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bible: angels are actually wheels of eyes and flames me: cool my mind visualising this:

My personal favorite use of the standard fantasy tropes is that all the stock characteristics of fantasy races are the stereotypes/caricatures the other races use for them. For instance:

Goblins

Stereotyped as thieving little tricksters with big noses and ears, but in reality they are extremely diverse, often to the point of not being related at all. Hobgoblins, Bugbears, traditional Goblins, Gnomes, Halflings, etc have all been called ‘goblin’ at one point or another, despite having very little in common. The thieving hordes idea comes from the fact that Goblin society is super socialist and they really don’t have a concept of personal property. The idea of locking a door in goblin society is alien, as everyone shares what they have. A goblin walking away with a set of silverware is less to do with greed, and more to do with the fact that their neighbor was complaining the other day about losing all their forks, and the goblin in question saw how many forks this tavern had, and decided to equal the scales a bit.

Dwarves

Dwarves are stereotyped as hard-drinking, dirt eating, greedy, hotheads. When you live underground rickets, anemia, and scurvy are all common, and displays of physical robustness become a cultural sign of status. At the end of the day Dwarves work well together, and drink a fairly normal amount, generally only drinking heavily among company. Dwarves are hospitable to a fault, and the way they show that is by engaging in eating and drinking in excess, to encourage similar behavior of their guests. A successful Dwarven feast ends with empty flagons and plates, and still full serving bowls. Stereotypes regarding digging greedily only come about from the twin facts that space is limited underground, necessitating regular expansion into newly built caverns, and in a magical world there are monsters all through the ground. And honestly, while the most famous Dwarven cities are subterranean, most live in hills, on cliff-sides, or on the rocky shores.

Orcs

Orcs are often stereotyped as unintelligent ravaging hordes who roll up to towns and wreak havoc. They steal away with women and children, rob livestock, and burn homes. Orcs in reality are generally nomadic. In the wide open plains, where water and food are scarce, to stay in place would mean certain doom, as their herds overgraze and soil water sources. Traditional Orcish clans have ancestral grazing lands millions of acres across. Distant corners may be visited only every decade. To graze on another’s land is a high crime among the orcs, as ever bite of browse is one stolen from the lifeblood of another clan. To prevent accidental trespass, Orcs have markers, large stones carved with jagged Orcish script. When humans (etc) wander into Orcish Land, they build farms and towns, and the Orcs feel they are in their right to remove them. Humans who are ‘stolen’ by Orcs are often just guests. In the open desert, Orcs can find water easily, and have plentiful food. They are eager to trade their fine leather goods and horn bows for goods from afar. Orcs also maintain cities, far flung and small, based on elaborate commerce. Each clan maintains a Great House in the city, and any Orc unfit to ride a Warg will stay there taking care of the family finances, trading goods, and teaching the young. Orcs of any gender ride, hunt, and herd with equal success, as a result an Orcish patrol might look very much like an army of large men to a human settlement, especially when that same party demands they leave their home and offer some settlement for their robbery.

Elves

Elves are stereotyped as haughty, distant, and immortal. While Elves are long lived, they are anything but immortal. The myth comes from Elvish naming conventions, and their religious connection to family history. Elves have given names, but rarely use them after the death of a parent, at which point the eldest same-gender child of a nuclear family will almost always adopt the ancient family name, and carry it, along with the history it is tied to. Elves think very generationally, always seeking answers in the future and past, digging through ancient tomes and burying themselves in study. Elvish librarians and scholars keep extremely detailed notes on present goings on, and as a result Elvish scholarship has a very black-and-white view of the past, informed by very deliberate attempts to remove bias. Elves generally don’t correct folks who think they are centuries or millennia older than they are, because the Elvish idea of the self is a very dispersed one, where every individual is, in a way, their ancestors. Perceived haughtiness of emotional distance arises from the fact that, to an elf, the past is settled, and the present is best lived through a mindset of calm, stoic inspection. To react with sudden, poorly thought-out, or overly emotional haste is to betray your ancestors, past and future.

i am nooooot locked the fuck in. im locked the fuck out. call the locksmith

Tw/// gore / minor blood

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Bear with me. Fo4 au in which synths are less like blade runner runaway cyborgs and more like fucked up flesh aliens from the thing.

we've found it folks: mcmansion heaven

Hello everyone. It is my pleasure to bring you the greatest house I have ever seen. The house of a true visionary. A real ad-hocist. A genuine pioneer of fenestration. This house is in Alabama. It was built in 1980 and costs around $5 million. It is worth every penny. Perhaps more.

