Today Is July 2nd, The Day Independence Was Voted On. It Took Two Days To Draft The Declaration, Agree

This is a hilarious concept

Silly idea for a novel: the maintenance guys for ancient temple traps.

They’re a team of travelling engineers and quality assurance experts, who have to stay a step ahead of the assorted adventurers and archaeologists. The job is to make all the puzzles and traps authentic to original design, difficult to solve (but not too difficult. They want a staggered fatality rate so the final traps and puzzles get a chance to shine as well), and to stay ahead of schedule.

They’re all members of the reportedly long lost people who built the ruins. How or why this might be is never addressed. They carry themselves like regular tradesmen, all ‘well there’s you’re problem’ while dangling on a harness over a spike trap to fix the giant swinging axe. They have a water traps guy but he’s sick so the mechanical engineer is filling in. The spring loaded traps are all sticking this year due to humidity. The spinning clockwork puzzles are waiting for a part. The guy who replaces the tiles on collapsing floor traps thinks that’s bullshit. The stone worker who fixes the facades after the repairs has a UST-drenched rivalry with the botanist who arranges the moss and vines over hidden entrances and faded murals. The poison darts guy and the snake handler are siblings trying to fill their dad’s shoes. The final assessor is the grizzled old expert who’s seen it all and everyone respects. He has final say on whether or not the work is up to scratch and they can move onto the next temple. He gets injured/falls into a bottomless pit at the end of act one and they have to do the big job without him. The pressure is on to do him proud.

The archaeologists/adventurers have no clue about any of this. They’re constantly traipsing through the jungles, trying to decode clues, and loudly dying in the background. This is treated like a standard inconvenience.

Occasionally they run into vengeful spirits or surviving priests, who treat them the same way you treat a plumber who is fixing your sink: and tentatively offer them a sandwich and a cup of tea and try not to complain about them wearing work boots in the house.

Bitte

Sauerkraut

i looove the miku trend. nomadic horselord hungarian miku be upon you

Over 10 years ago I drew this mother naga with her kid and a bowl of gulab jamun, and I was blown away to see people still reblogging it and saying kind things here. I decided to draw a sequel, the PTA (People That are Anacondas) meeting is over, and she finally gets to have some gulab jamun. c: I really hope this cheers you up some.

Reblog this picture of me holding a Family Size box of Honey Nut Cheerios? I’d really appreciate it.

some of you need to romanticise the fucking paragraph break

The Last Supper

Before the Throne: How The Assassin's Blade Reveals the Heart Behind the Legend

This Is Where It Hurts—And This Is Where She Begins

I didn’t expect this book to undo me. I opened it for context, for backstory, for a deeper understanding of a girl I already thought I knew. I was not prepared to meet her here—bloody-knuckled and golden-eyed, standing at the edge of her own undoing, daring the world to come closer.

The Assassin’s Blade is not a prequel. It’s a reckoning.

These five novellas do not orbit the Throne of Glass series—they are its heartbeat, its open wound. They are the story beneath the story, the ghost behind every line Celaena Sardothien ever speaks. I thought I loved her before. But it was here, in these pages of sun-scorched desert and salt-stung shores and bloodstained cobblestones, that I saw her clearly for the first time.

This is the book where the mask cracks.

Where we watch a girl who kills for coin learn what it means to fight for something she’ll never get paid for. Where the sharp edges of her arrogance are dulled by bruised compassion, where her bravado is tested against grief so raw it bleeds straight through the page. She is not softened here. She is tempered.

Her love story with Sam Cortland wrecked me—not because it was tragic (though it is, utterly), but because it was real. No grand declarations. No sweeping gestures. Just quiet defiance and tentative touches. A rivalry melting into alliance. A glance held too long. A boy who didn’t ask to be her hero—but stayed anyway.

And when he’s gone? The silence he leaves behind is the loudest thing in the book.

But this isn’t just a love story. It’s a story about choice. About power.

About what happens when a girl forged into a weapon begins to wonder who she is when she’s not being pointed at someone.

When Celaena walks into Skull’s Bay, she is the blade Arobynn Hamel sharpened for years—obedient, lethal, beautiful. When she leaves, she’s something else entirely. She’s the girl who chose to defy him. Who looked at 200 shackled souls and decided that maybe she didn’t have to be what he made her.

There is no moment more powerful than when she realizes she can choose. That her loyalty was never freely given—it was manipulated, conditioned, beaten into her. That the life she’s been living isn’t the only one available to her.

And it costs her everything.

Arobynn’s shadow stretches long over these novellas.

He is not the loudest villain. But he is the most dangerous. His violence doesn’t scream—it whispers. It gifts. It smiles. He doesn’t break Celaena with blows (though those come too)—he breaks her with belief. He teaches her to confuse control for care, cruelty for closeness. And when she finally sees through it—when she walks away from the Keep, from him, from the man who raised her in a gilded cage—she doesn’t just claim freedom.

She earns it.

Every setting here is symbolic. Every relationship a lesson.

The Red Desert teaches her discipline, the cost of trust, and what it means to be seen as something more than a killer. Ansel offers her friendship, then betrayal, then something stranger: mercy. In Innish, Yrene Towers reminds Celaena that healing and hurting can exist in the same body—and that sometimes, giving away your armor (a ruby brooch, a pouch of gold) can be braver than drawing your blade.

By the time we reach the final novella, the road ahead feels inevitable. And yet, I still hoped. I hoped Sam would survive. I hoped Arobynn’s grip wouldn’t tighten. I hoped, absurdly, that love might be enough to save her.

But this is not a story that spares its heroine. This is the story that forges her.

When Celaena kneels in the King’s court, sentenced not to death but to a life of chains, she doesn’t scream. She doesn’t beg.

She survives.

And on that long, bitter road to Endovier, when the world has been stripped from her and only the memory of love remains, she sees the white stag—the Lord of the North, the symbol of her lost home—and finds something fierce and sacred still flickering inside her.

Not hope. Not yet. But resolve.

“I am Celaena Sardothien, and I will not be afraid.”

Those words hit like thunder. They are not pride. They are not bravado. They are the bones of her future self forming beneath the ash. This line, whispered into darkness, is a prophecy. A promise. And I will never forget the way it made me sit back, breathe deep, and believe in her all over again.

This book didn’t just deepen my love for the series. It reshaped it.

The Assassin’s Blade is not supplemental. It’s essential. It’s the foundation. The soul. The scar tissue. It is the quiet epic of a girl choosing—over and over—not to become the worst thing that ever happened to her.

Reading it felt like remembering something I’d forgotten I knew. Something about survival. About love. About fire.

Rating: ★★★★¾ (4.75/5)

For the ache. For the anger. For the boy who died, and the girl who didn’t. For the blade that became a queen.

oh uh. scuse me. just a lil snail crossing your dash

Cherokee Miku from my home state of North Carolina!