delimeful

[delimeful]

USA people! Buy NOTHING Feb 28 2025. Not anything. 24 hours. No spending. Buy the day before or after but nothing. NOTHING. February 28 2025. Not gas. Not milk. Not something on a gaming app. Not a penny spent. (Only option in a crisis is local small mom and pop. Nothing. Else.) Promise me. Commit. 1 day. 1 day to scare the shit out of them that they don't get to follow the bullshit executive orders. They don't get to be cowards. If they do, it costs. It costs.

Then, if you can join me for Phase 2. March 7 2025 thtough March 14 2025? No Amazon. None. 1 week. No orders. Not a single item. Not one ebook. Nothing. 1 week. Just 1.

If you live outside the USA boycott US products on February 28 2025 and stand in solidarity with us and also join us for the week of no Amazon.

Are you with me?

Spread the word.

[delimeful]

not always what they seem (6)

warnings: poor decision-making, graphic panic attacks, lack of communication, guilt, fear, angst

��

With a sinking feeling, Logan watched the most easily-agitated of their guests continue on into the next testing area alone.

It was a breach of conduct to hope for certain results while performing an experiment, primarily because objectivity was vital if one wanted to produce genuine analytic results, but in this case, he found he couldn’t help the urge to wish that either of the others had ventured forward first.

The test itself was a relatively simple one: the chambers in this area were a series of identical rooms, as in the last, with sensitive motion trackers embedded in the flooring. In the previous area, the rooms had been temperature-controlled, so they could see which room their guests would seek out as ideal. There had been more mixed results than expected, but in a case like this, any data was good data.

In this area, each room had a different level of lighting, a spectrum ranging from bright enough that some exclusively-nocturnal species would struggle to see, to dark enough that most diurnal species wouldn’t be able to make anything out.

It was one of the simpler tests, with little to actively fear. Virgil had already begun investigating it with far more initiative than they’d shown in the maze before, their ever present hunched shoulders even beginning to slowly ease down as they went. Clearly, the presence of the other two beings and the harmless precedent set by the previous areas was helping settle their persistent wariness.

(A fact which only made Logan feel worse about what they would have to do next.)

Virgil headed directly for the lighter side of the area at first, frequently casting glances back toward the more shadowed areas, a mannerism that made Logan wonder if they had a surplus of natural predators on their native planet. They spotted the only item of note in the first room immediately, providing substantial evidence to support Patton’s proposal that their guests had strong visual abilities, and approached it slowly.

Seeing as they had refused to do even that much in Logan’s maze, this was heartening progress.

A flat dish segmented into two halves sat on a small stool in the corner of the room, and on top of that dish rested a simple nutrient tab and an orb made up of colorful pieces.

Virgil didn’t spare the nutrient tab much more than a glance, but after a prolonged moment of direct staring, they dared to reached out and swipe the puzzle sphere off the dish, immediately skipping back a few steps and craning their neck to look up at the semi-transparent ceiling.

(The opaque coating on the material was one-sided, so they could watch the results directly without perturbing the subjects by looming over them. In theory, anyhow. Virgil’s vision must have indeed been strong, or at least highly cued to motion, for them to have already noticed the muted shadows of Logan and his research partners through the roof.)

Virgil seemed to be waiting for some sort of severe repercussion for touching the puzzle sphere, as though they expected one of them to swoop down and grab the item from their hands— or even grab Virgil themself. None of them had so much as twitched, aware that even the simplest movements had been known to startle their most skittish guest.

After an exceedingly long pause, Virgil’s tense posture dropped away, and they spent a few moments inspecting the puzzle sphere with enough intensity that they even forgot to check over their shoulder for the duration. Despite being a few levels more complex than the treat ball Logan used in his maze— these were sapient beings, after all— it didn’t take Virgil long to align the pieces properly and thus solve the puzzle, allowing the sphere to pop open and reveal their prize: a dark shining stone.

They had all agreed on shiny prizes, seeing how glinting items had often subtly caught the attention of the tiny aliens. Patton had been concerned about the likelihood of them mistaking something inedible for food, so they had switched from polished mineral marbles to valt stones with a reflective sucrose coating applied to them. Valt stones dissolved in medium heat, so even if Virgil did manage to eat one, the stone would gradually crumble away based on the temperature readings Roman had taken.

