Life is a Celebration

Anonymous asked: sorry if i'm intruding, and i don't want to come off as rude, but do you intend to finish Devils or is it on a permanent hiatus so to speak? i know it's been two years and you're working on other things, so sorry if this is a silly question, but it's such a wonderful fic and i'd appreciate knowing whether or not i should mourn it. thank you! (sorry about the anon i'm very shy)

You are neither rude nor intruding! :D you are very kind in fact and I do not mind the anon - you can always talk to me, shades or no shades ;)

Although unfortunately I don’t have a very good answer for you :c I love Devils, and I know how it ends, and it is always on my mind - but I also do not know if I will ever have time to sit down and finish it at this rate :’( it’s like…I don’t know if I will ever give up on it, but nor can I promise a chapter anytime soon?

Instead of ‘permanent hiatus’ I would say ‘indefinite hiatus’, which is not that much better, but I can’t bear the thought of throwing it away entirely. And thank you for your love for the fic! It is very special to me and it makes me smile to know other people also like it :)

artemis-crimson asked: 💬!

I envision it as a water cycle of creative material. Raw ideas (say, Keyleth’s short hair, the reasons behind it, and the symbolism attached to it) are like water molecules, freely given to a cloud of thought that anyone can access. From there, individual artists – whether they are Critters or cast members – may condense these free-form ideas into their own works (pictures of a short-haired Keyleth, or the scene where Vax cuts her hair). When those works are completed, they are released and returned to the atmosphere, where they can be reused (perhaps in the form of fanfiction narrating Keyleth’s thoughts about her new hair). Molecules of certain ideas will always escape in this process, meaning no two rainfalls – or mental images, or physical images, or fanfictions, or performances – will use the same raw material. As we have also seen, due to the prevalence of pastiche in fandom, both the cast and the Critters repurpose raw material from cultural spaces outside Critical Role in the same manner.

By a long stretch, the single best paragraph (and idea) in my thesis.

Anonymous asked: 💬?

Gilmore turns back to the store with a decisive swish of his robes. Maybe he’ll surprise his employees in Westruun with a visit. Or maybe he’ll concoct another project altogether. Something clever to enchant, something to engage his endless curiosity. This is a day to stir the forces of the universe, a day to create something. Nothing like heartbreak to inspire ingenuity. The best bards write over the tears in their drinking glasses, and oh, if he isn’t an artist, what is he? The optimism makes a fragile barricade - bruises still ache on his spirit, and tonight, when he’s alone, it will all crumble and leave him in the dark again - but that is later. For now, he will play the king, the host, the magician, everything his customers expect of him. He will do what he does best, and of course, of course, he will smile.

GILMORE ;o; from Empires at Peace, one of the first fics I ever wrote ever, still beloved and Matt-approved 

vexahlla asked: 💬💬💬💬 SHOW ME WHAT UR PROUD OF

The smallest sliver of hope, the thread from which I dangled, was the thought that perhaps you did not adore me as I already adored you. Perhaps you had been desperate, in your grief, for contact and comfort. Perhaps you would not seek me out again, embarrassed at your forwardness, ashamed of our kiss. I would fade into memory with your fallen mother. You would buy another pair of earrings. That would be that.

Not so. When I saw you next, it was a split second after you had noticed me. I saw your shoulders rise and your chest swell with an inspired breath. I saw you blush – so much bright, lively blood in you! I saw you move like a shy, tiny bird, flitting through a crowd of flowers in pursuit of your Sylas. It was exactly the confrontation I had feared, but I could not tell if my heart beat harder for that, or for the flickering image of your smile.

That is how I will always remember you, Delilah – a little honey-drunk hummingbird, all speed and colour, entirely innocent of how I planned to break your heart.

This bit of Devils on Our Side is one of my faves! “honey-drunk hummingbird” is the best 3 words i have ever smushed together imo.

major-trouble asked: You need to tell that story immediately.

roachpatrol:

sidereanuncia:

The Colin Mochrie story? Gladly. This is a good story.

So I go to this college, and it can best be described as a little weird. It desperately wants to be Cambridge, but it’s not Cambridge, so it takes out its frustration with not being Cambridge on weird collective mockeries of Cambridge stuff. So far so good.

One of these weird mockeries is the debate club.

It’s hard to even properly call the Literary Institute a debate club - it is a club, and it does debates, but the debates are 100% stand-up comedy in a parliamentary format and the other half is bullshit pantomiming. For instance, every year at matriculation, the club drunkenly rushes the stage, interrupts the ceremony, and calls everyone in the audience a horse’s ass (occasionally while quoting Dune). It also puts on a yearly event called ‘Tuck-Ins’, in which people in the dorms can sign up (or sign their friends up) to have the entire LIT burst into their room, give them bedtime snacks, give them bedtime beer, sing some bedtime songs, and tell them a bedtime story. Except, the LIT never does anything seriously, so the bedtime song was always Barrett’s Privateers and the bedtime story was almost always something we called ‘The Rat Story’. Let me tell you about the Rat Story.

The Rat Story was a piece of… literature… that a LIT member dragged out of the dregs of the internet many years ago. Nobody knows where it came from, and my efforts to find it again were unsuccessful, but good lord, it was bad. It was a page-and-a-half-long Hermione/Wormtail (rat form) smut fic and it was awful. So awful. I’m cringing just thinking about it. It’s the worst thing I’ve ever read, and at this point I basically know it by heart. We read it aloud, from the poorly worded introduction to its horrible closing line (AND HE SCAMPERED AWAY WET! STUNNED! AND THRILLED!) dozens of times in a single night to unsuspecting students. It was an experience.

Now you might be wondering how Colin Mochrie fits into this.

So, one of the other things my college does powerfully and often is pretension. We are the most pretentious college you will ever see, and our college clubs are proof positive of this. Every year, various college clubs send out dozens of official-sounding letters inviting our various favourite well-known-people to attend our meagre college events (I, as president of the James Bond Society, personally invited Barack Obama, Sean Connery, and the Queen to our AGM). However, this year the Comedy Club was riding particularly high, and it sent out quasi-sincere invitations to speak to a variety of Canadian comedians.

And Colin Mochrie showed up, one fateful Tuck-Ins night.

He gave a talk, which was very good, but noticed as the talk finished that many students were rushing away to something in an awful hurry. We explained that it was the night of Tuck Ins, an important and sacred college tradition and that

We would be delighted if he would join us.

And that, my friends, is the story of how I found myself crammed in a dorm room with 20 other people, listening to Colin Mochrie describe Peter Pettigrew’s rat boner to a couple of second years who had no idea what they were getting into.

the universe is not just weirder than we imagine, it’s weirder than we CAN imagine