I Will Follow - Chris Tomlin

There’s so much gorgeous fanart on this site. I really need to reblog more of it. 

This is one of those fan artists from whom I have many works saved in my personal obsession folder and whom I’m super excited to have found and followed since making my tumblr. 

Also, I love the idea of the Doctor going around and giving his companions Christmas presents :) Perhaps it all started with that red bicycle he took back to Rose when she was 12; perhaps it’s been going on much longer, because it’s fun to imagine with the classic companions as well--the Doctor dropping by Gallifrey and reluctantly leaving Leela a nice new knife, or more likely a yo-yo, and the like. (I’ve just started watching Leela’s run in the classic series and I think she’s on my top 10 list of companions, if I could possibly make such a thing.)

I love how even the ‘round thingies’ are red and green and how the lights are around the big branchy bits as if that’s the tree. It’s really just such a gorgeous art style, and I love seeing what the Doctor’s up to in his holiday downtime :) 

I humbly beg forgiveness for the lateness of this. I had no idea when I signed up for the @dwsecretsanta gift exchange that a month later I would be offered a shiny new job that would swallow all my time. I am so very sorry about that.

This is for @nightfellart , a very TARDIS Christmas with Ten, enjoying a mug of creamy cocoa, en route to deliver gifts to his companions in time and space. I hope you had a very nice holiday this year!

I figured I ought to tell the story of my blog background (which gets into the story of my blog) and give credit as best I can for the picture I used to make it. Also I should probably warn you here and now that I tend to ramble. 

So, first off, I have to admit that I can’t give exact credit for the original picture I used; I got it from Google Earth a long time ago, and now that they’ve changed the photos layer, I can’t find the original anymore. I’ve tried a reverse google image search, but it doesn’t come up. All I can tell you is that it came from Narrows, Virginia, or the surrounding area, and it’s of the New River. So, if you’re the photographer who took this picture, let me know how you’d like to be credited (or if I need to find a new background image). 

I love this picture, though, with the tranquil water reflecting the mountains and that lone tree jutting up on the left. It has a nice balance, or perhaps a good visual flow, and it reminds me of home. (I’m originally from Blacksburg, Va, and Narrows is a little over half an hour west and a smidge north of home.)

Anyways, I’m also posting the various stages of my photoshopping (well, actually, I just used the “markup toolbar” in Preview on my Mac to edit the color of the image, but that doesn’t work as a verb as well as photoshop does). 

Aside from my general love of all things purple, I also wanted to tint the picture purple so that it would be a picture of “the Lande of Violet Mists”. The Lande (with an “e” for artistic flair) of Violet Mists is a fantasy land and somewhat of an in-joke going back to the blogspot blog I made Sophomore year of high school. It has a vague mythos on said blog--in bits and pieces, such as the one I have in my blog description here--but it’s mostly more of an aesthetic theme than a properly developed literary location, though I have written bits and pieces set there. Remind me to dig some of those back up and see if any are worth sharing here, actually. 

At first made this edit for aforementioned high school blogspot, and I did try to set it as my background there, but I couldn’t get the formatting to work. When I started this tumblr, though, I was happy I had it in reserve. 

So, basically I tinted the picture pink and turned the temperature towards cool (aka blue) to make it purple. I think I also decreased the sharpness to give it that atmospheric haze and boosted the saturation some to intensify it. I decided the first one wasn’t purple enough, so I made the second one, but that one just looked too unnatural (and a bit too pink) so I went back to the first one (each time I started a new edit, I made a copy of the original so that I could have each step as a separate image) and made it just a little more purple. I liked that one, and I just inserted a translucent square to have that more opaque region in the middle where posts go. That wasn’t wide enough, though, so I actually took a screenshot so that I’d have an image in proportion with my computer screen and copy-pasted the image onto that and stretched it wider, and that’s how I got the final image. I suppose this isn’t necessarily specific enough to be helpful as a tutorial, but hopefully it gives the gist of how I edited my background picture. When in doubt, add purple :)

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/

This is so gorgeous and emotional and dramatic! I haven’t watched the Netflix finale yet--I guess I’m saving it for a little bit--but I’ll never forget all the feels I felt reading the beach scene in The End, back before “feels” was even a thing people said. This song beautifully captures all of those emotions and gives me plenty of its own. I’m pretty sure it gave me goosebumps although I admit it is also a bit chilly in here. But the emotion in the lyrics and the singer’s voice are certainly goosebump-worthy!

Also, FYI, the volume is fine on my end. It sounds lovely!

