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HAPPY CORRU ANNIVERSARY!!

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A selection of the finest crocheted geodes! Pattern is from Crafty Intentions (a genuine genius of these modern times) and if you try it, I would recommend beads in the 8-12ish mm range. I tried larger (the blue one) and smaller and that seems to be the sweet spot, at least for me!

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in that ask you mentioned other villains in your stories having similarly “tempting mistakes” — what are some other examples of that, in aurora or elsewhere? i’ve always been really interested in the characterizations of your antagonists, and i’m wondering if this has something to do with it

The Collector is so fixated on solving a problem that she's completely divorced herself from the world around her, and will disregard any cost in lives or suffering because it is truly irrelevant in the paradigm she's anchored herself into. Hyperfixation is a bitch, and obsession can make anything outside of it seem unimportant. To create a character capable of such effortless widespread suffering, she needed to be truly incapable of seeing it as relevant. Jolon is the same way, but in a much smaller scale.

Tahraim is a similar model of "disregards everything beyond extremely narrow priorities of what he cares about" but he's much less of a dick about it, so while he's not really a villain, his morality is still pretty situational.

Zuurith, like Shrike, is obsessed with control. He's the epitome of "the world would be perfect if everyone just did what I think is right," and that paternalistic impulse feeds into every savior complex and vigilantism fantasy. He wants the world to work Just So, but he can't even make his own domain do that, and rather than seeing that as a failure of the goal itself, he sees it as a failure of his execution.

Tynan just wants attention. Terror is the easiest way to get it. He's the star; he's the coolest, deadliest thing around. He's unstoppable, a literal force of nature. And yet he still only has so much control over how he's perceived, and that makes him so angry.

The Void Dragon is self-awarely evil. He is a monster, a nightmare, the dark heart of this tomb world. He knows what he is, and that makes everything so easy, because he's not capable of kindness or mercy or creation or anything beyond his role as the eater of stars. He knows what he wants, and he knows how to get it, and the only joy in his existence is how much he gets to play with his food. When you're trapped and the world feels small, cruelty is very, very easy. When you're certain you're only good for hurting things, hurting things can become all you do.

The Paladin Champion knows he's right. He has built everything around the rock-solid understanding of what is Good and what is Evil, and because of the cause he serves, what he does is Good, even if it is at times cruel or imperfect. Being certain you're right is a very dangerous thing. Being certain of the morality of your cause can make it very tempting to stop listening to the morality in your head.

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I find it fascinating that Shrike is fundamentally _pathetic_, in a way that feel completely intentional. Like, the fact that she was hurt by a system, and thus uses it to hurt others seems to be intentionally written to spotlight how much an attitude like that is fundamentally limited, small, and pointless, as much as it exists in real life. Making a semi major recurring antagonist specifically pathetic shouldn't work but somehow does. Did you have specific inspiration for writing Shrike?

The things that motivate people to be wilfully, intentionally cruel fascinate me, and in my experience nothing motivates it more efficiently than a sense that you're balancing the scales by doing so. You did your time under the boot and now it's only fair you get to wear it.

The cycle of abuse and violence perpetuates itself because it convinces the people trapped in it that there is no life outside the cycle. There is only under the boot or wearing the boot. Once you escape the boot, your only choice to keep your freedom and ensure nobody puts you under the boot again is to ensure you're the one wearing it. And so you perpetuate the cycle and teach its lesson to a new group of victims who might one day be strong to break the cycle you bent to.

Shrike, to me, is a weak person's concept of what strength looks like. She's not strong enough to accept that the world and its people cannot be controlled, and that she cannot always win or escape suffering. She's not strong enough to tolerate loss of control, so she enforces an illusion of control and sees those willing to limit themselves as weak, bowing to forces they could overpower because they're afraid. She never left the prison, really, and when she saw it shattered, she made the conscious choice to keep the prison she'd built in herself rather than facing the wide world outside its walls. If you live in a dichotomy of Suffer Or Inflict Suffering On Others, freedom looks like Suffering. If freedom means others can simply choose to make her suffer again, then Shrike has no interest in it.

Shrike, like many of the villains in my stories, is someone I, at various points, could've easily seen myself becoming. She makes some very tempting mistakes.

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from silk reeling to fine suzhou embroidery by 许潇潇

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pat mandziy | if much ado about nothing was gen z

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So Chairman Kaga's gonna be rescuing me and actually - I think this is potentially doable!

It of course depends on who the kidnapper is. There are some who I think would cave in the face of a fabulously dressed man rolling up and biting into a whole-ass bell pepper while giving them a thousand yard stare.

But barring that, he has 3+ world class chefs at his command, all of whom have excellent knife skills and know a thing or two about dissecting something very quickly. If he can't bribe them with the promise of a delicious multi-course dinner in exchange for me, all it takes is getting one of them close enough.

And to help with that he also has an army of cooking assistants, all of whom also know a thing or two about using knives, and delegation is definitely a thing. So between coordination, numbers, speed, cleverness under the clock, and lots of knives, I might get out of it alive!

And assuming everything goes according to plan, we can have an amazing meal afterwards.

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Download this easy DIY clothing repair guide (only 10 pages) from Uni of Kentucky

link to PDF

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There are two types of skull planet.

Art by Ray Feibush (left) and Bruce Pennington. Check out these illustrations along with 400 others in my new art book - "Worlds Beyond Time: Sci-Fi Art of the 1970s" is out now!

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''i wasted those years'' who cares. you lived the only life you could've lived in those moments

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When inventing a fantasy religion a lot of people a) make the mistake of assuming that everyone in fantasy world would worship the same gods and b) assume that polytheistic religions see all of their gods as morally good

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Mars!

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Mercury☆

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