Latest Posts by amaltheiav - Page 3

haha game theory

Akari is way too used to this by now. Ingo doesn’t want to go anywhere near that mess, he’s got enough with his amnesia to struggle with the identity crisis of self that would cause 

[xiyao] Happy newlyweds ❤❤

Click for better quality or check my twitter

I’m so happy I’ve finally received @runawaymarbles commissioned ficprint of @determamfidd incredible lotr story, Sansûkh, in it’s entirety!! It here there is all 50 chapters divided into 3 books, as well as some extras like the Meet a Dwarrowdam series.

These books are stunning, professional and hefty, I couldn’t be happier to with their look and feel. Time to reread Sansûkh!

@runawaymarbles was a dear that delightfully created the look of these, inside and out. We nerded out over khuzdul and tengwar, and didn’t flitch when I asked to add the epilogue to book 3, even though it made The Forging of Hope like 25% longer and thicker then planned (see how long the epilogue is below)

Edit: @runawaymarbles has put these up on a drive so that you can print your own copies through lulu.express. These versions are made for the linen wrap hardcover! Enjoy Sansûkh fandom this is for you. 😘

Edit: I’ve made a walkthrough video to explain how to order from lulu

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The sea calls us home

The friendly @galadrielspeaks asked if I can show how to order the Sansûkh books from Lulu Xpress, so here's a walkthrough video! The "Foil

All three Locked Tomb covers together with a new lettering style! I’ve posted all of these so many times now lol but I like having them all together :)

It was many and many a year ago,

In a kingdom by the sea,

That a maiden there lived whom you may know,

By the name of Annabel Lee

diversity win! the guy who started a nuclear war and killed all life on earth is bisexual!

🥺🥺🥺

Senan ref sheet.

I had so much trouble figuring out how to make an outfit with no metal in it, since as nomads, her clan wouldn’t have access to a forge. They could buy it from cities, sure, but it would be unpractical and expensive if all their basic clothes had metal in it. So laces everywhere, yay!

Holds of Skyrim

The whole series in one post! Can't believe it's done :) I'm really proud of myself! Thank you all for the kind words and the warmest support! it means a lot to me 😳 Through this series, I wanted to convey this feeling of...awe that I had when I first played Skyrim. And I am delighted that this project made some of you feel this way. I love TES community that I have here very much 💗

✦ patreon with the full process description ✦ prints ✦ separate posts from this series

nobody

It poked me through the feed and I flinched. It said, Do not attempt to hack my systems, and for .00001 of a second it dropped its wall. It was enough time for me to get a vivid image of what I was dealing with.

aka an exercise in drawing biblically accurate peri

Bdubs calling (timid, perenially lost) Etho pet names during OOGE - Kaizo Caverns, 10 years ago

Performance Evaluations

---start file---

From The Desk Of His Majesty’s Most Private Of Areas: A True And Accurate Evaluation Of Growth Opportunities For The Knights Of The Square Table, The Loyal Court of Ren the King, As Suggested By The HR Department

(Note to self: when did we acquire an HR department? Ask Bdubs.) {We have always had the Royal HR Department, your Majesty! It consists of your loyal servant Bdubs.}

Scar:

Title: h0tgUy! (Note: is this even a real rank?) {Your Royal Heraldry Department (Bdubs) has declared it a rank, your Majesty!}

Good Points:

Intense and disturbing masculine energy

Unhinged (on second thoughts, move this to Areas for Improvement)

Star power? Think I saw him in a movie once. Keeps being mentioned. {If your Royal Cinematography Department may come in with a point here, your Majesty, I think Scar made that movie up.}

Areas for Improvement:

Late

Unhinged (on third thoughts, move this back to Good Points)

Cub:

Title: Sir Cubalot (Note: cannot say this without Scar laughing, order investigation into reason)

Good Points:

Magic

Very magic

Shining purple eyes!

Magic awaits!

