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.
the sea is the earth’s most haunted environment. the density of ghosts per square metre is unparalleled. every tide is a time machine. every whale song is a spirit box
im not sure how helpful or understandable this is, but these are some personal notes ive made when i draw heads at upper angles. feel free to try it out n see if it works for you, i hope it helps someone ;v;!
(also do note that the nose and how much it shows or hides the eye is very versatile and also depends on the character’s ethnicity so make sure to adjust it accordingly)
downside: going to have to include a picture of the Giza pyramids in the slides for the lecture upside: i get to give people a crash course in why perspective matters in two frames, because
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is such a funny sequence
i find most people who haven’t seen it in person don’t know that cairo is RIGHT THERE
I loved these perspectives so I took some of my own when I was in Cairo and yeah, they’re literally just. Right there. Pass em on your way to work, nbd
No, y'all don’t even understand.
There is literally a Pizza Hut across the street from the pyramids.
That Pizza Hut among other things is why Egyptologists laugh their asses off when we see another piece of media where the protagonists get “lost in the desert near the pyramids”, because it’s like… just turn around my dudes you’re only a seven min walk away from the nearest fastfood shop
Yall don’t know how much I adore all of this
@ everyone in the notes going “of COURSE they’re built near the city that just makes sense!!!”
Cairo being that close is a very modern thing on account of the settlement that eventually became Cairo not emerging until 641 AD. Cairo as Al-Qāhirah only exists since 969 AD. During ancient times, Men-nefer (Memphis, roughly 25km south of modern Cairo) would have been the city closest to Giza, but not cuddling up to the plateau the way modern Cairo is.
What the Giza Plateau was close to, however? The Nile.
That’s right my loves, the Nile did change its position in the 4500 years since the building of the pyramids.
The quarry that yielded the stone they were built with was also very close:
So those two things combined with the relative proximity of Memphis are a reason the pyramids were built where they are, rather than the proximity of modern Cairo (which is more because human settlements tend to spread).
This ties in nicely with the Diary of Merer (P.Wadi Jarf A&B) which details the movement of limestone blocks through the canals purpose built from the Red Sea to the Harbour of Khufu’s pyramid! Can’t have a harbour if there’s a big city next to it and not a river lmao
been struggling to draw lately so i went through some older stuff of mine and found this, only to realize i never posted it. i don’t imagine anybody’s still doing stuff for this weird social media-clan au thingy anymore, now that the meme of it has died down, but anybody’s free to these names for whatever uses they want, if they want them :)
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109 notes
12:17pm
May 19, 2023
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