#I'm really rusty lol

[thecheesecracker]

The wind in summertime 🎋

[silkspectred]

— Virginia Woolf, in a letter to Violet Dickinson, September 1907

[gotchibam]

Commissioned piece for Gabriel!

[ask-modern-patrochilles]

hope you guys are doing okay (you too mun!)

Achilles: A lot’s been going on!

[scarymonsters-andsupercreeps]

David Bowie study! I absolutely love this photo of him so I just had to draw it!

Original below!

[neproxrezi]

you ever boot up a video game and totally forget every mod you had installed

i sure just did

[skrunksthatwunk]

idk if i've discussed it before (i have certainly THOUGHT about it) but someone on my kuwa suffering ep 89 comp mentioned it and i just had to go off about it like. ok. sensui tells yusuke something along the lines of "you heard itsuki" when itsuki's inside the uraotoko, implying that not only can sensui hear those inside the uraotoko, but that he expects yusuke to be able to as well. which means that yusuke Almost Certainly Heard And Kind Of Ignored kuwabara's prolonged mental breakdown and wailing about how much he needs yusuke to live etc. which. guHHH i hate him yusuke you ass but also listen.

the only acknowledgement yusuke gives to this (if any) is when he says something like "sensui you're sooo fucking cooked this plan's going perfectly (my friends are going to get strong and kill you when i die)." he's trash talking to sensui, ignoring the others because, i think, he doesn't want to acknowledge what he's doing to them.

yusuke is explicitly recreating the experience he had with kuwabara's "death" at the hands of toguro, complete with the announcement of intent (and power) to kill, the inability to impede the threat in any way (barring a power-breakthrough), and the target in some way racing towards/volunteering for their death. yusuke learns through doing, and through tough love-style approaches. it's only effective if it hurts. watching kuwabara die like that was devastating to yusuke, but it sure as hell fucking worked. he beat toguro because of that maneuver. so even if he has to (re-)traumatize his friends in the process, this method will make his friends stronger, and he feels confident in that. but he never had to live with the consequences of kuwabara's death, not really. that's something hiei makes clear before they enter the cave as well, that there are no fake-outs ready to make him or anyone else stronger. the only deaths here will be real. the only power gained will come at a high, permanent cost. hiei's warning is an attempt to keep everyone alive, to keep yusuke from being stupid. and then yusuke decides to take that fatality into his own hands, but it's kind of his friends who would pay the price. he's going to make them live through the days, months, years without him, the actual permanency of loss (assuming they survive for that long), something he never experienced with kuwabara (a new facet of that traumatic scenario), AND he's escaping the emotional fallout of this choice through death. he doesn't have to see them mourn, won't get yelled at, won't watch them fail to move on. he's tapping out and choosing to believe they'll be fine.

but i think he feels guilty. just a little. i mean, yusuke couldn't even believe that people cared about him enough to want him alive in episode one. he's staked everything on his friends, which means he still kind of... doesn't value his own life, at least not compared to theirs. but he believes his friends love him and want him around, and we know that because he has to, or else he wouldn't make a plan that depends entirely on that love. he is actively leveraging the care he doesn't think he deserves, trying to hurt them in a way he is intimately familiar with (only worse), for.... what, exactly?

this is kind of my sticking point tbh. i don't think the answer is... super clear, but let's start with what it's not.

yusuke is not doing this because it is the most practical way to save all of humanity; that would be the mafukan, which he stopped. it could be a gamble to save all of his friends? the mafukan strategy would guarantee koenma's death/eternal imprisonment, whereas this strategy gambles all of humanity on the chance that his friends come out of the Easy Break Oven strong enough to avert the end of the world. if the sacrifice of even one friend is completely intolerable, perhaps he'd accept those slim odds and their steep consequences. yusuke tends to take risks like that, especially when he's got fight-induced tunnel vision. he doesn't think things through too much; his schemes are usually dependent on surprising his enemy enough to oneshot them. truthfully, i think this is the closest we'll get to an answer, and it's a more conventional one for this kind of story. but there is another layer i haven't been able to get from my mind.

i think yusuke is gifting each of his friends an honorable warrior's death.

