Inspired by framed insect collections, this collaborative project by Coey Kuhn and Shy Custis draws on occult themes for a series of pins suitable for wear or display.
With cohesive motifs and colors across the series, you can mix and match pins into your ideal arrangements for framing, or into fitting combinations to wear with the day’s outfit.
This series includes specialty additions like stone inlays, collar chains, and moving parts. Pledge now to help fund our first two sets, share with others to help unlock the rest!
For logistical reasons, pins are only available in sets through this campaign; all unlocked pins will be available individually on our shop after being funded, however at higher prices without the same set discounts.
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THANK YOU EVERYONE! Shy and I have been just blown away by your support and responses. We’re thrilled you’re as excited about this project as we are to make it! We’re so happy that all 6 goals have been met and are in talks about other future ones. Until then- enjoy the new sets!
i was playing pokemon blue on stream earlier at 350% speed and i got to thinking
what if the reason nobody in the pokemon world has any good teams is because its considered a dick move to have a proper team comp
like culturally everyone is like “haha pick the pokemon you want! if you’re happy with three geodudes, thats you and your life!” and then you’re supposed to just have a friendly battle with any other pokemon trainers and whatever pokemon they just happen to have
like the average trainer is probably just walking around with a growlithe because that’s their pet, or a hiker has three geodudes because the geodudes help him with hiking. and if this pet owner and geodude hiker meet, you’re supposed to have a friendly battle but nothing too serious
now imagine the 10 year old kid that has six pokeballs on their belt comes up. you’re like “haha, we’ll have a friendly battle!” and you throw out your geodude
and they throw out a fucking gyarados, and it one-shots your geodude
and then you throw out your pidgey you have because the pidgey helps you navigate mountains because you’re a hiker
and then electricity crackles around the gyarados and a thunderbolt flies off of this giant dragon and evaporates your pidgey
so you’re down to your last pokemon. you tell them you’re gonna send out your bulbasaur. the ten year old is like “oh okay in that case i’m gonna pull out my vulpix.” like not only is this kid walking around with an amped-up super dragon, but theyve also got multiple pokemon specifically for making type advantage counter-picks?
this kid’s a fucking asshole! really, kid? what are you trying to prove here? this is a friendly match between strangers for fun! why are you composing real-ass competitive teams? what a fucker!
i mean if you look at how npc’s talk about their pokemon, they’re service animals mostly. some of them are just pets. apparently they really enjoy sparring, so you let them battle other people’s pokemon for socialization, it’s like going to the dog park.
hell yes i’d be mad if i took my chronic pain support chow-chow to the dog park and some asshole with four rottweilers and a husky was like SIC EM THUNDERNUTS even if my dog enjoyed the tussle at first.
look, kid, the paras helps me weed the garden. it’s not a special forces attack paras. it’s just a bug that eats dandelions. please calm down.
this may be really nitpicky BUT I am listening to Solas speak about Elvhenan and he pronounces “Arlathan” as “Arla - than” which differs from how most modern elves say it as “Ar - lAth-an”
The interesting part of this is that these pronunciations could be linguistically distinct, as in they have different meanings.
“Arla” is canonically “trap” as in “Elgar’arla” - a spirit trap, where “Elgar” means “spirit.
“an” is a suffix to indicate location, and it is the same in both pronunciations (the /th/ in the first pronunciation could be written off as a linguistic insertion rule to separate two /a/ sounds from each other, but I digress).
So by how Solas pronounces it, with distinguishing between “Arla” and “than” we can translate “Arlathan” to mean something like “Trapped Place” or “Place of Traps” or “Place where there are Traps”. This makes sense considering Elvhenan’s history of slavery and ALSO the lore that says Arlathan was sunk under ground - it is literally trapped.
Here is where it gets interesting.
“Ar” is a first person pronoun, meaning “I” or “me”
“lath” means “love”
In the second pronunciation, we can say that “Ar-lAth-an” mean “Place I love” or “I love this place”, or perhaps even “The place where I love”.
Two very very different translations then! And an indication of how just a simple pronunciation can completely warp the concept of something. The first translation gives Arlathan an ominous feel, potentially even sinister, but the second is more loving and whimsical. Language actively shapes our perspectives, and so it would be no surprise then to see the Dalish have a romanticized idea of Arlathan and subsequently Elvhenan (in addition to the passage of time, being removed from it, and so forth).
Now this isn’t to say this is just a result of VA preference and interpretation *shrug* it could be coincidence. I could be reading into things, but it is a neat little thing to possibly consider. This is mostly to consider the interesting possible ambiguity and double meaning Arlathan’s name may have. This is by no means a perfect or even correct analysis. Mostly just a thought.
Also, I heavily sampled the wiki if you want a reference.
What’s even more interesting is that Arlathan might be the Black/Golden City in the Fade. If the theory “the Evanuris are trapped in the Black City together with the Blight” is true, then Solas’ pronunciation implies that Arlathan is literally the “Place of Trap”, “A Trapped Place”, because that’s where the Evanuris and the first Taint that threatened the world are locked away. That’s where they are trapped in.
We know for sure that there are some ancient elven ruins in the Forest of Arlathan: Tevinter claims that they sank the city underground using blood magic and powerful spells after conquering it, but we know that Elvhenan was already lost when the humans came, that the elves fought against each other in a bloody civil war caused by the absence of their gods and their new, disarming, weakened condition and magic.
So it’s probable that Imperium merely feasted on what remained of Arlathan and later came up with sly propaganda to show how powerful and mighty their empire was. The ruins found in the Forest of Arlathan are probably just a minor part of the city or the most external parts of it and the main, most important part of it might be what’s been floating in the Fade since the creation of the Veil.
It’s also not secret that the depiction of the Black City we can find in Solas’ frescoes and other pictures is very similar to elven architecture and the mosaics on the floor of elven temples that depict Arlathan.
youre gonna sit here and tell me sakura haruno, a type-a pre-med gym rat aries who punches really good, is anything other than a lesbian? i have to laugh
