#Mirabile

[kouji-yamamoto]

*221231 2022年は96ポスト✨ 今年もお世話になりました。 自分のポストなのにコメントを返すのが遅すぎるという無礼をかましてましたがそれでも懲りずにコメントを頂けた方ほんと嬉しい限りです🙇🏻‍♂️ 今年はしっかりと9つの画像からそれぞれのポストに飛べるようにリンクしてます👆🏻 来年も多忙な中変わらずポストしていく所存。よろしくお願いします🎍 良いお年を🎌 #パキポディウム #グラキリス #pachypodium #gracilius #象牙宮 #tylecodon #pearsonii #チレコドン #ペアルソニー #白象 #pelargonium #mirabile #ペラルゴニウム #ミラビレ #多肉植物 #サボテン #caudex #cactus #succulent https://www.instagram.com/p/Cm1GoXwrxAY/?igshid=NGJjMDIxMWI=

#パキポディウム #グラキリス #pachypodium #gracilius #象牙宮 #tylecodon #pearsonii #チレコドン #ペアルソニー #白象 #pelargonium #mirabile #ペラルゴニウム #ミラビレ #多肉植物 #サボテン #caudex #cactus #succulent

[wuxiaphoenix]

Worldbuilding: Spun From Glass

What’s the fiberglass of your story’s world?

Every plausible world has at least one; stuff that can be ugly and prickly and hazardous to handle without proper gear, yet just too useful not to keep around. Janet Kagan’s Mirabile has recessive genes as engineered genetic backup

as part of all Earth-import plants and animals from their colony ships’ storage banks. Meaning sometimes you get useful surprise fireflies from red daffodils, and sometimes you get biting cockroaches - or deadly Frankenswine. The Roman Empire had concrete.

Yes, concrete. It’s way older than most people think. And by incorporating volcanic ash, the Romans came up with a mix that would harden underwater. We didn’t figure out how to replicate that until fairly recently.

Your world should have things in it that are wonderful, awe-inspiring, and just plain pretty. But if you want it to feel realistic, it should also have things that are... eh. Useful, but not usually seen bare-naked in public unless there’s a major project in progress or something has gone interestingly kaboom. Like fiberglass.

Note, this is a detail to be used sparingly, and with careful attention to the tone you’re setting up. Bare fiberglass is okay if it’s part of a new building going up (things getting done! Improved on!) or if it’s blown to bits over the landscape by a bomb or tornado (oh no, horrible disaster - your heroes are going to do something about this!)

If it’s just... leaking out into view because the siding’s cracked and worn out, or people have prized off the building A/C for salvage, or there’s a hole in the roof nobody’s bothered to fix....

Then it’s a sign of decay, of humans gone feral, of society breaking down. This is treading the edge of Grimdark territory, people. Unless that’s what you’re actually aiming at, steer clear.

You can tell a lot about a society from how much of its nitty-gritty details you don’t see. Keep this in mind when you’re scene-setting. Also keep in mind what POV character you’re using to show readers the place. The hero who sees scattered fiberglass tufts and tenses, because Something Has Gone Wrong, gives an entirely different impression than the barefoot street urchin who just steps around it, as they have for as long as they can remember. And that’ll be different again from the construction worker picking up after a superhero/villain battle, c’mon guys, couldn’t you have waited until the roof was on and we all got paid...?

(Yeah yeah, empty warehouse site, no people, minimal collateral damage, sure. But my paycheck, man. The project’s gonna be over budget now and it’s not our fault!)

And if that’s bad, imagine the construction workers looking at the aftermath of Godzilla.

So when you’re building your world, spare some thoughts about what it’s built with. Your readers will appreciate it!

(BTW I highly recc’ Mirabile. Great setting, wonderful characters, and an excellent model if you’re trying to figure out how short stories should work. And you can’t beat the story hooks. “This year the Ribeiros’ daffodils seeded early, and they seeded cockroaches.” That line got me to outright buy the book when I was a VERY broke college student....)

#creative writing #worldbuilding #Mirabile #building

[agamemnon-sux]

Ongoing list of D&D characters I've played (excluding characters from pathfinder, GURPS, etc.). Why did this post take me over a year to write.

-Bongo bard (D&D one-shot, autogenerated): simple one-shot character. Update with name if I can find the sheet. Happy-go-lucky, impulsive. Played this game in anno domini 2019.

-Ribble "Turtledove" Itheroy (D&D campaign): this character means Everything to me & my tablemates for this game. Gnome paladin in service of Lady Boldrei, the hearthkeeper, with protector fighting style and oath of redemption. Has a mild temper, a deeply ingrained set of morals and a bleeding heart type of charisma. He's a wide-eyed young man away from his huge family and sprawling burrows on his first quest, and his arc ended up exploring what it means to be taught kindness, empathy, protecting the weak, and self-sacrifice vs what it means to actually apply those values in tense & nuanced situations. He also is about what it means to love and unconditionally care for people who don't always want you around, and who you can't expect to be with forever. I love this little church man and his unending choice to make home, whatever it takes. He also has a Summoned Mount, a big ol chow chow named Yona. I roleplayed so hard on this dude that when Ribble convinced himself he was going to have to die fighting the BBEG I made myself & my DM cry.

-wibble (D&D campaign): Wibble is a ribble retooling using elements that I played with for Ribble but ultimately couldn't make work. I play him in a highly infrequent campaign I do with my brothers like twice a year. He's a forest gnome instead of a rock gnome, oath of the Ancients, and leans much harder into being a silly little fey trickster who operates under his own opaque moral compass.

