zenosanalytic reblogged
painted this sober:
painted this on acid, and cried while doing it:
zenosanalytic reblogged
Apparently in China peach wood (Along with the rest of the plant) is believed to have properties that repel evil spirits, a little similar to silver in European legends or iron for both European fae and West Asian/Middle eastern Jinn. Taoists sometimes keep swords made of peach wood because of this. This made me realize something. If you took a peach wood stick, and attached studs to it of both silver and iron you'd end up with a club or staff (or mace, flail etc.) that would have the weaknesses of many kinds of supernatural creatures while still retaining effectiveness as a normal weapon (peach is a hardwood and silver's poor edge retention doesn't matter for studs). You could even keep adding new stud materials to get something ridiculous that affects over 120 catalogued folkloric monsters. Since you just need a few little studs you could even get some really expensive materials like meteoric iron (a thumb tip sized meteorite can still cost like 10-20 bucks I think). I could somewhat feasibly make a weapon that affects every monster ever thought to walk the earth, from vampires and werewolves to jinn and jiangshi and even mankind.
Club of Fuck That Supernatural Shit And Also Everything Else
#leaslichoma#:D#Club of Fuck That#XD XD#Mace of Disruption IRL#XD XD XD#Supernatural#Monsters#Spirits#Antimagic#Antimagic Items#Enchanted Items#Humor#The Deep Lore#frivolous reblogs#See Now: If the Supernatural writers had been CLEVER they'd have done something like this#u_u u_u#I'd say and THEN you could bathe it in saltwater but that'd corrode all the metal#u_u
zenosanalytic reblogged
Might I inquire as to what, precisely, a Mustain't is? (Aside from a string of letters I hesitate to Google in that order.)
In October 2014 I went on a road-trip to the Dryest Place In America.
I was having a rough year, very depressed from having dropped out of college for the third time. I decided a road trip was in order to re-set my brain and get a little distance. Being that it was October, and therefore all the campgrounds in the American Southwest were filled with people who have the good sense to camp in reasonable temperatures, I elected to take my parent's minivan so I could car-camp anywhere suitably isolated, and looked up some of the southwest's geographic extremes- the highest place I could drive to (Pikes Peak), the lowest place (Badwater Basin), and for fun, the Dryest Place in the continental US, which turned out to be the Pinacate Volcanic field just west of Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument. It gets rain maybe twice a century and has no standing water, despite being less than 100 miles from the gulf of California.
It's a startlingly beautiful and alien place. The ground is a deep chocolate brown to black volcanic sand, and in mid October, the rabbit brush is turning bright yellow as it shifts to autumn, the organ pipe cacti are a dark green and stand, partially concealed in the brush at exactly human height. The air is alive with birds and insects and bats at night. The stargazing is like looking into the eyes of God.
You get there by driving down a little dirt road called "El Camino Del Diablo", or "The Devil's Road".
I drove out about three hours from Glendale, AZ to get there, arriving at sunset, and felt a profound sense of peace. I stargazed, listening to the bats hunt and sing, and slept peacefully for the first time in months.
I stayed out there for three days, sketching and painting the landscape, taking strolls through this almost alien landscape, and enjoying the light and sound and total absence of human intrusion besides myself.
On the fourth night, it was a new moon, and I awoke in the middle of the night. Something was amiss, and it took me a while to realize it was because I could NOT hear the bats. I was sleeping inside the van with the rear windows rolled halfway down rather than trying to set up the tent, so I when I sat up, I looked out of the van's reflective windows to discover what at first appeared to be A Horse.
It was something between pale gray and bright white in the starlight, standing maybe a dozen feet from the van, sniffing curiously. It made sense- I was in the middle of mustang country and there was quite a bit of foliage in the area for it and it did look like a truly wild horse- lumpy where the bones were jutting out, dusty about the hooves and face.
I was instantly seized by the sort of paralytic fear Sleep paralysis is made of. I couldn't move. It wasn't quite looking at me because it couldn't quite see through the windshield into the shadowy into the shadowy interior, but I had the distinct impression that if I looked away, it would know, and get me.
I already had problems with horses. My beloved Aunt Helen's Prize mare tried to kill me on two separate occasions, and the year before I had to carry my sister-in-law backwards out of a slot canyon whilst reciting the Saint Crispin's Day Speech as loudly as possible to keep a mustang from trampling us to death.
