Latest Posts by alfhildr-the-word-weaver - Page 6

Season’s greetings! :) What adorable kitties <3

by Ryan Conners

I sat "nice try, giant worms" as my main screen and it makes me smile and chuckle every time I open my phone :) 

The general WTNV one is my lockscreen and it’s also lovely. I do love that Night Vale’s official color is purple (I have a fondness for purple if you hadn’t guessed) and of course, purple is even better with stars :)

more wallpapers i don’t think i posted. like and reblog if you use!

night vale freebies

My mom asked me to knock a spiderweb down for her the other day (she's very afraid of spiders and I kinda like them so I'm the household spider deal-wither) and I was like, "but mom! Free Halloween decorations!"

It's still up. For now, at least.

the spiders in my house watching me put up spider webs as halloween decorations

Oo, a more detailed look at Slytherin. Nice! 

Thanks all :) 

So Ravenclaw common room is absolutely gorgeous with Halloween decorations right now. It’s making me curious–what do the other houses’ common rooms look like right now? Please reblog with a pic of your house’s Halloween decorations; I want to see them all!

(This was also a reply to my question about what all the common rooms’ Halloween decorations looked like.) 

Thanks again, everybody :) All of them are so cozy!

Heh, got to see the gryffindor common room during halloween. 😁😁 thanks fred and george!

Thank you! Very festive :)

So Ravenclaw common room is absolutely gorgeous with Halloween decorations right now. It’s making me curious–what do the other houses’ common rooms look like right now? Please reblog with a pic of your house’s Halloween decorations; I want to see them all!

This will never stop being the perfect mix of adorable, adventurous, and mystical--truly the winner of all Halloween comics :) 

So Ravenclaw common room is absolutely gorgeous with Halloween decorations right now. It's making me curious--what do the other houses' common rooms look like right now? Please reblog with a pic of your house's Halloween decorations; I want to see them all!

I should probably mention the main reason I was in a space pirate mood today: Skyvault. As a kickstarter backer I got to preview the pilot yesterday and today, and I am feeling all of the hype--I want to binge it but the show doesn’t even exist (beyond what I’ve seen) yet! 

[I ramble at length about my experience of and feelings about Skyvault below, with somewhat of a pilot review mixed haphazardly in. There shouldn’t really be spoilers but some may consider some of it as such so read with caution.]

I mean, to be fair, I knew a great deal of the pilot’s plot before seeing it, mostly from watching all of the Q&A’s Door Monster’s already done on it, and also partly from the audition scenes I got to read when I auditioned for it... a year ago already I guess, wow. Time is weird. (I didn’t get a part in it, if you were wondering, but looking back on my audition tapes, they were kind of a train wreck and I have definitely come a ways as an actress in the past year, though of course I have a ways to go.)

But yeah, it’s pretty cool having the forbidden knowledge of the audition scenes--obviously I won’t say much, but when Ian mentioned in the Q&A that Truman’s favorite soup would become a plot point down the line I actually had a pretty good idea what he was referring to, and (assuming I’m right) that was 100% my favorite scene to read for (even though I wasn’t actually in the age range of the character I was reading and so in terms of professionalism I probably shouldn’t’ve included that in the audition, but pretending to be that old woman was also the best acting I did so there were pros and cons.)

But yeah, that’s just to say I did already know a significant portion of what the pilot would be before watching it, which is probably why I must admit I felt like not a ton actually happened in it plot-wise. There were also definitely things I wanted to see developed more in depth--Jay’s relationship with his friend and worldbuilding stuff in particular. It did feel like it moved a little too quickly, although as Kyle explained in the Q&A the pilot isn’t going to be exactly how the first episode will be if/when they get picked up but rather a summary of the show which they’ll use to help sell it, which is reassuring. So, its main weaknesses for me were plot depth, pacing, and world-development, and I have confidence that those were either influenced by my knowing too much ahead of time, or among the things that they’re already planning to fix going forwards, so I think hopefully my current critiques of it will dissolve with time. It really just deserves to be a longer first episode than it was so it can develop itself better.

The best thing about the Skyvault pilot, I’d say, was the characters. I fell instantly in love with both Jay and Truman. At one point I referred to them both as “shards of my soul”. Jay is delightfully enthusiastic about everything and addicted to adventure; he is far too happy in the face of potential death. He’s the hero who has completely idealized and romanticized adventure and is just so deeply in love with it that he plunges headlong into danger and grins in the face of death traps. 

