mikilavellan

[mikilavellan]

what does your blood taste like to a vampire

[mikilavellan]

One of my favorite hoaxes was in early 1962. There was a musical that debuted in 1961 called Subways are for Sleeping that was doing very poorly. For bizarre reasons (ads were banned in the New York subway system lest people take it as permission to sleep there) and normal (the reviews were poor).

But in 1962 an ad came out full of effusive praise from every prominent theater critic in New York. Every single one. From the Times to the Post, all of the famous theater critics in New York LOVED Subways Are For Sleeping

Except...

One of the papers paid to run this ad noticed something...off. Namely, that the editor knew Richard Watts the theater critic and he wasn't African-American.

It turns out that the producer of the musical had found seven New Yorkers with the same names as the seven biggest theater critics in New York, since while he couldn't lie and say they liked it, he could pay for *a* John Chapman or *a* Robert Coleman to see the musical and quote them next to their photo truthfully, bc how many people even knew what the leading theater critics in NYC looked like?

Turns out the producer had wanted to do this for ages, but had to wait for the NYT's critic to retire bc he couldn't find anyone with the same name. Anyway it worked: it went from being about to close, to running another hundred shows and winning a Tony

Here's the main source for this, btw

[mikilavellan]

Finally…………. still not all of them 🫠

[mikilavellan]

Redraw of my first drawing in exchange for a donation to Gaza

[mikilavellan]

IVE GOT IT GUYS IVE GOT IT

this article was written by the person gerard collaborated with for the language (WHICH BY THE WAY IS CALLED "KEPOSHKA" APPARENTLY) and he included pictures of the full alphabet out of order, so i plugged the missing letters into my chart based on what i already had!

heres the full alphabet as it was given

and here are the english versions of the font and "keposhka hybrid" which is an english language that includes the shapes of keposhka!! there are other things in the article that i didnt include bc im too excited so def read it!

[mikilavellan]

does anybody wanna see an oil pastel drawing of a fat cat sunbathing?

[mikilavellan]

Everyone says MCR won’t play the light behind your eyes but they’ve played boy division twice so a girl can hope

[mikilavellan]

she’s so tired

inspired by a tiktok audio in fact you can find the funnier video version here

[mikilavellan]

pick up your banjo

[mikilavellan]

There's no such thing as "female-presenting autism", but there's got to be a special spectrum for the women who exclusively reproduce with the most autistic men they can find, consider autistic traits to just be "how men are", and are then shocked, astonished and utterly baffled when they have daughters who don't know how to behave in an appropriately feminine (=neurotypical) way.

[mikilavellan]

Gonna drown myself in the river and have the queen of Denmark break the news

First thing you see after you zoom in is how you die

How you dying 👀

[mikilavellan]

[mikilavellan]

they are related i think

[mikilavellan]

Complained about Somerton’s words in this post to a friend and she pointed out that he is acephobic too. Which makes sense because he boiled down queer culture to “getting laid”

Somerton claimed asexuals don’t face the same discrimination gay people do. I’m not watching the video so this isn’t an exact quote but two of the things he included that asexuals supposedly don’t face is conversion therapy or corrective rape.

Like bro. That’s the two biggest things the ace community does face.

Reminder, reminder always, that of my queer identities it’s asexuality that I have been offered conversion therapy for. Thankfully all parties respected my refusal and I had enough knowledge to understand I wasn’t broken.

Back to the point about all the interesting gays dying in AIDS: HELLO? LESBIANS?

We can’t be sure how many female queers died from aids due to general medical neglect. The Yale library website says “65% of HIV-positive women died without ever being diagnosed with AIDS”

https://onlineexhibits.library.yale.edu/s/we-are-everywhere/page/women-and-the-aids-crisis

With that being said, it is really hard to transmit HIV via AFAB lesbian sex, so even the sexually active, “interesting” lesbian was more likely to survive the pandemic than her gay brothers. The majority of elder queers I know are cis women.

Lesbians were on the front lines of the fight against AIDS! I wouldn’t dare reduce those survivors as boring.

Then again this guy is aphobic so I wouldn’t be surprised if he’s misogynistic or lesbophobic or a number of other terrible takes and he forgot about the sapphics entirely.

constantly devastated by the world we lost due to aids

[mikilavellan]

The implications of Karlach being one of Zariel's favorites

When I say things like, "Karlach is a ruthless and efficient killer prior to us meeting her; the set up for an "evil" path for her has always been there," people don't understand how I come to those conclusions.

It's mainly because people don't know who Zariel is and the layered implications of Karlach being one her favorites are.

