jadedviol

[jadedviol]

Tim Kent — Ghost of an Idea (oil on canvas, 2021/2022)

#oh yeah this rules #art

[jadedviol]

turn up the dulcimer I can't hear the dulcimer

#me every day

[jadedviol]

me as a sumerian guy everyone hates: this is all just one big carving. like none of this is real, we just are in a relief carving

[jadedviol]

But never let me die without a struggle and without acclaim

#holy animation batman #art

[jadedviol]

Sometimes the smallest thing can rewrite the trajectory of your life. For example: the reason I could only think about Dragon Ball Z for five years of my mortal life is I attended a local theater one-act play based on Waiting for Godot where Vegeta and Frieza were fighting on namek and waiting for Goku. It was so good it rewrote my brain chemistry permanently

#it's what beckett would have wanted #(i don't know anything about beckett)

[jadedviol]

I wanna read more avicenna but my brain hurt

#god if this wasn't the entire mood for that one semester #the slowest reading i've ever done

[jadedviol]

my watery friend... are you too brushed with the pattern of the dappled light...?

#pied beauty by gerard manley hopkins

[jadedviol]

kind of obsessed with this security question option my doctors office has given me

[jadedviol]

Mario Ceroli — Platonic Discourses on Geometry (Man with Cube) [sculpture; russian pine wood, 1985]

#oh same #art

[jadedviol]

Wordle is running out of words. Only 2,000 five letter words remain. When that supply is exhausted the Creation shall begin. One day the word will be ZHURM, and all shall get it, and all shall understand it to mean "an ache from suddenly remembering a long-ago friend, who meant something to you once, but whose face you can no longer conjure". The next day the word shall be JOROL, and all will get it, and all will know it means "the melancholy confusion of passing by somewhere where you once could have died". The next day it will be GREFT, and all will understand it to be a small brown bird with white streaks found only in South America, and suddenly, it will appear, in the underbrush of the Amazon, in the streets of São Paulo, and all will know that it once was not there, but now, will always be

#and thus does borges live on

[jadedviol]

Franciscus Johannes Gijsbertus van den Berg “Johfra” (1919-1998) —The Adoration of Pan [oil on three panels, 1979]

#art

[jadedviol]

Every time I get together with my dnd group I loudly declare, "I'd rather be playing blades in the dark" just in case one of John Harper's agents is listening

no. Yourew not allowed to enjoy d&d. ifg you are out there and enojying a game of 5e my elite squad of pbta warriors will crash in yhtough yourt windows and get a mixed success on their roll, allowing them to flawlessly handcuff and arrest you but at the cost of describing to the GM one dream they will never achieve,

#“i've been trying to get them to play other games i swear” i scream as they take me away #“i ran monsterhearts for them once” #“let me show you yhe discord history”

[jadedviol]

ABACUSYNTH by ELIAS JARZOMBEK [2022]

Abacusynth is a synthesizer inspired by an abacus, the ancient counting tool used all around the world. Just like an abacus is used to learn the fundamentals of math, the Abacusynth can be used to explore the building blocks of audio synthesis.

#music

[jadedviol]

The introduction of terrifying transcendence to woodland creature fantasy is described here as a swerve, but, in the woodland fantasy I grew up with, it happens a couple times.

In Wind in the Willows, Rat and Mole encounter the god Pan one day and it is scary and beautiful and they immediately forget it "lest the awful remembrance should remain and grow, and overshadow mirth and pleasure."

Reepicheep sails out in a coracle, never to return, seeking the Utter East, beyond seas that are themselves beyond any known in Narnia.

Neither of these things are framed as cosmic horror exactly. Pan is shown to be benevolent; the Utter East is Aslan's realm. But both have the idea that at the edges of things there is a holiness that could kill or ruin you.

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.

#i'm not disagreeing with op #it is a strange thing #but not without precedent #anyway #i'm very excited to get a copy of The Far Roofs and to try to convince my friends to play it

[jadedviol]

“reify” is the funniest word to me. a prefix and a suffix doesn’t need a base word to be in a loving and fulfilling relationship

[jadedviol]

Did you know about this?

what a beautiful zebra!!

#this is some sort of real life gettier problem situation i just know it

[jadedviol]

I believe authors should be cryptic and unhelpful in the interpretation of their own work or even act like they’re dead and never comment on it ever

#give us nothing