The only character I may love more than Jay is Truman. I said right away that he reminded me of a live action Milo from Atlantis, and in the Q&A they told us that Milo was one of the main inspirations for the character other than Ian (acknowledging my comment while doing so, which always feels great). Being deeply in love with Milo and all awkward adventurous academics, it was inevitable that I would love Truman, and he certainly did not disappoint. I don’t want to spoil it, but there’s a reveal with him that is brilliant and hilarious and beautiful. I also love how they’ve already displayed his internal conflict between earnestly wanting adventure and discovery versus his tendency towards fearfulness (“I’m done being safe.” vs. “The things we do are extremely dangerous.” “How extremely?”). 

To put it in Harry Potter terms, Truman is my inner Ravenclaw and Jay is my inner Thunderbird, and I love them both dearly. 

I will admit I don’t relate to Kat nearly as much, but I’m sure I’ll come to love her as time goes on. There was already a moment when she and Truman touched hands and I’m such shipper trash that I’m already fully prepared to ship it, haha. I mean I’m still flexible on ships at this early stage, but like, I’m ready. 

They’ve also done a great job with kickbutt female characters and diversity. There are already several women who display a range of strengths in different ways but who are all capable of handling themselves, and it bodes well for an epic series. 

It also has, of course, that signature Door Monster humor. The actors have done a good job of being characters based on the Door Monster cast but not exactly them, and the whole thing has DM’s signature inventiveness and I am so ready to find out more. 

And, yes, as I stated, this is primarily what caused me to go on a space pirate bingeposting spree today. 

Anyways, this review, like my Skyvault audition tapes, is a bit of a trainwreck, but I am now too tired to edit it properly so for now I’m just going to toss it into the merciless void of the internet. 

New official poster for Skyvault as the pilot enters post production

THAT IS THE MOST MAJESTIC SAILOR-CAT I HAVE EVER BEEN BLESSED TO LAY MY EYES UPON. 

Fair seas and happy sailing, dear Ditty <3 I am thrilled to have spotted you on this fine website. 

Ditty, our ship cat, looking magnificent and nautical.

Now available as a print in my online print shop!

Now *that* is the sword I want :)

A phenomenally enameled silver Swept-hilt Rapier, Germany, ca. 1606, housed at the Staaliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden [960 x 860]

I once wrote a series of short stories that was basically just sensory descriptions of what it would be like to walk around on every planet, moon, and celestial body I had heard a description of. I later remembered that stories have to have plots and feebly attempted to introduce some actual events happening, but mostly I just wanted to write flowery descriptions of walking around on other planets (and moons and space rocks, etc) because, like... just imagining being on their surfaces is so deeply mind blowing. There are molten magma rivers on Venus, and lakes of liquid methane on Saturn’s moon Titan, and Jupiter’s moon Europa is covered in an ever-cracking miles-deep ice-crusted ocean, and I just wanted to walk around in all of those places, just walk around and see them. 

This is a fantastical accumulation of photos and it’s astonishing to realize how many places we have pictures of like this, as if we’re really there--places where we sent something and that thing of ours, at least, was really there. 

On the other hand, funnily enough, these pictures also prove Doctor Who’s assertion that a significant portion of the universe bears a striking resemblance to a quarry in Wales. 

dude seeing these Mega high quality images of the surface of mars that we now have has me fucked up. Like. Mars is a place. mars is a real actual place where one could hypothetically stand. It is a physical place in the universe. ITS JUST OUT THERE LOOKING LIKE UH IDK A REGULAR OLD DESERT WITH LOTS OF ROCKS BUT ITS A WHOLE OTHER PLANET? 

Me, believing every word of this: Wow, this is fascinating!

Me, who knows almost nothing about music: I wonder what a high C sounds like. Maybe I should look up songs in the key of high C so I can hear--

Me, finally getting it: Oh...  Oh. Ooooooh! Ha. 

Me, a little disappointed: So... none of that was real then. But... but... pirate shanties...