-Maud Wraithmore (D&D one-shot): much like Ribble, this character wormed her way into my brain and has taken up residence in my psyche. It started with a friend helping me min-max for a one-shot and we ended up with a bladesinger wizard who started with one level in barbarian, plus a little bit of metamagic. To make sense of that, Maud is a variant human kid from nowheresville, grew up by the swamp and wanted out, got into an underground fighting ring when all she had was her rage and her fists, and after that she started leaning into her spark of magic, making deals for scraps of spell instructions and moving into some more performative fighting circles, creating this WWE-inspired wizard streetfighter persona. I've got this idea that she's called back to the swamp by her hometown by some worrying dreams and ends up living in the ribcage of the dead titan that summoned her for a while, which is where she's able to learn most of her formal magic before she goes off and joins the BBEG she works under in the one-shot I made her for (she's evil, by the way). She's got a pretty broad stat spread so of course she has a -2 to Chr. This lady is intelligent and competent and will fall flat on her face in ANY conversation. Fortunately she is somehow able to poorly flirt her way into the heart of the DM's traveling salesperson, Rosie the Tiefling, who she will eventually marry & have a moss dweeb circle of spores daughter (Adelhaid) with. Disaster swamp wizard with a lust for life. Uproariously fun to play. I also have a build I made for a one-shot of Teenage Maud, while she's in the midst of growing her fighting ring reputation and not particularly evil yet besides just being an angsty rage-filled teenage girl.

-Volans (D&D oneshot, not mine): a borrowed character for a last-minute one-shot, a circle of stars Tiefling druid w/ his star map tattooed across his chest and an obsession with immortality. Interesting dude who got me interested in circle of stars for the first time (more on that later).

-Sorrel (D&D oneshot): a Tabaxi way of shadow monk I made for an Oops! All monks! one-shot, and one of my simplest characters personality-wise. I made him on a bootleg online character sheet creator that was mostly in French. His background was anthropologist specializing in... elves, I think? He was just a mildly slippery cat trying to prove his worth as a martial artist, who considered himself more an outsider & documentarian than a direct participant in his life.

-Feverfew (D&D oneshot): Feverfew is a funny case; I made her as an alternate to Sorrel depending on monk party comp, using the limited free options on D&D beyond. They clearly have the same history (why else would they both be named after herbs) but her background is Haunted One. I still had her character sheet up when our RA came by and we strong-armed him into playing for like half an hour, so bam, Feverfew was Real. So, she & Sorrel were brought to the monastery together and they trained until in her teens she had a nightmare so bad it changed her forever (maybe accidentally astral projected into the Abyss or something) and went out on the run, wandering in search of either answers or means of protecting herself, but occasionally still contacting Sorrel (or, in the case of the one-shot, being spectrally summoned to fight alongside her old classmates in a multidimensional Monk Tournament, which sounds way cooler than the game actually was).

-Mira (desert, D&D campaign): MIRA! Miramiramira. This character has everything: she's a crowgirl (crow cowgirl) druid with a rifle who has been stalking the Magnolia desert for the whole of her adult life, killed a dragon once, and has an innate hatred of being infantilized. She's circle of stars and her star map is an intricate embroidery project on the underside of her hat, the result of many long, lonely nights watching the stars. Mira (MiraBile, mee-RAH-bee-lay, btw) was hatched and raised in a traveling circus (owned by two very difficult women who called themselves sisters) and performed with another Kenku, AnDerLwm (OHN-dare-loom) as another "sister act." They were unrelated birds, but AnDi kept Mira safe, taught her most of her words, gave her her name, and was generally the brightest star in Mira's sky, until she disappeared. Mira, still a child, escaped from the circus soon after intent on finding her sister, and picked up her gun skills by long practice and her druid spells from a wandering deputy. Mostly, she watched the stars. For the campaign, her tendency to overhear things she shouldn't gets her looped into a series of fetch quests for incredibly powerful, potentially world-ending artifacts with a secret organization masquerading as a normal organization. Her arc & development revolve mostly around her willingness to trust others to understand her wants/needs and to look out for her, and her recapturing her lost childhood by embracing simple joy and silliness with her companions. She's even learning to play guitar from her warforged friend, a form of expression unhindered by her imitative speech. As her attunement with nature grows, she gains access to divination and seeking magic, which will allow her an understanding of the universe bigger than her missing "sister."

-Mira (islands, D&D campaign): My beloved crowgirl was my PC for more than one campaign; she was dreamed up for this one but played first in the desert (where she is ultimately a better fit...). The islands Mira has a similar backstory but is significantly more driven towards finding AnDi, falling in with her travelling group at the beck of some gods she doesn't understand (one thing that's true about Mira in every universe: gods and religion are near-completely foreign to her. She just Doesn't Get It). She's a grumpy crow lady who never knows when to call it quits. She has spent a lot of time learning how to front, how to deal with civilization without getting killed or mugged or run out of town, and she did her best to pass that information on to some of her companions who had similar trouble with social norms, to limited effect. Funny enough she also learned guitar, this time as a gift from a god to give her some form of social expression (the bass guitar, this time). She died in a scripted TPK to a zealot, that the DM intended to revive us from but we mutually agreed to stay dead. Because that campaign is behind us (rip Styx, the raddest character in the world), I get to decide what happened to that Mira, and I think she probably came back some three hundred years later as a false duragh (a wonderful idea from @/filibusterfrog). She was a restless, hunting soul who died outside of her home forest, and so the land itself would eventually shake her awake and send her on her way, dooming her to wander until she could find her sister. I wonder how that would shake out for her, given what I know about AnDi, but Mira does not.

