#I still don't get THAT myself

[triscribe]

So y'know what is scarier than a single shooter in a school?

A group of teens deciding they're gonna work together to kill as many people as they can.

Thankfully, in this particular instance, they were reported by a third party, so the boys involved who separately brought bullets and at least one gun to the school where my mom teaches were caught and arrested over two days. But fuck, word's going around they were planning to pull the fire alarm, fill the main halls, set up on the second floor balcony and just... hnn.

I took her some lunch today, got to see the lingering police presence, and unintentionally stuck around long enough to hear her spiel to the handful of kids present in her fifth period. My mom's not the sort to sit quietly if shit's going down, that's for sure. She treated it like any other class activity, showing her students where the skinnier ones can go out a particular window to hide on the roof, and the bigger ones where she's arranged a chair and desk and bookcase by the wall so they can literally climb up into the ceiling. Make sure to close the window afterward, last person up pushes the foam tile back in place, have it look to anyone coming in like there weren't any students present at all. And she finishes this with "and see? the coat rack inside this closet comes loose. nice solid piece of metal here. worst comes to worst, I'm sending you all out, and putting myself next to the door. key rule of being in close quarters with a gunman, you go for the knees, then the head, and don't stop hitting until they stop moving."

One of her girls got overwhelmed at this point and began quietly crying. 15 or 16 years old, just. dismayed that this is something real. something they need to go over. Two thirds of that school's student body were out today, kept home by worried parents, and the ones who still came were pretty evenly split between laughing it off, and cracking under the fear.

None of them deserve being in that position. Not the kids, not the teachers, not the office staff or kitchen workers or janitorial crews. But most of all-

A grey-haired, overweight ornery woman in her fifties with a makeshift bat shouldn't be the last line of defense between teenagers and assault rifles.

[inkskinned]

i hate to say it because i'm neurodivergent and a chronic-pain-haver but like... sometimes stuff is going to be hard and that's okay.

it's okay if you don't understand something the first few times it's explained to you. it's okay if you have to google every word in a sentence. it's okay if you need to spend a few hours learning the context behind a complicated situation. it's okay if you need to read something, think about it, and then come back to re-read it.

i get it. giving up is easier, and we are all broken down and also broke as hell. nobody has the time, nobody has the fucking energy. that is how they win, though. that is why you feel this way. it is so much easier, and that is why you must resist the impetus to shut down. fight through the desire you've been taught to "tl;dr".

embrace when a book is confusing for you. accept not all media will be transparent and glittery and in the genre you love. question why you need everything to be lily-white and soft. i get it. i also sometimes choose the escapism, the fantasy-romance. there's no shame in that. but every day i still try to make myself think about something, to actually process and challenge myself. it is hard, often, because of my neurodivergence. but i fight that urge, because i think it's fucking important.

especially right now. the more they convince you not to think, the easier it will be to feed you misinformation. the more we accept a message without criticism, the more power they will have over that message. the more you choose convenience, the more they will make propaganda convenient to you.

[taimanzano]

One of one. One, alone, one.

[dippiesque]

on our way!!💚

[umblrspectrum]

happy solvermas

[soyochii]

Quick doodles before I evaporate.

[demi-pixellated]

It's her time 🌟💫

[deathricedrawn]

i'm ready to try

[floccinaucinihilipilificationa]

[demaparbat-hp]

Them sleeping together (not sexually)! Thank you so much for feeding me with those gorgeous arts. Love you so so so much❤️

It's a long way to Ba Sing Se.

[vaguely-concerned]

can you even imagine what a fucking horror show the early game is from spite's perspective, though. not only is this funky forcibly severed little slip of the fade having to deal with the reverse cosmic horror of physical reality as perceived by a spirit and being trapped in it against its will -- existentially confused and disoriented and hurting and nothing makes any kind of sense, at the mercy of human cruelty at its most deliberately sadistic. and then the one source of comfort and compassion and some kind of safety and clarity that lucanis surely must have been to him in the ossuary despite everything just goes and shuts himself in his room inside with a seemingly passive aggressive number of locks between them and no explanation and won't speak to him and they're STILL in the fucking ossuary. rook came and found them and they could be free now (rook is here!) and still lucanis keeps them in the ossuary even though he PROMISED he promised they'd get out of there together!!! what the fuck DO you think at that point? like did he trick me that whole time??? he wasn't like zara before, so why is he doing this to me now? why isn't he saying anything? 'he won't move. I can't reach him'. at least in the ossuary they had a deal, a goal, a hope -- each other. at least he wasn't entirely alone, before.

this poor poor poor little spite spirit really was ferried into the real world like 'hey welcome to reality! as your first introduction to it you're first getting horrifically tortured and then getting to vicariously experience one of THE most distressing and harrowing psychological conditions the human brain can cook up for itself (a fully fledged and deeply entrenched freeze response flaring up with catastrophic severity due to an unbroken ongoing and unlikely to let up any time soon chain of Unfortunately... Recent Events). I think spite is being extremely reasonable and patient about the whole thing, when you put it into perspective. I'm not saying let him eat the self-lighting candles or anything, but he's got some extremely valid points along the way lol. spite is not only child-like, the metaphor work going on is a lot more pleasingly flexible and complex than that, but he is also helplessly existentially dependent on lucanis in a way that, if anything, is a heightened version of the way a child (or child part) has to depend on a parent to navigate the world and survive.