Me, still not sure how music works: But I still want to know what the key of high C sounds like, though. 

hey did anyone hear the news that scientists have actually been able to figure out the most common key that old pirate shanties were sang in

My gosh, these are beautiful. The color and the lighting are so delicate and the water is just glowing. I love how faint the ships coming through the fog are. Also boats are beautiful in general and this captures that, plus the water looks like candy in some of these. Lovely <3

ART HISTORY MEME; 8 artists: Ivan Aivazovsky [3/8]

I only have the finale episode of Wolf 359 left and I don’t know if it will have a happy ending or not and I’m a bit afraid to listen to it. I hope Eiffel makes it home to his little girl... 

Beautiful moodboard, by the way. It really captures that loneliness and guilt that underlies all the space drama and humor. Or, to put it in the modern parlance, this hits me in the feels. 

wolf 359 aesthetics- doug eiffel and anne garcía for @whoopsiedaisiedoo, @remembersunflowers, and @mossylog5

(requests are open)

Happy belated black hole day because I have a bad habit of forgetting things in my drafts! 

Also both the black hole picture and Treasure Planet are still awesome. 

Happy black hole day!!

They are truly fascinating

The other ships will still be looking to us, to the Black Pearl, to lead, and what will they see? Frightened bilge rats aboard a derelict ship? No, no they will see free men and freedom! And what the enemy will see, they will see the flash of our cannons, and they will hear the ringing of our swords, and they will know what we can do! By the sweat of our brow and the strength of our backs and the courage in our hearts! Gentlemen, hoist the colours!

I’m a simple woman, I hear the Pirates of the Caribbean music, I become gripped with the urge to don pirate garb and fight cursed skeletons upon the open sea

Gaah, Treasure Planet is such a beautiful movie. It really is a shame it never got any sort of sequel. 

(*Whispers hopefully*: Treasure Planet live action sequel?)

“Why, look at ya. Glowing like solar fire. You’re something special, Jim. You’re gonna rattle the stars, you are.”

Treasure Planet (2002) dir.  Ron Clements, John Musker

This is the pinnacle of art.

I mean, it spans the full range of emotion. Mystery and curiosity, struggle and anger, generosity and adorableness, it has it all. And what greater art is there than cats?

babies!!!

art by: watercatlor - pls do not remove credit

I recognize that it is most likely no longer his 41st birthday, but I do quite like this gifset.

*Googles his birthday* Ah, I see that it is in fact shortly after his 42nd birthday! I didn’t realize it was so close to mine. Heeey he turned 42 on the 24th--happy inverse golden birthday, John! 

Anyways I think I’ve been slowly becoming a Nerdfighter. I don’t know if I fully qualify as one yet but I’m getting close. It’s an awesome fandom name, by the way :)

Happy 41st birthday, John Green!

Thank you for being awesome!

This looks like it belongs in Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them, and I very much want to pet it and find out how soft it is... Also, I’m quite curious what sort of sound it makes.

Also I just looked them up and these pretty babies are endangered. Good on you, mysterious person’s hands taking care of this precious polka dotted baby :) 

Baby Eastern Quoll, Bruny Island. Tasmania, Australia

Look, Chester, buddy, I get that (some) Ravenclaws tend towards perfectionism, but... what more do you want from me, dude? We’re 79 points ahead...

BroTP or OTP, they’re adorable together and this is super cute art. Fairs and fireworks make for such pretty backgrounds <3

I guess I could maybe get behind them as a couple... As long as they’re happy. 

I didn’t say????? They’re my new fav now😉

My boi Alexei deserves everything, of course his American boyfriend!!!! And cherry slurpee!!!!!!!

I love when a gifset is epic and powerful, and then you look up the song that it’s set to and it just gets that much more epic and powerful with the music sweeping behind it. I’ve found some darn good songs from gifsets, too. This set is just wonderfully done. 

I can’t decide if I want El to get her powers back in season 4, or if it would be better for her to be free of them... I mean it’d be nice to have them back, but maybe she’s safer without them... 

carry your flame, carry it higher // torches - x ambassadors

I actually did call it, but only because I recognized him from his more recent role as dashing international art thief Pierre Despereaux in Psych, which is a pretty solid intermediate phase between Westley and Mayor Jerkface. 

I was just as surprised as you to learn that Despereaux was Westley, as I recall, back when I was first googling him. Like I think I thought he looked familiar but I couldn’t place him. (Then I ended up writing more than half of the Psych Wiki page on Despereaux but that’s another story.) 

