alchemicalterror

[alchemicalterror]

Idk if anyone has asked this before… but like… The Joker has his gas that makes people laugh, right? What would happen if you were to, say, mix his gas with yours? 👀 Hypothetically... For science, you know...

Had. Past tense. He died quite a while ago, and took that formula with him to the grave.

So hypothetically speaking, I guess science will never know.

[alchemicalterror]

Get those last minute votes in while you can.

i have a hard time believing you were ever married i mean you run a tumblr blog

....Uh-huh. Right. Hey folks, social experiment time:

[alchemicalterror]

How do you feel about FNAF? I personally think that the fact that you can't move anything other than your head, and thus can't run away, is an interesting concept for a horror game. Makes it scarier, I guess. hor hor hor hor hor... :3

Five Nights at Freddies 1 was released August 8th, 2014. This blog is set in, roughly, 2002-ish. It doesn't exist yet for him to form an opinion on. - Scary Mod

[alchemicalterror]

Don't know if this got asked already (I tend to mostly look at the art on here due to reading attention issues) but what made fear your muse as opposed to similar primal feelings like anger or lust? Was there something specific about it that sets it apart from the rest of the emotional experience spectrum? (feel free to just link to the explanation if it already exists, sorry to bother if so)

I have answered it before, yes, but if reading makes your head spin, I can make it nice and simple:

Everything you want is on the other side of fear.

To give a more nuanced answer, however.... See below.

Fear is one of the two fundamental emotions of the human soul, the two driving forces that compels us to do anything, the other being love. Anger, hatred, despair, joy, all the more complicated emotional states of humanity boil down into being some combination of Love and Fear.

Folks generally have a bad relationship with their fear response, however. They malign it, and don't see it as the survival tool that it is, and when it is ignored, pushed away, and wrongfully indulged, it becomes bad coping mechanisms and neurotic, knee-jerk behaviors instead of a tool with which we measure our lives and our place within it.

Fear, when appropriately weighed against other things, can make sure that we are safe, we are happy, and we are where we want to be - and it will tell us what is too valuable to lose, what we will fight tooth and nail for.

If I can help folks become comfortable with their fear, sit with it, come to understand it as the foundational emotion that it is... I think we'll all be better for it, collectively.

Just because something scares you, doesn't mean you need to lash out. It means it oughta be examined. Fear isn't something we, as people need to avoid; but it is something that we should strive to better comprehend, because growing comfortable with discomfort allows us to push ourselves to reach for things that we might not have found possible, otherwise.

[alchemicalterror]

Hey. Your brain needs to de-frag. Literally it needs you to sit there and space out.

If you want your memory or executive function to improve, stare out a window at the skyline or sidewalk or trees or birds on the electrical wires for like 20+ minutes per day. (With no other stimulation like a podcast or TV if you can manage but hey baby steps innit). If you're fortunate enough to have safe outside with any bits of nature, go stare closely at a 1 meter square of grass and trip out on the bugs and shapes of grasses and stuff.

Literally this will make you smarter. Our brains HAVE TO HAVE this zone out time to do important stuff behind the scenes. This does not happen during sleep, it's something else.

That weird pressurized feeling you get sometimes might be your brain on no defrag.

Give your brain a Daily Dose Of De-Frag.

[alchemicalterror]

Are there any rogues you’d like to get to know better?

Nope. I know too much about these people as is. Fuck 'em.

[alchemicalterror]

Hi Dr. Crane :D! I hope you're having a lovely day, and that your work is going well! I'd like some advice, if you don't mind. I'm graduating high school this year, and I'm really scared. I don't feel like I'm ready to grow up yet :(. I did get accepted in the program I applied to for university, but I'm worried I made the wrong choice, and that I'll regret it forever (i'm a professional in catastrophizing). Help T^T!

You're not gonna magically become an adult because you got a high school diploma, calm down. You're still a goddamn teenager.

I know the whole world makes it seem like whatever you do next is gonna dictate the path of the rest of your life, but it really doesn't. You can change majors, change colleges, change your mind. The important shit to learn in the coming years is less what happens in the classroom and more what happens in the time surrounding it:

How to manage your time. How to feed yourself, how to balance a budget, how to manage impulse control, how to socialize without the safety net of having the shared culture of a hometown to fall back on. How to cope with failure and keep moving.

