Credit: @pelagicventures

Uhm what is that it’s huge?

Issa sea tortoise, like the ones that can live to around 500 years old. They’re capable of getting quite large from what I gather.

A big boy!

I know I just reblogged this yesterday but… I just got to watch this full screen and I WANT TO HUG THIS TURTLE! I WANT TO BE ITS FRIEND!

that is a mini-a’tuin is what it is

A moment of peace

the water is so clear….. he’s flying

de chelonian mobile

@protosstar holy cow

I kind of want to see a story about an elf; tall, beautiful, clumsy as fuck, and an industrial worker who can’t do archery to save themselves and swears all the time.

And I kind of want to see a story about a dwarf; short, robust, hairy, elegant, sweet, very refined and a lover of poetry who’s never said a rude word in their life.

I just think it would be an interesting change of pace.

they’re girlfriends

they’re super fucking cute and i need more of this.

I dunno if y’all are following the official Terry Pratchett page on facebook or not but ever since the US election results came out they’ve been posting text images like these:

[Quote: “Always remember that the crowd that applauds your coronation is the same crowd that will applaud your beheading. People like a show.”]

and honestly the thought of Terry Pratchett throwing shade from beyond the grave is all that’s keep me going some days.

I saw one comment from saying something along the lines “well you shouldn’t post this, you don’t know how he’d feel about it”

No. If you read ANY of his books it’s clear how he’d feel about this nonsense.

I saw those comments and laughed my ass of because Terry was, and remains, a bastion of righteous rage and hope in a world weakened by fear and hatred. He told us plainly, Suffer Not Injustice—to take light into dark places and to care for those in need, not because it is kind or good but because it is right.

He’d be going absolutely fucking SPARE if he were alive to see the world as it is today. And I don’t just mean over the US elections, I mean Brexit, I mean Aleppo—the whole god damn world—he’d be going utterly Stoneface-I can’t be having with this-Librarian Poo.

And he’d damn well do something about it too.

NGL there’s been a 3rd thought in the back of my head when I’m wondering if I’m doing enough and if anything I do matters that whispers with wide-eyed horror–

“–but Terry Pratchett would go SPARE.”

The only upside to 2016 is that Pterry may in fact resurrect out of pure, unbridled rage.

“And ANOTHER thing…”

lately I am constantly reminded of the conversation between Granny Weatherwax and Mightily Oats in Carpe Jugulum:

“It’s not as simple as that. It’s not a black and white issue. There are so many shades of gray.” “Nope.” “Pardon?” “There’s no grays, only white that’s got grubby. I’m surprised you don’t know that. And sin, young man, is when you treat people like things. Including yourself. That’s what sin is.” “It’s a lot more complicated than that–” “No. It ain’t. When people say things are a lot more complicated than that, they means they’re getting worried that they won’t like the truth. People as things, that’s where it starts.” “Oh, I’m sure there are worse crimes–” “But they starts with thinking about people as things…”

“well you shouldn’t post this, you don’t know how he’d feel about it” …sure, he wrote it, and it’s his official page, run by people he trusted to do justice to his legacy, but yeah, better not post anything, just to be safe, there is just NO way of knowing what the man’s position on anything might have been.

Okay, but consider this...

Modern fantasy creatures and people being exposed to new lifestyles and developing dreams and goals that don’t fit with their species or their culture in the slightest.

This speaks to me today.

But also their friends and family who try so hard to be supportive:

That centaur’s gonna be a sea horse if it kills them

Something that’s almost never covered in fantasy mediums is common names.

Like we all know fantasy names are unusual, but any name to a foreign culture is considered unusual English names to Indian people are very unusual for example. But naturally, given that it’s an entire culture, there will be some common names, it’d be refreshing to at one point here this exchange.

“So I was talking to Vicnae and-”

“Wait which Vicnae? You can’t just say Vicnae. There are ten Vicnae’s in my village alone.”

This has 100 notes yesterday and 300 this morning what the fuck happened.

People understand the truly important things.

DSA (a German fantasy P&P RPG) actually has the name Alrik, which is hugely popular in the universe. Everyone is Alrik.

This is also a great excuse to use “X the Y” or “X of Y” type names without being pretentious. Calling someone “Thognor The Stout” goes from pomposity to practicality if he lives down the road from Thognor The Small.

