NPC

I wanted the birds to look like they were actually in the space so first thing after doing the draft was to do a lighting study

after that I covered the walls in letters in lieu of a projector/vr headset bc i have neither of those :) Then i take a picture of the section of wall and superimpose the lineart over top of it so I can pencil in the lines

et voila

GIVE IT UP FOR BIRD NUMBUH 5, THE CANADIAN GOOSE, Branta canadensis!!!!

bird 5/14, Bluejay, Cyanocitta cristata

birds 6 and 7: American Goldfinch, Spinus tristis, male and female

BIRD NUMBER 8, (yellow shafted) NORTHERN FLICKERRRRR, Colaptes auratus

genuinely made me start questioning my sanity around day 3, it's half the size the of the goose, WHY did it take me 4 days to finish??

Bird number 9: Red-tailed hawk, Buteo jamaicensis

my chains are broken i am FREE. although i did have a great deal of fun with this, the barring on the wings itself took me like four days and i am READY to move on

this was a week and a half of continuous work so please excuse me for getting a little emotional in the bg 🙏

BIRD NUMBER 10!!! The Male Mallard Duck, Anas platyrhynchos

the male and female ones are gonna be posted separately bc they're taking a lot longer lol but yea! super happy i was able to capture the iridescent green of the head, i found metallic green and blue paint at a craft store that really made his head POP. it looks better in person i promise

ALSO!! As this is the 10th one, BIG announcement. The end is in sight!!!!! I plan to finish within the next 3 weeks and there will be a small dedication ceremony/ unveiling happening at the library to commemorate its completion on the 16th of May. If you live in the Western New York region and want to check it out for yourself shoot me a dm!

aaaand another one bites the duck,

we're movin right along with bird numero 11!! The lady Mallard!! Anas platyrhyncos

power couple that they are, here's bird number 12 and 13,

the Northern Cardinals, Cardinalis cardinalis

and NOW that they are complete, ITS GO TIME, in the next five days (library's closed for mother's day 😭😭) i need to have the GBH fully rendered, the names of the birds vectored, weeded, masked, applied to the wall, and then painted, plus additional cattails throughout. I may be able to get away with just getting the GBH done in time for the unveiling and then just have the names and cattails added later, but i'm gonna really try to get it all done in time. BUT, i have a plan. Part of why i take so long on these is because i really am just figuring it out as I do it lmao. there have been many a time where i am sitting on top of the ladder googling "how to paint birds" but I think if i take the time tomorro to do all that figuring out how to approach it beforehand, this will go a lot faster. I may also recruit some of my artist friends to help with the placing of the names... hrmm we'll see.

Anyways, shout out to the librarian who tracked down exactly the thing i needed so i could figure out where to place the highlights in my birds eyes, ur the real mvp

Bird number 14 out of 14,

The Great blue heron, Ardea herodius

thank you to everyone who reached out or got excited about this project, it genuinely gave me the fuel i needed to keep going. In total, the 480+ total hrs it took me to cover this wall pales in comparison to how long its expected to spend on there, hopefully imparting a sense of beauty and love for the natural world to the next generation and here's hoping i'm only getting started with these.

Fantastic article!! The guys looking for it were fish researchers who saw it one time, knew instantly it was an undescribed species, and then tried for nearly 20 years to find and document it!

It's a type of ghost pipefish, related to seahorses, and it floats around coral reefs looking like a piece of algae and hunting unsuspecting prey

They are, of course, named after Snuffleufagus from Sesame Street!

Later on it the project, they got citizen science involved, and people across the Pacific started reporting sightings of snuffy fish from all over!

I wanted to make a wiki about it but I don't have time for it.

The point was to try to encompass every "superpower" I could think of into a magic system.

You can check it out here !

The writing part is done, and I've done enough spells to provide an example for each element. The goal is to fill up that huge array eventually! >:]

Sorry, wormnoodless, you’re a heretic.

Jesus screamed “JESUS CHRIST YOU STABBED ME”.

Since that Jesus had to be taken down due to a bad case of stab-itis, the backup Jesus came in, but he weighed significantly less than the original Jesus- which would have been fine, except that at the end the cross was supposed to ascend upwards with Jesus on it, and the weights hadn’t been adjusted.

my first year doing this, our industry contacts were 1 actor, 1 casting director, and 1 producer to get different aspects of the business, and they all gave us amazing advice and told fantastic stories. the actor in question was Zazu on Broadway’s The Lion King for several years, and told the best story by far.

in The Lion King, there are only two pieces of pre-recorded noise in the whole show. one, when Pumbaa does a MASSIVE fart while fighting the hyenas, and the other being Mufasa saying REMEMBERRRRRR as Simba climbs Pride Rock. the actor told us while struggling not to laugh that, during one night’s performance, someone forgot to flip the tape of these pre-recorded noises.

so, at the end of the show, the great climax where Simba finally accepts his place in the Circle of Life, the heavens parted and-

PFFFFFFFFFRRRRRBTFTBTBFTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTT

everyone froze. and then all ran off stage positively HOWLING with laughter.

