So running is still kind of a pointless form of exercise like going to the gym, but this reminds me of when I ran on a treadmill for the first time and was just left so confused as to why a machine used first to punish prisoners is people's experience of running. When running can be such a beautiful way to feel yourself move through the world and experience the outside, and instead everybody is convinced it's a chore they need to complete in a grey exercise room.
i don't think gym muscle counts. i think you should put on muscle from ploughing the field. rowing a boat. spending your days at the loom weaving intricate carpets. things of that nature
For con season this year I did a series of prints in a style I call "Duos" with two characters surrounded by a bunch of objects from whatever they're from.
Here's the Locked Tomb ones...it took a long time to come up with the objects please appreciate them...
PRINTS
its been p common knowledge for decades that light pollution can be massively reduced by just putting shades on streetlamps, and that doing that would save energy, help wildlife, and let us see the stars better, but are society says if u wanna change any minor little tiny thing u gotta dedicate ur whole life to campaigning for it and this is a good ways down the list of priorities for most ppl, so instead i gotta walk past newly-installed streetlamps that are just dumb glass globes that use half their electricity to blast half their light directly into the sky where it does only bad things for no reason and think "we should overthrow the government"
The 10 minute kilometer and 5 minute kilometer thing has been driving me crazy! A 10 minute kilometer is so slow! And a 5 minute kilometer is not very impressive. Considering they are in the cohort, I just find it baffling and haven't been able to decide if those numbers were chosen on purpose to show the effect necromancy has on their bodies like you said or if they're just numbers Tamsyn thought sounded like an impressive difference. Your post makes me think for the first time that it is probably the former, though I would still expect a bit more from Marta than a 5 minute kilometer.
Periodically, I remember how absolutely fucked up the necromancers in TLT are meant to look. Like, necromancy does an absolute number on people physically.
Harrow is "rather small and feeble".
Necromantic Ianthe is "the starved shadow" of her non-necromantic twin.
Our first description of Palamedes is "a rangy, underfed young man" who is "gaunt".
Silas is "knife-faced...He had a necromancer build."
Ianthe parodies make-over scenes in House novels with "if the hero’s a necromancer it’ll be described like, ‘His frailty made his unearthly handsomeness all the more ephemeral'"
Jod acknowledges to Wake that even small children with aptitude would look odd to non-House eyes: "“I have access to any number of cute pictures of necromantic toddlers with their first bone. They don’t make for fat-cheeked roly-poly babies, but they’ve got a certain something."
In As Yet Unsent, Judith brags about her previous physical fitness: "I could run a kilometre in ten minutes, which was among the fastest for my adept group in the junior reserves." Which is about double the time you might expect for a physically fit woman her age.
In non-necromancer-friendly New Rho, Harrow's body is mistaken for a child's and has to be explained as a result of starvation and trauma to seem plausible: "Pyrrha explained without missing a beat that what with everything Nona had gone through she had been ill and still didn’t eat very much, which was why she was so knobbly and undergrown. The nice lady said that yes, many of the children had problems like that, but it was still hard to imagine Nona was anywhere over fourteen, wasn’t it?"
Tamsyn Muir's descriptions of the Canaan House gang on Tumblr back this up: "Judith is somewhat less completely scrawny than other necromancers on the cast, though she should be less built than Marta is", Palamedes is "seriously underfed" and "bony", Harrow is "scrawny".
And that's just what I can think of off the top of my head - I'm sure there's more.
Anyway, necromancers aren't slender in a conventionally attractive way, they're gaunt in a concerning way...and probably the only reason no one instantly clocked that Coronabeth wasn't a necromancer was because they all just thought it was par for the course that a Third House princess would have had a lot of plastic surgery flesh magic.
Mama Mia it’s-a Wednesday
Barn Owl (Tyto alba), fledgling chick hauling ass across a lawn, as it was learning to fly, family Tytonidae, order Strigiformes, Netherlands
photograph by Hannie Heere
(grabs you by the shoulders) you have to make room for new experiences in your life. you have to go through the unpleasant work of leaving your comfort zone, even if just for a few minutes at a time. because if you don't, your brain will trick you into stagnation. you will start to believe that the world can barely fit you in it. but that's not true. it's the opposite way around. you can fit the whole word inside of you. your task is only this: to welcome it with open arms
people who don't wear glasses are so weird like you just wake up and your eyes are pussy fresh??
maybe this time picking at Textures on my skin will lead to being silky smooth
It's worth noting that there are some extraordinary people in the world who have been quietly doing the work for decades, and they should be celebrated with all the fervor that we denounce the villains. I first read about Harrison twenty-odd years ago, when he'd already been doing this for about fifty years, and this is one of those guys whose life can, indeed, be summed up by his headline.
James Harrison saved millions of lives. Millions. Not with anything flashy or dramatic, not with profound speeches or brilliant strategy or any of the things we insist are the ways to impact the world. He simply kept himself as healthy as possible so that every few weeks he could go and sit quietly in a room and give away a fundamental part of himself — quite literally his lifeblood — to people he'd never meet, for no pay and no expectation of acknowledgement. (He was, it should be said, acknowledged quite a lot per this article, but that's beside the point.)
When we talk about the kind of people we want to elevate and celebrate in our societies, I often think of people like James Harrison. I hope we get more of him; not just for his blood, but for his heart.