inimitablereel

[inimitablereel]

On of the best moments in TGCF is when Xian Lian is lying stabbed in the road in Lang-Er Bay, seriously thinking about committing genocide, and the merchant bumps into him, drops his rice, cusses and yells at him, and then a bit later comes back and apologizes for being angry and gives Xian Lian his bamboo hat. The reason it is the best is that we expect one moment of kindness. This is what happens in a book like this. We know that Xie Lian has to have an epiphany about humanity to draw him back from the brink of utter and complete darkness. We know he has to have a catalyst that makes it so he does not commit genocide and decides to save everyone instead. This is how these stories go. But in these stories, that moment is usually given to us by an innocent child. Or it's given to us by someone who is just a purer soul than all the rest. In the set-up for this scene, you fully expect the one who will give Xie Lian the will to save humanity will be the water merchant who has been wanting to help Xie Lian the whole time he was lying in the road with a sword through him. That water merchant has been shown to be more compassionate than the rest and has been held back by his wife, who fears the God of Misfortune.

And yet, in TGCF, that moment is not given to us by a pure, innocent child. It is not given to us by one person who just happens to be kinder than most. It's not. It's not. It's given to us by just your every day guy having a shitty day who is just as cruel and nasty to Xian Lian as everyone else, but who takes a moment to calm down and sees this pathetic loser in the rain and is like "hey, I lost my temper, sorry, don't be a pathetic loser, here's my hat, stopped getting rained on and looking so sad, go home."

It's not this pure shining moment about the inherent goodness of humanity. It's this pure shining moment about people doing shitty things and people doing kind things and how that's all mixed up within us and we're always both. It's that that gives Xie Lian the will to survive and sacrifice everything to save all humanity. It's not because there is good alongside the bad but because we're always both, and Xie Lian knows that he is both, and he thinks that's worth saving. He thinks it's worth being obliterated for.

When he's not obliterated for it, he lives for it instead.

#I gotta reread #what a book #tgcf

[inimitablereel]

fma: human transmutation is bad!! There is no equivalent exchange for human life >:(

dungeon meshi: how much meat ya got?

#I mean they very much did have problems with human transmutation #dungeon meshi

[inimitablereel]

happy dunmeshi day

#extremely good tags #dungeon meshi

[inimitablereel]

Crazy how quickly playing the lyre made me better at fingering

[inimitablereel]

Nothing gives the same kind of random ego boost like managing to finally clean up your home and making it nice. Like ooh look at me, I'm living like people do, I made myself iced tea and I am eating my snack from a real plate. I got floors and shit.

#and it only takes cleaning like 1 thing to be like ah look at my adult home that is clean #is it? dubious

[inimitablereel]

Dancing Marcille!

based on this dancing marcille

#dungeon meshi

[inimitablereel]

one time i had a dream that tiktok users deemed “kid” as a slur and that you HAD to refer to them as minors otherwise you would get harassed and threatened with doxxing. you couldn’t say “when i was a kid” anymore for example you HAD to say “when i was a minor” instead

#someone from emelan universe is on twitter I guess?

[inimitablereel]

I have been listening to the Hobbit audiobook while working. Bad idea. I didn't work, I drew Bilbo and his fancy home ♥

[inimitablereel]

california quails they’re unforgettable. small and round, black feather on top.

[inimitablereel]

25.04.2024 📖 today's anthy!

i need finish reading this book because i got half way through and i really wanted to look up fanart because everything described sounded so cool but then i got spoiled for the ending of the first book and it just turned me off of reading it 😭 i really like gideon and harrow though and i was enjoying the book a lot !! so im going to give it another try on the train on my way to see my friend. theyr the one who gifted the book to me actually haha

[ID by @fagofgod: three versions of a drawing of anthy from revolutionary girl utena. she is wearing a pink and white jacket and a pair of frayed jeans. she is sitting on the floor outside, leaning against a tree, holding up a book next to her face. she is looking up to the side with wide eyes and raised eyebrows, lips parted. the book she is holding is gideon the ninth by tamsyn muir. there is a colourful charm hanging from the book, presumably acting as a bookmark.

the first version of the drawing shows it in full. the second version zooms in to show the frayed end of anthy's pants as well as the book she is holding. the third version zooms in to show the book and anthy's face. end ID.]

#utena #wow I love this for her

[inimitablereel]

Imagine if eldritch giants attacked your village, massacred the entire population, your family, your friends, cooked and ate their corpses in front of you and then one of them found you cowering in its oversized belongings and went "Aww cute little creature, I'll keep you."

That's what happened to this critter.

#that comment #mind blown #dungeon meshi

[inimitablereel]

given historical ranges of different species, what kinds of frogs could have been present for the plague of frogs in exodus?

Fantastic question. Let's assume that the Egyptians considered toads and frogs to be different organisms, and therefore the stories referring to frog plagues indeed mean frogs other than Bufonidae (I think this is a reasonable assumption). If this is the case, there are basically two key candidates: Ptychadena nilotica and Pelophylax saharicus. Ptychadena have the edge over Pelophylax because they are somewhat more tolerant of drier habitats. Sometimes they occur in huge densities, so that every step sends dozens springing away. Both can lay enormous clutches, many thousands of eggs, and in a particularly wet year, I could easily imagine a boom in froglet development that would cause a 'plague'. And because the frogs would be trying to disperse, but heading into habitat that is too dry for them to persist long-term, you would quickly have a lot of dead frogs.

[inimitablereel]

Bittern at the grocery store

[inimitablereel]

Kind of hilarious to me how poorly the title "Mob Psycho 100" localized to English-speaking areas. To someone whose first language is English, it scans as:

Mob (Yakuza, Mafia)

Psycho (violent person with "crazy" behaviors)

Thus: a particularly violent member of organized crime.

But in Japanese it scans as:

Mob (background characters in crowd scenes in manga or anime)

Psycho (short for psychic)

Thus: a psychic who looks/acts like someone you'd never pick out of a crowd scene in a comic.

#oh that's why #I see

[inimitablereel]

Ornate harp in the shape of Godzilla. Bratislava, Slovakia, 1367,

#omg #I wonder what it was supposed to be in the shape of #since the answer *can't* be godzilla #edit: the answer is it's ai generated that makes sense

[inimitablereel]

Here are all covers for The Grave Robbers Chronicles. I’m still not sure about backgrounds, but I will come back to it after some illustrations.  If any of you have any illustration suggestions, do let me know! I probably won’t stick to the order all that much, so any scene from any book will be ok :) And since the last books are already translated by MereBear I am tempted to draw some illustrations for them right now, so I can make visualisation for a whole book :D

I plan max 10 illustration for each book (+/-), at least for now. 

#these ones! #OP did you end up using these for a fanbinding or was the goal just illustrating? they look rad either way #dmbj

[inimitablereel]

Apparently in 2021 I read both Gilgamesh and the Art of War

This is, perhaps, the funniest of the graphs

How ya doing down there on your own, The Odyssey by Homer?

#and also storygraph has wrong metadata for Hagar's Daughter (1901) which I also read that year #but I'm not sure it'd be visible on this chart anyways because gilgamesh really fucks with your graphs #spacing for 2023 is weird because I actually used goodreads that year and manually put all my books in at the end of the year #so everything got counted as jan1 I think