played for nearly 7 hours straight today on the count that i have no lectures on wednesdays and made it maybe (?) halfway through post-heavensward. im not sure but i honestly thought it was over after we killed Big Hogg and got estinien back but its still going.
i really love aymeric and how righteous he is i think i just have a thing for the knightly and just
Anya is live and ready to show you everything. Watch her strip, dance, and perform exclusive shows just for you. Interact in real-time and make your fantasies come true.
✓ Live Streaming✓ Interactive Chat✓ Private Shows✓ HD Quality
Anya is LIVE right now
FREE
Free to watch • No registration required • HD streaming
Anya is live and ready to show you everything. Watch her strip, dance, and perform exclusive shows just for you. Interact in real-time and make your fantasies come true.
✓ Live Streaming✓ Interactive Chat✓ Private Shows✓ HD Quality
Anya is LIVE right now
FREE
Free to watch • No registration required • HD streaming
"It baffles the mind that you keep coming here only to waste your time making furniture as if you were less. You deny your true nature and squander energy to whittle."
Altani knew that Zenos was goading her. This was the weekly ritual. He was alive. He was sitting on a chair she'd made and complaining about it. This once empty room in a small building near the Last Dregs had become his dwelling. It was still derelict in her opinion, but she had begun to turn it around. The building was stable with a little help from some other denizens. Once that was finished, she had started making furniture for the pouting prince.
It was more for her than for him. She wouldn't have housed a dog in the ruins before. When she learned that he was staying in this empty house, lying on the floor in the dust, she immediately began to rectify the situation. The seats in the Last Dregs were fine for a short café visit, but she was spending more time here. It made sense to have a place that she could rest. Zenos might not care about his lodgings, but she wasn't going to sit around in the dark like some sort of wretched animal. Before she had devoted her time to the scions, she was a carpenter. It was always nice to return to her roots.
Unlike her work in the firmament, all the furniture she'd made for this house was in the Steppe style. Low beds and tables, dozens of rugs and pillows. The bookshelf she'd made was more western in structure, but the carvings on it were from her tribe, the Borlaaq. She had always considered him Xaela at heart. Seeing him among the trappings of her people suited him despite his grumblings. It gave her something to listen to while she worked. There was a pile of wood blocks on the table, next to a knife that had been staked in the center. After this stool, she planned to make something more artistic, like a trinket box. Not that Zenos would ever have any trinkets to put in such a thing, she thought. Still, a house was not a home without a few knick-knacks.
"Move to the floor if you truly hate comfort so much," she replied, not looking up from the leg of the stool she was whittling, as he called it. "Misery for the sake of misery is a waste of time. You only think it is less because it is not something you have ever had to do," she said. "Garleans are soft and spoiled, and you are no exception."
Her mother would have scolded her for keeping a pet. She smiled. Keeping a baras indoors would have been less dangerous than what she was doing now.
Zenos studied her, but she was unruffled by the length and depth of his gaze. She was never unnerved by him. A puzzle that still fascinated, despite the hours already poured into it. She was often annoyed or enraged, but there was no tension. He'd thrown a knife at her last week, but she caught in her hand and stabbed it into the table. Then she had yelled at him for making her ruin the table. The knife was still there. She had still returned for another visit.
"There is nothing about me that is soft," he said.
Curious. She hesitated with her carving. Her face made an interesting expression as her eyes darted to look at him before becoming intensely focused on her work, refusing to rest her eyes on him a moment longer.
"Spoiled then. You and I had opposite upbringings," she muttered. "No one cared whether you lived or died, but gave you everything. My family and my tribe loved me, but I was given nothing. Everything I had to make for myself. My apprenticeship began at eight, and by fourteen I was making furniture for the tribe to sell."
That was true. His belongings had mattered little to him and it brought no joy, but there was an endless supply of anything he might need. As for her, he hadn't given it much thought before.
Who was she before they'd met?
When they had clashed at Rhalgar's Reach, he knew little of her other than the murmurings of soldiers. Heroes were nothing to him. He'd ended hundreds of so-called heroes in battles. None lingered in his mind. But her...
He remembered the day clearly. Her eyes blazed blue with a pink glow and her dark purple skin was glazed with sweat. Her lips were pulled back to show off sharp white teeth. That day he had felt something in his chest as she swung up her axe to clash against his sword. The surrounding battle slowed to a crawl. Even as her might faltered, he felt a spark of something, and he could not kill a creature such as she. There was a ferocity that he knew would only grow. In time, she would become more magnificent. To cut her down would be folly.
The circumstances leading up to her creation hardly mattered then. It was the future battle that he cared about.
He watched her as she continued her work. Her hands that masterfully held the axe also held the carving knife. She had an entire life before him, one that contained time for whittling. He had devoted every moment of his life to the hunt, and yet he still came up short compared to her. It was doubtful that mirroring her activities would make him a better warrior, but the annoying elezen girl's words came back to him. If he only pursued his pleasures, he would never get what he wanted from Altani. Woodworking was important to her for some godsforsaken reason.
Zenos reached over to the table and pulled out the knife. He took a small piece of wood from the pile and sat down on the floor in front of her. Altani looked over at him and raised an eyebrow.
"Come then, show me this pastime that takes you away from your purpose," he said. "What was the first thing your master showed you to make?"
She smiled at him and put down the stool. "Wooden pegs, but I already have enough of those. How about we start with spoons?" She pulled out a pencil from her tool bag and began to explain the process, sketching out the shape on his wood block. She pulled another block for herself to make as well.