Areas for Improvement

{Your Majesty, we have yet to witness Sir Cubalot actually do any magic} – Note: Don’t be silly, Bdubs, magic takes time. Add to his file: brought cake.

Joe:

Title: Sir JoeHills of the Says (Note: work out what a ‘first name’ is, people have been commenting)

Good Points:

Strong supporter of our cutting-edge fiscal policy

A positive attitude towards responsibility

Folksy idioms show that I, Ren the King, have the Common Touch {A WONDERFUL common touch, your Majesty!}

Areas for Improvement:

Please teach him how doors work {Note: send to Training Department (Bdubs)}

Cleo:

Title: Lady Cleo (Note: this does seem to be a real title, congratulations to my impeccable heraldry talents)

Good Points:

Has assured me several times she is not working to depose me and I believe her

Intimidating aura

Intimidates the enemies of the Crown

Areas for Improvement:

Also slightly intimidates his Majesty the King

Refuses to wear very fashionable glasses

{Very hurtful about Bdubs’ Command and Conquer skills}

Bdubs:

Title: {Royal Secretary, Royal Treasurer, Royal Architect, Royal Laptop Owner, Royal Impulse Skull Manipulator, please see annex for other titles}

Outstanding loyalty is a shining example which no one else seems to be following

Positive mindset ditto

Is the only person around here who can work a computer, must get him to show me how {To be actioned by the IT Department (Bdubs)}

Areas for improvement:

Was at party {for excellent reasons I do not need to enquire about and I fully pardon him and am sorry I let Scar threaten him}

Playing computer games during official meetings {which I find to be a charming quirk that brings levity to official business, and for his great work I should give him a substantial raise}

This will now be proclaimed with speed and splendor to my knights of the square table. {Note: send to Communications Department(Bdubs)}. My knights: go forth with an accurate understanding of your opportunities for personal growth, and make your king proud.

---end file---

false@eagle.craft: why am I on this mailing list? Bdubs, do you know what a ‘cc’ field is?

impulse@soup.group: no, no, please continue

grian@stillnotresisting.craft: OH MY GOD YOU ARE ALL MAKING THIS SO HARD

Oops, I never uploaded this one to Tumblr (which I only realized when someone else did, but then was kind enough to tag me, thank you)!

This is the comic that kickstarted my obsession with telling stories with as few panels as I could (usually 10-11 haha), so it’s got a soft spot in my heart. 

Hope (in 8 select parts)

1. Faint Music, Robert Hass

Maybe you need to write a poem about grace. When everything broken is broken, and everything dead is dead, and the hero has looked into the mirror with complete contempt, and the heroine has studied her face and its defects remorselessly, and the pain they thought might, as a token of their earnestness, release them from themselves has lost its novelty and not released them, and they have begun to think, kindly and distantly, watching the others go about their days— likes and dislikes, reasons, habits, fears— that self-love is the one weedy stalk of every human blossoming, and understood, therefore, why they had been, all their lives, in such a fury to defend it, and that no one— except some almost inconceivable saint in his pool of poverty and silence—can escape this violent, automatic life’s companion ever, maybe then, ordinary light, faint music under things, a hovering like grace appears. As in the story a friend told once about the time he tried to kill himself. His girl had left him. Bees in the heart, then scorpions, maggots, and then ash. He climbed onto the jumping girder of the bridge, the bay side, a blue, lucid afternoon. And in the salt air he thought about the word “seafood,” that there was something faintly ridiculous about it. No one said “landfood.” He thought it was degrading to the rainbow perch he’d reeled in gleaming from the cliffs, the black rockbass, scales like polished carbon, in beds of kelp along the coast—and he realized that the reason for the word was crabs, or mussels, clams. Otherwise the restaurants could just put “fish” up on their signs, and when he woke—he’d slept for hours, curled up on the girder like a child—the sun was going down and he felt a little better, and afraid. He put on the jacket he’d used for a pillow, climbed over the railing carefully, and drove home to an empty house. There was a pair of her lemon yellow panties hanging on a doorknob. He studied them. Much-washed. A faint russet in the crotch that made him sick with rage and grief. He knew more or less where she was. A flat somewhere on Russian Hill. They’d have just finished making love. She’d have tears in her eyes and touch his jawbone gratefully. “God,” she’d say, “you are so good for me.” Winking lights, a foggy view downhill toward the harbor and the bay. “You’re sad,” he’d say. “Yes.” “Thinking about Nick?” “Yes,” she’d say and cry. “I tried so hard,” sobbing now, “I really tried so hard.” And then he’d hold her for a while— Guatemalan weavings from his fieldwork on the wall— and then they’d fuck again, and she would cry some more, and go to sleep. And he, he would play that scene once only, once and a half, and tell himself that he was going to carry it for a very long time and that there was nothing he could do but carry it. He went out onto the porch, and listened to the forest in the summer dark, madrone bark cracking and curling as the cold came up. It’s not the story though, not the friend leaning toward you, saying “And then I realized—,” which is the part of stories one never quite believes. I had the idea that the world’s so full of pain it must sometimes make a kind of singing. And that the sequence helps, as much as order helps— First an ego, and then pain, and then the singing.

