Ice Cold Takes From A Transgender Woman:

Lord, grant me the strength to throw away this box that i'll never use, the courage to throw away this box that i'll never use, and the wisdom to throw away this box that i'll never use

*slaps roof of dragon* This baby can fit so much pure annihilating light in the trunk.

now that's what I call BWEEM

Commander Shepard - Mass Effect song (via miracleofsound)

Found a six leaf clover pressed in a book from 1902.

“average person eats 3 spiders a year” factoid actualy just statistical error. average person eats 0 spiders per year. Spiders Georg, who lives in cave & eats over 10,000 each day, is an outlier adn should not have been counted

One of the earliest lessons I had in 'adventure pacing' for running RPGs was a game where the players got arrested. When told "okay, you're all in individual cells [GM describes cells], what do you do? Look for vents, try to pick the lock?" "Sleep. We've been in continuous action for 36 hours, this is the safest we've been since we airdropped in!"

With Half-Life being talked about again, I do want to reiterate that Gordon Freeman went to work at one morning and; aside from being knocked unconscious and put into stasis a few times; went without sleep for the next six consectutive days

@achronalart, you often know about paint/media oddities: do you know much about Windsor & Newton Pyrrole orange/azo yellow medium? This blogger's sunset nearly got ruined by some odd-sounding clumping behaviour (though it did turn out fantastic in the end).

My man is complete. Another Knight of the Flame to join the Chamber of Purity.

Look at him. He is all nice and shiny and full of deamon killing vibes.

Look at him next to his bro. His buddy oh pal.

Look at his staff.

Look at the fabric. It took me 4 hours to finish.

Look at them together.

The skull would have said hi but its shy. Maybe next time.

Look at the fabric when it was still a wip.

No this post is not done yet.

I need to vent.

Because the orange and the yellow had been such a pain in my concave posterior I need a separate section on this post to adequetly describe my pain.

What the fuck is going on with w&n pyrrole orange abd azo yellow medium?

Like for the realzies as the kids say. I try to thin them down, they thin fine. And after a minute of them being left untouched and unbothered they begin to clump up.

I had to take this much out of the tube until I found paint that didn't have the consistency of dirt.

And at first things where fine until they began repeating bad old habbits like I didn't sqeeze the orange and yellow life out of those tubes 5 minutes ago.

So I improved.

Mixed in with glazing medium.

The paint told me to eat dirt cause it ain't gonna behave.

Mixed in with fluid medium.

The painy told me to eat [redacted] cause it ain't gonne bend to my demands.

So you know what?

I decided to turn around and tell it to bend over cause I ain't gonne give up that easily.

And the plan was for me to leave a decent glob of paint on the side thin a tiny piece of it on a different section of the palette and then apply the thinned paint immediatly before I guess the ghost of painting past comes and plays a trick on me again.

It worked.

But.

*goes very quickly to check the price of those tubes*

26€ for the pyrrole orange

18€ for the azo yellow medium

I won't even bother doing the math. Personally in my humble trashfire opinion I think that when a paint costs this much I shouldn't have to go through those painting gymnastics.

And you might say.

Wow. You are taking it way too personally bro. Calm your negative posterior and sit down.

And I will say no. Because I had to improvise on the fly and scrape off paint clumps from my mini and the blending was almost ruined four times because the paint gained the consistency of a dehydrated husk.

🧘‍♂️

Imma calm myself now.

My boy came out well. The trials and tribulations were part of the journey.

The patience cultivation is needed because the future projects will be far more intense.

Galaxy in Flames

This post contains spoilers for Galaxy in Flames, by Ben Counter, first published as a novel on (as nearly as I can tell) October 10th, 2006.

I'll be honest, I don't have a lot to say about this one. This book is the story of how Horus took the major part of the Sons of Horus, Death Guard, Emperor's Children, and World Eaters Legions to the Istvaan system on false pretenses of putting down another rebellion, and on the planet Istvaan III deployed those portions of them he judged most likely to object to his rebellion against the Emperor in a spearhead strike against the planetary capital, then bombarded the planet from orbit in an attempt to kill all the potential loyalists in a first strike. Saul Tarvitz, an Emperor's Children marine from Horus Rising, does some investigation behind the scenes, figures out the plot, then flees to the planet's surface in time to warn the spearhead, who take shelter underground, allowing many of them to survive the bombardment (virus bombs that otherwise kill all life on the planet, including its six or so billion civillian inhabitants). What follows is then three months of fighting on the surface in the ruins of the planetary capital, with the loyalists in slow retreat, getting whittled down to buy time in the hope that word has gotten out of Horus's treachery and a relief force will be sent to rescue them. No relief force arrives, but their slow defeat does tangle up the traitor forces in time for word of Horus's treachery to make it back to the Imperium. Loken and Torgaddon, the loyalist half of Horus's advisory Mournival council, fight Abaddon and Aximand, the traitor half; Abaddon and Aximand both live, Torgaddon dies, and Loken's fate is left unclear (spoilers he survives and is a character in later books).

