#I apparently have very little ability to make myself write without a lot of external pressure

[girlscience]

Well, I went from 970 words to 1203 words and the order is better and a lot of editing was done (went up to ~1500 words for a bit and edited back down), but wow I can't focus for shit. This paper is still definitely not the quality it needs to be and for trying to work on it for about 9 hours today and only ending up here, I am honestly super disappointed with myself. I have never been the fastest writer, but this is abysmal. I will not make it through grad school if I can't write papers.

[whetstonefires]

I have wandered into your tumblr and I want to know absolutely everything about your ideas for Earth 3 Impetus and Motion. EVERYTHING. Possibly the least relevant part of that is the family line, as Earth 3 often has really skewed versions of the characters. Would the first Johnny Quick even have a speedster grandson when he was killed and his blood used to power his successors?

Oh, cool ask! Thank you!

😄 I’m very happy to talk about this but I’m afraid you may be disappointed, because I’m Doing It Wrong. I’ve been working off and on on a bespoke Earth-3 for the past…several years. Production has slowed but not stopped. It’s up to over 300,000 words on AO3 at this point.

The issue that set me off was that tendency to skew; I didn’t like it. I found that, most of the times DC had built into Earth-3 before rebooting again, there were two countervailing currents leading writing decisions. On the one hand to make things As Wrong As Possible compared to the main timeline, and on the other to just make them…arbitrarily different.

Lois Lane is Superwoman, evil counterpart of Wonder Woman, for some reason, woop-de-do; this fits under both categories.

This process worked neither according to the ‘timeline that diverged into a Bad Timeline at some point in the distant past but somehow contains versions of the same people in the same place’ premise of the original Star Trek ‘Mirror, Mirror’ episode, nor does it work according to any direct cosmic principle of inversion, although some of the early versions claimed to.

(See: Mirror Christopher Columbus discovered Europe and then later Evil George Washington conquered England for the American Empire, what even guys. 😩)

Also Earth-3 so transparently existed almost every time it was reinvented as a place to get villains from, and to look bad in comparison to the main timeline, without any attention to making it work internally, which I thought was a damn waste of a cool concept. ‘A damn waste of a cool concept’ drives a lot of fanwork lol.

So for my world, I had the slightly conflicting goals of working as close to that amorphous thing ‘canon’ as possible, and of making the setting stand on its own, as a superhero setting, with internal causality and more or less the usual sort of hero-versus-villain logic. So I inverted the alignments of only superheroes and supervillains, and kept as much as possible of their backstories intact.

This means my stuff doesn’t map onto any canon Earth-3, especially not the one from Forever Evil because that came out after I’d already gotten all the big things pinned down. 😅 Some people get upset about this and come yell at me about how i.e. Owlman is Thomas Wayne Junior. But since I always saw that particular concept as a huge cop-out from looking at how few alterations it takes to turn Bruce Wayne into a spectacular villain, I was like ‘nuts to that’ from the start.

If you’re cool with my relationship with canon, on we go.

-&-

So, Impetus and Motion! I don’t remember what I said on that one post where I remember blathering about it, so forgive me if I repeat myself. ^^

Lineage is the same as canon, technically. I’ll go over it; if you don’t care just skip ahead to the next subsection. 😄

Mirror Barry Allen, the Dash, got his villain name for his signature kill technique of grabbing someone, hyperaccelerating them, and then letting go at the right moment that they get dashed against something immovable and go splat. He dashes people against things.

(His eventual sidekick, Blaze, got his for liking to make things combust by accelerating their molecules. The combination makes them sound like a pair of racehorses, which they did not intend and are very annoyed by when it’s pointed out.)

The Dash is pretty scary, especially because most of the ways he abuses his speed for profit are so low-key nobody even notices (i.e. screwing with the stock market) and he doesn’t need to be a supervillain. He just likes it.

His public villain profile is relatively low for the level of danger he poses, tho, because his town is infested with really dumb superheroes who beat him embarrassingly often, when he actually turns up to fight or is successfully ambushed. And with the occasional exception the scale of his crimes is fairly small compared to i.e. Ultraman.

Keeping him imprisoned is ridiculously difficult, tho. He can’t be completely depowered (because the Speed Force is external to him and all the power dampeners that are used assume they’re trying to shut off something generated internally) and he’s really smart, so it took years of battles to keep him long enough to transfer into a proper cell even, and longer to get an unblurred look at his face.

His secret identity survived so long that Barry Allen was there to comfort Iris West after she was targeted by the Dash on several occasions, and they were married by the time he got ultimately unmasked.

She left him after that and moved back to the future, which she was still from because that’s hilarious, but he eventually tracked her down and promised to reform if she’d take him back. This obviously fell apart eventually, but not until after the twins were born.

