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[hangingfire]

Master post of my tarot spreads

This is the cheat sheet I use when looking through my own blog. It doesn’t use the categories my tags use because it’s my blog and I can do what I want.

The (#) is how many cards are in each spread.

Any that begin with “meme” is just an indication you’re about to open a meme tarot spread.

I figure I haven’t updated in awhile but why not fix up this resource for myself and post it.

The tags listed in my bio still work obviously and anything that isn’t mine that I reblogged isn’t in this list.

Keep reading

[hangingfire]

please be patient with me im from the 1900s

[hangingfire]

what about blorbhov from my complicated russian novel though

[hangingfire]

horror sub-genres: folk horror

[hangingfire]

THE GRAND BUDAPEST HOTEL (2014) dir. Wes Anderson

[hangingfire]

I wanted to do one of those poll things for season 1 of The Terror. You know the drill, share it and tell me which one of these you think is a lie. To my fellow Cold Boys enjoyers, please share and don't give it away.

[hangingfire]

Holy crap, is it @theterrorreversebang time again? By golly it is.

@kaupaint brought a prompt to the table that I could not resist: "A shot of a hand holding a miniature portrait. The kind historically used to give to loved ones as a keepsake." I ran with that, and here is the result:

Rating: M

Warnings: Major character death

Summary: Three relics of the lost Franklin Expedition.

The truth is that this year's Bang was a struggle for me—not for any reasons except my own Bad Brain issues. But I think it all came together in the end. And @kaupaint's art is next goddamn level. Truly stunning, and collaborating with them was a privilege and an honor.

[hangingfire]

REBLOG THIS TO GIVE THE PERSON YOU REBLOGGED THIS FROM A GOLD STAR BECAUSE THEY’VE BEEN STELLAR TODAY AND THEY DESERVE IT ⭐️

[hangingfire]

The Chad Chronicles: a BG3 Dark Urge playthrough

(Note: Earlier versions of parts 1 and 2 were originally posted over on Reddit. I've decided to do my updates over here, going forward.)

There will be spoilers. Proceed accordingly.

Part 1. Character creation and the prologue

My first completed run in Baldur's Gate 3 was with a cheerfully chaotic good tiefling rogue, who got all the good endings except for the characters who inadvertently got killed along the way (Lae'zel, Minthara, Jaheira, Minsc). My second run, close to being done, is a Resist the Dark Urge game with Nimue, a snarky, selfish drow bard who has slowly become a Big Damn Hero.

I actually didn't plan on Nimue becoming a Big Damn Hero, but she has gradually become a better person because I, as a player, struggle with making anything other than goody-two-shoes choices. After a couple of very likable NPCs ended up dead at the beginning of Act I, she started to change (because I felt really bad about it).

But I'm curious about what a true Embrace the Dark Urge run would look like, and it finally hit me: if I'm going to play a version of the game in which everyone, including my character, ends up as their absolute worst selves, I have to run it with a character who looks like someone I would really like to kick in the nuts.

Meet Chad.

Chad is a human fighter who I've been told looks like "Gortash's shitty cousin". He is terrible.

This is his dream visitor:

We'll call her Stacy.

(The joke for those in the know is that [REDACTED] knew that the best way to get to Chad was to appear to him as a hot elf girl.)

So. Here we go.

The prologue proceeds more or less as normal—Chad even rescues Us before teaming up with Lae'zel and rescuing Shadowheart from the pod. In the helm room of the nautiloid, Chad decides to fight the demon for his sword and gets knocked out for his trouble. Meanwhile the girls fix the transponder, and then everything goes boom. End of prologue.

Chad takes a long rest immediately after the nautiloid crash, during which he has many murdery thoughts that he doesn't understand ... but that he kind of likes. When he wakes up, the unconscious Shadowheart is gone from the beach—he won't encounter and recruit her until he finally gets to the Emerald Grove. But before that, there are bodies on the beach to loot and creatures to kill.

Right from the start, it's clear that Chad is not the sharpest knife in the box.

(I intend to respec him at the first opportunity, turning his INT and WIS into dump stats so that I can boost his CHA.)

Clearly this is going to go well.

Part 2. Oh, rats

I laid down a few guiding principles to keep in mind for Chad's action and dialogue options:

He picks the most selfish and mercenary choices in any given dialogue or scenario, but it's even odds on whether they're going to be callously pragmatic or just stupid. (In other words: which option do I think will generate the darkest comedy.)

He will also use Intimidation over Persuasion at least half the time, depending on what he's trying to get out of a person (and also depending on whether that person is a pretty girl or not).