Now, I know what you're thinking: "Come on, Kate, that's a little kooky, but certainly it's not McMansion Heaven. This is very much a house in the earthly realm. Purgatory. McMansion Purgatory." Well, let me now play Beatrice to your Dante, young Pilgrim. Welcome. Welcome, welcome, welcome.

It is rare to find a house that has everything. A house that wills itself into Postmodernism yet remains unable to let go of the kookiest moments of the prior zeitgeist, the Bruce Goffs and Earthships, the commune houses built from car windshields, the seventies moments of psychedelic hippie fracture. It is everything. It has everything. It is theme park, it is High Tech. It is Renaissance (in the San Antonio Riverwalk sense of the word.) It is medieval. It is maybe the greatest pastiche to sucker itself to the side of a mountain, perilously overlooking a large body of water. Look at it. Just look.

The inside is white. This makes it dreamlike, almost benevolent. It is bright because this is McMansion Heaven and Gray is for McMansion Hell. There is an overbearing sheen of 80s optimism. In this house, the credit default swap has not yet been invented, but could be.

It takes a lot for me to drop the cocaine word because I think it's a cheap joke. But there's something about this example that makes it plausible, not in a derogatory way, but in a liberatory one, a sensuous one. Someone created this house to have a particular experience, a particular feeling. It possesses an element of true fantasy, the thematic. Its rooms are not meant to be one cohesive composition, but rather a series of scenes, of vastly different spatial moments, compressed, expanded, bright, close.

And then there's this kitchen for some reason. Or so you think. Everything the interior design tries to hide, namely how unceasingly peculiar the house is, it is not entirely able to because the choices made here remain decadent, indulgent, albeit in a more familiar way.

Rare is it to discover an interior wherein one truly must wear sunglasses. The environment created in service to transparency has to somewhat prevent the elements from penetrating too deep while retaining their desirable qualities. I don't think an architect designed this house. An architect would have had access to specifically engineered products for this purpose. Whoever built this house had certain access to architectural catalogues but not those used in the highest end or most structurally complex projects. The customization here lies in the assemblage of materials and in doing so stretches them to the height of their imaginative capacity. To borrow from Charles Jencks, ad-hoc is a perfect description. It is an architecture of availability and of adventure.

A small interlude. We are outside. There is no rear exterior view of this house because it would be impossible to get one from the scrawny lawn that lies at its depths. This space is intended to serve the same purpose, which is to look upon the house itself as much as gaze from the house to the world beyond.

Living in a city, I often think about exhibitionism. Living in a city is inherently exhibitionist. A house is a permeable visible surface; it is entirely possible that someone will catch a glimpse of me they're not supposed to when I rush to the living room in only a t-shirt to turn out the light before bed. But this is a space that is only exhibitionist in the sense that it is an architecture of exposure, and yet this exposure would not be possible without the protection of the site, of the distance from every other pair of eyes. In this respect, a double freedom is secured. The window intimates the potential of seeing. But no one sees.

At the heart of this house lies a strange mix of concepts. Postmodern classicist columns of the Disney World set. The unpolished edge of the vernacular. There is also an organicist bent to the whole thing, something more Goff than Gaudí, and here we see some of the house's most organic forms, the monolith- or shell-like vanity mixed with the luminous artifice of mirrors and white. A backlit cave, primitive and performative at the same time, which is, in essence, the dialectic of the luxury bathroom.

And yet our McMansion Heaven is still a McMansion. It is still an accumulation of deliberate signifiers of wealth, very much a construction with the secondary purpose of invoking envy, a palatial residence designed without much cohesion. The presence of golf, of wood, of masculine and patriarchal symbolism with an undercurrent of luxury drives that point home. The McMansion can aspire to an art form, but there are still many levels to ascend before one gets to where God's sitting.

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Types of wizard:

Demigod

Minor god

Just some asshole with a stick

Just some asshole with a stick immortal edition

Just some asshole with a stick necromancer edition

Biology major

Teen protagonist

Drug dealer

Undead asshole with a stick

Physics major

God’s most favorite little special guy who’s gonna save the world yes he is

Guy in a van

Drug dealer in a van

Preteen protagonist

Cool professor

Bad professor

Python programmer

Climate change scientist

Functionally an archer with extra steps

Man behind the curtain

Literally just Merlin

me when sun characters are terrifying and destructive. me when light is an overwhelming damaging power. me w

What with bucket hats, bare midriffs, and flared jeans having been resurrected by some irresponsible necromancer with frosted tips, I figure there’s no better time to resurrect some of my favorite Y2K fonts. I typically only see the same three or four pop up in discussions on the subject, so maybe this will be helpful to nostalgic designers. Click though for links.

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this looks so sick

Epigenised (Opal-CT, Lussatite) Helix Ramondi snail fossil, from Dallet, Puy-De-Dôme, France.