#look how i customised my good omens book!

[yourlakebed]

a couple days ago I sent a letter here on tumblr to @neil-gaiman , to which he did not respond (fair enough, he was probably on strike that day from what I've seen on social media, and he also has so many asks per day that I'm honestly amazed how he manages to live his life answering so many of them). but i decided that i want to leave it here anyway. because it came out much more personal than I originally intended and I'd like to have it as a reminder to myself about these part of my life and this version of me.

so the letter goes like this:

hi, mr Gaiman!

I sincerely hope you're having a good day. I'll try to be brief, which is barely possible as I have so much to say.

first of all, I cannot put into words how thankful I am for all your work and especially for what you've done to good omens. throughout the history of tv we were queerbaited and gaslighted to the point where it was even hard to believe that what I'm seeing on the screen had actually happened, and had actually appeared on other people's screens (and I know for sure that lots of people in this fandom share this feelings of mine about season 2). and it's not only about the queerness, but the depth of the story itself. i would very much like to go into all the details about the way your art influenced me on a deep, profound level and helped me realise and accept some very vital aspects of my personality (I was in agony for two months, thank you 🖤).

secondly, I want to thank you on behalf of all your Ukrainian fans. I remember the first months of russian invasion, when was forced to move to Germany, and suddenly found myself completely isolated from everything i knew. it felt like Death, like I was practically separated from Life. so I clung to any type of mental support from the creators I new and loved before. lots of them broke my heart.. and then there were you with all your posts about our situation and encouragement of people to do everything in their power, and your participation in Lviv Book Forum with Noah Harari, and your post here about that one old Ukrainian church (yep, I remember everything!). that meant the world to me and still does.

it was summer and "Sandman". and then it was autumn, and I found myself still in Germany, still completely alone and isolated on a bench in a park reading "The Graveyard Book". and then "Good Omens". I practically used the second season to survive the august, and in the end it helped me to make one of the hardest decisions in my life. now I'm home, in Ukraine again. right now when I was writing this the air alarm went on, but I am happier than i ever had been in this past two years.

i know the chances that you'll see this are very low. but i needed to get this out of my chest and let you know how grateful I am.

and the last one - i finally got my physical copy of Good Omens, and decided to customise it myself. mostly to make the soft cover harder, but also to make it pretty✨️

thank you, mr Gaiman, for everything.

[teahermitcomics]

Right, it's MCM London Comic Con this weekend. And I have a bunch of new shit ready for it, I've been working my butt off. Let's take a look at what's new on the table! Which you can find with this handy map.

Cup 9! £10

It's finally in print, it's gorgeous, thanks again ComicPrintingUK for another excellent job. Look at those deep cover colours, gonna look great next to vols 1-8. Speaking of, new deals!

Cups 7-9 are £27 (Saving £3)

[The Teaset] Cups 1-9 is £69 (saving £8). Nice.

Wooden Waiter Chick Pins: New batch! £6

I've hatched a bunch more of these chick pins (pegs unrelated, that's just how I dry them before I tie their ribbons on 😂), they're more yellow than the last batch so I hope you like these bright little birds!

Koala Pride pins! £4

Let Robert the Koala from Cafe Suada help you show your pride. There's also pronouns and customisation available.

Right let's get into the prints 👀 Excuse me for the length of this post but I have whipped up a BUNCH and there are some surprises...

Cafe Suada prints of any size will now be FREE with purchases of The Teaset book deal, btw. And maybe smaller book deals too. As a treat 💝

A4 Prints £8 💦Sweat & Soap Screentone Edition! 💦 😇Good Omens: I'M NOT NICE!! 👿 ⚓️Cobymeppo!!! (and Garp)⚓️ 🌸SKIP & LOAFERRRR🌸

~New triptychs~ £8 💙Megamind Blue Edition💙 💚Persona 3 Dark Hour Edition💚 🔫Metal Gear Solid🐍 🗡️Knives Out x Glass Onion🧅

By popular demand, I also have some new A5 pirates for you. £5 👑Elizabeth Swann 👑 🍏Hector Barbossa🍏

and...