It seemed maybe they’d been overly-proactive; Virgil flipped the stone in their hands a few times, drew it close to inspect it, but didn’t so much as smell it, let alone put it in their mouth. After a moment of this, they dropped the stone into the pocket of their leg garment.

They all shared an excited glance: positive engagement!

Virgil perked up further when they ventured into the next room and saw the same set up, only slightly altered: the stool and dish were set in a different corner, and the puzzle was a different shape. They didn’t seem nearly as wary this time, and settled into a routine of locating the dish and walking up to it, picking up the puzzle, and using deft fingers to fiddle with it until they got to the small prize inside.

The only sign that the brightest room gave them any trouble was the slight squint they took on, though the light evidently wasn’t perturbing enough to make them take the puzzle into a different room. That was a good sign; it meant that the odds of causing damage to their guests’ eyes with ray-based scans were low, and many of those scans were invaluable for determining physical makeup.

When it came to the dark rooms, Virgil moved slower, and took slightly longer to scout out the location of the dish each time. In the last three rooms, they took the puzzles to one of the lighter rooms to solve it, helpfully confirming Logan’s theory that they were focusing on the color-matching element of the puzzles rather than matching the tactile symbols on the pieces. In the last room, it was extremely likely that they couldn’t see anything at all, as they moved extremely slowly and searched the room through touch, making a circuit around to each corner and then walking back and forth until they gently bumped into the stool.

These results seemed to indicate that their guests could operate in a wide range of different lighting, but had a considerably easier time navigating in the rooms set to daytime-lighting. They also indicated that Virgil, at least, could see a fairly large scope of color, as it was only on the two most color-complex puzzles that they resorted to using the other available senses to solve them.

The test also indicated that they had no choice but to use the next chamber.

After all those rooms, Virgil still hadn’t touched a single nutrient tab, just as none of the three had done more than disinterestedly inspect the nutrient tabs Patton had left on the table with them in the past two cycles.

This wouldn’t have been unusual or particularly concerning if these had been normal specimens. Many fauna didn’t engage with the nutrient tabs, since they were tailored to be non-toxic to all lifeforms in this quadrant, and thus were admittedly rather bland and uninteresting. In that case, they would usually move on to performing more physical tests to discern what variety of foods were safe and tempting to the creature in question, and then provide those instead.

Things were obviously quite different when working with sapient aliens, especially ones who had refused all physical tests more intensive than touching a thermometer. They couldn’t effectively communicate with their guests yet, and they didn’t have time to dismantle that language barrier. It had already been a concerning amount of time since they’d been taken from the stasis of the specimen sects, and they had no idea how to identify or treat starvation.

It was probable that providing items more easily recognized as edible would solve the issue of their guests not eating, but without that testing, they didn’t know what would be poisonous to the small aliens. If they simply offered an array of foods, as they had the textiles, the chances of their guests having a bad or even fatal reaction to something were far too high. That was an unacceptable risk.

Logan had been the one to insist, in the end. No matter how ill-advised it was to ignore the boundaries of their guests, no matter how much he dreaded the idea of being responsible for the reappearance of that upset and frightened body language, he wasn’t willing to allow them to die through his inaction or lack of care.

He had already made a mistake with the three of them previously, letting panic drive him and ignoring their objections in favor of picking up Remus. If one of them had to become untrustworthy in their eyes, better that it was him.

Logan ignored the concerned glances of his research partners, watching grimly as Virgil pushed through the door to the next testing area.

—

Virgil was having a surprisingly okay time, considering the circumstances.

At first sight of the structure, he’d anticipated some kind of horrible alien death maze, full of sawblades and pit traps and possibly even a car-sized boulder that would squash them all flat.

Instead, it had been full of various rooms, not winding or confusing or particularly maze-like in any way, with items or environments for them to react to. He’d gotten a bit concerned about the puzzles, but really, there weren’t any real signs that pointed to this being a bizarre trial-by-fire or even a remotely competitive scenario, even by his paranoid standards.

There were doors between each distinct chamber, but none separating the rooms themselves, and all the chamber doors had remained open even after they’d split the party like idiots in a horror movie.