2. No Choir, Florence + The Machine

3. from The Naomi Letters, Rachel Mennies

4. from On Jellyfish, Nina Li Coomes

5. When We Were Orphans, Kazuo Ishiguro

…oh, I don’t know. All I know is that I’ve wasted all these years looking for something, a sort of trophy I’d get only if I really, really did enough to deserve it. But I don’t want it any more, I want something else now, something warm and sheltering, something I can turn to, regardless of what I do, regardless of who I become. Something that will just be there, always, like tomorrow’s sky.

6. To the young who want to die, Gwendolyn Brooks

7. In Blackwater Woods, Mary Oliver

Look, the trees are turning their own bodies into pillars of light, are giving off the rich fragrance of cinnamon and fulfillment, the long tapers of cattails are bursting and floating away over the blue shoulders of the ponds, and every pond, no matter what its name is, is nameless now. Every year everything I have ever learned in my lifetime leads back to this: the fires and the black river of loss whose other side is salvation, whose meaning none of us will ever know. To live in this world you must be able to do three things: to love what is mortal; to hold it against your bones knowing your own life depends on it; and, when the time comes to let it go, to let it go.

8. Untitled Project 01 - ISSAC LAM

b4 pride month ends i want to say hi to the naorises of the world

(pls use he/him for naoto !)

Please make a post about the story of the RMS Carpathia, because it's something that's almost beyond belief and more people should know about it.

Carpathia received Titanic’s distress signal at 12:20am, April 15th, 1912. She was 58 miles away, a distance that absolutely could not be covered in less than four hours.

(Californian’s exact position at the time is…controversial. She was close enough to have helped. By all accounts she was close enough to see Titanic’s distress rockets. It’s uncertain to this day why her crew did not respond, or how many might not have been lost if she had been there. This is not the place for what-ifs. This is about what was done.)

Carpathia’s Captain Rostron had, yes, rolled out of bed instantly when woken by his radio operator, ordered his ship to Titanic’s aid and confirmed the signal before he was fully dressed. The man had never in his life responded to an emergency call. His goal tonight was to make sure nobody who heard that fact would ever believe it.

All of Carpathia’s lifeboats were swung out ready for deployment. Oil was set up to be poured off the side of the ship in case the sea turned choppy; oil would coat and calm the water near Carpathia if that happened, making it safer for lifeboats to draw up alongside her. He ordered lights to be rigged along the side of the ship so survivors could see it better, and had nets and ladders rigged along her sides ready to be dropped when they arrived, in order to let as many survivors as possible climb aboard at once.

I don’t know if his making provisions for there still being survivors in the water was optimism or not. I think he knew they were never going to get there in time for that. I think he did it anyway because, god, you have to hope.