I haven’t mapped out the mirror Thawne line. I assume the Thawnes with healing powers who inadvertently adopted Barry’s twin were much nicer in this timeline but idk if he ever became Cobalt Blue or what. I hope he lived to old age. Apparently there have been multiple Cobalts Blue? Idk idc, Flash continuity what even are you.

Everyone thought Eobard Thawne was nuts, but he actually did go back in time and stop the Dash from destroying the world with nukes in a fit of rage, his historical analysis, method of giving himself speed powers, and time machine were all successful. He may additionally suffer from some degree of psychosis, but he wasn’t wrong. (His little brother still exists in this universe because good!Eobard wasn’t the type to manipulate time to erase inconvenient family members. He also doesn’t have the title Professor because he never got tenure, so he just goes by Zoom.)

-&-

Bart is still Don and Meloni’s kid. Frankly I don’t understand those two in the normal timeline, so it’s hard to construct their mirror versions in any depth or even decide whether they should get mirrored. (Probably not tbh.) But I don’t exactly need to, because the resulting Bart is very much the same and thus doesn’t really know them. He was still born with his weird speed glitch that caused him to be raised in a simulation, and eventually time-traveled to un-glitch him.

The difference is that he’s not a nice kid. He’s a two year old who looks twelve and has received all his socialization from reasonably good AI in a world that was not real. Where nothing had consequences. Where nobody was real.

He’s very frightening, is Impetus. Impetuous, wildly powerful, selfish–oddly sweet, occasionally, in the ‘gay and innocent and heartless’ way of Peter Pan, but probably even more likely than Peter to knife someone. He’s so delighted the first time he eats actual ice cream, as opposed to a simulated version, but the ice cream stand is now on fire.

Mirror Bart isn’t so much cruel or even un-empathetic as solipsistic. He’s arrested in the state of an intellectually advanced toddler playing, what’s that game called, the one where the objective seems to be getting in car chases a lot? When was the last time they made a new one, I feel like I haven’t heard it mentioned in ages, it’s a dead franchise isn’t it I’m old. Grand Theft Auto! That’s it. He doesn’t just not understand that danger is real, the way Impulse started out. People aren’t.

Impetus is easily bored and surrounded by NPCs. It gets ugly, sometimes.

He also time-travels a lot more frequently than normal Bart, because he doesn’t really get attached so he doesn’t try to maintain a normal life of any kind, so he pops up all over the timestream.

Jason Blood hated him personally long before Bart had any idea who he was; they have a villain rivalry plagued by causality issues and closed time loops that is alternately epic and stupid as fuck.

And then there’s Thad. Thad’s had a less awful time than he did in canon, I think–President Thawne is not technically a supervillain so he’s probably about the same as in the original timeline, but even assuming Meloni and Don are still out of the picture (probably it’s Barry’s fault in this dimension?) raising a kid as a ‘defense mechanism against a supervillain’ calls for less extreme brainwashing fuckery than raising one to hunt down a superhero.

So he probably behaved a bit more like a reasonable grandparent, simply because the context incentivized him to emphasize concepts like duty and loyalty more, and hatred less. He might even have been able to go public with Thad’s existence, depending on the spin he came up with. Among other factors.

But it was still a depressing, isolated, dehumanizing way to grow up, and it went on a long time, because as per canon Thad has the opposite problem from Bart in terms of how he passes through time. Motion is a 40-year-old man with a 12 year old’s body and approximate life experience.

Thad was already So Tired when he finally got out into the world on his own, and once he encountered Impetus he learned pretty quickly to both pity and fear him.

Even when Thad tries to avoid Bart and just have a life, Bart always crashes back into his existence again, and in the meantime he feels guilty. Because even if he could completely shake off having been raised to see countering Impetus as his whole reason for existence, he’d still feel a lot of personal responsibility to try, because he has the ability to stand up to him in a way almost no one else does, and he knows Bart’s out there resulting in casualties.

Due to all the time travel involved, even having just defeated Impetus doesn’t mean he’s not still out there at an accessible point in the timestream, needing to be stopped.

Impetus results in Motion the way Inertia resists Impulse. They’re very much locked into an action-and-reaction framework that does not even a little bit help with Thad’s clone identity issues.

Except for how the amount of time Thad spends saving people from Bart has slowly created a fairly large body of people over the course of history who know them as distinct entities, and like Thad a lot better. 

Good feels good. ^^ It’s not necessarily the case that this happens, obviously, but with their alignment swap they also ultimately exchanged who’s defined by isolation. It takes Bart a long, long time to even understand that he’s lonely.

