#(ish. bc its only an excerpt)

[apopcornkernel]

And that was when a flash of gold whistled past her ear, barely grazing her skin.

Dihya stood frozen, could barely even register the spear that had almost pierced her throat, could barely hear past the roaring of her pulse—

—and somewhere, the dainty clinking of a crown, tumbling golden down the steps to land in a growing pool of blood—

“Trespasser,” said the trees, “this is your first warning.”

On pure instinct, Dihya looked up.

Crouched in the branches was a woman, her raiment cut from evening cloth, trimmed in gold. Curling around her head was more gold, in the form of a crescent headpiece.

The vision of the bloody palace steps faded fully away.

“I’m sorry?” Dihya managed.

“You do not belong in the labyrinth,” the goddess uttered, low and dangerous. “Leave at once, and you may yet escape unharmed.”

Dihya frowned. “What labyrinth?”

The goddess made a disapproving sound. “The dream of the forest maze,” she said slowly, as if talking to an idiot. “This realm that you have haphazardly tripped into.”

“Oh.” Suddenly, a lot of things made sense. “Oh.”

“Well?”

“I...” Dihya hesitated. It should be easy, simple—she, of all people, had a healthy fear for the divine. There was no need to anger the goddess.

But they were still after her. Fleeing the desert had surely helped impede their hunt, but simply crossing the Wall of Samiel did not guarantee her safety. And if she had truly stumbled into a dream, well—

“I can’t.” Where else was safer than a dream?

“Ha... I am disappointed each time.” The goddess rose up to her full height. “Ready your blade, then. I will have myself a fair hunt.”

excerpt from a wip—an au based off of viridiscent and faramarz from the lore of deepwood memories, wandering evenstar, hunter's path, and light of foliar incision

dihya, bodyguard of the homayani princess dunyarzad, is forced to flee the desert after the homayani family’s enemies massacre them and seize the throne for themselves.

kandake is the protector of the dream of the forest labyrinth, a realm existing parallel with apam woods.

kandake’s duty is to drive the trespassing dihya out—or failing that, kill her. but night after night, she cannot bring herself to deal the killing blow.

[rassicas]

This is maybe a dumb question but I was wondering if you have any thoughts on why the male octoling voice sounds deeper than the voices of any other player-character options? Maybe it’s just me but I went from playing a female octo to a male octo and the voices sounds pretty different, and I don’t hear as a big of a difference between female and male inkling voices

I don't recall there being commentary given on the voices of the player inklings (unless I'm wrong bc i haven't translated the sound design interviews, only read them) but my best guess is that for starters, the Inkling boy and girl were designed come off as more androgynous...

-- Both the Inkling boy and girl designs give off an androgynous impression, neither with an extremely strong masculine nor feminine quality. What influenced that choice? Inoue : Women who love skateboarding and punk rock tend to have this determined, tomboyish look, so that's the kind of atmosphere we went for.  In the beginning, we were thinking of using only the girl as the player character, so that was the design completed first. Nogami : However, we thought that some people might want to choose a character with the same gender as themselves in order to get emotionally involved, so we created the boy's design.

...while the playable Octolings are intended to come off as more mature than the Inklings, so I believe that plays into them coming off as more masculine/feminine respectively. excerpt from a 2018 famitsu interview:

-- The voices of Octoling girl and boy are slightly more mature than those of the Inklings. What idea did you have in mind when you created their voices, and what were your instructions? Yamamoto: Although they're about the same age as the Inklings, we made both the Octoling girl and boy seem slightly more mature to express their diligence and seriousness. I worked together with Ikejiri, the designer, to create voices that fit with the following backgrounds. Girl: She has a big sister-ish look and mature, feminine appeal. Has a calm personality. Boy: Has an unstable and peculiar feeling to him, like a boy whose voice is still changing, but in the latter half of that change. He's steadfast, yet a bit outgoing and mischievous.

Octoling boy supposed to sound more mature=voice made to sound like its almost done changing=deeper voice

[ncrosha]

i'm going through siege of x-41 again and man the writer just fucking nails josh as a character. and somehow gives him an even worse life than the one marvel did.

and fuck man.

CW FOR BREAKING BONES, KIDNAPPING, TORTURE (alluded to, minimal detail) and allusions to slavery.

so tl;dr that first day his powers kick in things play out differently. josh was still with duncan and the reavers. it did not go well for him. he's sold off to wolfram and though some things are super different, like m-day didn't hit, josh is not brought to the x-men until after schism.

oh and wolfram? wolfram appears to be this wolfram. who fucking tortured him into figuring out he could use his powers on himself. josh's powers basically shoot off down an entirely different development path bc he'd been forced to learn to adapt and evolve his mutation.

i honestly love it because he just comes into the story already deep into his post-xforce character arc. and he's so much more fucked up about it because he can't even say he did it for a good cause. the harm wasn't unintenentionally done, or done out of necessity, it was done because it could be and he's got to live with that.

it also forces him to very seriously reflect on his own actions and choices to join the reavers. he understands the external factors in the choice (his age, his friend group, the general societal stance on mutanthood, his parents politics are even mentioned) but not in a way that excuses it. just something that gives context to how someone makes that choice when they're just going along with the crowd and don't actually hold that hatred in their heart. and it's just so good.

he's constantly saying the wrong thing because he lived the last year of his life being a tool to be used, and now he's relearning to person and trying and failing to figure out new social nuances he knows nothing about while also trying to figure out if he can ever atone for being bigoted against them in the first place. he hasn't forgive himself so he doesn't understand how anyone could forgive him in turn.

and now he knows what it is to be hated for being a mutant and he experienced it completely separate from other mutants. he's got no support system and the one he tries to make ends up being very quickly pulled away from him because blindfold sees how laurie dies in 616 and tells him you stay the fuck away from her you asshole.

like he stumbles in to mutant society after a year-ish of enduring the most heinous shit you can imagine and he's like - oh yeah nah everybody here is totally right to hate me and write me off. i suck. i suck so much how could i even think about doing that. i'm not going to even try to justify it. i'm just going to curl in on myself and try to be as useful and out of people's way as i can be and its just

some other random excerpts.

also this. a precog who only sees dark futures tells him she hasn't been sleeping much - and now she's figured out its because of him. of all his terrible potential.

and he also knows that part of his powers more. probably better than he ever does in 616, because he was never given any other way to explore his abilities.

[fatehbaz]

For posterity, from my earlier/first answer to this question, regarding other big creatures and devegetation in the eastern Mediterranean, just to get all of this stuff in one post/place:

How dramatic was the deforestation?

[Excerpt:] While some texts merely allude to environmental degradation, such as the Sumerian gardener Shukallituda's experimentation with agroforestry in the wake of deforestation [...] others contain explicit description of forest clearance, including the claim of Gudea of Lagash (2141-2122 BC), who "made a path" into the forest, "cut its cedars," and sent cedar rafters floating "like giant snakes" down the Euphrates [...]. Despite declining biological diversity and productivity, the annals of Ashurnasirpal II [king of Assyria from 883-859 BC] describe abundant wildlife and a substantial inventory of domesticated livestock. He claimed to have slain 450 lions, killed 390 wild bulls, decapitated 200 ostriches; caught thirty elephants in pitfalls; and captured alive fifty wild bulls, 140 ostriches, and twenty adult lions. In addition, he received five live elephants as tribute, and "organized herds of wild bulls, lions, ostriches, and [...] monkeys." At a banquet on the occasion of the inauguration of the palace at Kalhu (biblical Calah), his 69,574 guests dined on 1200 head of cattle and 1000 calves; 11,000 sheep and 16,000 lambs; 500 stags; 500 gazelles; 1000 ducks; 1000 geese; 1000 mesuku birds, 1000 qaribu birds, 20,000 doves, and 10,000 other assorted small birds; 10,000 assorted fish; and 10,000 jerboas - along with enormous quantities of beer and wine, milk, cheese, eggs, bread, fruit and vegetables, and a vast number of other offerings. [...] Hence, many indigenous societies were disrupted, reconfigured, and dominated prior to formal colonial annexation. [...] In Western Asia, patterns of [ecological] disturbance and [social] domination emerge with the complex interplay of ascendant [...] aristocracies in the fifth millennium BC - patterns that cascade through history. [End of excerpt.] Source: Jeffrey A. Gritzner. "Environment, Culture, and the American Presence in Western Asia: An Exploratory Essay." 2010.

---

If the description is to be taken as authentic, this deforestation was intense enough that cedar trunks floated down the Euphrates "like giant snakes". Assyrian princes caught elephants in pitfall traps for sport.

The cedar forests of the Fertile Crescent probably hosted oryx and gazelles with nearby populations of Syrian elephant, Syrian ostrich (Parthians gifted ostriches to Chinese courts; ostrich art appears in Tang-era China), the Asiatic lion, cheetahs, leopards, and the Caspian tiger.

Extinction of some of these creatures only happened very recently within the past century-ish: Tigers, lions, cheetah, caracal, and leopard were all alive in Persia, Anatolia, the Levant, the Caucasus, and Mesopotamia within the last 125 years.

OK so I actually have a better answer, now. The other post, where I initially responded to this message, addresses the forests of the Fertile Crescent, the effects of devegetation on other large creatures (tigers, elephants, etc.) that historically lived in the Levant and Mesopotamia, the extinction of rhinos in most of China, and the possibility that Stephanorhinus (a Pleistocene rhino from a now-extinct genus) survived until the early Holocene. But here, I want to talk about rhinos in North Africa. In my initial response, in naming Stephanorhinus hemitoechus as a potential inhabitant of the Middle East, I was distracted and thinking about rhinos living in the Levant/Assyria and Mesopotamia specifically. If the question is “have rhinos lived in the Middle East during the Holocene?” … then I think it’s important to emphasize this: The extinct Ceratotherium mauritanicum (in the same genus as white rhinos) and the still-living Ceratotherium cottoni (the “northern white rhino” or “Nile rhino”) were both alive in Morocco and Algeria during the Holocene. And the northern white rhino probably survived in the Sahara for longer. Holocene rock art across the Sahara depicts rhinos. Some petroglyphs, perhaps as young as 7,000 years old, depict rhinos in Morocco, Libya, and Egypt.

Short answer: There were white rhinos, possibly two different species of white rhinos, living in North Africa and near the Mediterranean coast in the Holocene long after the construction of Gobekli Tepe.

The “rhinos of the Middle East” are white rhinos. Within a matter of a few years, they will no longer exist on this planet.

As of 2022, there are only two remaining northern white rhinos left alive. This species will be extinct, vanished, very soon, within our lifetimes.

And it turns out that this so-called northern white rhino, Ceratotherium cottoni, seems to have inhabited Egypt, Libya, Algeria, and the Mediterranean coast of North Africa during the early Holocene.

In media campaigns and textbooks, this creature has long been a prominent example of a “critically endangered species.”

The “northern white rhino” is also called the “Nile rhino”. This creature a unique subspecies, Ceratotherium simum cottoni. However some researchers instead consider it to be a unique species of its own, Ceratotherium cottoni. In 2018, “Sudan,” the last male of the species, passed away. The two remaining northern white rhinos, Fatu and the older Najin, are both over the age of 20. In October 2021, Najin was “retired,” or determined to be ineligible for breeding.

—

We have no evidence that Stephanorhinus survived into the Holocene, or any later than 14,000 years ago. But if we consider the wider “Middle East” and incorporate the Mediterranean coast of North Africa, then rhinos were still present until at least 9,500-ish years ago. Long story short:

Basically, even if Stephanorhinus went extinct before the end of the Pleistocene, Ceratotherium mauritanicum could have been alive on the Mediterranean coast of North Africa for several thousand more years. And then even if Ceratotherium mauritanicum went extinct at the beginning of the Holocene, it remains possible that remnant populations of the still-living northern white rhino lived in North Africa (since we know they previously lived across the entire region as far as Morocco). Finally, even the still-living black rhino may have lived farther north into Egypt before the ascent of the Old Kingdom.

Ancient rock art of a rhino in the Draa valley of Morocco:

The rhinos depicted in the early-Holocene rock art could be either the extinct C. mauritanicum or locally-extinct populations of the extant white rhino.

Furthermore, considering the “Green Sahara” of the middle Holocene was much wetter and featured savanna landscapes, the still-living black rhinoceros may also have had a wider distribution, at least up until the time that the Sahara began to dry again which coincidentally aligns with the time of earliest dynastic Egypt. White rhinos (both the extinct C. mauritanicum and the living white rhinos) seem better adapted to dryland environments, like those of the Sahara and North Africa. And black rhinos seem more associated with seasonal woodland and more-vegetated landscapes. But the “Green Sahara” may have suitable to some black rhinos.

However, rhinos remain conspicuously absent from Egyptian depictions of the lower Nile. Therefore, I doubt rhinos persisted anywhere near the Fertile Crescent after 3000 BC.

Here’s the “Green Sahara” landscape, featuring “Lake Mega-Chad” and large areas of vegetated savanna and wetland:

—

So here’s the geographical gap we’re talking about.

And this might appear conspicuous, given that within human history, other large mammals like elephants lived in both Africa and Asia and also in the Fertile Crescent between them; lions and cheetahs and leopards lived in both Africa and Asia and also in the Fertile Crescent between them.

Distribution map of the 6 living species/subspecies of rhinoceros (made with working-class GIS, MS Paint, lol):

That’s what rhino distribution looks like “in history.” Today, rhinos are extinct across like 99% of all of that distribution range, though.

Anyway, here’s what the Late Pleistocene in North Africa looks like.

Note that I haven’t included the woolly rhino, the Siberian unicorn,  or Stephanorhinus mercki, all three of which lived farther north in Europe, Central Asia, and northern East Asia.

Note that at 12,000 years ago, the northern white rhino’s distribution is wider than it is today.

Even the straightforward W!ikipedia article about Ceratotherium mauritanicum explicitly proposes that the rhino was still alive during the “earliest Holocene” and disappeared “by the Mesolithic.” Now, even when following-up with academic sources, I have questions about how the distinction between two species is being made. Here’s what we know:

- Ceratotherium mauritanicum was definitely alive during the Late Pleistocene, and maybe later, and was definitely present in Morocco.

- The closely-related Ceratotherium cottoni, the still-living “northern white rhinoceros,” was also living in Morocco and northern Algeria during the Late Pleistocene, alongside C. mauritanicum.

- Rhinos are depicted in ancient artwork/petroglyphs from the early Holocene in Morocco.

My question is: If C. mauritanicum and C. cottoni (a still-living species) were so closely-related and living in the same place, can we really know which species of rhino is depicted in the ancient rock art?

Furthermore, it’s still possible, also, that the still-living black rhinoceros ranged further northward in the “Green Sahara” during the early Holocene. It has been suggested that some rock art in Egypt, east of the Nile, depicts the black rhino, but I don’t know where this oft-repeated claim comes from?

So finally, this is my guess at the presence of rhinos by the time of pre-dynastic Egypt:

Anyway, if you want to do some research, these are sites with artwork depicting rhinoceros from pre-dynastic and/or early dynastic Egypt, the early Mesolithic, “Bubalus” style locations, or the early Holocene generally (from maybe 8000 years before present, or younger):

L’Assif N’Talaisane in the High Atlas of Morocco; Yagour in the High Atlas of Morocco; Messak-Tadrart area of Libya; Aramat area of Libya; Gilf Kebir in Egypt

Elephants are even more common in early Holocene art from the Sahara. A lot of these sites also have petroglyphs of giraffes, too, including the “Giraffe Caves” at Gebel Uwaynat at the Egypt-Sudan frontier.

A giraffe in ancient rock art in Libya:

“The last humid period […] end[ed] about the time of the first Pharaoh in Egypt.”

Even without rhino presence, here’s the milieu of creatures known to be present in the eastern Mediterranean in the Holocene up until at least the Bronze Age:

Asian elephant (in Assyria, eastern Anatolia, and Mesopotamia); African elephant (in Nubia, Kush, Punt and probably also in Algeria until Rome’s conquering of Carthage); aurochs; hippopotamus (in Nile delta, Sinai, and at times in Phoenicia/Lebanon); gazelles; Arabian oryx; Asiatic lion (widespread, including Greece and Balkans until 500 BC and Mesopotamia until 20th century); Caspian tiger (in eastern Anatolia, the Caucasus, Hyrcania, Kwarazmia, in some places until the mid-20th-century); Arabian leopard and Persian leopard (both still present); caracal; cheetah (widespread though probably intermittent, still alive in Persia); Syrian ostrich (now extinct); sacred crocodile (in Nile delta, coastal Palestine, and isolated oases in Tunisia and Morocco)

—

Anyway. After the construction of Gobekli Tepe, after the decline of (most!) woolly mammoths, after the end of the Pleistocene, as “civilizations” emerged in Egypt and Mesopotamia, was there a rhinoceros that lived naturally in the eastern Mediterranean? Probably, yes. The white rhino. Maybe two different kinds of white rhinos. But they were probably gone by the time of dynastic Egypt. And of that entire lineage of North African white rhinos, only two individuals survive on the planet today.

We will live to see the final end of North African white rhinos.

[amandagaelic]

Fanfic Tag (bc, Sunday)

I was tagged by @waitingforthestarstofall and @disappearinginq who are two of my favorite enablers over here. And according to at least one of them, there are no rules in this game, which means my replying many moons later is all good (right?). 

Questions:

Ao3 Name: gaelicspirit (same on FF.net)

Fandoms: Supernatural, The Young Riders, White Collar, Hawaii Five-0, Sons of Anarchy (all only on FF.net), The Musketeers, Daredevil, Teen Wolf, Timeless, MacGyver, Magnum, P.I. (on both Ao3 and FF.net)

Number of fics: 75 (+ 1 WIP)

1. Fic you spent the most time on: From Yesterday

2. Fic you spent the least time on: Raincheck

3. Longest Fic:  From Yesterday   (286,050 words)

4. Shortest Fic: Sacrifice (2,315 words)

5. Most hits: Devil to Pay (on Ao3...no clue on FF.net)

6. Most kudos: Devil’s Own (huh, I’ve never compared these stats before...maybe I should write more Daredevil)

7. Most comment threads:  Devil’s Own (on Ao3), Ramble On (on FF.net)

8. Fave Fic you wrote: This is a toughie. I love them all when I’m writing them...I think maybe it’s a 3-way tie between War Scars, From Yesterday, and Conairt. The first two were as AU as I generally get (I’ve a tendency to be a bit canon-bound) and that was fun to explore possibilities with those characters, and the 3rd was basically the story I wanted to read but couldn’t find anywhere...so I wrote it myself. 

9. Fic you want to rewrite/expand on: Hmmm. I don’t know that I’d actually rewrite any of them. They exist in my mind the moment they’re being created and then once out there in the world for all to see, that’s who they are, scars and all. I have occasionally thought about expanding on my White Collar story, Fortunate Son to explore what happened next. Though, now that the show has ended, it would be 100% AU. I guess anything I would really want to take further would be a new story in and of itself, so it wouldn’t really count as “expanding” on it. 

10. Share a bit of your WIP or share a story idea that you’re planning:

I started another MacGyver fic last weekend called “Hello to the Night.” I’m about 25K-ish words into it and still playing it out. It’s a bit of pandemic therapy for me, to be honest. It’s really hard to get out of my own head these days, it seems.  Premise: Set  around S4 episodes 9 and 10. Turns out emotional trauma + concussions + experimental drugs don’t mix quite as easily as one might think. Mac’s dark side does more than toss him a creepy grin from the other side of a window when getting “lost in his head” is taken up a notch.

Excerpt:

Another streak of light cut like a white-hot tracer bullet across the darkest part of the sky.

“You out here making wishes on shooting stars?” Bozer asked, tapping the back of his fingers into the palm of his opposite hand.

It caught his attention then that Mac was clad only in a T-shirt and shorts; it almost looked like they were the clothes he’d gone to sleep in, not grabbed for a planned midnight run.

“These aren’t stars,” Mac corrected him, his voice sounding strangely detached from the moment. “That light is caused by dust and rock falling through the atmosphere and burning up—happens when the Earth passes through a trail of debris left by a comet as it orbits the Sun.”

Bozer felt his mouth tug up in a reflexive grin. “Is that right?”

“My dad gave me my first telescope when I was eight,” Mac continued in the same, oddly modulated tone, as if he were speaking in a dream. “Showed me how to find the constellations, track comets. I took it apart one day and he wouldn’t help me put it back together again. Said I obviously needed to know how it worked, so I should figure it out.”

Bozer remembered that telescope. He remembered James MacGyver’s stern face as Mac worked to rebuild it from the collection of parts scattered around them in piles organized by size and use. He remembered fearing that face.

“I did, too. Figure it out.”

“Yeah, I know, man,” Bozer smiled, watching Mac watch the starts. He frowned a little when he saw a hard shiver chase its way through Mac’s slim frame, though the blond man didn’t seem to notice.

“It’s like they were mine, y’know?”

Bozer’s frown deepened. “What—”

“And for a little bit there, it felt like he gave them to me,” Mac continued as though Bozer hadn’t spoken. “Like the whole universe was mine because he let me see it. But…,” Mac shook his head, his eyes distant as they tracked down from the sky and skimmed the horizon in front of them. “Then he took them away. He took them with him when he left. And I can’t figure out how to get them back. I keep trying, but…they’re just…,” he looked back up at the night sky, “they’re so far away.”

Bozer reached out and rested his fingertips on Mac’s bare arm, flinching back a little when he felt how chilled his friend’s skin was. He couldn’t see it before, but with that touch he realized Mac was shivering consistently now.

“Hey, Mac, you okay, man?”

Mac blinked, looking down at Bozer’s fingers on his arm, then frowned. He glanced around him slowly, tracking over to his left until their eyes met.

“Bozer?”

“Yeah?”

“What…what are you doing here?”

Bozer blinked, his eyebrows climbing his forehead. He tightened his grip on Mac, wrapping his fingers around his friend’s forearm until he felt the other man’s shivers through the bones of his hand.

“I was looking for you,” Bozer said truthfully, trying to keep the worry from his voice as he watched Mac look around him, over his shoulder to where the Griffith’s domed building loomed in the shadows, then back across the dark horizon to the lights of Los Angeles. “You decide to go for a midnight run or something?”

Mac swallowed hard, reaching up with a trembling hand to rub at his forehead. Bozer recalled his tired voice claiming his headache had a headache earlier that day—no, last night—in the lab. He dropped his hand and looked around again and Bozer realized what he was seeing was a growing awareness and recognition—and it frightened him.

“What the hell are we doing out here?” Mac asked, his voice sounding thin, baffled.

“Mac,” Bozer gripped his arm tighter. “I found you out here.”

Mac looked at him, blue eyes cloudy with confusion. “What?”

“I found you, man.”

Mac darted his tongue out, wetting dry lips, his shivering increasing until Bozer saw his teeth start to chatter.

“I don’t…I don’t remember…,” he shook his head. “I don’t remember leaving the house.”

Bozer folded his lower lip against his teeth, biting it to keep whatever noise that wanted to escape a prisoner. “Well, how ‘bout we head back there now?”

Mac nodded shakily and moved to slide off the fence. Bozer saw in a split second the ground was too far below him for Mac to land safely. He thrust out his arm and braced his friend, swinging his leg back over the fence to the paved walkway and pulling Mac backwards with him. Mac scrambled to find his footing, standing on trembling legs as he gripped Bozer’s shoulders.

“Holy shit,” Mac took a stuttering breath as if he’d forgotten that was what his lungs were supposed to do, straightening slowly. “How the hell did I…?”

Bozer shook his head. “How about we don’t worry about that right now, huh?”

Mac nodded, his eyes still on the drop-off on the other side of the fence.

“C’mon, man,” Bozer turned Mac toward the parking lot, keeping one hand on his friend’s arm, the other on his lower back. “It’s late and I’m cold.” He wasn’t, but it was always easier to get Mac to act if he was doing so on behalf of someone else.

“Yeah,” Mac nodded. “Yeah, sure, of course. Boze, I’m—”

“Don’t,” Bozer pushed him gently forward. “Don’t worry about it, man. Yesterday was weird for everybody.”

“Yesterday?” Mac asked, the word tripping out on a faltering breath as his shivers increased.

Bozer pressed his fingertips harder into Mac’s lower back, feeling the corded muscles there tighten against the pressure. “Yeah, y’know…crazy DARPA drug, Tesla weapon….”

“That was yesterday?” Mac asked, blinking owlishly at him.

“Time flies when you’re trippin’, man.”

Mac didn’t reply and didn’t resist as Bozer continued to guide him toward the parking lot. He stumbled over his own feet—any coltish grace that once guided him having vacated in the wake of whatever this was. Bozer steadied him, noting that while Mac didn’t quite lean into him, he needed the support.

“Easy, man,” Bozer wrapped an arm around Mac’s slim waist, pulling him flush against his side. “You’re moving like me after a night of whiskey.”

“That…doesn’t sound good,” Mac returned in the same spacey, confused tone. “You make some pretty bad choices ‘cause of whiskey.”

As they reached the car, Bozer shifted his hip to keep Mac propped up, pulling the passenger door open and maneuvering his friend into the seat.

“Yeah, well,” he reached across Mac’s shivering form to fasten his seat belt, “in whiskey’s defense, I’ve also made some pretty questionable choices completely sober.”

Mac huffed a semi-amused chuckle, his head dropping back against the seat. Bozer jogged around the back of the car to climb behind the wheel.

“Let’s crank that heat up, how ‘bout—” Bozer stopped as he glanced over and saw Mac had quite literally passed out, head tilted against the window.

His hands lay lax in his lap, fingers curled toward his palms, the left one twitching in what looked like an attempt to reach out, but not quite getting there.

“Jesus, Mac,” Bozer breathed, turning up the heat anyway as his friend shivered even in his sleep. He shrugged out of his hoodie, draping it over Mac’s bare arms and t-shirt covered torso.

Tagging: Okay, if you’ve already been tagged--or literally have no interest in this--feel free to ignore. This is a bit of a free-for-all here. @thethistlegirl @impossiblepluto @flowing-river24 @panchostokes @nativestarwrites @beamirang @21forestglades @blazeofobscurity @angus-mac-intosh @purplecolouredglasses @writtenbyblair @dashboardonfire @bands-space-and-monsters-oh-my @macgyverfever @thekristen999

[wardingdreams]

vii is dragging me back into pony hell, so here’s some discord excerpts of me screaming some more about Luna during the black moon.

I'm still fiddling around with the headcanon as a whole, but as of now, Luna in that state is very...  disconnected? Like a state of disassociation, because of the damage a flare in her emotions could cause, and also just because of how suffocating that power ultimately is.  It's not something she ever learned how to really deal with because she always did it alone.  Not only is it not Celestia's realm, she does already cover Luna's duties during that night / subsequent day.

So she hasn't really accepted it as being her own / herself, like a disconnect between her and the moon, ironically at the moment when they have never more been the same. 

 Twilight was made for pure magic of that level, if not more.  Luna never truly was, not raw like this. She's more so an extension of a force that has its own body. Twilight is the entirety of a cosmic force  woven into mortal flesh. 

They're so similar and yet different at the same time.

But despite not being quite "present", Luna is still aware enough of what's happening and such; she's just very empty as a person to make space for all that magic. She'd absolutely evade Twilight's attempts to take any of it, but the insistence in turn also cause those emotions to flare; the very thing she's trying to avoid. 

BUT A THOUGHT I'M HAVING, that unlike Twilight's raw and arcane power, the pure building block of magic, the moon's Lunar energy manifests much different.  Whereas Twilight's would turn to chaotic destruction if it got out of control, I'm debating that the Lunar magic would not only bathe the surroundings in its cold light, but also take the warmth from it; that it turns the world into a reflection of its base existence, without all the elements at play, such as warmth and color.

Yesterday I learned the curious trivia that creatures who live only in caves are usually white / pink-ish in color bcs they don't need any sun, and just this correlation between the cold dark and absence of warmth with color is 10/10

me crying about the idea that their surroundings are beginning to turn cold as Luna keeps trying to evade Twilight's support, but the second they touch horns, all that cold hue receives a pink-ish tint.

Equestrian creatures are such magical beings, any one of them would become such a husk when exposed to pure lunar energy. It's not that it zaps their magic like Tirek does, but it just.... desatures it. It takes the warmth, the connection between it all and disrupts the harmony necessary for them to exist. 

Twilight being able to stand it is because their forces are equals; they are both building blocks of the universe, one cannot subdue the other without genuine force. 

Them sharing their magic brings back the equilibrium, and instead of the forces trying to outdo one another, they intertwine as it was intended.

I think the remaining struggle is because even though they're intertwining and in balance, they're still only two aspects of creation. It is missing at least the sun.

Not to mention that Twilight isn't made for lunar magic, and Luna isn't made for the raw arcane.

[vitosscaletta]

🍓🍓🍓🍓🍓🍓 Christian, Helena, Gina, Georgie, and Aaliyah!!!

THANK U!!!! sorry this is so late :(

CHRISTIAN

IDK if I ever said this but his whole mansion in Bel Air is modeled after the interior in Versailles - still modern but with STRONG Baroque vibes

His favorite european city - besides Versailles of course - is Venice 😳 he lived there for some time in the 18th century and loved it there... he misses it a lot

He has a ghoul.... his name is Claude, the only living descendant of his favorite sister :(( Christian tracked him down in the early 1900s in Paris and eventually offered him to embrace him, but Claude was like nah... I wanna see the sunlight dude. They’re still living together in Bel Air since they’re the only family they have left :0 

Hangs out in LA nightclubs a lot - not the goth ones we see in the game.. the sexy ones where rich people hang out, he mostly feeds from them there.. slurp slurp!

Can speak english, french, italian, german and a few words in latin.. op king. being that old gives you time to learn languages ig

Went into an overdramatic state of fake depression after Helena dumped him.. didn’t leave his mansion at all, just hung around in his room, not eating (... drinking blood..), moping and talking about killing himself bc Toreadors are fucked up. Claude is like.. get up dude -_-

HELENA

I also dont know if I ever said this but even though shes not the fledgling.. Heather is still her ghoul (she was in the santa monica clinic to get somehting done for la croy and yeah).. she regrets it because Heather is soooo annoying and does all of this shit for her like calling her her master and all that and it’s just so uncomfortable. Especially when she offers her her student loans. Helena is like “oh my god I can’t take this what the fuck?????????? this is yours. okay you know what.. if you insist.. i will take it 😏”

She doesn’t have the heart to kick her out though.. mostly because Helena misses having a roommate :c

The only people who were genuinely sad about her death are her mom and sister jhdsjhds.. the fake rich friends she had before her embrace didn’t really give a fuck about her until they realized they could get attention through it & started posting sob stories on myspace. Helena is mad about it.. those hoes treated her like a third wheel when she was alive 😤

she probably ends up “accidentally” telling her family she’s alive.. 

what annoys her the most about her death isn’t even the fact that she was killed.. it’s the fact that she didn’t die in a beautiful way, she was just some random nobody with no friends or fame who may have been killed by her boyfriend (except that the official story is that she never arrived at his house). Christian couldn’t have waited until she was an established actress so it could have been more poetic, nah he had to embrace her when nobody cared :((

She liked Christian’s Bel Air mansion but honestly?? her weird old apartment was still better - it wasn’t big and the furniture was a mess but it was still her home

GINA

Grew up with a single mother because her father died early in an accident... he was a construction worker or something :c her mom worked as a maid for a rich family until she got fired for stealing from them jdfkjsd

gets to rapture by assuming some rich girl’s identity. idk how she does that but.. somehow she does. Of course nobody knows about that, it’s her big secret 🤫 to the other rapture residents she’s just a rich heiress who acts a little different from New York’s high society because she lived abroad

she dislikes Rapture’s upper class for living so large when the poor have nothing just like she had nothing growing up.. doesn’t do much about it though..  Gina: *donates like a tiny amount of her wealth to an orphanage* wow helping people feels so good :)

Doesn’t have any real friends in rapture either except maybe Diane.. ironically because she thinks everyone else is fake 🙄

She didn’t like F*ntaine AT ALL because she thought he looked creepy but also because the Bronx accent scared her.. she’s really paranoid that he might have run into her while she was still living there and remembers her even though that’s soooo unlikely 😒 every time they’re in the same elevator together she turns away and pretends to look for something in her handbag

The civil war is just the worst for her bc she doesn’t want to align with the rebels they’re all freaks but there’s also no way in hell she’ll be on Andy Ryan’s side.. she’s just like *reluctantly joins rebels because she thinks its the winning team and because she thinks A**** is hot and doesn’t realize its the same guy she hid from at parties* *doesn’t do shit* 

GEORGIE

has a weird relationship with her mom... she died when she was very very young and Georgie really doesn’t remember much about her - almost everything she knows is from her father reminiscing about how beautiful and loving she was but that’s not.. true.. its just how he remembers her, in reality she was a very cold & narcissistic person. she’ll never know the truth though :/

does NOT care about any politician or noble whatsoever but had a soft spot for Jessamine mostly because she made a friendly impression on her (from what she’s seen on posters and all that stuff).. Georgie liked to imagine she wanted to make things better for people like her. (the heart when pointed at Georgie: this bitch digs through garbage cans. freak.)

has little pots with flowers all over her little clinic in the distillery district, it adds a little life to her weird looking little home and makes it look even more goth-ish because they’re all dried out :/

is one of those people who are pretentious about drinking tea

has a weird rivalry with dr Galvani that he doesn’t know about 😒 her clinic is near his home and she's mad jealous of him, this dude has money to fund his research and expensive tools and what does he do with it?? dissect fucking rats? (she heard about it from Granny Rags and yeah she believes everything she says).. she’s out there calling him an idiot, meanwhile Galvani doesn’t even know she even exists

used to be a pickpocket as a kid.. mostly when her dad didn’t make enough money, she still got into trouble for it most of the time though and stopped when she got older -_- its ok though because she got to steal family heirlooms at the Boyle mansion during their masquerades because one of the sisters called her ugly

AALIYAH

unlike the game wants you to believe she’s from Nevarra City rather than Ostwick 😳 the youngest of 5 siblings and the only mage in the family - since Nevarra is pretty chill about magic and has no circles, she grew up without the whole oppression thing that’s going on in the rest of thedas, thus all this templar shit is nonsense to her. We’re fine back home, thank you! Your mages are just fucked up because you put them in prisons!

She was supposed to become a Mortalitasi and have a pretty powerful position in the Nevarran court until idk something political that involved the chantry in one way or another happened and she got shipped off to ferelden’s circle (post blight duh). She managed to escape after a few weeks in its weakened state and joined the mage underground - she never really was a circle mage like in the game 🙄

She and a group of other mages she was friends with were supposed to go to the conclave together to.. vote for mage rights but you know what happened! Also you know this excerpt from a very angry person’s journal you can find in the fade? that was from her best friend who died in the explosion :c She still misses her a lot

The only people she’s close to within the inquisition are Sera, Varric and Dorian.. the rest are either more acquaintances or outright hate her (especially Vivienne.. i love her but BOY did they not get along).. She likes the advisors a little more, Josie is cool they’re not like bffs or anything but they like each other.. Leliana and her got along soooo well I think they were really good friends. Cullen was.. unfortunately her boyfriend but they also hated each other in the beginning. more on that later

The worst thing for her was the attack on Haven it fucked her up sooooo bad :c All those innocent people she wanted to protect dying, she tried her best to save them but it was still too late for some of them despite her best efforts.. it just really messes with her and she hates thinking about it.. she actually tried to run off on one occasion after that 😳

Feels sooo weird about the fact that she’s nevarran because on one hand that’s her home and she’s proud of it!!! on the other hand everyone acts like she’s the biggest freak bc they think she was in a death cult or something and she HATES it :((

[fightwing]

5, 10, 15 for the mun meme!

5. What is an aspect of your muse’s canon material or canon existence that you never had the opportunity to explore but really want to?

i don’t think i’ve done all that much dickbats, and while i wouldn’t say i loved him as batman simply bc i know its not what dick ultimately wanted, i definitely wanted to explore it more. like dick was SUCH a different batman to bruce (not better, just different) like mending the relationship w the police, being the light to robin’s dark etc. and he’s definitely incredibly hard on himself and still grieving over bruce and fighting with the one batfam member he never had before (tim), so i think its such an interesting time. especially as damian eventually morphs into that one ‘ur the only bitch in this house i ever respected’ meme, that is one of my fave dynamics maybe ever 

For book muses, what is your muse’s favorite scene? Why? Can you provide a short excerpt?

oh fuck me, so many. i’d like to nominate titans rebirth (first like twenty ish comics as well as year one) and the entirety of grayson if we’re talking rebirth. but like individual scenes dick coming back ‘from the dead’ and monologuing to jason, tim, babs, and damian was *chefs kiss*. even if it was an encrypted message i loved what he said to his sibs who were (justifiably) mad at him, and the fact that everyone put aside that to help dick out. *wipes tear* they’re all so..... they’re all so fucking stupid 

15. What plots/interactions leave you feeling protective of your muse?

oof so many!! dick has a tendency to be way too hard on himself (like most superheroes) and having to write things he blames himself for that i!! do not!! agree with!! is testing a bitch. he also has a tendency to not explain himself and just kinda take the blame (not telling them he really did die) and im like itching to write a whole ass explanation as to why he did what he did but he doesn’t!!!! i want to vibe check him into next wednesday and show him he is loved + valued

[fatehbaz]

hmm

And not just monkeys.

A favorite refrain of mine is to acknowledge how the stereotypical image of Southwest Asia and the “Near East” as a place of desiccation, desolation, or obligate desert-ness is, really, not fair. There was a “retreat of the elephants.” This is, after all, the historical home of the famous Lebanese cedar forests.

The region was a “Fertile Crescent,” but not in the way that European popular historiographies generally mean. The famous moniker might be a fitting title, not merely because of the early ascent of irrigation, agriculture, and “hydraulic civilization.”

The region was a meeting-place, where animals typically associated (in contemporary cultural consciousness) with both Africa and Asia mingled. The monkeys were likely not native and were instead imported as captive creatures, for leisure and “entertainment,” brought from Indus Valley cultures (”India”/South Asia). Monkeys were already being written about in Mesopotamia during the Ur III period (2050-ish BC, but were possibly imported earlier). 

But there were other charismatic creatures which were actually native to, and still living in, the eastern Mediterranean and Mesopotamia at the time: 

Elephant, tiger, lion, cheetah,  leopard, caracal, hyena, ostrich.

At the time that Enkidu and Gilgamesh would have hypothetically been hanging out, hippopotamus and sacred crocodile (Crocodylus suchus) would’ve likely still lived in lower Egypt near the shores of the eastern Mediterranean. There was a now-extinct subspecies of ostrich which lived in the eastern Mediterranean and Arabian peninsula. Asian elephants (Elephas maximus) seem to have lived along the northern coast of the Persian Gulf westward into Media and to the Euphrates (elephant-hunting was a past-time for Assyrian royalty).

Cats. As recently as the early twentieth century, the peripheries of Anatolia and Mesopotamia were still home to tiger, lion, leopard, cheetah, and caracal all living near each other. That’s well into modernity. (Caspian tigers apparently were seen near the shores of the Black Sea in the medieval era, and they still persisted in Anatolia and the Caucasus until only a century ago.)

This excerpt - about the cedar, forests, and biomass of the Fertile Crescent, and the massive impact of human devegetation and empire-building - left a big impression on me:

[Quote:]

Alexander von Humboldt noted that while one “might easily be led to adopt the erroneous inference that the absence of trees is a characteristic of hot climates [...].” [...] While some texts simply allude to environmental degradation, such as the Sumerian gardener Shukallituda’s experimentation with agroforestry in the wake of deforestation ... others contain explicit description of forest clearance, including the claim of Gudea of Lagash (2141-2122 BC), who “made a path” into the forest, “cut its cedars,” and sent cedar rafts floating “like giant snakes:” down the Euphrates” [...].

Despite declining biological diversity and productivity, the annals of Ashurnasirpal II [king of Assyria from 883 to 859 BC] describe abundant wildlife and a substantial inventory of domesticated livestock. He claimed to have slain 450 lions, killed 390 wild bulls, decapitated 200 ostriches; caught thirty elephants in pitfalls; and captured alive fifty wild bulls, 140 ostriches, and twenty adult lions. In addition, he received five live elephants as tribute, and “organized herds of wild bulls, lions, ostriches, and male and female monkeys.” At a banquet on the occasion of the inauguration of the palace at Kalhu (biblical Calah), his 69,574 guests dined on 1200 head of cattle and 1000 calves; 11,000 sheep and 16,000 lambs; 500 stags; 500 gazelles; 1000 ducks; 1000 geese; 1000 mesuku birds, 1000 qaribu birds, 20,000 doves, and 10,000 other assorted small birds; 10,000 assorted fish; and 10,000 jerboas - along with enormous quanitites of beer and wine, milk, cheese, eggs, bread, fruit and vegetables, and a vast number of other offerings. [...]

By the dawn of the first millennium AD, much of the wildlife of the steppes had been displaced by herds of livestock. The numbers were impressive. For example, in AD 222 the Xianbei (Hsien-pi) sold 70,000 horses to the Kingdom of Wei. In 1241, across the continent, Hungarians (Keler) are said to have opposed the Mongols under Batu Khan with a force of 400,000 horsemen. [...] The pattern is familiar [...]. Hence, many Indigenous societies were disrupted, reconfigured, and dominated prior to formal colonial annexation. [...] A Sumerian epic tale, ‘Emmerkar and the Land of Aratta,’ describes an earlier state of peace [...], ending with man’s fall from grace. Descent [...] is described in the epic, ‘Lamentation over the Destruction of Sumer and Ur.’ In Western Asia, patterns of [ecological] disturbance and [social] domination emerge with the complex interplay of ascendant Egyptian, [...] Indo-European, and Dravidian aristocracies in the fifth millennium BC - patterns that cascade through history. Owing in part to the Western idea of ‘progress,’ sequential changes, even if non-adaptive, are often viewed as markers on an evolutionary journey from a primitive past to an eventual state of perfection. In retrospect, it is clear that many ‘advances’ were simply measures that compensated for altered social relationships or [environmental] maladaptation, or conferred strategic advantage.

[End quote.]

Source: Jeffrey A. Gritzner. “Environment, Culture, and the American Presence in Western Asia: An Exploratory Essay.” 2010.

[halliescomut]

Okay but I have a lot of thoughts about this. And I'm pretty sure if we get to see Payu with his hair down before the end of the season we will all collectively loose are shit.

So I have a thing for normally put together characters in a state of domestic disarray. And I want to talk about it. This will be a ramble that I will try my best to edit into some type of sense.

So the starting point: Red, White, and Royal Blue, the year is 2020. I first purchased the audiobook, which I love, but I suck at remembering to bookmark stuff there, so I can't give a direct quote, but...there's a scene, I think about 2/3rds of the way through the book (correction, it's about half way) where Alex and Henry have spent the night together and Alex is watching Henry do his 'beauty' routine. Brushing his teeth, shaving, etc. and it's really Alex's first time seeing Henry in such a domestic scene. A scene that could be repeated thousands of times over their life. A scene where Henry is literally stripped down to just this human, not a prince, not a celebrity, public figure, just a man. A man he loves, whom he very specifically loves seeing without the publicity armor they both have to wear so often. And it's a scene that touched me so much in the book, just genuinely made me tear up think about how this could be repeated over the next 50 years. **Edit with actual excerpt (which is the last page-ish of chapter seven, if you're looking for it).

And y'all, these two paragraphs kill me. Like it's such a beautiful moment, not ruined by the stress they're under, but almost sweetened. Like...its a recognition that if Alex were blessed to watch Henry every morning for 50 years, it wouldn't be enough, but also would seem like far more of a blessing than any flawed human could deserve. You know?

Next point of contact for me: Nevertheless K-drama. This was one of the first K-dramas I watched (I'll admit it was for Song Kang Park, I'll watch that man in anything), and sort of right after Jae-eon and Yu Na-Bi start their relationship, he asks here about tying her hair back, because she uses he loose hair as a shield, and she mentions to him not straightening his hair. So there's a scene where he's fresh from the shower and he lets his hair airdry in these loose waves, and because it's a departure from his regular look, and something he really only does because she asked, and because he's staying in, it's markedly intimate. Picture below for comparison, and also bc he's so gorgeous.

So these little scenes of seeing someone, especially when you are kind of seeing it from the point of the love interest (Romance stories are intentionally filmed in a way intended for you to fall in love with the characters, so you're regularly looking at these people from the perspective of someone in love with them, or at least falling in love with them) are really just these amazing little glimpses into a person's true self. We are seeing them in the most bare basic way, when they're not wearing the armor that all people develop when it comes to interacting with other people, armor made of clothing or attitude.

Another example would be Din Djarin in the Mandalorian, He keeps his helmet on, only exposing his face twice in a little more than 10 hours of television, and it is VERY clearly a metaphor for him emotionally taking down his barriers for someone he cares deeply for, in this cases, paternally. Like, I've straight up sobbed every time at the scene of Din removing his helmet so that Grogu can see and know his face before going with Luke (*spoilers I guess, but it's been more than a year.)

Related note, that touches on the same idea: I've noticed too that in East Asian romantic dramas there's quite often scenes of one person drying or brushing the hair of the other. These small quiet moments, where both have a moment free from stress, unburdened by whatever demands are placed upon their characters, and it's always so lovely for me to see. Because it just a simple intimate moment without the added connotation of sex. Examples to follow, because why not. (Most pulled from this post , so if you want to know what shows they are from, you can find it there. Last pic is from You Are So Sweet)

And it's just something that I love. It's a beautiful expression of care and tenderness, but when focusing on that one character, it's also glimpses of vulnerability.

In most cases (*cough* NOT VegasPete *cough*) there's no risk of physical danger, it all about an emotional vulnerability to a person. And that sort of vulnerability is both hot and beautiful.

So moving into seeing Payu with his hair loose--Seeing Payu with his hair down will certainly be hot, but it's not just going to be because loose hair is pretty sexy, but because it's a physical or visual expression of his barriers coming down, especially if this is a scene where Rain is seeing him in that state. The dynamic we've seen with them so far is Rain being vulnerable with Payu watching, but we haven't really seen Payu's vulnerability being seen by Rain. His most vulnerable moments are when he's talking to Rain while Rain sleeps.

(I tried to find more examples, but the Love in the Air hashtag at this point is all just PayuxRain banging, and I couldn't scroll forever, I'm only human.)

So in a continuation of the them of my previous post regarding Love in the Air being a character driven show; this would be a step in Payu's character growth.

I may have lost the plot somewhere in here, but I think you can sort of catch my point.

We had a sex scene before we had payu with his hair loose, I can't believe this shit

[thegeminisage]

🎤 for the fic meme!

🎤 - what’s a strongly-held opinion you have about fics?

geez what ISNT a strongly held opinion i have about fics...let me see if i can narrow it down to like a top 5 or something lol. in no particular order:

there really is not any such thing as "writer's block." i know i say this all the time but there literally always is a particular reason the words aren't happening and waving it away as a "mysterious block" like the power to type fiction in a google doc is an ability given to you by the gods on high & you just have to wait for them to bless you again is like. not actually going to help you get anything done. it's not magic and it doesn't happen on its own! figure out the problem, the EXACT problem, and then you can fix it.

ambient sounds/the right music will always make it easier to write. i have a whole list

fics and books aren't the same thing. they're 2 different forms of media that are just similar on a surface level, like tv & movies. saying fics aren't as good as "real books" is like saying tv isn't as good as "real movies." tv isn't trying to be movies & fics aren't trying (or shouldn't be trying) to be books so shut the fuck up. (also, fic is better <3) relatedly, if someone wants to file off the serial numbers then just let them & leave them alone, that's literally their own business. it's kind of unfair that fanartists can get paid and we all accept that as normal and not cringe but fanfic authors can't even SUGGEST they should be paid without getting roasted and in fact have to jump thru hoops (said serial numbers) if they ever wanna see any cash. i don't really wanna get paid for writing fanfic bc i do it for fun and that's an instant way to take the passion out of it but i do believe you should be able to commission a fic/set up a patreon the way u can for fanart cuz that's only fair. you know?? like in this unsympathetic bitch of a capitalist hellscape im not gonna judge most people for trying to monetize their shit. Bad Opinion but there it is

fic writing is for fun and if you are stressing a lot about your stats or if comments are the only reason you write it is not a good way to live. i won't elaborate in order to respect privacy but i have had not one but TWO former-ish friends have literal actual nervous breakdowns about this. if you can't separate fic writing from the need for it to be personal validation you're never going to enjoy it for its own sake and you should maybe work on some personal stuff instead of your fanfic. idk i'm not your mom

DO NOT DO THAT THING where you like. put "idk how to summarize" or a fic excerpt in your summary. AND THEN PUT THE ACTUAL SUMMARY. IN YOUR NOTES. i can't see the author's notes from the browsing page! if you can summarize it in the author's notes you can move that text to the box that i actually can see! excerpts are great for tumblr but they're very bad at getting me to click on a fic on AO3 unless the tags are both very descriptive and very up my alley. if you really like excerpts you can put that AND the summary in the summary box but for the love of god don't hide the summary behind something i have to click on bc i'm so sorry but i will not do it.

[ask meme]

[automagick]

The purpose of lorem ipsum is to create a natural looking block of text (sentence, paragraph, page, etc.) that doesn't distract from the layout. A practice not without controversy, laying out pages with meaningless filler text can be very useful when the focus is meant to be on design, not content.

The passage experienced a surge in popularity during the 1960s when Letraset used it on their dry-transfer sheets, and again during the 90s as desktop publishers bundled the text with their software. Today it's seen all around the web; on templates, websites, and stock designs. Use our generator to get your own, or read on for the authoritative history of lorem ipsum.

       Origins and Discovery      

Lorem ipsum began as scrambled, nonsensical Latin derived from Cicero's 1st-century BC text De Finibus Bonorum et Malorum.

         Hedonist Roots      

Until recently, the prevailing view assumed lorem ipsum was born as a nonsense text. “It's not Latin, though it looks like it, and it actually says nothing,” Before & After magazine answered a curious reader, “Its ‘words’ loosely approximate the frequency with which letters occur in English, which is why at a glance it looks pretty real.”

As Cicero would put it, “Um, not so fast.”

The placeholder text, beginning with the line “Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit”, looks like Latin because in its youth, centuries ago, it was Latin.

Richard McClintock, a Latin scholar from Hampden-Sydney College, is credited with discovering the source behind the ubiquitous filler text. In seeing a sample of lorem ipsum, his interest was piqued by consectetur—a genuine, albeit rare, Latin word. Consulting a Latin dictionary led McClintock to a passage from De Finibus Bonorum et Malorum (“On the Extremes of Good and Evil”), a first-century B.C. text from the Roman philosopher Cicero.

In particular, the garbled words of lorem ipsum bear an unmistakable resemblance to sections 1.10.32–33 of Cicero's work, with the most notable passage excerpted below:

“Neque porro quisquam est, qui dolorem ipsum quia dolor sit amet, consectetur, adipisci velit, sed quia non numquam eius modi tempora incidunt ut labore et dolore magnam aliquam quaerat voluptatem.”

A 1914 English translation by Harris Rackham reads:

“Nor is there anyone who loves or pursues or desires to obtain pain of itself, because it is pain, but occasionally circumstances occur in which toil and pain can procure him some great pleasure.”

McClintock's eye for detail certainly helped narrow the whereabouts of lorem ipsum's origin, however, the “how and when” still remain something of a mystery, with competing theories and timelines.

   McClintock wrote to Before & After to explain his discovery;

“What I find remarkable is that this text has been the industry's standard dummy text ever since some printer in the 1500s took a galley of type and scrambled it to make a type specimen book; it has survived not only four centuries of letter-by-letter resetting but even the leap into electronic typesetting, essentially unchanged except for an occasional 'ing' or 'y' thrown in. It's ironic that when the then-understood Latin was scrambled, it became as incomprehensible as Greek; the phrase 'it's Greek to me' and 'greeking' have common semantic roots!” (The editors published his letter in a correction headlined “Lorem Oopsum”).

As an alternative theory, (and because Latin scholars do this sort of thing) someone tracked down a 1914 Latin edition of De Finibus which challenges McClintock's 15th century claims and suggests that the dawn of lorem ipsum was as recent as the 20th century. The 1914 Loeb Classical Library Edition ran out of room on page 34 for the Latin phrase “dolorem ipsum” (sorrow in itself). Thus, the truncated phrase leaves one page dangling with “do-”, while another begins with the now ubiquitous “lorem ipsum”.

Whether a medieval typesetter chose to garble a well-known (but non-Biblical—that would have been sacrilegious) text, or whether a quirk in the 1914 Loeb Edition inspired a graphic designer, it's admittedly an odd way for Cicero to sail into the 21st century.

       Meaning of Lorem Ipsum      

Lorem ipsum was purposefully designed to have no meaning, but appear like real text, making it the perfect placeholder.

         Interpreting Nonsense      

Don't bother typing “lorem ipsum” into Google translate. If you already tried, you may have gotten anything from "NATO" to "China", depending on how you capitalized the letters. The bizarre translation was fodder for conspiracy theories, but Google has since updated its “lorem ipsum” translation to, boringly enough, “lorem ipsum”.

One brave soul did take a stab at translating the almost-not-quite-Latin. According to The Guardian, Jaspreet Singh Boparai undertook the challenge with the goal of making the text “precisely as incoherent in English as it is in Latin - and to make it incoherent in the same way”. As a result, “the Greek 'eu' in Latin became the French 'bien' [...] and the '-ing' ending in 'lorem ipsum' seemed best rendered by an '-iendum' in English.”

Here is the classic lorem ipsum passage followed by Boparai's odd, yet mesmerizing version:

“Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Nam hendrerit nisi sed sollicitudin pellentesque. Nunc posuere purus rhoncus pulvinar aliquam. Ut aliquet tristique nisl vitae volutpat. Nulla aliquet porttitor venenatis. Donec a dui et dui fringilla consectetur id nec massa. Aliquam erat volutpat. Sed ut dui ut lacus dictum fermentum vel tincidunt neque. Sed sed lacinia lectus. Duis sit amet sodales felis. Duis nunc eros, mattis at dui ac, convallis semper risus. In adipiscing ultrices tellus, in suscipit massa vehicula eu.”

Boparai's version:

“Rrow itself, let it be sorrow; let him love it; let him pursue it, ishing for its acquisitiendum. Because he will ab hold, uniess but through concer, and also of those who resist. Now a pure snore disturbeded sum dust. He ejjnoyes, in order that somewon, also with a severe one, unless of life. May a cusstums offficer somewon nothing of a poison-filled. Until, from a twho, twho chaffinch may also pursue it, not even a lump. But as twho, as a tank; a proverb, yeast; or else they tinscribe nor. Yet yet dewlap bed. Twho may be, let him love fellows of a polecat. Now amour, the, twhose being, drunk, yet twhitch and, an enclosed valley’s always a laugh. In acquisitiendum the Furies are Earth; in (he takes up) a lump vehicles bien.”

Nick Richardson described the translation “like extreme Mallarmé, or a Burroughsian cut-up, or a paragraph of Finnegans Wake. Bits of it have surprising power: the desperate insistence on loving and pursuing sorrow, for instance, that is cheated out of its justification – an incomplete object that has been either fished for, or wished for.”

       Usage and Examples      

Lorem ipsum was popularized in the 1960s with Letraset's dry-transfer sheets, and later entered the digital world via Aldus PageMaker.

         Digital Ipsum      

The decade that brought us Star Trek and Doctor Who also resurrected Cicero—or at least what used to be Cicero—in an attempt to make the days before computerized design a little less painstaking.

The French lettering company Letraset manufactured a set of dry-transfer sheets which included the lorem ipsum filler text in a variety of fonts, sizes, and layouts. These sheets of lettering could be rubbed on anywhere and were quickly adopted by graphic artists, printers, architects, and advertisers for their professional look and ease of use.

Aldus Corporation, which later merged with Adobe Systems, ushered lorem ipsum into the information age with its desktop publishing software Aldus PageMaker. The program came bundled with lorem ipsum dummy text for laying out page content, and other word processors like Microsoft Word followed suit. More recently the growth of web design has helped proliferate lorem ipsum across the internet as a placeholder for future text—and in some cases the final content (this is why we proofread, kids).

       Controversy in the Design World      

Some claim lorem ipsum threatens to promote design over content, while others defend its value in the process of planning.

         Design or (Dis)content      

Among design professionals, there's a bit of controversy surrounding the filler text. Controversy, as in Death to Lorem Ipsum.

The strength of lorem ipsum is its weakness: it doesn't communicate. To some, designing a website around placeholder text is unacceptable, akin to sewing a custom suit without taking measurements. Kristina Halvorson notes:

“I’ve heard the argument that “lorem ipsum” is effective in wireframing or design because it helps people focus on the actual layout, or color scheme, or whatever. What kills me here is that we’re talking about creating a user experience that will (whether we like it or not) be DRIVEN by words. The entire structure of the page or app flow is FOR THE WORDS.”

Lorem ipsum is so ubiquitous because it is so versatile. Select how many paragraphs you want, copy, paste, and break the lines wherever it is convenient. Real copy doesn't work that way.

As front-end developer Kyle Fiedler put it:

“When you are designing with Lorem Ipsum, you diminish the importance of the copy by lowering it to the same level as any other visual element. The text simply becomes another supporting role, serving to make other aspects more aesthetic. Instead of your design enhancing the meaning of the content, your content is enhancing your design.”

But despite zealous cries for the demise of lorem ipsum, others, such as Karen McGrane, offer appeals for moderation:

“Lorem Ipsum doesn’t exist because people think the content is meaningless window dressing, only there to be decorated by designers who can’t be bothered to read. Lorem Ipsum exists because words are powerful. If you fill up your page with draft copy about your client’s business, they will read it. They will comment on it. They will be inexorably drawn to it. Presented the wrong way, draft copy can send your design review off the rails.”

And that’s why a 15th century typesetter might have scrambled a passage of Cicero; he wanted people to focus on his fonts, to imagine their own content on the pages. He wanted people to see, and to get them to see he had to keep them from reading.

       When to Use Lorem Ipsum      

Generally, lorem ipsum is best suited to keeping templates from looking bare or minimizing the distractions of draft copy.

         Form Over Function      

So when is it okay to use lorem ipsum? First, lorem ipsum works well for staging. It's like the props in a furniture store—filler text makes it look like someone is home. The same Wordpress template might eventually be home to a fitness blog, a photography website, or the online journal of a cupcake fanatic. Lorem ipsum helps them imagine what the lived-in website might look like.

Second, use lorem ipsum if you think the placeholder text will be too distracting. For specific projects, collaboration between copywriters and designers may be best, however, like Karen McGrane said, draft copy has a way of turning any meeting about layout decisions into a discussion about word choice. So don't be afraid to use lorem ipsum to keep everyone focused.

One word of caution: make sure your client knows that lorem ipsum is filler text. You don't want them wondering why you filled their website with a foreign language, and you certainly don't want anyone prematurely publishing it.

       Lorem Ipsum All the Things      

Coming full circle, the internet's remixing of the now infamous lorem ipsum passage has officially elevated it to pop culture status.

         Because it's the Internet      

There was that time artists at Sequence opted to hand-Sharpie the lorem ipsum passage on a line of paper bags they designed for Chipotle—the result being a mixture of avant-garde, inside joke, and Sharpie-stained tables. Those with an eye for detail may have caught a tribute to the classic text in an episode of Mad Men (S6E1 around 1:18:55 for anyone that didn't). And here is a lorem ipsum tattoo.

Of course, we'd be remiss not to include the veritable cadre of lorem ipsum knock offs featuring:

Bacon Ipsum – Served all day. “Bacon ipsum dolor amet chicken turducken spare ribs.”

Hipster Ipsum – In case you're in need of a “shoreditch direct trade four dollar toast copper mug.”

Corporate Ipsum – “Leveraging agile frameworks to provide a robust synopsis” from eight to five.

Legal Ipsum – Fully unlicensed legalese for those times you don't want to pay $400/hr.

Not to mention, Cupcake Ipsum, Bob Ross Ipsum (“happy little clouds”), and the furry Cat Ipsum. And in case that's not enough, check out our very own Ultimate List of Lorem Ipsum Generators.

So there you have it. Lorem ipsum: the nonsense words unable to fully escape meaning.

       Original Source Text      

Below are the original Latin passages from which Lorem Ipsum was derived, paired with their 1914 translations by H. Rackham.

         Section 1.10.32 of Cicero's “De finibus bonorum et malorum”      

Original Latin text:

“Sed ut perspiciatis, unde omnis iste natus error sit voluptatem accusantium doloremque laudantium, totam rem aperiam eaque ipsa, quae ab illo inventore veritatis et quasi architecto beatae vitae dicta sunt, explicabo. Nemo enim ipsam voluptatem, quia voluptas sit, aspernatur aut odit aut fugit, sed quia consequuntur magni dolores eos, qui ratione voluptatem sequi nesciunt, neque porro quisquam est, qui dolorem ipsum, quia dolor sit amet consectetur adipisci[ng] velit, sed quia non numquam [do] eius modi tempora inci[di]dunt, ut labore et dolore magnam aliquam quaerat voluptatem. Ut enim ad minima veniam, quis nostrum exercitationem ullam corporis suscipit laboriosam, nisi ut aliquid ex ea commodi consequatur? Quis autem vel eum iure reprehenderit, qui in ea voluptate velit esse, quam nihil molestiae consequatur, vel illum, qui dolorem eum fugiat, quo voluptas nulla pariatur?”