Carpathia had three dining rooms, which were immediately converted into triage and first aid stations. Each had a doctor assigned to it. Hot soup, coffee, and tea were prepared in bulk in each dining room, and blankets and warm clothes were collected to be ready to hand out. By this time, many of the passengers were awake–prepping a ship for disaster relief isn’t quiet–and all of them stepped up to help, many donating their own clothes and blankets.

And then he did something I tend to refer to as diverting all power from life support.

Here’s the thing about steamships: They run on steam. Shocking, I know; but that steam powers everything on the ship, and right now, Carpathia needed power. So Rostron turned off hot water and central heating, which bled valuable steam power, to everywhere but the dining rooms–which, of course, were being used to make hot drinks and receive survivors. He woke up all the engineers, all the stokers and firemen, diverted all that steam back into the engines, and asked his ship to go as fast as she possibly could. And when she’d done that, he asked her to go faster.

I need you to understand that you simply can’t push a ship very far past its top speed. Pushing that much sheer tonnage through the water becomes harder with each extra knot past the speed it was designed for. Pushing a ship past its rated speed is not only reckless–it’s difficult to maneuver–but it puts an incredible amount of strain on the engines. Ships are not designed to exceed their top speed by even one knot. They can’t do it. It can’t be done.

Carpathia’s absolute do-or-die, the-engines-can’t-take-this-forever top speed was fourteen knots. Dodging icebergs, in the dark and the cold, surrounded by mist, she sustained a speed of almost seventeen and a half.

No one would have asked this of them. It wasn’t expected. They were almost sixty miles away, with icebergs in their path. They had a responsibility to respond; they did not have a responsibility to do the impossible and do it well. No one would have faulted them for taking more time to confirm the severity of the issue. No one would have blamed them for a slow and cautious approach. No one but themselves.

They damn near broke the laws of physics, galloping north headlong into the dark in the desperate hope that if they could shave an hour, half an hour, five minutes off their arrival time, maybe for one more person those five minutes would make the difference. I say: three people had died by the time they were lifted from the lifeboats. For all we know, in another hour it might have been more. I say they made all the difference in the world.

This ship and her crew received a message from a location they could not hope to reach in under four hours. Just barely over three hours later, they arrived at Titanic’s last known coordinates. Half an hour after that, at 4am, they would finally find the first of the lifeboats. it would take until 8:30 in the morning for the last survivor to be brought onboard. Passengers from Carpathia universally gave up their berths, staterooms, and clothing to the survivors, assisting the crew at every turn and sitting with the sobbing rescuees to offer whatever comfort they could.

In total, 705 people of Titanic’s original 2208 were brought onto Carpathia alive. No other ship would find survivors.

At 12:20am April 15th, 1912, there was a miracle on the North Atlantic. And it happened because a group of humans, some of them strangers, many of them only passengers on a small and unimpressive steam liner, looked at each other and decided: I cannot live with myself if I do anything less.

I think the least we can do is remember them for it.

All right, since it's the anniversary of the Titanic sinking, do you want to tell us about how the Carpathia sank?

i very much want to do that.

I feel a little guilty, sometimes, over this. I made all these innocent people fall in love with Carpathia, and then they go to read more about her and learn she was unceremoniously sunk in WWI and it understandably upsets them.

But I don’t think it should. So today I’m going to tell you what happened on July 17th, 1918.

There’s…poetry, in the story of Carpathia’s final hours. Sometimes things happen that make you believe in fate. Parallels. Things that ring true, the echoes of harpstrings across time. History doesn’t repeat itself but sometimes it rhymes.

She was a comfortable little cruise liner, not flashy but safe and steady; perfect for getting people where they needed to go. Arthur Rostron having been promoted and given a new position following the Titanic rescue, she was under the command of a Captain William Prothero. The British navy commissioned her as a troop carrier at the beginning of WWI, transporting supplies and soldiers from Canada to the European front. On this mission, she was part of a convoy en route from Liverpool to Boston.

