#kickstarter mention

[disability-can-be]

Good morning, low-battery pals!

Today I found an awesome kickstarter for a product called the BrailleDoodle. It is a double-sided pad designed to teach Braille on one side. The other side is a blank grid of magnetic balls that can be lifted with the magnetic stylus, allowing any shape of tactile art or writing to be made. It's like a touchable Etch-a-Sketch! They have guides for the blank side as well, so you can have a little help too.

They have a special going on for the first ten days of the campaign, with each BrailleDoodle being $70. The project is already fully funded! Here is the link if you would like to explore!

(I am not related to this project in any way, just sharing a cool thing I found.)

I hope you all have a wonderful day! Don't forget to wash your water bottle!

[prokopetz]

Something I love about The Far Roofs is how much of a swerve its premise is if you're coming to it uninitiated.

Okay, so there's these talking rats with a culture of swashbuckling heroism – basic Redwall/Reepicheep stuff.

Also, there's a magical realm called the Far Roofs which exists above every human community, and that's where the rats go adventuring; a little weird, but you can see the precedents in popular fiction. It's like wainscot fantasy taken to its logical-yet-absurd conclusion.

By default, the game wants you to play as a fictionalised version of your (presumably human!) self and go up onto the Far Roofs to have adventures with the rats. All right, now it's coming together: it's like isekai fantasy meets The Muppet Show, with you as the obligatory human character, right?

Then we get to the nature of those adventures: the rats have this whole culture built around questing against beings they call "the Mysteries" – beasties with names like Harpy and Goblin and Unicorn. So basically it's a bunch of muppety rats on the roofs fighting Dungeons & Dragons monsters, and you go up and help them do it. Great.

And then you get to what the Mysteries are actually like, and... well, I'm going to let the following excerpt carry the weight here. (This particular bit of text also appears in a previously published work by the same author, so I'm not giving anything away that's still under wraps.)

Unicorn, which is named Numinous, dwells three steps away and beyond the world, but most often in the Farthest Roofs, where the Steppes of the Sky come down to touch the Vast and Earthen Court. There it is stepping upwards from the world, as it has always been stepping upwards from the world, caught in a moment of transcendent glory that does not complete. It simply is. Melanthios heard the footsteps of Unicorn. Melanthios heard the ringing of Unicorn’s bells. So Melanthios chased Unicorn off to the Farthest Roofs, and Melanthios did not return. Anton and Karel, who were his sons, were wiser than their father. They heard the bells but they did not follow. Instead, they memorized the scent. They gathered swords, and ropes, and nets, and they went out. They brought food and water and all manner of gear. They clung to the roofs with all four feet wheresoever after Unicorn they went. It proved no good. Anton looked up, and Karel to his brother. The world came down— That’s what Karel said. He had time to look away. He had time to bury his head in his paws. He did not see the fullness of Unicorn’s presence. He only saw Anton his brother become unreal. In the light of the moment of the Unicorn, Anton became as a paper figure in the fire. His reality burned out. His shadow seared into the roofs behind him. Where he’d stood, for just a moment, the Steppes of the Sky came down to touch the Vast and Earthen Court; and Anton was gone away. So Karel ran and Karel ran and Karel ran from the Unicorn; and all his life, he envied but was more fortunate than his brother.

These are gods. You're going up there to kill God.

Like, it's still silly wainscot fantasy with funny talking rats, but there's that tension. It's like if Fraggle Rock occasionally took a hard turn to serious cosmic horror – Lord Dunsany by way of Jim Henson – and that tonal juxtaposition was treated as something unremarkable.

Basically what I'm saying is go back The Far Roofs.

[themeeplord]

So hehe, mermay am I right~

Have a cryptid kraken Eclipse✨

@naffeclipse don't mind me dreaming of a Deep Dreams and Cryptid Sightings combination for a moment~

[fantastic-nonsense]

thinking about the 'load-bearing event' post and how nearly the entire post-1990s Bat mythos rests on No Man's Land happening, and it getting punted out of canon when the reboot happened irreparably fucked over both the "Batfamily" as a concept and multiple character dynamics until Death Metal/Infinite Frontier re-canonized it last year

[soukeyed]

got so caught up in the euphoria of replaying sa2 and shadow05 that for a minute i lived in a world where his current character of just being a prick for no reason didnt exist

[bluevelvt]

the kimono outfit padmé wears might be my favourite in the film and i lament how little screen time it gets every damn day

[ehlnofay]

19! :)

19: sea change

In the last few days of the year 200, Torr kills the Emperor. In early 201, a war breaks out.