🏴‍☠️ Izzy Hands 🏴‍☠️

People have been asking me to draw him for ages but it wasn't until Season 2 that I felt COMPELLED 🥺

I've also whipped up a cute rainbow concertina print to celebrate Sense8 with all the cluster portraits I did. £8

The final new print, as you may have all expected, is the stupid (lovely) hypocrite (Icanfixhim) pale gremlin leaving us all bloodless (horny)

🩸Astarion🩸

............................

...

Surprise!!

✨Teapot Shaker Charms! ✨£10

These wooden teapots feature a tiny Geraldine you can shake around inside with various sequin bubbles, hearts, stars and beads, backed by eye catching gold and bronze foils. The spout also has a tea coloured gem "pouring" out of it!

I only had time to make 4 so if you want one make a beeline for Artist Alley, Row H, table 20!

Okay that's it for real now, thanks for not scrolling away! All of these are just the new products, so my table will of course have all my other comics (Cafe Suada 1-8, For the Love of God, Marie!, Ambrosia, Nether Realms, Feels like Noodles and The Weight of Expectation), prints and other merch from before.

I haven't tabled at MCM since last year so I'm really looking forward to seeing you all there! COME TO MY TABLE AND SPEAK TO ME OF YOUR BG3 PLAYTHROUGHS--

[jeff-from-marketing]

Okay so a friend of mine accidentally tripped on the Pathfinder landmine, so now I gotta contain the Infodump explosion here. You're welcome.

Holy shit Pathfinder is so good. I'll admit it's not for everyone! It does have a lot of rules to play with and can get a little crunchy at times, but if you don't mind that then please take a look. It's so easy to just look into Pathfinder, because Paizo are fucking based and have made all of the rules completely free to access to everyone. Archives of Nethys is the most well known and basically official source for reading up on anything Pathfinder related, but there are others out there! Like I said, the rules are free! And that alone lowers the barrier to entry so fucking low that it becomes a tripping hazard, and it's amazing! I've always been a big believer of "try before you buy" and this is absolutely that.

So I could continue to gush about all the great things in terms of rules that Pathfinder offers. Like how martial classes actually have something fucking interesting to do in combat beyond "I just hit with my weapon." How positioning matters because not everyone and their mother has attacks of opportunity heavily punishing the thought of moving in combat. How the degrees of success system gives you so much flexibility as to how well (or how horribly) you can perform something. Especially for spells where even crowd control ones can give benefits if the target makes their save. Or how that system actually rewards players who do decide to specialise into that thing by making them more likely to critically succeed. Or how character customisation is absolutely insane between all the classes, ancestries, heritages, and every class getting to make interesting choices at almost every level. You get a class feat every second level! You can have two people play the same class but still play those classes very differently! The amount of diversity is insane! But oh hey speaking of diversity...

Oh my god the setting is so gay. Not like "oh if you read into it a lot you can kinda see the gay" no no no. This is "these lesbians are canonically married and go off on adventures and do crime together" kind of gay. Pathfinder does not shy away from trying its best to make sure everyone is included and fairly represented. There's elves whose whole view on gender is just "gender is just whatever vibe I'm feeling today, even if that's either Yes or No" or just "gender? Oh no thanks!" You have the deity of transitions, who looks after anyone going through a transition in life, but explicitly mentions those that are transitioning into a new and more fitting body as one of those transitions. There's also a couple deities who are all about protecting sex workers and generally being gay. There's even an entire fairly extensive category of assistive items specifically for characters who have a physical disability. And going to the system itself, Paizo makes sure to include content warnings in their books where they may be needed, and pretty explicitly says "here's where this thing is in the book, this is the topic it covers, please talk to your players and make sure everyone is okay with this or if adjustments need to be made. Everyone should feel welcome at the table!" and even in the newest Lost Omens book (at the time of writing) it has a sidebar that contains advice on creating mutant characters that don't potentially come across as ableist.

