“What happens at the beginning of Ragnarok is so destabilizing for both Thor and Loki. They are all they have; as in, there’s nothing left. Everyone’s gone—Odin’s gone, Frigga’s gone, the Warriors Three are gone, Asgard is basically gone. And so Thor and Loki turn to each other and say, you’re all I have left. And actually, that’s enough.” – Tom Hiddleston [Empire Podcast]
“I’ve known her since I was seven. I had a crush on her even back then. But she lived back in the Dominican Republic, so I’d only get to see her during the summer. We just got tired of being apart. So I asked her to marry me. My parents were against it. I was twenty-one. I was going to City College. I was still living at home and they thought I wasn’t ready. And there was definitely some truth to that. I had to drop out of school once she moved in with us. I couldn’t handle everything. At first I was depressed but I started to progress quickly at work. I got raise after raise. We moved out of my parents’ house and got a small apartment in the Bronx. Now I’m studying to get my electrical license. I’ve seen a lot of the guys I work with start their own companies. You’ve just got to want it. You’ve got to want to move up, and you can find a way. The marriage has been great and it’s been tough. We have a two-year-old daughter now. It’s a lot of work. But it’s also awesome to go home everyday and find two people who love me.”
this one’s a few days late due to having a lot of doctors appointments sorry it’s just 9 pages, and about some rats… it’s more symbolic than anything really
(it’s completely unrelated to any of my songs that have to do with “puzzleboy”)
“Anyone can be seduced, Y. I could seduce you, if I wanted. It wouldn’t be hard,” X says, dismissively.
“I think you overestimate yourself,” Y says. X gives xir a look, and sighs, leaning forward.
“Okay, listen. You’re lonely, insecure, desperate for approval, and have no emotional support. Literally all I would have to do is make sure to consistently be there for you, compliment you as often as I could get away with while still sounding sincere, slowly escalate how much I touched you, start sprinkling in romantic and sexual compliments, and eventually bring it to a head by telling you I loved you. Even if you didn’t like me that way, you’d probably still sleep with me out of sheer desperation to keep me around, and I’m attractive enough you’d convince yourself you felt good about it.”
Y gapes wordlessly as X props zir head on zir hand.
“Now, I’m not going to do that, because I have a functioning moral compass and that’s some abusive, fucked-up shit, but maybe think twice before blaming the victim, next time.”
So, I was at the bookstore today, when I found a cute little book.
Funny, huh? It was short, so I started flipping through it, because hey, making fun of Darth Vader, right? All sorts of silly Halloween type monsters, and then this witch, too.
Aww. This is making me laugh, because really, it’s very silly. Let’s see what he says to this, because he was not impressed by the wolfman, the vampire, or the ghost…
WTH????
No, seriously, I was NOT expecting that.
Props for getting Darth Vader and how he probably feels about himself right, but uh… maybe tone it down a bit? I was not expected the mood whiplash.
Newt Scamander is not just a magizoologist, he’s an inventor. I mean, look at that suitcase. Those charms? The habitats? This from a guy who got expelled from Hogwarts, come on. He didn’t copy them out a book, he made them up on the fly, probably with a griffon nipping impatiently at his shoulder and yes I know beautiful, you need your mountain just give me a sec a mountain is a difficult thing to fit in a suitcase and he keeps coming back because I found a way to grow actual real trees without any soil, your mountain looks better with trees and what do you think of this new weather charm, do you like it? Oh no that’s a no, hang on let me rework it and try again and everything he does has to be invented because no one has ever thought to do it before.
But it’s all for his creatures. All of it. He pours his heart and soul into their habitats and their diets – their diets! Did you know that he spins the mooncalf pellets out of pure magic and cocoa powder? He doesn’t know if it has to be cocoa powder, but that’s what he had on hand at the time and so that’s what he used to create the spell. He moves heaven and earth to defy the impossible because he never stops to consider that he can’t, and in his suitcase he creates entire worlds for his rescued strays.
One of his rescued strays is a dragonet with great tears through the membrane of its wings. They won’t heal – they were made with acid, they’ve scarred over. The dragonet lives in a permanent state of panic, trapped on the ground with legs too weak to carry it to safety, and it flaps its wings in a futile attempt to escape whenever Newt gets close.
So he builds it new wings.
Individual copper scales mould to the arms of its existing wings, each one carefully charmed to flex and move like real scales, and between them, a living metal membrane – he melted it and trapped it in the stage halfway between liquid and solid, and when the dragonet stretches out its wings the new membrane flows and glints in the sun as it takes flight. Newt laughs and waves and watches it go; he’ll stick around to make sure it works, but the metal should grow as the dragonet grows, and he anchored it to the creature’s own magic rather than his own so there’s no chance of the spell running out. He’s happy to let the dragonet run free with its new metal wings.
He turns his attention instead to a fwooper, one whose voice box has been removed with a crude vanishing charm. The fwooper’s beak gapes endlessly and soundlessly open as it follows Newt around while he gathers the bits he has around – oh, a tin whistle, that’s perfect – until he’s built it a new voicebox. He houses it in a collar until he’s sure that it works, this strange mechanical collar with levers and gears and a set of tiny bellows blowing through the tin whistle, but when he goes to fix it more permanently the fwooper flaps huffily away. It likes it’s collar. It’s keeping it.
There’s a sleipneir that’s had four of it’s legs hacked off to disguise it as regular horse; Newt collects ice and lightning and builds it four new ones, and the sleipnir stretches it’s eight legs and crosses an ocean in one glorious stride.
There’s a crup with its tail docked, such a simple and common procedure but the crup doesn’t like it so Newt weaves him a new one out of a blanket and a tattered rope chew. It’s not soft enough, not quite right, so he uses a couple of strands of his own hair and – yes, that’s it, that’s perfect. The crup uses his new tail to sweep everything off Newt’s table and onto the floor, and spends the rest of forever chasing it in delight.
Then there’s a selkie, her husband stole her skin and she wants more than anything to leave him but she can’t – so Newt sews her a new skin and when he throws it over her she barks a laugh and flicks her tail and drags her husband into the sea to drown.
A gorgon shows him the ruined mess of her hair, the limp headless bodies of the snakes that some wandering hero stole from her; Newt builds each snake for her individually and gives them steel blades for their spines and they writhe around her head in untouchable glee.
And – one day – a person, just a regular person, but she was born with only stubs in place of her feet, and she’s not even magical but remember that Newt is kind and Newt doesn’t care all that much for following the law. Her builds her new ones from the living roots of the walking vines and she takes her feet and bares her teeth at the world and shows it what she can do when she runs.
Newt smiles after her and wishes her well, and turns his attention to the siren, the wampus cat, the old man, the child – he keeps going and keeps creating and every time he meets someone that the world has given up on he cocks his head and thinks no, they just need something to stand on.
how good would it be if luna, who believes in the crumple-horned snorckack and nargles, thought that dinosaurs were made up by muggles
Okay, but consider:
Someone (probably Hermione) takes Luna to a muggle museum of natural history, in a last ditch effort to convince her that dinosaurs really did exist. They go through all of it: full and partial skeletons on display, fossil imprints of skin textures, a little video about carbon dating, exhibits on the evolution of all life from tiny one-celled sea creatures, bird-hipped vs. lizard-hipped, living giant isopods and coelacanths, the whole spiel about how the dinosaurs aren’t actually completely gone, since some, like the anchiornis and archaeopteryx, were the predecessors from which today’s birds – including every owl in the Wizarding World – evolved.
Luna takes all this in with her usual calm demeanor until the very end, when her eyes seem to grow even more enormous in her face, but doesn’t say anything. After a full minute of Luna’s silent astonishment, her companion prods her for a response. “Of course!” Luna exclaims, “no wonder I’ve never found them. I’ve been going about things the wrong way!” She launches into a lengthy explanation that the records that she and her father have been using for references were copies of copies of copies of absolutely ancient scripts, so in order to find the creatures as described in them, she needed to be looking for fossils.
Luna (with Rolf as her assistant) begins searching through areas of Wizarding Britain, using magical equivalents of the muggle tools she read about at the museum (a variation on Tempus to determine the age of a magical item or creature, Cryptozoam Revelio as a substitute for ground-penetrating radar). She finds the remains of a number of magical creatures from various ages, as well as accidentally uncovering a nest of Knuckers, a relative of the dragon previously thought to be extinct. After this discovery, she and Rolf are given a bit more credence than before, and they gain the support among creature-handlers, especially dragonologists. Because of this, they get access to more regions of the world, and their team grows. Eventually Luna ends up founding the Wizarding Archaeological Society, the first institution to combine both muggle and wizard research methods at a single institution.
On the 50th anniversary of the Society’s founding, they open a museum of their own (”Everything that was, at the WAS!”), to display the various fossils of magical creatures that they’ve managed to locate over the years. Unveiled at the opening ceremonies was what would become the pride of their collection, a diorama of Crumple-Horned Snorkacks in every stage of development, along with details about their habits, average lifespan, and a map of the full range of their habitat at their peak population in the mid-17th century. Their extinction at during the 20th century was attributed to rising global temperatures, as their most flourishing period coincided with the coldest years of the Little Ice Age, and no specimens from any later than the 1976 Heat Wave had thus far been recovered. The disappearance of the Snorkacks, it was said, had been an early warning sign of the global climate change which had troubled the entire world, wizarding and muggle, for the better part of the last half-century. A cooperative partnership had been reached between the WAS and the Royal Society a scant decade after the WAS’s founding , allowing research witches and wizards to pool their resources with muggle scientists, in time to prevent a catastrophe that the wizarding world would otherwise have been unlikely to survive.
In her speech at that evening’s gala, Luna told the story of how it all happened, to reveal the person who had singlehandledly started this series of events, which resulted in not only a golden age of discovery in the field of cryptozoology, but also an era of peace and cooperation between both worlds, allowing restrictions imposed by the Statute of Secrecy to be loosened for the first time in nearly five hundred years, all in the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake.
Hermione Granger, who had been grumbling in her chair the entire time, rose when acknowledged. Luna Lovegood beamed at her aging friend, the witch who had gone from being her most skeptical critic to her most dedicated – and most challenging – supporter in a mere half-century.
Via Schatky with thanks to Lickal0lli for the translation
This is actually such an amazingly motivational post because it explains visually exactly what art block is. Do you know what art block is?
Art block is that moment when you realise your skills could be so much more then they currently are. It frustrates you to draw because you can finally see your drawings differently. You can see where they can be better and you want them to be better. It’s not a matter of “I can’t draw today”, it’s a matter of “I imagined this would turn out so much better” and “there’s something missing, I just know it. What technique did I miss.” You’ve got past that temporary phase of analysing and researching and now you’re able to incorporate it in your own work, you just need to figure out how, and when you get past that art block. Well, you’ll see the improvement before you know it. Slowly, but it’s there. And once you get comfortable with using those new skills you’ll move on and start analysing again, and you’ll see where you can improve.
Stay experimental and open to learn, it’s the quickest way to get over art block.
((Some inspiration to all the lovelies struggling with an art block right now~))
wupacing 