He tossed the last weird rock he’d earned in his palm, rubbing his thumb over the dull angles of it. Even knowing they were part of some weird alien plot, it had been surprisingly soothing to focus on those puzzles, probably because he could burn some of his nervous energy by fidgeting with them. Not that he’d say as much aloud; that sounded a little too ‘enthusiastic lab rat’ for him. No thank you.

There was probably plenty of data they were getting from each chamber, no matter how simple they seemed, but Virgil wasn’t really in the mood to try and puzzle it out. Dee was probably right about the aliens trying to squeeze as much relevant information from them as possible, but he couldn’t help but feel sort of apathetic on the matter. Sure, they could be using it to learn more about humanity for presumably nefarious purposes, but if they wanted more humans, couldn’t they just grab more humans? They certainly didn’t seem to have a problem nabbing the three of them.

Maybe he was just being stupid, too busy freaking out about their own lives to really think about the big picture or whatever, but it didn’t seem to add up. Like, if he’d found an anthill and wanted to get rid of it, he wouldn’t need to run experiments on the ants to learn more about them first. He’d only have to kick over the anthill.

If all the aliens wanted to do was get rid of them, why bother with all the tests? It had to be obvious by now that they didn’t have any sort of natural defenses that could stand against giant aliens, and their technological capabilities obviously outstripped humanity’s by far.

He wasn’t suggesting they were trustworthy or anything— there was a wide range of options between metaphorical ants and potential friends, after all. Even if their status was closer to ‘interesting lab specimens’ than ‘pests to annihilate’, they still weren’t guaranteed any sort of safety. It was just… something useful to think about whenever the overwhelming panic started to boil up in him.

It was a theory that Virgil immediately lost all faith in when the doors to the next chamber sealed behind him.

He whipped around, a jolt of ice spiking through his veins as he confirmed that yeah, that sliding noise absolutely had been the doors closing, he’d jinxed himself so hard, he was going to fucking die—

“Hey!” he snapped, the word coming out a little strangled on his first try. “Hey! No, no no no, open those back up! Dee! Remus!”

The doors weren’t entirely opaque; he could see through them well enough to tell that the doorways beyond remained clear of any silhouettes. One beat passed, and then another. The fear crept in quicker now, his breathing coming faster. “Guys! I’m serious, something’s happening! Dee!”

Still, nothing.

They wouldn’t just ignore him. Even if they were actually total assholes who didn’t care what happened to him like his brain was screaming, he’d spent enough time around them to know that Dee was nosy beyond belief, and Remus sought out danger like a moth flying into an oven. If they’d heard, they would have responded, one way or another.

So, they couldn’t hear him. That meant this was planned. The aliens wanted something with them— no, with him. They’d separated them, singled him out to get it.

Virgil stumbled hurriedly into a corner, bracing his back against it as he scanned the room, his gaze periodically flickering up to the gray ceiling above where he was sure he’d spotted a shadow of movement earlier.

The chamber itself was empty, with no visible doors other than the two on either side that had firmly locked him in. It was a single blank room, nothing on the floor or the walls, the only notable difference being the fact that it was apparently soundproofed.

It was quiet for long enough that he managed to wrangle his breathing back under control, the tension in him only ramping up as the uncertain moment stretched on and on and on.

And then, a click, and the ceiling was pulled away.

Virgil sank down into a crouch on sheer instinct, as though he could avoid whatever was coming simply by shying away from it. He’d thought the enclosed room was bad, but the sudden feeling of being completely exposed was somehow worse.

The panther alien— Logan— leaned into sight, uncanny eyes locking on him immediately, and Virgil hunkered down a little further.

“No,” he tried, not even sure what he was objecting to, other than everything about the situation. “Do you h-hear me? No.”

Logan’s ears flicked and angled backwards, eyes narrowing slightly, and an audible rumbling started up. Wow! Virgil hated everything about that, actually.

When the alien moved, reaching into the enclosure with one of those inhuman hands, the gesture was almost painstakingly slow. If it was an attempt to not frighten Virgil any further, it failed miserably; it only gave him more time to work himself into a proper panic.

He tried to duck away the moment that hand got close, obviously, but it only took a few tries before Logan seemed to lose their patience. The next grab was too quick to dodge, and Virgil couldn’t help the small shriek that burst from him the moment he was caught, primal terror overriding all rational thought. Logan jolted at the sound, but didn’t loosen their grip nearly enough for him to wiggle free.