This isn't Wizard of the Coast's "oh we're totally inclusive!" because they sweep controversy under the rug and do their best to avoid the topics as a whole. Paizo is (by every measure I can see) genuinely and legitimately trying, and in my opinion at least succeeding. I guess it helps when you actually communicate with your playerbase and actually take feedback on board.

So if you're like me and started to become a bit disillusioned with D&D 5e: try Pathfinder. You don't have to spend a single cent to just try it, and if you end up loving it then there's still plenty to spend money on later!

[callmemythicalminx]

Book Review: Lessons In Corruption by Giana Darling

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Where do I begin to describe how much I love this book, this series and this incredible author. I can’t count on both hands how many times I’ve re-read each book in the Fallen MC series, that’s how much I dearly adore them. As a frequent reader of taboo and motorcycle club romances, I was especially siked when I first read Lessons in Corruption to hear that it was an age gap (which all the books in the series are) and was student-teacher too.

Cressida Irons has spent the better part of her youth living a life never fully her own. Groomed to be a perfect, higher society housewife by her parents, she married her much older next-door neighbour at the age of eighteen, believing she was going into a marriage of excitement and adventure. Quickly, however, she realised her naive teen fantasies wouldn’t come true with her husband. After having an epiphanic glimpse into a more fulfilling and exciting life after seeing a man who could only be described as a chrome king, she leaves her secure husband and family behind. Starting over on her own two feet, she never expects to see the man who inspired her to escape her meagre life, never mind fall in love with him. But when she truly meets him, a man destined to be a king of the lawless and free, rearing to show her the world at his feet, she can’t help but want to be his rough and tumble queen. Only one problem- he’s her student.

‘Before King (B.K), I’d enjoyed my books, going on long walks through Stanley Park and hanging out with my parents. A freaking pathetic list. Now, I loved riding on the back of King’s black-and-chrome customised Harley Davidson with my breasts to his leather jacket and my hair in the wind’

King Kyle Garro, a man of only eighteen, who holds the weight of his predestined path to become the president of the Fallen MC on his shoulders like a bad omen. Forced to be a protector and adult from a young age by the world around him, he’s mature and intelligent beyond his years, with a desire to be more than is expected from him. When he saw Cressida gazing enraptured at him across a sun-soaked parking lot, he knew that she would be his, even if it meant he’d have to corrupt her in the process. Their age gap or the fact that she’s his teacher does nothing to deter him from seducing and showing Cressida how to truly live, he’s a man that gets what he wants and with her, he’ll stop at nothing to get his queen.

“Got shit for it when I was a kid but I’m a romantic. Read fuckin’ Wuthering Heights when I was eight and got hooked on the classics. Always knew I’d meet a girl, want her, take her and keep her forever. That would be it for me”

Though this is, of course, a romance and this story does include snippets of all the usual love tropes, the budding romance between these two characters is beautiful, exciting and brutally realistic. Every encounter they have through the book is filled with passion, something which Giana does exceptionally well with all of the romances she writes. Something the geek in me particularly enjoys is her use of fantasy and mythological tales in her stories. Her characters are often reminiscent and akin to greek gods and goddesses, but this doesn’t make them feel any less real. They all feel so much more special, sexy as sin but as loyal and powerful as the mythical beings that once ruled the world.

‘A king at home in a grocery store parking lot, his throne the worn seat of an enormous Harley’

In many romances I read nowadays, I always find that the heroine is in one of two categories- she’s tough as nails, an independent woman or she’s fragile, needing the protection and adoration of her hero.  Cressida is a perfect blend of these, fierce yet vulnerable, strong yet willing to be soft in the arms of her King. She can defend herself when she wants and depend on her man too. She yearns to be adored and loved by a man who takes what he wants and will give her that roughness she’s always desired, to be taken and made to do the most sinful things. She finds that man in King, who is single-handily the most romantic and lyrically spoken hero I’ve ever read. He can be both dirty and swoon-worthy, reciting his own beautiful poetry in his seduction of Cress. He’s family-driven, just like his tough yet loving father Zeus and his fierce yet fun sister Harleigh Rose, who both get their own stories also. When we meet him, he’s young but has the maturity, talent and intelligence of a man twice his age. His seduction of Cress is beautiful, as he pushes her to accept him with his own assertiveness while giving her the freedom to grow and live free after escaping the restrictive clutches of her ex-husband and parents.

