#Common Clay

[pokemonranch]

Aight, I want to ask something to Rotomblr 'cause I'm actually curious.

How many of y'all had an actual, Prof-given starter, and how many just... got a random wild one?

[iambittythings]

Today's beast is the beloved city resident, the Rock Dove or Common Pigeon. If you do not enjoy a pigeon, I question your taste, how do you not enjoy these jaunty little fellows and their beautiful colours, they're even iridescent! Quality bird.

If you'd like a pidg for your home, please check out Bittythings and Beasts.

https://bittythingsandbeasts.etsy.com

[d13t0rt10n]

Raimundo: Clay is off to see his dad, so while he is gone, I’m going to cut the sleeves off all of my shirts.

Kimiko: Why?

Raimundo: He's like 90% of my impulse control.

[joycrispy]

I've been seeing a lot of nostalgia for CR2 and the Mighty Nein on my dash in the last few days, and it made me curious.

If you loved campaign 2 of Critical Role, particularly if you were a fellow Cad stan, please reblog and tell me: what's your current obsession/hyperfixation? What replaced CR2 for you?

If it's CR3, tell me about that! I love hearing about CR3!

If it's something else completely unrelated to Critical Role, I wanna hear about that even more!

[oddly-casual]

Trolls Band Together Spoilers

(Transgender spice???)

I haven’t seen anybody really talk about it but I like Bruce has some trans swag

Like, okay I know his name change was supposed to be because he wanted to distance himself from the band but let me have my fun.

Bruce changes his name and Clay and Branch immediately start calling him Bruce. John Dory is the only one who still calls him Spruce and even Clay has to correct him bc John has trouble coming to terms with the fact that his brothers have forged their own identities.

AND Bruce was set having one body type (absolutely ripped) because that’s what was expected of him, but after he leaves he finds a life and a body he’s happier in and doesn’t feel the need to change for anyone.

I’m sure I don’t need to dig into the metaphors, Bruce with trans swag!!!

[sad-rod3nt]

morty and orel doing that one spiderman meme where theyre pointing at eachother

church buddies

[jbbartram-illu]

What time is it? LOON LADY TIME!! I'm making a trio of Loon Ladies in this new batch of creatures & this is the first one I've finished (the other two are all wrapped up in damp plastic, waiting to be painted with slip & carved...hopefully tomorrow!).

I also have a few other brand new species of Bird Ladies in mind & am very excited to get started on them!

[shorthaltsjester]

taliesin and laura remain truly so fantastic at making characters who… don’t necessarily have something extremely and inherently in common but do have experiences that were caused by similar sources and that lead them to have quite different opinions/ideas about things but in ways that are typically very reconcilable? which is a lot of qualifiers but it’s a through line of vex/percy with nobility, jester & cad with loneliness (and also god stuff but in a different post maybe someday i’ll talk about how actually their god stuff is intensely related to their different experiences of loneliness), and now imogen & ashton with being left behind.

like vex was this character who technically had a claim to nobility due to her blood but at the same time was burdened because of that same claim. and percy who was born into and raised by nobility but that nobility ended up making his family the targets of a massacre. and then vex who lets down her walls and Do I Look Like I Come From Money? and percy giving her the title grand mistress of the grey hunt because it has nothing to do with blood, or his love for her, or anything aside from the fact that it’s something she can prove herself worthy of simply by virtue of who she Is, not who someone makes her. and percy and vex’s conversation about forgiveness and it’s necessity for growth as probably two of the characters most inclined to hold grudges.

and caduceus clay who gets left behind with nothing but his Belief while his family goes off into the world. and jester lavorre who gets shut inside with no company except her Belief as her mother protects her from the world. and they both get the burden of loneliness and the understanding of love’s nonmalicious imperfection. and caduceus having a panic attack on a ship and jester telling him that the world is a lot bigger than his cemetery and that means he has to break out of his comfort zone to find his path. and caduceus telling jester that he doesn’t think she gets as much credit as she ought to and she deserves more pastries. and jester thanking caduceus for showing her how cool it is to actually heal people and caduceus asking if she wants to use his shield while he doesn’t need it.

and ashton who was left broken and dying on the ground and was given inescapable pain as their means of survival. and imogen who was left behind by the only person who could provide true understanding of the pain she’d one day come to feel. and ashton who’s a barbarian, who wields their rage casually and unapologetically and who sees the Shittiness of the world but is unrelenting in his version of optimism. and imogen who is weighed down by pessimism she doesn’t Want to have but hasn’t cracked how to undo and who doesn’t admit her anger until it comes up again and again and again and carries it like a burden or like guilt, who we only see really Grasp and feel Confidence about her anger being something good in front of others when she has those conversations with ashton. and like. ashton who looks at imogen and sees a superhero. imogen venturing through ashton’s mind and holding his bleeding and exhausted head and saying i’m sorry. i’m sorry. and imogen who looks at ashton and sees someone special. and fucking “we got him killed.” and “no, we didn’t. don’t you dare. […] we are not what fucking killed that man. […] we are his eventual victory. we are his fucking revenge.” and “i’ll be his revenge.” and “i have no fucking doubt.”

and in general rp wise they both tend to make some of my favourite characters (also typically the ones i find most frustrating) because they both tend to make flaws that are easy to hate and they make those flaws very central to their characters but i think that’s also what makes their character interactions so deeply compelling because so frequently it’s like. yes yes these two characters have like. a helix of things they have in common but also things they deeply disagree on but they’re going to spider-man point at the things that are the same and they’re going to honour their differences while doing so. and it’s just. i always enjoy it so much and i was psyched when i heard about an imogen and ashton side pit stop in last nights episode and i was not let down when i watched the episode today.

