So Apparently The Illustrator For The Sword Art Online Novels, Abec, *also* Has Interviews You Can Find

One of the things I like about Trails is how mundanely it treats some forms of magic, and how magically it treats swordsmanship. It's known that trains work though gravity manipulation gemstones that just slide the train at great speeds. Fine, normal magical-tehcnology stuff. Combat mages throw fireballs, sure, and almost anyone can learn to toss out lightning or healing spells. Streetlights run on mana, it's all presented as normal technological development, the domain of universities and corporate R&D divisions. But swords? Swords are magic. Swords are real magic. The sort you train your entire life mastering one small school of. You look at Laura there and think "that sword is far too large to be useful", and you're right! Unless you're trained in the Arseid school. If you're a Arseid student, yes, you can throw around a 7' long great sword like it's a regular old claymore. You learn strikes that cause a localised earthquake. You can just spontaneously manifest glowing wings and attain a combat-focus that lets you cut a tank in half. And the Arseid school is brutally simple and mundane next to the nonsense that comes out of Nord spear dancers, who spin tornadoes up with a pointy stick, or the catastrophic, time-dilating, nonsense the Eight Leaves masters get up to.

Considering SAO's reputation (mostly due to its shitty adaptations), it's really funny to see a part where Kirito and Asuna just turn to the camera and say "stop treating women as property and start treating them as people."

I think my first fandom fandom exposure was arguably livejournal, but before that I was in a university RPG society, and before that I was making a weekly pilgrimage to Games Workshop to play games and talk about games, so I think "local club" is an honest answer, also this sentence is too long and must end soon.

Reblog and talk about your experience in the tags!

happy yuri night everybody

Not once in the Trailer do we see supes punching anyone. He breaks a window. But there is all this. Only a few seconds, but in such a short trailer it's still 5% of the runtime. Because Superman is about saving lives. Not beating baddies, not defeating villains, not avenging, but saving lives. Having the ability and the desire to help. If he can't be hurt, no-one else can either.

SUPERMAN (2025) dir. James Gunn

Twitch is gonna start kinda censoring queer people and it would be really helpful if you could read the next few sentences and then also go to a link and click the word vote.

They're implementing a new rule where if you discuss "sensitive social issues" at all you have to flag your streams as such, these issues include things like war and political unrest but also any lgbtq topics (once again our existence is political).

Essentially a streamer will have to choose between never ever mentioning anything queer (or even just discussing their own life if they're queer themselves) or flagging every stream with "sensitive social issues" and scaring away 90% of viewers.

If you have a twitch account you can go here and log in and click vote. They do listen. Please vote.

love to get tours of architecturally award-winning buildings from the people that work there. especially libraries, for some reason. I have never seen a well-designed architectural library. highlights I have seen include:

it's mostly glass and all the panes leak (many such cases)

they forgot to account for the weight of books and now it's subsiding

it's mostly glass and therefore essentially a greenhouse. books and people studying famously love wild winter-summer temperature fluctuations

it's Round. books tend not to be

they put the radiator just under the window....which is a skylight

the only lift is for moving books, so if you can't use the stairs, you'll have to go out, use the main building lift, and come back in on another floor. doors on other floors need a special access keycard

we built this space specifically to house manuscripts but the temp/humidity control is always on the blink

the stairs/corridors are too Aesthetically Narrow and if you want to pass another person, you have to awkwardly crab shuffle past each other

there are no walls separating the library from the rest of the faculty building. no one's ever wanted a quiet study space, after all

I want you to remember:

The fascists hate you too and they just will pretend otherwise until after they've killed the rest of us, before they turn on you.

One of my favourite things about the setting is how Teenagers With Attitude are clearly considered a strategic resource that every nation should be developing, lest they develop an Angsty Teen gap with the Soviets.

The geopolitics of the Trails series are so funny. In Trails in the Sky SC, you have an entire chapter dedicated to figuring out who is trying to disrupt the signing of a major non-aggression pact, during which you learn a lot about the internal politics of all sides and what the treaty can and can't do. It's a really interesting chapter that teaches you a lot about Liberl's place in the world and it helps to ground the setting in a good way.

All that being said, it turns out the disruption was caused by a bored child supersoldier with a fucking gundam.