miasmic presence in the Sea.

Just picture it. You’re sailing the vast silver void of the Astral Sea, the guardrail of your ship under your hands, your sails proud and arched above you. Suddenly you see something in the distance. A darkness. A vast, rippling obsidian shape. A colour pool, you think. It has to be, at that size. One of the black pools to Limbo. You think to say something, but already the helm has moved to avoid it. You’ve no business in Limbo right now.

But even as you turn, you realise that the shape has rippled. Moved. You realise it has turned to follow you. Whatever this is, it has sentience. It has will. It’s not a colour pool, it’s a creature. As large as the ship and larger, and it’s not slow either.

Maybe you escape. Maybe you fight it. Maybe you win. But when you next make port, you the hear the rumours spreading. You’re not the only one who saw such a thing. There’s a corruption, out there in the Sea, and it’s growing. It’s spreading. It’s not one creature. It can’t be. So many have seen it, or something like it. And some … have seen something bigger. Not the size of a ship, but the size of a city. The size of a port. A vast, obsidian blackness, spreading out across the silver sea, that whispers and speaks. Of hunger. Nothing but hunger. A vast, gnawing, incomprehensible hunger.

(I love oozes. I love oozes. Juiblex is as eldritch as anything the Far Realm could come up with)

And it cannot be destroyed. This vast, parent blackness. All the firepower of some of the greatest spelljamming vessels have died trying. If there’s a way to stop this, it has yet to be found. But someone, somewhere, must know how. This is the Astral Sea. There must be some fragment of a dream, blown by a psychic wind, that details how to defeat this creature. Some archive, that holds the knowledge of what this thing is, what it springs from, what force empowers it. And how to decouple it, how to detach it from the strength of the Faceless Lord, before it grows large enough to devour cities and ports and perhaps even planets whole. Some artefact, maybe, or artefacts …

I’m just saying. If, like me, you grew up with the Pirates of Dark Water. If you grew up with that space fantasy vibe. Spelljammer looks like such a good opportunity to live out the dream …

My vampire ex-boyfriend is stalking me. This is not an unusual occurrence. Even when we were still dating he was always doing this, he just used to be more obvious about it because if I called him out he already had a line locked and loaded about how he was only looking out for me. And sure, I'll admit that I've had more than the average number of near-death experiences for a seventeen year old, but at the risk of rehashing old arguments, a lot of that could've been avoided if he'd just turned me the first time I asked.

I've broken things off with my vampire ex-boyfriend a couple times before, usually for about the same reasons, but this time it's different. I think he's noticed it too. I'm not grieving anymore, not holing myself up in my room listening to sad music watching every gray day pass me by. I've talked to my friends, then to my dad, and they're on my side. My dad took a little longer to come around, but it helped that his best friend's son went through the same thing. It's good to have people around who want to support me, not just protect me.

My vampire ex-boyfriend didn't want me to be a vampire like him. He didn't want me to have sex, with him or anyone else. He didn't want me to go out with my friends without him there, but he also didn't want to come along. He didn't want me to go out after dark. He didn't want me to cut my hair. But he liked me, he really liked me. He liked that I didn't ever show much skin even in the summer. He liked that I didn't have any real hobbies or passions so that he could be the one to introduce me to music and fine art and literature. He liked that I kept my innermost thoughts so buried that they were a secret even to me.

I don't know for sure if I want to be a vampire anymore. I think I might, or at the very least I want to keep my options open, but it doesn't feel as urgent now that I know there are other ways to change myself. I used to think I needed it to be close to him. He was so beautiful, is so beautiful. My vampire ex-boyfriend, with his serious, brooding stare and his model chin and his body carved from the center of a pale diamond, his chiseled angles sharp enough to cut with just a glance. And then me beside him, with my long mousy hair and my fragile frame hidden beneath overlarge shirts and jeans when even a knee-length skirt made me feel too exposed. For all his sanguineous habits, I was the parasite, and he was the genuine article, and maybe that's why it hurt so much to have him reject me again and again. All I ever wanted was to burrow into his colorless skin, to feel what it was like to be strong and unyielding. My vampire ex-boyfriend hated his perfect body. He waxed poetic about my warmth, my softness. Maybe we were more alike than I thought in the end.

I load my old pickup truck full of lumber and nails and feel pleased by how much easier it is now that I've started to put on a little muscle. Working with my hands makes me feel more grounded in my body, so dad's enlisted my help in some of his DIY projects around the house. My collection of bandages is growing, from splinters and slips and the occasional dropped hammer, but my coordination grows a fraction less abysmal each day, and if I spill blood there's no one there to wince and whine about it.

I put a lock on my bedroom window. I pin photographs to my wall documenting my changes from month to month. Dad shows me how to shave without cutting myself, despite my insistence that if I could figure out my legs I can figure out my face. I smile more days than I don't. I still turn my head in the same direction when I hear a loud crack from beyond the treeline that's not quite thunder. I still visit his family, when he's not around. In another life I know his parents would've treated me like one of their own.

Just as I'm climbing into the driver's seat I hear a voice from the shadows, whispering the name of a stranger. I drive away. I've got no more interest in raising the dead.

I’ve been playing Book of Hours for less than a day and I already have an entire google doc which displays what books are in which room and what their aspect and levels are. The shelves in the Reading Room are completely sorted by aspect as well. This is fantastic 10/10 I love it already.

