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anystalker707 · 9 months

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i need you [1/2]

Pairing: Crocodile x [gender-neutral] Reader Summary: It's been a while since Crocodile last saw his partner, and they don't seem to be very happy. Tags: light angst / comfort / he's very sweet ok

oneshot for @gojo-mochi 's dilfcember event

MASTERLIST

PART TWO [AMAB READER VERSION]

PART TWO [AFAB READER VERSION]

“There you are,” Crocodile exhaled, raising his eyebrows lightly without trying to hide his expression of tiredness. He’d been telling you to come to greet him properly ever since he got back home, eyes narrowing at your form by a doorway when he decided he was a little too tired to chase you around and waste energy in the way; he knew it from experience. He took a long drag from the cigar, letting the smoke burn his lungs before he slowly blew it out through his mouth—the room had wide windows, thankfully, quickly dispersing the smoke. It was a price to pay to be around him.

Despite the warmth in Crocodile’s eyes, you still stood there quietly for a moment with a discomfort twisting in your chest while something heaved under your eyes. It’d been quite a while since you’d seen him properly, counting the times he only showed up for a few minutes a day or late at night to leave early in the morning. He sat behind that massive desk with piles of paper stacked on it, which was a familiar sight you’d missed.

“Come on.” He patted his thigh, eyebrows furrowing a little as he nodded in encouragement, and maybe you’d ignored things for long enough now. He straightened his posture on the wide armchair once you sat on his thigh, humming in appreciation.

“That’s my good one.” His hand ran up and down your back a couple of times before it settled down around your waist.

There were a few wanted papers and documents with the Marine stamp before him on his desk, and Crocodile didn’t bother to close the folder because he didn’t have anything to hide from you. Either way, you weren’t interested in it either, running your eyes over the desk while he talked. He had just come back, and the desk was already full of stuff that demanded attention, which was supposed to be yours.

“Now, now,” Crocodile exhaled and reached over to the ashtray. The bright red sparkles of the cigar’s tip extinguished against the bottom of the ashtray, turning gray like the remaining in there and serving as a base for the now discarded cigar. “What’s gotten my doll feeling all blue?”

Rough fingertips pressed to your jaw in a light touch and turned your face toward him, allowing Crocodile to study your expression through half-lidded eyes; worry mixed with intrigue lingering in his gaze. His thumb ran across your cheek a couple of times, index finger under your chin to tilt your head up. Despite all of that, your eyes still focused on the painting that hung on the wall behind his chair.

“What can I do for you, hm?” Crocodile’s deep voice had a caring tone in it that always made you melt a little bit, even more so with those loving touches. It was quiet in the room—his office was wide but crumpled, with lavish carpets and curtains, while his regarded book collection also took great space, neatly organized on the shelves along with some items and photographs.

Your eyes finally met Crocodile’s, and despite the way your heart fluttered, the discomfort twisted inside your chest again, so your eyes immediately fell to the table once more. Something heaved inside you, compelling you to curl up in Crocodile’s lap.

A few theories of what bothered you swirled in Crocodile’s head, but he wasn’t sure what to believe, so he opted not to conclude anything for now. With a soft sigh, he opted to go for what he usually did, to comfort you. His fingers gently played with your hair before he started massaging your scalp gently, eventually rubbing the back of your neck soothingly. He was about to say something, but the words died in his throat the moment you started relaxing in his arms.

That’s it, Crocodile mentally said, wrapping an arm around your waist to hug you closer to him while he rubbed circles into your back, letting your head rest against his chest. He did it for what felt like hours, and nothing ever felt like too much if it meant it was for you. All it brought was the relief to see you melt into his arms and slowly let go of whatever bothered you.

“My love,” he whispered, cupping your face to hold your head closer to his chest as he pressed a kiss to the top of it, and what he received in response pleased him. Your hands gently gripped his pullover vest while you nuzzled into his chest.

Crocodile let the silence sink in for a moment, shoulders relaxing as he felt you comfortable in his arms until the soft sound of sniffling cut through the peaceful atmosphere. His lips pressed together in a frown as he caressed your hair a little longer before pulling away just enough to take a look at your face.

“My love, what’s wrong?” The back of Crocodile’s fingers ran along your cheeks to catch your tears, but they were soon dismissed when you pressed your face to his chest instead, wetting the soft yarn of his top with your tears, but he couldn’t even bring himself into worrying about that. “Dearest,” he exhaled softly, voice laced with frustration as his hand tightened around your waist as if to anchor you to him because it was everything he could do, silent with his thoughts as he offered you what he could for now.

Crocodile’s eyes fixed on the papers on the desk without really paying attention to them, just choosing them as a spot to rest his eyes on while he tried to sort out his thoughts, which wasn’t easy. All the stress from the past weeks clouded his thoughts in a way only you could help him go back to a peaceful state of mind, but for now, he fought through the sharp headache that attacked his temples to focus on you. You were more important, after all. What would be of him without you?

Something brought Crocodile back to reality, but your cries were too incoherent to be comprehensible. He blinked a couple of times and looked down at you, relaxing his brow and his jaw. “Yes, my love? Can you repeat that for me?”

“...you, hm? Where were you?” You sniffled a little bit, gulping. “Did you get tired of me? Did I do something wrong? Why would you—” Cut off by a sob, you just gave up on talking and let out a groan of frustration instead.

Now, it started making more sense. A soft breath escaped Crocodile’s nose as the realization slowly set in, and he brought a hand up to his face, sighing as he pinched the bridge of his nose and then ran his fingers along his eyebrows before his hand lowered to your cheek to tilt your head up. The sight of your teary eyes made his heart ache and guilt heave over his shoulders.

“Oh, dearest,” he breathed, shaking his head lightly. “I’m deeply sorry, you know how things can run out of control, and you also know that my love for you is never-ending. I would never think about leaving.” He adjusted you on his lap to kiss your forehead while wiping your tears away once more. “I long for you, but I also can’t involve you in problems either. I rather solve them first and then come back to m—”

“So what?” You sniffled, looking at him in the eyes. “So I have to suffer because you’re away? Sit and wait and…” You kept ranting, and Crocodile knew you didn’t mean it, he knew what spilled from your mouth resulted from the desperation of going so many days without him, from the hurt of the way your feelings and thoughts twisted during his absence, and he wished he’d been there before to comfort you before this mess had been created.

“I’m sorry, dearest,” Crocodile said softly, and he would try to talk and argue if you weren’t so caught up in emotions, so he just kissed your tears away, holding you close until the crying babbling turned into soft sobs, and you relaxed in his arms again.

There wasn’t a lot Crocodile could decipher in your muttering, but he could make out the whiny ‘I need you’ whispered next to his ear when your arms wrapped tightly around his neck. You clung to him tightly, making his emotions waver in ways he wished they wouldn’t, but he accepted the vulnerability you caused him. Loving someone had a price, and he wasn’t afraid of paying it if it meant having you.

“I’m here,” Crocodile whispered as he gently ran his hand up and down your back until your back wasn’t shuddering with sobs anymore. “That’s it, dearest,” he whispered as his fingers massaged the back of your neck. “I’m here for you now, and I won’t be leaving soon.”

“I don’t want you to ever leave,” your weak whimpers were muffled against his shoulder, and Crocodile sighed.

“We can talk about it later,” he breathed, knowing it was better to discuss it when both of you had your emotions in order rather than make empty promises for a momentary peace. “Come on,” he said as he shifted a little to hold you in his arms properly so that he could stand up, breath hitching a little as he kept you against his chest on his way out of the office. His paperwork wasn’t as important as you were. “Let’s relax for now, how about that? Have you eaten anything today?”

Your arms were still loosely wrapped around Crocodile’s neck, one of them looser so that you could bury your face into the crook of it, inhaling his scent to calm yourself down. Hesitantly, you shook your head, taking in a deep breath to brace yourself for the inevitable disappointment that would come from him. Your stomach churned again just at the thought of food, but maybe things would be fine now.

There, however, was no disappointment in Crocodile’s hum as he changed his route to the kitchen. “Then we must eat first. We can also take a shower, then go to sleep. How about that, hm? Will that help my sweetheart?”

Your heart fluttered at his words, and you nodded with a weak hum, sighing as you closed your eyes and let the tension go of your muscles.

.𓆝 𓆟 𓆞 𓆝 𓆟.

PART TWO [AMAB READER VERSION]

PART TWO [AFAB READER VERSION]

#one piece #crocodile #x reader #x male reader #x female reader #gender neutral #crocodile x reader #crocodile x male reader #one piece x reader #imagine #oneshot #fan fic #fan fiction

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crudely-drawn-ben · 5 months

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Introducing Trilogy

Yesterday I released Trilogy, a new tabletop RPG crafted to support you in having grand adventures in worlds of your own making.

There are several reasons I started writing Trilogy, but the biggest one is that I ran a Dungeon World podcast called Crudely Drawn Swords for seven years and that was a lot of time to think about what we were playing. To a degree Trilogy is the game I wish that we could have had to run the podcast.

Starting from the question "what would a purely PbtA game for epic fantasy look like?" I started thinking more widely - what do I want from a fantasy game? And the truth is that I want a game that supports the structure of characters and their interactions but doesn't tie itself to a specific setting.

Trilogy begins with The Appendices - conventionally in epic fantasy these are at the end and document information about the wider world that might not have made it into the story, but here it is where you sit down as a group and decide what tone you want your game to have, and your world looks like. What kind of place is it? What magic is there? What is religion like? What are the major cultures where the story begins? How would it feel to be in this world? Trilogy doesn't tell you any of these things, it gives you the tools to think through how you want your world to look.

This creates a secondary challenge - without knowing what the world looks like, how could I design character classes for this type of game? Trilogy answers this by going back to the fundamentals - instead of a conventional character class, the playbooks in Trilogy represent a narrative arc. Some of them, like The Fighter, The Priest, or The Magus, look like familiar classes. Others, such as The Volunteer, The Mentor, The Weapon, or The Defeated, are a little different. Character arcs have a set of turning points, story beats that allow you to advance along your arc after you have collected a certain amount of experience. Some are positive and others negative, you choose which ones you want to hit and when, but every character's story has its highs and lows and to get the most from the game you need to lean into both. A character can pass through three arcs as they grow and change, like the three volumes of a trilogy.

The aim of the game is to create a slower but satisfying sense of progression - instead of hit points characters take Stress and Harm like in other Powered by the Apocalypse games that can have both mechanical and narrative effects. That makes combat feel dangerous, but the game also offers more ways to solve problems without getting into combat - I have played games where the player characters never got into a fight, instead resolving confrontations through an ingenious selection of alternative strategies including "lying" and "vomiting magic ink all over the floor." I'm genuinely enthusiastic about this game - I think I would be as excited about it if somebody else had written it. It leans hard into the joy of discovery and the excitement of adventure - you can play it as spooky and whimsical or gritty and hard-edged and anywhere in between.

Because I was writing it I even got to make most of the examples of play roll out as the story of someone's game, something I always appreciate when I read it. It also contains every technique I use as a GM in the hope that even before people get the chance to play it (heaven forbid any TTRPG afficionado have books we haven't got around to playing yet!) people who read it will still be able to use that advice in their other games. So that's Trilogy, the game I've been working on for the last few years. I think it's pretty great and I hope you will too:

Obviously it's a full-priced game and that's a big gamble from an unfamiliar creator - if you want an idea of what it's like in practice we've got the CDS team back together and we're starting a streamed campaign so you have a chance to see it in action. You can find that over on Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NxpXacko9Nc

The first episode includes me notably failing to use OBS at both the beginning and end, and I can't make any promises things will improve in that regard, but it should be a good opportunity to see how the game shapes up from this start and with this crew I know it's going to be funny and take some wild swings. If you're interested in reviewing Trilogy or you really want to give it a try but you can't afford it, drop me a message

#ttrpgs #indie ttrpg #pbta #epic fantasy #fantasy

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mageofseven · 1 year

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How Likely the Boys Would Be Willing to Carry the Baby For You

Okay so I know I'm still writing a series on this topic (btw I know Satan is next but someone sent in an ask with an incredibly inspiring prompt about Belphie's so I think Imma do his next then Satan's), but I decide to still do this post.

This ranks how likely the Boys would be willing to be the pregnant one in the relationship, but in a situation where you/their partner wouldn't be in danger; you just want kids, but you don't want to be the pregnant one lol

•▪︎▪︎◇°●♡●°◇▪︎▪︎•

Most

Diavolo: Honestly, I bet most people thought Beel would number one, but he isn't for two reason: Dia's absolutely joy at being pregnant and Beely's absolutely joy at seeing his partner pregnant.

