Nice!

Loving the idea of earth cryptids/folklore monsters being real only the humans have no idea until after first contact.

If someone said "show me the cutest animal I've never seen before", what would you show them?

the pygmy jerboa!

Clark never felt pain until after he became Superman.

Hero Rats

Din carrying Grogu properly

most inspirational little book from all inspirational little books I've ever read – 'Art Matters' by Neil Gaiman and Chris Riddell. this little book contains four essays, my favorite is 'Make Good Art' it's really awesome.

'When you start out on a career in the arts you have no idea what you are doing. THIS IS GREAT. People who know what they are doing know the rules, and know what is possible and impossible. YOU DO NOT. AND YOU SHOULD NOT. The rules on what is possible and impossible in the arts were made by people who had not tested the bounds of the possible by going beyond them. AND YOU CAN. If you don't know it's impossible it's easier to do. And because nobody's done it before, they haven't made up rules to stop anyone doing that again. Yet.'

– Neil Gaiman.

A Taxonomy of Magic

This is a purely and relentlessly thematic/Doylist set of categories. 

The question is: What is the magic for, in this universe that was created to have magic?

Or, even better: What is nature of the fantasy that’s on display here?

Because it is, literally, fantasy.  It’s pretty much always someone’s secret desire.

(NOTE: “Magic” here is being used to mean “usually actual magic that is coded as such, but also, like, psionics and superhero powers and other kinds of Weird Unnatural Stuff that has been embedded in a fictional world.”)

(NOTE: These categories often commingle and intersect.  I am definitely not claiming that the boundaries between them are rigid.)

Keep reading

And we have XKCD about this 😅

I understand why alchemists invented, and modern fiction writers use, systems with a few understandable Elements like Earth / Fire / Air / Water / Light / Dark.

I understand why even most nerds don't bother to study the Elements in real life. There's too many of them, and they don't neatly correspond to meaningful aspects of macro-level existence.

But just once I'd like to read a worked magical system where the author has looked up the properties of the real Elements, has put in all the work to build up a system of plausible-sounding correspondences, and the protagonist is a rare dual-element Tellurium-Iodine wizard.

Fruit Dragons by Alexandra Khitrova.

The hobbits invent a fun game called ‘how close can we get to our friends before they notice us’

easy mode: Gimli (makes a lot of noise himself, very easy to sneak up on)

medium mode: Boromir (challenging enough to be great fun)

hard more: Aragorn (VERY attentive to his surroundings)

expert mode: Legolas