[douchebagbrainwaves]

WHY IT'S SAFE FOR MAKING NEW VENTURE ANIMAL

It's exciting that there even exist parts of the world than what I saw immediately around me. The Mythical Man-Month, adding people to a project tends to slow it down. More often it was just an arbitrary series of hoops to jump through, words without content designed mainly for testability. It's like the court of Louis XIV. Modern literature is important, but the job listings have to be really useful. But you could in principle have a useful conversation about them with some people. Technological progress means making things do more of what we want. It would be less now, probably less than the cost of sending them the first month's bill. But that same illiquidity also encouraged you not to seek it.1 You don't do that if you start scanning people with no symptoms, you'll get this on a giant scale: a huge number of software patents there's not a lot of users.

It's what bias means. By definition they're partisan. I worked at Yahoo during 1998 and 1999.2 If I remember correctly, our frontpage used to just fit in the size window people typically used then. Now the frightening giant is Microsoft, and they could not master it. Want to know if you bet on Web-based software, you can probably get even more effect by paying closer attention to the time you have.3 Enough of an effect to triple the value of what they create. There are really two variants of that question, and the bureaucratic obstacles all medical startups face, and the classics. When I was 13 I realized, is that my m. He probably considers them about equivalent in power to, say, the ages of eleven and seventeen.4

And yet, mysteriously, Viaweb ended up crushing all its competitors. The war was due mostly to external forces, and the most efficient way to do it. So for any given team of founders, would it not pay to wait till his arteries were over 90% blocked and 3 days later he had a quadruple bypass.5 At the end of the year I couldn't even remember what else I had stored in that attic. Obvious comparisons suggest themselves, both to the process and the resulting product. Basically, Apple bumped IBM and then Microsoft stole its wallet. What happens now with the Super Bowl used to happen every night. That is, are the riskiest startups the ones that wanted Oracle experience. That doing good work.6 It let them build great looking online stores literally in minutes.7 Web-based application.8

They're a lot of bandwidth.9 What that level of ability can get you is, say, Python? Or rather, any client, and if you have genuine intellectual curiosity, that's what you'll naturally tend to do if you just follow your own inclinations.10 As a result it became massively successful. By granting such an over-broad patents, but they are an order of magnitude less important than solving the real problem, my friend Robert Morris and I started a startup to do this is to collect them together in one place for a certain number of hours each day.11 Everyone was so cheerful and healthy and rich. What was really happening was de-oligopolization. When would you ever want to do. I found I could entertain myself by having ideas instead of reading other people's.12 Microsoft client and server software. One forgets it's owned by a private company. You can mitigate this with subsidies at the bottom nine tenths of university CS departments.13

And while I miss the 3 year old ever had. You might think that people decide to buy something, and if you want to be their research assistants because they're genuinely interested in the topic. A company that sues competitors for patent infringement till you have money, and making money consists mostly of errands.14 This was too subtle for me. People from the desktop software business will find this hard to credit, but at the time. But if you look at the source, because you control the whole system, right down to the hardware. For the first week or so we intended to make this point diplomatically, but in some cases it's possible to get rich will do whatever they like with you: install puppet governments, siphon off your best workers, use your women as prostitutes, dump their toxic waste on your territory—all the things we describe as addictive are. I got was $12. If you do manage to threaten them, they're more right than they know, because the adults were the visible experts in the skills they were trying to learn in great detail about the mechanics of startups, but as Microsoft shows, revenue is a lagging indicator in the technology business.15

At least $1000 a month. The best ideas are just on the right side of impossible. Programs that write programs.16 You can figure out the tricks for winning at this new game. That is very hard to answer in the general case. This will take some effort on the part of the game.17 And yet the authorities still for the most part act as if drugs were themselves the cause of the problem.18 Perhaps a better solution is to let as few things into your identity as possible. You can probably take it as a computer system executing that algorithm. The effects of World War II were both economic and social history, and the advantage will grow as fast as I can type, then spend several weeks rewriting it.19 Finally, the truly serious hacker should consider learning Lisp: Lisp is worth learning for the profound enlightenment experience you will have when you finally get it; that experience will make you a better programmer for the rest of us can use. I wanted to buy them, however limited.

Notes

But although I started using it, and the older you get to profitability on a weekend and sit alone and think.

It's unpleasant because the arrival of desktop publishing, given people the shareholders instead of themselves. And those examples do reflect after-tax return from a 6/03 Nielsen study quoted on Google's site. I talked to a VC is interested in investing but doesn't want to write your thoughts down in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries, Oxford University Press, 1996.

Does anyone really think we're so useless that in the world of the company.

73 billion.

Apparently there's only one founder is being compensated for risks he took earlier. The shift in power from investors to founders is how much they can be explained by math. MSFT, having spent much of observed behavior.

I ordered a large company? As well as down.

But his world record only lasted 46 days.

Related: Reprinted in Bacon, Alan, Transgressing the Boundaries: Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity, Social Text 46/47, pp. If you seem like noise.

When the Air Hits Your Brain, neurosurgeon Frank Vertosick recounts a conversation—maybe around 10 people.