April 29, 2023 -  Saturday

Pictures are of today’s art and a book I found (and put back) in the children’s section on my way out of the library last week. Based on the cover it’s exactly the type of book I can imagine my past self retreating to on a summer afternoon after doing some workbook my mom made me do, or maybe taking with me in my bag to school with so much excitement about reading it on the way, or showing my friends 🥺 These past few years, since I haven’t been so occupied with my academics anymore, I’ve been able to revisit this version of myself that I had lost touch with for so long tbh, and have been able to feel that magic again ✨ Though the situations that lead me to here have been unexpected and difficult, I’m so grateful, alhamdulillah, for everything 💕

last post for the night i swear

the real tragic part about the whole science fair incident is that perpetual motion is impossible to achieve

ford’s machine would have never worked, regardless of whether or not stan had interacted with it

(warning i accidentally wrote an approximately 30-tag dive into ford’s character in the tags don’t click see more if you don’t want to read that)

anyway!! good night everyone ❤️‍🩹

I realized something when I reread A Life Erased. That Kell's mother as we've "seen" her in the short story, somehow is hinted at in bits and pieces in Lila. It's like Lila was giving hints about Kell's mother all along and his past before he was given up.

His mom gave him a knife with his real initials on it. Lila is fond of knives, and even though Lila is not her birth name, the name she tells Kell to call her after they introduce each other starts with L, just like his real surname. Those two initials on the knife make me think about the initials lovers carve on tree trunks. I've already said multiple times that knives are symbolic of their relationship, and this object is also symbolic of Kell's identity intertwining with Lila's and viceversa.

His mom was a fire magician. The first magic Lila tries to call on is fire. His mom and dad likely did illegal things like thieving and traveled on ships, because the text specifies her arms are tanned. Kell's mom has fair skin and red hair just like him, so I assume she must've been a lot under the sun to be described as tanned. Lila used to be a thief, and now she's the captain of a ship. Moreover, one of the ships Lila raids in AGOS is called the Copper Thief. Who has copper hair? Kell, but also his mom.

Perhaps we will see Kell's parents again in future tftop books.

I will be adding to this post every time I remember some weird obscure media from my childhood that my family still tries to convince me I imagined. This happened with Chicken Run but that is most definitely a real thing so I’ve decided I’m going to trust my brain about these things.

Today’s addition:

A kid’s book that was like a compilation of a few short stories (I think maybe there were three??) about dolls. There was a story about dolls having a picnic and one was made of something shiny so she got snatched up by a magpie and had to escape from the nest.

There was one about a little china doll that gained sentience and as she learned empathy she became more human. I specifically remember this one because at the very end it talked about how she had to teach herself to remember to go to the bathroom because once she started needing to eat real food she’d just go all over herself.

Also something about a doll getting lost at like a carnival or something? I don’t remember that one very well.

A lot of Aki because I love him, Hitsu (not a self insert) and unfinished art trade (giga flop)

"I love my Bible!"

~ Sam

in an older post (Top 5 Brocedes moments) you said that back in 2008 Nico had a favourite Brit and it (probably) wasn’t Lewis and Lewis had a favourite German (Adrian Sutil) but it (probably) wasn’t Nico. This got me wondering who was the favourite Brit and why that person? Sorry for bringing this up but the question won’t leave my head.

Hi! I’m going to be honest I actually cannot for the life of me remember who I was talking about in that post but if I had to guess I think the favorite Brit (in terms of people on the grid/associated with f1) might have been Jenson? Just based on what I could tell from the research I had done (doing activities off-the-grid together, general camaraderie)… I think I said that based more on how the media would sometimes play up the friendship between Nico and Lewis and how their level of friendship during that period in time (pre-Mercedes) actually (probably) wasn’t as best-friends-since-childhood as ppl make it out to seem…

very excited that max is finally going to talk to scrapdragon. hes your friend! the grudge that wants to eat you :) dont be mean and hit him with the bat talk to him

the paradox of self-awareness 😵‍💫

It's hard thinking about books I enjoyed as a kid because there's always the lingering question of "was this book actually good, or was it just kind of gay?"

girl help ive just woken from a dream of a whole separate life lived and now i have to remember everything about our reality as I wake up and the memories slowly fade

not to be dramatic but sodam yat is probably the single most infuriating waste of a character ive ever seen. the concept of him alone is so good it makes me want to SCREAM like!!! he is kyle! he’s a mirrored version of kyle where absolutely everything is flipped on its head

instead of being the only lantern left after the destruction of the corps and rising to become basically its god, sodam starts off at the highest point, as ion at the height of the rebuilt corps, and he’s destined to see it destroyed until he’s the only lantern left! his story is just kyle’s played in reverse! kyle as a tragedy!

and it started almost a decade before kyle was even created! sodam joined the corps in 2007, but the prophecy stating he would be the last green lantern to be killed before mogo when the corps finally falls for good is from an annual released in 1986! by the time his story started, it had already ended in his death and failure to save the corps over twenty years before!!

he’s one of the best tragic heroes i’ve ever seen in a comic book like EVERYTHING he does just drips with dramatic irony, and it is so good!! everything about him is SO GOOD!!

and if i think too much about the fact that he’s only interacted with kyle like twice, has barely shown up since like 2011, and has now given up being a green lantern to go be a government official on the violently xenophobic, totalitarian planet that he spent his entire life trying to escape, it makes me want to start biting people!!

Bingge really missed out, huh…