-Hermés Mercurie (D&D oneshot): bubbly Satyr drag bard that I drew up for a heist one-shot. My beloved. The reason that I could do a Greek accent for like twelve hours before losing it again. A great solution for my DMs calling my characters by female pronouns regardless of their genders. It's important that you know that she's just here for the job. She's just here to get paid, man. She plays like a dozen instruments and can vogue with the best of them. I managed to roll two nat 20s in a row to keep a vampire count distracted long enough with a lute/piano duet for the party to steal the macguffin so that count is gonna remember her forever.

-"Chestnut" the Firbolg (D&D oneshot): the Firbolg, like most of its kin, doesn't really have a name, but its party insists on calling it "Chestnut." It's an unnerving mountain of a person who shouldn't be left alone around still-warm corpses. Absolute savant with a quarter-staff.

-Sid "The Id" Wicked, the priest of the people (D&D oneshot): My bastard son. The priest of the people. As a half-elf son of a wealthy elf socialite put to shame by her fling with a human, Sid grows up contemptuous and irreverent, gallivanting the streets of fantasy London and eventually falling into the newly-reignited cult of Argos, a minor god of vision (Argos's domain is... complicated, but I like to think of him as the god of Witnessing, and of feeds from unsecured security cameras). The cult was meant to just be a front for a bunch of punk-ish street kids to operate behind but unfortunately Sid & his friend Teddy commit to the bit perhaps a little too hard and end up properly pulling Argos from obscurity, leaving Sid a legitimate cleric ready to adventure. Sid is gross, mean, and way, way too excited to get your skull under his elaborately studded boot for someone who has cleric HP. He's besties with the party's bald wizard and makes Pal'leth the githyanki deeply nervous. I only got to play Sid for a brief window, but I've had lots of time to think since about the dreams Sid might start to have after prolonged contact with Argos, the Visions, and how well he might be able to handle that.

But I digress... Sid dresses himself somewhere between a mantis shrimp and an 80s goth rocker. He's got a stupid little French mustache. He carries a once-ceremonial mace that he stole from home into which he's inscribed "pick a god and pray". He's bisexual but he doesn't know that yet. He has a relationship with his mother constantly bordering on violence but he's also the only person in the world who understands her. He dyes his hair black to piss her off and then begs her for money. He says he's the frontman of a band that existed for like six months when he was 16. Literally what's not to like.

-Nizoirse "Nisa," the New (et Hrothgar, D&D oneshot): the instant I found out they had added Verdans to the game I knew I wanted to play one for a one-shot. Additionally, I had agreed with another player prior to create a pair of characters that we could play in-tandem, allowing him to play a private, unexpressive character and lean on my roleplaying skills for the both of us. We landed on a bugbear & a Verdan, giving them camaraderie as goblinoids. Both monks, though the bugbear (Hrothgar) had some prior levels in assassin rogue. She exists in a one-shot world in which most humans vanished from existence in semi-recent history. She woke up in the shadows of the Teeth (a mountain ridge), amnesiac and in an unfamiliar body. She was taken in easily by a nearby monastery and trained in martial arts, meditative grounding, and pottery. The monastery was headed by a'Era the Inquisitive, a curious and kindly copper dragon. She was ambushed by Hrothgar while traveling and subdued him, but recognized in him a hungry, desperate man and invited him to study at the monastery. After many trials of self-denial and physical resilience, she underwent a sudden physical transformation (a Verdan growth spurt, but when you're the only Verdan you know that's not exactly self-explanatory) and became an object of fascination for a'Era; she began training under him directly and received a dragon's name: Nizoirse (knee-ZER-shuh) the New. She & Hrothgar would eventually leave the monastery in pursuit of knowledge and adventure, meet new friends, and make a few interesting discoveries.

Nisa's area of fascination is anthropology, especially of humans-- she associates the disappearance of humans with the mystery of how she came to exist, and pursues cultural knowledge to fill the void of the absolute nil of her own past. She will put the discovery and preservation of knowledge above her and her party's safety. She prides herself on being extremely composed & unflappable, and keeping her emotions from affecting her work. She would fight and die for Hrothgar and cares deeply for the rest of her crew as well, but finds their worldly attachments misaligned and frustrating. I find Nizoirse really compelling, especially her brand of positive nihilism and the fact that she can manifest sick ass dragon wings from her ki.

-Designation 24 (D&D oneshot): I had a few thoughts when making this one-shot character: what if an angel was a robot, and what could possibly be going on in-world with a paladin-warlock multiclass? In terms of characterization and dogma she borrows heavily from Gabriel Ultrakill, because I wanted to play Gabriel Ultrakill, sue me!! I decided she wouldn't have a name, because she's someone who gave up their whole personhood, whole past for a higher purpose, instead she would be designated 24, a number I chose at random. She's a paladin sworn to some sort of angelic order of the sun, which, um. Nobody told me until after about the Solari, a race of sun angels in the D&D cosmology OF WHICH THERE ARE ONLY AND EXACTLY TWENTY-FOUR. She was DESTINED to be.

Anyways, Designation 24 is a giant heavily armored woman with flaming sword and shield. She follows a goddess of cleansing fire and ancient pacts (unnamed at this time but in fact another facet of Boldrei), and was trained in a secretive ultra-militaristic cloister of angels, her Sisters. She doesn't fly nor is she particularly fast but she does a kind of threatening lumbering teleport. She has an ongoing issue where the very sunfire that fuels her will rip through her, pouring from the gaps in her armor and burning her awfully in the process. She thinks in the past few years that she's been in closer contact than ever with her God, but when you're staring into the brilliant fire in front of you it's nearly impossible to tell that the Voice you're hearing is coming from the deep, cold shadows pooling behind you...

