#Imperial Seal

[evonydavidguo]

How to increase your March Size in Evony?

How to increase your March Size in Evony? With the development of your castle and troops in Evony, you will realize that even though you have a lot of troops, there is a limit to how many troops you can send out. In order to send out troops as much as possible, we have to increase our March Size. So, how to do this? There are a lot of methods to increase March Size in Evony. If you are interested…

[fuckyeahmarxismleninism]

Venezuelan Interior Minister Diosdado Cabello reported the arrest of a U.S. Navy SEAL alongside two Spanish citizens allegedly linked to intelligence agencies.

The foreign citizens are accused of plotting to assassinate President Nicolás Maduro and other high-ranking Venezuelan officials.

At a press conference on Saturday at the ministry’s headquarters, in front of some of the 400 seized firearms linked to the reported plot, Cabello accused Wilbert Joseph Castañeda, an active duty U.S. sailor, of leading the effort on behalf of U.S. intelligence.

“Castañeda is the head of the operation, placed here by the CIA,” said Cabello.

Castañeda’s arrest was first reported earlier this month. At the time, White House Spokesperson John Kirby denied that the Navy serviceman was in Venezuela on official business and argued his travel was for personal reasons.

[alexiethymia]

IF THIS ISN’T DRAMATIC IRONY

[ancientstuff]

So, by imperial archive, they mean mostly the building that housed the documents. There seem to be a few documents in fragments, but more seals than documents. I think. It's a bit confusing.

[dangermousie]

Oh, brother...aka keeping it in the (royal) family

I recently realized that for some reason “multiple brothers one girl” seems to be a popular category in costume dramas. I am not sure why such sharing is necessary in a polygamous society for fancy royals each of whom can get himself a whole harem, but I am not complaining that it appears any remake of the Hollywood classic “Seven Brides for Seven Brothers” would clearly be changed into “One Bride for Seven Brothers, and Some of the Brothers Spit Blood and Die” if it were a cdrama. Here are some of the dramas at issue. 

Liu Shi Shi appears to be the queen of this subgenre to such an extent that I am vaguely wondering if it’s in her contract. We are gonna start with THREE of her dramas:

Bu Bu Jing Xin - Liu Shi Shi has not one, not two, but THREE hot royal brothers, played by Nicky Wu, Kevin Cheng and Lin Gengxin, pine for her time-traveling self. Since this is an exquisite (no, seriously, it’s amazing) period piece about loss and longing, she ends up with none of them, instead of a hot vagely-’cesty gangbang as one might expect from that set-up.

Lost Love in Times - poor Liu Shi Shi, she’s a sexy witch having to pick between William Chan and his shady brother Joe Xu. To make it even trippier, the two actors look like each other, to really hammer the whole “siblings want her” theme.

The Imperial Doctress - why bust what’s not broken? It’s the true and tried Liu Shi Shi and hot royal brothers formula. She’s a doctor who spends most of her time practicing medicine, escaping barbarians and creating feminism, not noticing that as she pines for one royal brother played by Huang Xuan, another royal brother, played by infinitely hotter Wallace Huo, is pining for her.

Gong/Jade Palace Lock Heart - if Liu Shi Shi is the queen of that set up, Feng Shao Feng is the king, what with this and Military Seal, both of which star Yang Mi. Clearly, there are worse ways to make a career than stealing Yang Mi from a royal brother. Here, Yang Mi is a spunky time traveler in the middle of Kang Xi’s sons’ fight for the throne. She first falls for Four but ends up with Eight. In between, she offers to bang Four to save Eight as one does. Gives a whole new meaning to sharing is caring and “have you brought enough for the entire class?”

Legend of the Military Seal - Yang Mi and FSF strike again. FSF is madly in love with his brother’s wife, and since she’s not afflicted by blindness, she shares his feelings. Surprisingly, but delightfully, happy ending ensues. 

Who Rules the World - more like which brother rules awesome Zhao Lusi’s heart. Going by the rule of “hottest brother wins,” Yang Yang gets the girl in a drama that is pretty yum yum.

Colourful Bone - one hot seriously whumped out royal brother and one whiny immature one, oh who should the heroine pick? This drama stands for the proposition that you should protect and save abused people, especially if they are hot men, since they will always turn out to be an emperor in disguise. This drama btw is one giant kinkfest for yours truly.

The Eternal Love - you could make THREE whole seasons out of timetravel and brothers into the same girl, who knew.

Dreaming Back to the Qing Dynasty - if you’ve seen Gong or BBJX, you know the drill. Horde of queued brothers queueing for the heroine.

(Mine and all my brothers’, that is -Ed.)

Princess Jieyou - Yuan Hong narrowly escaped the curse of fancying his brother’s woman in BBJX, being about the only sibling not in love with LSS in that one. But clearly, you can’t fight fate and shortly thereafter he’s got to be a sister-in-law luster in a drama of his very own. He is a barbarian general who falls in love with a woman only to discover she’s to marry his brother. Angst and deliciousness and eventual happy ending (the husband fulfilled the uglier brother’s duty by eventually kicking the bucket.)