This is approximately what it should have looked like:
Instead, it was... off. like trying to draw a horse from memory.
The waist tapered in.
The legs were slightly too long or the torso slightly too short, probably both.
The ears were Triangular.
The head wasn't quite right- Too narrow and the jaw wasn't heavy enough.
The tail was too long and arced unnaturally away from the body.
The neck arched.
The nostrils were too high and close
The mouth too long.
Whatever this is, a Mustang it Ain't.
I watched it from the back seat as it sniffed around the front of the van, curious with about the side mirrors. It moved around the van, nibbling experimentally on the front door handle. It came up to the side windows, sniffing like a dog, and it's breath didn't fog up the glass.
Finally, it came up to the rear window, which was rolled halfway down to let the fall night air in. Not even half a pane of glass and two feet of air between us, and I could clearly see it's bright blue eyes.
Horses have Elongated pupils to give them a wide field of vision, and eyes that rotate sideways in their sockets so the pupil remains parallel to the ground. Rather creepy to watch, especially the ones with blue eyes.
A real horse that was curious about the interior of the van would have come up to the window more or less sideways, and looked at me with something like this:
Instead, the damn thing walked up and faced the back window head on, staring back at me with this:
I'm not sure how long we watched each other like that, eyes locked. My eyes burned. I couldn't blink. My mouth was dry. I couldn't swallow. My throat began to ache. I couldn't make a sound. My skin began to twitch, like I was severely dehydrated. I couldn't move. My lungs burned. I couldn't move. I couldn't move. I couldn't move. I couldn't move.
Something was touching the side of my hand on the seat next to me. It's my water bottle.
The realization must have broken the terrible paralysis in the lower parts of my brain first, because by the time I consciously realized I could move again, I was already flinging my water bottle out the window at it.
The top was open, and splashed out the window at the Mustain't.
I've never heard such a scream out of an animal. Something halfway between the sound of unquenchable rage vibrating in someone's chest and the way rabbits cry out to God when the dogs catch them.
It jumped back, pivoting away from the van, snarling at the water bottle. I don't think you're supposed to be able to see All of a horse's teeth at once, no matter how angry it is.
I watched it run into the night for some distance, it's pale body visible against the black sand and the dark gray shadow of the ancient volcanic cone it was headed for.
When the blood stopped pounding in my ears, I could hear the bats again.
I debated leaving right then, but I didn't want to get out of the van with that thing in the area, nor litter by leaving the water bottle out there. I also had the awful idea that if I left now, it might somehow be able to follow me home. I ended up staying up three hours to watch the sunrise, shaking and trying to figure out if I'd woken up from a vivid dream, if my meds had stopped working, or if that had really happened. I didn't dare move until I actually felt the temperature rise, before stepping out of the van to grab the bottle. I had my camera ready- I was still using a DSLR back then- to take pictures of the hoofprints, to show how close it had gotten to the van.
No hoofprints.
Beetle tracks in the soft sand around the van, and the clear foot-and-wing prints of a bird that had hopped around then taken off. But no hoofprints.
I went over the entire campsite with the tent broom, to make sure I removed every scrap of evidence I had ever been there, including my footprints, grabbed my water bottle, and drove the three hours back back to Glendale, then decided to do seven more hours of driving to Moab, Utah just to put more than 500 miles, the state line and at least nine things that could be considered "running water" between me and the Mustain't.
-
I still have that water bottle. It has a dent in the bottom from hitting something, but that could have happened at any time. Strange thing though. I can't drink that bottle dry. I'll have it on me, drink whatever I've put in there- water, juice, iced coffee- and eventually feel like I've drunk the whole think and that it's empty. But I open it up and it's still at least a quarter full. I drink that. I get thirsty. I open it up again. ...and there's always a mouthful left.
Not sure what the side effects of drinking from a bottle cursed by a Mustain't to always have some left are, but it lives in the Emergency Breakdown Kit in my car now, just in case I meet another one.