He is actually nice to most animals (cats, birds, dogs, livestock) and thinks that makes him an Okay Guy, but he hates rats and bugs.

As the game progresses, he will get increasingly more unhinged and murdery.

After the mop-up operation around the nautiloid, Chad heads out to find his fortune. He hits it off with Astarion, murders a couple of tieflings to recruit Lae'zel, and does not cut off Gale's hand, since a smart magic guy is useful. Very quickly he has a party of people who are useful, or hot, or both.

When he gets to the Grove, he kicks some goblin ass (though really it's Lae'zel and Astarion who do most of the work). He nearly punches out Aradin, then talks to Zevlor and learns about Kagha, then goes to talk to her. On the way, he finally recruits Shadowheart and bullies some kids. He manages to save Arabella more or less by accident, and after talking to Kagha, he agrees to escort the tieflings out of the grove if the druids will pay him enough.

And then, because he makes dumb choices and hates rats, I had him pick up one of the rats and huck it across the room like he's in a shot-put competition.

(Yes, I know what the rats in the Grove really are, from previous runs. That may or may not have been a factor in my decision.)

Cue aggro from the druids. The party manages to take out Kagha and one of her underlings, but the other druids all rush off and when the party emerges from the cave, they discover that the druids have massacred the tieflings. Wyll (who Chad hadn't even spoken to yet) is among the dead. No Blade of the Frontiers for Chad.

Whoops.

(Wyll would hate his guts anyway.)

Plus the druids are all aggro at the party and the whole-ass grove has gone red in the minimap.

Double whoops.

The party manages to hightail it out of the grove without getting attacked and has their fight with the True Souls on the road, and that's when I decide I'm done with him for the night.

Chad's adventure has gotten off to a ripping start.

[hangingfire]

kitten i'll be honest daddy isn't sure he's cut out for full time employment

[hangingfire]

REBLOG if you have amazing talented artist friends!

[hangingfire]

As always, on this, the anniversary of his passing, GNU Terry Pratchett

[hangingfire]

At my school, there was a very popular course on human sexuality with a professor named Dr. Chad. Literally everyone referred to the class as "Sex With Chad".

This, by the way, was well before "chad" picked up its current vernacular meaning. That joke reads really differently now than it did thirty years ago.

taking a class on sex this semester which has resulted in many fun things like "sex activity" and "sex final" being added to my planner. being very mature and serious about this .

[hangingfire]

Women at Sea

Women at sea or women in general in connection with the navy are unfortunately still a rather neglected topic, and so Margarette Lincoln, herself an author on this topic, once looked at the literature on this subject.  Here is the list she compiled and which I would like to pass on to you, as there are a few that deal with this topic.

- Bold in her Breeches: Women Pirates Across the Ages by Jo Stanley (1995) - The basic work that covers all women pirates through the centuries and geographically from Ireland to China.

- Female Tars: Women aboard Ship in the Age of Sail by Suzanne J. Stark ( 1996) - She deals in her book with three types of women on board, the whores, the officers’ wives and women in male disguise.

- Heroines and Harlots: Women at sea in the great age of sail, by David Cordingly (2001) - he looked at the archive material and was able to confirm that there were a very large number of women in England and America who went to sea. He also tries to include the role of men.

-British Sea Power: Representing the Navy, 1750-1815 by Margarette Lincoln (2002) - here she included a whole chapter devoted to how women saw the Navy. She continued this with her next book - Naval Wives and Mistresses (2007) and now tried to include letters and the social role.

- Naval Families : War and Duty in Britain. 1740- 1820 by Ellen Gills (2016) - Here individual families and their fates are highlighted.

- Enterprising Women and Shipping in the 19th century, by Helen Doe (2009) - She stays ashore in her book and highlights the maritime business in women’s hands.

- Sailors and Traders: a Maritime History of the Pacific Peoples, by Alastair Couper ( 2009) - Explores the sexual relationships of European sailors and indigenous South Sea island women in the 18th and 19th centuries. It also makes a connection to the whalers and the recruitment of almost exclusively female crews in the 20th century.

- From Cabin Boys to Captains- 250 years of women at sea, by Jo Stanley (2016) - Here she now reports on the life and work of female sailors.

- Pirate Women: The Princesses, Prostitutes and Privateers who ruled the seven seas, by Laura Sook Duncombe (2017) attempts to shed light on the lives of female pirates.

- Women and english piracy, 1540- 1720 : Partners and Victims of Crime, by John Appleby (2013) - moves away from the romanticised lives of female pirates and shows how women supported pirates and even started their own businesses. He also tried to dispel some of the myths.