Originally, the actors were going to stroll on stage with our Lefou hauling in the really neat (and real!) taxidermied deer head that we had found in a local thrift store. Now, two days before opening night, our director wants Lefou to run in from off stage and catch a stuffed duck that Gaston has just shot. This, of course, requires two things to work properly as a scene: a gunshot noise, and a stuffed duck.

The gunshot noise, we had covered. Blue-collar, redneck school? Guns a plenty to record. The stuffed duck? Harder than you might have thought to obtain.

Three hunting stores, two taxidermists, and one Pet Supply Store ™, I’d finally found a semi-realistic pheasant squeaky toy. What follows is an account of the ways this dog toy managed to be the nightmare prop of the six show run.

Opening Night: The stagehand, who was supposed to drop the bird from the ceiling catwalk, missed his cue and didn’t drop the it. Lefou’s actor rolls with it and does an excellent job of looking around foolishly before getting cuffed upside the head by Gaston. The stagehand then drops the bird squarely on Gaston’s head. Cue laughter.

Saturday Matinee: Different stagehand throws the bird instead of dropping it and beans Lefou directly in the face with the prop. Lefou falls over. Cue laughter.

Saturday Night: Bird is missing during curtain call. Director hauls the deer head down from it’s place on the tavern wall and tells Gaston and Lefou to revert to the old blocking i.e. no gunshot, no bird, just walk in with trophy. During Gaston and Lefou’s conversation, gun shot sound goes off and a stagehand throws the bird onto the stage…from the wrong side of the stage. Lefou and Gaston stare at it in awkward silence for a solid thirty seconds before Lefou makes off-script, subtle joke about Gaston’s gun going off late instead of early. Cue adults in the audience laughing.

Sunday Matinee: Director begs the stagehands to get the cue right at least once. Gunshot and bird prop go off without a hitch. Lefou accidentally catches the prop when it falls from the catwalk. He’s so startled that he caught it that Gaston runs right in to him. They drop both the gun and the bird props, and grab the wrong prop in their scramble. Gaston spends the rest of the scene gesturing dramatically with a stuffed pheasant, instead of a gun.

Sunday Night:  Director is fed up with bird prop, decides that Lefou should just carry bird prop in after gunshot happens off stage. Lefou accidentally squeezes the prop during the intro conversation, startling both actors into silence with the squeaky toy noise - apparently, neither of them realized it was a dog toy.

It was awesome because when people saw the play and didn’t know the girls were identical twins, it literally looked like it was one actor doing multiple, uber fast costume changes.

One of our first performances was for our peers and it was a big school so lots of people didn’t know the twins. This - for some reason - was also the performance they chose to record.

Listening to the confusion of the audience during the playback was fantastic and completely topped by the moment Viola walked off stage left just as Sebastian walked on stage right and someone right beside the camera goes “OH WHAT THE FUCK” so loudly it drowned out everything else.

It’s like our third show and everything has been going surprisingly well. Hook and Smee climb to the top of the “tree trunk”, supposedly looking for Peter and not knowing they’re standing above his hiding spot the whole time.

Turns out someone didn’t close the trapdoor properly, because the second Hook steps on it, he plunges through the thing. He’s able to catch himself, but he’s got his ass and one leg dangling through this hole where it’s like a ten foot drop to the ground. All of us stage crew are literally two feet away from him offstage, just gaping at him because???? Y'all this fall looked BAD. Looked like my dude did the splits in mid air. The whiplash caused his fucking wig to come off. The audience is dead silent, all of us backstage are dead silent, the director is like already looking up how to treat a broken groin.

Lights come up on the stage and there’s a statue dead center of the stage that two characters are circling around while flirting. The whole scene goes down without a hitch.

Well, because we couldn’t get a statue prop, the staue was actually one of my friends in just some really good makeup, a perfectly still pose, and plaster in her hair that really sold it.

A few years ago, I was part of a production of She Kills Monsters. Very briefly summarized, there are ‘real world’ scenes, plus fantastical scenes within a D&D campaign, guided by a dungeon master character. My job was to sit in the audience (no headset) and draw on a tablet during the D&D scenes, which was projected onto the back of the stage (like home-drawn maps or settings for the campaign).

The first few shows go awesomely. Then we hit night four.