Beelzebub: This man is still incredibly willing to carry the baby. He may think his partner is beautiful while pregnant, but it not like he finds no enjoyment in being the pregnant one. This man is insanely curious while pregnant and is grateful to be able to take some hardship off of his partner.

Asmodeus: Honestly, this man thinks he looks incredibly sexy with a pregnant belly. Morning sickness sucks and birth will be painful, but everything in between will be great and at least his partner won't have to go through that stuff, right?

Simeon: Pregnancy is...well, not something angels usually experience 😅 still, he'll do it for his partner if he must. Every growth and sensation will be so new to him so please explain what's happening to his poor body.

Solomon: Not exactly something on his bucket list, but he'd do it if his partner was adamant about it. Would treat it like a little experiment and document the experience.

Mephistopheles: He'd definitely rather not. It simply wasn't the 'right way' to do things, the way his traditional family has taught him. However...he treasures his partner more than them therefore, despite how uncomfortable the idea of it makes him, he'd be open to it for his partner's sake.

Barbatos: He's lower on this list than he'd like to admit. He's always doing his best to take care of others after all, which is exactly why he wishes he could more easily say yes to his partner on this subject but also why he struggles to; pregnancy would make him tired, nausea, achey, give him headaches, and other things that could prevent him from doing his job after all. Poor Barb wouldn't be sure what answer to give.

Lucifer: This man is constantly exhausted and has headaches as it is; he doesn't need a pregnancy to make it worse. If his partner had some sort of health risk, he would carry the pregnancy for them with no complaint. Otherwise...this man likely won't do it. He is physically miserable enough 😅💔

Satan: This man isn't big on kids, but the problem is more than that and worse yet--he can't describe it. He struggles to decipher his own emotions most of the times and the thought of being pregnant conjures complicated ones that he doesn't understand, but they still overwhelm him nonetheless. Please forgive him. He is truly sorry.

Mammon: It was honestly hard finding a place for him on this list because I think he would agree to it but his partner should not let him. He'll do it to please them, but only for him to end up getting really upset and depressed with his changing body and it would be really bad for his mental health.

Belphegor: Usually Belphie is last in these sorts of lists, but no one can be worst than Levi in this specific one. As we all know, this sloth demon doesn't like kids so if his partner wants one so badly, they can carry it themselves.

Leviathan: Oh dear devil, this man would freak out and he knows it. He would rather never be pregnant. Ever little body change would scare him and his paranoid nature would send into a crying fit about how he believes he is poisoning the baby because he had a second pop that day. He knows he'd be like this and that's why he tells his partner he just can't handle it.

#obey me #obey me otome #obey me lucifer #obey me satan #obey me diavolo #obey me mammon #obey me leviathan #obey me asmodeus #obey me beelzebub #obey me belphegor #obey me barbatos #obey me simeon #obey me solomon #obey me mephistopheles

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sophieinwonderland · 5 months

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Tagging @explaceholder for post alert.

So, until recently I absolutely didn't care about multiplicity and in fact education that I received suggested that multiplicity is not real, including DID.

What coincided is that in the last few weeks several posts about it made it on my dash and I lurked r/fakedisordercringe. The subreddit left me with conflicting feelings because on one hand it's true that many of the featured people clearly don't fit the criteria for their disorders, but also the place felt too aggressive considering that the "fakers" may be just misinformed.

With most disorders it's clear because there always exist states that severely deviate from the norm but are not pathological. With multiplicity though it's clear that most of those people don't have DID, but some people noted (and later I saw it on your post) that said "fake" multiplicity may be just non-pathological spiritual practice. I know a number of ideas about how human psyche can be dissected into sub-personalities, including those that were proposed as psychotherapy techniques and for a time I semi-regularly interacted with tulpamancers who also fit the criteria of "believe in possessing multiple personalities inside one body". And while I never experimented with splitting psyche and don't want to, I have some experience with other spiritual practices and know that power of believe and symbolism may make you feel very interesting things. And some of the "ex-fakers" even report that those other personalities felt real as long as they were doing practice but eventually disappeared after they stopped.

So while having DID without trauma is scientifically impossible, I can easily accept that people may have brains or experience that makes them feel like there are multiple hypostasises inside of them. Which is very different but as legit as any other self-conceptualization.

What I am getting at is that I don't want to dismiss endogenic systems as non-existent, but they are obviously non-pathological. Main complaint from the cringers is that endogenic systems downplay the severity of DID and misinform people, and it would be in fact a very bad thing to do. But like, do they? Or are you mostly having discipline and distinguish pathological and non-pathological states?

I just recently learned about the whole thing and want to study it for scholarly reasons and also because it feels like it becomes louder and louder, so I decided to just ask the most important question directly. Also feel free to correct me on any of the mistakes

Thanks for taking an interest in this and being open-minded!

If you're interested in studying multiplicity, this doc has a ton of sources you can check out:

For plural history, you may want to check out the Plural Deepdive:

Something I find about r/Fakedisordercringe is that a lot of ableist misinformation gets spread around there. Many of the things they claim aren't symptoms of DID are, in fact, and have been well-documented.

I also think you shouldn't necessarily conclude based on behaviors from brief snippets that their experiences aren't pathological.

In the end, the only things you see are the snippets these systems want to show, which are then further cherry-picked by the cringe subreddits.

While it's great that you're more interested in non-pathological plurality, please don't assume that someone's plurality isn't pathological just because you see a video of them being happy with their system. Because dissociative disorders are immensely complex, and there are plenty of systems that get along very well. One study even showed a majority of people with DID said they would miss the voices of their alters if they were gone. But they still had DID.

It's very, very common for people with DID to enjoy some aspects of the disorder, even if other aspects still would result in clinically significant distress or impairment that would make it pathological.

So while having DID without trauma is scientifically impossible

I wish people would stop saying this. We are... in a very gray area.

What we know for certain is that people with DID nearly always report a trauma history with statistics being upwards of 90%, which is huge. And the fact that it's not quite 100% can possibly be explained by amnesia... but we can't know that for certain.

There is a huge difference between "DID is virtually always caused by trauma" and "it's scientifically impossible to have DID without trauma."

Remember, a lot of science operates in these gray areas and our scientific knowledge is constantly overturned with new research.

I don't mind if people believe that all DID is trauma-based. I just don't think it should be presented as if it's some sort of scientific law when there are still too many unknowns.

Main complaint from the cringers is that endogenic systems downplay the severity of DID and misinform people, and it would be in fact a very bad thing to do. But like, do they? Or are you mostly having discipline and distinguish pathological and non-pathological states?

Personally, I think it's kind of silly for people to say "these people who don't say they have DID are downplaying the severity of DID."

Because by and large, that's what we're talking about. Only a very small number of DID systems identify as endogenic.

At least purely. There are mixed origin DID systems who may report being plural before they experienced the trauma that caused them to develop their system, or they may identify some of their headmates as spiritual, or consider themselves mixed for other reasons. But people who will say they have DID without any trauma are an exceedingly rare anomaly.

So yeah, most purely endogenic systems are not saying their plurality is related to any disorder and there's no logical reason their presentations of plurality should affect the perceptions of disorders they aren't claiming to have.

...

Anyway, hope this was able to help! 😁

#pluralgang #plurality #plural #multiplicity #endogenic #pro endo #system #did #dissociative identity disorder #osdd #did osdd #pro endogenic #systems #syscourse #sysblr #actually a system #actually plural

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keelt9 · 6 months

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Cap. 2

Part 2

Masterlist

That was the third time, his mind traveled to that moment, the reaction was the same, a soft smile on his face followed by shaking his head.

“Enzo, this is a good one, great job!” He heard about the headphones, that day he was in the studio recording the monolog, a part of it.

He comes out to check the recording, he knows Mar, of course he does, but he doesn’t relate the connection, not until that day.

“Sorry, I'll go out for a second and come back in a moment.” She excuses herself leaving them hearing the final parts, a few minutes later she opens the door one more time.

“Just sit there and do whatever you are doing, for Christ sake!” Mar wasn’t mad; it's obvious from the giggle that follows that sentence. “Sorry, what do you think?”

“I can wait in the car!” Mar keeps __ pulling by her arm to get inside of the room. “It’s not like I’m doing this for the first time.” Mar comes out for her insisting that she will be more relaxed knowing she is at least inside of the building.

__ bring her tablet with her, being two weeks disconnected from all her life already accumulated a good amount of mails and with Christmas in 5 days this just increased, she decided that minutes waiting for Mar will be enough for at least answering a couple of them.

After literally close the door in front of her eyes she just give up and sit in one of the couches and continue in her reading, when a mail come in, her mother and a document, Lucia keeps sending files to her childs for a feedback or a opinion with topic weddings but __ continue doing the same thing, let it the other emails hide them.

<At least try to read it> A message from Esteban popped in her cellphone.

<How do you know I didn’t read it?> The response she got was two emojis one for each sibling, rolling their eyes.

Fine, is the only thought came to her mind while open a file with a bunch of pictures about flowers and wedding bouquets, the only answer she was able to write was, <So pretty, mom>, follow by keep working in what Enrique send it her before leaving Mexico; he started to work in the cultivation in a new zone of the ranch where the access to the water it will be continue but the grapes will be more expose to the impact of the cold and warm airflow; her task is design how they will set the storage by the time the harvesting begin leaving enough space for their “little” experiment.

“Ready!” Mar said opening the door, __ lost the track of time, what for her were just minutes turned into an hour, as she raised her sight she caught the glimpse of a familiar face turning around so quickly.

“__?” Mar waves her hand in front of her face, turning her attention.

“Sorry, what do you say?” Mar smiles and points with her head to the exit. “I told you that everything seems fine in the loveland.”

Caro keeps texting to them about the updates of her date and everything seems to be really great, a nice restaurant, nice dinner and excellent company, she resumes in her last text.

“Hey Mar!” Mar closes her eyes and say <Please no, please don’t, just a few meters of the exit> and turns around with a smile on her face. “Matias, what are you doing here?”

“I’m waiting for…” He just averted his eyes to the left side of Mar when his eyes recognized the girl. “Oh, we met again.” __ didn’t raise her sight of her shoes her mind working in the storage and the relocation of the barrels, until she heard, <meet again>

“Do you know each other?” Mar asks, seeing the frown expression in __.

“No, just see one time.” __ answers.

“Ok, amm, what you’re saying?” Mar changed the subject thinking he could see her the last time she brought __ to the storage.

“Yeah, have you seen Enzo? I’m waiting for him to go to dinner but I couldn’t find him.” He keeps sending glances to __.

“No, he left the studio before me so…__ did you see him? He is tall, slim, really slim these days, he’s wearing a black pants, black hoodie.” Mar tries to describe him but in __ eyes seems like she already had the idea of what he looks like.

“Sorry, I was so distracted by some files until you called me.” __ shrugged her shoulders.

“I didn’t know you had two sisters.” Matias crossed his arms really curious about the girl with a hard way of looking; he isn’t dumb at all, already notice after the little encounter with these girl, Enzo has a little, almost unnoticed smile from time to time, he isn’t a credit that to that girl but it’s a curious thing.

“Because I don’t. She is __ Ovalle, best friend of my sister.” This time __ actually smiled and extended her hand for Matias to shake it.

“Matias Recalt, nice to meet you __.”

At that moment Mar sees Enzo walking out to the building, she points to him. “There he is.” Matias turns around and shouts his name.

“Well, you found him, it’s our cue to go.” Mar claps her hands. “Good night Matias.” She smiles __ and tingles her arm with __ turning around and keeps walking.

“Good night, nice to meet you __.” He smiles at her and she just waves her hand before walking to the car.

“Where were you?” Matias asked when Enzo reached him. “I’ven looking for you.”

“I was talking with…people.” Enzo is trying really hard to look like always, unbothered.

“Talking with people?” Matias has two options: push further to his evident nervousness or let it pass…for now.

“Yes, people.” Enzo takes a deep breath to look into his eyes, but at the moment he does it, he turns his gaze at the first blink.

It took 3 seconds to Enzo recognized the girl who was sitting with her legs crossed, frown expression, and head bend to the left, like the girl who ran away after giving his ring; his intention was let it pass, so he keeps walking but the curiosity to at least know his name and if she works there increase in each step he walks far away, and started to getting slower.