---
(I'm a disabled artist and make my living telling stories, please consider supporting me on Ko-Fi or Pre-order the Family Lore book on Patreon)
zenosanalytic reblogged
dungeon meshi has some four humors shit going on
IM FUCKING CRYING
zenosanalytic reblogged
I was talking to a friend earlier and she asked me about in what way I mean it when I say I'm a cat and (because I'm the worst) I deadass said "okay so look, Hegel says that" and yknow maybe my brain is starting to actually work again because I'm becoming once again utterly insufferable
Anyway [big breath in]
Hegel said that language has the unique quality that its interiority is as external as its exteriority is internal, and I think this is true - everything described by language correlates to language and language correlates to everything it describes in an inseparable fashion. This begs the question of what is precluded from language, which in turn, as my friend pointed out, explains the prevalence of the word "vibe" in popular culture at the moment. People are fucking sick of talking, they're sick of describing things, they want to be understood implicitly, and I think that for as long as people have been using language one really important place people have looked for understanding beyond the world of words is in the interiority of animals. Straight people call it being a cat person or a dog person, but I think it's pretty obvious that furries and petplayers are driving at something similar phenomenologically - when they look at their furry friend they see something happening inside them which is essentially similar to the shape of their own mind, thoughts and experiences. I implicitly feel a need to describe it with as few words as possible because it isn't mean to be in words in the first place. I want to just say I'm a cat shaped girl shaped cat and have that be all, because actually being able to describe it in words is a vanishing point that I can never reach because I'm trying to describe the definitionally indescribable. When I look at a cat I think "wow, me" and I feel more connected to the actual real world than anything in the world of words has ever made me feel.
The use of language has pulled us both away from and simultaneously into something deeply human because we try to use words to articulate the experience of the world around us, including the immanent world of spirits through which we really emotionally connect to the world. We're all trying to pretend we've transcended spirituality, superstition, religious beliefs and animism, and all the while the human species is going through the biggest (and getting bigger always, ever deepening) epidemic of depression in the history of our existence because the only transcendant things we have to imagine are like, The Economy or some other soulless self-denying spiritual concept which pretends not to be superstitious for the benefit of profit and the self-belief in rationality of those making the profits. I'm not saying RETVRN, incidentally, there is no backwards, I'm saying that we have to embrace belief in things that we know are abstract, irrational and beyond language because if we don't it's not that we won't have anything to nourish us spiritually, it's worse: we remain spiritually attached to the most inhuman and evil spirits ever conceived.
Which is why I want to assert my belief in the abstract and spiritual consciously and deliberately. Three of the spiritual things I believe in are: the revolution; love will be there in the end; there is a kitten in my soul. The more words I try to use to describe this the closer and further I feel myself getting from the real understanding, because the way people relate to animals is neither internal nor external to language, it's a false dichotomy created by language that needs the illusion that we are not animals in order to make sense at all
Hope this helps
"...because the only transcendent things we have to imagine are like, The Economy or some other soulless self-denying spiritual concept which pretends not to be superstitious for the benefit of profit..." Yeah
There are ALLOT of things driving depression, obvsl, but part if it is, yes, this need for a PERSONAL and AUTHENTIC self; an ineffable internal identity that ISNT just another commodity for the all-consuming leviathan Capitalism to market, sell, and reshape into yet another way to argue IT is the everything and only thing possible. I sometimes think THIS is why conservatives hate trans and queer ppl so much; our insistence that WE define themselves, not the hierarchy of money and power trying to shove the world into a square.
zenosanalytic reblogged
Lil drawings of ghosts based on some synonyms for ‘ghost’ & what vibes I get from each one.
this is absolutely correct
zenosanalytic reblogged
Alright
I want to talk about how cryptozoology is often toxic for Natives interested in it. I personally love cryptozoology, but I'm often uncomfortable while going through it because of how much content with w*ndigo, sk*nwalkers, or thunderbirds in it. So I can't stress enough to those involved in cryptozoology, please stop adding these spirits in with cryptids. Mothman, Jersey Devil, Nessie are all cryptids, but not Native spirits.
zenosanalytic reblogged
Bès
I love group entries!
They make it simpler to hide
My crippling despair.
zenosanalytic reblogged
On Spirit-Demon Conversion
So we’ve been told in the games a few times that demons are generally considered ‘spirits gone wrong’, due to various causes, by those knowledgeable enough to know, and that there is a conversion process that turns benevolent spirits into their less friendly counterparts
This does fly directly in the face of both the Andrastian (where spirits represent virtures, and demons represent sins, and both are independent of each other) and the Dalish (where there is no distinction made between the two) viewpoints, and I do consider both of these perspectives to be incorrect. It’s not surprising that they’re incorrect, given that knowing the ins and outs of another society is virtually impossible when you don’t actually go to that society, but I think it’s worth noting that both of these ideas about spirits and demons are wrong
Why do I say that? Because the few people who actually have the authority and experience to speak to these matters both express viewpoints that disagree with the common religious ones. As such, there are basically two people throughout the games I personally trust to actually know what they’re talking about, because they are two of the few who actually could
I agree that Solas and Justice aren’t contradictory, and I like this idea, but I tend to look at it as something more simple and direct.