‘King was everything I’d dreamed a man should be: a real man built of loyalty, tenacity and verve, who laughed like the world was made just to entertain him and loved like crazy’

If there’s one thing I really love about this book, it’s definitely Cress’s character growth. She goes from being a social recluse, looking down on the world around her to a fun-loving, ready to take on the world babe. She’s still the same nerdy chick, using cute curses like ‘for Pete’s sake’ instead of swearing, but she’s wilder, ready to experience new things with her King at her side and the Garro clan at her back. Giana does this so wonderfully with all her characters, making them feel so realistic and complicated, that you can’t help but be drawn into their stories, feeling the pain and happiness of every moment. The different spoken text by the two characters, though a simple technique, adds so much to their character. Cressida speaks eloquently, tight-lipped in a way at the start of the book, as though the shadow of her old family is still present, but then she’s braver, louder, voicing her opinions and speaking from her true self. King is rough yet smooth even in tone, speaking in long sentences, choppy yet at the same time lyrical and poetic-like. Other characters, like Zeus for example, have this amazing tiny detail, creating even more personality for these characters and I simply adore it. Giana’s writing has quickly become my favourite thing to read, as each new story feels familiar but exciting and new. Though I’ve now ready countless MC romances, this series especially feels so special and memorable to me in particular, because I feel like I experience everything these characters do. As Cressida breaks free of the mental chains her ex-husband and parents restrained her with, we feel the same excitement when she takes her first ride on the back of King’s motorcycle and every moment between them after.

‘It didn’t really feel like me, not the new Cressida who rode on the back of motorcycles, got drunk on weeknights with strangers and let teenage boys feast on her pussy in the middle of her classroom’

And let’s not forget how good this story is steam wise- it gets real hot when reading any of Giana’s books. When you read as much smut and steamy romance as I do, sometimes you can find that sex scenes are lacking or just don’t live up to the building tension author’s have been creating with their characters. With this book though… it’s everything you’ve been waiting for and more! Each encounter is exciting and passionate between King and Cressida, placed beautifully in the story so that it feels exciting and new. What I’ve noticed especially with miss Darling is that her sex scenes never just come randomly. They always add more to the story, either it be by advancing the character’s personality or adding more fire to the burning romance we’re reading through. Each of Giana’s stories feel so well thought out and miraculously detailed that when you start to read her other books you begin to notice all the extra details she’s been hiding that lead on to new romances with her characters and events that were foreshadowed three books ago, that finally accumulate and cause havoc upon release. It’s exhilarating. It’s also genius writing and it’s just one of the reasons I love Giana’s work so much.

‘I’m asking you to risk everything to be my partner, to stand by my side and rule the Fallen men of Entrance, to lie, cheat and steal, to breathe my fucking breath, take my kiss and my cock and rule with me’

With Lessons in Corruption, it feels like I’m being introduced to the whole idea of a motorcycle club once again, especially with one so focused on family and love. Because of this, as you learn each member’s story, you begin to feel like your part of the family yourself and it’s such a lovely, warm feeling to have associated with these books. It feels like coming home when I re-read King and Cressida’s story and each one after. Giana’s beautiful writing and storytelling shine so brightly in this first story, sucking you into the world of The Fallen- I cannot recommend this story highly enough. For both newbies and well-versed readers of MC romances, this story is a stellar example of great characters, storytelling, steaminess and beautiful writing.

🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟/5