Wandering around the house, muttering to myself, to the tune of Drunken Sailor:

"What did I do with my goddamn knee pads?

What did I do with my goddamn knee pads?

What did I do with my goddamn knee pads?

I need them for a cosplay..."

The creator of Hazbin Hotel (who I know nothing about and *strongly prefer it that way*) simultaneously

A) Making a pitch perfect Tumblr Sexyman, then announcing they're aro ace, and

B) Announcing that Lucifer was the one who gave birth to the child, not Lilith

Will forever be the funniest shit I have ever seen. I'm convinced this is top tier trolling, and I love it.

It's still fucked up to go "why can't people accept trans men as men when they act JUST LIKE cis men," and it (at best) is putting trans men in a shitty position wherein we have to prove ourselves suffieciently enough and at worst is actively just transphobia reliant on gender essentialism, which affects all trans people and then some.

I'm SO obsessed with them.

After this I believe they are both equally as unhinged as the other, just opposite ends of a spectrum about it HAHAHAHAHA

Also...

More micro organisms.............. (FAVE PANEL TBH LOOK AT THEM)

What would stick!Alan's reaction to meeting stick!noogai be?

mostly shock and confusion! he's very confused by this and very concerned for his counterpart!

noogai!victim also scares the shit out of him for obvious reasons and as soon as anyone asks about his victim they can unfortunately immediately tell they weren't as lucky.

"That's probably the most unsettling part of things; not the tadpole, not the memory loss, not the outbursts of nigh-insatiable bloodlust... I'm still favored by something, someone, and I have no idea who. The blessings feel strange in my hands; familiar to hold but the balance is all wrong, like swinging a real sword after using training weapons all your life. Or maybe the other way around, like being handed a blunted knife after doing something stupid with the real thing. No fucking idea who I swore my oath to. But I know that oath like my own heartbeat; blood for blood, justice for the weak, and vengeance where justice turned a blind eye. When I feel the divine burning through my hands, it never feels the same twice. A different hand on my shoulder every time, but it's always Death. Death as rebirth, death as rest, death as justice, death as dispassionate inevitability... And death as hunger.

Doing @catbatart's RPG Inktober challenge and knocking out a twofer with Days 1&2 - Dwarf and Paladin. I'm gonna be on and off on this one, this is the first thing I've drawn since mid august last year, so I figure that'll be safer for my wrist and/or sanity. But I'm planning to try and knock out 10-15 out of all 31, which is still pretty ambitious for me.

Folks who've been following me since the olden days of Fallout 4 might recognize Maya Acerbi under the beard and edgelord coat of paint she's gotten as my Dark Urge playthrough character for Baldur's Gate 3. Everyone else has their cool, mysterious, catlike Durge characters, and then there's me with a crusty old dwarf woman who by the end of every day looks like she got dragged backwards through a bush and then rolled in mud and/or blood that might even be hers.

i think the stock market in its entirety is such a flop....back to grain markets.

Once Again, I Am Dissatisfied With DAI. which! yknow. in other news. water is wet. but like. a lot of the arguments -- both in-world (e.g. from vivienne, wynne, etc,) and from the fans -- for keeping the circles as a system, even with reform, seems to revolve around the idea that mages need some kind of magic school to learn how to control their magic. i don’t disagree that mages need to learn how to control their magic, but i disagree that they need a place for it, or some kind of magic school, for it, and i definitely vehemently disagree that the circle is that kind of place, in the past or the future.

there are canonically other ways, other than the circle -- ways that aren’t formal education systems -- for mages to be educated, with as little risk to themselves, spirits or others, as possible. ways that don’t involve chantry oversight, templar guards, or segregation from the rest of society while they “train”. and, in truth, the circles weren’t created to protect mages or to educate them in the first place -- it’s an incidental feature, not an intentional feature.

like... let’s dig into the history of the circle for a second. because the circle hasn’t been around since the beginning of time, and surely, whatever the mages were doing before to learn to control their magic was working, seeing as how there’s nothing to indicate mages or anyone else was dying en masse from an inability to control their magic. the southern thedosian circle system was "adopted" from the tevinter circle system, with a critical difference -- where the tevinter circle system was a formal schooling system, the southern thedosian circle system was not.