“No!” he shouted desperately, but there was no point. Logan may have understood the word, but understanding didn’t mean listening. Virgil didn’t have the same dauntless charisma as Dee, the confidence to negotiate with giants that could choose to do anything they wanted.

His stomach dropped as he was lifted up, the restraining hand wrapped around him never faltering even as he cried out and tried to thrash free. The panic felt nearly blinding, and he barely registered the blur of the much larger room passing by as Logan carried him over to some new surface, presumably for some other strange test.

The moment there was a solid surface under his feet again, he instantly tried to push off of it and scramble free, but even now Logan didn’t release him. He only had a moment to feel oddly betrayed– had some part of him really thought this wouldn’t actually end horrifically?– before he was being repositioned and gently but firmly pressed against the surface, like a butterfly being spread over a pinboard.

Or a corpse set out for dissection.

“Fuckshit fuck, fuck you fuck you fuck you,” Virgil spat as viciously as he could, twisting his limbs ineffectively and frantically pushing against that impossible hold. “Let me go, don’t you fucking dare–!”

The rumbling grew louder, the slightest shake tangible in the hand pressing him down, and the alien shifted their hand slightly, enough for Virgil to see past it.

With their other hand, Logan was holding a narrow silver instrument in the air above him, its purpose indiscernible but its mere presence enough to make Virgil’s voice cut off sharply. His furious struggling died down to involuntary twitches, his wide eyes locked on the tool.

The alien was as unreadable as always, the tip of the tool drifting closer, and Virgil felt his mind go entirely blank with terror.

A high, thin whine split the air, like an animal caught in a trap. It took Virgil a long moment to realize the sound was coming from him.

“Please,” he tried hopelessly, the words barely taking shape. “No. Please no.”

—

This wasn’t working.

Even from an animal, this sort of mindless, terrified whimpering would have been reason enough to stop this procedure and look for alternative, less stressful methods. Knowing they were coming from a sapient being? Knowing that, translatable or not, Virgil had likely been reduced to begging for their life because of his actions?

Logan couldn’t do this.

—

The pressure on him abruptly vanished.

Virgil’s body reacted far quicker than his mind, a fresh surge of adrenaline tearing through him as he hauled himself upright and bolted. It didn’t matter which direction he picked, so long as he was getting away from the threat looming over him.

There were thin semi-transparent barriers set up on each side of the table, preventing him from getting too far and also from doing anything rash in his panic. He twisted to look behind him the moment he reached the furthest corner, half-expecting a massive hand to be hovering over him already, only waiting for him to pause so it could come swooping down–

The alien hadn’t reached forward at all. In fact, Logan looked further away, as though they’d taken a step or two back.

It took a few tense moments for Virgil to pay attention to anything beyond that distance, most of his focus going to keeping his heavy, gasping breaths from turning to outright hyperventilation. His gaze locked onto every small motion Logan was making, but it took several repetitions before he registered the meaning behind the gesture.

It was the same movement as the other one– Roman– had done after trying to separate him from Remus by grabbing him. Dee had hypothesized it was some kind of… apology.

“You should fucking be sorry,” Virgil muttered, still wheezing a little with every inhale. “Serve you right if I– if I keeled over just from– fuck.”

His voice died out as soon as Logan moved, his body flattening further against the barrier behind him as though he could somehow merge through it, but Logan was moving away, reaching towards something to the side.

After a few seconds of rifling, they returned with a thick disc-shaped object in hand. Virgil stared blankly, suspicious and bewildered in equal measure.

Logan seemed to glance over to check that he was watching, and then carefully lifted the disc to their mouth and emphatically sank their teeth into it like they were an excited kid taking a bite out of a cookie. Their lip curled up as they did so, giving Virgil a better look at those fangs than he’d ever particularly wanted, and then, after a long stretch of holding that position, they opened their mouth back up without actually tearing a chunk free from the disc.

Virgil frowned, almost too confused to be frightened, as Logan tilted the disc to show Virgil the clean imprint of teeth left in it. The alien set the disc aside, and then picked the silver tool back up, which set his heart racing anew.

Instead of reaching forward with it, however, Logan simply lowered the tool to the surface where Virgil had been pinned down minutes before, and set a small item down before retreating. Now that he was looking at it from a distance, the tool wasn’t sharp-edged at all, only having two narrow prongs at the end.