[cacw]

more ocs

[allieinarden]

The best part of being a woman is having a completely different personality from every other woman out there because femininity is an incredible supplement of the soul rather than a substitute for it.

[ghost-format]

Esmp Cod Jimmy and Jrwi Riptide Gillian meeting is a crossover I need in my life

Two fish bois always disappointing their elders, having things taken from them because of it

Born into some sort of world-changing and catastrophic destiny that’s weighted on their shoulders

And also they have badass sisters

I want this so much

[marxonculture]

Personhood and Genre Fiction | My 2024 Reading Journey So Far

I’ve been working as a Library Assistant for six months now, and boy has it been a massive jolt to my love of reading. It’s hard not to be excited about digging into a book when you’re surrounded by them all day, and I credit that feeling with being responsible for my reading more books for pleasure in the first four months of 2024 than I have in the previous seven years combined. As I reach a modest milestone in my reading for the year, I wanted to reflect on what I’ve observed to be a common theme among the books that have most captured my imagination since January. With the world having been in a particularly fraught state over the last few years, and an increasingly prevalent trend of groups of people being actively dehumanised by those with power and influence, it’s been quite an emotional experience for me to discover that the books which have most captured my imagination this year have been about personhood and what defines it.

Piranesi by Susanna Clarke (2020)

The first book I finished this year is one that I think about every day. Susanna Clarke’s Piranesi is a wonderful little novel about who we are at different times, and crucially different places, in our lives. It explores personhood through the lens of fundamental internal change; when we go through seismic changes, do we become different people or are we fundamentally the same?

Clarke uses magical realism and a meticulously well-designed alternate reality/dream world as a means of exploring the evolution of one’s own personhood, as well as an adoration of design, architecture, and place. Piranesi was invigorating for me as a reassurance that it’s okay to redefine oneself at different points in life, and that just because you’re a different person now, that doesn’t mean that the old you ceases to exist.

Feet of Clay by Terry Pratchett (1996)

Terry Pratchett is so well known for being a satirist, that it’s easy to forget how sincere and moving his work can be. After putting it off for many years, I finally started reading the Discworld books this year, and have been enjoying them immensely, and while I had a great time with the first two books in the City Watch sub-series, it wasn’t until the third entry that one of them really hit me, emotionally.

Feet of Clay is about golems (‎גּוֹלֶם). For those unfamiliar with Jewish folklore, golems are anthropomorphic clay constructs ordered to obey the commands of their master and animated via the inscription of the Hebrew word for truth on its head. Pratchett’s golems are slightly different in that they are brought to life by placing governing words inside their heads. Pratchett uses this to remarkable effect to build a story of self-ownership and self-determination. It was especially moving to me to see Jewishness used in this way – as something empowering rather than grotesque, which is a real rarity in Western fantasy writing.

A Closed and Common Orbit by Becky Chambers (2016)

The last book I wanted to talk about here was this second entry in Becky Chambers’ beautifully humane, space opera anthology, The Wayfarers series. A Closed and Common Orbit centres on two protagonists, one an AI learning to adapt to a life passing as a human in an illegal ‘body kit’, and the other a clone, bred for factory work, trying to help the AI make a life for herself.

As with her first book, The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet, what characterises Chambers’ writing is her deep love for her characters, and the way that love manifests itself in this book is nothing short of miraculous. Sidra and Pepper’s parallel journeys are not merely about convincing others of their personhood, but rather convincing themselves. A Closed and Common Orbit is about finding a way of living where you feel most like yourself, learning to feel that you deserve for your needs to be met, and accepting that your loved ones see you as a person, even in times when you don’t.

All of these books have meant a great deal to me during a time where I have had to completely re-evaluate the ways in which I see myself. Genre fiction is not necessarily where I expected to find this feeling of personhood and recognition, but it’s especially exciting to have done so. There’s nothing quite like finding deep meaning in something you have engaged with purely for entertainment, and I hope to continue to do so as the year goes on.

[char-lie-spirals]

Okay, so there’s this TMA statement, right? It’s about one of those funky fears that starts with S… you know, the weird guys?? Yeah. Those.

So it all starts with this girl signing up for a class. She’s not a full-time student, she’s doing this in her free time, she has other responsibilities, whatever. But in that class, she meets this kinda-off-putting guy with short dark hair, I’ll just refer to him as “G” from now on.

Once she realizes that something Really Weird is going on, it’s too late and she can’t avoid G anymore. She even makes the decision to quit the class but he's still just Always There. And things only get weirder! She watches a guy eat something that is clearly NOT food, maybe an “artistic medium” if you want to call it something fancy... Clearly, if she had never met G, that wouldn’t have happened to her!

By the end of the statement, she can clearly see that this “G” person is NOT human, and she finally gets away. Still, the last bit of the statement is G contacting her one last time only to say something that leaves her very shaken.

Oh, by the way, G does get mentioned again! He’s mentioned 3 times in the podcast, actually!

1) This statement

2) He’s mentioned/implied to be exes with this one guy?? Who ended up really tangled up with a different (unrelated) fear, but still. They were exes.

3) This one’s complicated but like… there’s this monster/being/whatever that was mentioned in the statement about G, but in a different… “form”? It has a different name now, but it mentions G briefly when it speaks with Jon.

Oh yeah and G actually dies years before Jon becomes the archivist. So... that statement sounds familiar, right?

So now here’s the question! Am I talking about MAG 3 - Across the street or MAG 126 - Sculptor's tool? Does G stand for Graham or Gabriel?

[connectionterminated13]

My new crack ship is William Afton X Clay Blake...

[9w6]

connection terminated

[bijoumikhawal]

Stylized Coptic human figures