so, in case it needs saying, yusuke, kuwabara, kurama, and hiei all (at least once, if not several times) exhibit a desire to die in combat in a way they deem noble to give their lives purpose (usually by self-sacrifice, but sometimes by another metric of honor, like hiei's duel with shigure and his desire to die in mutual defeat against an evenly matched opponent; or even kurama's decision to fight shigure in his human form, displaying a sort of passive suicidality via placing being true to himself in this (somewhat symbolic/inconsequential) way over survival). they need to make their lives count for something, because they feel guilty for being alive (kurama and hiei feel guilty for their past actions (hiei's is most evident in his distance from yukina, though that's not its primary reason), hiei, kuwabara, and yusuke have all been ostracized and made to feel like burdens on/unwanted by their caregivers and general society; all four of them have felt profound isolation even from their loved ones (yusuke and hiei are rather obvious; kurama can never tell his mother about the majority of his life nor what she truly means to him in the context of it; and kuwabara is separated from his peers for his spiritual awareness and his "stupidity" (plus his parents aren't around? and he is Desperate to define manhood/manliness through a broader pop cultural one which includes the warrior sacrifice thing bc he has no male role models BUT that's for another post) (i will admit kuwa's the most tenuous one here irt isolation)). they want to die for a cause so badly it's actually physically painful to me. it is passive suicidality, and they define their lives and identities by their relation to, engagement with, and skill at doing violence, etc. they live to die by the sword. anyway. nobody talks about it but i think it's very important to understanding what yusuke's doing here.

because i think he knows that about himself and his friends. they're kindred spirits. at the very least he knows this about kuwabara, who literally made a speech about this before diving into toguro's fingers In The Event That He Is Recreating Explicitly. he is dying nobly like they all want to on the chance that they'll get to break out and fight sensui rather than dying without even getting to take a swing. it's about his pride and theirs. but i don't think yusuke necessarily believes they'll win. he knows better than anyone how strong sensui is, and how wide the gap is between sensui and team urameshi. his stated position that humanity is doomed and that he doesn't care about its fate is, i think, not completely genuine, but if we take it at face value, he's not killing himself so that his friends can survive the end of the world. something's going to come around and kill them eventually. he's doing it so they can survive long enough to fight sensui. he needs them (specifically kuwabara) to be strong enough to free themselves to begin round two. but he's given up on their side winning, on humanity surviving, on his own victory---why should he think his friends are capable of winning? this could be another case of yusuke's fight-blinders. it could be another gamble, more blind faith put in his friends. but honestly it reads more to me that yusuke's giving them a chance to die together on the battlefield. them winning would be great, but it's not his goal. it's a pipe dream.

he knows he's going to be killed. they're probably going to be killed, too. but to make it so they last a little longer against sensui, to make the odds a little more even, so they are killed not like livestock, but like worthy fighters, he'd die a little faster. it's the best kind of death someone like them can have; and he'll deprive himself of it just to make their ends a little sweeter. even if the road to that is far more bitter.

but it's not like yusuke's friends know what he's thinking or agree to it, and he can't exactly make his case for it in the moment. he's making that choice for them. whatever his intentions, whatever odds he thinks they have of beating sensui, he's kind of sealing all of their fates. so how the hell is he supposed to acknowledge kuwabara screaming at him not to die, trying desperately to express what yusuke means to him in what could be their final moments together? this plan is going to hurt his friends terribly. it is already doing so, and he can hear it. his choices to stop koenma from using the mafukan and to die for his friends' strength are both selfish in some way, no matter how you read the scene. if yusuke comforts kuwabara, he might not get strong enough. if he twists the knife, well... how could he forgive himself? and either way by responding he would have to face them all and say yes, i'm doing this regardless of your feelings (with the intention of hurting you). so i think he does what he often does. he avoids it. he lets that emotion glance off him and his bravado and his one-liners so he doesn't have to deal with the fact that he's hurting people, that he's scared and guilty and unsure of himself. that he's about to die again, about to put kuwabara through the grief he saw at his wake again, only worse; about to put his quieter friends through something similar.

yusuke is confronted with the responsibility one has to the people who care for them, and he runs from it in an attempt to give them some small peace. just like when he died before and thought hey, at least my mom and keiko won't be burdened by me anymore. because the only thing he can really do for them is die.