Zariel was a solar (the highest order of D&D angel basically) who was tasked with overseeing the Blood War. Because she preferred to be where the action was and found it hypocritical to just passively observe from the sides like what most celestials tend do, she went down to Avernus to try to end the Blood War once and for all. And it takes quite a lot of idealism and confidence (one might say hubris even) to defy celestial orders and believe that it was possible to end a never-ending war if only a righteous and powerful outsider intervened.

She enlisted an elite army from Elturel called the Hellriders (the organization that Zevlor is a remnant of) to help her fight the Blood War. And when a solar descends from the heavens and asks you to take up a holy mission with her, what paladin is gonna say no? So, a lot of Hellriders probably romanticized this quest and thought it would be a most glorious heroic battle.

It was not.

Mortal human wars already suck, but imagine one waged between armies of demons and devils. It's ugly. It's brutal. There is no point to it but carnage and violence. It is designed to rot your soul in ways many mortals aren't equipped to handle. And so, the Hellriders who survived the initial onslaught turned tail and deserted Zariel in battle.

This is why when you save him in the mind flayer colony, Zevlor talks about how a Hellrider "has no oath," which is a soft way of putting that any surviving Hellrider is an Oathbreaker. They broke their oath to Zariel.

(The descent that Descent to Avernus is about is Zariel enacting vengeance upon the city of Elturel by dragging it down to the Hells. To her, this is what they deserve for what they did to her. To the her, this is enforcing justice and the oaths the Hellriders swore to her.)

Zevlor's dialogue and abandonment of the tieflings becomes so much more resonant when you know this history. It also makes the PC's dialogue options make so much more sense when you know this isn't the first time he's forsaken someone he had promised to protect.

Anyways, Zariel dies, her unconscious form is taken by Asmodeus, she rises as a corrupted version of herself, and Asmodeus makes her the new Archduchess of Avernus who basically keeps her old celestial job of overseeing the Blood War but now she's a devil whose idealistic righteousness has been twisted into vengeful fury.

Zariel is very much not your typical type of devil. She retains the righteousness from when she was once a solar and considers herself a cosmic martyr. She doesn't do the plotting and politicking and scheming that other archdevils flourish in. Her whole thing is this feeling of superiority over both devils and angels because unlike them, she's willing to get her hands dirty — to burn and corrupt herself in the name of her cause. You know how some edgy anti-heroes become their enemy in order to defeat them? That's what Zariel thinks she's doing.

She will never backstab you, but it is her burning mission to front stab you. Ruthlessly. Mercilessly. Painfully. All means justify her end. Ironically, it's this zeal that keeps perpetuating the Blood War. It's poetic. It shows how the Hells are a mirror of the Heavens. Yadda, yadda, yadda...

SO! What does it say about Karlach that this devil, if not favors her, at the very least sees her as a prized possession? Because Zariel has many war machines that she doesn't hesitate to count as acceptable losses. There is no sacrifice too great, after all, in furthering her cosmic cause.

Well, it shows that Karlach is extremely resilient and extremely useful in the Blood War, but also that she's reliable — that never once has she turned her back on a fight like the Hellriders. We know that Karlach is idealistic — that her naiveté and willingness to trust others is what damned her to the Hells. But we also know that Karlach can be reckless and sometimes be dismissive of the cost of that reckless power.

(Larian definitely could have fleshed out Karlach's soul coin plot more, but there was some really juicy bones to having a cambion force a messenger to tell Karlach the backstory behind each soul for every coin given to her. When thinking of how to best torment her, this is what a devil comes up with. It implies that Karlach would rather use soul coins indiscriminately and that it is actual torture to remind her that these souls she's snuffing out to fuel her engine were people who had desires and fell into bad circumstances just like her because they made foolish mistakes to fulfill those desires.)

The more I played and the more I learned about Karlach, the more I realized: Oh, you're not just one of Zariel's many toys, are you? You are Zariel — or at least Zariel on a smaller cosmological scale.

Zariel's story actually has a lot in common with a BG3 companion's "ascension paths" in that the road to becoming a powerful being at the expense of others is paved with brick after brick of rational and even altruistic justifications.

Karlach's "evil path" could have very well gone down the same path that Zariel did. She consumes so many soul coins that the heat of her fury consumes her. The fires make her powerful but they burn away the thing in her heart that made her want to be powerful to begin with.

... But Larian kinda dropped the ball in Act 3, so instead Karlach just dies or becomes a mind flayer instead. Enjoy, gamers!

[mikilavellan]

constantly devastated by the world we lost due to aids

[mikilavellan]

six of crows au where everything is the same except-