… Had he seriously had a panic attack over the outer space equivalent of tweezers?

The embarrassment was powerful enough that he managed to force himself to slowly edge forward, squinting at the item Logan had placed before him.

It looked just like the disc Logan had just bitten, only in miniature.

Oh. Oh.

Virgil was no genius, but even he could put the pieces together on this one.

With a few wary glances at Logan’s towering form, he slid closer and picked the disc up. There was a hard outer shell along the sides of it for him to grip, but the rest of it seemed to be made up of a thick, clay-like material. Not the sort of thing he’d usually put anywhere near his mouth, but… he looked up at Logan again, considering.

There was nothing stopping them from doing this against his will, earlier. Nothing but Virgil’s own protests, desperate enough that Logan had decided to try a different way. Maybe Dee had been onto something, when it came to compromising with these creatures.

Besides, it wasn’t like he was actually eating the stuff. Just… biting it. Eugh.

Pushing past his deep reluctance, Virgil bit down into the disc, jolting a little when he realized there was a flat pane of plastic-y material in the middle that kept him from biting through the whole thing. Really, it felt oddly similar to those mouthguards dentists made him wear while getting an x-ray of his teeth. Except squishier.

He forced himself to hold the weird disc thing in his mouth for what he thought was probably the same amount of time Logan had while demonstrating, and then unhooked his teeth from it with a grunt. Peering closely at the disc, he could see that the holes left behind were perfectly matched to the shape of his teeth.

It had to be some kind of plaster-mold-cast thing, but Virgil had never been all that into ceramics, and so he didn’t have the foggiest idea of what exactly Logan intended to do with a mold of his teeth. At this point, he didn’t even care.

The energy crash was beginning to hit, and so he barely even jumped when Logan reached down at him, only taking a few stumbling steps back and then holding the disc out as far from his body as he could manage.

To the alien’s credit, their touch was gentle enough that he barely registered it as they plucked the disc out of his grasp, the palm-sized disc looking comically tiny between those massive fingers. The rumbling had started back up again. Maybe it wasn’t a displeased sound, after all. Cats purred soothingly, didn’t they?

Logan immediately moved away, presumably to do mysterious alien scientist things to the disc. Virgil spat a few times, trying to get the faint aftertaste out of his mouth, and sat down heavily. His whole body was still shaking like a leaf in the wind, but this sort of wrung-out jittering was vastly preferable to the frantic, burning terror of before.

He’d managed some kind of communication, for what it was worth. He hadn’t died, despite all expectations to the contrary. It had been a horrible experience, but at least he’d managed to figure out what was going on in time to prevent any actual heart attacks.

One thing was for certain: the minute he reunited with the others, he was putting a permanent ban on splitting up in weird mystery mazes. This little excursion had been more than enough for him.

[delimeful]

Feeling incredibly sick and angry about everything. I’ll go about my day and try to be normal and then it just ambushes me and honestly the only people keeping me sane rn are the Arabs who’ve voiced similar experiences and are staying the course and being vocal despite all the attempts to basically blame everything that’s wrong with this country on us

[delimeful]

Help Lina's family get through this week

Can you guess much it costs to survive a week in Gaza?

On Lina's (@linsaif) request, I'm making a new post breaking down her weekly costs, so people hopefully have a better understanding of what Palestinians are going through and require to survive.

Here's what Lina needs to purchase each week:

🍞 A 25kg bag of flour: 80 euros

🐣 Diapers: 60 euros

🍼 3 cartons of milk: 60 euros

🍅 Vegetables when available, and other supplies: 100 euros

💧 Water (for drinking, cleaning, and hygiene): 80 euros

= 380 euros per week for a threadbare existence for a family of four.

Except even just withdrawing money comes with a 30% fee.

Covering the fee, that brings us to 494€ per week. Now you see why Lina has been asking for 500€ short-term goals.

Lately, donations have slowed to a crawl. Lina is forgoing all other necessities in order to afford milk and diapers for her 9 month-old daughter, Sidra, who is suffering from severe diaper rash.

But good news! 🌻 Lina says Sidra's skin has begun healing thanks to your previous donations. Here she is with the diapers and milk that were bought with your generous help.