This is how Carpathia dies: On the morning of July 17th, 1918, she is 120 miles off the coast of southern Ireland.

So is the German submarine U-55.

She takes one torpedo on the port side; the damage is serious, yet not catastrophic. But it knocks out her wireless. Her attempts to send an SOS fail.

The second torpedo hits the engine room.

Three firemen and two trimmers are killed instantly in the explosion that dooms her. One life would be too many, five men are dead and five families are in mourning. I do not dismiss or disregard that loss. But there will be no more casualties today. Carpathia has never given people over to Death without a fight.

The order to abandon ship is given calmly and professionally, long before the situation becomes desperate. Lifeboats are lowered in time, and filled quickly. They know what they’re doing, and they do it well. By the time she begins to sink in earnest, every person onboard is safely in a lifeboat and well away from her.

She stays afloat exactly long enough to save them. There are worse ends for a good ship than this: No one dies in the sinking of Carpathia. There is no terror in the dark, no drownings, no one trapped and forgotten.

The U-boat surfaces. There’s a third torpedo.

Carpathia buckles quietly and starts to vanish, and that harpstring…shivers.

There was another group of lifeboats, once. Alone and facing death, too small, too scattered, tossed like toys and struggling to stay together. Helpless on the open ocean.

This is not the sinking of the Titanic. Carpathia has done everything right, and her people are still alive. They can still be saved. But this is not the sinking of the Titanic, and the threat is not cold and time but German torpedoes.

And this time, Carpathia cannot come for them.

There is a cosmic cruelty in this moment. It’s wrong, an injustice the universe can hardly bear. It’s not fair, for Carpathia’s story to end like this. It’s not right. 706 lives were saved because of a moment of kindness and a friendly wireless transmission; she should not go down cut off and silent, unable even to cry out. This ship who gave so much, who tried so hard, who broke and transcended herself in a thousand tiny moments of bright glory, burning hope as fuel against the dark–for her to die alone, and have no one even try to help.

U-55 comes about. Its machine guns train on the lifeboats.

HMS Snowdrop appears on the horizon.

She’s a little thing, relatively speaking; not a battleship, not a destroyer. A minesweeper sloop on patrol–important but not terribly prestigious. But another member of the convoy, seeing the steam liner taking on water and understanding the radio silence, has sent Carpathia’s SOS for her. And Snowdrop may not be the strong arm of the British navy, but she is no refit passenger liner.

U-55 has done what it came to do; its crew came here to eliminate ship tonnage, not risk themselves and their vessel over a few lifeboats. There is a brief exchange of gunfire with Snowdrop, but U-55 quickly peels off to run.

Carpathia disappears quietly. It breaks my heart that we lose her–but far better, always, to lose a precious ship than to lose her crew. She will sink and drift more than 500 feet below the surface before she settles, almost upright, on the ocean floor. She will rest there until 1999, when an expedition that could not bear to forget her, that could not bear not to try, will finally locate and identify her wreckage.

But that’s in her future. Right now, on a clear morning off the coast of Ireland, the minesweeper HMS Snowdrop takes on 215 people–save for the five lost in the engine room explosion, the entire ship’s company.

The date is July 17th, 1918, and RMS Carpathia has pulled off her last miracle.

cycles

You run from him.

He follows.

If you follow Selmers to the poetry society meeting in Night In The Woods, this is her poem. I loved it and the themes of the game, and wanted to use it as practice to see if i can control the way readers ‘hear’ the words through images.

A commission for @honeybbbunches on twitter of some older members of Inaba’s investigation team meeting up in Tokyo sometime in the future.  

in the blackest of rooms

Yes, Jiang Cheng woke up like this.

twitter/my art tag/patreon/k0-fi/p4ypal

A window into anxiety.

I guess experience kinda fucked me up.