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— ⟢ the last prince and the nameless hero ⟣ —

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alnst au sketches pt. 1

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Average British Fantasy Author of the 20th Century: Born in Hong Kong, raised in Singapore, Kingston and Oxford, he kissed his first girl at the tender age of 38. He spent 23 years obsessively writing notes for his epic masterwork, the Sword of Gormenlia series, with elements drawn from Indian mysticism, Arthurian mythos, Surrealist poetry, Victorian racism and Radical beliefs[?]. He died in Cyprus where he owned the world's most beautiful houseboat.

Average American Fantasy Author of the 20th Century: Born on the border between Ohio and Montana, Wizjeremiah VanderMcDercken, better known by his pseudonym John "Wizard" Whiteman, was raised in a ghost town and was the only citizen of his county who could read. At the age of 14, he stole a car and drove 30 hours straight to New York City to send his first story "The Alien was Really a Man" to Astounding Stories, for which he was paid a whopping 12$. A string of successes followed, including "The Man was Really a Robot" "The Alien was Really a Wizard" and "The Wizard is Really a Man When You Think About It". He harassed Samuel R. Delany for twelve years over a mild criticism of one of his now out-of-print novels. Died in Yonkers where he had a condo.

Average Canadian Fantasy Author of the 20th Century: Born just outside of Toronto

Average French Fantasy Author of the 20th Century: Despite publishing over 170 novels over a period of fifty years, no one outside of France, or indeed within France, knows who Jean Messac is. Left on the steps of a convent in the south of France, he soon learned to hate the nuns, the books in the local library, Parisians, Americans, specifically the citizens of Syria, the Dominican Republic and Bulgaria, the French literary establishment, Regionalist writers, Sartre, De Gaulle, Casimir, anyone who appeared on TV, Radio, Newspapers and Photographs. He lived in a shoebox gifted to him as a joke from André Breton. He was a high school teacher and wrote for a variety of magazines and publishers, was institutionalized three times and was a Majdanek survivor. His books have all been translated in Russia and Japan following a popular JRPG adapting his saga "Pox-Children of the Kamchadals". He died in the same city where he spent his entire life at the age of 64.

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OH. OHH. DONT SHOOT ME AGAIN IM ALREADY FUCKING DEAD IN ALREADY DEAD PLEASE STOP

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To enhance the experience, I made clipped parts of the soundtrack by tnbee you should listen to: https://youtu.be/DZ4qLlzC0ic

Please DO NOT watch the video... Just loop the song for the 33550336th time with me. :3

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I have no idea who or what carhartt is but i always see big boys wearing em so they have my full support

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I was raised agnostic and tend to remain ambiguous on theological matters.

-but my house has a porch on the second story that affords me a terrific view of my neighborhood and the Colorado Front Range and I was partaking of some peace before the 4th Of July Finger-Loss Festivities begin, and I have had a

~*Spiritual Experience*~

I just watched my neighbor try to unload an actual wooden pallet that had to have been forklifted into the back of his insecurity pickup worth of fireworks.

Except that he does not have a forklift in his garage.

He does have so much sports memorabilia and cardboard boxes of unsold MLM Merchandise and patriotically themed camping gear and posters of women in bikinis and flags of suspect political organizations in his garage that there is only BARELY enough space for the fireworks and certainly none for his truck.

So he had to unload the individual boxes of recreational explosives from the back of his truck and stack them in the minimal space he had cleared by hand. This is a tedious and time-consuming process as this neighbor has purchased a wide variety of recreational and locally illegal explosives instead of many of just a few types, so the individual boxes are rather small.

He begins, and this is crucial to what happens next, by cutting apart the industrial-grade saran wrap his explosives dealer had so carefully wrapped his merchandise in, and discarded it unsecured on his lawn.

Where Outdoor Conditions sometimes happen.