But please, don't let her healing come at the cost of the rest of the family being able to eat.

You've already done a lot of good for Lina and her family.

Can we get her family through this week?

Current date: November 11, 2024

0/500€

✅ Lina's vetting information here.

📝 Previous campaign details and posts here.

☕ For those without 5€ to spare, you can support Lina's family for the price of a coffee on ko-fi (organized by @cygnettes).

[delimeful]

I was wondering, do you ever play around in any of the worlds you've created without planning to write a story about it? Like imagining what-ifs or imagining if you were in that world? I've been really into the humans are space orcs stories lately and I have certain fantasies in those worlds I've been daydreaming for the past months. But even when I imagine a completely different backstory for them, I recently realized I usually imagine the races you described in WIBAR and YCGB and other alien fics. Still daydream of sanders sides characters a lot and now Ampen and Ulgorii just live in my brain as character concepts lol

it's hard to say that i play around without planning to write about it, because most of the time, if i roll an idea or concept for a story around in my head for long enough, i inevitably end up wanting to put it to words properly :'D but i certainly do like to imagine or daydream about my worlds so often that there's plenty that doesn't make it to my published stories

for "what-ifs" i even have a folder that's mostly a collection of spin offs/alternate POVs of some of my AUs! here's the placeholder titles of a handful of them, ranging from extreme silly to extreme angst lol

when it comes to humans are space orcs stories, i do love to play around with the setting + characters i already have (as my biggest universe, wibar has SO MANY of the aforementioned spin off/AU ideas) but i also love to come up with new alien designs + fun ways the designs can be juxtaposed with human deathworlder stuff, so i often end up branching out and making something new! i'm flattered that my designs have joined your imaginings though :D

as for lime in the wibar-verse... i've speculated on it a few times, and atm i think my wibarsona would probably be not a human, but a crav'on! spiky lime :) i have seen some very cute art/writing/speculation with other people's self inserts, mostly as humans, and i think it's so fun that others are playing in my sandbox too! ^_^

[delimeful]

Hi everyone, Mohammed reached out to me to share his fundraiser for his family. They are extremely close to meeting their goal! if the next 400 people reading this donated €10 ($10 USD) right now, their fundraiser would be complete!

This is a vetted fundraiser (row 178, entry 174). Please share and donate to help Mohammed and his family. they just had another child and need the funds to take care of their newborn baby. You can see more of Mohammed and his family’s story here on his blog @mohammedalanqar

[delimeful]

Attention Pennsylvania voters!

Senator Bob Casey’s race is now at a margin of 0.53%.

An automatic recount in PA is triggered with a margin of 0.5%. That’s a difference of 0.03% or a little over 2,000 votes. We need to make sure every ballot is counted here, and there’s thousands of uncounted ballots right now due to voter error.

Did you mail in a ballot? Check to see it was accepted here:

If it says anything other than accepted/counted/etc, your ballot needs your attention. A mistake in filling it out means that your ballot will not count unless you “cure” it. Check your county’s curing policies:

See full instructions for curing by county here.

You have until November 12 to cure your ballot in PA.

Do you know someone who mailed in a PA ballot? Please pass these links on to them. You may be the difference between their vote counting or not in a super close race.

Everyone else, you can help PA voters cure their ballots. If you live in Pennsylvania, you can help canvass in your county (see links in this thread). If you are in another state, you can sign up to call voters and help them cure by phone.

Want to help another state? Sign up for a shift through November 19.

[delimeful]

been sitting on this one for a WHILE

[delimeful]

i need everyone to know that community is what will save us all in every single way imaginable. you forming a bond with your neighbour or coworker might help them move house or feel less alone or have the courage to leave an unhealthy living environment. you helping a stranger might provide them with hope. in turn, being able to lean on your community in times of need will save you. your broader bonds with your community are the revolution we need. our society seeks to divide and separate us in so many ways but we are all so much more united in our struggles and joys than you are made to believe. we need to hold onto each other very tightly.

[delimeful]

Ada Limón, “To Be Made Whole”, On Being with Krista Tippett

[delimeful]

THOUGHT GAINED: INFERNAL ENGINES

PROBLEM

The world is ending. You know it, your neighbor knows it, the dealer knows it, the jailer knows it, the king and all his men know it. All one has to do is look around to see it— the future is curdling into something pale and incorporeal. The infernal machine that is this stupid world is going to blow, sooner rather than later. So what are you doing? Why are you still here? Why is anyone still here?