drakon used mages against the darkspawn in the second blight (which started ~1:5 divine). by that point, the first inquisition was already a functioning organisation -- the inquisition itself predates the chantry (the inq starting around -100 ancient and the orlesian chantry established by drakon in -3 ancient), and hunted down dangerous mages and demons (the original inquisition is EXPLICITLY mentioned to be andrastian hardliners who also hunted “cultists and heretics” but this makes no sense as the inquisition predates the chantry. i can only imagine then that this was twisted/added later on, after the nevarran accord, as the seekers’ role became to hunt down cultists and heretics, to act as though that had always been their job/purpose). under inquisitor ameridan, and during the blight, in 1:20 divine (the second blight ends in 1:95 divine, seventy-five years later) the inquisition signs the nevarran accord and become the seekers and the templars, the latter of which exists to hunt down mages to drag them to the circle, which is also established at this time, in an agreement between the inquisition and the andrastian chantry/orlesian empire. the templars are explicitly created to capture mages unwilling to submit to the circle and bring them in. that’s why templars are also referred to in-game as “magehunters”.

i want to note that there’s no indication here that the circles were set up for the protection of mages from the public -- mages had been living in society openly before this. mages themselves (as far as we can tell; maybe bioware will retcon this later and say mages in the first inquisition pushed for this... ) did not push for the creation of the circle; it was created under drakon’s chantry, in conjunction with the inquisition, which contained mages but at this point, the inquisition’s (mostly as a result of ameridan) main priority had shifted from dealing with magic -- it was supporting orlais against the blight. (which further establishes the very roots of the templars and the seekers as the chantry’s army by the time of dai.)

the inquisition’s whole purpose was to hunt down dangerous mages. they then transitioned into... essentially, what they are now. magehunters. but why hunt mages in the first place? orsino asks at the end of da2 why the chantry doesn't just drown mages at birth -- why lock them up in the circle? from a colder standpoint, why aren't mages just made tranquil the moment they're taken into the circle? it's certainly more profitable for the chantry, who can use the tranquil for enchantments, and it would entirely eliminate the so-called danger that mages pose to themselves and others simply by existing. presumably, it might even serve as a “punishment” for the magisters sidereal who were mages that unleashed the blight on the world (according to the chantry). why put them into a "magical boarding school" (again! it’s not a school, it’s a prison. the circles are a prison) in the first place if the very existence of mages is such a danger?

& i think the answer to that question lies in the relationship between the leaders of a nation and the chantry/the templars. the way it seems to work is that chantry law supercedes sovereign law (evidence: loghain's use of apostates against the wardens is labelled a crime by representatives of the chantry during the landsmeet; later in da2 alistair claims he can’t free the ferelden circle as the chantry opposed it) BUT the grey warden treaties supercede even chantry law (duncan is able to conscript amell/surana/tabris (the alienage, of course, is a chantry invention), the warden is able to conscript anders). when you play the mage origin in dao, you're immediately alerted to the fact that greagoir is agitated by duncan's presence, because duncan is recruiting mages for the grey wardens and he has no right to deny duncan that recruitment. this is explicitly exacerbated by the fact that cailan has been demanding mages for the battlefront for the king's army (confirmed by duncan & irving (in the circle tower) and alistair (in ostagar) separately) -- that's why wynne, uldred, and the group of circle mages were present at ostagar.

according to chantry law, which supercedes any ruling cailan could pass, mages belong in and to the circle. so how come cailan legally has the right to demand mages for the battlefront? why can’t greagoir -- the knight-commander of the tower -- simply say no? unless... you know. that was the real purpose of the circle’s creation. not for education. not for the protection of mages. but so that, as emperor, drakon would always have easy access to mages to supplement his army. he “utilised” mages during the blight (again! there’s no explanation of what the hell that means. did mages sign up willingly to fight for drakon? did he force them to work for orlais whenever/wherever he found one??) and splitting the inquisition (ameridan implies the inquisition were actively supporting orlais/drakon during the second blight) between hunting down mages and fighting the darkspawn seems like a waste of resources. but maybe that’s why the division between seekers and templars exist in the first place -- seekers were sent to the battlefront whilst templars, lesser in number maybe at the time, ran the circles as a source of mages. (over time, maybe, the numbers balance between seekers and templars reverse -- templars are easier to control, once the chantry monopolises the lyrium trade, compared to the seekers?) now that would be justification for shoving all these mages into a circle together, rather than just eradicating them on sight.