It’s not wholly unexpected, at least not by those who know where to look. The Emperor’s death is no small blow to Solitude, the city that sent him off on a voyage he would only exit under a pall; especially considering that the guard had patted itself on the back for successfully foiling an assassination attempt right before his ship left, only for his throat to be slit under their noses, anyway. The head of Skyrim’s Penitus Oculatus appears to have vanished. No-one reports seeing anyone out of place on the boat until they started stumbling over the bodies. The Empire mourns through all the official avenues as the heir prepares for succession; Solitude’s government is busy trying desperately to smooth it over, putting out excessive bounties on the assassin that failed and scraping up intel on the one who succeeded. Not that there’s anything much to find – it’s a locked-room murder, and every logical suspect has an alibi that holds up to interrogation. There are no leads to follow.

And Windhelm is a powder keg.

It always has been, ever since the Great War, as long as Torr or any of his kids have been alive. Short-fused and disillusioned, crowds moving hot as blood through its winding stone streets, it’s always been something tough, hard-throated, splintered into careful lined sections. Torr walks whatever lines he wants, but not everyone has the energy to straddle them; not everyone can.  The upper city is all harsh-cut stone and ice, the bricks ancient, the crowds in a hurry, even though none of them seem to know where they’re going; the Grey Quarter is where the snow runs when it turns to slush and the walls are stuffed with rags. The planks keep snapping with dry rot, sharp and gaping as broken teeth. They need to be filled to keep the cold out. The Cornerclub keeps the fire roaring. Talres goes there to work most days and doesn’t come back up to the house until the streets are empty. No-one knows it’s going to happen, not exactly, but there's no way anyone couldn't know. There are a lot of people who have been waiting on an opening, and all eyes are pointed elsewhere.

With little fanfare, the Jarl and his entourage leave Windhelm.

The city stops being a fuse and starts being the wreckage after it’s blown. Torr is told that there’s a span of a few weeks where Talres stops leaving the house completely. Katla gets arrested again and weasels out of it on her own. The ill-drawn posters of something approaching Torr’s face stuck up over the walls of Solitude are covered up with announcements and calls to join the Legion. Windhelm floods with bodies ready for the rebellion. Aventus’ house is already crowded; in a few months, Torr hears, it’s nigh impossible to walk in for the bedrolls and blankets spread over the floor. The city has never been a warm place in any sense of the word; Torr’s siblings are inundated with more kids and more kids with nowhere else to go. They don’t know if Solitude is much better; they look different now than they did on the night of the assassination that wasn’t and then was, hair cropped shorter and uneven, face gaunter, the weight they’d managed to gain over their comfortable months in Falkreath sloughing off them like a spider’s old skin, but even so it’s a bit much to step foot in there so soon, some of the bounty posters still mouldering on their posts. One of the kids says something about needing a whole other house. They’ve only got the one. Still, it makes Torr think.

(Skyrim has one orphanage, a little wooden hall down on the banks of Riften’s canals. And now there is a cursed house in Windhelm.)

Torr doesn’t go to Solitude. They only occasionally go to Windhelm. When they’re not on business, they stay on the outskirts of Danstrar; the Pale, all frozen winds and snow high enough to ice a horse’s knees, is an unappetising enough target that aside from an announcement of alliance with Windhelm’s Stormcloaks the war has not truly reached them yet. Which is ironic, considering.

(If prompted, Torr probably could have seen this coming – Torr, who spent years with his finger on Windhelm’s pulse, moving through the people and hearing endless talk about the government. It was going to happen sooner or later. And of course the Empire reeling from the assassination of its Emperor – the first since around the time of the Oblivion Crisis, which no-one is anxious to repeat, and the reminder of which put plenty of important people quite on edge – is enough of an opportunity to weigh heavily in sooner’s favour. If he’d thought about it with his blade set beneath the hairs of the old man’s beard, he would have known he was setting a war in motion. What Torr doesn’t know is if he would have cared.)

(Probably not. He still doesn’t, after all. Not enough to regret anything.)

Dead winter bleeds into spring; a little ice melts, and the sea begins to change. Torr’s shoulder aches when the weather is bad. There are clashes on the roads, outside cities, described in newspapers and word of mouth. Cyrodiil ships off heaps of soldiers to spill into Solitude’s ports. The house in Windhelm is overrun. But the nightshade kept in the temperate corner that Babette has transformed into a garden begins to bloom months early. The tides still come in and out.

The old Emperor is dead. Skyrim is tearing itself apart. Torr cleans his knife after use with a soap that smells like lavender and tries very hard to dredge up any guilt.

[deaderthandoubledead]

I'm about to finish Magnus Archives for the very first time today and I'm filled with so much sadness. In a weird way this show has been so comforting for me (despite all the horrors) and it pains me that I'll never be able to experience listening to it for the first time again. Jonny and Alex and everyone did such good work and this is definitely one of those fandoms that will stay with me forever, hyperfixation be damned...

