I Don’t Have Plots, I Have Several Hundred Cool, But Vague Characters And Unconsecutive Scenes That

Billi speaks. (via billispeaks)

Celestial Mapping and Celestial Proportions by Tallmadge Doyle

love the idea that infernal is a language tieflings don’t have to learn, they just have it built in from birth, and they quickly discover that they can say anything they want out loud in infernal, since almost nobody else understands any of it.

thieves have thieves’ cant, tieflings have the secret language of satan

Talon!Stephanie Brown Commission for  @our-happygirl500-fan ! This was v fun to work on tbh. Commission Info 

Geode (x)

I generally like and support both conspiring and d&d

I’d love a co-conspirator to help me plan d&d games

Medusa with the Head of Perseus, Luciano Garbati, 2008

Also, this just in from the Science World:

MIT researchers just developed (as of September 2019) a new BLACKEST BLACK which is more light absorbing than Vantablack

While I think they are pursuing a patent, this article indicates they plan to make it “freely available to any artist to use for a noncommercial art project”

http://news.mit.edu/2019/blackest-black-material-cnt-0913

MIT News

MIT engineers develop “blackest black” material to date

Made from carbon nanotubes, the new coating is 10 times darker than other very black materials.

if you’ve ever wondered what it’s like to live in the midwest, this is it. 

I have … a tip.

If you’re writing something that involves an aspect of life that you have not experienced, you obviously have to do research on it. You have to find other examples of it in order to accurately incorporate it into your story realistically.

But don’t just look at professional write ups. Don’t stop at wikepedia or webMD. Look up first person accounts.

I wrote a fic once where a character has frequent seizures. Naturally, I was all over the wikipedia page for seizures, the related pages, other medical websites, etc.

But I also looked at Yahoo asks where people where asking more obscure questions, sometimes asked by people who were experiencing seizures, sometimes answered by people who have had seizures.

I looked to YouTube. Found a few individual videos of people detailing how their seizures usually played out. So found a few channels that were mostly dedicated to displaying the daily habits of someone who was epileptic.

I looked at blogs and articles written by people who have had seizures regularly for as long as they can remember. But I also read the frantic posts from people who were newly diagnosed or had only had one and were worried about another.

When I wrote that fic, I got a comment from someone saying that I had touched upon aspects of movement disorders that they had never seen portrayed in media and that they had found representation in my art that they just never had before. And I think it’s because of the details. The little things.

The wiki page for seizures tells you the technicalities of it all, the terminology. It tells you what can cause them and what the symptoms are. It tells you how to deal with them, how to prevent them.

But it doesn’t tell you how some people with seizures are wary of holding sharp objects or hot liquids. It doesn’t tell you how epileptics feel when they’ve just found out that they’re prone to fits. It doesn’t tell you how their friends and family react to the news.

This applies to any and all writing. And any and all subjects. Disabilities. Sexualities. Ethnicities. Cultures. Professions. Hobbies. Traumas. If you haven’t experienced something first hand, talk to people that have. Listen to people that have. Don’t stop at the scholarly sources. They don’t always have all that you need.

saturday D&D tip: write all your lore from the woefully confusing world of Academia™. The whole argument depends on a tenuous citation of a guy who wrote about an event 100 years after it happened. The biography of the lich was written by one of his greatest enemies and so we have to treat it as a questionable source despite being the only primary source we have. The translation out of Old Draconic might be “sword,” or maybe it was “thorn,” but then the Draconic for ‘thorn’ was also often used as a euphemism for ‘usurper,’ etc. the academic text they were relying on is actually a fringe theory that may or may not have any basis in fact.