Heat-Sensitive Mug Shows the Northern Lights When You Pour in Hot Liquid
It’s not hard to find a heat-changing mug that displays an impressive picture, but this design really reaches for the sky. ThinkGeek recently released a $15 mug that reveals the aurora borealis, the astronomical event often called the northern lights. When empty, the outside of the ceramic cup shows a blank night sky—but add a little coffee, and the mug brightens right up. The heat from your beverage causes a stream of vibrant green colors to appear along the container’s side. (Source)
Thank you for your loyalty, if you’ve been following me this long then you know when I’m recycling old answers/pics at this point :O … I aim to keep content as fresh as possible, and drag up the old stuff only if it’s a reeeeally good fit *u*
You have indeed been following me for almost 2 yrs! I love seeing familiar names in my Activity feed, and I ALSO have all the “X is now following you” messages (bc I am a little bit of a borderline hoarder)(in a good way), so here’s yours, from 5/31/14, the day you hit that Follow button and jumped into our trashpile improved your dash:
// An amazing writer, she can play just about anyone and always excels in bringing their voice to life. Especially with Spike, hell, he even sounds more like he ought to than on the show, given she’s actually English and knows how to use ‘bloody’ and other important words.
I’d recommend following her to anyone and everyone. Go play with her! Send her asks, start threads, plot stuff, she’s absolutely wonderful and always finds a way to make things work so it’s great for everyone involved. No ooc drama, just ic fun and quality entertainment here. New to tumblr RP like I am, but if you can persuade her to play with you, go do it!
Also, I can and could and have and will say about a billion more things, because apart from being a very talented writer and funny and sweet person, she also happens to be my girlfriend. So, yeah, people, she’s all that plus hot and mine. I’m so lucky.
//Okay, this needs to be answered OOC, because my Lestat would have to answer with my personal headcanon, b/c I think Mater is full of shit.
According to canon and Anne/Mater, her vampires do not experience sexual pleasure with their genitals. In QotD, Lestat calls his cock useless, claiming that it can no longer do what it was intended to, or some shit like that (I have a migraine and I’m not looking it up, but I’m sure @i-want-my-iwtv could give you the precise quote because she’s amazing).
Anne of course (typically) reneges on this when she wrote PL, creates a bunch of faulty science bullshit so that Lestat can jizz for science and create Viktor.
In fanon, it’s generally accepted that, yes, the vampires can have sex. There is some variation on this depending on what fic you are reading or who you are RPing with–but it’s generally agreed upon that vampire sex is 100% about the blood and sensuality, and that, even if they aren’t going to orgasm in the traditional sense, they are still going to get something pretty intense out of the entire situation.
There are some pretty amazing fics out there that make sense of all this, but since Vampire Chronicles fan fiction doesn’t technically exist, I can’t help you find them.
For my purposes, sure, Lestat has sex. Plenty of it. And it’s primarily about the blood. But there is also fun to be had with their bodies, and that’s more fun to write anyway, so there you have it.
ooc: ALL OF THIS. Also like… you can’t tell me that vampire sensation is 10x that of a human and expect me to believe that sensual touch does nothing for them. Maybe they can’t reach climax but that’s what the blood is for. Doesn’t mean sexual acts don’t work as amazing foreplay.
ooc: I’ve written about this before at some point I believe, but that’s very much my take on it too. Especially this: ‘you can’t tell me that vampire sensation is 10x that of a human and expect me to believe that sensual touch does nothing for them’
Hell yeah.
^Basically agreed with all 3 ppl here. Respect #Your headcanon may vary on this topic.
Canon doesn’t directly take on whether their dicks even work until the 3rd book, when Lestat says:
“I studied my reflection … and the organ, the organ we don’t need, poised as if ready for what it would never again know how to do or want to do, marble, a Priapus at a gate” – Lestat, Queen of the Damned
So I’ve discussed this topic at length in my tags for it: #asexuality, #asexual, #sex, #sexuality, #lets talk about sex. So check those out for more discussion on it. Ricean vampires still do feel sexual lust, it’s channeled through the experience of taking/sharing blood, and other sensually physical things.
In fanon there is a wide spectrum of whether they can have penetrative sex, some even speculate that their um… output… would be very bloody.
TL;DR: It all depends on your idea of what sex is. There are human couples who are unable (or do not want) to experience penetrative sex, and they can still be intimate with each other in other ways.
Claudia asks Louis about sex in IWTV, and he replies that it “‘…was something hurried…And… it was seldom savored… something acute that was quickly lost. I think that it was the pale shadow of killing.’”
He could have been lying a little to downplay it, so that she wouldn’t feel as bad for missing out on smtg she would never be able to experience, or maybe bc he truly felt that the experience of killing supercedes mortal intercourse. We don’t know bc #unreliable narrator.
ALL THAT SAID, if you prefer to take AR’s word as the gospel for canon, she has been definitive about it:
(there is a space here for no good reason thanks Tumblr!)
I think that reproductive obstacle (vampires are undead, they cannot carry a growing baby inside of dead flesh) is why Anne Rice made the choice that they could BE sexual, but not in a reproductive way.