In five years you're gonna barely be in your twenties, and most folks live to be in their seventies. There ain't no such thing as making a wrong choice when you're eighteen, this is the time of your life to fuck up, that's what being eighteen is for.

I'm serious about this. Make wrong decisions, learn from them, it's important. Wrong decisions are how you find out what you actually want and what you actually find important in life.

Still; congratulations on graduating, I'm proud of you. Go on and enjoy the freedom to be stupid while it lasts, kid, you're gonna be fine.

[alchemicalterror]

You mentioned casually dating.

Well casually doesn't automatic mean no romantism

Please indulge this hopeless romantic and tell us what kind of things you do.

Fancy dinners/ casual dinners?

Buying flowers?

Sweet messages?

Well.

Normally I'd sit on this one til St. Valentine's, but given the poll I've got running at the moment, it seems... topical.

I'm big on hand-made gifts, pretty much across the board. I make custom perfumes and colognes, as well as carve fancy candles for folks - the candles go out to friends, too, not just partners, but scents are a romance-only kinda deal.

Beyond that, it tends to depend on the person in question. I ain't gonna give an exhaustive list, but just for a couple examples....

B ain't one for showy overtures, she's a lady who likes good conversations and good meals, and so I'll have her around and cook for her from time to time. She works in food service, and it's nice to take the onus of her having to cater for others off her shoulders a while, let her feel cared for, for a change. Lotta foot rubs and bath salts.

P on the other hand is a lady of style, of culture, well-traveled and fashionable, who loves to see new things and be seen. I take her dancing, to fancy shindigs uptown, I dress up in my nicest clothes and let her fuss over the details. She likes makin' plans, and I ain't gonna take that passion outta her hands. I can't travel much as she'd like to, but if she wants to put together some kinda fancy surprise for me, least I can do is try to keep up and be appreciative of all the work that goes into that. Glamorous as she is, you bet your nose I'm gonna be dressed to the nines any time we meet up; she deserves it.

I've already spoken a bit about how Kirk likes quieter expeditions away from the noise of the city, which I'm more than happy to indulge. I'm hardly a homebody, and especially when the weather's a bit warmer, I love an excuse to head out into the woods a while, and there's a romance to there bein' nobody around but you and a beau for miles, with not much to do but what needs doin' to keep up camp, to talk and watch the stars.

And then there's a lovely Dr. W, with whom I share a number of music and counterculture tastes, who I'll surprise with book signings for authors I know she loves, or invite to concerts when work's been a bit much for both of us. Glory knows being a medical professional is daunting work, and there ain't nothing to take your mind off it like reconnecting with things that let you forget you're anything but instinct, at least for a coupla hours. Music's great for that - the louder the better.

So on, and so forth. Romance lies not in the gestures themselves, but in what they mean to the people you're putting them on for. It's important that I know how to show my partners a good time, with care, forethought, and individual attention to their needs.

And goodness knows, I am a romantic at heart, so I take very special care to make sure I do just that. Hope that answers your question~

[alchemicalterror]

Frankly, doctor, I find your fashion sense inspiring.

It's the DILF shirt, ain't it?

...Ghoul still won't tell me what it ostensibly means.

[alchemicalterror]

Hello dear Doctor Jonathan Crane!

I am enamored by you, absolutelly head over heels in love, not pursuing you, it's more so admiration, so much adimiration it makes me giddy, and I would like to show that in some way, sorry, you probably get this a lot, but yeah, so uh, just telling you that so you know :)

Bye bye ~♡

— 🔅

Awww, a genuine compliment ain't ever gonna go awry, child, I appreciate the kind words. It's surprisingly rare I get any kind of straightforward fan mail, actually.

I appreciate you bein' so polite about it, too. I'm glad I can be some sorta inspiration to you, in my way.

[alchemicalterror]

Literally though when we’re you married who married the scarecrow

Y'all are really stuck on this today, huh? Look.

I've been over this before. It is not my favorite topic, so I ain't gonna get into it at length.

But the short version was; I was not always 'The Scarecrow, man who robs chemical repositories and raids industrial complexes of for raw materials to further his research'. I was not always a man pushing fifty, with two young adults under my roof to look after and do right by. I was not always running this quaint little social experiment on the internet, just to see what all y'all do with it.