Edit: I realize now that I was using my cheap headphones when I wrote this; they’re not great headphones and so I always have to turn the volume up on things to compensate. I just didn’t realize that I wasn’t turning the volume up for this song. So, yes, the volume is indeed loud. It’s not hard to deal with though, and this is still a gorgeous song. I was listening to it on repeat at work the other day.

I think it’s best to listent to it at low volume because I still can’t use garage band properly and the volumes are wrong 

Kit and Olaf love story was my insipiration for this song, they are one of my first ship and it felt like a nice way to honor it. 

I hope you enjoy it. I’ll be posting the lyrics in a reblog so keep an eye open. also as soon as I’ll fix the volumes I’ll be putting it on band camp. 

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 :) 

Wow, Mars!? I know that’s kind of bad but it’s also kind of awesome. 

We live a mile south of the MN/IA border (we live in Iowa but the nearest town is in Minnesota, just 6 miles north), and this is not my first -20F day. It’s a funny thing, stepping outside when it’s this cold; I find it feels as though it’s wet, not because of any moisture, but just because it’s so cold that my body reads it as wet from the drastic temperature drop. 

But, back to that exciting part about Mars. 

I’ve often compared putting on all the pieces of my winter gear to putting on a space suit, and I’m not going to lie, I sometimes go full mental role play when it’s this cold and I’m going out to feed animals in the barn. Like, I start mentally referring to the house as the exploratory base and my car as the rover and I’ll say I’m going out on a solo surface mission and whatnot; if my scarf slips off my face, I have a helmet breach, and so on. (I could probably pick more accurate scientific space terms, especially after reading the Martian, but it’s usually just in my head so I don’t typically pay too much attention to accuracy). Apparently, I never realized how semi-accurate I was actually being! 

So wait, wait though. Are you actually telling me that the winter gear currently in my possession--knee-length down coat rated to ~ -20F, wool scarf, felt-lined wool mittens, wool hat, snow boots, snow pants, etc... Is what you’re saying that with the clothing I currently own, I could potentially walk around on the surface of Mars without actually needing a space suit?? I mean, I guess there are also other factors, like oxygen and pressure and things, but I’m suddenly feeling like a patched together homemade spacesuit made from the winter gear I already have and like maybe a scuba diving tank or something is way more viable than I had previously considered. It’s a good thing I don’t have any way of quickly transporting myself to Mars right now or the high level of childish space energy currently flooding me might make me foolish enough to try it. 

Also I just had this moment where I thought, “it’s like I’m in space!” and then remembered that the earth actually is a planet that is in space, so, technically... I am in space. So, in conclusion, stay warm, my fellow space travellers, and may your space suits/winter gear serve you well :)

Fun Fact for my friends caught in the US Polar Vrotex:

It’s 19-20 F (-7 C) whole-ass degrees at the Larsen Ice Shelf in Antartica.  

Google says it’s -7 F (-22 C) in St. Paul, MN.

Congratulate it’s nearly 30 degrees warmer in antartica rn, stay toasty and be real smug about living through this.

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

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

Oh thank you! Look at him being all rock star :) Very cool. 

Oh I wonder if that’s the same show they took clips from in this fanvideo? I remember thinking how funny it is to see him wearing a cross (on account of his not actually being a vampire). 

James Marsters in Strange Frequency [x]

Part I [x] | Part II [x] | Part IV [x]

It’s a weird time for me fandom-wise. Normally, the way I cycle through obsessions, I’d be fading out on Gotham in favor of A Series of Unfortunate Events, because that’s kind of just how I process things, cycling from one fandom into another, and then back around again after taking a break for a while. But now Gotham is coming back, and both because I’m on tumblr now and because it’s exciting and rare for me to be current on a show I’ll want to keep up with it, especially since this is the final season, even though I was getting a little burned out on my obsession with it. But also, I’m in rehearsals for a play right now (which I need to leave for soon) and so I’ll be missing it live tonight (and for all of January) and I’ll have to stay off tumblr tonight until I can see it on hulu tomorrow--probably not until after rehearsal again, actually. Also I was going to try to put out a season 3 inspired Nygmobblepot fanmix before Gotham came back but that’s not getting done in the next 5 minutes so I suppose it’ll just have to come out this weekend amidst the rush on season 5 premiere stuff. Also I got a Doctor Who audio drama for Christmas and I’ve been listening to that in the car on the way to and from work, so it’s like I’m actively consuming things from 3 of my fandoms all at once, which is probably not that strange for most people, but which is rather strange for me given the way in which I obsess over things. 

tl;dr--I’m going to try and put up a Nygmobblepot fanmix I’ve been working on this weekend, but because of play rehearsal I won’t be able to watch Gotham live on TV this month so I’ll be watching a day behind on hulu and avoiding tumblr in the space inbetween.