So, The Snow Live Wallpaper I've Been Using On My Phone Kept Crashing On Me, And I Figured It Was Time

So my mom and I picked back up watching A Series of Unfortunate Events on Netflix the other day, and for the most part, I really do like it and I agree it’s a highly faithful adaptation of the books (though admittedly it’s been a while since I read them, but from what I recall, the series is doing quite well). 

But one thing did bother me: their Lemony Snicket is not at all like I pictured him. No hate to Kronk; Kronk is doing a great job being the Lemony Snicket that he is. But like I said, he’s just not at all how I saw the character as I was reading him. 

For one thing, given that his name is “Lemon-y”, I pictured him as blonde, perhaps strikingly so. For another thing, I just got the sense that book Lemony was a touch more shy and awkward, and I pictured him as a rather wiry kind of guy--not completely scrawny, thin but tough. That is to say, less strong-shouldered than Kronk. And recently, after a bit of thought, I realized that the Lemony I was picturing as I read looked more or less like a young Tom Petty.

I could just see Tom, fedora nestled on his soft blonde hair, hanging about libraries looking for clues regarding missing sugar bowls and odd, question-mark shaped creatures, penning lengthy coded love letters to a woman who regrettably cannot marry him, and watching grimly from the shadows as a number of dismaying tragedies befall that woman’s orphaned children. He has the perfect lemon-y hair, a suitably wiry frame, and just the right amount of quirky awkwardness in his smile, I believe. 

(To clarify, I don’t think Tom’s deep, Southern speaking voice would necessarily suit Lemony, just his physical appearance, so this is just for the sake of visualization.)

And so, I present to you, young Tom Petty as Lemony Snicket. Well, really just a series of photos where he looks how I would picture Lemony as looking; I haven’t edited them or anything, just arranged them. 

Anyways, young Tom Petty is just generally adorable and full of subtle swag. It’s always fun to look at pictures of him.  

Image sources below the cut. 

picture sources, in order:  1http://www.theuncool.com/tag/tom-petty-the-heartbreakers/ 2 https://www.pinterest.co.uk/pin/544724517406734973/ 3 https://www.cbsnews.com/pictures/tom-petty-1950-2017/2/ 4 https://www.biography.com/people/tom-petty-201299 5 https://www.listal.com/tom-petty-%26-the-heartbreakers 6 https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0965382/mediaviewer/rm3324321792 7 https://www.elmodulor.com/el-modulor-ep08-tom-petty-nacio-en-florida-pero-le-dio-sonido-a-california/

So I just finished Stranger Things Season 3 and, of course, I have a great many thoughts and feelings and a great deal of angst but for now I just want to say...

New BroTP: AlexeRay (or MurLexei?)--the grumpy, cynical conspiracy theorist paranoid about Russians and his cheerful, bubbly covert Russian scientist bestie. Or, when what you fear the most becomes your best friend. 

I love youtube’s suggested video categories feature and its understanding of my interests <3 

Flynn Carsen is a mood. 

And also either preposterously wealthy or achingly deep in debt, though it’s probably the former because at a certain point I think they stop giving you loans. 

But I can’t blame him; if I had unlimited money, I too would have 20+ degrees and still be in college. 

you ever think about how the whole librarians franchise began thanks to flynn carsen getting kicked out of college because his professor thought he had too many degrees and not enough of a social life 

Hmm, I could list a few things I've seen that strike me as fairly common, though of course they'll be different for everyone. These are just generalizations I feel like I see crop up a lot; maybe they'll help you get your feet wet with the fandom’s lore.

Obviously, the Fab Four are barely in the comic, but there seem to be some commonalities to their characterization that the fandom has built. For example, I feel like Fun Ghoul is typically fairly chaotic, probably the most so out of the main four, and on the reckless side. He’s probably the funniest. Also, he’s often skilled with explosives and quite fond of blowing things up. Party Poison is the leader, sassy, and often has a temper. Party laughs loud and shouts louder. I think Poison is also the one of the Fab Four most frequently cast as non-binary, but the gender of all the characters varies quite widely across fanon. There was a movement recently against Jet Star being cast as the Mom Friend, but I feel like he's still widely regarded as sort of a mediating force and generally a bit more on the thoughtful side, though obviously they can all be wild at times (there’s a certain minimum of chaotic energy required to be a Killjoy). Kobra Kid typically loves his motorcycle and likes to race it; I feel like he's usually kind of a cool dude(tm), or at least tries to be. And, naturally, Kobra and Party are almost always siblings.

Outside of the Fab Four, Cherri Cola writes poetry and has a poetry corner segment on his radio show; he's usually sweet and rather melancholy. Show Pony is even more chaotic than Ghoul, highly flirtatious, and even more widely headcanoned as nonbinary than Poison--I'm not sure I've ever seen anyone use "he" pronouns for Pony (though the actor in the music videos does for himself, but that’s not really relevant to fanon about the character). Dr. Death-Defying is something of a guardian of all the Killjoys, borderline omniscient at times with his radio broadcasts, and he serves as the grounding force behind a rowdy, chaotic gaggle of teenage rebels. His couch is always there for new Killjoys to crash on. He’s a comforting presence and a source of wisdom (though again, I’d say a certain amount of chaotic energy is present in all Killjoys, Dr. D included). 