He still felt that carving was a waste of time when they could be sparring, but somehow as he held his rough spoon against her perfect one, it didn't seem quite so pointless.
As a professional hand engraver, when it comes to old crafts like these, its way more accessible to get started with the basics than you'd expect. Back in the day good steel was expensive so trying something like hand engraving was expensive and difficult to justify. But now you can can just buy a good quality handpush graver online for less than a fancy coffee. Just think, for under a hundred quid you could get all the kit you need to get started with fucking up coins and stabbing yourself repeatedly!!!
Don't threaten to do it, go research it, and actually give it a go!!! Most of the books for old crafts are out of copyright. Even if you don't get a job at whatever you try, or hell, even of you don't become in any way good at it, just learning and trying something new is good for you, and it gives you a greater understanding and appreciation for things.
Fuck AI? Good. I agree. Now fucking do something about it. Return to doing human hand crafted things as an act of rebellion! Start knitting, start wood carving, start engraving, whatever the fuck. But most importantly, remember you don't need to be making money doing it to make it worth doing.
Anya is live and ready to show you everything. Watch her strip, dance, and perform exclusive shows just for you. Interact in real-time and make your fantasies come true.
✓ Live Streaming✓ Interactive Chat✓ Private Shows✓ HD Quality
Anya is LIVE right now
FREE
Free to watch • No registration required • HD streaming
Anya is live and ready to show you everything. Watch her strip, dance, and perform exclusive shows just for you. Interact in real-time and make your fantasies come true.
✓ Live Streaming✓ Interactive Chat✓ Private Shows✓ HD Quality
Anya is LIVE right now
FREE
Free to watch • No registration required • HD streaming
just. please know. that giffing scenes like that is a fucking nightmare labor of love.
to wit:
bottom's the raw capture, middle's just flat curve correction to make the footage visible, top is the final coloring with /counts seven adjustment layers to add back in Literally Anything But Yellow
every giffer i know does it out of love for the game, but for the record it's not... easy. it's not just slapping the footage in a cap grabber and posting whatever it spits out. "professional" lighting and color grading has only gotten waaay murkier and flatter in the fifteen years i've been giffing on here, so uh. don't repost gifs, please!
I thought the bottom was a black bar. I didn't even realize that was footage.
Everyone say thank you to your neighbourhood GIF maker! Giffers are so important to the fannish ecosystem, but to so many people the amount of work involved invisible.
i need everyone to get into college football right now i am dying to talk about the texas tech situation. this is the kind of thing that will be referenced for the next 100 years. there will be documentaries and biopics about this.
texas tech's quartback, brendan sorsby, was investigated for sports gambling. i know sports betting is all the rage right now, but athletes themselves are not allowed to do it. it is Rule Number 1 and it is the highest priority rule for the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA), who governs all athletic programs at about 1,100 colleges in the US.
the invesitagetion of sorsby revealed that, not only did he place more than 9,000 sports bets when he himself was a collegiate athlete, but 40 of those bets were AGAINST HIS OWN TEAM when he was playing at indiana university. immediately, this threatens the integrity of the sport, and especially because indiana is the hottest team right now as the defending national champion.
the NCAA, which is largely a sham organization these days (they've truly lost their grasp and college athletics are the wild west now) actually enforced their Number 1 Rule and told sorsby his career is over, that he would never play college football again (and, subsequently, that he would never get drafted into the NFL because his college career was cut short).
well, because the NCAA is a husk of its former self, sorsby and texad tech immediately took this to court. MANY athletes have learned these past few seasons that if you can find a judge who's a fan of your team, you can get any NCAA ruling overturned. that's exactly what texas tech did. they filed a suit in Lubbock, where the university is located and where every judge is an alum of texas tech. so sorsby was granted an injunction and will now only be suspended for the first 2 games od the 2026 season (which are alwayd against no-name teams that will be destroyed regardless of who's suspended).
every other school in the country immediately went on the defensive because this is a very clear integretiy issue. so nebraska and georgia (sic em dawgs) released statements saying that all currently-scheduled competitions witb Texas Tech in ANY sport will be canceled and there will be no future schedulings. at least 3 of the major conferences (SEC, Big 10, Big 12) , who account for almost all division 1 sports teams in the country, are also in discussions about cancelling comtests. Texas Tech is part of the Big 12, and there is serious talk of all other teams in the conference shutting texas tech out.
now would probably be time where i say that texas tech is one of the wealthiest programs in college football becaise there is a single billionaire alumnus pouring money into the program with hopes of essentially buying a championship. so texas techs integrity has always been questionable. anyway, the university president put oit a statement that he doesnt care that sorseby violated regulation and that texas tech will sue any school that refuses to play them because it jeopardizes their championship prospects if they're umable to play any games.
this is all just startomg but its so juicy and delicious. the NCAA is going to crumble to dust if they cannot get this injunction overturned. schools like georgia and nebraska have plenty of money so a suit isnt necessarily a concern, but this will absolutely change college football forever. i cant stop reading about it.
update on this: texas tech is claiming that every school who has/is considering cancelling all contests is "afraid" that texas tech is better than them. what's funny about this is that sorsby's stats are average. he is not good enough for this kind of protection. many schools who have already cancelled or are considering it have much better quarterbacks than sorsby. also, texas tech's head coach had said that it's actually ok that sorsby bet against his own team because it "its not murder or assault."
the claim is now that texas texh university just cares so much about brendan sorsbys mental health that they have to sue everyone who calls this an integrity violation. any other school who wouldnt defend an athlete that committed this violation "doesnt care about mental health"