But it was hilarious because my mom, who has also seen Psych and Princess Bride, totally thought I was wrong. I looked at the mayor and I was like “hey, that’s Despereaux” and she was like “Nah, I sort of see the resemblance but that isn’t him”. Then I looked it up and it was; it’s bloody Cary Elwes. I’m very proud of my facial recognition skills, which are frequently lacking but in this case were spot on. 

Although, to be fair, I also kept getting the mayor and the newspaper guy mixed up, to the point where I briefly thought that the mayor also ran the newspaper, and when I learned they were separate I had no idea which one was Heather’s dad, so I guess that’s 1 win and 1 loss for my facial recognition skills after all.

(Also Pierre Despereaux is the #1 best side character in Psych and if you love Westley, I highly recommend you watch Despereaux’s episodes on Psych. The first one is called Extradition: British Columbia and it’s great and you should watch it...)

WAIT

ARE YOU TELLING ME THIS GUY

IS ACTUALLY THIS GUY???!!

WHO WAS GONNA TELL ME????!!

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 how a discussion of tropes can turn into an actual, full-length, illustrated story and get me emotionally involved. This was beautiful. Admittedly I could predict the gist of the villain’s motivations from a ways out, but that twist about MC-kun caught me by surprise and definitely gave me feels. I’m not even that familiar with anime tropes, but the mechanics of this story world were fascinating, and that was a quite the battle scene! 

This is exactly the sort of random find that I love about this site. 

You know those anime meta posts along the lines of “I was born with pink hair. The doctors told my parents I was a Main Character and ever since my life has not known peace from demons/spirits/sports competitions/harems who find me”

Well I see that, and I raise you this:

An anime boy whose appearance is, by absolutely anyone’s account, completely and utterly average. Mundane hair. Mundane eyes. Not even glasses to set him the tiniest bit apart. A simple, unmemorable, unrecognizable civilian among a backdrop of millions.

And he has a lot of passions, and a lot of ambitions, which he hones every chance he gets. He’s dabbled in sports and archery and cooking and just about anything you could wrap a competition around. And he’s competed in many of these. Every chance he gets. With all of his passion and all of his might.

He’s crushed by the competition every single time.

Until one day–one day something clicks for him. Something that should have seemed obvious from the start and yet never was–as though everyone, including himself, was unwittingly blind to it. It clicks, when he realizes every kid who’s beaten him in competition, every kid who’s gone on to fame and glory and acclaim, has been some candy-haired gel-spiked ridiculously-dressed fucker. 

There’s some trend there that this Main Character boy can’t explain and can’t understand but he decides, this one time, fuck it. He’ll play along too. He’s got a model train competition in four days, and he’s got nothing more to lose. He hits up the department store, buys the pinkest, noxious-est, fruitiest hair dye he can find, the spikiest hair gel available, and the gaudiest clothes on the thrift rack. He enters the model train competition looking like a bubble gum gijinka.

And he wins.

Suddenly, the other candy-haired contestants notice him. They talk to him. They pledge rivalries. Girls notice him. Judges applaud him. Acclaimed model train aficionados offer him internships across the world. He’s hit on something. 

The main cast expands to cover just about every candy-hair cliche in the book: from the mostly-normal-looking demure school girl with the blue hair to the Naruto-est, yelling-est boy with the red-and-green spiked hair. The cool megane senpais, the purple haired tsunderes, suddenly everyone is interested in him. They’re prodigies and upstarts and underdogs and they truly believe that this main character boy is one of them.

So the main character boy maintains his ruse. He touches up his roots at dawn every morning and carefully attends to his gelled spikes and tells absolutely no one about this great, uncanny, unfathomable secret he’s stumbled upon. He wins his competitions left and right. He racks up the acclaim. He’s hailed as a prodigy of all trades, just now bursting onto the scene, and boils to the top of all his candy-haired peers.

He’s rising up, his every dream within his grasp. Until one day he gets a note under his door, taped to an old picture of his Normal Boring self from middle school, that says “You don’t belong”

Oh hey look it’s that part of 12′s regeneration speech I quoted on one of those phone cases I just did :) 

(13′s episodes are still pay-per-episode on Amazon Prime but I’m very much looking forward to meeting her once they become free!)

Doctor, I let you go.