Anyways, I'm basically trying to summarize the headcanons of a bunch of people at once, and as it’s been said before, things are different for everyone. Just because I see these as throughlines for these characters doesn’t mean that they will be for everyone. But, those are some general impressions I’ve gotten through the fandom.

Also I realize I really only went for basic character descriptions, rather than anything about the setting or other lore, so let me know if there’s any other area of fanon I should attempt to sum up and I’d be happy to try :) 

Could you maybe give a crash course on killjoy fanon? Like I read the comic and I just got here and I’m hella confused. I almost feel like I read a different comic than y’all lol

Okay my answer won't be good, you came to the wrong blog for something coherent, but if anyone sees this and would like to add on, please do!

I'm gonna start by saying basically there's just what little canon they gave us and you just make what you want with it, your own set of hcs and worlbuilding and characters' races and sexualities and genders and whatnot, it's free real estate.if the canon doesn't spark joy, you can throw it away,have fun with this.

I've been trying to write an answer for a couple of hours but i have nothing, I'm sorry this wasn't helpful at all. Someone give an answer to this?

Okay, so, today on deeply nerdy things I'm working on (and also looking for advice on; vote at the end of the post!)...

So I've been working on coloring Worm's page from the quarantine coloring book (this is what I have so far), and I decided that I needed to put a name on the side of the boat. Because this stream was the first thing I watched with Gerard and Worm, I decided that “Daydream Believer” would be a good name for the boat (fair warning, it’s a pretty violent game they’re playing in that stream, but to summarize, the part I’m referencing is from Gerard’s turn as the murderer when he starts playing Daydream Believer by the Monkees to creep out Worm and the other dude they’re playing with, which is the moment I linked to.)

But then I thought, this is an alien creature’s magical space-boat. I can’t just title it Daydream Believer in English. So I whipped out my D&D player’s handbook (5e) and went to the Elvish alphabet.

But then I thought, I can’t just write Daydream Believer in English with Elvish letters. I need to translate it into proper Elvish first. Which, of course, the only correct Elvish languages to use are Tolkien’s--Sindarin and Quenya. (In any case, I don’t believe that there is a complete D&D Elvish language.) 

So, I brought up a few Sindarin and Quenya online dictionaries and translators, and I came up with a few different translations for “Daydream Believer”, and I wrote them out and transcribed my favorites to try and see which ones looked best in the D&D Elvish alphabet (I know Tengwar is technically the correct Tolkien-based Elvish script to be writing in, but I was already rolling with the D&D Elvish transcriptions, and I think I like the look of them for an alien space boat better, so I stuck with the D&D Elvish). But now I’m kind of stuck between three, and I thought, why not ask tumblr?

The two on the left with the blue highlights are Sindarin translations, and the one on the right with the green highlight is Quenya; I know there are differences in use between the two languages but I figured there’s no particular reason an alien couldn’t speak either of them. The first of the two Sindarin translations is “celain ely thenid pen”. ‘Celain’ means daylight, ‘ely’ means dream, and since I couldn’t find the word ‘believe’ in Sindarin anywhere I looked, I used ‘thenid’ which means ‘faithful’ and ‘pen’ as a pronoun meaning ‘one’. So, the first translation is really “daylightdream faithfulone”, which is fairly close. But I chose that translation mostly for aesthetics, and I worried I had strayed from the truest translation of the words, so I did another. 

The second Sindarin translation I did was “eraid ely esteliad pen”. ‘Eraid’ is just ‘day’ instead of ‘daylight’, and ‘esteliad’ is ‘trusting’, which seemed closer to the meaning of a daydream believer as one who is trusting in their daydreams rather than one who is faithful to their daydreams, although that could lead to a whole debate on the meaning of the original song, which--let’s be honest I’m way overthinking this already. I’m just trying to find pretty letters to write on the side of this boat, lol :) But nerdy linguistic overanalysis for a random obscure reference that pretty much no one is going to get is what I’m here for, haha. 

So, the third and final of my top three translations is the Quenya one, “árë maur savindo”. Quenya actually seemed to translate the phrase more easily, if only because there’s a word for “believer”. ‘Árë’ is day, ‘maur’ is dream or vision (which, I like the idea that the daydream believer’s daydreams are visions of a sort--oh no I’m analyzing the song again, I said I wouldn’t do that, I’ll stop, haha. I actually have thought about the meaning of the song quite a lot), and ‘savindo’ is believer. The Quenya translator that gave me ‘savindo’ warned that it was fan-created, but ‘sav-’ is in fact the Quenya verb for believe, and there was a whole section in the Quenya-English dictionary I looked at for “one who ___” verbs and they all ended in ‘indo’, so I think it’s a correctly derived translation. 