[gale-force-storm]

Whelp, I've graduated from writing poetry to full-on love songs. Unfortunately I don't have Gale's voice, so my own mezzo-soprano will have to suffice lol

Lyrics and chords under the cut!

If You’ll Catch Me

C Am F C C Am F G

C Am You saved me the very F C First day that we met C Am F G And since then you’ve always stood by me C Am Yet I still need to ask F C For my heart needs to know C Am F G If I fall will you be there to catch me?

C Am If I fall will you catch me? F C If I fall in love? C Am I’d give you each star in F G The heavens above C Am My heart and my soul F C Anything I can do C Am G I’d happily do it for you C Am F G If you’ll catch me

C Am I’ve been beaten down F C My heart broken and bruised C Am F G I’ve loved and been used before C Am But you’ve given me hope F C For the first time in ages C Am F G That I could be worth something more

If I fall will you catch me? If I fall in love? I’d give you each star in The heavens above My heart and my soul Anything I can do I’d happily do it for you If you’ll catch me

Em I’d paint the sky Em I’d blow your mind Am F G I’d give you the best gifts that I could find Em Yet you say you want Em Me as I am Am F G Not the miracle, just the man Em If it is true Em I’ll leave behind Am F G All of my old ambitions Em I’ll start right here Em And I will make Am F G A life with you my new mission

C Am If I fall will you catch me? F C If I fall in love? C Am I’d give you each star in F G The heavens above C Am My heart and my soul F C Anything I can do C Am G I’d happily do it for you

If I fall will you catch me? If I fall in love? I’d give you each star in The heavens above My heart and my soul Anything I can do I’d happily do it for you If you’ll catch me

C Am F G If you’ll catch me C If you’ll catch me

[loverboybrightsideghost]

hey there - I've been thinking of listening to rqg thanks to all your excellent posts about it, but I've never listened to an actual play show before. can I ask. how do you do that. are there seasons? is it all one story and you have to start at the beginning?

RUBS MY EVIL LITTLE HANDS TOGETHER!!!

but genuinely, i'm glad you asked! when i saw rqg from the outside before listening to it, i was also not really sure what it was.

rusty quill gaming is one long campaign (through not all actual play podcasts are!), and it is called "erasing the line." there are four seasons, although the seasons don't really have an equal number of episodes between them (season four is the longest). each episode is about forty minutes to an hour long, and they have mid-episode breaks, so if you can't listen for that long, you could totally pause it in the break and come back later.

you should definitely listen to it in order, and i suggest starting with the episode 0 metacast. moment of truth, i did not listen to that episode again on my relisten, i am listening to it now as i write this, but i do believe it contains Important Lore to understanding the story world, so i highly recommend starting there.

there aren't content warnings on the early episodes, but i think you can check the fandom wiki for a specific episode to see them, as fans have added them there (not sure if they're there for every episode though).

also there are kind of official transcripts on their website, but i am not sure how accurate they are as i have not read them. i know it was a Whole Deal with rusty quill (the company) to make transcripts, because they didn't do them from the beginning in 2015 and especially with something like actual play it can be hard and time-consuming to transcribe, and as there are over 200 episodes (including specials), there was also a big backlog. all this to say that there are transcripts, but i don't know if they are complete or very accurate.

apart from that, i will say that it is a little slow at the beginning, but if you give it a chance you may end up loving it :)

[keeps-ache]

i think i tapped on the explore page by accident some minutes ago, i've been scrolling for a good sec like 'why is this on my dash. i don't know any of these people. what's going on' lmfsvh

[rhonuscorner]

Have a WIP to show that I'm not actually dead when it comes to drawing DCA stuff. Also, new AU yaaaaay! No I haven't forgotten about my circus theater AU, but these two suddenly decided they have a right to take up space in my brain and wanted a story to go with it, so that's a thing now. I can't wait to actually show off their designs, so happy with how they came out.

I'm calling this AU the Eclipse Protocol and I'm really excited about it 👀 I say that while I still haven't uploaded the first chapter of Cirque des Célestes, which is still sitting unfinished at 14k+ words which is way too big and I have yet to figure out how I'm gonna tackle that and make that story manageable. I don't have the brain power for that right now, so I'm giving the new AU priority for the moment.

