Who can face the sea and not inherit its lonlines?

also me: *sees one (1) mountain* ohohohoohohohohoh holy SHIT holy fuck that’s a big fuCKING ROCK

me: oohhoh no. no ba.d . where . are teh rocks. wheres the woter. oh god it’s just drit everywhere for a million miles I need TREES dammit where are my lumber guardians

Me: wHy ar e there s.o man y trEes??? They all g.ott so BiG wher is th skY

Me: where is everyone? Where is everything? What great calamity flatten this world?

‘The Shortest Day’ illustrations by Carson Ellis

hello harrenhal nation. if we're all so "smart" and "genre aware" lets see if you can beat the curse😏

— Ursula Le Guin 

armor, 1617

Walter Crane, Francesca, 1902, Colour print from six wood blocks on paper, Victoria & Albert Museum, London

"St. George and the Dragon – Rivière's depiction of an exhausted St. George lying down beside the slain dragon is a radical departure from the triumphant equestrian position in which this saint is traditionally depicted"

“I dreamed of you” is an admission of the reawakening of hope. This one single thing combatting full disillusionment with moral fairness, honor, and knightly values due to their systemic corruption. Knights and heroes pillage and rape, and your king burns innocents alive while their protectors standby and watch. What do you do when every vow contradicts another? The violence inherent to this hypocritical system that you find impossible to overcome makes you resort to nihilistically embracing amorality. You become everything that you despise: a genuinely horrid person. Your cynicism has metastasized for two decades. “It is unfixable. It is inevitable,” you tell yourself. In turn, you position yourself above the flawed moral paradigms in your mind because you have been so disillusioned by them. It leaves you wracked by your conscience, and you are trying to be invulnerable to it as a means to cope with and rationalize your moral corruption. If everything is shit, then there is no point in being a better person, right? AND then you have hope, this slight flicker of idealism, rekindled by a single person. A person that truly embodies everything that you wanted to be as a child. Everything that every young boy dreams of becoming: a true knight. One that overcomes the contradictions of knighthood™ instead of becoming corrupted by them despite all of society despising her for it and continuously blocking her path instead of rewarding it. Because that is what being a true knight is. There are no excuses. The dream is no longer fictitious. That is “no chance and no choice.” He dreamed of her.

— Stephen Berg, from “In It,” In it: Poems (University of Illinois Press, 1986)

Phenakistoscope art by Belgian physicist Joseph Plateau, 1987.

Saint George Killing the Dragon (detail)