It ends like this:

In the meantime, three embedded civilian observers who've been secondary characters in the last two books escape from Horus's flagship the Vengful Spirit to the Eisenstein, the one ship in the fleet held secretly by loyalists, which escapes and will be the subject of the next book. One of them, Euphrati Keeler, is now preaching the Emperor's divinity, manifesting miracles, and being called a saint.

It's essentially an extended action story with a jailbreak B-plot. It makes some odd pacing decisions, basically skipping from the bombardment to the last few day of the siege; I feel like it could have wrung more drama from making the situation more grinding and desperate... but then I'm just describing Helsreach, which is not surprising because Helsreach did this better.

All but one of the traitors have ridden a slip-and-slide down into Saturday morning cartoon villainy in this book; they're now all sneering monsters, constantly internal monologuing their own sense of superiority and expressing petty contempt for everyone around them, including amongst each other. Horus imperiously tells people who were his trusted allies, friends, and close confidants in Horus Rising how cool he is and how they'd better not fail him; those former close confidants and trusted allies just accept that he's right to do that and then treat their former friends and subordinates the same way. It's not even that they feel out of character; they don't really have characters. The exceptions are Lucius, who's like that but more so, because he's one of the series' designated ultra-assholes like Erebus, and Aximand, who kills Torgaddon and feels bad about it. I assume that'll come up later.

Look, it's fine. It does the job it sets out to do. It doesn't fail in any interesting or infuriating ways like False Gods did; the ending is reasonably affecting if you like Saul Tarvitz. It successfully novelizes some lore that was around for decades and moves the events of the series forward. This is one of the most important events in the Heresy and we'll be re-visiting it a lot in future material; I hear some of that future material treats it better than this did.

Euphrati Keeler's role is weird. You would think the book would be interested in playing with tone when it comes to the death of the atheistic Imperial Truth and the birth of the Imperial cult, but like the death of all native life on Istvaan III and the betrayal and murder of the loyalists by their traitor brothers, it's all presented in a very matter-of-fact manner.

This has long been my belief, honestly. I'm convinced somewhere in this there's an analogy between Star Fleet and the Guides/Scouts. Their primary purpose is to give out-doorsy kids something to do.

Just what level of “don’t ever fuck with us” is Starfleet? I mean I used to think Jem Hadar and Klingons being these fierce warrior races was something of an Informed Trait when they kept losing in face-to-face fights with mild-mannered Starfleet officers. But then I realized… it’s actually because Starfleet officers are just that tough.

Just how motivated and ambitious you have to be, as someone coming from a post-scarcity society, to sign up for such arduous training and potential danger? I have to wonder kind of people decide to go through years of rigorous education, constant work and travel, and the possibility of a nasty death when they are guaranteed lives without fear or want right on their home planets.

Could it be that Starfleet may, in fact, be a place for malcontents? Not the kind of small-time malcontent that turns to destruction and exploitation, but the kind of malcontent that is stifled on some level by the cushy existence of their home planet (even while being willing to die to protect it) and wants something more. Something out there and anywhere but here.

Such people are dangerous to the preexisting system unless they have an outlet for their energies. Just to name a few headliner captains, leave the James Kirks, the Jean-Luc Picards, the Kathryn Janeways, the Benjamin Siskos, the Philippa Georgious with nothing to do but enjoy life, and chances are they’d get restless. You can see their innate drive in the paths they didn’t take and in alternate universes: Picard has a brother who was perfectly content to run a vineyard at home, living a comfortable rural existence. Picard could have had that or any of a million other career paths, but he still chose the uncertainty of the stars. The 20th-century version of Benjamin Sisko had a burning ambition to write groundbreaking science fiction despite being struck down over and over again by racism. Georgiou was goddamned Emperor in the Mirror Universe, and Burnham and Lorcas wanted her throne. Clearly these are not people who can sit content and let the world be; they shift the very earth they stand on and reach for the stars any way they can.

So what do you do with world-shakers in paradise? You could choose to kill them or lock them up and “reeducate” them, but that goes against the Federation’s ideals. You could let them live free and potentially climb to the top, but they might make too many changes and disrupt the whole comfortable arrangement.

Or, you could give them a way out–infinite ways out, in fact, into space. Their boundless energy would be structured and channeled in morally acceptable directions by the strict rules and directives of Starfleet, and their ambition to be better than others and be judged by their abilities would find expression in rank and promotions.

These are, of course, the same individuals who would die to protect the Federation when it is threatened by a race of fierce warriors, a mechanical collective, or vast theocratic empire. The same people who would have felt stifled in civilian life and could have threatened the whole system become its fiercest defenders. It’s a brilliant system, really, that meets everyone’s interests and turns a society’s potential threats into its greatest assets.

I don’t think it’s any wonder, looking at these incredibly trained and driven people who can take down Klingons in single combat and engineer their way out of alternate timelines, that non-Federation worlds–and maybe more than a few Federation ones–hover somewhere between suspicious and outright terrified of the Federation’s intentions. Starfleet is one of the major reasons one can make a case for the Federation being a “soft” empire, and I can see why peoples ranging from the Ferengi to the Klingons are so suspicious of them. Because you do not ever fuck with Starfleet.