reiinai

one of my favorite moments in campaign two was when they were infiltrating vergesson and caleb went on a murder spree and beau casually poured acid down a man's throat and the cast were all like exchanging looks of horror and they thought caleb and beau were for sure falling under The Eyes' influence and would have to be dealt with and they made a separate group chat to discuss it.. and then turns out it wasn't any influence at all bc i guess beau and caleb are just freaks like that all on their own ❤️😊

I'm an electrical engineer and for the longest time I was saying that electricity and electronics isn't magic, but think about it.

You literally have to collect rare stones from remote locations, put them into specific formations to work. All of this gets written down in symbols which don't make sense to the uninformed. It gets powered by energy which can not be seen in most cases.

Like what else do you want. What's your standard for calling something magic.

"It doesn't stop being magic just because you know how it works."

Terry Pratchett, The Wee Free Men (Discworld #30)

gay_irl

Planerider Ryn is off to celebrate 10 years of Critical Role! 🎊🎂🥂

This is another project for @artists-guild-of-exandria, and what better way to collaborate than with a character who can party-hop? Other backgrounds featured in the gif are by fellow AGE contributors:

@reiinai | @passingthegravesoftheunknown |@typefortydesign | @/matdoodls (Twitter & Bluesky) | @/pajamazon (Bluesky) | @/pixelzpaint (Twitter & Bluesky) | @pleasantsaladnerd | @tealtumbleweed | @pigmentsandpotions

“If you are no friend to the Empire… you have certainly today become heroes of the Dinasty”.

My piece for @artists-guild-of-exandria's #AGERewind!! Decided to challenge myself and redo one of my more ambitious pieces. 2024 vs. 2019!

Below a closeup of the M9 plus another of my fav easter egg to include 😉

[Image ID: Screencap from unspecified website in dark mode. Text reads:

"After that that stupid thing from Bezos and Musk about how a trillion humans would mean a thousand Mozarts, it got me thinking.

We clearly must have Mozarts today, and at least a couple of them probably got the same upbringing he did to nurture their skill and talent, and we would therefore have:

I can only conclude that the modern-day Mozart is Weird Al Yankovic.

I will not be taking questions."

Followed by: a portrait of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and a photograph of Weird Al Yankovic, in similar 3/4 poses with similar eyebrow-raised and smiling expressions. End ID.]

i think a lot of people who have never done music do not understand how absolutely implausible weird al's skill level is. you can say "so many musicians can do at least one of his songs, obviously", and yes, they can, but they couldn't do all of them. you have people who studied ten or twenty years to be able to do something genuinely incredible, and they've specialized and focused and developed the ability to produce a particular kind of thing, and they do it really well, and then this guy comes along and says "welp, time for a new album", picks ten of them, and duplicates their shtick well enough to be clearly recognizable.

this man produced a piece of music which an experienced listener can hear and say "oh, that's Frank Zappa". how? not even Frank Zappa sounds like Frank Zappa!

Is weird Al doing different shit now? Bc if he was writing pastiches this would be true, but all I'm really familiar with is the stuff where he just rewrites the lyrics to an existing song, or does a polka cover of it.

Weird Al's "style parodies", or original compositions explicitly in the style of a particular artist or band, are approximately as numerous as his actual song parodies. Generally the Regular Parodies get all the attention, they're the big money spinners, but his style parodies are both numerous and legendary.

Dare to Be Stupid, the title track off the album of the same name, is probably the big one that people would know - a more Devo song than actual Devo, and that's according to Devo themselves.

An incomplete list of other ones that rule, actually, are:

This lists all Weird Al's known style parodies. There are a LOT.

Caleb: You know archaic Draconic??

Essek: I got bored with classical Draconic.

Caleb: You know *normal* Draconic?

Essek: Yeah, someone from my knitting club taught me.

Caleb: You have a knitting club?!

Essek: You don't know everything about me Widogast. Now, do you want a sweater or a scarf?

I understand the impulse to clown on Essek for walking around in Vasselheim with his recognizable voice with the Bright Queen's spearhead commander, and of course we could turn to the metatextual elements (the necessity of signposting the world for players on the part of the GM, the ease of using a familiar ally to introduce a relevant NPC and new point of contact) to dismiss this if we wanted, but I think it's more interesting—and funnier, as you'll see—to imagine this as simply an extension of the laws and logic that dictate the Mighty Nein as a narrative entity.

Fundamentally, the Mighty Nein within their campaign pursue personal and collective agency, often at the expense or in denial of political power. Where they do interact with more political forms of power, they evade its grasp upon them, most notably in their interactions with the war, but also while they engage with the Cerberus Assembly, the Cobalt Soul, and even the Revelry. The way they pursue agency, on the other hand, has far more to do with their own support of one another and their own individual power, especially where there is magic involved, and manifests in having the freedom to move and act as they wish in the world.

The culmination of this, as we know, is the mechanical ability in their final battle against Lucien and the Somnovem to manipulate the terrain of the battle map to their advantage with only imagination. At the same time, Jester and Caduceus can both call in free favors from their gods, one of whom is unlimited by the Divine Gate and in fact is far more governed by fey logic. Fjord has made three different divine pacts and is virtually unrestricted by any of them. Caleb's hallmark is an almost infinitely malleable home that almost literally seems to operate as a hammerspace, with a pinnacle dedicated to the potentiality of the universe, the application of which is one of his signature spells—against all odds successful in his initial goal, no longer fueled by guilt and grief, of bending reality to his will. It's narratively and thematically cogent that this be the calling card of the party as a whole.

The Mighty Nein are, in effect, dictated by Looney Tunes logic, and nothing else. They have been so successful in their pursuit of their own freedom that they no longer abide by the cosmic laws of Exandria, let alone the laws of physics or sense. So yes, from an external point of view, it does look exceedingly foolish for Essek to be traipsing around in Vasselheim under the Bright Queen's nose, but it's far more entertaining to argue that being a member of the Mighty Nein in fact simply confers the capability of ignoring the laws of reality without consequence when it's narratively convenient, characteristically interesting—or just really fucking funny.

in conclusion

i'm bisexual because i'm attracted to both flesh and machinery

im bisexual because im attracted to both the divine and the mundane