And if you’re going anywhere NEAR Celtic-type influences then for maximum realism I insist upon populations of:

Ruari Dubh and Ruari Ban (full brothers)

Ruari Mhor

Ruari Dubh Mhor (no relation)

Wee Ruari

Wee Ruari Dubh

Ruari (Who Lives By the Hill)

Not-As-Big-As-Medium-Sized-Ruari-But-Bigger-Than-Wee-Ruari Ruari

The two brothers called Ruaraidh are named after two different grandfathers called Ruaraidh.

Their two sisters are called Ruaraidhina.

my problem with the ‘harry becomes lord of 2/¾/5 ancient noble houses’ trope is so unbelievably petty because its that fic writers don’t take it to the potential extreme. like, okay, you wanna make harry the bossest of bitches i get that, i understand, i have that urge too from time to time, but c’mon, be a little more creative about it please

so how about a fic where harry goes to gringotts after the fighting is all over to try to make peace with the goblin nation because this boy does not need more problems and after much hostility and some groveling and promises of future payments for damages caused a plucky goblin lass comes and shuffles harry into her tiny cube office to discuss the nature of his financial situation

(this is a grave insult among goblins. getting handled by a female, first of all, because they are supposedly less capable bankers, hello misogyny among other species, and because they consider anyone who needs help with his money to be lower than cave scum. harry doesn’t know about his. and if he did, he wouldn’t care because he does, desperately, need help)

and plucky goblin lass (who we will call PGL for short) brings out this MASSIVE tome of parchment and slams it down on her desk. a cloud of dust rises. harry sneezes and gets a terrible feeling. some of the parchment is mildewing. the stack is taller than his hand is wide. this can only end badly

PGL tells him that he’ll need to read the entire book to fully comprehend the new scope of his property and harry kind of weakly says “what??”

and it turns out that heyo, when the death eaters swore to follow voldemort with all their lives and souls and magic in their little racist hearts they actually swore a modified liege lord oath which also has the coincidental side effect of ceding all titles (and property connected to said titles) held to the lord in question too. haha how funny who knew

and that’s an ongoing thing. so voldemort was the de facto head of two dozen magical houses at the beginning of the war and he just picked up more as he gained more followers and he probably could have just voted himself and his crew into every position of the government and run the country like that if he cared to do it but voldemort was not about dat political life. he wanted change and he wanted it now. he wanted to MAKE AMERICA MAGICAL BRITAIN GREAT AGAIN. so he started a civil war and just never informed his loyal death eaters of that little fact because they didn’t need to know.

and you might think that gringotts vaults are tied into bloodlines but they’re really not. the malfoy family vault belongs to whoever is the current head of the malfoy family. normally, that’s a malfoy and his malfoy spawn becomes the next head and so it passes through the family, accumulating inherited wealth. it was a working system until voldemort got involved and exploited the ever-living hell out of it.

now this all becomes harry’s problem because it turns out that Right of Conquest is an actual thing. what was voldemort’s is now his and voldemort has has the time to accumulate A Metric Fuck Ton of stuff.

also connected to titles are votes in the wizengamot. and whoo boy, this is where harry’s problem becomes really really really problematic. because the noble families squabble over those votes like children, hoarding them and passing them down, occasionally trading them for advantageous marriages and such, but mostly jealously guarding them like the politcal gold they are. it’s such a bitterly tight-fisted market that any one family has ~maybe~ three or  four votes.

and now harry bloody potter has a hundred of the things and a completely unintentional stranglehold on the government. whoops

and then hermione would shotput harry straight into the wizengamot against his protests and things would become so hilarious i just

some jerkass attempts to increase his own salary for doing basically nothing

“how about no,” harry and his hundred votes say.

somebody attempts to tighten restrictions on where magical creatures like vampires and werewolves can work

“how about no.” harry crosses his arms. “actually, how about we repeal those bullshit laws already in place that make it almost impossible for werewolves to get a job right now, hmmmm? and how about we put something in place to catch abusive owners of house elves? and make sure they get paid? and vacation days? and healthcare? actually how about we get healthcare for EVERYBODY HOW ABOUT T H A T?”

ten generations of purebloods cry out in horror. look upon him ye mighty and despair.

the years after voldemort’s defeat don’t go down in history as The Golden Era. in fact, thanks to harry bloody potter (and some incessant nudging by hermione granger), they go down as The Decade of Frankly Astonishing Strides Toward Equality *cough* enforced by a semi-plutocracy.