Interesting! My headcanon (and I’m not sure how plausible this is) is that spirits/demons are also very easily moulded by human interaction, which fit with Justice’s fears. Consider the pride demon on sundermount- Merrill approached it for knowledge, as if it was a spirit of wisdom, and worked with it without anything terrible happening for nearly a decade, while Marethari treated it as a pride demon and was posessed very quickly. This would also explain why the Avvar seem to interact with so many more benevolent spirits than andrastrian mages. As for mortals becoming spirits, I think that this might be what the elven gods are in a very simplistic way. There’s probably something else going on there as well.
I haven’t played DA2 yet, but I have read a bit about Merrill’s storyline and I agree that this seems like a good way to explain what happened with the “demon”. I like that idea, too, of spirits and demons sort of picking up on the feelings and thoughts of mortals they interact with and playing into the roles those feelings suggest for them; you could even think of that as them behaving the sameway they would in the Fade(where they passively take up roles in people’s dreams, like the spirits pretending to be darkspawn and skill shrines in the Fade sections of Origins), but not really understanding the harm they’re doing by behaving that way towards mortals in the mortal realm who can’t just “bounce back” from grievous injuries, like other spirits and mortal dream-selves in the Fade can.
And if this were the case it’d suggest different ways to take some of the Codex entries on demons as well. Iirc the Origins entry on Desire demons talks about them sometimes going years before attempting to possess mages who interact with them, and this could just be a response to changes in the feelings of the mage themselves rather than some long-term plot to seduce. Like, so long as the mage continues to Desire their knowledge the “demon” is content with sharing it and feeding off the scholar’s curiosity and satisfaction but, once the mage begins to desire them in a physical and sexual way, or to desire a deeper understanding of spirits(say, wanting to know what life is like in the Fade rather than just facts about demon behavior and how the Fade and magic interact), or if the mage begins to fear they’re being manipulated or mislead by the demon, or if the mage starts to grow bored of the interaction(though unknowingly threatening the spirit’s Purpose), then the demon starts wanting to possess them either as a mirroring of the mage’s feelings and thoughts, or as a way to fulfill the Purpose they take from that interaction.
And yeah, I very much bet that’s what’s going on with cultures that have far more benevolent and mutual interactions with spirits like the Avvars, the Rivaini and the Navarrans. Since they don’t approach spirits with the sort of fear and loathing that more indoctrinated Andrastrians do, and treat their mages better, and don’t have the long histories of warfare and genocide, and try to uphold more equitable social institutions than countries like Ferelden and Orlais, “demons” are just less likely to show up in their societies and tend to be less destructive when they do. If Solas is right about spirits becoming demons in response to bad situations in the mortal realm(and I don’t see why he wouldn’t, and stuff like the Veil being “weakened” at places of great violence and the Brecilian forest, as an ancient battlefield, being filled with demons supports his argument anyway), then it’d make sense for more unequal or lawless societies -where poverty, fear, oppression, and violence are more commonplace- to create more demons within their borders.
zenosanalytic reblogged
On Spirit-Demon Conversion
So we’ve been told in the games a few times that demons are generally considered ‘spirits gone wrong’, due to various causes, by those knowledgeable enough to know, and that there is a conversion process that turns benevolent spirits into their less friendly counterparts
This does fly directly in the face of both the Andrastian (where spirits represent virtures, and demons represent sins, and both are independent of each other) and the Dalish (where there is no distinction made between the two) viewpoints, and I do consider both of these perspectives to be incorrect. It’s not surprising that they’re incorrect, given that knowing the ins and outs of another society is virtually impossible when you don’t actually go to that society, but I think it’s worth noting that both of these ideas about spirits and demons are wrong
Why do I say that? Because the few people who actually have the authority and experience to speak to these matters both express viewpoints that disagree with the common religious ones. As such, there are basically two people throughout the games I personally trust to actually know what they’re talking about, because they are two of the few who actually could
I agree that Solas and Justice aren’t contradictory, and I like this idea, but I tend to look at it as something more simple and direct.