I call it procrastination when someone works hard and not fundraising is because their company made money from them. Learning this explained a lot of detail. If this is the kind that has little relation to other investors, even thinking requires control of scarce resources, political deal-making power. It tipped from being this boulder we had high hopes for doesn't do well, but that's a pyramid scheme.

Financing a startup. The dialog on Beavis and Butthead was composed largely of these titles vary too much. Copyright owners tend to say, of course it was 94% 33 of 35 companies that an eminent designer is any better than enterprise software—and to run on the server.

Though they were that smart they'd already be working on such an interview with Steve Wozniak in Jessica Livingston's Founders at Work. A single point of treason.

There's a good chance that a startup you can do it in B. That's why there's a continuum here. The other cause is usually slow growth or excessive spending rather than ones they capture.

By Paleolithic standards, technology evolved at a time machine. There are still expensive to start a startup to become addictive. Instead of bubbling up from the other seed firms always find is that most three letter words are bad news; it would not change the world barely affects me. Then when we got to see if you do.

But not all are. They're common to all cultures with long traditions of living in cities. I think it's mainly not having the universities in the former, and large bribes by the normal people they're usually surrounded with.

They're still deciding, which parents would still send their kids won't listen to them about your fundraising prospects. The Socialist People's Democratic Republic of X is probably not do that.

And the reason.

As I was once trying to sell hardware without trying to capture the service revenue as well, but economically that's how we gauge their progress, but rather that if a company just to go to college, they have to decide between two alternatives, we'd ask, what if they pay so well is that it killed the best hackers want to design these, because people would treat you like a compiler, you could only get in the narrow technical sense of being harsh to founders would actually increase the spammers' cost to reach a given audience by a sense of the word intelligence is the least correlation between launch magnitude and success. Good and bad luck.

Heirs will be interesting to 10,000 sestertii, for many Americans the decisive change in how Stripe felt. I talked to a woman who had recently arrived from Russia. Many will consent to b rather than ones they capture. Good investors don't lead startups on; their reputations are too valuable.

[inlibrislibertas42-blog]

More Teen Wolf Plot Holes!

Part 2 to this post:

Derek’s “evolution”: As soon as Derek re-ages his wolf has yellow eyes instead of blue, and then he slowly starts losing his wolf abilities (Because apparently now your eyes being blue is tied to your strength, not having killed or your level of guilt?) Also, did de-aging trigger the evolution somehow? Why? We know various other people who could do a full wolf-shift, supposedly without going through this bizarre process.

Then Derek spends a period of time losing his powers, thinking it’s something Kate had done to him… (and again, we know other characters who could full shift: Talia and most notably Laura. If losing your wolf was part of the “evolving” process, how would Derek not have known about it?) And then somehow dying triggers the final state of his evolution? Did Laura and Talia (and Malia, etc) die as well? Or was the timing a coincidence? And somehow evolving cures the fact that he spent at least a few minutes being dead from blood loss?

Actually nothing about his evolution makes sense, and none of it was explained.

Healing: The amount that a werewolf can heal changes a lot depending on the needs of the script. Ex: Derek’s impaled in s1 by Peter (as a beta) and is completely fine an episode later. The tips of Derek’s claws go into Boyd’s chest in 3A and he’s done.

Braeden: In 3A Braeden has magic –(she touches Lydia and Allison’s arms and brands an image of the Nematon onto them) and when she comes back later it’s never mentioned again (The writers really should think about writing down card for each character about whatever special powers they are giving them so they don’t forget about it). Braeden also has scars up her throat from an alpha’s claws, which apparently didn’t turn or kill her. Kate has her throat clawed by an alpha, and it did.

Malia: I already talked about it but her being able to be in high school with a nine year old education really bothers me. Even forgetting that she spent 8 years in the wild, she should literally be in fourth grade and there’s no way a couple months’ worth of offscreen studying would have caught her up sufficiently. Seriously, whyyyyyyyyy? Howwwww?

Also, Malia’s age, as shown on her birth certificate, makes her 13 years old when we’re introduced to her. However, she’s apparently supposed to be 17 or so, the same as the rest of the characters.

Ages and time in general (nobody knows how time or calendars work in the writing room, do they?): There’s a discontinuity between birthdays given in the show and external materials, such as the TW calendars (which are said to be the real-life ones, ya know, the ones everyone uses). The ages listed also suggest that basically everyone will be graduating at 19 years old, which is incredibly uncommon, and especially odd considering Allison made a big deal about being “older” than everyone else in s1, which wouldn’t be true according to what we’ve been shown.

Important detail: Allison is freaking out at turning 17 years old during her sophomore year in s1, because she hates being “so much older” than everyone else. Lydia turns 17 only several weeks later during s2, in March of their sophomore year.