(it might even explain why meredith/elthina rejected alrik's tranquil solution in da2 on paper; they still needed the mages to fight against the qunari at the time, if they were ever to attack kirkwall. you can kind of see it during the battle in hightown -- meredith sent the mages ahead of her to deal with the qunari. mages are weapons to them. the circle exists to support the military endeavours of the chantry or of the leader of the nation.)

it would also explain why there’s some instances where sovereign law does seem to supercede the chantry law. on the one hand, templars are under the chantry’s control and nations could be convinced to allow the (orlesian) chantry to train templars in their lands to bring mages to the circle and combat dangerous magic (and of course the orlesian chantry monopolises lyrium trade with orzammar so presumably other countries can’t get their hands on it for themselves which yknow! what do people like to say about how the chantry is neutral or helping people again? monopolising the anti-magic serum so no one else can have it sure is very helpful and altruistic...). but why allow the circles to exist, under the power of a foreign-based system (the seat of power for the chantry, who controls the templars, is in orlais after all)? it could so easily be used against you... unless you were convinced that you could also utilise these mages during war.

so, considering this as the central reason for the establishment of the circle, does it mean the circle can't become a school? irl, as far as i know, formal schools started off as a way to educate the military, later to educate the workforce, and schools in colonised nations often served as a vehicle for cultural and religious assimilation. i don't think the circles, as they are, are exempt from this. we already know that the circles approach magic from an andrastian perspective -- it's most clearly highlighted in conversations between anders and merrill in da2, and vivienne and solas in dai. but we see it in how much keili is taught to hate herself in the magi origin in dao, the way magic is taught to be some unforgivable curse and sin. we know (some of) the circles teach mages battle magic (within reason; i always wonder if being set on fire or hit with lightning or whatever else is more than just a game mechanic and reflective of some kind of underpowering of spells so that mages can’t turn against their oppressors easily) probably specifically for the reason i outlined above -- you see mages being taught how to fight in the circle in dao during the magi origin alongside all of the lessons about how they must only ever use their magic to serve. already inherently, circle education functions to supplement the military and to serve as a vehicle for cultural & religious assimilation.

so... even if you were to "reform" the circle -- by removing templars, or removing it as an institution from chantry purview... or whatever vague "reforms" are actually implemented in dai...is the circle, itself, even as a "magical boarding school" necessary? is the circle actually necessary for mages to learn how to control their magic? and tbh the answer is no <3

like you see it time and time again, that you don’t need to go to magic school to learn how to use your magic. you meet so many talented mages who don't succumb to demonic possession or struggle with controlling their magic who didn't receive any education in the circle -- merrill, morrigan, zathrian, lanaya, aneirin, velanna, the hawkes (pc mage hawke, bethany).

later, you learn of the dairsmuid circle, where mages continued the same teachings that have been passed down to them for generations, with no sign that the city has been overrun by abominations or was threatened by uncontrollable magic. you learn of the avvar who willingly become “abominations” and unbecome them, with no loss of life on either side, or threat to the rest of their people.

the reason behind the establishment of the circle has nothing to do with education. any education that results from the circle is incidental to the main purpose -- which is to supply armies with magical power.

Arch is like the quintessential, stereotypical janky and complex linux distribution, because it's basically designed by and for the turbo-nerds who enjoy delving into the guts of their systems. It's fuckin Build-A-Linux Workshop. But like, unless you have a very unusual use case or you just go out of your way to do something weird and fucky because you can, even arch just kinda starts up without fuss or complication once you get it set up

Fight or Flight

Oh god oh god, that cringe response is so strong. I’m sorry I can’t help but open my mouth. Almost twenty years in fandom and I still feel like the baby that stumbled onto livejournal and tried to prove they weren’t a child by having opinions TM

my head is in my hands right now, I feel your damn pain.

I wish I knew why leaving comments was so hard. Well done you for asking the question, honestly.

maybe one day we’ll be fully grey and give zero fucks and feel like every time we leave a comment we’re Gertrude Steining a creator. In the meantime we just share a vague ‘I liked this’ shame and get to live in that awkward silence of not knowing how support is received. Here’s to being dominoes balanced on the edge 🤘

All of this, genuinely. I think about it all the time, and maybe it’s that we’ve been socialized to associate sincerity with childishness and/or (negative, harmful) obsession? Which: as a creator, as an artist, I fucking LIVE for sincerity. I love when people come back to the stuff I make with their whole chest. There’s absolutely nothing off-putting about it. I welcome that shit every time.

So then the question becomes: why is earnestness fair and even endearing from other people, but I must be above it myself? Why do I always hold myself to a standard unlike any I’d set for a stranger? It’s bonkers. And it merits not only questioning, but actively repairing in myself. I love authentic positive reactions to my art and to my queerness. Of course other people deserve the same from me. Bonk that mortification over the head until it stops squirming, and just let the joy in.

sometimes i’m reminded that i desire nay deserve a modern adaptation of Petshop of Horrors

.

please don't leave (again)

(pesca belongs to @hopelesslovebug )

Any more of a deep reason required to love a show if you find all of the characters that ever appear on your screen endearing? Main cast or supporting or the most inconsequential roles.

Just watched Infinite Regress and damn Jeri Ryan’s really acting her gd heart out. Also, I love how much people shout in this one.