tl;dr: we truly don't give enough sympathy to spite for having to live in the head of lucanis dellamorte. a place even lucanis dellamorte would prefer not to be. to be fair to him I think lucanis would be the first person to agree with this lol

[myfairstarlight]

just thinking about how distraught mel looks when she sees the hextech weapons after promising jayce she wouldn't let the council corrupt his dreams, essentially making all her efforts vain

and viktor's blank face as he sees the blueprints for the weapons, showing that jayce broke his promise not once, by reviving him with the hexcore, but twice.

idk, something about paths diverging or whatever. They left him alone unsupervised for like one day and he does this shit

[poorly-drawn-mdzs]

Another year has passed, and with it the opportunity to reflect back on all that has happened. While my growth was not as dramatic as last year, I can still see lots of positive change.

I'll never have enough ways to say thank you for all the love and support you have given me this year. On to 2025!

(2023 summary here!)

[temeyes]

jetlagged

[uncanny-tranny]

To any disabled person undergoing tests to find What's Wrong: I hope your results come back the way you hope and that you receive the help you need. I hope you are not denied care, I hope you are taken seriously even after this, and I hope that you will be taken care of compassionately

[library-windows]

Kiersau is an old abbey, Andreas, and sometimes even I wonder if it - if we - have outlived our purpose here. . . . Sometimes I wonder if we were meant to change and we just... forgot to.

So here's something I thought was interesting.

Between Act I and Act II, the townspeople of Tassing age and change. Some of them begin going gray (or go grayer). Some grow longer beards or hair. Some have cheekbones become more prominent, or have lines on their face that develop or deepen, even subtly. And of course it's especially obvious with the kids of Tassing, who are growing from babies into children, and children into teenagers.

Even those characters who don't have visual changes to their faces or hair have differences to their clothing to show that time has passed. They've changed, even if it's only replacing or restyling old clothes, or growing out their hair. People have died, been born, gotten married, moved into town, built new businesses, taken up new ideas - the growth and change is often modest, but it's visible.

But at Kiersau Abbey...

... nobody changes - so much so that most of the monks and nuns don't even have different portraits between Act I and Act II, despite the passage of seven years.

For those that do, the only change is to the color of their habit (the seven years between Act I and Act II would encompass the entire period between entering the abbey and solemn profession, so anyone who was a novice when Andreas was there in Act I would have necessarily professed by Act II). The only other one who changes is Aedoc, whose "image" becomes more worn - but even he doesn't change facially. (Compare him to the visible aging of Ill Peter, another elderly male character.) None of the members of Kiersau physically change, visually, in those seven years. No lines on their faces, no gray hair, no wrinkles, no beard growth, no drooping, no aging, nothing.

The only ones who change regardless of the outcome of Act I are Cecilia, who was far more worldly and savvy than her counterpart, more proactive and less caught up in Kiersau as a bubble; and Piero, who understood and accepted that change was inevitable and didn't fear it. And the only way that they could change was to die, and disappear altogether.

And for all that there's been at least one major change to Kiersau with the closure of the scriptorium (and possibly more, depending on Ferenc and Matilda's fates in Act I), almost nothing has changed in terms of how Andreas/the player sees and experiences the abbey. Of those characters in the abbey who have "grown up", Zdena is still half-heartedly tending to the remains of the library under Illuminata's supervision (and Illuminata herself, though she's now Mother Superior, is still in the library sorting books). Lukas is still in the kitchen, and still can't quite figure out what to do without Wojslav directing him. Volkbert is still doing the menial, grubby work nobody else wants to do. He even lampshades how taking his vows hasn't really changed anything except the color of his habit:

I'm a monk now. . . . I still do the same work, but now I have the same robes as the other brothers.

One expects the abbey to change more slowly than the town, given that the monks and nuns aren't likely to be getting married or having children (one presumes, at least); but even those characters who have, in name, taken on new roles are still functionally doing mostly the same things they were doing seven years ago.

The only members of Kiersau that we see change, grow, take on visibly different roles, and age are the ones we see in Act III, after the abbey has been destroyed and they've moved on elsewhere.

Obviously Kiersau Abbey is not some kind of actual pocket dimension where time doesn't move (unless . . . ?). But it's posited even within the text of the game as a deliberate anachronism, a medieval holdover in the early modern age; and it's set against the inescapable presence of the Church's inertia versus the looming Reformation, and the growing social unrest against the feudal status quo. A major theme of the game is the inevitability of change and loss, and how being able to accept it and move on is essential for growth/survival. And it's clear that the stagnation has reached such a point that there can be no lasting change on a social scale in Tassing until Kiersau burns.

So all that said, I don't think the visual contrast between the clear progression of time in Tassing, and the lack of it in Kiersau, is a coincidence.

This is Kiersau, Andreas. You should know by now, nothing here changes.