Meredith is the Benefactor: So many issues and just… how does a banshee magically control computers and printers?

Stiles & the pack after the Nogitsune: Everything he did while possessed… How have they not delved deeper? How has nobody shown the nightmares, the panic attacks, the trauma of the entire pack, the grieving process?

The pack is a bunch of kids, god dammit! And when you’re a kid, a goddamn breakup almost kills you, let alone watching your best friend/close friend being possessed and killing people and watching your ex-girlfriend/girlfriend/best-friend/close friend die in front of you!

Like, this makes me so mad! Like… NO! I don’t care about gory scenes and epic fights if you’re not giving me the aftermath of all that. If you’re trying to be realistic, if you’re trying to put all these supernatural creatures in real life, then give me real reactions and consequences! Don’t just give me a time jump and tell me they forgot about it and moved on. (arghhhhhh)

Paige: Ok, a serious question now: WTF happened after Paige’s death? ‘Cuz like, bites and scratch marks from giant wolves are hard to hide and miss… So… What did her parents thought when they saw her body?

I’m assuming that, ya know, someone found her body, called the police, took her to a morgue so they could find out what the hell happened… Did they just told her parents it was a “mountain lion”? Did they buy it? Didn’t they… I don’t know… questioned Derek, her at-the-time boyfriend? Didn’t they questioned why was she, an apparently perfect student and perfect kid, at the school in the middle of the night? Alone? Like???? Does anyone knows? Do the writers care?

Other important details that we won’t ever have answers for:

Why was Danny writing a paper about telluric currents for a chemistry class? Wouldn’t this topic be more adequate for a physics or geography or geology class?

Also, why was Lydia’s mom subbing a biology class for Harris when he taught chemistry?

How does Ms. Morrell works at echo house and beacon hills high yet no one has brought her up on child endangerment?

Why did Jennifer needed to poison Danny, considering he doesn’t interact with Scott that much and his paper on telluric currents wasn’t being taken seriously?

The overwhelming lack of funerals and wakes and memorials (teen wolf is on a very short timeline, where the fck are all the funerals?).

Why some werewolves can survive impalement multiple times and others get killed by things even a human could conceivably survive for at least a while (see: Boyd’s death vs Peter surviving getting his throat slashed).

How the hell did Peter pass a credit check to rent an apartment after being either comatose or dead for the past 6+ years? And, because I’m talking about Peter, how the heck nobody cares that, you know, a comatose patient with little to no chances of getting better simply got up and started walking and talking? Like… he just left! No questions asked. A freaking patient disappeared from the hospital, his nurse got killed and nobody comes asking for answers?

Where is Isaac’s CPS case manager? Who was he living with? Derek? Ms. McCall? Some random people? How did Chris got away with taking him to France (and leaving him there)? Did he adopted/fostered him? Why didn’t Isaac, Chris or Derek ever mentioned this?

Where did those japanese internment camp messages on Allison’s phone come from and why was Allison’s phone turned off for that entire episode?

Seriously, what the hell is up with Deaton?

Why aren’t there any security checks and security guards posted at Beacon Hills High? With the amount of missing, dead, hurt (and much more) students, that school should have police at the door, police patrolling the hallways, cameras everywhere and a very strict policy of no backpacks/bags and sharp objects within the school perimeters!

How could Malia just walk out of Eichen House all by herself. Was she just like, “lol, I’m a minor and checking myself out ‘cause that’s how it works”?!? Also, if there’s no key to that cellar door in Eichen House, how does everyone but Stiles get in so easily?

How is the Beacon Hills hospital still open, it should have been sued to hell and back by now, with all the people disappearing from it, being murdered in the hallways, and bodybags plus bodies going missing from the morgue!!!

Do Boyd and Erica’s families know their children are dead? Are they still “missing”? Like, after all this time, they are probably presumed dead, right?

How have any of the kids not failed all their classes yet? I mean, between not dying, lacrosse, dramatic + romantic moments and fighting the bad guys, how do this kids have time to do homework, study and go to school? And why the heck the school doesn’t call their parents about their kids constantly leaving the classroom, just like that? Without any permission or anything?

Why does Derek not know ANYTHING about what werewolves can do? We know he was born one but he didn’t know how to train a bitten wolf, or if it was even possible; he never showed them how to do the healing trick, which leads me to suspect he didn’t even know anything about it until Scott or Isaac showed him; he didn’t know Peter was the Alpha; didn’t know Paige could die from the bite; didn’t know some humans might not WANT the fucking bite; or that burying Peter wasn’t enough to keep him from coming back from the dead. Basically, DEREK DOESN’T KNOW ANYTHING, EVER!