Under the helmet she looks exactly like Rorshach from Watchmen. I <3 you scary dyke of all time.

-Sycorax Font-of-Tumult (D&D campaign): oh, my boy. My baby... Sycorax is a fairy & a wild magic sorceror. They were born from a condensed pool of chaos and immediately stood up, dusted himself off, and became a low-level politician utterly and disastrously outspoken against the king. He had enough sense to be an activist generally within the law, but got themself in immense trouble when a wild magic surge went haywire at a demonstration and disfigured one of the king's generals.

Sycorax is an idealist, finds it hard to sit still, and is very difficult to tell no. They believe that the ultimate forms of good include small joys, whimsy, and regicide. If you leave him in a room full of people long enough he WILL start a riot and it doesn't really matter to them what it's about. There's a brief period where they wild magic surge himself down to about 3 inches tall and bright blue, which messes with his relationship to their physical body for the rest of his life. He figures out eventually that the robot they've been traveling with is constructed from the same chaos he bubbled out of and immediately latches onto it as their sworn brother.

They're dead, by the way. I knew I wouldn't be able to make it to the campaign's finale session so I asked the DM to kill me. Sycorax was shot clean through by never-before-seen assault weaponry during a capital riot, and guided their party and the remaining protestors to a safehouse before succumbing to the injury. His last words were "what a wonderful thing it is to be alive" before dissolving back into the chaos he was born from. And yet they linger; in every oil-slick shine on the ground, in every flickering shadow, in every murmur of unrest and its following outcry for change. In every cicada's song rests Sycorax, waiting to be the crack where light gets in.

-Ethel of Sunspring (et Frederick, D&D oneshot): Another one-shot character I built in tandem with another player, in this case my brother! We decided it would be fun to play in-game siblings and wrote up Ethel and Frederick of Sunspring, both warlock multiclasses who belong to the Nightwatchers, a local cult following a Lady Umbra, a historic nighttime vigilante (Robin Hood style) who was powerful and beloved enough to ascend to demigod-hood. They were two orphans who grew up together and Frederick mainly pursued the Arcane (divine sorcerer, fey-touched) while Ethel, the more grounded of the two, pursued martial excellence (samurai fighter, devil-sight).

The DM pulled a fun trick on us for this one-shot; we knew the party knew each other in advance, but we showed up and he said "okay, you've all known each other for decades at this point, you're all elderly and live in a retirement community together" which is so much fun, it instantly made Ethel (and everyone else) into cool ass grandparent adventurers taking on One Last Job. So you get this old-lady rōnin type character with otherwordly red eyes and impeccable aim. And she and her brother are still constantly messing with each other and conspiring amongst themselves. We need more grandmas who kill people in media.

-Posey Lanier, "the Jester" (D&D oneshot): Posey is the nomenclative punchline in a rule-of-threes joke involving a trio of pink tieflings (Mowzie, Rosie, Posey, the worst cousins in the world who you should never trust with anything, most especially your money. Rosie is the one who's married to Maud!). He calls himself "The Jester" and wears a blue and white porcelain Venetian mask with a jester's outfit to match. He's a rake rogue (a "swashbuckler" if you're nasty) with an especial talent for mockery; if you need a guy eviscerated in public but without any bloodshed, the Jester is your guy. He's genuinely mean, but at least he's genuine! Except also not genuine at all, since he's a sneak using Batesian mimicry to convince you he's some kind of bard.

Whatever the dynamic was with the one-shot's fairy mead crew was borderline polycule. I'm convinced they all sleep in one heap in the middle of the floor. He's especially sweet on one of the crew's druids (Rivari, I think, but it could have been Yinner. I really should start putting down player names when I make these lists) and has been roped into collecting a great many botanical field samples at personal expense that way. Posey occupies the Faceless archetype, and so goes between the Jester alter ego (loud, exuberant and deliberate) and Posey-as-himself, who is lank, reserved, and generally kind of a bummer. These days, he's the Jester most of the time. It's all fun and games with Posey until the jingling of bells ominously stops.

-Ken'renaq (Pathfinder 2e campaign): I said I wasn't gonna talk about my Pathfinder characters but that was over a year ago and I would like to tell you about her. She's from my brother's campaign & he has a really fun set of player races (essentially re-categorizing all the humanoids into elvish or goblinish) including a handful of beastfolk, one of which is bearfolk, the Takiaq. Ken'renaq is a champion (Pathfinder Paladin) who is surprisingly sneaky for a fully grown brown bear wearing armor. She follows the Liberator cause which means she respects the hell out of people for making their own decisions and demands freedom at all costs (weirdly enough, this campaign is also about regicide. Even here, Sycorax haunts the narrative). She's friends with Solid Snake from the metal gear solid franchise. I don't remember a ton about her background because we haven't played in months and I can't check my character sheet outside of Foundry.

She's just Ken.

-Doctor Flichard "Flinch" Underfoot (D&D oneshot, sort of): a wonderfully eloquent friend of mine could only describe Flinch as a "little creep" and I couldn't agree more. This guy sucks so bad. I got to drop in for a session on the campaign my old group had been playing for the last year as a weirdly pathetic lackey to the Big Bad. As with many of my characters, he's just a string of keywords that I've smushed together into a person: he's a bard but his performance skill is university lecture on planar cosmologeology, a field in which he was a premiere researcher. He had a psychic Incident 400-something years ago in an attempt to "open his mind" that left his head permanently cracked open to the psychosphere and him vulnerable to predatory thought entities (and gave him some sick ass lightning scarring cause. duh) and made him into a psychic halfling vampire who doesn't need brain juice to survive per se but just kind of likes it. He has a strong Jersey accent and says shit like "in my salad days". He's been living in Hades for at least decades and his coworkers have been stiffing him out of some of his pay because he sucks and because he's the only one that's not a yugoloth. My siblings and I spent so long laughing at shitty halfling names when I was trying to make him. I wish him as well as he deserves wherever Banishment spit him out.

IMAGES TIME

Ribble (& Yona!)

Maud, Maud & Mira pride art

Sorrel (left)

Mira

Hermes

Sid

Nisa

24 (insanely sick commission by @bedrock-to-buildheight)

Sycorax

#memnon talks #time to tag the fuck out of this #ribbleposting #wibbleposting #maudposting #volansposting #sorrelposting #feverfewposting #miraposting #hermesposting #firbolgposting #chestnutposting #sidposting #nisaposting #nizoirseposting #24posting #sycoraxposting #ethelposting #posieposting #poseyposting #kenrenaqposting #kenposting #flinchposting #ribble 'turtledove' itheroy #maud wraithmore #sorrel #feverfew #volans #mirabile #hermés mercurie

[ytixrus3us5uey]

White girl bj BBC in gym parking lot Inked redhead masseuse queened by dyke milf Kinky teenager riding dick Stunnng Tranny Havng Rough Anal With A Black Stud Redheaded granny blowing Leche en las Tetas Randy tasty tramp cooch gets Small Girl twat poled strong How to give a handjob hot blonde teen slut When Annika Eve, Mya Mays, Fucking my ex girlfriends mom VR porn sex with czech pornstar

#Dekow #sextarius #sun-fish #decoyed #islandman #verenda #unmodestness #recip #cookhouses #washmaid #mirabile #haphazardry #whenever #supersilently #noncuspidated #unharboured #squawkier #twice-predicted #postholes #Firth

[exercise-of-trust]

you say serindë, i say þerindë, let's call the whole thing off

#miriel therinde #tolkien fanart #silmarillion fanart #caption borrowed from a darths and droids strip title. mirabile dictu they are still making comics???? wild #subcreation

[dance-world]

Omar Rivera and Antonio Cangiano - Ballet Hispanico - photo by Gustavo Mirabile

#Omar Rivera #Antonio Cangiano #Ballet Hispanico #Gustavo Mirabile #bailarín #danseur #tänzer #ballerino #dancer #ballet men #boys of ballet #dance #ballet #ballet couples

[abhorrenttheorizer]

Entire image is spoiled, a while back I wanted to make some more doodles similar to this one but I wasn't pleased with it and it lacked the same weight and balance that my first one had so it stayed in my Procreate septic tank till 2024 to be posted.

Also I got incredibly silly so uhhh consider this image as a warning:

Transcript:

"big ass sasaj lol xd"

"(GETS REALLY FLUFFY WHEN ANGRY)"

"(YouTube Kids)"

"2 BODY PILLOWS"

"I WEAR THESE BETTER THAN YOU, BITCH."

"(YES, THIS HURTS HIM)"

"HEARD YOU BOZOS HAD FREE COFFEE."

#brainlet hour #mr mirabil #the mr men show #the mr. men show #mr men and little miss #mr men little miss #mr. men #mr grumpy #mr. grumpy #this fucking blue muppet is one of those characters i physically cannot bring myself to publicly talk about #because i Will get weird and i Will get creepy about it #in reality i have hundreds of mr grumpy doodles i can only post like 2% of them though lol

[diamondcitydarlin]

"I got a wicked sweet tooth tonight."

The Purge: Election Year (2016)

#the purge #the purge: election year #candy girl #purge candy girl #horror movies #horror gifs #kimmy #kimmy the purge #brittany mirabile #she IS the moment #why isn't there a whole series about her tbh #blood cw #blood tw #bright lights tw #bright lights cw #my gifs #fave movies

[lairai]

For once, perhaps, everything would be alright.

For the Heron's Ballad event in Realm of Serpents. Mirabile (left) belongs to me, Claude (right) to @hirundine

#art #my art #realm of serpents #realmofserpents #Mirabile Visu #This took so many tries to get right #but I'm pretty happy with it??? #which is quite new #took way longer than I thought it would though #but!!! still on time for the event!! #arpg #roleplay art #fantasy

[echoestm]

"window escape." (tara to chris. murmurstm.)

don't get caught! || accepting

"Tell me you at least waited until he kissed you 'night, and then did his sweep." Busted. The both of them. She's not supposed to be out here smoking anymore than Tara is supposed to be out here escaping the safety of their home to go do god knows what. Heh. God knows and she knows. Some days it doesn't feel like that long ago when she was the one that tender age, doing the same thing. And where was she going? To a Macher party. Or a football party. Or anywhere else her friends had decided to gather with bottles of stolen liquor from parents' cabinets or baggies of weed to be rolled up in papers. To do all the stupid shit teenagers do. Just like she's gonna let Tara do.

"Ugh. The things I'm going to have to do to him to keep him from noticing that his FAVORITE is missing. You owe me one." A little gross parental traumatizing is the only price tolled for the favor of not just letting her get away, but aiding and abetting. If she happens to delight in the slightly green hue it puts on her daughter's face? Well... that's neither here nor there.