SOLUTION

You are doing the only thing worth doing. You are living. *Why,* you ask? Try and remember now. Remember your mother’s hand on your shoulder. Remember the taste of a fresh catch. Remember the times when you were kind to the dogs in the valley and they did not bare their teeth. Remember the weight of a child on your shoulders. Remember the stars throwing their light against the wall of sodium and smog. Remember singing until your throat was raw. Remember crying just as loudly and publicly, and the gentleness with which someone opened your curled fist and pressed a handkerchief into your palm. Crying, laughing, running, eating, screaming, haunting, loving, fighting, fighting, fighting. The fight fuels you, and you fuel the fight. You run yourself ragged just for a chance to keep running. You never stop. You cannot stop. The world depends on it. *You* are the infernal engine. You are the world. And, simply put: you want to live.

[delimeful]

[Video Description: A video of a pangolin rolling around in thick, clay-like mud. It is visibly covered in the mud from head to tail, and is thrashing about with significant enthusiasm. End VD.]

oh to be a pangolin squirming around in the sludge 🥺🥺🥺 this would fix me

[delimeful]

baby pangolins look like an adorable creature someone made up for a fantasy/sci-fi series. just a sweet polite little alien type of beast wearing a nice little scalemail outfit

[delimeful]

just remembered you exist!! really enjoying rereading some of your works. particularly your little dragon anxiety series but a lot of them really helped me get though the height of pandemic isolation and all the misery that was the early 2020s. honestly it's surprising that I haven't actually thought of you in a bit- your WIBAR series guys are still one in my rotating cast of "imagine if these characters listened to this song" pretty frequently. I didn't bother to check when it was posted so I don't know how long it's been but since I read it the tiny dragon series has gotten a new chapter, and it made me so so happy to read it!!! honestly, this is just a bit of a ramble, but I really just want to say that you and your work have changed me for the better. you made some of the shittiest years of my life a bit less shitty, and I'm pretty sure you were one of the people who inspired me to actually start writing and stick to stories. I wish you the best in every aspect of my life <333

there's nothing that makes me happier than learning that my stories could help inspire others to create their own :'') i'm glad my work could help you find enjoyment and solace both during difficult times. that's what stories are for, after all! :)

[delimeful]

Its been a long time but I remembered them recently. Do you think Spider anon and Cheesy anon ever found eachother?

man, i hope so, anon. those two had pickup line dedication like no other. match made in ridiculous joke heaven :P

[delimeful]

Omg new chapter! Thank you! Can't wait to read it (but I might keep it preciously for when I'm cosy in my bed tonight). I'm sure it's gonna be amazing. Also, I hope things are okay for you, and you don't feel pressured to update, we're happy when you do but not at the cost of your wellbeing, it's prefectly normal to be busy with other things and to take your time. Anyway I just wanted to say I love your writing, and thanks for everything you've shared and everything you will share in the future :)

i'm honored to be the chosen bedtime story for you anon :) thank you for sending in such a sweet message. can't wait to write even more!

[delimeful]

Not to tell you what to do. But I'd block the anon. If they cant not be a jerk than they dont deserve any of your time with their complaints and moaning. Im sorry you have to deal with people like that.

To my knowledge you can block people on their asks and it will get their ip address blocked.

thank you, i appreciate the advice! /gen

i typically avoid blocking people because 1. i have hopes we can work things out by talking and 2. i've had some people go to pretty extreme lengths to block evade in the past, but you've got a point. at this stage, i have to admit: i've wasted a lot of time and energy trying to explain to someone who clearly doesn't care what i have to say :')

i think i'm going to turn my anon asks off for a little bit, since i imagine the original asker isn't going to be brave enough to send asks with a public blog. if i keep getting asks like that when i turn anon back on, i'll just go ahead and use that block function.

i do wanna take the chance to say thank you to everyone who has sent me such helpful, kind, and encouraging asks in the past week, anon or not! i've got some queue'd up and some saved so i can see them when i feel down, and they all made me feel really grateful to have so many people who respect and uplift writers in my community :''')