Blep!

The Hallowleaf family 🌙

More shadowzel feat baby xan!!

“Someone will remember us

I say

even in another time”

- Fragment 147, Sappho

Fragments by Sappho mock book cover 💘💐🕊️

I’ve been continuing to play with cover concepts, and am very excited to share this one for a prospective collection of Sappho’s poem fragments. 💘

I’d come up with the idea earlier, to reuse my illustration of Flora from Stabiae, but this week I stumbled across this very cool font named Big Caesar that looks just like ancient handwriting. I’ve tweaked it a little bit to fit the composition, but overall kept the original look.

Ever since i was a little girl i knew i never wanted to be pregnant

The Favourite

A Grand Duke is murdered, and Baldur's Gate begins to unravel. Kingpin Rilsa Rael sees a chance to watch the corrupt city burn; Guildmaster Keene just wants an orderly system to exploit-- and finds an unexpected ally in seeking balance.

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I checked and I first mentioned this idea FIVE MONTHS AGO and I decided I just need to start posting and see what happens. Please enjoy some crime wives and the origin story of whatever the fuck Nine-Fingers and Jaheira have going on.

Not a gaming post; I just love H. neanderthalensis more than anything. I’d like to think there was a functional purpose for their occipital bun such as supporting their thick shoulder and neck muscles for spear and atlatl throwing. But what do I know?

The thing is that the portrayal of Neanderthals as having been inherently grotesque and alien to H. sapiens is something we will never have proof of. But we do have proof that, in different locations and in different populations across time, we all found eachother desirable. We saw eachother and wanted to touch. And the offspring were held by their mothers and raised and had their own offspring in turn.

When you look for the first proof that H. sapiens found Neanderthals repulsive, you have to wait until the Victorian era, when the white masters of empires were busy portraying Neanderthals as stupid, brutish, and (of course) dark-skinned.

In more modern times, we’ve had people arguing that instead of seeing Neanderthals as Benighted Savages, they should instead be seen as Noble Savages, (allegedly) cruelly destroyed and driven from their lands by H. sapiens. Which one of their two you believe says more about your modern political views than it does about ancient H. sapiens.

And, whether we construct Neanderthals as Savage or Noble Savage, the fundamental assumption we project into the unfathomably distant past is still that H. sapiens saw Neanderthals as an Other, with the language we use being almost explicitly that of modern racial dynamics.

But we have no proof of any of that. We have no proof of hostilities. We know we co-existed and we had sex. That’s it.

Humans obviously have sex with some humans and kill others. We also know that, when small groups of humans occupy vast spaces with infrequent contact with others, unique cultures will always form, some more hospitable, some more neophobic/xenophobic. But many cultures of small settlements placed among huge unpeopled landscapes place supreme emphasis on hospitality to strangers. Plus, we fucking love other social animals, as evidenced by how we befriended wolves.

I’m a humourless weirdo and a wet blanket about popular constructions of Neanderthals as “monstrous”, and I freely admit it. But that’s because it’s tied up in legacies of imperialism. Not only that, but it also privileges one culture (yours, mine, modernity’s) as being most human by implicitly assuming we can project it onto people in the past. Since you don’t pretend that all global cultures share exact same values as you do, it doesn’t take more than a few moments’ reflection to realise you can’t do that to the past.

if you’re having a bad day, here’s a cute little marching band

After lunch walkabouts are very important for mental health reasons.

Gonna chill out the rest of May and then change my entire life in June. Possibly July if that doesn't work out. Certainly no later than September or October.

"come home and see my girl cave :)" I say flirtily. You agree, imagining a rec room with some couches and maybe a few vintage consoles. I lead you down into the basement, where I have carved out a slimy grotto with its own ecosystem. by the time you see me dive into the water and come up with a fish in my teeth, it's too late. You want to fuck me so badly.

go away forever with me