#➤ 𝐚 𝐬 𝐤 𝐞 𝐝 && 𝐚 𝐧 𝐬 𝐰 𝐞 𝐫 𝐞 𝐝 ┊ ❛ sex is the question. yes is the answer ❜ #➤ 𝐯 𝐞 𝐫 𝐬 𝐞 : makes you wanna scream ┊ ❛ mirabile dictu. don't you agree? ❜ #murmurstm

[kouji-yamamoto]

*221021 出始めの萌え🌱 事務所が手狭になってきたので移転したいなと考えながら、どーせならルーフバルコニーがあるところがいいなと。 条件が増えてくるとなかなか見つからないので広いバルコニーがあるなら事務所は狭くてもいいと付け加えてみる… #本末転倒 #ミラビレ_ky2 #pelargonium #mirabile #ペラルゴニウム #ミラビレ #ペラルゴニウムミラビレ #caudex #cactus #succulent #塊根植物 #観葉植物 #多肉植物 #サボテン #botanical #家 #住宅 https://www.instagram.com/p/Cj9TaOUPPvy/?igshid=NGJjMDIxMWI=

#本末転倒 #ミラビレ_ky2 #pelargonium #mirabile #ペラルゴニウム #ミラビレ #ペラルゴニウムミラビレ #caudex #cactus #succulent #塊根植物 #観葉植物 #多肉植物 #サボテン #botanical #家 #住宅

[wuxiaphoenix]

Book Formatting Review: Mirabile

Okay, this is going to be a slightly odd one. I love the setting. But I give the paperback 5 stars, and the Kindle version 4, or 4.5 at best.

I’ve read both the original paperback put out in the 90s, and now the Kindle version.

And while the stories in both are good, if you want to see how to put a bunch of short stories together as a novel, you’re going to have to track down the old paperback version.

Mirabile started out as separate short stories all in the same setting in an SF magazine. As far as I can tell, the Kindle version simply collects those stories together. The older paperback version, on the other hand, edited said stories in three important ways. It added bits of a framing story around all the original short stories to tie them all together; bits that portray Mama Jason telling all of these stories to her friends and relatives as life goes on. It edited out the repeated information on chimeras and Dragon’s Teeth, so we get an explanation in the first story and just added details in the others. (The original short stories have an explanation in each story - necessary for readers who might be finding this setting for the first time picking up a new magazine, annoying if you’re reading it all together.) And it edited punctuation and italics alllll over the place, along with a few other word choices, making the dialogue sound more emotional and like natural speech.

If you want a book to work coherently, these are crucial edits.

I don’t know why the Kindle version has the “magazine version” of the stories. Possibly a copyright problem? Or someone not having access to the paperback text? Something else? But it was a shock, and not one I could have anticipated from the sample, given samples typically cover about 12%, the first story covers about 15%, and the first framing bits would have come after that. But jumping directly from the first story to “Return of the Kangaroo Rex”, without the little bits of family teasing each other about what was and wasn’t true, was jarring.

Also one minor continuity problem. While in the paperback Susan’s age isn’t mentioned much beyond late teenager, the magazine stories state her to be 16, then 18, then 16 again in later stories. You’d think, even if someone were putting the magazine stories all together in one spot, they’d catch that little detail and make a few discreet snips. Oy.

So. That’s what I’ve got. Just so you know what you’re looking at, when you find one version or the other!

#book review #editing #mirabile

[tortoisesshells]

@jomiddlemarch requested a perspective flip of "Physician, Heal Thyself - Or, Our New England Cousin: Being An Unpublished Excerpt From the Lives of the Staff and Volunteers of Mansion House Hospital, Alexandria, Virginia, in the late War" - this is not the perspective flip requested, because I have the reading comprehension of a bear (perhaps even one hopped up on cocaine), but:

A monster then, a dream (G, Mercy Street, ~800 words, Jed Foster/Mary Phinney, no real warnings except for vampirism/slapdash crossover with Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter, I guess?)

In which Mary Phinney has pointed questions for Jed Foster,

or,

The dentist’s apprentice was whistling tunelessly down the great hall of Mansion House in the slanting afternoon light; the haphazard arrangements of the ailing and the dying did not seem to impede his progress much, for all he barely seemed to look. His box of tools was missing, Jed Foster realized, belatedly – there was something strange in the way he moved as a result. Perhaps. Jed shook his head, as though to shake loose something stuck in the cotton wool of withdrawal and blood-lust and exhaustion, but nothing came to him: it was still the waning summer of 1862, and the great crimes of a guilty nation – to quote a man he had no business quoting, except that it would please Mary Phinney – were being washed out by a tide of blood.

Some part of him hoped Adam and his whole brood of the damned would choke on it. Jed, as alive to the irony as any of the walking dead could be, certainly was – choking, he meant.

But all this was ignoring the head nurse, who was busy about her tasks beside him. It was poor coin to pay her for his parole with (and the half-second’s pull of his whole being towards the thud of her pulse in her neck, worse still!) and so he put it all out of his mind, save her and her causes and her counsel: “There is something wrong with that man,” he said.

Read the Rest on AO3!

#first mercy street fic in HOW LONG? mirabile visu. #anyway. i owe you a real fic friend! i'm working on it! #fic #my fic #mercy street pbs #yes frank is a vampire. jed's almost got it. he's running on empty. #eta: okay but I am borrowing adam and vadoma from AL:VH in this one.

[cuppateadeer]

Vergil? Is that you?