(all thanks to a third tier plot never really explored by a would-be dictator YOU’RE ALL WELCOME)

Omg this is beautiful.

Harry as an accidental Lord Vetinari, oh my god.

Harry dealing with that all these pureblood families outright hate him. They were loyal to the Dark Lord, loyal to blood supremacy, loyal to their own enrichment and empowerment via the casting down of others, and now here’s Harry Potter, who opposes all of these things, who killed the Dark Lord and vanquished their dreams: their new Lord and Master.

And they can’t do anything about it because not only is it a binding magical contract but it’s their tradition, their law, their way of doing things, and they can’t attack Harry without shattering their own foundations in the process; they can’t even really convey their dislike of Harry because it would be disloyal to their own House.

So, all these pureblood wizards from old families who both hate Harry Potter and everything he stands for but also as a point of honor are perversely proud of him. He’s a wizard; he’s a half-blood, but he’s also the scion of a House of the Sacred Twenty-Eight, and he’s a powerful and talented wizard who vanquished the greatest Dark Lord history has ever seen. And he’s the Head of a dozen great and ancient wizarding Houses, he’s their Head of House so to speak, and they tie themselves in knots trying to figure out how to feel about him.

And the ones who don’t have a noble House, but only have their votes in the Wizengamot that Harry Potter owns, and you just don’t throw tradition out and start casting votes on your own inclination, well, they aren’t honor-bound and pride-bound to claim and embrace him, but they make their social standing from copying the greater Houses, and when their betters are quietly and gracefully saying “he’s a chaos-minded tyrant, but he’s our chaos-minded tyrant,” well, they buck up and agree.

Harry Potter, unlike Voldemort, isn’t lashing out at random or threatening to kill their children, so it’s sort of an improvement in many ways, even as they want to scream and throw things over all his reforms.

And after all, the old Houses value power. And Harry, above all, has power.

He goes down in pure-blood history as the Tyrant. The most powerful Lord their family lines have ever known. The man who reshaped their world. Elderly wizards tell their great-grandchildren long after his death that “I knew the Tyrant.” “I beheld him when my father took me to the Wizengamot, and he spoke to me.” “When I went to Hogwarts, he gave a guest lecture.” This far removed, at the end of their lives, the details of his rule are forgotten, the overturnings of tradition lost to history, and he is remembered with pride, even with adoration.

Their Tyrant. Their Lord. Harry Potter, the Greatest Wizard that Ever Lived.

(There are pictures of Harry at Hogwarts, at the Ministry, at St. Mungo’s, outside the Auror Office and in front of the Minister’s Office and in the entrance hall to the Wizengamot and in both the entrance hall and the Headmaster’s office at Hogwarts, and in every House he ruled. He wears stately robes and an impressive hat, gold jewelry, a beard (dark in some pictures, silver-shot in others, pure snowy white in still more, for he lived to be an old man himself, older than Dumbledore, older than Griselda Marchbanks, who lived to dance at his wedding), his glasses accentuating his brilliant green eyes, his scar more prominent in the pictures than it ever had been in life, surrounded with such trappings as the Sword of Gryffindor and the Elder Wand and a skull that purports to be that of Lord Voldemort.

Also at Hogwarts, in a back corridor next to a set of of dancing trolls and an overzealously combative knight, is a portrait commissioned by the executor of Harry Potter’s estate, in response to directions left in his will. This portrait depicts an eleven-year-old boy in brand-new wizard’s robes, with broken glasses and untidy hair that happens to cover his forehead. The portraits of his older selves go wrapped in the lofty dignity of the position he attained later in life; this child, filled with the untarnished wonder of the magical world, goes freely among the portraits with an anonymity Harry Potter never found in life, and loves it.)

No story of the Tyrant could be complete however without mentioning his right hand and chief advisor, Hermione Granger, The Mudblood Manipulator. It is whispered that it is her that is to blame for the Reformation, and for the Tyrant’s oddly liberal politics. Some say that she was his mistress. Some say that they were secretly married. Some say that she had him ensorcelled, and bewitched. She is upheld as an ideal for Slytherin girls, as one who wielded power from the shadows, somehow pushing the Tyrant, who was infamously stubborn, into changing so much of the Wizarding World, shaping it as she liked. Clearly a Dark Lady, nonetheless her powers were unambiguously formidable, and so she is upheld as a role model.

