Wolfpack’s Home For Imaginary Bastards

three person poly relationship made up of two people who are already dating trying to coax someone with horrific self worth issues into a loving relationship. stray cat style

they’re all laying together in bed and the couple are both thinking to themselves like good, he stayed the night to cuddle and talk when we offered, he should know that we genuinely care for him and want this to be more then a handful of one night stands. and the stray cat guy is like wow this sure is nice i think i’m falling in love with them. it’s really too bad that they don’t actually give a fuck and hate me and probably want to kill me with hammers for no reason

WEIRDLY SPECIFIC BUT HELPFUL CHARACTER BUILDING QUESTIONS

@bluehairedemon you can't hide this in the tags

Bound Man by John Singer Sargent, c. 1917-21

Free worldbuilding idea:

Wizards have the same trust in magic that software designers have in software, which is to say, almost none at all.

“Are you fucking kidding me I worked in a reagrent shop for a few years I don’t trust any of that stuff. Who the hell knows what other components are in the ashes.”

“Yeah I was in the circle that made Alston’s Divine Circle of Teleportation. There’s some pretty nasty corner cases you can get into but the headmaster published it without us. I just take ships. It’s way safer.”

“I call bullshit on that Necromancer channeling spirits of loved ones. What did he say he was using? ‘Medium Conduit Ruinic Circles’? That’s just a bunch of buzzwords slapped together, and they don’t even interact with each other.”

“I’ve been looking at this scroll all morning and I’m 90% sure that the scribe didn’t even look at the standard for pyromancies.”

“Help Desk, this is Gloriline, what did you fuck up this time?” *indistinct vocals* “Dave, I’ve seen the news, and, frankly, I can see the ash cloud from here. You paid for extended support, not enabling support.”

“I can’t get this fucking spell to work, Jane, can you look it?”

*passes a scroll* *a few moments of silence*

“I think you missed a bookend rune right here-”

“GODS DAMN IT! IT’S ALWAYS SHIT LIKE THAT! THANK YOU!” *angrily scribbles on parchment*

(It takes five more aggravatingly tiny adjustments before the spell works)

I don’t play wizards anymore because they’re too much like my day job.

Instead of a orb the wizard has a little statue of a duck he tells his spells to and then swears when he spots the obvious mistake.

You beat me to it! I was going to add that the reason why wizards and witches always have familiars around is so they can Rubber Duck at them until they realize what the mistake with their spell is!

Outsiders get it wrong and figure the familiars are somehow teaching spells to their owners, but no. It’s just explaining to Firewing what you’re trying to do with this teleportation matrix until you realize that you’ve been using telepathy crystals to power it the whole time like a FUCKING IDIOT!

Programming is magic (derogatory) so why shouldn’t magic also be programming (derogatory)?

Have some more ✨Suggestive Boots✨

Some of my recent character sketches collected on the same page once again 🖤

Forgot to post the finished version of this one!

“Spell Weaver” - 8″x10″ watercolor, colored pencil, acryla gouache, white pen and grey fine liner on illustration board. Prints available.

The original has been trimmed to fit a vintage oval frame, but I need to get some better photos of it before it can be posted for sale. 

you can just name your characters anything. you can name them Printer. you can name them Shnorpty. you can name them There Are Pillars. and peoppe will just have to accept it.

I'm curious--how do you guys go about creating your OCs?

Diagrams from a thirteenth-century version of the Ars Notoria.

Child’s cape. Twilled peacock blue woollen cloth, embroidered in cream silk thread, with a cream tassel on the hood; Anglo-Indian, 1860-70

UNHINGE YOUR JAW

the act of translating can be a horror. acts of creation can be a horror. many things that are capable of being eaten are also capable of rot and decay so unhinge your jaw.

Trans and Genderqueer Subjects in Medieval Hagiography, Edited by Alicia Spencer-Hall and Blake Gutt

@kangaroopawflower This was the art I was telling you about during book club!

Balkan Tattoos called Sicanje

"I'm a monster, you're a monster... oh, we're a perfect match!"

the eise eisinga planetarium in franeker, the netherlands, the oldest working planetarium in the world. located inside the former home of eise eisinga

why are british people always so mad when people make jokes about their accents. sorry you say yewchube. it’s funny though innit

This is something I’ve been dying to talk about.

There’s something called culture. People (especially USAmericans) think of culture as cultural dress, cultural food, cultural music. These are culture, but they are only the very superficial aspects of it. Like the icing on your cake. Far more deep rooted is the more meaty bits of culture: the attitudes, the ideas, the taboos.

There’s a guy on tiktok who has done a series that shows this very well, of Germans Vs Irish. In one video the German offers the Irish person two kinds of tea, green or black. The Irish person keeps putting off the choice with things like “Oh sure whatever is easiest”, “Which have you more of?” and, “Ah sure I don’t want to cause a fuss” whereas the German just wants a straight answer. This is a cultural difference of politeness.

Here in the UK, accents mark your class very openly. They let everyone know where you’re from (though this has become less pronounced in the last 50 years,) and what your background is. A lot of people (especially northerners, but also a fair contingent of working class southerners) face discrimination on the basis of their accents.

Some of us (myself included) even change register (though I believe USAmericans call it code switching) in and out of our regional accent and a close approximation of RP. We learn to do it because it makes us seem more intelligent (even though it shouldn’t) and helps us be taken more seriously.

Thus, our country carries a lot of baggage when it comes to accents. Especially those of the working class who have had their accents made fun of, or have faced discrimination based on it.

So when someone outside the country (usually USAmericans) makes fun of our accents they’re stepping on a lot of cultural taboos and boundaries. Especially because the “It’s Chewsday, gonnae wot-ch sum yewchube innit” is a working class accent.