#dracula daily #mirabile visu

[blackfemmecharacterdependency]

BFCD Reviews By Nesha || The Purge Franchise

Welcome, Welcome, Welcome to my experience with my Purge marathon this month, for October purposes. We could glide by the first one, since there is literally one Black woman in it and she’s there for like, a few minutes, or whatever. BUT. Since there were prominent Black female characters elsewhere in the franchise, I decided to just put all of my thoughts into one long post. (Only covered the movies 1-3, because that’s all I watched)

This essentially started whenever I saw this post that asked for POC thoughts on the representation in The Purge. I was already considering reviewing it, but that pretty much was like my little push. Then, I was in the comments or whatever, and just don’t think that I had the time at the moment to really state my thoughts in a comments section, particularly while I was only two movies in. Basically, long story short, if there is ever a story about POC, especially in stories where injustice is a major plot point - if there are characters of color, there need to be writers of color. If there are characters of color and no writers of color... Just know that them white people fucked it up. Sometimes it’s okay, because sometimes, they got a friend of color or something and have watched a few documentaries. Lol. Idk if this man who wrote this franchise know any Black people outside of work. 🤷🏾‍♀️

And the usual disclaimer, since we back OUTSIDE! You say you outside but you ain’t that outside. I’m outside of my fandoms in this department, and these things tend to bring the fandoms to me because I stepped foot in their things. Disclaimer for somebody who stumbled across this post because of the fandom tags - I am an independent partaker of this content, not “part of the fandom,” and my audience in particular is NOT for everybody. SO: If you may have been criticized in the past for casual racism, tone deafness to Black women’s concerns or accused of misogynoir or antiblackness, leave now. If you don’t like cussing, AAVE, general ratchetness and mean lesbian energy, you too might wanna go. A bitch can be eloquent, but I type like I talk, at times, so it is what it is and I don’t curate for kids, dudes, or nonblacks. That’s just what that is.

The Purge

I initially watched this movie whenever it first was out (more like whenever it was out of the theaters, so not at the very beginning of it’s existence, but pretty dang close). I watched it at my older sister’s house. I wasn’t interested in it. Whenever I heard the premise, I thought it sounded pretty dope, but then I saw Ethan Hawke, and so I was willing to pass. One thing I’ma do is pass on an Ethan Hawke movie without a second thought. So. I didn’t plan on watching it, but my sister put it on at her home one night and that’s her TV, so I wound up seeing the thing.

Wasn’t impressed with the movie, overall. It came out at a time where I was very invested and involved in Black activism and the movie read like someone who had read a few white liberal articles on politics and then made a lil’ movie about the horrors. It felt extremely tone deaf in some areas, and like the point it was trying to make was not being properly communicated. 

BUT THEN, I noted that many of the white people I knew personally felt very into it and I decided, “Oh, okay. It was meant for them. It was to communicate things that we already know to these people who have often always been able to live without having to know or think about these things. I’m including this interaction with someone in the fandom, on the post linked above, to clarify:

So. To me, this family read as conservative. They could be moderates. I definitely could see it. They put their flowers out to show that they support the purge, but then whenever it comes down to it, they don’t actually have it in them to support it in full. But. I feel like there are so many conservatives like this as well. 

I’m from Texas. Southeast Texas, to be exact. Right by the Gulf of Mexico, right by Louisiana. I have hella conservatives surrounding me who were “nice” people. They love their families, however that looked, and didn’t actually go out to klan rallies or anything, but they support law enforcement and make excuses for these “great institutions” in our nation, and in Texas. Now... They wouldn’t be likely to actually shoot me down dead without a second thought like the police would, but they would support the police force, despite them doing such things. This is how the main family reads, to me. 

The writer though? Felt like someone on the other side. The ones who will gladly raise awareness to help the less fortunate, but if they had to do even a step more than that, they would not have the energy. The story read like a person - who puts BLM in their profile, but doesn’t really even know any Black people, much less help them - telling a story about how maybe, under the right (or very wrong) circumstances, their white counterparts could see the light about humanity. 

I was glad to see that brotha survive, but beyond that, this was not a movie for me or mine. It isn’t a movie that outside of this marathon I will watch again either. Now, the second one, to me, was more empathetic.  It was like if the writer heard feedback and decided to clarify and expound on what message the story was giving, and opened up a doorway to a broader audience.

The Purge: Anarchy

We followed characters around who knew what was up and were just trying to do their best. Instead of following people who were part of the problem like we did in the first movie, we followed people who were more likely to be affected by those in power who were the problem. They even went so far as to cast leads who are biracial Black women as part of the ensemble that we take this journey with. 

Yes, like the first one, they’re still shown as targets of the problem, but they also are shown as survivors too, and while there is still an undertone of white saviorism, as there also was in the first movie, it isn’t a cut and dry white savior story. It is a group of people who need help through an impossible life in an unfair world, and how each of them does their best, not only to live, but to look out for their loved ones, and eventually each other. It is really the type of story that I would have wanted from a world like this, and I would have wanted evidence that there were people who could somehow make the best of it all. 

Nobody don’t do that like Black people. One of our main identifiers is how we make lemonade out of lemons, so there was good visuals in who they selected to follow through this story and I thought the end was BEAUTIFUL. To see the brotha done not only survived last time, but he done started working to give power to the powerless? Loved that for him. Loved that Our Good Sis nem made sure to have the man’s back who had theirs in the beginning. It was a well told story for such a horrifying state of things.

The Purge: Election Year

I don’t know what happened here...

This movie was not good. At the end of the day, I think that they needed Black people, preferably ones who know about community work, politics, and such to assist them in trying to write these characters.

They gave you more POC in this story... They gave you more access to the ones standing up to the corrupt power system. But, then they sort of sullied it with this idea that to rise up is to be as bad as those who LITERALLY use their power to eradicate you and have the means and malice to do it. 

White liberal knucka strikes again with a heavy hand in false equivalencies of an organization that had to be created in order to help and protect the most vulnerable people in these disgusting times with actual white supremacists. The white supremacists were a seen, real, force trying to eliminate the one person who wanted to make changes, from a place of power.