His process for unloading the fireworks is to 1. Climb up through the gate into the bed of his pickup truck (a feat made unusually difficult due to the slope of his driveway, and this man's fascinating decision to wear the world's Siffest and least Flexible Denim Overalls. 2. Once in the pickup bed, he selects ONE (1) box from the pile He is apparently from a niche religious institution that doesn't believe in stacking things. 3. Carries it awkwardly around the palette that barely fits in the truck bed 4. His wife yells "Be careful!" when he nearly falls out of the pickup. 5. He Yells "SHADDUP!" back at her. 6. The Large German Shepherd barks from inside the house. 7. He yells "SHADDUP!" back at her too. 8. He sets the (1) box down on the gate 9. Slowly and awkwardly climbs out of the pickup bed 10. picks the box back up, and carries it into the garage.

Question: Aren't you going to help this poor man? Answer: Absolutely Not.

There's four military veterans, MANY dogs, and several people with dementia in this neighborhood, all of whom are terrified by this chicanery every year and many neighbors have repeatedly asked him to maybe do the fireworks somewhere else. (This is the Eighth Year Running he's held a major demolition event in his driveway, and for those of you who can do math, you may be able to guess the precipitating incident to this little ritual) Additionally, I live in Colorado, a state marginally less prone to spontaneous and catastrophic conflagrations than a rotting grain silo, but only marginally. Our recreational explosives laws are written accordingly.

I am in fact calling the Non Emergency line to report Fireworks violations, and reading off the brand labels to someone named Dorothy, who is gleefully totaling up a SPECTACULAR fine for my oblivious neighbor.

However, while I'm on the phone with Dorothy, I notice the wind begin to pick up. and by "Notice" I mean "The Industrial Saran Wrap he left on his Lawn earlier is suddenly swept up about 100 feet into the air by an updraft intense enough to make my ears pop" And by "Pick Up" I mean "I look up to see the sky has turned a fun and exciting shade of glass green, and the bottoms of the clouds are bumpy and rounded, and the overall effect is not unlike looking up through the bottom of the cup at God's Matcha Boba Tea."

For those of you who do not live in places with Inclement Weather, these conditions mean "You have about 30 seconds before a Major Meteorological Event Occurs."

I move under the eaves. "Hang on Dorothy." I say, nose filling with Petrichor. "The show is about to be cancelled." "Oh, that doesn't matter!" Dorothy cheerfully informs me. "It's illegal for him just to possess those, no matter if he actually gets to set them off or not." "Terrific, because he's gotten maybe five boxes out of a hundred inside."

Sometimes, the weather gods are Merciful and give you a verbal warning, typically in the kind of thunderclap that makes your ears ring.

The Gods were not merciful today.

It's not often that I am in the time, place, correct angle or in a properly observational frame of mind to see this, But I got to see it today. Huh. I thought. I've never seen a cloud just DIVE for the ground before. Oh. I realized as it got closer. That's RAIN.

Sometimes, a thunderstorm will form in such a way that the rain that would normally be distributed over an area of say, five to tent square miles, is instead concentrated into an area of say, my neighborhood exactly.

So today, I was granted the rare privilege of being able to actually see the literal wall of water descend from On High and DIRECTLY onto my porch, my street, and my neighbor's truck, and his pile of unwrapped fireworks.

The sheer impact force of the downpour immediately scatters the teetering pile of fireworks boxes in the back of the truck, like the wrath of God striking down the tower of Babel. Boxes tumble, then are washed out of the bed of the truck by the deluge. Smaller Boxes are carried down the road in a little line by the stream forming in the gutter, like little impotent explosive ducklings.

My neighbor was definitely yelling something, but I could not hear what over the DEAFENING noise several million gallons of water makes upon high-speed contact with the earth's surface, but there was a lot of arm-waving and faces turning red as he went looking for the saran wrap that had probably blown to Nebraska by now, while his wife started disassembling the complex three-dimensional puzzle of interlocking material goods in search of a tarp. They do not have a tarp. They have one of those wretched Thin Blue Line flags though, and my neighbor jogs out in a futile effort to cover what's left in the truck.

Which is when the hail begins.