Tl;dr--those are the three best translations I came up with, and I highlighted where I wrote each of them out in Elvish in the image above. So, now I’m asking you to vote: which Elvish translation of Daydream Believer should I write on the boat on my coloring page? “Celain ely thenid pen”, “eraid ely esteliad pen”, or “árë maur savindo”? Vote in the replies or reblog with your vote! :) 

Postscript: If anyone wants to see my full Elvish translation scribblings which led to this, here’s what my process in my sketchbook looked like:

(There was a reflection from an old art class in the top left so that’s what I roughly photoshopped out if you were wondering.)

It’s always fun to have an excuse to mess around with translations and practice writing things in Elvish script :) 

Happy Valentine’s Day! I’ve been working on a longer Valentine’s post of my own for a few days now (a sort of retrospective of my ships through the years via my favorite fanvideos) but it’s late and I need to go to bed, so it’s going to have to come out a little late. So, I thought I’d just reblog something cute and Valentine’s-y while it’s still Valentine’s. Well, it’s technically early morning the day after, but you know, close enough. Anyways, luckily I stumbled across these super cute pink heart-bedecked Nygmobblepot gifs <3

Gay Panic/Heart Eyes.

It's also the inspiration for the title of one of my all-time favorite youtube miniseries, The Guards Themselves!

It's a fun little "the superheroes are being used by the rich to further their agendas and the anarchist supervillains have a point actually, though they're not exactly the most skilled supers ever tbh" type adventure with lots of fun memorable characters. It was basically the creator's film school senior project and I think it's pretty well done as low-budget youtube movies go.

But yeah, in this case, the guards are variously the superheroes, the private security force employed by Meyer (the primary rich guy in question), and the anarchists, and there's plenty of exploration of the guarding of the guards themselves!

Also Kyle (the main creator)'s best friend Ian actually teaches Latin--he plays Big Fist in this--and I'm pretty sure he had a hand in the title.

https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PL0u5ZHidq4X4QhFAX9FzSiYJLRen74sLF&si=cd6os_w0rL3OFYs-

(General warning for some pretty gratuitous gun violence, but not too much in the way of blood)

Quis custodiet ipsos custodes ?

"Who will guard the guards themselves?" / "Who will watch the watchmen ?"

It was found in Juvenal's Satires but it may have been added by someone else

Nowadays, it's sually used in relation to tyrannic governments or corrupted law enforcers but it was originally about the moral behavior of wives and eunuchs.

"Who watches the Watchmen ?" is a phrase used several times in Watchmen

In Terry Pratchett's Watch series (Discworld universe), it's super important and is an acab phrase of sorts used by Commander Vimes, the cop main character to keep himself in check in a pre-acab world when these books were published

*Note : the Discworld propaganda isn't mine. I had actually cut parts of my original list of phrases before letting you make picks and this one hadn't made the cut. However, one of you had asked about this specific phrase and I elected to add it to the form

If you want to submit a new form to vote for it, go for it. Same thing if you've changed your mind about other phrases, but please try to remember which ones you have already voted for

As much as I love the Doctor’s pacifism (which he sort of sticks to at least most of the time except when he later shoves cyanide in a dude’s face but ya know... he has bad days I guess), I also love how Jamie straight up stabs a Sontaran in the leg. Like yeah, you’re one of the most fearsome warrior species in the universe? Well I’m Scottish and Imma stab you. 

But yeah, I went back on another of my erratic sprees of Classic Who-watching tonight and I happened upon the Two Doctors. I’m starting to quite like Jamie as a companion. (Even though this is his last appearance as a companion in terms of episode order, it’s only the second full serial I’ve watched with him in it because my approach to watching Classic Who can be summed up as wibbly-wobbly timey-wimey.)

This serial also very much made me think of that 12th Doctor quote, “hardly anything is evil, but most things are hungry”. Obviously the Sontarans are more about battle-glory than hunger, but that Androgen chef, on the other hand... 

“Sontaran might is invincible!”

The Two Doctors - season 22 - 1985

I love it! It’s settled, I shall meet you in the Northern wilderness ;) Haha. 

This is a great example of your quality descriptive writing, though! :) You made a vivid snippet from that little prompt. 

I feel like I have made a tumblr friend now and I’m excited :) I am working on the ask game you tagged me in but I am long-winded and rambly and terribly indecisive/bad at picking favorites so it might be a bit... I’m slow with my tumblring, haha. 

I recognize that you posted the color game a while ago now, but purple, mauve, saffron, and fallow :) (I mean, to be perfectly honest, fallow sounds fun with just about anyone, but like... I love your fics)

I was running through the Northern wilderness, bare feet pounding against hard earth. A cold wind whipped through my hair, biting but exhilarating. My lungs burned with it. I could hear the footfalls of another beside me. I turned to look and there was @alfhildr-the-word-weaver running beside me. Matching thrilled smiles lit both of our faces. Yes, fallow was fun!

Sorry if this is cheezy, but I enjoyed imagining it XD Thank you for sending this. It makes me really happy to know you enjoy my fics. I didn’t know it before but I do now and I love your blog too♡