If anyone asks the ghost of Draco Malfoy, who is rumoured to have gone to school with them both, he tends to sniff and say something to the effect that “Granger always did all of Potter’s thinking for him”.

The young pureblood historians take that as confirmation of their theories.

Originally posted in January 2014 and reposted now with new and I hope improved gifs and the addition of one word to the caption:

In an alternate (and better) universe, a scene from the film adaptation of Jamie’s bestselling political erotic thriller Fifteen Shades of Grey that definitely wasn’t originally written as extremely personal Malciavelli Machiavelli fanfic.

I have to say….he’s at his most beautiful in this…..just stunning….

He really is.

and here i was thinking "new Vetinari faceclaim"

2 kinds of people huh

Well, the chase scenes were pretty great, what with all those mouse-carts hurtling recklessly across the blazing sands of the Fourecksian desert, but the flamethrowers were just a waste of perfectly good Scumble as fuel.

Google disxworld maps #discworld #terrypratchett #bic

Terry Pratchett, The Truth (via snipejaeg)

Dear Terry Pratchett (a selfish love-letter to a man who shaped my world)

So, you’re gone.

Door shutting behind me, I slid my keys in my pocket, the song I was listening to was reaching its end, I wandered, tired, relaxed, into the kitchen, I flung my bag onto the sofa, left my shoes, muddy, by the door, like I always do. I dropped the post on the table, pulled out my phone, and there was a little notification, small, thin, like ones that I’ve seen hundreds of times before, usually emblazoned with “David Cameron says…” or “Jeremy Clarkson suspended…” Only this little message, this little sentence - it, well, broke me. “Terry Pratchett, author of Discworld series, has died, aged 66″. Simple, short, objective, inhuman. The words looked alien, they blurred, I didn’t even read them, just saw the shapes, I think my mouth, for a moment, formed the words… Terry…Discworld… died…

I had thought about this day, of course, for years. How I would react, how much I would cry, I’d thought about it, objectively, simply, devoid of emotion, inhumanly. And then, suddenly, it was now and true and real and it felt… surreal. I had never factored in it feeling surreal. I thought, for a moment, perhaps the whole day had been a dream.  The birds were singing much louder than usual, the light in the kitchen was much more yellow, But the day itself had been too gritty, too real - I was half-way up the stairs before I knew it, sprinting, Vimes did this too, once, Vimes had done this too, Vimes - I had logged onto my laptop before even one thought had formed, blood pounding and pounding, pounding so fast I could hardly breath, surges of adrenaline and anger and fear -

Your anger was the powerhouse of Discworld. And your fury against your disease was perhaps it’s greatest driving force, But I would rather you were alive, and Discworld had never existed, because you deserve so much more than your 66 years. (you would have been amused it was the Devil’s number, I think) I never knew you, yet I mourn you like you were a loved one, I never knew you, except, of course, I knew your books Your art, your works, your creation - I knew them back to front. And you wrote yourself into your characters, didn’t you? Into Vimes, into his anger, his shrewdness, his ‘Street’,  into Granny, her anger, the power of her mind, into Death you poured all your feelings about death itself, your fear, your blasé; your love of cats. Into all of them you poured how much you cared, for those who weren’t able to care for themselves, the weak, the lonely, you cared about them. Even little Tiffany, standing on a green hill, with her frying-pan and her blue dress, raging against the world, was you, I think. Into Vimes… And I knew your characters inside out, so I like to think I knew you. I loved you, that’s for sure. I loved you.  I didn’t know it, until someone messaged me with the words “I loved him too.” But I didn’t know that I did, until today, until after that little notification on my phone, after the roof had blown off my world.

I didn’t know how much Discworld meant to me. Those books are the books I turn to when I am ill or sad or bored or lost. I read and I write and I read about you, and your works, I have a pile of Vimes books, stuck full with post-its, of all the pages to type up, one day, and discuss; I have a pile of Vimes books, Vimes, of Vimes - And now, they’re over. And I don’t get that. Wikipedia says “Terry Pratchett. Died: 12th March 2015″,  and I don’t get that, either. You’re dead?