The Promise of Chang’an - if you want to watch brothers with the same woman but no happy ending, and have already watched BBJX, I present this recent drama where Cheng Yi gets to, as always, suffer beautifully watching the woman he loves marry his annoying brother. Pretty much everyone dies at the end of this one, going off to a great big threesome in the sky.

Twisted Fate of Love - will Sun Yi pick the delicate Tan Jianci or the sexy as fuck bastard that is Jin Han? Being a smart woman, she picks the latter and my hormones rejoice.

Go Princess Go - this is a drama that parodied every cliche there is, so why not brothers into one woman? Who is actually a man in a woman’s body making it even more delightful!

Ashes of Love - even being divine, with women from three separate realms available will seemingly not prevent love interests being a scarce resource leading to sibling love rivalry. Deng Lun and Luo Yunxi duke it out ostensibly for Yang Zi but in reality for who can suffer more prettily. Deng Lun might get the girl, but LYX wins the suffering crown, so it all more or less evens out.

Princess Silver - are siblings in love with the same woman not spicy enough for you? How about TWINS in love with the same woman? One awesome (Aarif Rahman) and one psychotic (Jing Chao) want our heroine and both marry her at one point. Only the awesome one gets to bang her though. (But the psychotic one gets to stick meathooks through his brother in compensation for not being able to stick...ummm...meathook through the heroine, so it’s all OK.)

Secret of the Three Kingdoms - and now we are gonna go REAL PERV! If twins are not enough for you, seekers of strong sensations, how about IDENTICAL twins? Ma Tianyu replaces his dead identical twin brother as the last Han emperor and gets to woo Wan Qian (whose plan it was in the first place.) At least she doesn’t need to get used to a new face?

We are gonna end here and not get into father and son sharing the same woman a la Empress of China.

(Congrats to Aarif Rahman for getting to bang both his brother’s and his father’s wives on screen. That is an interesting niche.)

[fatehbaz]

[M]onk seals continued to live in large herds along the largely unexplored Atlantic seaboard of northwest Africa. It was not until 1434 that Portuguese explorers landed on these [supposedly] untamed coasts, and discovered thousands of monk seals. Almost immediately, an intensive and lucrative trade in skins and oil was established [...]. Constantly vying with Spain [...], Portugal was determined to increase its sphere of influence in Africa. While Spain eventually became preoccupied with Columbus’ elusive vision [...] [and] his celebrated 1492 expedition [...] Portugal’s colonial influence in Africa was reaching its height by 1500. The first expeditions to Africa’s Gold Coast were recorded for posterity by an official chronicler, Gomes de Zurara [...]. In his book [...] he relates how the Portuguese Infante [royal prince], eager [...], dispatched explorer Afonso Gonçalves Baldaya in a cargo vessel to make contact with the mysterious “moors” or “pagans” who were believed to inhabit the region (Zurara, 1437).

“But these are people, no matter how beastlike they may be,” proclaimed the Infante, “and they need to be governed... I command you to penetrate this land as far as you can and that you work in order to learn about those people, perhaps taking one captive, so that you may become acquainted with them.”

It was in “the year [...] one thousand four hundred and thirty-six” that Alfonso set sail [...]. [T]he barinel eventually reached the shores of the Gold River, the Rio de Oro, situated at the Bay of Dakhla in the western Sahara. [...] Afonso and his crew sighted their first seals. Literally thousands were suddenly in their field of vision. [...] “Upon seeing on a reef at the mouth of the river a large number of sea-wolves,” relates Gomes da Zurara, “which, according to the estimates of some, amounted to five thousand, he ordered killed those that could be killed and had their furs loaded onto the ship [...].” Despite the windfall in skins and oil, Afonso was still dissatisfied, having failed to take captive any of the elusive natives. He therefore ventured a further 50 leagues “to see if he could capture a man or at least a woman or child in order to satisfy the will of his master.” [...]

---

[In] 1437 [...] another Portuguese ship was dispatched to the Gold River to fill its hold with the furs and oil of the sea-wolves. [...] In 1441, [...] the Infante ordered his young wardrobe keeper, Antão Gonçalves, to captain a small ship and return to the Gold River. [...] “[T]he reason for this voyage, as instructed by his Lordship,” writes da Zurara, “was none other than to load that ship with a great quantity of hides and oil from those sea-wolves.” It appears to have been a lucrative undertaking. “ [...]

Antão Gonçalves had fulfilled the command of his master, his ship’s hold brimming with hides and casks, but the young man was eager to pursue his adventures rather than return home as ordered. He assembled his 21-man crew on deck, and addressed them with a rousing speech: “Friends and brothers, our cargo is complete, as you can see, so the principal aim of our mission has been accomplished, and we could well return should we wish to limit our toil…” He then proposed an adventure that would gladden the men’s hearts, providing relief from the laborious and tedious task of hunting, skinning and melting-down seals - a hunt for native slaves [...].

---

These first tentative expeditions to the Gold River paved the way for hunting on a more intensive, industrial scale, with 15th century Portuguese explorers dividing their time between lucrative massacres of seals and the equally profitable slave trade [...].