Now, that’s not to say we can’t take a joke, but this is the kind of joke you share with someone who you have been friends with for a while. My boyfriend often will pick up on the way I say certain words, in much the same fashion I pick up on his idiosyncrasies of speech (English isn’t his first language so he says stuff like close the lights, which is adorable.) If we aren’t predisposed to liking you, then the joke you’re trying to make is more like an insult.

The way I like to think of it is if you were in a pub, and made those sorts of jokes to someone. If they knew you, and they liked you, they’d probably laugh along. If they didn’t like you or know you, they would punch you in the jaw.

HOWEVER: I recognise this post as a joke. I don’t personally find these jokes offensive, but then no one really makes fun of me or considers me stupid because of my accent.

Oh that actually makes a lot of sense! It’s like how it’s assumed in media that the southeastern Appalachian (‘hick’ or ‘redneck’) accent is audible shorthand for ‘this American character is stupid.’ That sentiment reinforces negative stereotypes about that region which has historically been home to a large working class population that has suffered from an underfunded education system and other systematic abuses. It is ultimately an underhanded joke, but not everyone from America (or even the region necessarily) considers it to be offensive despite its classist nature.

yes, that’s basically it! it grinds my gears when certain Very Online Americans will quite rightly say that europeans have no right to mock the us’ lack of healthcare/gun control and working-class accents…but then turn around and act like working-class british accents and foods are hilarious and should be mocked ‘bc of colonialism and the bp oil spill’ as though all british people are directly responsible for the oil spill. and then some of them conveniently forget that there are in fact british people of colour - in the wake of brexit, a smug american blog defended saying that british people upset by the referendum were getting ‘karma’ for the british empire, even when british poc pointed out that they were the ones most likely to be negatively affected by brexit, by saying ‘obviously i don’t mean you’, to which said british poc responded ‘THEN WHY DID YOU SAY BRITISH PEOPLE’

The hatred, by the privileged of England, towards Scotland and any Scottish accent was so pervasive that my mother wouldn’t let my brother and I develop a Scottish accent. She was born in Jamaica but her family moved to London when she was 11. She moved to Scotland when she was pregnant with me. Both my brother and I were born in Scotland and spent out entire childhood there. Mum was adamant that neither of us would have the local accent. It was “common” and “low class” and “would hinder us in the future”. She used to fine us half our pocket money if we used any Scottish slang or said anything in a Scottish accent. I got bullied at school for having a “posh English accent” but she thought my job prospects were more important than a modicum of happiness at school. My outsider status was doubled by that. I was brown and “English”.

Even now, after decades in Scotland, I still don’t sound Scottish. The English hear a slight lilt but that disappears as soon as I spend any time with them.

I feel alienated on two fronts now, skin colour and accent. And one of those was avoidable if it hadn’t been for the prejudice against against perceived lower class accents. Even in Jamaica Mum learnt to speak in an English accent like the white girls at her school. She could switch between the two. Jamaican with her parents, posh English everywhere else. Why couldn’t I have had that?

The fact that a lot of regional actors are expected to code-switch their accent patterns the a kind of neutral English accent in Britain shows how pervasive the classism is.

When Christopher Eccleston was cast as the Doctor in Doctor Who, people were surprised that he used his own northern accent, instead of performing with an accent like every Doctor before him. That was only 15-ish years ago.

Even now, this still happens - James McAvoy made a very vocal protest a couple of years back about a critic who complained about the use of Scots accents and only applauded the “plummy English” accent of one character in a play.

Regional and working class accents were used as joke accents for decades in British media. Look up old broadcasts and notice how many people only speak RP English (ie. the formal pronunciation that smacks of elocution lessons and enunciation). As media accessibility and productions expanded, there have been more regional accents showing up, but it’s still a big problem.

Putsimply when you mock “innit” you’re mocking poor people and often people of colour. Boris Johnson doesn’t say “innit bruv”.

I would like to add that there was a study by the Worcester College that found that people talking with a Birmingham accent were twice as likely to be accused of a crime as people who speak RP. Accents carry huge baggage in Britain.

I think another aspect of this that causes problems is the ways in which British characters have been depicted in American media with no distinction paid to what their accent says about them (and frequently by actors who aren’t always doing a very good job of sticking to one specific accent reliably). It has led to a situation where many, many Americans cannot particularly distinguish between two wildly different British accents (certainly not with anything NEAR the same accuracy as a British person could), and then we ascribe the same cultural stereotypes of British characters in American media across all British accents. So like the classic stereotypes for British characters in American media have been the “cool, intelligent, sophisticated supervillain” or the “snobby rich person”, yes? And the accent is part of how those qualities are coded to the audience, yes?

Because of this, your average American has no idea what a Liverpool accent sounds like, or a Yorkshire accent, or RP. To the American ear, all those accents blur together and register as some degree of “ah! fancy and smart :)” unless accompanied by powerfully obvious visual coding for some other class – but even then it doesn’t always work, because our cultural recognition of class differences hinges on different signals, and our cultural understanding of class is already a lot weirder and shakier than in the UK. I would wager real money that if you show your average American a lower-class character with ANY British accent and a middle-class character with ANY American accent (even possibly Standard) and ask them to talk about each character’s background, your average American will 100% assume that the British character is either higher class or at least equally middle class with the American one.

ANYWAY. What all this means is that when Americans make fun of British accents, a lot of them genuinely, truly, sincerely think they’re punching up and that this is not a harmful or hurtful thing to be doing. This is obviously a problem for a number of reasons, and I am not writing this whole discussion in order to excuse the behavior – I’m merely pointing out an element of HOW and WHY this thing is happening, and to point out to my fellow Americans what processes might be going on in their own heads so that they can do a better job of unpacking some of their cultural assumptions.