"HELLO?" Yelled Dorothy. "HI!" I shouted. "WE'RE HAVING SOME WEATHER!" "OH GOOD!" she shouts back. "WE NEED THE MOISTURE!"

I watch for a minute longer, but the loss was immediate and catastrophic- the hail is the size of marbles and dense and cares not for your pitiful cardboard and cellophane, ripping the boxes asunder and punching holes in the few things covered in plastic. The colors on the Thin Blue Line Flag are seeping all over the remains of that it was supposed to protect in a particularly apt visual metaphor. Not even the few boxes that made it into the garage are spared, as the German Shepherd escapes from indoors, and in an attempt to assist her humans, jumps directly into the small stack of not-yet-ruined boxes, scattering them into the driveway and deluge. She even picks one up so her humans will chase her around the yard, before dropping it in the gutter to be swept away.

So. I was raised Agnostic -but even I can recognize when God slaps someone upside the head and shouts "NO!" at them.

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(If you laughed, please consider supporting my Ko-fi or preordering my book of Strange Stories on Patreon)

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u ever wonder if ur associated with a character forever to someone else. like. when ur scrolling ur dash and u see a url u don't recognize and after going to their blog ur like ohhh this is the Character person. yeah ok i remember now.

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im still not sane about her whn (max graves) / last words of a shooting star (mitski)

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i taught my mom the phrase breasting boobily last time i saw her lmao

today I used the phrase "breasting boobily" in casual real life conversation and everyone was shocked asking how I came up with that and I had to explain it. ive been at the devil's sacrament so long that I forgot he wasn't god

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in college back in 2018 i still didn't have a smart phone yet and they introduced DUO two-factor authentication and I carried one of the physical "clickers" because I couldn't use the phone app. I remember classmates being unable to participate in class or print assignments at the library even with school desktop computers because they left their phones ate home by accident or their phones died so they couldn't login to their school profiles.

professors started doing those kahoots quiz games for attendance points and I told them I couldn't participate because I didn't have a smart phone.

one of my professors scoffed in front of the whole class and said, "are you serious?" i said "are you going to pay for my data plan?"

he relented because he had to and every single day he had to print out a little physical quiz for me to take while everyone else did kahoots. it was so funny bc it was a lecture hall with like 150 students. he gave up after like 3 times and just counted me present.

at work i refuse to have a single work-related app on a phone they aren't paying for so they always have to order me the physical "clickers" for double authentication and they act like I'm pouring concrete in their shoes about it lmaoo

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i do however have absurd leg to torso proportions so whenever my brother who's half a foot taller than me drives my car he's like "it's so funny i don't need to adjust the seat" bc i'm just 90% leg like a newborn horse so one thing i'm gonna do ☝️ is reach the pedals

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im thinking about the astronaut from world war z again. and the one from fear the walking dead. i am always thinking about people stuck in space during the apocalypse, and performing their duties anyway

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There's a really conceptually interesting beat in World War Z, during one of the later Todd Waino sections, where Waino is discussing that the problem with trying to use land mines to fight zombies is that the point of a landmine isn't necessarily to kill the enemy, it's to control their movement because they're aware of the possibility of land mines, it's to hurt them, it's to turn a soldier into a living-but-crippled drain on the medical system of the enemy nation and a morale drain when he goes home to his parents without legs. And, of course, since absolutely none of those head games or logistical concerns are applicable to zombies, the best case scenario is that you create a bunch of legless zombies that are harder to notice until they're underfoot, and the worst case scenario is that you blow up your own guys on accident because the documentation on where you put the landmines while running away from all the zombies wasn't very good. And all of this is part of the book's continual concern with how there's this two-faced idea in war, where you dehumanize an enemy against whom none of your tactics would be remotely effective if they actually were the unthinking evil automaton you're hyping them up as. That's fine. But at the end of it all I'm left in an uncomfortable position where I'm not really sure if Max "lectures at West Point" Brooks recognizes the moral horror of what he's describing, or if he thinks that Landmines are a clever idea that're just inappropriate in this specific context. A lot of the book falls in that uncanny valley for me.