Beware the Bibliophile

Before Qaylie was born, Granddad would come down from the mountain to the town when he was needed. But that was over ten years ago; now he stayed in the mountain, and those who needed him went to him instead.

Qaylie liked to go before it was dawn. The sky was brightening now, a hazy shade of midwinter grey. Wisps of windswept snow had covered the well-worn path, and sat on the pines in grey, sullen lumps.

Icicles glittered around the mouth of Granddad's cave, turning the crevice into a grinning, toothy mouth.

She grinned back. She cupped her mittens around her mouth, and shouted, "GRANDDAD!"

The winter air echoed the word. And then the sound began, the low, grinding, scraping noise of metal on stone. It sounded huge. It sounded heavy.

It sounded old.

It was.

Granddad pulled his head out of his cave. Things tied into his horns - jewelery, bottles, skulls, tied together with fishing nets and bits of rope and lengths of yarn - clinked and clattered and clanged against each other in a ghoulish windchime.

He was missing a tusk. The other had been carved into scrimshaw depicting a valley full of fire, the flames twisting into awful, leering faces.

He pulled himself out of the cave. His neck was a carpet of wrinkles. His talons pulled his bloated, scarred belly across the stone. His fleshless wings hung limp at his sides. He was the colour of cold iron, and he was the shape of a nightmare.

He wore spectacles. One of the lenses was a round stained-glass window from the church back in town.

Qaylie held out the pack. "O Great And Terrible Baradir The Red!" she recited. "I Come Bearing A Tithe, In The Awful And Desperate Fear That You May Not Yet Snuff Out Our Fleeting Lives."

The dragon hummed. Pebbles and little bits of ice vibrated with the sound. "And I accept it," he rumbled. "And may you live to grant me more tithes, you tiny, ill-born, insignificant insect."

The two stared at each other, refusing to let a flicker of emotion cross their faces.

Qaylie broke first. She sprung, laughing, and wrapped her arms around Granddad's snout.

"Happy birthday, Granddad," she said.

Granddad laughed. Under the cool, black scales, Qaylie could just feel the furnace glow.

***

Suddenly having 50 moving eyes can make you disoriented and barfy and the adjustment period sucks ass

It takes both more and less time than you’d think to figure out what the structure as a whole looks like and where those eyes ARE

After you get used to it the entirety of the structure itself and all of the eyes you can see from feels like an extension of your nervous system in a very bizarre way. Like I have dreams now from the perspective of A Building and I’m not sure how to describe that.

On my COMFORTABLE system, the one I spent the longest time on, I never had to think about what code I needed to punch in. If I needed to watch a specific person, I could follow them all over the site without thinking about it.

Now at a different location, all the manual equipment and codes and lag and resolution are different, and it feels like going from playing the piano to driving stick shift on the left side of the road with my feet

While all the people with security & surveillance experience are chilling in the notes like

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.

This gurgling, curdle-furred Muppet was diagnosed with stage III kidney disease at 7, at which point it seemed likely he would live only another couple of years. I knew his breed was prone to it, and that he was not ethically bred, when I adopted him, and did so assuming that he would develop CKD from the jump. He did. And that is how it felt. Of course. So every year after that was stolen time, and he lived to an improbable 14+ years. The entire time, I held him lightly, knowing I was going to have to let him go. It made those years really good. I really cherished them. I am grateful for them and for what they taught me.

Losing him was expected, and an easy transition. Losing his two brothers unexpectedly within the same week was horrific. I am still broken even two years later. My boyfriend is still broken. Their baby sister is still broken. The anticipatory grief towards her, my bright little star, our Fancy, is bone-crushing at times, because those final moments are crowded so near, still. I am struggling mightily with it. I cry often. I am Very Afraid.

All I can say I've learned, after having our lives torn apart:

Make their lives, every day, good lives. Keep them in fresh food and water, keep them clean. Every day make sure their eyes are bright for at least an hour, all told. If they cry, learn to understand, and tend them. Check on their paws, ears, and mouths regularly. Try to teach them tricks. Show them new things often. If they interfere with something of yours, let them have it or give them something like it of their own. Leave a place beside you, always. If they misbehave, do not punish the behavior -- address the underlying need, it is valid. Play. Love. Gentle hands. Soft voices. Do not turn away during the times you are tired or frustrated or do not know how to fix something. Do something. Know that they are living things with interiority and feelings, and they have an image and an idea of you that encompasses how you sound and smell how you touch them, that they have an understanding of what you are like as a person, and they have no choice but to be with you, so make that person a good one. If you feel that you aren't very good and don't know what you are doing, keep trying. Ask for help if you need to.