<It’s just a question.> His subconscious justifies the stop he did at the middle of the corridor, he bites his lip and turns around.

He panicked when he heard the voice of Mar follow by the strange girl raising her eyes, he quickly turned around one more time walking faster to the end of the corridor and enter to one of the rooms where props are keep; as soon as he slowly close the door and hit his forehead to the cool wood he get it, why she runs like that.

He waited for a couple of minutes to come out and got down where Matias must be looking for him, they agreed to go to dinner, and the missed calls confirm he is looking for him. What he didn’t expect was to find the girl and Mar talking with him. Thank God, when he was spotted by Mar, they apparently said goodbye and walked away.

“Her name is __.” Matias says out of the blue in the middle of the dinner, taking out of balance to Enzo.

“Who?” Enzo took a bite of his food, in his defense his mind was analyzing the next-to-last day of shooting.

“Oh, the girl who ran away the other night. It’s really… how can I describe her?” Matias tried to analyze the “not mind” attitude but the soft expressions she can have when she seems interested or curious about something.

“Odd? Atypical?, something like that.” He didn’t get the response of Enzo so let it pass, and change the topic, maybe after all he is already making stories in his mind.

#enzo vogrincic #enzo vogrincic x reader #fic #the society of snow #enzo vogrincic fanfic #latam

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lexusiswriting · 6 months

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A love you deserve (Ricky Olson) - Part 12 of ?

Hi guys!

Sorry for keeping you waiting, I had a couple busy days, but I'm back now <3

Warnings: none.

Tags: @multifandomcrackhead, @nicelittlenightmares, @roll-tide-babe89, @skulliecadaver-blog, @21-century-tae, @melissa-anderson, @abiomens, @w743, @insanitywulf, @awkwardalex, @philomenie

Requests: OPEN.

_________________________________

Ricky’s point of view

In the week we had time to prepare for our first studio session, I was a mess. Not one song felt right to me, my mind was on a completely different dimension, and Lexus wouldn’t respond to any of my messages or calls. I was completely lost, and I didn’t know what to do at this point.

Chris heard about everything that happened, and he wasn’t happy at all. He tried to make me let her go for the sake of the band. Yes, we have a big chance now with her to go above and beyond, but I couldn’t stop my feelings for her just like that. Especially when I know it’s all my fault.

Now we were in the studio, waiting for her. I couldn’t pretend nothing happened or that I was heartbroken. While I was making a plan to talk to her after, she entered the room, making all my thoughts go away. Even though she greeted us, her eyes would not dare to look in my direction, and I could feel we both shared the same sorrow.

“Alright guys, being the first day I don’t necessarily want a name for the album, so any song you think is almost done would be great. Just to get an idea of what you want to do. From there, I would be happy to help you with the rest.”

Chris came closer to the rest of us to decide on a song. We had 3 songs we worked on really heard, but none of them were close to be done.

“I think Porcelain would be fine. What do you guys think?”

Good song, but I don’t think it’s the best idea to be the first song she will hear from this album. I had another idea in mind.

“Let’s play Cause of Death. I think she will like it more.”

“But you have a part in it as well, and the last time we tried to play it, you weren’t using your voice properly.”

“Don’t worry, I’ll do my best.”

Lexus’s point of view

They started to play their song while I wrote the name of it on a document. I hated to do all this paperwork, but it was a part of my job. Chris said that Ricky would sing a part of it as well, and that made me really curious.

From the very first seconds, I knew this was going to be a really good song. I loved everything about it. As I have a lot of new bands, making their debut album where they have a lot to learn, I missed these moments when everything will be perfect from the beginning. You can clearly see the years of experience they had.

The whole time, I was looking at everyone, except Ricky. Something in me missed him deeply this past week, but the other part of me was almost set to send Motionless to another label. Of course, I wouldn’t be able to do that, but still, that thought crossed my mind for a second.

I was absorbed by their song, loving every second of it. But Ricky’s turn made me to finally look at him.

No hope, no time

Can't go back, can't rewind

I still belong to you

No hope, no time

Can't go back, can't rewind

You still belong to me

While he was singing, I felt like he was looking directly in my soul, not just in my eyes. Until the song finished, I couldn’t look at anyone else but him. Chris was the one to bring me back down to earth.

“So, what do you think?”

“It’s perfect, guys. Of course, you still have to work a little bit on it, but I loved it. Congrats!”

While they were cheering for their success, I stood up, only wishing to be alone in my office. After I closed the door, I tried to catch my breath, thinking about what happened. Of course, he wrote those lyrics to get in my mind. But this time I had to be careful, to not suffer once again because of him.

Someone knocked on the door and I thought it would be Stephanie, to get all the documents I signed earlier. But there was Ricky, with a sad expression on his face.

“I’m sorry. I know I messed up really bad this time, but give me one more chance, please.”

“What story do you believe now?”

“Yours, of course. Look, I talked to some friends who happen to know Corey. Everything you said was true. But they all keep it behind the scenes for his image.”

“So, you still had to check which one of us was lying. Ricky, I’m sorry, but I’m really tired of this. Please, leave me alone.”

“Alright, I’ll go now, but I promise you something. A long time ago I realized we were made for each other and one day you’ll be mine, and I’ll be yours, officially, for eternity.”

#ricky horror #ricky horror imagine #ricky olson #ricky olson x reader #ricky olson fanfic #chris motionless #justin morrow #miw #motionless in white fanfic #ryan sitkowski #vinny mauro #motionless in white

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tellthemeerkatsitsfine · 6 months

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I’m about halfway through the audiobook of The Holy Vible, the book that Elis James and John Robins published in 2018. It’s really varied, with each chapter being on an entirely different subject (they went with one chapter for each letter of the alphabet, which was a gimmick I thought I’d find annoying, but in fact find myself looking forward to seeing what they get into next every time they finish one). John wrote some of the chapters and Elis wrote others, but they both jump in on each other's chapters with little commentary.

A lot of it is, to be honest, not objectively great literature. Listening to Elis spend an entire chapter talk about how great his favourite band is is only interesting if you’ve listened to a lot of Elis James already, and you happen to really really enjoying hearing people tell you why they like their favourite thing so much. Luckily both those things are true of me so I’ve enjoyed this. I probably wouldn’t recommend it to anyone who’s not already really invested in their radio show.

Anyway, I’ve managed to hold off for a while on doing another post about how listening to John Robins is bringing up mental health-related stuff for me, but then I got to chapter L in this book, which they have rather convolutedly titled “Living – Grief Is” (because they couldn’t make “Grief Is Living” Chapter G, as they had to use G for Elis’ favourite band, Gorky's Zygotic Mynci). It’s a reference to episode 191 of their Radio X show, the time in October 2017 when John Robins came on the radio to explain how the night before, he got drunk alone in his house, ate ten bags of something called Space Raiders (I’ve Googled them, they’re like chips – crisps – I think), and decided he’d do some writing, but due to being too drunk just wrote the words “Grief is living” in a notebook and then found it in the morning next to the chips wrappers. This story caught on with listeners and led to a bunch of people emailing in with their stories of vaguely harrowing shit they’d done in the middle of the night after drinking too much.

I liked how many people connected with the story, because that’s pretty high up on my list of experiences I’ve had frequently but never tell anyone about (or wouldn’t have – now that I’m making an actual effort to stop drinking, I feel like I don’t have to try as hard to minimize how much I was drinking, and being freed of those mental gymnastics is one of the few upsides to what’s been a mostly shitty process so far). When I’m drinking I’ll hit a point where I’ll start feeling things more and think I need to share this, but also be conscious of how much I will fucking hate myself if I start sending anyone drunk messages (not that I never have done the drunk messaging thing – I used to do it a lot when I was young enough for it to be almost acceptable, like early twenties – but especially in the last five years or so, I’ve started getting so paralyzingly mortified at realizing that anyone could ever hear or read my drunk thoughts that I’ve started avoiding getting too drunk around other people and definitely avoiding sending any messages while drunk), so I’ll open a Word document and just type out whatever I’m thinking. And figure that if any of it makes sense in the morning, I can do something with it.

I also have the quite common habit of eating terrible food in the middle of the night while drunk, so that image – of waking up and finding wrappers from the shitty food you ate and something you wrote that’s harrowingly depressing but also cringe-inducingly stupid – is an experience I’ve had many times, leading me to immediately delete everything and throw everything in the garbage and try to forget I ever did that because I hate the person who did that. Somehow, waking up to find something I wrote in a Word doc about something that was making me sad – I somehow find that almost as mortifying as waking up to find I’d sent those thoughts to someone in a message, even though obviously writing stuff in a Word doc that I don’t send anywhere should be no big deal. But it’s always something I wrote about some emotional thing that’s there when I’m sober and that I try to be an adult and ignore, and then I see how horribly I laid it out when drunk, and I can’t stand to look at it. And obviously I also feel guilty for ordering Subway at 1 AM or whatever I did.

Like I said, pretty high on the list of things I have done regularly but don’t even let myself think about, much less share with anyone else. And it was kind of cool to hear John Robins recount a similar story, and then get all those other people writing in to say “Oh yeah I do that too.” I mean, obviously it’s a bad thing to do and all of those people should stop, and John Robins has stopped, and that’s good. But it is nice to hear it’s not just me. It’s up there with that one chapter from Michael Legge’s book, which described the specifics of a post-drinking morning in harrowing detail – for the most painfully accurate description of this that I’ve heard in comedy. And what do we look for in comedy, if not painfully accurate descriptions of substance abuse problems?

Anyway, John Robins named The Mental Health Chapter in his and Elis’ book Grief Is Living, because he explained that that story resonating with other people is an example of why it is worth sharing these things. I got to this chapter while on a break at work, listened to the first five minutes or so, quickly realized that this was far too emotionally heavy a thing to listen to while being at work, but by the time I worked that out it was too late, it had made me feel too many things. I did even really feel in a place to put on some other more lighthearted podcast, so I tried music instead, played the Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy album that was referenced in the chapter, which was a terrible way to try to make myself feel less emotional and more ready to work. The last session I had to run that day was a rather tough.

John Robins acknowledges early in the chapter that he feels awkward and a bit cringe-worthy doing a “Mental Health Chapter”, and I feel similarly about picking out “The Mental Health Chapter” as the one to make a Tumblr post about. Feels like it’s saying “This chapter is the really significant one in the book, because they Talk About Mental Health”, and I feel weird saying that. If it helps at all, this isn’t the first post I’ve written about that book. I actually wrote a really quite long post rebutting all of Elis’ points in Chapter F – Football, because he spends so long explaining why football is better than other sports and all he does is list things that can apply to any sport, football is not special because it has drama and excitement, that’s just what sports are, and listening to him explain the justification for Popular Team Sport Playing With a Ball And a Net Supremacy did make me feel a bit like I was back in high school having my objectively much bigger athletic accomplishments in a much less popular sport superseded on the announcements for the junior boys basketball team making the regional semi-finals or whatever. I wrote a long and detailed post explaining point-by-point why Elis’ argument is not specific to football and actually lots of other sports do that better, and then I looked at it, said “This is overly defensive high school bullshit”, and deleted it all without posting it.

So here’s my second post about the audiobook I’m listening to, and it is on The Mental Health Chapter, though I’m going to touch on the couple of chapters around it as well, because honestly the best cure for listening to something that makes you feel too many things is to write them down and say them into a void and then they’re gone and you can move on with your life.

When I got home from work, I re-listened to the first few minutes of that chapter, and I started transcribing as I listened because I thought I'd include some of it in this post. I didn't go in with a plan for how much to transcribe, and ended just continuing to write until I'd covered the whole introduction. So here's that:

When Elis and I began broadcasting together, it never occurred to me to be anything other than as honest with him on air as I was in person. If he asked me how I was, and I was sad, I would say so. If he asked me, “How was your week, John?” and I’d had a tough time, I might exclaim, “Awful!” before playing Green Day. It soon became clear that this wasn’t very common in the world of commercial radio. And, as a result, over the years, our Radio X show has contained many references to, stories about, correspondence concerning, all kinds of things one might place under the broad heading of mental health.

I must admit I’m even slightly uneasy using terms like “mental health”, or depression, maybe because I worry that other people – whether rightly or wrongly – might cringe, or tense up, or think, “Oh, this isn’t about me,” or, “I don’t want to hear someone being all open about stuff.” So thank the Lord for our old friend Elis James, who, with a common touch like no other, coined the term “the darkness of Robins”. Little did that man on the street know that not only was he predicting the title of the 2017 Perrier Award-winning show (sorry Fosters, if.com, lastminute.com – that’s what I’m calling it) – and, by extension, predicting that one day I would be crowned the funniest comedian on Earth (plus Australian support) – but he had found the only word I felt totally comfortable using to describe my vibe. (Note to self: potential game show title. Get Elis to pitch it to one of his TV friends?)

I was reluctant to write about darkness. I’m far more comfortable describing how it manifests itself, and then having a laugh about it. I would never want to suggest that my experience was in any way unique, or that my take on it was in any way authoritative. I think perhaps, what I feel most acutely is a fear that anyone suffering from any form of mental health problem may read what I write and think, “That’s not my experience. Maybe I’m even more unusual or alone or weird than I thought.” What I have learned is that the more subjectively one talks about such things – eg. “I ate ten bags of Space Raiders before writing ‘grief is living’ in a notebook” – the more people can see themselves in those stories. Yet, when you try to speak generally – eg. “Depression is like running up a hill through treacle” – you immediately exclude most people. Because our experience of mental health is as varied and individual as our experience of physical health. Just because I get pains in my left hamstring after long drives doesn’t mean your eczema isn’t real. (The sole downside of being one of the world’s most accomplished clutch balancers.)

I wouldn’t say I’m depressed, or suffer from depression – I don’t think I do. However, I do feel dark at times, and my general outlook and baseline mood is often one of darkness. I felt a connection to the word when I first heard Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy’s masterpiece: I See a Darkness. It’s a flawless album, and the title track speaks to me very personally, as I’m sure it does to everyone who has heard it. Have a listen, and then a read of the lyrics. It’s not as bleak as it first sounds. It’s a song of honesty, friendship, and hope. But it’s still sad, mournful, and dark. I love that balance. There is light in the darkness, but also darkness in the light.

There’s an interview with Will Oldham – aka Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy – on music website Pitchfork. It’s a characteristically stupid interview, where, hilariously, the interviewer begins by asking why Will Oldham doesn’t like interviews. And, having heard his reasons – nuance impossible, detail glossed over, interesting topics rushed or edited, complex topics not pursed – he then spends the rest of the interview proving Will’s point. There’s a great bit where he asks if Will Oldham has had much experience of karma. He answers, “Tons and tons.” To which the interviewer simply responds, “Johnny Cash played I See a Darkness on his last album. What was that like?” I mean, come on! Maybe dig a little deeper into the interesting thing he just said. It’s like that bit in Knowing Me, Knowing You where Alan Partridge asks the racing driver if he gets bored of the same old questions, before asking, “When did you first want to be a racing driver?” Anyway. If you don’t want to be annoyed, don’t go on Pitchfork.

But there’s one really cool thing Will Oldham says in the interview. He’s asked, “Do you think that you’re more depressed than most people?” Which, speaking as someone who has given a few interviews over the last year, is a really horrid question – and I’ve had some stinkers. (No, it’s not about her and she’s not seen the show and yes, we do speak.) There’s no way out of that question without A) your answer becoming the story – eg. “Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy has depression!”, or “Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy’s melancholic persona all a lie” – or, B) sounding self-important. Answering either yes or no would make him sound like he thinks he’s somehow special, and separates him from his audience. If you fudge it, it sounds like you don’t want to engage with depression or mental health. And, in fact, it’s impossible to answer, because how do you know how everyone else feels? Such a dumb, unanswerable question.

However, somehow, the brilliant Will Oldham finds the perfect answer: “Not today.” I absolutely love that answer. I love it so God damn much. Because in one exchange, something of the experience of mental health is captured, without anyone claiming ownership of what that experience is like. Everyone has mental health – both positive and negative experiences of it. And everyone’s experience is not only different, but different day to day. In that answer, we have a world where everyone is depressed and not depressed. We’re all experiencing emotions in different ways, at different times.

First of all, I need to acknowledge that in the first part of that, John Robins says much more clearly and precisely something I took way too long to try to explain in a post I made last month, after I listened to him and Elis on the Comedian’s Comedian podcast, about why I like their term “darkness” so much. I like that they don’t set out to explicitly “talk about mental health”; they just tell stories about their lives, and those stories often (this mainly applies to John) involve things that indicate deviation from the platonic ideal of a psychologically healthy person. In 2014, Elis James made an offhanded comment about how John should someday write a show called The Darkness of Robins, cataloguing all these deviations because clearly they resonate with people.

The term grew from there, John started referring to his issues with the vague term “darkness” (ie. “Pretty tired this morning because I couldn’t sleep last night, woke up at 2 AM with a case of the darkness”), listeners started writing in to say this show has helped them with “the darkness”, and nobody has to actually say the words “mental health”. And as John acknowledges in that chapter, that can be a good and a bad thing – maybe in some ways bad because properly naming mental health issues can be important, in some circumstances. But I don’t think a commercial digital indie radio show has to be one of those circumstances where that’s required. “Darkness” is a word that makes it so much easier. It’s a word that can be used to include people who have a whole range of different mental health diagnoses, or multiple diagnoses, and who don’t want to get into all the specifics but do want to be included. And it includes people who are undiagnosed, and people who wouldn’t be diagnosed because their issues don’t meet clinical diagnostic criteria, but they still lay awake feeling terrible and would like a word to describe that.

It’s also a word that strikes the perfect tone. Obviously naming a show “The Darkness of Robins” is ironically grandiose, and there’s something just slightly ironic about it every time they use that word. Obviously they’re being a bit intentionally silly by calling day-to-day psychological struggles something as dramatic as “darkness”. But it’s only a very small touch of irony – just enough irony to take the edge off and make you feel like you’re not formally Talking About Mental Health, but not so much irony that it starts mocking or minimizing the struggles.

I said basically all of that in a post I made last month, and now I’ve said it all again here, and I enjoyed listening to John Robins say pretty much the same thing, but say it much better than I have, and confirm that I was reading it right. They really did hit on a good thing with that word.

I also find that last bit of the above quote really interesting, about the impossible interview question. I’m pretty sure a really difficult part of life is figuring out what bits of your experience are normal and what you should assume is an exception. I’ve gone through phases where I was convinced that everyone’s basically depressed, I don’t think anyone identifies as being “normal” or “happy”. And I’ve gone through other phases where I’ve thought everyone except me is basically normal and I have nothing in common with anyone.

I think during most of my twenties, I leaned more toward the former way of thinking, possibly because I spent most of my time around people who all had something so wrong with them that they felt best when doing a sport where they could literally throw themselves at other people and either physically overpower them or be physically overpowered and being able to do this five or so times a week is all that kept them functioning. If you spend all your time around people like that, you start to think any issues you have are probably normal, everyone has issues, I’m no more messed up than anyone else. On the other hand, last year I started an in-person job for the first time in ages, and either my coworkers are a lot better than I am at being normal and functioning humans, or they’re a lot better than I am at pretending to be normal and functioning humans. I suspect it’s a bit of both.

One time in 2019, my best friend and I had been in an argument for a while about something that does not matter now, and I went over to his house and we ended up getting into it again. He told me this was upsetting, and if I hadn’t come over we’d have avoided all this and would have both have enjoyed our evenings much more, so there was no point to doing this. I said that as shitty as this was, if I’d stayed home, I’d have just spent all evening feeling bad about how we were fighting and worrying about the issue at hand, so for me, this was an improvement on if I’d just stayed home. And he told me “Well that’s the different between us, because my default state isn’t sad. If we didn’t have this argument, I’d have spent the evening feeling fine, because I don’t just feel bad all the time the way you do.” We resolved that fairly unimportant argument pretty quickly, but that sentiment’s stayed with me. Most people’s default state is not sad. It’s possible that I am, in fact, more depressed than most people. Most days.

Not knowing whether you’re “normal” compared to other people isn’t just an issue when it comes to issues of darkness, either. I’m in that cycle of “I’m pretty sure no one is like me” and “I’m pretty sure no one is special and everyone is pretty much the same” with everything. Like people who identify as being really nerdy – we joke about that, but surely we know everyone jokes about how very nerdy they are, so no one is really more nerdy than anyone else, right? Everyone has the thing that they’re a big nerd about, and they think it makes them different from other people, but it doesn’t, because everyone else also has a thing. I mostly thought that, but in fall 2022, I got stuck in a meeting at work where they had an “icebreaker game” of saying your name and a topic on which you could easily give a 30-minute speech. You didn’t have to give the speech or anything, you just had to say what topic you could easily do. There were eight people besides me in that meeting, and seven of them said this was a really difficult question and they struggled to think of anything. One person said Taylor Swift, and that is fine because I am a very non-judgemental person who has no opinion on that (the last clause of this sentence was of course sarcasm, though to be honest, I do genuinely have more respect for someone who could take for 30 minutes about a subject I think is stupid than I do for the people who didn’t have that strong an interest in anything). Maybe that’s a sign that my level of nerdiness does significantly set me apart from most people. Or maybe all those other people were just doing the same thing I was, which is going through the massive list in their minds of subjects they could explain for half and hour, and trying to find one that wouldn’t sound too weird or niche, and not coming up with anything. I hope it was the latter.

I’m thinking of that Daniel Kitson bit where he said you assume other people’s mentalities are basically the same as yours, but then you remember that some people hang their coats up on a train, and the illusion of shared experience shattered. I really like that one because it’s such a specific thing, but he did nail it. I cannot imagine hanging my coat up on a train. It’s such a small, insignificant thing, it’s not against my moral principles or anything – it’s just something it would never occur to me to do. And yet, I have been on trains and seen coats hung up on those little hooks. Some people just go through the world differently from me.

I think the smallest, least important thing in my life that gives me that feeling Kitson was describing – that “Oh shit, the baseline assumption I made that we approach life in basically the same way is incorrect” – is when someone recommends some media to me, and then lets me know what paid streaming site it’s on, as though that will have any bearing on how I watch and/or listen to it. I think the biggest, most important thing that gives me that feeling is that some people have children on purpose. Some people out there think “I find getting out of bed in the morning and tending to my responsibilities so easy that I could probably still do it even if you added a lot more noise and stress, as well as a huge number of additional responsibilities, and raised the stakes to the point where an innocent child's life depends on me getting it right every single day for many years, even at this higher level of difficulty.” They don't just think they're mentally and physically functional and will likely stay that way for the next eighteen years - they're so sure of this that they think it would be fine for a child's life to depend on it. The massive gulf between my mentality and the mentality of a person who could do that – the deep fundamental level on which that gulf exists – makes me sometimes think I don’t have any common experience with almost anyone. And then I listen to a story about someone getting drunk alone and writing something stupid like “Grief is living” in a notebook, and I say “Okay, there are some common experiences.”

The chapter before “L: Living – Grief Is” is “K: Keeping it Session”. This is John Robins’ expression that means sticking to session ales when drinking, which means under 4.5% (basically, weak beer). He goes into great detail about how this improves both the experience of drinking, and your life in general. It’s another thing I’ve described before on this blog, which is that it’s a sneaky thing that seems like it promotes responsible drinking, but actually it’s just a sign of a drinking problem, someone who loves the act of drinking alcohol so much that he’s found a way to make it last longer, because if each drink is weaker then you can have more of it, all else equal. That chapter made so much sense as I listened to it, and I was thinking, once again, that maybe I could try this as a way to satisfy alcohol cravings. Until I got to the very end of the chapter, which I’ve also transcribed:

Having banned spirits in my house from April 2017 – due to factors – the power of my moral hangovers has lessened. Yes, I still have the odd cloudy day that I have to write off, and spend ignoring the self-doubt and seeking emergency crying nooks in central London. (Unused studios at Radio X HQ are an absolute Godsend for any tearful digital DJ caught short welling up in public – for example, after watching the film Arrival at a central London cinema in Jan. 2017). But these days are rare. I have had to admit that spirits, rum especially, had a large part to play in the end of every relationship I’ve ever been in, numerous shame wells, and all my major career failures/plateaus, 2007-14. But I’ve now reached a happy medium where, by sticking to session ale and having the odd day off booze, marked in red Sharpie on my official Queen calendar, I’m genuinely able to enjoy my drinking and my life. So, go forth, dear friends. Spread your alcohol over longer nights, extended chats, and deeper nooks. Forgo wasteful units, erase shame from your mornings, and keep it session.