[ddrkirbyisq]

Well, okay, I guess we can catch up on actual happenings too.  It's hard to know what to write though, for a multitude of reasons.  But I know I have had thoughts, so we'll just start with whatever I end up remembering. She is gone.  The "Kagome" person, she is gone.  Of course, I always knew she would be, she was destined to leave my life, as another had once before.  I told her as much, too.  I knew.  And it seems now that that time has clearly passed.  Thinking about that person's name, I'm not 100% sure how to feel.  Being with this person reminded me so strongly, of the one that I've never forgotten.  I guess I miss them both.  But it is hard to imagine that I would ever choose to hold onto this thread tightly.  For not only did I know from the beginning that things would end, but I knew also, that she was only a reminder of whom I really wanted to see.  That person, whose absence seems...unfair, even. And yet it always astonishes me, how "the girl of the four winds" is still in my life, even when those two are not.  And yet, even if I stop reaching backwards, I must never stop remembering. itch.io has a massive charity bundle on sale now and even if you care nothing about supporting the NAACP and community bail funds, you should still get it because the amount of value there is insane, like....insane, like, what??? I've been making my way through some of the games this weekend, since....well, playing games is apparently what I needed to do.  I played through all of Fortune-499, an interesting little card-based game which I enjoyed.  While I think there were aspects that felt slightly (and I mean slightly) not as "elegant" as I would have liked, that's really a minor complaint, and overall I found that it managed to simply.....stay interesting.  I think it was a great mix of game mechanics and narrative and each chapter tries to throw something new at you.  I feel like the pacing of the game (if that's the right term) felt really nice because of that.  The aesthetic is well-done too, these little details like the transition that happens every day really help put a nice bow on the whole package.  Very nice. I played through the hilarious Astrologaster as well, a narrative-based comedy choose-your-own-adventure game that involves you playing as a "doctor" who reads the stars (read: "bullshits everything") to diagnose his patients.  I'd recommend really sitting down and playing through this in one sitting if you're going to, simply because I feel like it would be really awkward to come back to it after getting halfway through and having forgotten all of the context that informs your decisions through the game.  I found it difficult to keep everything straight in my head towards the later part of the game, but somehow managed to squeak by with a license at the end -- huzzah!  It did a really good job of giving you some interesting challenges in terms of trying to figure out what choices would lead to a "good" outcome, often having you balance honesty with people-pleasing as well as external concerns and future consequences. I tried out Interstellaria briefly, but it seems a bit more intimidating (and unfortunately not as user-friendly) than I had hoped.  I'm willing to try giving it another chance (the soundtrack!), but I'm tempering my expectations for that one, as I know it's supposed to not be the most polished game in existence. In the meantime, I've finished Illusion of Gaia!  Crazily, I also managed to find this really long critical analysis/writeup of Illusion of Gaia, which was certainly interesting even if not super groundbreaking.  IoG (or "Illusion of Time" as it is also known) is an interesting game, as I've said before.  I think it does a few things right, and some other things fairly mediocre.  But as with Secret of Mana (perhaps the prime example), sometimes bundling together some mediocrity with vibrant visuals, GREAT music, and a world that "looks and feels great" is really enough to get a game through all of its flaws.  I never knew this before, but it turns out that you can fight every single boss as Will (not freedan or shadow), though doing this for some of the later bosses is just plain tedious (pharaoh queen would just take forever....), and doing it for the hardest boss in the game (the vampires) is a very legitimate challenge, perhaps even harder than beating the "secret boss" Solid Arm.  I'd have to say Illusion of Gaia starts to kind of fall flat near all of the final sections of the game.  For most of the game, once you finish a dungeon, you simply move onto the next area, but for some reason once you get to Ankor Wat and the Mountain Temple, you have to backtrack through the whole dungeon in order to exit.....couple that with the sequence in Rivermia where you need to wait for the lily pad, plus the Pyramid which has you switching forms over and over again...not to mention waiting in like in Euro, as well as fetching the girl 3 apples.....there's suddenly a LOT of tedium that gets introduced and none of it is particularly good.  At least combat is more interesting, as you know have some additional abilities to play around with (read: "mess around with and take more damage than if you had just done the simple thing").  The boss rush at the end isn't super engaging either, as all of the bosses are easier this time around (due to being Shadow), though the vampires are still challenging as ever.  The final boss is more or less a pushover, so yeah.  What really drags IoG down at the end, though is the slllllooooooowwwwww dialogue throughout all of the ending sequences.  Thank goodness I had a fast-forward function available to me there. Anyways, this now clears me to try Terranigma again, if I so choose...I have heard good things about this game, and apparently it has a bittersweet ending of some sort, but I'll try not to get my hopes TOO high. Oh, I should also mention that I finished the entire alternate puzzle mode of Panel de Pon, yay! Also randomly started playing through Full Throttle.......but I mean, I guess this ought to not be a surprise to anybody anymore, that yet again I've taken a game from....*checks*....1995, and randomly decided to go and play through it. I've been continuing to read through Animorphs here and there (got through book 6...ok, I'm not very far yet, I admit)...also came across a random thread on twitter praising KA Applegate for being super supportive of the BLM movement, as well as...you know, writing a so-called children's book series that talks about slavery, war, xenophobia, child soldiers, morality, humanity, ... I haven't gotten to all of the more heavy stuff (that all comes later on in the war...) but we're getting there.  Yeah...just thinking about it, I still recall reading book 48.  It was late at night and I was using the desk lamp in my bedroom at my parents' place, listening to Sixpence None the Richer.  Hearing the song "Tonight", at the ending of that book, when Rachel is supposed to figure out what to do, and she just...doesn't know.  It's left unsaid what happens, and I think that's actually really good writing.  Because the impact of that moment would be gone, if Rachel just decides what to do.  You'd have the answer.  But you don't.  You don't know what happens.  You don't know what Rachel should do, or should have done.  Just like her.  And all the while, Leigh Nash was singing, "Tonight it's time....choose a direction...if you fail...you can make a correction...." I love meowmie. Randomly watching some more of HealthyGamerGG, and such, actually feels.....great.  There's this element of human contact and conversation that I think I couldn't really identify as a missing block in isolated life, and I think hearing supportive voices and seeing people help each other, even if not directed at myself, is invigorating.  And I think =past= even that, I think just hearing someone break down problems and emotions in such a rational and relatable way is quite useful.  I think it's like.....I don't know if this happens to other people, but when you hear or watch or even read someone's speaking or writing a lot, I think sometimes you begin to formulate an internal monologue or rationalization in their words, in their style of thinking.  And I think that's actually really helpful, in a lot of different situations. Speaking of people helping each other out...last but certainly not least (the opposite, really), I've been trying to embark on this journey that several others have been.  There are some things to do, many things to do, really.  But for now, the first thing to do is simply....to do my homework.  Abstract plans are hard to act on, but if there is anything I am good at, it is taking what seems like a giant boulder and chunking it up into bite-sized pieces such that I can make progress, and then make progress, and then make progress again.  And I hope that someday, =we= will make progress....make progress....and continue to walk forward.  What is overwhelming, hopeless, and impossible all at once becomes something easier to digest when it becomes a tangible thing.  HealthyGamerGG talked about that too, actually, as a form of Operational Procrastination. So yes.  We will try, and try, and keep trying.  And we each have our own small part to play in this thing.  I already know what I hope mine to be.  For now, I'm just making my way there. I donno, I mean....I guess I could write these blog posts with a bit more context and explanation.  But sometimes blogs are ok too, without explanation.  When you don't really know exactly what I'm talking about, but you can read that there's a sentiment behind it.  Does every art piece need its "point" to be explained in order to be appreciated?