There’s a scene where the adventuring party is in a dungeon, so I’m drawing away at drippy stones and cobwebs… and then realize, suddenly, that I can’t hear any of the usual audio cues. In fact, the previous scene was slightly off, too. No sound effects, no music. The performers are speaking, but that’s it.

Then, I faintly hear the sound of hurried footsteps outside the theatre space, circling from the booth at the back all the way around and down to the backstage entrance. Something is clearly up, but I can’t stop drawing to go ask.

I would not find out until afterward that the sound board had just up and died. Massive hardware failure. That means no audio cues, no crew headsets, and had no way to carry messages other than by running from booth to backstage and back again. The director was also not in attendance for this show, and if I recall correctly, there was no intermission to try to troubleshoot anything. The show must go on.

On the plus side, we’re well enough into the run that the cast and crew manage to hit nearly all other cues from memory.

On the downside, two upcoming fight scenes are heavily reliant on music.

I gotta applaud everyone for just winging it like maniacs, particularly the dungeon master. For the dance-off battle set to a rap track, the DM sweeps in off-script and declares the fight will be done to the beat-boxing of the NPC who had just been ‘killed’ a few moments earlier (said actor immediately sits up and just goes off, no hesitation, I still have no clue if this kid had ever beat-boxed a day in his life before this). For the climactic battle of the protagonist versus the five-headed dragon set to speed metal, a crew member leans in from stage right with a handheld stereo held aloft, determinedly blaring the closest royalty-free track the crew could find on short notice. It was amazing.

The beer can was thoughtfully swirled. "No," she said eventually. "I tried, though. It just - it didn't work."

The wind blew over the stoop, cool and smelling of rain.

"'Didn't work?'"

"I wanted it to work, it - I was six, and I was in my dad's truck, and we were in the Wal-Mart parking lot at night - I don't remember why - and I thought, 'I should make an imaginary friend,' so I looked through the window and-"

She frowned. "Fuck. This sounds like a joke, but I made a Vaporeon. It was just a fully formed, perfect Vaporeon in a parking lot of a Wal-Mart. And I was so happy and I opened the door to make it jump in so I could take it home with me.

"But there was something - wrong with it. I'd made it perfectly, but I forgot to make it alive. It just sat and stared and I begged it to jump in the truck with me before my dad drove off, and it sat and stared, and we drove off and I was so sad and confused and - disappointed."

She wiggled the tab of the can. "It's still there," she said quietly. "I drive past that parking lot sometimes, and that same Vaporeon is still sitting in that spot. I've seen that parking lot get full to the tits in the middle of the holidays, I have never, not even once, seen someone park in the spot it's sitting in."

A car drove by. After a moment the frogs in the ditch started to chirp again.

Think of Rhazes like the Sun Tzu of Alchemy. The Kitab al-Asrar is full of ancient occult wisdom like “make sure the room you’re doing alchemy in has windows so you don’t inhale metal fumes and die.” Rhazes assumes the would-be alchemist has access to five things: Literacy, technical knowledge, space, financing, and reproducibility. These standards would become so influential, people would quote Rhazes as an authority on alchemy and medicine well into the 17th century. 

Ha! You know sometimes it can be a bit annoying answering asks like this, because most fantasy media isn t terribly interested in authentically representing history, BUT THIS TIME I can give y'all a specific and direct answer!

The archetype of the potion-crafter you're talking about almost definitely has its roots in an actual pre-paracelcian european medical profession; the Apothecary.

There were three types of doctors in the 1500s. There were diagnosticians, the people who went to school to learn about anatomy, and were allowed to call themselves "doctor." There were surgeons, the low-skilled workers who were in charge of hacking off limbs and draining bedpans. And there were apothecaries, basically the medieval equivalent of a pharmacist.

If you were a wealthy merchant, and you went to a doctor for your runny nose, he would look you over, and give you a prescription that you were supposed to take down to your local apothecary, so you could buy a potion from them.

But these prescriptions weren't exactly strict. A doctor might prescribe you an exact list of ingredients with the amounts, or he might just prescribe you "a healing ungent of cooling and drying herbs." So the apothecaries occasionally had some wiggle room based on supplies and expertise.

The important thing to remember, is that apothecaries were NOT considered magicians or alchemists.

That is, until Paracelsus came along.

See, good ol' Paracelsus was a radical innovator. He was one of the first physicians in history to be all three types of doctor at once. He was a diagnostician, a surgeon, and an apothecary. He argued that all doctors should have knowledge of their entire profession, and that no doctor was above suturing their patients wounds, and mixing their patients medicines.

He was also, crucially, an alchemist and a magician.