That bit reminded me that – oh right, this is all bullshit. That is a man who, since writing that, has admitted he had a significant alcohol addiction that was not, in fact, resolved in 2018. That man just explained to me, in 2018, that he has now figured out his drinking habits and is able to do it in a healthy and responsible way and it’s all fine. That’s just lying, I’ve done it too. I don’t know how many years in a row I’ve said “I think my drinking was reached problem levels last year, I’m glad I have it under control now.” Don’t take alcohol advice from people who are lying. (I mean, obviously cutting back is better than not cutting back and drinking weaker alcohol is better than drinking stronger alcohol. I just mean, if you’re having ten drinks in a night on a regular basis, there isn’t a way to make that a good idea, no matter how much I – and apparently John Robins – would like there to be. And if an alcoholic tells you there is a good way to do that, they're probably lying.)

Later in the Grief Is Living chapter, John Robins gets more into discussing how mental health problems manifest and what he’s learned about how to deal with them. To his credit he is very careful about this, he keeps saying he’s not an expert, his experiences will not necessarily apply to anyone else, and the vast majority of his actual advice consisted of referring people to experts, or relaying things he’s learned from experts.

He breaks down lifestyle things into categories that he tries to take care of for the sake of mental health – food, sleep, drink, exercise. And then goes into detail on each one, acknowledging that sometimes you can’t get it all right and sometimes people aren’t capable of following advice on this and sometimes it’s not enough, but it tends to help. He then added that while this doesn’t apply to him, the other big everyday lifestyle factor in mental health for half the population is menstruation, as a huge number of people find their mental health fluctuates significantly with that cycle. And then he talks about how many women he’s known who suffer horribly from this and how they try to manage it, and gives some advice about taking it to a doctor if it’s bad and demanding to see a specialist if you get brushed off or told there’s nothing they can do because it’s not right that women are expected to just “live with it” when there are medical treatments that can help with that.

This of course made me think of the routine in his 2014 Edinburgh show, about his girlfriend’s PMS/PMT. I wrote about this before too, how I do see where he was going with that. The routine is less bad than any one-sentence summary (like the one I just wrote) could make it sound, because he was clearly trying to be more nuanced than just “women be crazy on their periods”. He was approaching it with sympathy for how frustrating those feelings are for the woman experiencing them – but at the same time, he was also making a joke about how those symptoms look odd from the outside. Sara Pascoe did almost the same thing in her show LadsLadsLads – said she suffers from clinically bad PMT and then told some stories about times that led to getting emotional in ways that were amusingly disproportionate and that looks odd.

Obviously, the giant, glaring difference between the two situations is she gets to make that joke because it’s her experience. I guess it’s a double standard, but it seems fair enough given the trade-off of who has to actually live with it, that people who get periods are allowed to make the joke and people who don’t should be very, very careful if they try doing the same thing. John Robins was more careful than most cis men throughout the history of stand-up have been, when it comes to writing a “women be crazy on their periods” routine. But still, not careful enough. That routine is the bit of Robins stand-up that I think is least defensible (aside from that other bit about Sara Pascoe at the end of Darkness of Robins – it’s fine, she hasn’t seen the show and they do speak, it’s hopefully fine and he hopefully ran it past her), I cringed through it when I re-listened to his 2014 show recently and I think including it was a bad call. However, I do like that hearing this bit in the book confirmed the way I read that routine, which is that he doesn’t actually think the primary victims of people suffering from PMT are their male partners. That he was trying to talk about how it’s a genuine issue that people suffer from and that sucks for them, but also, we can make lighthearted fun about it! He just… didn’t do it nearly well enough to justify touching a subject that has such a terrible history of cis male stand-up comedians being dicks about that.

Anyway, I don’t want to get into detail here (or anywhere, talking about it makes me extremely uncomfortable and that sort of thing is why destigmatizing and normalizing discussions about it are good, ie. a cis man including it on a list of lifestyle factors that affect mental health because it’s a huge one even though it doesn’t apply to him – normalizing it through jokes in stand-up sets is also good, but probably best to leave that to the people who experience it), but the fact that I have this cycle every month has a significant detrimental effect on my mental and sometimes physical health, as well as in some ways my overall quality of life, and I appreciate hearing it mentioned so casually. To be honest, that’s another situation where I used to think I’m worse off than most people, but now think I’m not. Every person I’ve ever known well enough for them to have told me about their experience with that cycle has had horror stories that should not be normal, but given how common they are, I think that is normal. My ex-girlfriend had that issue described in the book, of doctors brushing off her terrible, abnormal symptoms because this is just what women are expected to go through. My mother had an emergency hysterectomy at age 48 after experiencing so much blood loss over so many years that it gave her permanent disability issues, and it took until that point for anything to get done because women bleeding a lot is assumed to be normal. It is a good thing to talk about and differentiate between common and normal, I think. Sorry about the tangent, I just figured I’ll package all my oversharing in this one post and then we can move on.

I need to get into another part from later in the Grief Is Living chapter of the book, when John Robins talks about the gambling addiction he used to have, and relays some things he learned from the Gambler’s Anonymous meetings he attended for a while. He explained: “I haven’t gambled since the sixth of December 2002. If you’d told me, on the fifth of December, 2002, that I would go sixteen years without gambling, I would have thrown up at the horror of that idea. Slash burst into tears, slash started gambling.” I wrote out that quote just because I found it helpful. Thinking about giving something up forever is overwhelming and impossible and will immediately make you turn to that thing just to cope with the thought of living without it forever. But you can do it a little at a time and someday it’ll add up.

I’m going transcribe one more quote from that chapter:

My point here is this: You are enough. You did something. Too often, we feel like we aren’t in control, aren’t capable of things. And it doesn’t matter whether it was writing a symphony or emptying the dishwasher, you did it. And hold onto that for dear life, because when it’s all you can do not to bang your had against the wall, or stay in bed all day, or drink into oblivion, emptying the dishwasher is a symphony. And it’s with these small, seemingly insignificant handholds that we can begin to pull ourselves out of the swamp.

I included that because it made me think of that blog he wrote for Chortle (which John and Elis' book described as "comedy's Bible/menu/tabloid", which I found quite funny), during the 2007 Edinburgh Festival, that I wrote about a couple of weeks ago. I made fun of one particular entry in it, which I mostly stand by, because it was so fucking pointlessly intense in such a Classic Robins way. Firstly, he writes glowingly about a Phil Kay show he saw:

It does begin, however, with some of the most beautiful prose I’ve heard in a comedy show. So much so that I have to take out my notebook to write down the statement “the law of love says ‘you are enough’”. Unfortunately Phil sees me do this and takes me for a reviewer. “He might be a journalist” I look up “bang, you’ve missed a bit of the show” he says. I’m wearing headphones round my neck and he riffs on that for a while then moves on. But by now my face is burning and I become his point of focus after delivering set pieces. I feel terrible for the pressure he now seems to think he’s under when there is no need, “I’m not a reviewer Phil! I’m a fan! I’m a worshipper!” but I stay quiet, sit back, and enjoy his remarkable talent. I was going to give him a review, just for neatness, but I don’t think you can really review his shows, just him. He walks a line of personal confession that any self proclaimed storyteller, myself included, is simply miles away from. Of course it’s an intensely personal thing, but for me, as nice as it is to make badges, this style of comedy is where i find hope for the new wave, or whatever you want to call it. The amazing thing is that Phil’s been doing it for nearly 20 years.

So adorable, so annoying, so pointlessly intense, so pretentious but earnest, so sweet – a 25-year-old inexperienced comedian taking out a physical notebook during a show because he was so moved by the line “The law of love says you are enough” that he just had to write it down. But then, he writes about how the night unfolded later on:

After the Zone, which pretty much sold out and was really good, (a high point was Carl telling a woman with an annoying laugh ‘it’s like being heckled by the Lilt ladies’), we went to the Brooke’s Bar. It was rammed and hot. I met a person I’ve not met before, and it was he who made me realise that Phil Kay is not the only one off up here this year. I won’t mention his name because of what transpires later, but he’s like a cross between Chris Morris and Peter Cook circa ‘Derek and Clive get the horn’, drunk, breakdown era, vitriolic Peter Cook. He’s bounding about the bar vomiting all forms of obscenity out onto an unexpecting audience, save those who know him, who reliably inform me that this is normal behaviour. It’s ‘what’s the worst thing you can say to a stranger’ stuff, captivating as much as it is abhorrent. When it crosses the line into straightforward assault I keep my distance. But he reminds me of me, in a way. Not the assault, but the tractor beam of desperation to perform that throws you round a room of strangers and leads you to ruin their evening.

First of all, I need to acknowledge that this does not sound anything like Chris Morris. And I know Peter Cook had issues, but surely there’s a less dramatic simile than that, that John could have used to explain that some comedian was being a dick in a bar. Anyway, the story escalates very fast after that. Weirdly fast. The guy who is not Chris Morris or Peter Cook leaves, and then John and his friends leave, and they find the guy again in a chip show, where he's shouted verbal abuse at some locals and picked a fight with them.

He is chased out by 6 or 7 very rightly angry men, they knock him to the ground and begin to beat him. It’s the kind of thing you only imagine doing when you’re brain won’t sit still at night; “God, imagine if I shouted ‘Fuck you all’ at a funeral, or went to a Millwall game and called them all fags”. It’s not just social suicide, but increasingly physical suicide that I am watching. As the punches and kicks are thrown we wade in to stop the trouble, in the slightly awkward position of being totally sympathetic with the people who are kicking the shit out of him. One minute they were buying chips, the next being called “foreign cunts” and being told to “speak English” in their own country. He didn’t mean these things, but says them to achieve the desired effect: self destruction. As Burgess said, and never truer than now, “destruction’s our ode to joy”.

As we break it up, and shelter our colleague away from the gathering crowd, tears fall from his battered face, and now I properly see myself in his little boy lost eyes. I know that burning need to feel something, anything, other than what you’re feeling inside. In a former life I’d have put my fist through a door, or smashed a bottle or jumped through a shop window, something more controlled than letting half a dozen drunk Scots administer the punishment. “We need to get on top of this”, I say to him, and beating in my head is that statement, like a fucking beacon; “the law of love says ‘you are enough’” to be honest this guy is more than enough. But somehow I need to show him that like Phil suggests, he himself, is all he needs to do whatever he wants. That release, the blessed release that comes from being half killed by an angry mob can be found inside you, the law of love says so.

You definitely should not shout racist abuse at people who have graciously allowed thousands of annoying performers and tourists to take over their city for an entire month (though you also shouldn't beat people up in the street even if they deserve it, and if you see other people beating someone up in the street you should try to stop it if you can, even if they deserve it). And it's pretty fucking intense to quote the likes of Anthony Burgess to Phil Kay while describing the tear-stained face of a man who just picked a fight in a chip shop. I certainly wouldn't call it pointlessly intense this time - that situation got pretty fucking dramatic. But John Robins' narration also got pretty fucking dramatic, and I made of fun of that in another post a few weeks ago, and I mostly stand by that.

But I have to admit I did feel a bit bad after writing that, because of course I know exactly what he's talking about, I spent over ten years of my life unable to function unless I could go into a small room and physically throw myself against people until I knocked them down or they knocked me down and something hurt enough to stop me feeling anything else. And I realize that is also a pretty dramatic thing to write, it's the sort of thing I'd wake up to find written in a Word doc on my laptop next to a Subway wrapper and an almost empty whiskey bottle (which is, obviously, also a way to achieve that feeling of catharsis), but it is an experience I know well and is probably worth talking about. Maybe if more people wrote their feelings down in overly dramatic blog entries, fewer people would feel the need to go pick fights in the street.

And I thought of that old Chortle blog entry when I heard that line in The Mental Health Chapter of his audiobook written 11 years later: "My point here is this: You are enough." He remembered that line. Or he forgot it and it's a coincidence that he repeated it, that's probably more likely. But it did make me think I should be less of a dick about a twenty-five-year-old comedian contributing even more spelling errors to Chortle, while trying to express the way he connected to someone's emotional experience, in the hopes that it might turn out this one doesn't set him too far apart from other people. After all this, I really don't have grounds to make fun of someone else for doing that (although, in my defence, I at least keep my spelling errors/convoluted connections to an emotional experience on this website/gremlin network, and don't sully the highly respectable Bible/menu/tabloid of comedy with them).

Okay I'm done the dramatic parts now. The next chapter is "M: Mind Scenarios", which is much more lighthearted as it looks at the things he thinks about when trying to sleep, although that chapter does contain the line: "I find falling asleep sober so difficult that I’ve twice called NHS Direct because I thought I was having a heart attack," because it's John Robins, so even the fun little ones can get fairly dark. But that chapter is mainly not un-acknowledged alcoholism, it's mainly Sherlock Holmes fanfiction. That is not a joke, it's not something I'm taking out of context to make it sound weird. It's a very literal description of the chapter.

He explains to us that he likes to invent Sherlock Holmes mysteries while falling asleep, and then he spends quite a bit of time - a significant portion of the chapter - reading out an example. I kept waiting for there to be some twist or double meaning that would connect to other things from the book, but no, he just wanted to read us his Sherlock Holmes fanfiction. When he finished the Sherlock story, he didn't add any analysis or explanation of why he'd done that, he just immediately moved on to discussing the cognitive benefits of fantasizing about a nuclear apocalypse.

...Like I said, I'm enjoying the book, but I recommend it to people who are already on board with James and Robins and their whole thing, and I recommend it no one else. I'm having fun though. The vast majority of the book is much more fun than this post.

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dropintomanga · 1 year

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A Thought On Talking to Someone Who Wants to End It All

Goodbye, Eri finally came out in print this past June and people who missed out on last year’s digital release got to see how great this one-shot by Tatsuki Fujimoto (of Chainsaw Man fame) is.

I myself wrote about Goodbye, Eri last year and revisited the one-shot again after getting the the print release. There’s a few panels I want to talk about here.

I will be talking about suicide after the jump.

If you’ve read the manga, you know the initial premise about the main character, Yuta, creating a film for school documenting his mother’s last days and how controversial the film ending was. Many of his classmates criticized him for being tasteless. As a result, Yuta decides to kill himself by jumping off the roof of the hospital where his mom died. It is there where he meets Eri, the female lead of our story. She then asks if Yuta’s going to jump and then says the following.

The reason I want to focus on those 4 panels now compared to last year is because of knowledge I’ve gained about talking to someone thinking of suicide over the past year. Eri doesn’t try to comfort Yuta. She probably knows he’s in a lot of pain and wanted him to unleash it on those who are disrespectful to others. Although Eri does save Yuta from jumping off the roof, it’s somewhat indirect as she comforts him in a different way than how I see most people in the West do it.

Last year, I watched a Hong Kong mahjong comedy. There was a scene where the main female lead was about to kill herself after losing everything in mahjong. As she’s about to jump off the roof of an apartment building, she hears the sound of mahjong tiles being shuffled and notices her mentor and peers playing mahjong right next to her. Her mentor asks her if she’s going to jump, the heroine says yes, and then he tells her to come down and play before going to jump off. There’s a subsequent conversation about mahjong and the mentor convinces her to keep playing/living by empathizing about her situation.

In my experiences with consuming Asian media so far, I feel like when things like suicide attempts/prevention are shown, the support system usually says you can try so-and-so before actually considering dying. Eri does this with Yuta by dragging him to watch movies with her non-stop and gain enough knowledge to make a new film for his school.

In the West, there’s no true care for the person experiencing suicidal thoughts or bad advice being given to those who interact with said individual. I can give a real-life situation. I listened to a podcast story about a woman who felt tremendous guilt over witnessing the death of a young girl she met by suicide on a expressway. She was a nurse who seemed to always have the answers for her patients at her job. But once she was in a highly tense situation outside of work, she became uncertain over what to do. She talked about what she told the girl before she died - to think about the people who love her. The girl didn’t respond well to that by saying that nobody loved her. The nurse thought about physically grabbing the girl before anything bad happened, but was worried about the response. She didn’t and the girl would walk away from her to get run over by a car. The nurse had to live with a lot of guilt and social isolation for years. When the nurse started to come to terms with the suicide and got better mentally, she said that she would’ve told the girl that life does become different and gets better over time.

So to me, it sometimes feel like the West’s mindset is “Oh my god, there’s a problem. Someone wants to die. I need to fix it or else I’ll be a failure. I can’t deal with the pain of what this person is experiencing.” while the Eastern mindset is “Ahhh, you’re thinking of dying. I see. I understand. Wait. Maybe I can show/share with you a moment of joy that you might like before you go.”

I could be VERY wrong here. But this is what I have observed over time.

Talking about death and the grief that comes with it will always be hard, but it doesn’t need to be hidden for the preservation of cultures that want to “move on” because it’s not productive for “society.”

I do think that people who experience any kind of suicidal ideation want some kind of acknowledgement of any kind - especially of the physically comforting kind from someone who doesn’t look like a threat in their eyes. Eri does this by grabbing Yuta’s hand when she drags him to the abandoned building where they would make many precious memories watching films.

After reading what Eri did and hearing the nurse’s regrets about not saving someone from suicide, just be the hope and don’t be afraid of doing so. The best way to not say goodbye in a tragic manner is acknowledge their pain with compassion followed by showing them an empowering solution (not vice versa). Suicide forces us to confront our own bias regarding emotional pain and the social aspects that lead to it. Maybe that’s why a lot of Westerners struggle with with talking about suicide.

I would argue, as this manga and maybe non-Western views show, that human love or healthy connection is the best answer.

#Goodbye Eri #manga #mental health #suicide #suicide prevention #talking about suicide

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fimproda · 4 months

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Anotha question

Whats a fond memory you have from your time as a writer, either this Acotar fics or the previous ones? Has there been any reader comment you liked specially? Can you name some top 5 good experiences?

These asks are getting better and better, this is so interesting!

I have many, many fond memories of my time as a writer. Let me give a top 5 on this topic as well, and then I'll list my best experiences with readers.

It was the Year of the Lord 2020, November 5th if I recall correctly. I had started my first year of university on September 30th, and for my very first semester, the only subjects I had were General and Inorganic Chemistry I, General and Inorganic Chemistry Laboratory, and Maths I. It was a Wednesday. Usually, we would've had two hours of GenChem in the morning and two hours of Maths in the afternoon, but the professors had decided to switch for that day, so our lesson of GenChem started at 3 PM and should've gone on until 5 PM. Now, our GenChem professor was quite old and nearing retirement, and it had already happened that he'd cut lessons short because he'd gotten tired. That day, he ended the lesson after only one hour had passed, and I found myself staring at my computer screen at 4 in the afternoon without nothing to do. I don't know what drove me to open a document and type 4k words in one sitting, but I did it. I finished House of Cards that day, one year and a half since my latest update.

Speaking of House of Cards, I won the 2019 Wattys with that story. I remember that I was doing my homework, around 3 or 4 PM, and I either got an email from Wattpad or a message from one of my acquantainces that I'd met on Wattpad (I don't recall which one of these happened first) telling me that I'd won. I just smiled, texted my friends, told my readers and followers, and got back to my homework. The Wattys had never been a great deal for me, to be honest, but I dare anyone not to be happy when you've won something.

In 2022, watching Bridgerton season 2 and reading Tower of Dawn inspired me a great deal to write Daisy, chapter... 4? 5? Let's see if @zoyalannister has a clearer memory; I believe it was chapter 4.

Speaking of Zoya, I wrote from scratch a huge chunk of one chapter of her story How (not) to end a feud, which I was only supposed to edit. It was either chapter 6 or 7 (or maybe even 5, I truly don't recall), and I worked on it from the afternoon all the way into the night, until like 3 AM. Everyone who knows me well, including Zoya, knows that I am not a night owl by any means and I'm usually asleep by 11 PM, so me being awake at that late hour was quite unique, and in fact hasn't happened since.

Last year, I watched the last episode of Queen Charlotte, cried, and wrote a good 70% of Constellations, chapter 3 all at once.

And now for the reader experiences:

Let's start with House of Cards again. During my time on Wattpad, my friends bore witness to the many, many, truly dumb comments and/or reviews I got on my story. We were so used to it that, when the time came that I finally got a decent one, we full-on celebrated. If I had to number the actually good reviews I received, I'd say 5: one from Caterina, one from Rebecca, one from Elisa F., one from Elisa S. (who is one of my best friends now), and one from Giulia. Their comments and reviews are my Roman Empire; I think about them every day.

My grandma read all my old stories, the ones I wrote in Italian, and we used to have hour-long conversations about them. I don't know what else to say about this, I think it's enough. Pity that she doesn't know a single English word; it's been too long since I heard her opinion on one of my works.

The second comment I got on Hydrangea, soon after posting it on AO3: survivegladers said "A very well written story! I was able to really feel and understand Grace's feeling through the events! It's indeed an incredibly deep narrative that was handled in an assertive way." @zoyalannister and I were shitting ourselves in fear over that story, so when we got this comment, we were able to finally release the breath we'd been holding for days.

Literally every comment I got on In the shadow of a dream. I'd written it without much care or thought, in no more than 3/4 hours, when barely a day had passed since its conception. I was not expecting the overwhelming (and overwhelmingly positive) response from the public, and I'll always be grateful to the ACoTaR fandom for being so active and engaging.

Again, literally every comment on Constellations, chapter 3. I took a gigantic leap of faith with that chapter, choosing to voice some thoughts and ideas that I knew much of the fandom would consider wrong or at least controversial. I remember I'd just returned home from pilates when I got the first comment, which was a simple "Wow", and I couldn't bring myself to read it in a positive light: I kept thinking it meant something like "Wow, this is a load of bullshit". Thanfully, that reader then did me the favor to write something more and elaborate, and it did end up being a positive opinion. Another reader then kept answering my answers to her comments, so we struck up a conversation in the comment section. But to be fair, all my Constellations readers are wonderful people, @panaryn and @generalnesta above all others.

#ask reply #ask response #writeblr #writers on tumblr

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kafus · 10 months

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advent of code 2023 day 1

so for the record i'm being pretty casual about this, i have stuff going on this month + my health is wonky as usual so i may not actually be doing this everyday, might do puzzles late, etc

anyway! i'm still a bit of a novice i think, but i decided i would try out this advent of code thing, seemed fun. i'm using html/javascript since that's what i have any experience in right now.

my solutions below the cut so you aren't spoiled if you want to do it yourself!

i decided to keep my part 1 and part 2 solutions separated, they're on the same document. i have some really basic HTML that looks like this:

and this was my solution for part 1 before words got involved:

for the record i have taught myself basic RegEx multiple times, and every time i forget nearly everything, so most of my time spent on this solution was refreshing myself on a little bit of RegEx. i think this is pretty straightforward - split the input by line, then loop through each line and remove anything that isn't a number, then take the first and last digit in each of the remaining strings, add them all together for the result.

the solution for part 2 on the other hand:

i actually found this somewhat frustrating because the problem itself didn't clearly explain whether something like "eightwothree" in the provided example should be "8 2 3" or "8 3"... my original solution disregarded overlapping words like that. this caused issues because if you had something like... i don't know, threeeightwo, my program would make the resulting two digit number 38 instead of 32, resulting in a wrong sum when adding all of them together.

once i realized the issue i was a bit stumped on how to deal with this and get the overlapping words to be included. i knew that i could manually loop through each position in the string, looking for any of the nine digits in either their letter or numeric form, and when it finds a result, push it to an array of results or whatever, but i really didn't want to do that because it would be unnecessarily bulky in my opinion. and i wanted to keep experimenting with RegEx instead. so after some googling i landed on amending the numPattern and changing

lines[i] = lines[i].match(numPattern);

lines[i] = Array.from(lines[i].matchAll(numPattern), (x) => x[1]);

and while it works great, i admittedly don't fully understand it. like, conceptually i get its intention and the end result it spits out, but i wish i understood what was happening under the hood with .matchAll() better. i tried to wrap my brain around it, but i'm too hungry and too sick feeling to properly teach myself right now, so i've decided to drop it and if it's still itching at me later, i'll come back when i feel better to understand it.

anyway, after that, still pretty straightforward - once it's taken out all of the numbers in both numeric and written format, it loops through the results and converts the words to digits, then joins all the digits together, then does the same thing as before with slicing off the first and last digit to make two digit numbers and adding them all together at the end with .reduce().

#ayano was here #ayano.txt #programming #advent of code #advent of code 2023

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amysterywrappedinanenigma · 9 months

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Who/What is "enna", if I may ask?

You absolutely may ask

So, Enna is my character for the dnd campaign I'm currently in. For anyone familiar with the mechanics or classes, she's a spores druid (thematically based around mushrooms/fungus, undeath, etc.), and she's an elf. She's really sweet, but a bit clueless a lot of the time, and her magic manifests as fungus and moss, and can be pretty unsettling to look at.

Time for spoilers.

If anyone from my dnd party is looking at this, look away right now. I have no idea how any of you would have gotten here, but look away now, if you somehow did. Or else. Please. GIGANTIC spoilers.

Also, putting it under a read-more in case people want to avoid some light body horror/weirdness.

Is anyone who doesn't want spoilers gone? Great. Here we go.

The twist is that she's not an elf at all, but is actually a tiny stationary myconid (living mushroom) who is inhabiting the body of a dead adventurer, and has been impersonating her and living her life ever since.

Here's a blurb from my backstory document that explains it pretty well:

Roughly three years after the original Ennamelda first left home, she went on a solo scouting mission into the Snakewood forest, where she was attacked by something she couldn’t see. The attacker killed her almost instantly, tearing her heart out of her chest, and her body fell into an area of particularly dense undergrowth, right next to a tiny, stationary myconid. The original Ennamelda’s spirit lingered for a few moments after death, and the myconid was able to connect with her telepathically in her last moments, but there was no way to reconnect the spirit and the body with the physical state it was in.

She didn’t want her parents to have to experience the loss of their only child, who they worked so hard for and already almost lost once before, having seen the effect her almost dying in her childhood had had on them, and the myconid was interested in the prospect of seeing the world after meeting this first person, so the two decided that the myconid would attempt to inhabit the original Ennamelda’s body, and live on as Enna.

The original Ennamelda’s spirit faded completely after just a few minutes, but it took about 3 years for the myconid to fully inhabit and adapt to the body. There wasn’t much she could do about the opening where her heart had been, so Enna is never seen without studded leather chest armor that covers her entire torso to hide the wound. If the wound were to be revealed, you’d see an open chasm where the heart should be, with the inside of the wound covered in working mushrooms and other fungi, keeping the body functioning.

She's SO MUCH FUN to play. Probably one of my favorite dnd characters I've played because it's a lot of her being kind of weird and trying to figure out the world and fit in with humans, while not giving herself away. It's been a blast getting to play with and balance her kindness with her cluelessness since she's not very used to the intellectual or emotional workings of people.

#thank you for the ask!#I love enna #she's fun to talk about #if anyone wants to know about some of my other dnd characters i'm happy to share!!#I always have fun talking about dnd stuff #the main tags i have for my characters are Maggie Zaria and Enna #enna

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lynne-monstr · 18 days

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hey Lynne, it's the anon who's stopping by. I just saw your post and wanted to reach out. I really relate to what you said, about how when something bad happens, the strangest tiny details stick with you and give you mixed feelings months later. I'm coming up on the one year anniversary since my own personal shitshow (well we're not quite there yet, but I'm currently living through the anniversary of things that eventually led to the shitshow), and I often find myself having similar thoughts to yours. "oh this was the song I had stuck in my head the week before it all went wrong", "oh I said this exact same sentence on a call with my mom the night before", things like that. it's a strange feeling to deal with. to me it almost feels like grief.

anyway, I thought it might comfort you to hear that you're not the only one having this sort of experience. and I'm glad to see you're doing well overall! I'm very happy for you! 💞

on my end everything still kinda sucks, I'm not gonna lie. I feel like I'm caught between a rock and a hard place, where I technically have two options, one is a bit less painful for me but very painful (emotionally) for someone else (and it's still not an option I particularly like, because it means giving up on something I've been chasing), the other doesn't hurt anyone else, and means there's still a chance of getting the thing I wanted, but until that happens it makes me suffer a lot. sometimes I miss the days when life was simple, even though that's just nostalgia. life is never simple.

oh well. we go forward. one thing I really admire in you is your ability to bounce back, I always found it so impressive how resilient you are (I hope that's not too weird of me to say, if it is I apologise!!). I hope to be like that too, one day

I hope you enjoy your wine and your morning on the balcony!! have a lovely day!

hi lovely anon! thanks for the very nice words, it very much does help to know it's not just me! yeah i think there's definitely an element of grief and processing the way the brain snags on stupid tiny details and magnifies them.

one of the things i did shortly after the shitshow thing went down was to find a new hobby to learn, just so I could stop my brain from constantly thinking that the last time i did some specific thing (heard a song while running; read a particular book; opened my wip document) was before. haha if you can't turn your brain off, tricking it works almost as well. it was very helpful in that regard, and bonus that it gave me a new hobby!

i'm sorry to hear things still aren't great for you. those two options both sound pretty unpleasant. i'm rooting for you, whichever way you eventually decide. from the things you've said and your determination to look forward it sounds like you're handling it as best you can. fingers crossed for better days.

the wine was delicious, thanks! i may go back for a happy hour glass later today :)

#anonymous #thanks for the ask!#stopping by anon #i don't think it was weird at all it was very nice of you to say <3

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sleekervae · 1 year

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Past Lives [1.9]

Masterlist

A/N: Happy almost Friday, babies! And Happy Last Day of Summer but summer's still sticking around for now so. Also, I'm gonna start a tag list for this story so if you want to be added, just shoot me a message!

Warnings: tiny bit of angst, emotions, cardio

Word Count: 4,102

@richardslady121

The salt carried by the cool morning breeze tickled Austin's nose, as he and Jade made their way through the forest. The gentle rustling of leaves and babbling creek filled his ears, relaxing and invigorating his mind. He couldn't help but be drawn to the natural beauty surrounding him; the vibrant green canopy above, the distant white-capped mountains, and the lingering patches of snow adding contrast to the landscape.

As they paused on the path, Austin reached for his camera, eager to capture this picturesque moment. Jade stood behind him, trying her best not to let her fatigue show. Hiking was not her usual activity, but she didn't want to miss out on spending time with Austin.

"Did you get a good shot?" she asked softly, not wanting to startle him.

He showed her the preview of the photo he took, seeking her opinion. She smiled at him in awe.

"It's beautiful," she said sincerely.

As he watched her study the photo with genuine interest, Austin couldn't help but admire how she glowed in the February sun. He could see the signs of exhaustion creeping onto her face, but also see her determination to conquer this hike with him.

"What?" Jade noticed his gaze and chuckled lightly, "Do I have dirt on my face?"

Austin shook his head, a fond smile playing on his lips, "Just thinking..."

"Yeah?" she prompted with a hint of curiosity.

"About how you clearly don't hike enough," he teased playfully.

She rolled her eyes with a sigh, adjusting her shorts, "Is it that obvious?"

"You're doing great," he reassured her. "Just a couple more miles."

"She woke up and chose violence today," Jade muttered under her breath. Austin couldn't help but laugh at her remark.

"What else are you going to take pictures of?" she asked playfully.

He shrugged nonchalantly, "Whatever catches my eye."

Austin fiddled with the settings on his camera, giving Jade a bit of a head start. Despite his longer legs and greater experience, he let her gain some ground, confident he’d catch up in no time. The wind played with her ponytail, strands of light dancing across her olive skin. His heart thudded in his chest, a wild urge to capture the moment. He lifted the camera, his finger deftly pressing the shutter. The first click framed Jade perfectly on the trail, and he zoomed in, trying to steady his excitement. Switching to burst mode, he held the shutter down, the camera firing off rapid shots. He glanced at the results.

The colors were achingly beautiful. Austin couldn’t tear his eyes away. It was like gazing into a clear brook, where shades of river stone grey mingled with flawless cerulean skies, flecked with liquid amber and fresh leaf green. As he flipped through the images, he watched her dark lashes lower, the hues of her eyes deepening with every frame. The final shots showed her eyes closed, face serene, pale pink lips slightly parted.

Jade had heard the rapid clicks from a distance. She decided to let him be, for now. A small smile curled at her lips as she called out.

“You coming, Attenborough?” she jolted him from his reverie, “We’ve got a couple more miles to go!”

Austin quickly stowed his camera, “Yeah, yeah, right behind you—Little Miss Bossy.”

She shot back a smirk, “Oh, shut up. You sure Callum didn’t want to come?”

“Said he had a thing…”

Austin soon caught up, and they climbed together. He snapped shots along the way, capturing light filtering through trees, glinting off streams, though his lens often found its way back to Jade. Nature’s beauty was well-documented, with Jade featured just as frequently to meet his personal quota.

Finally, they reached the crest of the hike, and the crystalline lake spread out before them.

“Jesus, Mary, and Joseph…” Jade huffed, her exhaustion giving way to awe at the lake’s tranquil beauty. She felt a humbling sense of insignificance, her worries dwarfed by nature’s vastness. She and Austin exchanged awestruck glances, their fatigue forgotten in the face of such splendor.

She was glad she’d come along.

As Jade began to unpack her backpack, Austin forced himself to take a few superficial, thoughtless photos of the area, capturing its natural, still-life beauty. The click of the shutter felt like a forced distraction, a way to keep his eyes and mind busy while his thoughts wandered elsewhere.

“So?” he turned to her as he capped the camera lens, a teasing smile on his lips. “Did I do good?”

Jade offered an unsure expression, glancing between him, the lake, and the trail they had emerged from. Her lips curled up as she continued to pull out their picnic supplies.

“On the view or trying to kill me?” she chuckled, the sound light and melodic.

“How about both?” he replied, his tone cocky.

She tossed a cold cut sandwich at him, and he caught it against his chest with a grin. “Sit down, I’m hungry.”

They settled on a dry log of driftwood, spreading sandwiches, crackers, and dried fruit between them. The aching burn in Jade’s body slowly dissipated, allowing her to fully enjoy the moment. She took in the scenery, relishing the silence, the shared space that felt intimate and uniquely theirs.

Jade could recognize her growing dependency on Austin, a mix of guilt and longing swirling within her. She wasn’t sure if she was ready to give him everything he needed from her. What started as a way to have fun, blow off steam, and reclaim her power had morphed into something deeper, something that felt like it belonged in another universe.

They sat beside each other, the air comfortably quiet and warm as they rested. Austin closed his eyes, listening to the gentle lapping of the water against the shore, a rhythm that matched the beating of his own heart. He knew that if he looked at her, if he opened his mouth, he might say something he shouldn’t. His left hand rested next to hers on the driftwood, mere centimeters apart. He marveled at her dark locks; seven months ago, her hair barely reached her chin. Now, it brushed her shoulders. So much had happened in those seven months, yet time between them felt like it was passing too quickly.

This was the intimacy they had always craved—so much silence intertwined with so much power, unspoken words climbing and clawing from her gut. Jade’s heart sobbed silently. She loved him too much. And he wasn’t ready for that. It was easier to hide her feelings behind excuses, fussing, and silence. She was lying to herself; the silence was unbearable.

“Can I ask you something kinda weird?” she spoke suddenly, breaking the tranquility.

Austin nodded, opening his eyes. “I don’t think much is off limits with us,” he replied. “Shoot.”

“When I was on my… dare I call it a date – what were you doing that night?” she asked, her voice tentative. “Before I called you?”

Austin glanced at her from his peripherals, the act of his chest rising and falling suddenly feeling heavier. “I was going through the script James had sent me. I have a table read in a couple of weeks.”

“For the sci-fi movie?” she asked, her interest piqued.

“Mmhm,” he confirmed.

She turned her gaze to him, visually tracing the line of his profile. “Suppose you have to keep that to yourself for a while?”

He raised a brow, a hint of amusement in his eyes. “You’re curious?”

“I’m always curious, and I wanna support you,” she nodded, sincerity in her voice. “I like all your projects.”

He stifled a laugh. “All of them?”

She hesitated, then blurted, “Okay – I mean… ‘Yoga Hosers’ was kinda weird,” she shrugged, feeling her face heat up. “But you make a cute fuckboy.” She cringed the moment the words left her mouth. God, get yourself together, girl. “Wait, that sounds so stupid.”

To her immense relief, Austin laughed. “It’s okay. I had fun on that set – despite the fact I died via bratwurst,” he mused, turning to meet her gaze.

“Yeah, they lost me way before that,” she admitted, fixated on the sparkle in his dark eyes.

When he looked at her like that — and he did a lot — she felt like she was his whole universe. It was the kind of look he’d give a significant other. She saw it whenever he talked about his mom. Jade always figured she was just doing some wishful thinking when he gave her that look.

“I think my favorite song is ‘Roman Holiday’,” he said suddenly. “From your discography.”

She visibly shuddered. No, there’s no fucking way.

Nevertheless, she strove to keep her composure, turning her eyes to the lake. “Why?” she asked.

“Because it’s beautiful, and you sound incredible,” he shrugged. “And young love, foolishness, and self-reflection tend to go hand-in-hand.”

She simpered quietly. “Did you know the term 'Roman Holiday’ refers to when someone is happy that someone else is suffering?” she asked.

“I didn’t. Thought it was just a movie,” he replied.

“In Roman times, it referred to the bread and circuses era. There was so much death and barbarity, but spectators showed up time and time again to watch someone get slashed to death. Today, it refers to pleasure or advantage gained from someone else’s discomfort or suffering. I read a lot about it,” she chuckled at the end.

“Were you the happy one or the suffering one?” he asked.

“Both,” she sighed. “I don’t know. I’ve been reflecting on my place in the world and what I’ve created. I’m gonna be thirty before I know it, and I don’t know if I’m fighting for relevancy anymore so much as fighting for my own peace of mind.” She laughed again, nervously this time. “Sorry, that’s a lot.”

“No, no, it’s okay,” Austin assured her. “If it means anything, I’m still dealing with all of that. I was scared for so long that I would turn thirty and fall into obscurity, not know myself as an adult. It was even scarier when I came back from Australia; I had such a skewed sense of who I was. It’s why I’m always looking for things to keep me grounded.”

“And what’s keeping you grounded these days?” she asked.

He paused momentarily, mulling it over. “This is one—just being in nature. Good music, talking to my dad maybe two or three times a week. Cooking is a big one; I need to improve on that.”

Jade chuckled. “You’re a good cook, Austin,” she assured him.

“Not as good as you,” he pointed out.

She tossed some hair behind her shoulder, her smile widening. “Well, it’s an acquired skill,” she mused. “Anything else?”

He sighed quietly, looking down at her. “I’m reading a lot more. It helps take me out of a heavy headspace. And I’m trying new hobbies.”

“Like what?”

“Pottery.”

She raised her eyebrows. “Really? When did you start doing pottery?” she asked.

“A couple weeks ago. I wanted to wait until I got better to show you,” he admitted shyly.

“Like I’m a clay critic. I’m biased; I think everything you do is cool,” she replied.

“I know,” he nodded, smiling. “But I like impressing you.”

“You already do.”

“How?” His lips curled further, his expression curious.

Jade could feel her cheeks heating up. She broke away from his gaze, smiling bashfully. “How do you impress me?”

“Yeah.”

“Is this some sort of ego trip for you, or…?”

His laugh was music to her ears. “I just wanna know what the coolest rockstar on the planet likes about me, is all,” he replied.

Her smile faltered a little. “I liked you long before I was a rockstar, Austin, come on,” she admitted, her heart thudding heavily in her chest as she mulled over her next confession. “… I wrote you a song, actually. Before—like… ten years ago.”

“Really?” He shifted his position on the log, looking down at her. “Did you… release it?”

“I did.”

“Which one?”

“… it was about swimming pools,” she said, averting her eyes between his and the dirt and rocks below their feet. Fear rippled through her like an icy chill, yet she was anxious to see if he would get the hint. Austin wracked his brain, flipping through her song titles, lyrics, the little metaphors he’d read into and loved so much. And then it hit him, the tidal wave realization, the memory washing over him, awe-struck and feeling utterly foolish.

“Roman Holiday?”

Her soft nod was his answer. What were the odds?

What were the odds of their whole relationship?

Jade wasn’t sure if she should speak, if he should speak—what was she even supposed to say at this moment? But she never answered his question before.

“I’ve always been so impressed with your low-key sense of humor, your natural charm paired with your clumsiness, how gentle you are even though you tower over almost everybody. And back there—you’re clearly better at hiking, but you slowed down to walk with me,” she gave a shaky sigh. “And ten years ago, when we were younger and stupider, I wanted to do crazy shit like break into city property or smoke weed on the roof. You indulged my bullshit but also reined me in when I needed it. I never listened to a lot of people, but I always listened to you. I always wonder if my life could’ve turned out differently if I had kept you.”

The more he thought about it, the more it began to make sense. The clues and hints had always been staring him in the face, glistening through his ears whenever he listened to the song. Only then did Austin clue in to just how highly she thought about him, how much she needed him. He wanted to go back through her first album to see if he could pick up any more clues.

Much to her chagrin, Jade thought she had made another mess.

“How come you never said anything?” he asked tentatively.

She scoffed. “What was I supposed to say, Austin? You fell in love with somebody else, it wasn’t my place. Evidently, it was my place to fuck up someone else’s relationship—”

“Hey, don’t do that,” he urged. “Jade, you don’t have to keep that burden on yourself.”

“I know, but I can’t help it. And I deserved everything I got. I know my head is messed up, and I talk too much and do stupid things. I say dumb things and most times they don’t make sense, and I shoot myself in the foot—”

“Don’t berate yourself like this,” he cut her off swiftly. “You’re a sensitive young woman. Kind and smart and very private about your emotions, but you’re so passionate. Of course, I can’t understand what you’ve been through, but I want to.” He reached to cup her cheek with the palm of his hand. “I think I’ll learn to ask you how you feel. I can ask you more often if you want me to. And I’ll keep nagging until you elaborate,” he laughed at that, even though her cheek felt wet. “How do you feel right now, Jade?”

She shook her head, debating whether to retreat into or away from him. Her mind was on high alert as it battled it out for what she wanted versus what was the right thing to do. Her words came out shaking, “I feel like myself,” she paused, “—first time in two years… I owe that to you.”

Austin bit his lip at that. He had managed to show her even though he had desperately tried not to, when he thought he shouldn’t. He feared his love for her intensifying lest she didn’t reciprocate. But she was always thinking about him, his body, heart, writing about him then and now. She wanted to keep this relationship.

“What would you do if I asked you on a date?” he asked, terrified. It was worth a shot. If it went wrong, she would leave and both of them would nurse their broken hearts separately. But if it went right? It was a leap of faith.

She was stunned, at first unsure if she’d misheard him. Jade finally met his gaze again. “Do you… you wanna date me? Actually?” she asked, wide Bambi eyes shining in marvel. “Not just for sex, like actual go out on dates, be together, do couple stuff—like grocery shopping?”

All he did was nod.

As his silence prolonged, she took some space, old insecurities gnawing at her from within. Jade buried her face between her hands, a muffled groan escaping her. She never thought she would be here, still incredulous that this was reality. The paradigm shift between her disaster date—disaster life, more like—and being here was the most intense whiplash she had ever experienced. She was terrified, but she was happy.

It felt as though a massive weight lifted from Austin’s chest, though he was still nervous as she hadn’t given him a response. “I don’t want you to think I’m pressuring you into stuff. We don’t have to do anything. I just need to have you close, in any way you’ll allow me,” he confessed, trying to reassure her.

Jade bit her lip and caught his hand in hers, looking for reassurance. She looked at her shoes. “You’ve had a lot more leeway with me than most people,” she popped her lips out of nerves. “I don’t know where this is going to lead us, specifically,” she took her time, toying with his fingers.

Austin brought their joined hands to his mouth, kissing the back of her palm. “I really like you. I really fucking care about you and I think you’re smart, beautiful, passionate, and dedicated—all traits that I admire and respect and that I could fall for easily,” he explained, leaning his forehead against hers. “I just need to know where I’m standing with you.”

She closed her eyes and inhaled his scent. His cologne and simply his skin always smelled so good. She remembered hiding her face in the crook of his neck during their last rendezvous. How he’d held her there, close, his hand cradling the back of her head. Domestic and blissful.

“I’m attracted to you. Mentally. Physically too. I’ve always been. I— I don’t know if you’re ever going to love me, or if this would be suitable for both of us,” she led his hand behind her back, around her waist. “Honestly, I… I’m freaked out.”

“Mh. What is it that scares you?” he traced the shape of her spine under his finger.

“I’m needy. I’m impulsive, and I can’t—I won’t be able to deal if you get hurt because of me,” she explained, breathing with difficulty.

He cupped her cheek. “You couldn’t,” he assured her, “You couldn’t hurt me even if you tried.”

“And if this doesn’t work?” she doubted, tentative. “What if I’m too clingy, too needy, or we get too busy for each other?” her words faded, old insecurities, old trauma re-emerging to the surface.

His thumb rubbed against her cheek. “That’s when trust comes into play, Jade. You need to trust yourself, and trust me too,” his mouth came to hers. “Can you do that for me?”

“Austin—”

“I don’t want a no-strings thing anymore,” he admitted, voice low but firm. “And if that’s too much for you to handle, then I understand.”

“It’s not. I don’t want a one-time thing with you,” she murmured, leaning in as he started to withdraw. “I should’ve said something. Last time I was at your house, I should’ve,” she reminded him, her voice barely above a whisper.

"I wish I had,” he sighed. “I would have done stuff we weren’t ready for. Maybe even stuff we’re still not ready for now. But I don’t ever want you to feel like you’re a burden or too much.” He slipped an arm around her shoulder, pulling her close. “I can’t promise that nothing bad will ever happen, or that we won’t hurt each other. But I trust you. You’re worth the try.”

Jade took a deep breath, fearing she might cry as her throat tightened. Austin had told her over and over how special she was, how she deserved love and forgiveness and kindness. Only now, she started to believe him. He wouldn’t have gone to all this effort if he wasn’t serious. He had taken her up a mountain, for crying out loud.

She nodded with confidence, “Yes,” she whispered.

“Yes?”

“Yes,” she decided, her voice steadying. “Yeah, I’ll… I’ll trust you. I want to try this.”

Austin nodded, despite her clear joy he could see the reservation, the fear peeking out. She was nervous, and he didn’t blame her. She had been through hell, and he empathized with her. It might speak poorly of him, but he was feeling a little selfish. He wanted to show her, teach her that she could have something good, even if she felt she wasn’t worth it. He would take good care of her.

“Really?”

“Really.” She smiled, genuinely smiled, her dimples poking into her cheeks and her eyes regaining their sparkle. She smiled that way just for him, and he felt his heart might burst in his chest.

Austin nodded, even as her smile lit up her face, he could see the reservation, the flicker of fear in her eyes. She was nervous, and he didn’t blame her. She’d been through hell, and he understood that. Maybe it was a bit selfish, but he wanted to show her that she could have something good, something real. He wanted to take care of her.

“Really?”

“Really.” Her smile was radiant, her dimples appearing, and her eyes sparkled with a new light. She smiled that way just for him, and he felt his heart swell.

He leaned in and kissed her gently, his lips brushing against hers with a tenderness that spoke volumes. JJade's lips tingled as she pressed them against his, their bodies melting into each other. She could feel his warmth radiating through her clothes, and she rested her head on his shoulder, savoring the moment. Her fingers trembled with anticipation. Austin wanted her to trust him, to trust herself, to allow herself to be happy. She knew she needed that just as much.

She glanced around at the landscape, the zero-point horizon, the rustling silence of the trees, the still lake, and the tranquil beauty surrounding them. Somehow, Austin managed to make everything feel right, and she didn’t even know why.

It must be the Leo energy, she wondered. Perfectionist.

By the time they'd arrived back in the city, the sun was beginning to set. Pastel pinks were beginning to stain across the skies. Despite the ride back home, the ac blasting and the wind whipping through the open windows, Jade was still hot. Hot, sore -- and incredibly dirty. She took two steps into Austin's house before she kicked off her shoes, pushing fronds of loose hairs from her face as she's started for the backyard.

Austin hadn't noticed at first, his first instinct was the stick his head in the fridge for something to eat. Of course, his ears perked up when he heard his backdoor open. One bite of an apple in, he followed her, curious as she stood at the edge of his pool -- still in her hiking clothes.

"What're you doing?" he asked, voice muffled through his chew.

Jade glanced at him over her shoulder, smiling coyly, "Cooling down,"

And with that, she threw herself into the water.

Water splattered across the tile surface, rippling heavy as the refreshing cool enveloped her burning body. And it felt fucking fantastic.

Austin laughed from the doorway, striding over to the edge of the pool. He crouched down as she emerged, folding her arms on the tile as she stared up at him with starry eyes.

"Hi,"

"You cooled down?"

Adoration flooded her gaze, her lips curled into a satisfied smirk as she spoke, "Only from the hike,"

He cocked a brow, "Oh, is that all?"

"Mhm," she nodded, "I have an idea for our first date,"

"Do you?" his lips curled at her offer.

Jade bit your lip, trying to hold back a shy smile. Focus, "You joining me in the pool?"

Another bite from his apple; Austin averted his gaze from her to the pool's surface, and back again. His decision was a no brainer.

After all, it sounded like a fun first date...

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