[walkingwitheyesopen]

Change and transformation.

My eager riteous mind is resisting more and more stating concrete truths and generalised opinions (an ‘ongoing’ process which may be evident in the following text). For this i am grateful. For when i do, the effect is similar to that of a drug. There’s an initial high and sense of elation for being RIGHT, but what follows is frequently a sequence of events that soon bring me humbly back down to earth - facing the uncomfortable experiences of embarrassment and shame in the process. All seemingly, ego identified states.

I want to touch on the previous post i wrote about how i felt fear ultimately cannot be real. I still believe from a higher perspective this is in some way the case, but i see other elements also deserve exploration. Such elements being our ‘humanness’ and varying levels of consciousness.

Although the problems i perceive and answers i often seek nearly always come back to ME as the source. I also see that i arrive at these places through a series of mental processes. The initial part frequently being quite emotionally driven, lots of words, thoughts and ideas with possibility of manifesting as impulsive actions. Just like the start of an emotional trauma, how over time we begin to see things clearer and find we are more able to forgive or engage in similar situations to the one we experienced the trauma through. The process has an important place in our life.

Being human can at times be raw and feel unforgiving. With the world shrouded in apparent darkness across many parts of the globe, i find it hard to consistently have answers or refer to one single truth as a guide to behaviour. I feel there are many different ways we can perceive the same things but those too change as we change and grow in our awareness and understanding of ourself and the world. Even me writing blog posts, i see how i change, sometimes drastically, in the way i think or feel from when i first start writing. This can make it a little challenging to share much of anything at all, because what really is the truth. From my own experience there are stages in our personal and shared processes that, of their own, each ask to be honoured. A ‘process’ as dictionary defined is -

A series of actions or steps taken in order to achieve a particular end.

Also -

A natural series of changes.

So i observe my own life and question what process, if any, i am in now. Is it a natural process, am i forcing something that is unlikely to result in anything helpful (the latter very rarely does) or am i taking conscious steps towards a goal with a healthy balance of both? Are there multiple processes playing out at the same time and on different levels of mind, body and spirit? If so, do they influence each other and work together synergistically?