Alchemy was the cutting edge of technology for the time, a practice regarded with equal parts awe and suspicion, but it was more the realm of glassblowers and metallurgists than doctors or botanists. Paracelsus disagreed. He argued that if it's part of God's creation, it should be used to heal the human body.

This extended to magic. Paracelsus figured that you had to factor in things like "the movement of the planets and their influence on the earth." And he was known for prescribing patients things like "astral talismans to be worn about the neck." A practice that, even for his time, was often seen as backwards and superstitious. (Although given how harmful medieval medicine was, the astral talismans might have been your best option sometimes.)

Paracelsus was a radical. People fucking hated him, especially when he was alive. But his ideas were extremely influential, and exploded in popularity after his death in 1541. I can confidently say that the fantasy archetype of the Potion Brewer is based on Paracelcian physicians, the doctor/alchemist/apothecary/magicians who followed his theories.

well see the thing is. mohammad was almost certainly a real guy, who was some sort of leader of a group of people. POSSIBLY he never lead a large group, and the large group didnt form until afterwards. but it seems like he led at least a large-ish group. he probably had some sort of religious teaching, altho its unclear if he had any original doctrine or was just a passionate judeo-christian monotheist. oh and yknow, he lived and did stuff around arabia (well. some people say syria. probably not syria).

and that's...sort of all we can say for sure about the real muhammad! there's all sorts of other stuff that MIGHT be true about muhammad, especially after they got to medina. but his early life is a blank to us, the same way jesus' life before his ministry is a blank to us. who knows! but people who confidently tell you "mohammad lived in a city of pagans and converted them all" are exceedingly credulous. we have no good evidence that happened

one interesting thing the shwepisode talks about: so, obviously the islamic conquests "happened". in the sense that there wasn't a state there, and then there started being a large state there. but we dont see them archeologically! which is not crazy, they allowed people to surrender. they didnt just raze everything to the ground. but it's unfortunate, it would be nice if we could use archeology to say stuff about early islam. in part, we cant use archeology re: early islam because a huge number of artifacts were destroyed, there's a weirdly small amount of surviving stuff that could tell us about early islam. but it's not clear! posssibly even the *stories* about uthman destroying a whole bunch of alternate qurans aren't true!

There's a number of opaque Syriacisms in the Qur'an that likely weren't obvious to readers or Syriacs themselves, and a number of stylistic consistencies (like in the details of broken rhymes) suggestive of a single author from the Hijaz who knew some esoterica, with the variations being largely insignificant (like ambiguous readings that don't really mean much differently) and consistent with going through reciters with slightly different imalah (like where i and a are both read e).

Idk I get the urge to downplay the religious aspects but the trutherism stuff is kind of just a step removed from ancient aliens type patronization. Obviously Muslims wouldn't have the most sober account of their prophet but that doesn't mean they're liars or bad at recording history.

And people have good faith religious experiences all the time that honestly convince them of things - just look at born again experiences in christianity or the kind of analogous things in hinduism or so on. You don't have to accept anything of Islam to posit that Muhammad had some kind of analogue to a born again experience that made him believe he encountered Gabriel.

And if I, a linguist (an intellectual 🧐), hear Tumblr English out in the wild, I get so excited. Genuinely, I seriously considered writing my masters thesis on tumblr english and only didn’t because my advisor was a bit of a stick in the mud. This is a VERY Exciting Time™️ for linguists because the advent of the internet (and more specifically areas of the internet that encourage communities to form among people scattered across the globe) has created an era of exceedingly rapid language change, and gives us a huge opportunity to study how language changes on a much shorter timeline than usual. Throughout human history, geography has been a huge limiting factor in language bleed, transmission, and change; but now we have the ability to talk to people from all over the globe regularly enough that we are picking up vocabulary, grammar, and linguistic markers from all over the world.

Like, do you get how fucking cool it is that english speakers who have never visited Asia are able to use borrowed words like isekai and honorifics like -san fluently?? Do you get how many idioms and weird little grammatical constructions we’ve created that are unique to OUR dialect of english? Think of pissing on the poor or (like I used earlier) me, an intellectual. Our dialect, here on this hellsite, is the only one I can think of that has created a significant catalogue of complex tone markers specifically for the written form to compensate for the shortcomings of the written word in communicating meta-linguistic information like sarcasm or mockery or excitement. This dialect, primarily created in the written form (which is nearly UNHEARD OF), exploded onto the linguistics scene in 10 or 20 years when normally it can take centuries for dialects to distinguish themselves. It's academically BONKERS and I am HERE FOR IT. It's in the same realm as Nüshu, the Chinese written script only used by women.

okay there are 42 chapters in the book, and dividing 3000 by 42 = ~72

so I’d have to write the chapter titles like this:

It's Aro Week, so here are a few of my favourites!

List: