#i'm so confused. hello

[copia]

?????????

time for sister imperator 4

[starflungwaddledee]

did you remember to leave space for all your phantom limbs?

⋆｡ ﾟ☁︎｡ ⋆｡ ﾟ☀︎｡ ⋆｡ ﾟ ┊ ┊ ┊ ┊ ┊ ┊ ┊ ˚★⋆｡˚ ┊ ┊ ⋆ ┊ ★⋆ ┊ ◦ kirbytober 2024 #03 ★⋆ miracle // phantom // magic

[rebouks]

Previous // Next

Courtney: Take a right here. Oscar: Absolutely not. Courtney: C’mon! I have an idea. Oscar: Getting arrested for kidnapping is a terrible idea. [Oscar rolled his eyes as Courtney grinned and raised her hand threateningly; snorting, he threw the indicator on and pulled over with acquiescence, lest she get any ideas and grab the steering wheel herself] … Courtney: Is Levi ready? Nadia: For? Courtney: Camping. Nadia: He’s not going. Courtney: Oh-.. we’ve already booked a spot for him. Nadia: Hm. Courtney: It’d be easier if he were out of your hair for a week though-.. right? [Nadia squinted at the slightly unkempt woman before her; she was clearly mistaken in her previous assumptions that Courtney was a simple, feebleminded housewife] Nadia: Don’t take me for a fool. Courtney: Alright, what’s it gonna be then? Nadia: LEVI! Nadia: Do you want to go camping with these.. people? Levi: I thought you said-… Nadia: Do. You. Want. To. Go? … Nadia: That was quick-.. you won’t bring any bad habits back, will you? Levi: I’ll try not to. Nadia: I’ll miss you, sweetheart. [Levi clenched his bag tightly and ignored his mother’s outstretched arms, knowing full well they’d remain firmly plastered to her waist were there not a car full of Finch’s right next to them] Levi: Hey-.. scootch over, losers. Ava: Hi, Levi’s mommy! [Levi shut the door before Nadia could respond, catching naught but a glimpse of her upturned nose as Oscar sped off]

[alienfailboy]

you know the fanship is good when you can't tell if the screen shot is edited

[tosteur-gluteal]

Again, gouache painting I made to relax

[captainkirkk]

I don't do on tumblr for several days and then I quickly check my dash while connected to airport WiFi only to find the great booping war has broken out. What year is it. Where am I

[dany36]

TIME TO EAT MY FUCKING SHOE HAHAHAHAHAHALDFKJLSADKJFLASKDJFLASJDFLASKJDFLASKJDFLSAKJDFLKASDF TRUE FORM ELMA LOOKS EXACTLY THE SAME AS THE WII U FORM AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA

haven't heard good things about chapter 13 but at least i won't have to do it while staring at her ugly-ass DE mim GOD BLESS!!!!!!

[egginfroggin]

Yeeting both Ingo and Emmet into Hisui and having them get taken in by the Pearl Clan and Diamond Clan, respectively, is fun, but what if they were both taken by the Pearl Clan.

And then became Lady Sneasler's Wardens (coughadoptedkidscough).

And proceeded to tell absolutely nobody that there were two of them.

As far as anybody who isn't from the Pearl Clan or who hasn't been introduced to the twins by Irida -- the Responsible One -- knows, Lady Sneasler has a really weird Warden named Emmet who just abruptly swaps coats and demeanors seemingly arbitrarily.

And is terrifyingly good at getting around the Highlands quickly.

Honestly.

It's almost like he's in two places at once, sometimes.

Yeah, they went off to the Highlands and one of them (probably Emmet) was like, "Hey what if we just didn't tell anyone that there's two of us," and the other (probably Ingo) was like, "That's a horrible idea. I love it. Let's do it."

The player character knows that there's two of them because Irida herself introduced Ingo or Emmet as one of Lady Sneasler's Wardens, so the player character was basically directly informed of the fact that there's two of them.

Nobody else is aware of this.

Warden Emmet is just a mysterious cryptid lurking around the Coronet Highlands, and everyone is very confused by him. And maybe a little afraid.

Except for Melli, Melli is just exasperated with him. As usual.

And due to the distance between the Highlands, the Pearl Settlement (full of people who know) and the rest of Hisui (the people who don't know), it never really gets properly stated that there are two identical Wardens running around the Highlands. Irida just thinks that people talk about Emmet a lot and chalks it up to him maybe being the weirder of the two. Or maybe Ingo's shy, or something. Who knows.

Either way, they get away with it for years.

[cloud-somersault]

idk how people can read my fics and have the takeaway that "macaque cannot exist without wukong" like. ??? i don't??? what???

[tragedytells-tales]

I was thinking about the Possessed!MK AU from the six au's challenge again, revisited Eddsworld Trick or Threat, and realized something.

LBD weakened the seal on MK's monkey form with her first attempt to get into his mind. So during the fight where Wukong gets possessed, MK is slightly powerful enough to protect Nezha and not instantly be on a first name basis with Wukong's fist.

By that, I mean he was fast enough to dodge, he didn’t throw hands. Instead, he initiates the "distract MK senior and grab the staff" plan early on, with Nezah being in charge of getting Wukong as far away as possible. With the help of Macaque who is about to lose his mind because of MK risking his life, as per usual.

With LBD's power being stretched thin and the Mayor absolutely struggling, MK finds it surprisingly easy to hold his own against LBD. And because she already tried to enter his mind once, she tries to do it again. And in doing so, she weakens the seal on MK's power, makes him falter when he glitches, and tries to funnel a part of the power holding Wukong into MK.

Wrong move, now she's dealing with three whole monkeys. MK's monkey form snaps to life as his magic fights back against the perceived parasite again, but now without barriers.

So she and the not-mayor get stomped. A small piece of her mind still lives in MK, but that's a story for another day, and the three dudes who were fighting for their lives look at MK like "????"

MK has a "it is what it is" moment and an internal crisis, but the three go find Mei to tell her the news. And that's how that scene goes.

MK still gets possessed by LBD later on and it becomes an Emperors new clothes situation where LBD and MK are fighting for his body, but that's a future MK problem

So, the first LBD fight where Wukong gets possessed is literally just:

Wukong, Macaque, and Nezah: Why couldn't she possess your mind?

MK, a monkey, already went through partial mind invasion in Spider Queens lair and is sick of it, shrugging: You can't possess something twice👍

[sydney-carton-of-sour-milk]

The Many Illustrators of A Tale of Two Cities 7: A. A. Dixon

"'Collins' Clear-Type Press, let me ask you a question.'"

This is a very long post.

This week's edition has, in my research, become quite the edition.

Sadly, this image is the best source for the cover wrapper illustration that I could find.

You are likely familiar with Arthur Augustus Dixon's illustrations for the 1905 Collins Pocket Edition of A Tale of Two Cities. Several of them are very common to find in Internet searches and articles about the book, if not other editions of the book itself.

But the question raised by my research for this week's edition is: Are you familiar with all of them?

Thing is, as the source above states (read the whole article if you have the time, it's very interesting!), Dixon created twelve illustrations for this novel.

And sure enough, this source from the Internet Archive and this source from @oldillustrations (hello!) both have eleven of the same illustrations - with the twelfth presumably being for the wrapper, as seen in this source (previously cited) from the Victorian Web.

Alright, so that's three separate sources, all with (effectively) the same set of elaborate illustrations from 1905. Neat!

...

...but if you start counting...

...you'll notice that this seems...

...like a lot more than twelve!

Basically, there are five illustrations by A. A. Dixon that are completely unaccounted for in any of the three sources previously cited.

For the purposes of this post, the cover wrapper is considered #0 and is not pictured in these banners.

In full-size set of illustrations in this post, this source from Google Books is the source of four of those mystery illustrations:

#3: "'He stared at her with a fearful look.'" #6: "'Drive him fast to his tomb.'" #7: "He said, 'Farewell!'" #12: "'She appeared with folded arms.'" #9 ("'Patriots and friends, we are ready!'") and #11 ("'You are consigned to La Force.'") are sourced from Google Books in the full-size versions in this post simply because the Internet Archive versions of those two illustrations had cropping issues.

To me, this is mystery enough on its own. Why would another version of the book suddenly have more than the originally-stated number of illustrations by this artist? Especially considering that the Google Books source does not have #13 ("''I know you, Evremonde!''") - why would it be missing one of the "main" set?

It gets even more interesting.

As you'll notice in the banner, we're still one off: Keen-eyed observers of the full-size set of illustrations might have already noticed that #14 ("'Carton and the spy returned.'") looks a bit different than the rest of them - a bit like what happened in the previous edition of this series!

That's because that Dixon illustration comes from this completely random source - a post from a blog called the Paperback Palette dating back to 2018 - that I happened across on Google Images of all places while sitting on an airplane trying to set up this post last week!

And to top it all off, that source is missing #6!

At this point, if your first instinct is, reasonably, that perhaps Dixon didn't actually illustrate these extra five and that it was someone imitating him for later editions, then know that that was my instinct too - until I (dare I say it again) checked those signatures!!!

(I edited the colors to prevent flashing.)

All five of those illustrations bear Dixon's signature, so it's safe to assume that they are A. A. Dixon originals - from 1905, even.

Interestingly, #s 1, 10, 13, 15, and 16 don't have signatures! Does this mean anything? Probably not - as an artist myself, I often forget to put my own signature - but still, I can't resist mentioning it!

So the most likely explanation here is simply that the publishing house originally commissioned A. A. Dixon for more than twelve illustrations and then held on to some of them, eventually choosing to publish them in other editions. Still, we can't say for sure.

And as to why some are missing from the more "complete" sets - human error, most likely!

If you scrub through the Google Books source, you'll notice that #s 11 and 12 actually repeat (one even changes color, which I have no explanation for) - it's most likely either that the book was accidentally printed with repeats of #s 11 and 12 where 13 and 14 were supposed to go or that the person scanning this edition made a similar error.

As an aside, it's so interesting that the illustrations are evenly spaced throughout the book - I had not noticed that until now!

And as for the Paperback Palette source, it's most likely that the blogger accidentally skipped over an image while combing through their edition or just glossed over it when posting the batch (I understand that from experience!) We can see this by adding up the letters in some of the illustrations' captions - doing so reveals that the letters are meant to go to P, the sixteenth letter of the alphabet.

Thus, one must be missing! Case closed!

Except... It's actually (going by both the chronology of the book and the order in which this set was found in Google Books) missing the wrong letter! Here, it seems that In the Google Books source, #7 in the full set is given the seventh letter in the alphabet, G - whereas in the Paperback Palette source, "#7" is labeled as the sixth, F:

This implies not only that #6 is absent from the Paperback Palette source but also that there is a missing mystery illustration located between this source's H and K - that is to say, before or after #9!

EXCEPT... For one, this isn't the only inconsistency I've noticed - there are several places where the letters seem shifted in a strange way. I've seen #2 listed as "C" and #9 listed both as "H" and "I2i" (???), just as two examples. (My theory is that the cover wrapper and the frontispiece may be at play here, but who knows?)

More importantly, though, it seems that, for some mysterious reason, all of the sources with relatively consistent use of these letters (i.e. all but the Victorian Web) - even the sources with only eleven interior illustrations - still give #15 in the full set the fifteenth letter, O. Which, of course, may make all of this pretty moot anyway.

Dare I say..."Oh."

Suffice it to say, just as much as major sources like the Internet Archive and Google Books are vital to this sort of research and preservation work, so are smaller websites and bloggers! After all, without the Victorian Web and the Paperback Palette, we as collective netizens likely wouldn't have ever known about the cover wrapper or illustration #14 (not to mention that the versions of the illustrations from the set posted by @oldillustrations have by far the best image quality and standardization that I've found! Please go check them out if you haven't yet!).

As for the reasons behind Collins' Clear-Type Press not publishing all of the illustrations from the beginning (if that's the explanation we're to go with here), I suppose the question I'd like to ask is:

why? why would you put us through this?

& the standard endnote for all posts in this series:

This post is intended to act as the start of a forum on the given illustrator, so if anyone has anything to add - requests to see certain drawings in higher definition (since Tumblr compresses images), corrections to factual errors, sources for better-quality versions of the illustrations, further reading, fun facts, any questions, or just general commentary - simply do so on this post, be it in a comment/tags or the replies!💫

[ssaraexposs]

WAIT...WAIT...WAIT...WAIT...

WHAT ABOUT MY BOY RYUUNOSUKE? WHAT ABOUT HIM? WHAT DOES THAT MEAN?

[octahedral-chaos]

Incredible update on the Quartz saga

Girl is a HEADMATE (???????) now-

[astronomically-gay]

Wearing skirts, but like, agender way

[ravelqueen]

I'm reading book 3 of Scholomance and El just killed the Mawmouth in the London enclave and SHE'S SO SAD ABOUT ORION AND SO AM I

MY FEELINGS ARE ALL OVER THE PLACE OVER THOSE TWO BECAUSE ORIONS LAST WORDS BEFORE GOING DOWN IN BOOK 2 WERE ABOUT HOW MUCH HE LOVES EL AND EL IS SO DESTROYED WITH NO ONE MOURNING HIM AND BEING UNABLE TO SAVE HIM AND I'M JUST AAAAAAAAAAAAAA

please someone talk to me about scholomance im DESPERATE

(Also this bit obliterated me emotionally like Ms Novik how fucking dare you????

[themintman]

yall y'all y'all I always forget that like. I post public art. On a public account. Like I don't realise that people actually SEE my art or think about it or whatever. Bbut. My GOODNESS. this month I have seen my art in the wilderness and I AM. TERRIFIED???? HELLO???? PEOPLE KNOW ABOUT MY PUBLIC ACCOUNT????? it's so scary goodness me. ANYWAYS KNOW THAT IF YOUVE REFRENCED MY ART AT ALL I DO KNOW. I HAVE SEEN IT AND I AM PROBABLY FREAKIG THE FUCK OUT GOODNESS ME. IM JUST TOO SCARED TO RESPOND BEYOND LIKE. A LIL EMOJI REACTION. HHH