Enter the White Savior Trope that they were flirting with last movie, and amplify that bitch. This movie was so damn annoying with the thought of this white woman being the only hope that the people had, when the brotha had been tearing through the Purge purists’ shit for years. (He finally got him a name this movie too). But, my point is. There is no better way for you to get me to roll my eyes and smack my teeth than to try to paint some white as the only hope, and in THIS particular story, it’s especially heinous, because there was already some hope in the niggas evening the field a little bit by exterminating some of the high profile people and hitting their fancy events.

What this movie did was that, and even worse, they shoved down my THROAT that these negros with guns were just as bad, and somebody in there had the audacity to have the main negro say at one point, “Now, I love Black people, but I’m not letting you shoot these good white folks. These our white folks” while those people were in the process of trying to thwart an operation that could eliminate one of the worst of the purge pushers who had ALREADY tried to kill them PERSONALLY! WHY??? WHO BUT SOME HONKEY OR SOME COON WOULD WRITE THAT AND BE SERIOUS??????????? 

HUGE. STEP. DOWN. From the trust that they built with me as a Black viewer in the previous movie. I thought perhaps that there might be another increase in awareness and quality, like there was between the first and second movies. There was not. Not for my Black ass. I didn’t even watch it in one sitting, and was ready to end my trek through the franchise. I was that irritated by the complete and utter audacity, in a universe like this, in a situation like this for THAT. What SHOULD have happened, if it wasn’t some white nonsense, was everybody shoulda told that white lady what the brotha was tryna tell her and get the white people to sit down and shut up and get out the way, because come 7:00, THEY were gonna fucking be safe again! EVEN IF this white bitch is the only fucking hope in this universe, what she was gon’ do? Wave a wand and make it so? 

These people were supposed to just wait for you to have the right pieces in order to possibly help them, when they KNOW FOR SURE, one of they problems can end, right now today, by blowing this dude brains out? GOOFY. This is goofy. This was the height of too white for me to personally enjoy. Especially because people who tend to say shit like, “Then, you’re no better than them” usually haven’t gone through nothing. This hoe went through the purge. Shit killed her whole family. She was almost assassinated TONIGHT, multiple times, and the minute. THE VERY MINUTE she realized that these people who HELPED HER were going after her opponent, her main focus was how SHE couldn’t win like that. BITCH, THIS IS THESE PEOPLE’S LIVES. FUCK YOUR WIN.

AND, WHO THE FUCK PUT THIS LADY IN CHARGE??? They already have an entire operation that they had to do with not one spec of help from the great white hope, and they have been doing there best and helping people. They have been about it, while she has spoken about it. And then suddenly, folk all gather to crowd and protect her and why is everybody in this movie priority to protect her? This is not my ministry. Hated it, for all of that. Some other POC might have liked it, oh no baby, not my Black ass. I was cussing all they asses out through them shenanigans. Fuckin’ up the church’s money.

“This is no longer an assassination. It’s a rescue mission.” IT COULD BE BOTH! UGH. HATE THIS GODDAMN BULLSHIT. “We can’t be like them.” YOUR LIFE LITERALLY IS NOT GOING TO BE SHIT TOMORROW, LADY, FUCK YOU! And she’s like... getting in his way as they’re tryna move out, talking through him through the door when he has this decision to make. Quite frankly, I think she’s a piece of shit specifically for getting in the way of this group killing that man. She’s just the “lesser of two evils,” who STILL does not have these people’s best interests at heart, and it is not clear if the writer knew this or actually believed in her policies. Judging from the way this story has always read as white liberal bullshit, I think it’s a writer issue, and not that her character is this way on purpose.

AND THEY KILL MY NIGGA! They gave us the optics of the main Black character getting gunned down by Nazis. And the one white hero whose entire mission this movie is to save the white woman is the one we get to see defeat the main Nazi. Who, as I said, had just killed the longest running Black character in the franchise, who only even got a name THIS movie, even though it’s his third appearance in the franchise. The other main negro jump in front of the white woman to give us the Sacrificial Negro Trope that I had a sneaky suspicion would occur in this movie. I just didn’t know which one they was gon’ do it too. But I knew. I felt it in my spirit that this was the type of writer who would employ that representation. Girl, fuck this movie. No lol. 

The first hour and a quarter are tolerable, then it just shits itself. I actually went to try to see if there was some shuckin’ & jivin’ ass nigga behind the scenes that for whatever made them think this was okay, but nope - white people were responsible, and it SHOWS. Powered through the last half hour on principle. Don’t know if I wanna continue. There are so many horrific things that I can watch that I will probably love out there.

Not only was this the worst movie in the franchise, but this is one of the worst movies that I have seen recently. I’d advise the Black people with interests similar to mine not to waste your time. I would punch this man in his face for writing this movie, if I could. Whew. Well, niggas and friends... idk if Auntie Nesha will be finishing this franchise, but even if I do, at MOST, I’d do a “Nesha Watches” and liveblog it. This shit got my equilibrium fucked up. 

#BFCD Reviews by Nesha #The Purge #Nesha Watches The Purge Franchise #Nesha Watches The Purge #Nesha Watches #The Purge Franchise #Eva Sanchez #Carmen Ejogo #Cali Sanchez #Zoe Soul #Laney Rucker #Betty Gabriel #Freak Bride #Brittany Mirabile #long post #reviews #BFCD Spooky Season #Queuetober

[dance-world]

Antonio Cangiano - Ballet Hispanico - photo by Gustavo Mirabile

#Antonio Cangiano #Ballet Hispanico #Gustavo Mirabile #bailarín #danseur #dancer #ballerino #tänzer #boys of ballet #ballet men #dance #ballet