Indeed, within a few years of the sea wolf discovery, a purpose-built installation to process seal hides and oil had been constructed on Ylha de Lobos [...] in the estuary of the Rio de Oro [...]. Around Cap Barbas [...] no less than three sites once bore the name of the sea wolf [...]. [T]he [French and British] colonial plundering of the region [in the early twentieth century] [...], like [...] [Portuguese] conquest before them, were also portrayed as essentially idealistic endeavours. Just as the conquest of the Rio de Oro by massacre and slavery [...] “proves anew that the pursuit of disinterested geographical knowledge [...] were never the only motives of colonial conquest, so the slaughter [...] [today] would today be called “rational exploitation” [...]”,

---

All text above by: William M. Johnson. “Monk Seals in Post-Classical History: The role of the Mediterranean monk seal (Monachus monachus) in European history and culture, from the fall of Rome to the 20th century”. Mededelingen 39. The Netherlands Commission for International Nature Protection. 2004. [Bold emphasis and some paragraph breaks/contractions added by me. Presented here for commentary, teaching, criticism purposes.]

[bisexualastronaut]

i really really don't understand the navy seal buck aus like have we been watching the same show? the one where buck specifically quits and (later) joins the fire department because he wants to help people? the one where he sued a whole city just so he could go back to helping people?

[soraeia]

Other thoughts from the recent HC blab post:

Before Charidynn sealed Allisae's magic, the Aegis was teeming with all sorts of flowers, especially the East Castle. They barely had to hire any actual gardeners to maintain it. After Allisae's magic was sealed, however, they had to hire more people and cheat a bit using their Coraphae flowers in order to just keep the gardens green and have some blooms. Without the Coraphae, the gardens...just kept dying at random times.

Why? Because Allisae was unknowingly drawing the life from them. Charidynn sealed her magic away and kept it from coming out of her body, but not her ability to draw magic from other things into her body. And Allisae. Never knew it herself.

With the existing seal in place, Allisae couldn't actually use the magic she drew. So all of it kept. Building.

And Tahariel(@soulsxng) just popped the cork off a bottle that was close to exploding.

Charidynn stopped Allisae's magic lessons when he sealed her away so she can't control it.

[zhakyria]

Kahl’ryn

Aliases: Red Blade, Cipher 9, Alliance Commander

Species: Twi’lek

Age: 38

Gender & Orientation: Cis man (he/him), pansexual

Relationship status: Married to Theron Shan

Alignment: Neutral to Neutral Good

Personality: Reserved, detail orientated, cares deeply for his family and friends, will go to great lengths to see that they are safe, doesn’t believe in destiny, he does his job and does it well, he’s tolerant of sith machinations until they start being detrimental to the mission or the Empire.

About: Went to great lengths to protect his family from Sith retaliation after his father was branded a traitor. Once in the position of Alliance Commander he was able to reconnect with them and recruited them to the Alliance. Allied with the Empire, because he doesn’t trust the Republic and he is more familiar with who his enemies are within the Empire. Uses his position and alliance with Empress Acina to ‘take out the trash’ and eliminate those that interfere with the mission or overstep their bounds. Respects only a handful of sith, gets along well with the military. Doesn’t want to destroy the Republic and tries to keep casualties to a minimum. His goal is to strengthen the Empire and bring and end to the war quickly. 

Artwork by Dakota Curry

[furtiveseal]

Was reminded of the existence of 40k Imperial Knights and damn. I don't play or collect 40k anymore nor do I really want to (seriously starter boxes used to be 65€ now they're 200?????) but IK are still so cool. There's just an aura that comes with showing up to the "I painted a bunch of little guys for my army :)" game and dropping a giant walker of death that can't be beat

[grand-theft-carbohydrates]

second hardest part of writing sanguo is that my kiwi upbringing means i have 0 respect for authority and cannot resist the urge to take the piss out of Important Historical Figures. if i edit something more than twice it inevitably dissolves into a monty python sketch.

[empirearchives]

Imperial seal from the National Museum of the Légion d’honneur which was ordered but never used under the First French Empire

[maligknightsthorns]

A neatly wrapped trio of chrysanthemums have been placed on top of Camilla's desk in her office while she's been out, with a small note attached. It reads:

Chrysanthemums in general mean; you're a wonderful friend. Happy birthday, Camilla.

- Seteth.

The note does much to ease her tension. It allows her to enjoy the flowers, for there's no way Seteth would know the intricate differences between Nohr and Hoshido.

[w-m-pitt]

Badge of South Australia (28 November 1878 - 14 January 1904)

[imperialasociate]

Elevate your dry fruits packaging with our Rotary PFS Dry Fruits Packing Machine. Achieve freshness and efficiency using advanced technology.

[crownedstoat]

Storm prep Is completed and now time for a signature Beryl cocktail.

2 oz Goslings Black Seal Bermuda rum

1/4 oz R Jelinek Fernet Liqueur

1/4 oz 1804 Grand Imperial Orange Liqueur

1/2 oz simple syrup

2 oz pineapple juice

1 oz orange juice

1/2 oz lime juice

1/2 oz lemon juice

Built in a mule mug with crushed ice, stirred and garnished with mint