This should be you:

A being guided by love even when he had literally no idea what was going on.

The best balm for borrowed grief is to simply do your very best, every day.

for your consideration: "game changer" and "very important people" in 11 emmy categories.

Like don't get me wrong, the book one is good (the idea of Grace having to spend multiple days locked up stewing about how he's gonna die before they even knock him out is deliciously angsty, as is Stratt's last attempt to beg him to understand why she has to do this) but fuck.

He like literally starts climbing the walls.

Like he came in there relatively composed. He had a rationalisation for what he was going to do, he probably rehearsed his little speech. He's putting the walls up because he knows he's not doing The Right Thing, but he doesn't want to let on that he knows that. He's probably pretending to himself as much as Stratt. He's doing it For The Kids.

And then the switch to just pure, animal terror when the doctor comes in. Like there's a degree of comedy to it. Grace is always slightly goofy, slightly immature (probably why his students like him so much) and now he's climbing and running like a kid playing tag. Except its not a game and it's not working.

Eva's tone when she tells him to “sit down, we'll do it different”. Like I know I'm murdering you, I know that you're not capable of seeing this any other way, but please at least see sense and spare yourself the trauma of having to be literally dragged kicking and screaming. Please.

The resignation when she says “he's running.” Like, she doesn't have to say who's running, or why. She knew this was a possibility. She knew this was a likely possibility but why couldn't he just fucking be the guy she needs him to be? Doesn't he know how hard this is??

The realisation that, if Carl is by the fence, then it's probably because they were concerned that Grace might actually outrun the guards and would need to be ambushed. The possibility that Carl specifically is there because, in that scenario, Grace would be more easy to catch if he trusted his pursuer.

Like I think one reason I'm attached to Ryland Grace is that I honestly couldn't tell you that I wouldn't behave like that in that scenario. Like sure, we all like to say we'd bravely sacrifice ourselves for humanity, but like it's not like I'm currently chaining myself to rainforest trees or throwing soup at paintings in museums or kidnapping oil execs or whatever it is I'm supposed to do. I don't even really attend protests.

There are significantly more things that I could be doing right now to make the world a better place that I don't do because they would involve upending my life and putting myself at more personal risk than I am comfortable with. I have no room to judge Ryland Grace.

Been sitting on these for a solid month now so I figured it’s time to post em! AU in which an aging and frail Grace gets his consciousness transfered to an eridian body to extend his life :D

Some notes:

these were the rejected ones

* New student, very small. Grace said it was pebble. Pebble is small Earth rock. Pebble likes name.

* He found out Eridians have no gender rules.

* Students brought him mineral sample. After he stopped crying he said he loves show-and-tell game. Human naming conventions oddly literal.

* I told him Earthsun grew bright.

* I took him up atop atmosphere bypass elevator to look at stars.

* He woke up from nap and found me still with him. I did not wait on his chest; he says I am heavy like “elephant” and he “couldn’t breathe.” I laid my arm over him instead, kept him close, feeling safe. He said “cuddle” was warm.

* Before class he heard younglings singing.

* He has plants in house from sprouts on ship. Plant grew “bud.”

* Engineers got seawater temperature right. He took off shoes and stood in water, sighing. He didn’t care about pants getting damp. Cried until shirt was also damp. Humans very endlessly wet.

* He missed “Doritos.”

* Adrian helped food scientists make taumoeba dried paste. Made it crunchy after heating. We fused it into triangle form. Told him it was Tauritos. That made him laugh-cry. Laugh-cry is rare and precious.

* He remembered Eridians have no gender rules.

* We made him celebration outfit. Used metals he calls pretty. He can see frequencies named “colorful” and “shiny.” These make humans happiest.

* I gave him hug when he wasn’t expecting it. Easier to hug close now with exosuit. Hug when Grace sitting down so he does not fall over.