Well, off to cry my eyes out at the finale and then jump straight into Protocol

[waitingforsecretsouls]

Compelled by a Pharazôn who physically resembled Eärendil, similar to how Arwen was said to be Lúthien come again, as the Evenstar of her people. The End mirroring the Beginning one last time.

[mikuyuuss]

I am reminded once again how I wish that we were shown more of Giyuu's backstory. I would understand it better if he was a normal guy whose parents are alive, but Giyuu's the opposite of that, his backstory is actually really sad in hindsight too.

From what I remember, the fanbook tells us how he lost his parents to an illness when he was young, leaving only him and his sister Tsutako. Their parents left some money for them to be able to survive, but surely, that still can't be easy. Tsutako must have had a lot on her shoulders while taking care of Giyuu.

and I wonder how Giyuu must have felt during those times, was he too young to process all of it, or did he feel like a burden to his sister? Is that one of the underlying reasons why he felt guilty for what happened to Sabito and Tsutak? Some of these stuff were definitely implied in the main story, but I just wish they showed us more of it!

And just when Tsutako is finally about to get married, she lost her life to a demon because she chose to protect Giyuu, and Giyuu tried to tell the townspeople about what happened but they didn't believe him. His distant relatives instead planned to take him away because they believe he is mentally ill. So without any choice, Giyuu ran away, nearly diied in the mountains but was founded by a hunter and later taken in by Urokodaki. The rest is history.

Considering how training takes about two years, and Giyuu was 13 years old when he took the final selection. I would guess that he’s probably around 11 yrs old when all of that happened to him.

Like that was a lot of stuff. Giyuu clearly had a rough childhood, but that wasn't shown in the main story at all and was just summarized in one taisho secret. :(

I wanted to see more of his relationship with Sabito and especially Tsutako. I really really hope we get a spin off or a light novel chapter that can help further flesh out the rest of his backstory, because it's just way too interesting not to.

[rockandrolldisgrace]

a little vent

[aesteraceae]

I fucking hate that Homestuck has so many little gems scattered in it's absolute hurricane of terribleness

Bc like. One second there's Dave Strider a traumatized kid who fronts as being super cool and uncaring and strong to make up for how small and weak his guardian makes him feel on a daily basis, and then when he actually gets the ability to be strong he immediately uses it to take care of his friends because at his core he's just a kid who cares about people and literally time travelled when he lost his first pair of shades that John gave him and does everything can to get them all out of it alive. He also has a sick fucking god tier design I'm sorry the gear timetables??? His whole thing is music and he uses time travel like rewinding a record shut UP THATS SO COOL

There's the class and aspect system that is actually remarkably interesting for analysis of character and what someone values and is willing to fight for. Rose being a light user but eventually succumbing to grimdark as a metaphor for her true purpose being a mediator between the two, Karkat being a knight of blood that tried his best to protect everyone with friendship instead of bloodshed, but this approach literally lead to half of his friends dying violent bloody deaths that he couldn't protect them from.

But then the universe is a fucking frog, and hundreds of people died bc it's genetics were fucked up because a bunch of 13 year olds were put in charge of it. And troll racism. And gamzee. And faygo?? And hate sex and buckets and selfcest and millions of different timelines and gamzee and murder and underutilized characters and just the worst dialogue ever etc etc

Like I could go on for literal hours about classpects and character analysis in this stupid series bc they're genuinely good and interesting but every time I see something actually from the comic my bubble of "this isn't that bad, actually!" Is popped and I and forced to slog through hundreds of pages of ableism and bad writing and stupidity and I'm TIRED😭

[prokopetz]

I have very little to say about Break!! that hasn't been said elsewhere, other than to observe that if you're the sort who sees a character class called "Murder Princess" and picks it purely on the strength that it's called "Murder Princess", this game will probably interest you, because it has a character class called "Murder Princess".

[ballgame]

What's an Undertale character that's yet to appear/be directly mentioned in Deltarune that you guys want to see incorporated/have some sort of cameo? All major characters have been accounted for, so I'm talking minor characters or misc. enemies.

Mine's River Person. No particular reason, I just think they're neat. Maybe they could be driving the bus that Asriel rides back to town on.

[vividviolence]

honestly been thinking about this tweet a lot. if there'ss gonna be an official preeny website we fucking win

this is to say I looooooooove web design so much i love indie websites and indie comics with their own websites and so on and so forth. very excited

[doyouknowthemossinman]

I need just a little piece I'll take anything Give me something to hold on to

i wouldn’t normally put lyrics and make it all nice and formatted and pretty for just a sketch but this scene and this song go SO well together and i didn't even know i loved this song until i saw it live!!! also i drew this like a week ago