pyrrhiccomedy

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Beautiful older woman at the party asks me why such a cute kitten like myself wears a collar despite having no master and I, in turn, ask her if she knows what a Ronin is.

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guy whose genitalia is one of these

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we're heading towards some record setting humidity this summer so JUST A REMINDER that if you're in any way prone to migraines, this weather is great at triggering them! Be EXTREMELY diligent about staying hydrated if you're going out, EVEN TO AN AIR CONDITIONED SPACE, and ESPECIALLY if you are drinking any alcohol at all! even a single glass of wine or a cocktail! You will feel fine for an hour or two but then you will NOT FEEL FINE. If you have a headache that isn't responding to painkillers and it gets noticeably worse when you move or change elevations (sitting to standing, not like, going to the mountains) then drink a full glass of water and go lie down in a cool, quiet, dark room until it passes! DO NOT LOOK AT A SCREEN UNTIL THE DANGER HAS PASSED. I know you're bored but it could be so much worse!

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do y'all think the parallel mouse America is like also dealing with resurgent mouse fascism or have they been doing better

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what are the implications of being part faerie in heretic? does rosemary have any neat powers? or weaknesses?

Fairies are ageless; Rosemary is not. She will age and die like a human...unless she chooses to become fairy. To be a halfling, like she is, is not a stable state. Living in our world, she will gradually become human, once she leaves childhood; or, if she lives in the Wood, she will gradually become fairy (starting immediately). Her nature is mutable, and always will be. If she decides to try to stay both, it will be a delicate balancing act, involving frequent crossings, and a great deal of heartache. But those who do make that choice tend to lead interesting lives.

She does also have the choice of living in the Wood and making it her home, which humans do not. The crossing is difficult: humans typically can't enter the Wood unless a fairy takes them there, or they devote years of study to the appropriate rituals, and when they arrive, the Wood (and the fairies in it) are generally hostile to their presence. Most of the stories that start with humans trespassing into the Wood end with "and they were never seen again."

The fairies, meanwhile, are the most favored children of the Wood, and travel through it easily, and the Wood will often extend itself to make their lives more comfortable. But they can't leave it except to come to our world, and only then if a human gives them their name, except during rare conjunctions of seasons and stars. And if they find themselves in our world without a name, they will fade and die within a month.

Rosemary should be relatively free to cross back and forth! The Wood will not favor her the way it does the fairies (unless she becomes fairy), but it will tolerate her, and she will likely not be hunted by the fae.

Rosemary also has a number of fae qualities: she's good at rhymes and riddles; she has quick and clever fingers; she has a diminished capacity to understand consequences or delayed gratification; she can make herself almost unnoticeable while she's sneaking around; she's very quick to temper; and animals are instinctively fawning and subservient towards her. She doesn't have the wildtongue, so she can't speak with them, but her brother does; and she will probably be able to learn it much more easily than most.

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A Plague Tale: Requiem | Scenery

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Were they able to save Tommassin?

Also who got custody of Bastions and Bellefleurs daughter in their situation?

Tomassin is still dead, but bringing him back is very much in the works. They still have Tomassin's bones, and Tomassin's spirit - as a, uh, whatever he is; a nephilim, kind of? - doesn't go to any inaccessible afterlives but just turns up outside the walls of the white city and starts bleeding and doesn't stop. Which is to say, it is recoverable, and should still be tethered to his earthly remains, if his body can be resurrected! But also means that his soul is not in the domain of the Madrugad, who you could usually count on to resurrect any good Christian, if you spent a petition on making the request. As it is, they just need to take his bones and...make him be alive again, which is, unfortunately, the domain of Mother White.

Mother White is a ravenous god-eating grub, and the undead corpse of the devil, so while you can petition her, it is almost never a good idea to do so. Bastian, as the Blood, intends to let her eat him and then force her metamorphosis from the inside, inheriting her power in the transformation, but he's not quite strong enough to have a hope in hell of pulling that off yet. He's getting close, though. It'll probably be at the end of the England arc, which is a few months out.