This small list shows how little work has been done on this topic, although there are some small articles on individuals that have gradually appeared in naval history magazines. There is still a lot to be done in this area and more research is needed.

[hangingfire]

The terror is a good show because it’s a fascinating story and critique of colonialism with amazing acting, writing and attention to historical detail, but there’s also a scene where a guy covers himself in forks before he gets eaten by a magical polar bear in order to wound said bear, which actually works

[hangingfire]

The day's activities commenced with a tour of the garage. In the garage, there are many mysteries one is not allowed to know or see. The use of phones is forbidden lest one incur accusations of espionage. When we got into the garage, Lewis's car was naked, its insides visible for all to see. I think this was the moment where my respect for the sport as it exists really made itself clear. It is hard to describe what I felt looking at that car. The closest phrase I have at my disposal is the technological sublime. I pictured a living, breathing animal of extraterrestrial origin, hooked up to a thousand arcane sensors that delivered messages in little pulses. All the tubes and sculpted carbon-fiber parts and the endless net of wires all working in service to the godhead engine, formed something totally incomprehensible to me, a feat of engineering so vast it breached the realm of magic. Hamilton himself walked through in his helmet, unexpectedly on an errand. After being in the presence of the car, I perceived him differently than before, when he was just a guy driving in circles on TV. The scope of his capabilities became more directly known to me in the face of that which I believed to be unknowable. All of that was built in service of him.

[...]

One thing that strikes me about Formula 1 is its unexpected resemblance to fencing— it is an absolutely poised and disciplined affair. Recently, for my 30th birthday, I took up medieval sword fighting—historical European martial arts, they call it. For the first two weeks we worked on standing in a good medieval stance, always prepared to move. Sword fighting is learned through what are called set plays, specific motions of sword and body combined into one fluid action. But when you watch people who are really good at sword fighting, an ornate, flowing dance emerges from these seemingly disparate parts. Formula 1 is like that. When the cars line up on the grid, everything is totally neat and rehearsed, completely in its place. Tires, people, staff, even journalists. The teams are meted out in perfect sections—they don't call it the grid for nothing. But when time comes for the sprint to begin, team members move in perfect coordination, synchronized. They have stances and footwork. This is most true of the pit crew and the astonishing speed at which they travel through space as one organism, totally practiced in set plays of their own. This was beautiful to watch in real life. The unfurling of the apparatus of the setup, groups peeling back one by one until there are only these alien cars, these technological marvels kissing the ground. Before the heartbeat, they respirated.

[...]

After the second sprint, the INEOS folks informed the journalists that we needed to leave early in order to avoid traffic and make it to dinner on time, where, apparently there would be a special guest. Frustrated, I returned to watching the cars as they started up again, knowing that the drivers were pushing them to their limits, engrossed in their personal kaleidoscope of motion and color. Hamilton was in one of them. In the last shootout, he drove differently than before. A great verve frayed the lines he was making, something we can only call effort, push. Watching him, I understood what was so interesting about this sport, even though I was watching it in its most bare-bones form— cars going around in circles. The driver is the apotheosis of quick-moving prowess, total focus and control. The car is both the most studied piece of human engineering, tuned and devised in lab-like environments and at the same time a variable entity, something that must be wrestled with and pushed. The numbers are crunched, the forms wind-tunneled. And yet some spirit escapes their control, and that spirit is known only by the driver. Yes, we watch this perfect blend of man and machine, but we speak of the machine as though it were not of human origin, as though the machine, being born from science could— eventually, through its iterative processes— sublimate human flaws. The driver, being human, knows this is false. His intimacy with the machine is the necessary missing connection, and even if the machine were perfect, it was made for imperfect hands. But it is never perfect. The gaps in its perfection are where disasters transpire, but also miracles.

—Kate Wagner, "Behind F1's Velvet Curtain"

(Putting aside the controversies around this article, this might be some of my favorite writing about Formula 1 and why it can be so goddamn captivating. The drama and the pretty people are entertaining, but these passages really nail the ineffability at the heart of motorsport, and beautifully.)

[hangingfire]

What I need is for someone to reverse-engineer the pattern for that sweater.

Because of how it's made, when it's held up in the photo in the article, you can see how the floats of yarn were carried across the back of the work, and there's something absolutely thrilling about that. Obviously there's literally nothing new about knitting techniques, but there's something about seeing the concrete evidence of someone over 200 years ago doing the exact things that I'm currently struggling to get better at.

Very very interesting