So…roughly three months ago my mother was trying to order a painting for her office space of a New Orleans street view
She picked out a print of pointillism style painting, nice bright colors, appealing to the eye sort of thing.
It arrives only for her to find that it’s not a painting, but rather a mosaic-by-number kit with ~75,000 pieces. Her eyes are bad enough that she can’t really put it together herself and my fathers hands aren’t steady enough to get the tiles facing the right way. So, for the past two weeks I’ve been putting them down one by one so that she can have a nice mosaic for her office wall instead.
I’m roughly 25-30% done:
5/19 update
5/23
5/27
Almost 50% done!!
Stepped away for a bit, but back at it! 9/25 update
10/15
Took a break for a while but here’s the 3/5 update!
the difference between how link does gender and how zelda does gender is that link decides what pronouns he’ll use that day based entirely on what outfit he’d like to wear, and zelda has a calendar up on the wall with five months blocked out weeks ahead of time and labeled “boy time”.
I’m obsessed with court jesters in fantasy stories so have another story concept about it:
A new person is introduced to the king’s court, and as soon as they walk in the court jester announces that they are a thief and a fraud and rode in here with stolen horses. And just as the newcome member is about to retaliate, they’re advised not to, and explained that nothing the jester says is true, ever. He just says completely baseless and wild shit, recreationally. The newcomer looks at the jester, who is currently bemoaning that the king won’t kiss him in public, as if they are lovers. The king looks irate, but leads by example and ignores the jester’s idiotic claims.
The more one learns about the court’s inner workings, the more apparent it is that the jester really does do that. The false claims and absurd rumours that go around aren’t regurgitated by the jester as often as they are apparently started by him, and are proven false on a consistent basis. The only way to make yourself a worse clown than the jester himself is to get defensive about it, or make any attempt to disprove him. Once a drunken high priest embarrasses himself completely by stripping down in front of the court to prove that he does not, in fact, consist of two smaller men standing on each others’ shoulders, concealed by the priestly garb.
“And the king is fucking the jester” has become a standard sarcastic retort that people say to imply that someone is a naive fool who believes in wild and false baseless rumours. Along the lines of “You think the old marchioness’ handmaid is actually secretly her personal assassin? Do you also believe that the king is fucking the jester?”
But if one could wiggle their way all the way through to the deepest bottom layers of court scheming without getting killed along the way, it turns out that there are a handful of these claims that actually are true, but nobody would ever believe them - or believe you if you told them about it - because the truth is disguised as such open-faced blatant lies that you’d look like a fool trying to actually prove them. And all of these most outrageous things are schemes that re-inforce the power of the throne or directly benefit the king. And the system is so sturdy that the jester could flat-out say that out loud and nobody would believe it because it’s the jester saying it.
Because the truth is, the king is fucking the jester.
this doesn’t render on windows unless next to a non-phallus hieroglyph so here is a version for windows users:
𓀐𓂸
Prev: mobile user here! theres fucking nothing here
It’s supposed to look like this:
Prev: How did someone make this??
Unicode, the technical standard describing what text symbols exist in computers¹ and how they are encoded², has a block containing Egyptian Hieroglyphs. And since there exists an Egyptian Hieroglyph depicting a penis³, they included it in the standard. And since most computers follow that standard, they can display a penis.
You can check out unicode characters for example here:
1) There do actually exist different standards describing which characters computers should use and how they should be encoded. These days pretty much everyone uses UTF-8 (Unicode Transformation Format) because when exchanging data between computers or programs everyone must use the same encoding to get readable results.
This also means that unicode must (try to) support pretty much everything any human could ever want to write, which means it includes many things like mathematical symbols, special symbols for just about every language, emoji, combining characters that modify other characters, a variety of spaces, box drawing symbols, control characters for eg. text direction, …
2) Which is actually somewhat complicated. Unicode assigns each symbol a number, but then the text (sequence of symbols) needs to be converted into a sequence of bytes. This is done via the Unicode Transformation Format, which actually results in different characters needing differently many bytes to store.
Also, certain emoji (flags, anything with skin colors or gender, emoji depicting multiple people) are actually multiple characters that get squished into one symbol when rendered.
3) There actually exist three. The above, a version with cloth (𓂹) and one with emission (𓂺).
Also the unicode standard defines words like character, symbol, glyph, … to have exact meanings, I used the interchangeably here.
this made me have a complete meltdown with delight as I went from “bwahahaha penis sign lol lmao” to “wait if hieroglyphs are unicode there must be an oryx one” and THERE IS!
look at it! 𓃲
𓃲𓃲𓃲𓃲 <- herd!
and the newborn hartebeest!!! 𓃛
frog! horned viper! CREATURES! I’m so happy! I’m gonna be so insufferable with this!
it’s kinda crazy. you can use these like more detailed emojis, or even make whole stories without using a single letter. here’s an example:
