beadedslipper

It was all just a show, anyway. They did it every year. They brought out a selection of criminals, and the Sorcerer who ruled us showed his power by bringing about their deaths by magic. Just to show, every year, what happened to anyone who crossed him.

There was a time, probably, when the people he executed really were rebels or assassins. In latter days he had to take what the dungeons offered. I was dragged up in chains between a pickpocket, sobbing in terror, and a man who’d killed another man in a brawl. There were few criminals of any note, by then. So instead of choosing the wickedest criminals, they chose based on appearance. The man who’d been in the brawl had a face like a clenched fist, and looked like a ruffian. The pickpocket, aging and with hands beginning to tremble, was a different kind of example. As was I.

“There aren’t many pretty ones, this year,” the man who chose me had said, examining me. “But this one will do. Not young, but not old, a woman, well-favoured enough for the gallows… what was her crime?”

The warder shrugged. “She tried to kill one of the sheriffs.”

The man looked down at me and I shrugged. “I hit him with a washing stick, because he tried to extort money from me, and he was a baby about it.” I refused to treat this as anything but pathetic, even after my sentencing. “I didn’t even break any bones.”

“Treason, then,” the man said, nodding. “Attacking the servants of the law. That will look well on the list. Send her.”

I had been debating ever since what to choose. Something quick? Something painless? I considered demanding that I suffer the attack I supposedly made on the sheriff, but then I realized the Sorcerer would only give me what the man had said I was going to do, and that was not a pleasant way to die. I had all but decided on something swift and relatively painless. Beheading with the sharpest of blades sounded good. It would be quick. 

Do not use the website called Sci-Hub!

It lets people access scientific articles for free. This is dangerous. It helps the free flow of knowledge and reduces the competitive edge of all the people who worked really hard to have been born into a wealth.

Like, it’s literally a website where you can type in the DOI of an article and read it, without ever having to pay the publisher who exploited the author.

Have you ever wondered about like cave paintings?  Like, “What were they doing?  These don’t…  look very good,” -chuckles- In fact, almost every cave painting has Spaghetti Lines, which are webs of lines drawn over-top images, which you can see here.

-picture changes to a grayscale image of a deer standing in tall grass-

And here’s an example of natural Spaghetti Lines in nature, but we’ll get to that in a second.

-picture changes to a photo paleolithic drawing of a mammoth.  Alongside the photo is a tracing of the drawing, to clarify the lines-

The second weird thing is like sometimes animals are given extra body parts, like here the mammoth has two trunks.  And here, there’s a drawing of an antelope or a deer, it looks like, that seems to have two heads.

For a long time, people would assume like maybe the Spaghetti Lines were just some kind of paleolithic graffiti, and maybe the animals were these kind of religious creatures that they had mythologized.  But then, in 1993, a German scholar went into this cave in southern France, and it changed everything.

Unlike the other caves he had been to, this one was very poorly funded, so it had no artificial lights, and he had to be guided in by a local farmer, with nothing but a flickering lantern to guide his way.  Here is how he described the experience. 

He said, “M. Lapeyre finished his story and wanted to move on.  I encouraged him to remain and to slowly swing his lantern back and forth a few feet from the cave wall.  As he moved the light, I saw the colors of the tectiform begin to shift.  When the lamp arced to the left, the blacks faded, the browns became red and the red intensified.  When the light moved to the right, the pattern reversed, creating a shifting color scheme. Moreover, the engraved lines under and around the tectiform became animated.  Suddenly, the head of one creature stood out clearly.  It lived for a second, then faded as another appeared.  The spaghetti lines were no longer a confused two-dimensional pattern.  Rather, they became a forest or a bramble patch that concealed and then revealed the animals within. By firelight, a secret of the cave painters was exposed.  In the space of a few moments, I saw cuts and dissolves, change and movement.  Form appeared and disappeared.  Colors shifted and changed.  In short, I was watching a movie.”

Understood this way, the antelope with two heads, under the dance of the firelight, is an antelope going from grazing to checking for predators.  And the mammoth with two or three trunks becomes a mammoth in motion, swinging his trunk.

There’s something beautiful to me about knowing that hundreds of thousands of years ago, ancient humans descended into the depths to watch movies.

Quick 1am fanart of Percy and Vex getting happily married because I suddenly felt emotional over them

I made this a long time ago and was very nervous about posting it to Tumblr. I can’t really think of a good caption~ everything I wanted to say is in the little blurb at the beginning. 

‘God of Arepo’ Fan-made graphic novel 

STUDIO GHIBLI + YUMMY !