All of that and I want to add my two cents
If we think about it, they are being “sexual” in a reproductive way. Their reproduction it’s done it by means of blood interchange, it’s the vampire’s way to carry on the species, so to speak. So for me, it makes perfect sense that their sexual act it’s precisely blood interchange as well.
Sex is for reproduction after all (from a biological point of view), intercourse is the human way and blood the vampire way. So sexual organs may not be involved for them, but that’s about as far as the difference has to go, I think. All the other aspects of sex that we add to it wouldn’t have to change or be excluded for them.
So I would say vampires do have sex, they just don’t need sexual organs to do it. And I might say that’s also why they don’t seem to mind genders at all.
// Coming in again, because why not? Not as if I added much the first time around.
Excellent points made by everyone so far! I just had some thoughts on sexual preference that occurred to me.
First off, as everything here, there’s no definite answer to any of this, it’s all up to how any individual interprets it or wants to play it out.
We all know that vampires can canonically find literally anyone attractive (how sexual that is is up for debate), especially when they are after their blood or while they are actually feeding from them. It seems to be impossible to drink someone’s blood without being intimate to some degree, even if the only intent is to kill them. Gender, looks, personality, everything seems to not really matter at that point.
So much for feeding. I think with sexual – or maybe romantic is a better word – preferences, vampires can have those same as humans have, they might just on the whole be more open-minded, in part maybe due to the different views and vision granted by the blood. And, obviously, many of them really discover that they don’t mind genders at all, if they haven’t already figured that out before they were turned.
As far as sexual organs go, I could see that while they are obviously not needed for the intended biological reason of reproduction, they are probably still sensitive spots when handled in pleasurable ways. Sex isn’t just about doing things that lead to climax after all, so for vampires every contact other than the actual blood exchange might well just be a kind of foreplay, but, hey. Foreplay is fun!
@perladivenezia: thank u for that addition, I meant “reproductive” in a mortal way, and you brought up a REALLY GREAT POINT, in how “reproductive” can be considered in a vampiric way.
@darknessmolten: “As far as sexual organs go, I could see that while they are obviously not needed for the intended biological reason of reproduction, they are probably still sensitive spots when handled in pleasurable ways.”
YES. That, plus everything else you added, very well-put.
For sure! He did come across as a lot less intelligent than he had proven himself in ALL of the prior VC up to that point, but there are legitimate reasons. Which I’m gonna lay out for you, under the cut, bc SPOILER ALERTS.
When you consider the larger picture: of the ocean of crap he’s waded through up until that point, we can’t just write him off as “crazy” or “dumb.“ He’s actually wounded in many ways, so his mind can’t be firing on all cylinders.
Not the least of which was the devastating betrayal of Louis and Marius, in their refusal to help him in his hour of need.
In IWTV he was an enigmatic tyrant, in TVL he partially corrected that by revealing his backstory and the vampire origin story and showed that he is a BAMF which means he CAN BE tyrannical sometimes,…
So if he comes across as such a disgusting moron, why share this story with us? Could be for the same reason he shared TVL: to correct the record, and to try to make some sense of it, get some closure, and maybe learn something from the experience as a whole. He’s sharing it with us so that maybe we can benefit, too, and as bizarre and as big a turn-off as it is, the very least you can take from it is the tried-and-true: “BE CAREFUL WHAT YOU WISH FOR – YOU JUST MIGHT GET IT”which seems to be a recurring theme for him, and in VC in general.
[Spoilers ahead…]
It’s in QOTD when we see him attempt to find himself a role in the modern era, that’s also when he appears to lose some of that quick wit we loved him for, as his new SJW GF wears him down, intending to destroy the fabric of society in the name of Extreme Social Justice. He can’t dissuade her from her plans, so he eventually just stops trying. He’s practically praying for Marius internally. She is manipulating him vigorously throughout their time together, keeping him sleep-deprived and physically addicted to her, arguing her philosophy irrationally, he’s constantly reminding the reader that he’s slipping, losing himself in her, he’s actually terrified into submission to her to the point where he doesn’t know where his loyalty lies when it finally comes down to choosingsides. He was not the one to save the day in that story. He watches passively as someone else does.
Akasha’s damage was done, a part of him has been crushed… it was a major blow to his sanity and his ability to be rational about things before leaping into action. In the beginning of TOBT he’s suffering already, haunted by his past. He is not healed emotionally, not in a position to make the kind of deal that he makes with RJ, and after that, he’s even less equipped, emotionally AND physically, to try to remedy the situation that HE CREATED.
The most devastating blow is probably when Louis and Marius both refuse to help him. At that point, he’s broken mentally from that betrayal, more physically weakened, and just grasping at straws to try to get things back to normal.
So is all that an excuse for the awful, terrible things he does in that story? Absolutely NOT. But you can see that he’s crippled in many ways, so his mind can’t be firing on all cylinders.
I’m trying to relearn to draw from references. I’m so bad at following a reference closely and this was somewhat of a failure on that front – it doesn’t look like the reference as closely as I wanted ;A;
Hello and thank you to my new watchers from EatSleepDraw! 😀 You guys are awesome.
I-want-my-IWTV 