I also have a love/hate relationship with drawing robo hands/joints/parts aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa. It's fun but it hurts my brain.

[burning-academia-if]

Different anon than genetics anon

But I’m actually pretty sure two people with blue eyes can have a child with brown eyes because they determined that eye color was actually determined by polygenic inheritance rather than the more Mendelian dominant and recessive pattern. Means multiple genes determine the phenotype of eye color, rather than just one.

Also, I wouldn’t be too concerned about following the basics of genetics 1 to 1 simply because the basics of genetics doesn’t account for a lot of things (linked genes, chimerism, genetic disorders that affect appearance, mutations, or even how sometimes a genotype and a phenotype don’t match in the way you expect because the sometimes the body makes mistakes following instructions so to speak (we see this in some intersex people who have a functioning y chromosome who for some reason never go through androgenization process [two times, this occurs, in utero and also later male puberty] and sometimes don’t find out they’re intersex until way later). Also hormones have a real stake in how you look, which is why it isn’t uncommon for pregnant women to experience things like hair texture or color changes, or even eye color shifts if I’m recalling correctly. In fact, even head trauma can change your eye color.

But I’d put whatever you’d want down for reasons and then *sparkly fingers* magic and not get too lost in minutiae of it all unless it’s something you enjoy. But also take what I’ve said with a grain of salt, things change and I could be outdated (I’m not afraid to say it’s been a minute since uni)

I love I brought out the science people with this lol brings me back to my biopsych research days of college (which is obviously Different from biology).

But yeah! That's what I meant in the last ask when I said "multiple traits affect it like eye color" (polygentic inheritance). I also didn't want to go full blown scienctic terms since I'm not sure how much of complicated biology is common knowledge aksksks so I tried to scale it back to like high school I guess

But also this is obviously pseudo science LMAO it's like trying to explain the biology of a mermaid and how they work in water (even though pop culture mermaids would not survive in water). You take bits of reality for the basis and then make up the rest of it so that it Works(tm)

[hazeerror]

//SPOILERS FROM THE PAST WITHIN / RUSTY LAKE ROOTS

This post is just basicly me ranting about my favorite game so don't take it that seriously ^^

Hyperfixation goes brrrrrrrrr

Something that I really loved about The Past Within is that how it tells the story from an unreliable perspective. This really showed when I played it with my boyfriend, someone who doesn't know the lore of the games and there for doesn't know Albert's history. It's clear that the story is told trough a bias towards Albert since he made the cube and we play as his daughter, Rose who also probably doesn't know the full story or just ignorant towards it. So when we played the game, for my boyfriend Albert just seemed like a weird old dude who really loves his daughter, but for me, I knew that the photo in the box of Ida was an evidence of his obsession towards a woman who he could never get and there for brutaly murdered her then made a lombic baby with her egg, that's Rose. He doesn't loves Rose bc she is his daughter, he loves her bc she is the only connection he could ever had with Ida, a trophy of some way. I think there was like one single reference that Albert had blood on his hands and that was in my side. And there for the ending has mixed messeges too, for those who knew the lore and for those who don't. For those who don't, it was just a father-daughter reunion. But for us who knew, we just witnessed one of the most dangerous man of the series return and basicly running free in the world while also having the rarest cube in his position.

I'm very exited for Underground Blossom and for how they will continue this ending and also about how this clif hanger will effect Rusty Lake itself, both the story and place.

[girlitfeelsgood]

I'm so nervous about writing an essay for the first time in two years. What if I do horribly 💀

[worldwright]

Hm.

Me and my magnus archives excel spreadsheet were keeping track of which episodes Jon got his marks in.

*enhance*

HM.

It sure is, buddy.

[coollyinterferes]

oh my goodness haiiii speedwagon!! haiii jonathan !!!!

unprompted asks 【always accepting】

"OH! Hello there, mate! How is it goin'?" Speedwagon greets first, offering a gentle tip of his hat at the kind anon along with a big smile. "Gotta admit I wasn't expectin' t' see rejoice over our comin' back."

"Good evening, Anon friend. Thank you for the kind welcome back!" Comes Jonathan's turn to greet back. "We are truly thankful for your kind greetings, and we hope you've been doing well!"