Friday Art Attack

A synthwave cover art image, of course.  Synthwave is a kind of faux 80s movies (or even video game) soundtrack genre, that does sometimes include lyrics, at which point it shades into merely 80s nostalgia style synthpop.

It's important to put a lich up every week, I think.  I guess I must just have a lot of lich pictures.

I don't know what an eagle would be doing in such a dense forest, but I think the idea of a trained NE Coast indian falconer with a big, shaggy eagle is kinda fun anyway.

Some 4e Eberron art by WAR.  I don't actually know what that woman is doing; her pose is very bizarre and she looks too skinny to hold up that much hardware on her head without falling over.

I think if hot naked women crawled around at Devil's Postpile during the summer, tourism would probably increase.

Well, maybe not for families, of course.

The cover to the edition of A Princess of Mars that I first read.  There was also some Frazetta line art in that edition, and I will never, ever get the Frazetta inspired images out of my head when imaging John Carter, Dejah Thoris, the calots, the green men, or anything else.

Although in my mind Dejah Thoris is, of course, actually red.

Charge of the Night Brigade.

When we think of the Greeks we don't necessarily think of Egyptian imagery, but we have to remember that the Greeks really got around.  They had tons of cities in southern Italy and on Sicily, all along the Black Sea, the French and Spanish riviera (Marseilles is based on an old Greek name Massalia.)  In The Clash of the Titans from the 80s, Andromeda was presumably Greek, but she was from Joppa if you listen, and Joppa, which wasn't part of Greece in even a loose sense until after the founding of the post-Alexander Seleucid Empire, but was rather either Phoenician, Philistine, or Hebrew, depending on the time period.  In myth, she and her parents were actually white Aethiopians, which seems a contradiction in terms given that the Greek word Αἰθίοψ (Aithiops) actually means "burnt-face" presumably in reference to dark skin.  Although keep in mind that although we think of Africa as black today, the ancient world did not, and sub-Saharan black Africans were probably extraordinarily rarely ever seen by the Greeks or Romans, even when Egypt and North Africa were provinces of their empires.

Another lich, this time confronted by Elric himself, in this Michael Whelan piece.  The colors are a little pastel for my taste, but still; Michael Whelan.  C'mon.

I'm not quite sure what's going on here, but there seems to be some kind of technological overlay on the fantasy going on.  Sometimes I quite like that idea.

An alternate redesign of Darth Vader.

This is just a really cool fantasy landscape, but it could represent Rivendell quite well, actually.  Especially if you believe the quite probable theory that Rivendell was heavily inspired by Tolkien's own experiences hiking and backpacking in Lauterbrunnen, Switzerland when younger (in 1911), of which this could be a slightly fantasized up version.

Speaking of Tolkien, here's an image of Eowyn and the Witch-king.  As good technically and dramatically as this image is, however, I can't reconcile Eowyn looking as big and bulky as a man here.  If she isn't feminine and slight and attractive, then she doesn't work.  Tolkien describes her very tall, of course, but not as looking like a shot-putter or body-builder.

Eox was merely an intriguing and interesting footnote of sorts in the Pathfinder book Distant Worlds, it becomes a major setting element, however, of Starfinder.

Epicyon haydeni, the largest member of the dog family that ever existed (possibly not counting some extremely large breeds of domestic dog, of course.  The variability within that group is truly astounding.)  The largest known specimen weighed an estimated 375 lbs, although on average they would have been much smaller; well within large dog range.

Of course, this is the borophagine subfamily; a somewhat hyena-like bone-cracking family that was widespread before the advent of "modern" canids like the wolf, jackal, coyote, etc.

Demons are always fascinating, especially when they are both horrifying and sensual at the same time, right?

Someone (many someones, actually) decided that Boba Fett going out like a chump is really stupid, so here's n image of him escaping the sarlacc shortly after getting tossed in.

A phytosaur like Rutiodon attacking a silesaur like Eucoelophysis in the Chinle.  The name of the latter is ironic: "true Coelophysis" wasn't even (most likely) a dinosaur at all, much less a Coelophysis specimen.  Although we can't completely rule out the possibility that it was a primitive ornithischian instead of a silesaur.

A big hairy guy.  A werewolf?  A beastman?  A thurse? Up to you, I suppose.

(As an aside, I created the word thurse myself from Old English þyrs, but it turns out that it is actually a real word, and þyrs carried on into Middle English as thurse, thursse, thyrce, thurs, and thirs.  I was kinda trying to do what Tolkien himself had done with the word orc and make it sound like a native English word even though I had never seen it and only knew the Old English and Old Norse versions of the word.  And I'm not even a linguist!)

The word appears as is in Stephen Grundy's 2010 translation of Beowulf: "And yet he was also, though many generations separated them, distant cousin to the shining eoten-maid Geard, whom the god Frea Ing had seen from afar and wedded; and to Scatha, the fair daughter of the old thurse Theasa, who had claimed a husband from among the gods as weregild for her father's slaying: often, it was said, the ugliest eotens would sire the fairest maids."

Although I believe eoten should be modernized to ettin or etten.  See Joseph Jacobs collected English fairy tales, specifically "The Red Ettin." (Which is actually an Irish fairy tale, but it uses an old dialectical English word in it, of course.)

During the Eemian interglacial 125,000 years ago (another time that was warmer than today's temperature, you stupid climate alarmism cultists) the majority of Fennoscandia actually became separated from the mainland and was an island.  I don't know why, but I really love maps like this that show slightly alternate geographies based on what we believe the past was like as sea levels rose and fell.  Although generally I prefer the lower sea level interpretations where Great Britain was connected to the mainland and much of the North Sea shelf was the Doggerland and was full of big animals, hunters, and more.