I was once a young man. I was once the valedictorian of my high school, undergraduate and graduate programs, PHD candidacy and a doctor three times over, fought over by people dyin' to throw money at me to see my ideas take shape in reality. I was once no one of particular infamy, notoriety, or media acclaim, unless you happened to be in very specific academic circles.

I was once twenty-nine years old and, dare I brag for half a minute, a catch. And I was once married.

You can read about it, and most other things, in the questions folks have asked before.

I do admit, I find it very funny that 'running a blog' is apparently the thing that makes my past marriage hard to believe rather than, you know. The whole criminal thing. That's what did it for her. Granted, I didn't have a blog back then - not sure this place existed back then, to be frank - so who knows. Maybe this'd have been unforgivable, too.

[alchemicalterror]

i have a hard time believing you were ever married i mean you run a tumblr blog

....Uh-huh. Right. Hey folks, social experiment time:

[alchemicalterror]

.....

Y'all really do just put any old thing on this blogging platform now-a-days, don't you?

I'm going to assume this is some kind of wishful thinking, rather than my ex sniffing around for alimony that was long since paid out, and who made it abundantly clear y'all didn't want me in your life anymore.

[alchemicalterror]

Always nice to know I managed to explain somethin' complicated in a way that's coherent; you are my litmus test for that, bein' one of the most broadly educated men I know, I appreciate the weigh-in.

And I agree. But so long as the kid doesn't go preventing his own existence somehow, I figure he'll be broadly fine, time's weird.

Wait shouldn't you be more worried about Ghoul NOT going back to the future? Don't you worry about the sacred timeline and all that? What if he meets his past self someday and the universe implodes?

So. Short version?

No.

Long version below:

So that line of thinking pays homage to the false idea that time is a straight shot of events that can be plotted on a graph or timeline in one unbroken, contiguous stream from beginning to end.

In reality, what we perceive as time only holds any sort of narrative flow or structure because we as people can only hope to glimpse it from a single perspective - our own - and because we are creatures hard wired to seek and internalize patterns to such a degree that we will invent them for our own comfort.

But just because we are able - through this fabricated self-delusion built off perspective re-enforced by a societal drive to tell stories and arrange events in a manner that suggests they are, in fact, sensible - does not mean that this is how time or reality actually work. Casuality is much more complicated than that, and existence as a whole much larger than can be summed up from a single person's understanding of it.

In truth, what we call time is less a single path of events strung one after another, or even something that could be represented by a conspiracy board of events, and is instead more akin to an entire bathtub's worth of glitter upended on enough fly-paper to wallpaper a bedroom with, roughly once per second, with each sparkling fleck being an entire cosmos' worth of concurrent experiences happening everywhere, to everyone and everything, across our universe, constantly.

Trying to worry overmuch about the shifts that one little change is going to make in that sea of chaos, and set the world's supposed narrative on a farcical 'wrong' path incorrectly attributes the possibility of a 'right' one, when in truth reality is just going to keep on reality-ing whether or not Ghoul lives out his life in the early aughts or pops back to when he came from. Weirder shit has, is, and will be happening all the damn time, and it ain't worth worrying about one stray speck of glitter.

S'pecially since I like this one.

But that's just a layman approaching the topic from the broad strokes of psychology and sociological profiling, and taking an educated stab at explaining something damn well outside my wheelhouse, I'd chase up Eddie for a more nuanced approach from a background better suited to this sort of discussion if it interests you.

[alchemicalterror]

[alchemicalterror]

How does the bathroom situation work in your house? Is it three men sharing one or do you have your own or?

Oh, it ain’t that bad. There’s one bath in the apartment, but like…

So, Ghoul wants to shave pretty much as soon as he gets up, right?

Meanwhile, I want coffee, so I’ll go start breakfast and a pot before I get to the whole grooming ordeal, so we don’t much have a collision.

Then I tend to be outta the house all day, so the boys sort their shit without me. My son usually ain’t even awake yet by the time I head out. Same thing happens at night, just in reverse, with the night owl getting final dibs.

(Ghoul’s a clean kid, even if my boy’s a bit more typically haphazard, and I tend to keep things clean when left to my own devices, so it’s fine. Ain’t come home to a disaster yet.)

[alchemicalterror]

Mixing sodium with potassium is crazy!