Bellefleur tried to take Rosemary with her when Bastian drove her out of France, but Bastian prevented her from doing so. She's a daddy's girl anyway. She's presently with her papa in the English otherworld, and has been such a good helper and very brave. She's eight now.

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It's a little fucked up that the past literally only persists in the form of its traceable effects upon the exact present moment. You would think that surely at least some little bits of the past that can't be deduced from the present state of things would nonetheless still be hanging around in some vague ghostly form, but nope! Completely gone forever! And yet however meanwhile, the present is so very rich in evidence of the past that you would think there's barely any room left for all the proper Now stuff. But somehow it all hangs together.

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One day, you know, I'd like to write some really shitty poetry riffing off Arthuriana despite being a tourist at BEST on the scholarship, and also probably despite missing the religious point entirely (I do do that...), but, this does lead me to gobble up a LOT of Arthurian-adjacent writing, and pretty quickly you can really tell where the author's preference goes (and there's always a preference).

Anyway, that's my really long-winded introduction to: I've been wondering, statistically, so...

PS: YES I know they're not on opposite sides, sorry for the Mordred erasure, bear with me.

PPS: if you want to expand on your vote the tags and notes are open, I am all ears about wildly different character and archetype interpretations.

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are there any pieces of fiction that have inspired Heretic? Like you've talked a lot about how you and emily are medievalists and scholars of religion/philosophy/divinity, but any novels, video games, movies, comics that you can point to as touchstones?

I took inspiration from a lot of ttrpg systems to build out how Heretic works mechanically, but I don't think that's what you're asking.

Cultist Simulator is the only thing that directly inspired Heretic. I was playing it during the pandemic and thought, "what if this was set in the middle ages, and was a ttrpg that I could play one on one with my wife," and the whole project took off from there. Vampire: the Masquerade was an influence, too; I don't think anybody who's read much Heretic lore would be surprised to learn that I ran a massive Gehenna campaign. And Lovecraft, of course, for a world with a background state of "full of little cults with terrible secrets, worshiping vast powers of unknown origins and intentions."

Beyond that, like - Jorge Luis Borges's "Labyrinths" is an influence on basically everything I make. "The Name of the Rose" by Umberto Eco is also definitely in there. "The Cipher," by Kathe Koja; "Last Days," by Brian Evanson; "The Black Opera," by Mary Gentle; "The Library at Mount Char," by Scott Hawkins, in spite of all the problems I have with it. Also, obviously, the Matter of Britain and the Matter of France. Put that reading list into a blender, and you'd get a soup that reminded you of Heretic.

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If someone jerks me off with a puppet it counts as a threesome, right?

read your bible

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On the Shore By Fidus

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if you've been doing anything you don't have to do for over an hour, I think a helpful habit to get into is to ask yourself if you're actually enjoying it. scrolling on your phone. watching a tv show. being at a bar with your friends. whatever.

like if the answer is no, you get to stop, and if the answer is yes, you get a nice little moment of mindfully appreciating that you're having fun right now

and if the answer IS no, a good follow up question is, "what is my goal right now?" is it relaxing? are you chasing a dopamine hit? do you want these people to like you? "I am not having fun" can be kind of a directionless statement, but "I am not having fun, and I am trying to [X]" can give you a heading for where you might want to go with yourself next.

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This post has gone so much further than I expected it to. This is my sweet cat. His name is Eddie Potato.

when my shelter cat passes by me, he pauses for a second, and looks up. He is waiting for me to lean down, and touch my hand against his side, so that when he keeps walking, my hand skims across his fur. he doesn't really need attention. he has his own thoughts and plans. but after more than a year of living in our home, he has come to expect a moment of kindness whenever he crosses my path. if I don't do it, he will follow me. "where is your hand?" he asks, with his plaintive and impatient eyes. I give it to him. he bumps against it like a balloon before wandering away. this is a poem to me

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