I had planned to meet you, you know. Just the other day, I stood in my kitchen, planning to meet you. I was going to ask you about Polly and Mal. I was going to give you a book, a little book, full of every url of every Disc-blog on Tumblr. I was going to talk to you. I was going to talk to you about Vimes. Vimes –   Let’s talk about Discworld. You, through the amount of the books, the depth of the books, the complexity of the books, created a world and it feels, to me, at least, real. But now – is it dead? Gone, stopped, locked, in time, in place, never able to progress, never able to move on? And it was my childhood. I can’t remember a time when it wasn’t there, waiting for me, as a comfort blanket, whenever I needed it; it was there. And now – now, has it stopped? Has the Disc stopped spinning? And Vimes. Vimes… Vimes is -  Dead? He is - was - so like me, that, sometimes, when I was tired and alone and scared and lost, I felt he was me. We overlapped. We coincided. He was amazing. I wanted to be, well, him. He was - my companion - my friend, he was me, myself, my inspiration, my role model: we overlapped. I felt right viewing the world from inside his head. And now, like the Disc, he’s locked. Dead, gone, stopped, trapped, where he was, forever - He has been reduced to a character in a finished, closed, read, book.

You know, I’ve never lived a day without you being alive, somewhere, before. The amazing thing was there was this moment, where I was, well, screaming - I’d just found out, just started to believe, just started to realise it wasn’t a dream, I was crying and crying and the crying built up and built up into a scream - and then I looked up, out the window, and there were my neighbours. They walked to their car. They got in. They drove away. The most constant, most important, widest, happiest part of my life was being stripped away from me and I was screaming - And they walked to their car. Unaware, oblivious, inhuman. I think - I think I wanted the world to stop, for you. I told you this would be selfish, I don’t know the reality of it, I wasn’t there, when you -

I never knew you, but I think I loved you. Vimes was, well, was me, and now he’s  - gone. You - are - gone. And after all this, I still don’t believe it.

Zoom out. Zoom out, now, from this bedroom, this girl, her computer, her. Zoom out so you can see the whole planet, busy, and bustling, and moving. A planet full of people who are looking up to the sky, and seeing another earth, a flat earth, a disc-shaped earth, paused, halted, stopped in its tracks, frozen, and cold, and fading away, across the multiverse, they see the Disc.

The people on our world are mourning. Mourning the death of a man, the most brilliant man you could imagine, who wore black hats, and smiled like the sun was inside of him and was telling him jokes, and created puns and stories and worlds, and grew angry, and angrier, and was, well, brilliant. They mourn the death of a man, and the death of a world, this other world, this flat world, his world, the disc-world. They look up to the sky, and they see it, across the multiverse, and they say, Not Yet, they say, Too Soon, they say, You Are Still Needed, and they say, Let It Live. And then they look down, they pick up their pens, turn to their keypads, and they start – they start to write. To draw, to create, to imagine, to breathe- And the flat world, frozen, cold, it - jolts. It jolts.

And the people on our world, they say, Let It Live, they pick up their pens and they write, and they write, they are not him, the man who created it, but they still believe in this flat world, this disc-world, in his world, they still write his characters, his people, his creations, they say, Let It Live, they say, Let It Breathe. They pick up their pens, and they - they breathe. They breath their life, across the multiverse - and far, far away, one eye of a gigantic, giant turtle… flickers. Air, suddenly, is forced back into its lungs It begins to move, to breathe, to live, The Disc begins to unfreeze, the clocks in the towers begin to chime all at once, the people on it begin to move and think and live once more - somewhere in the Ramtops, Granny Weatherwax looks up, and mutters “Well – that was strange” and in Ankh-Morpork, the pearl of cities, Vimes… Vimes - he looks up. And the tune of All the Little Angels floats into his mind, And then he looks down, lights a cigarette, shuffles his feet - he has, unfortunately, new boots - and he walks home.

And the people on the Roundworld look up to the sky and they say, Terry Pratchett? He Went Too Soon, and they say, We Won’t Let His Ripples Die Away, and they say, We Won’t Let His World Die Away, and they say, Let it Breathe, Let It Think,  Let It Live, and the turtle? Well, the turtle moves.

Yet more unreasonable employment standards in the UK

blatant alivism and it’s disgusting.

Did the Discworld fandom just hijack a post?

what a vitalist establishment