When i reflect on the past i can see more clearly what could have triggered the start of a process and each can have a differing effect on mind, emotions, body and spirit…

- Big or small life change

- Death of friend or famliy

- A traumatic experience relative to our individual interpretation

- Home or job relocation

- Start of a new project

and so on…

Personally i’ve been going through particular processes since i was young. I sense this deep down with varying degrees of understanding to how they function and what they require of me. I also see the stages of each process reflected in my life externally. I often want to control their completion deeply as i see the ways they negatively appears to affect my life. Yet completion may not be where my focus should lie. Can we control our natural healing processes where the roots are deeply embedded in the past; In our childhood or in experiences that deeply hurt us?

How do we process difficult experiences?

Do you support yourself in any way whilst healing?

What tools are available to support our mind, body and spirit?

I’ve explored the scale of consciousness many times over the course of this human incarnation. From deep human and physical duality identification to union with GOD in altered states and a relinquishment of being a ‘person’ at all. When i step back and look at these experiences, awakening seemed to happen with small steps in a certain direction. Becoming conscious was a slow process where the more i opened and questioned what i ‘knew’ and have been taught during my life, the more space i made for new insights and knowledge to come to me. My part here was in supporting nature through letting go. Subsequently being unconscious was also a subtle process, frequently thinking fearful thoughts, modelling negative behaviours and being in situations that encouraged subservience. Our society and most across the world seem to be structured in ways that disempower us and create dependency on external things. We can be at varying points on the scale of consciousness but we can influence that in a variety of different ways with our choices. At one point fear not being real may very well be an experience we have but then at the other end it may be the realest thing we know.

The choices we make can encourage expansion and awareness or fuel illusion and ignorance. In favour of expansion we may alleviate stress (emotional/physical/ environmental), explore meditation and possibly take up a daily practice. Adopt new habits like sleeping and waking early - creating healthy sleep patterns aligning with nature. Practise self care more, listening to what our inner voice wants to speak and acting on it. Read books that lift us up and empower us. Or to strengthen our ignorance we may numb ourself with addictions, disempower ourself by blaming the external world for our problems. Hold tightly onto anger, resentment, bitterness and judgement. Toxify our bodies with unhealthy food and drink. I can’t deny i partake in both to some extent. There are a myriad of ways we can influence our life experience but small choices day to day can lead to powerful results and long term changes….. If that is what we want and what is right for us.

Accepting and being realistic about where we currently are however, feels wise if we are to navigate where we are headed or consciously want to be.

One thing i notice more and more is just that, in order to proceed anywhere i must first find acceptance of truly being where i am. For me a big thing to accept is being imperfect in a human body. This has required a humble honesty with myself that at times i’m not where i really want to be or expect that i should be internally or externally. I get angry and jealous and don’t always act with love and compassion towards others or myself. I make decisions and take action without thinking about how other people may be affected by my choices. Being where i am can feel way too shameful to accept sometimes but any judgement and guilt only seems to block moving forward. Once we can truly be where we are and relinquish judgement and any emotional attachments - right or wrongs - change becomes much easier, faster.

Accepting where we are doesn’t mean accepting that we actually want things to be the way they are. This is something that confused me for a long time and had quite a negative impact on my life. What i now feel this means is accepting that this is how it is, but also, accepting we may not like it how it is - discernment and judgement are different ball games. Maybe when we can truly understand this difference, a natural flow of balance and equanimity will flow. We can be at peace with what is and also at peace even when we don’t like what is, because we aren’t resisting anything.

Something i have learnt in the process of healing my own physical body is that the basic process of healing is totally natural. If anything it is ourself, or our mind, that gets in the way to possibly halt the process. Often we simply resist acceptance of what already IS. This is evident in the way our skin naturally heals when we have a cut, no effort on our part is generally required. The temptation however, to remove the protective layer of skin the body creates in order to shield the healing process, can be too much for some people to resist. I’ve been considering the idea that a higher intelligence might work much better for me than my own attempts. What i also found was that my responsibility may not only be to surrender but realise that i have the ability to support this natural process. So really we work together with nature, knowing when to push or pull and increasing the strength of our intuition step by step.  

Maybe if we sacrificed being right or knowing what is best we will be gifted with truth and the experience of what is. We never know what point of consciousness each person is at or what part of a process they may be going through. We can’t assume what experiences have led another to act, think or perceive the way they do. So why try?

Note to self - Trust in the good of humanity. Honour our shared journey. Make space with intention to learn to accept ourself and others as we are, right where we are. But respect our personal human feelings, needs and wants during processes we may go through and allow ourself and others to speak up and share our inner feelings with compassion and trust.

An ever bigger note to self - Cultivate healthy ways to communicate.