#My feelings on it are: idk if higher powers exist. If there is a Single Big Guy，I feel like it’s be like. They made the Big Bang and all th

[gryphonablaze]

My interpretation of this is that trans religious ppl aren’t going against their deity’s plan, rather, the earth ppl misinterpreted or incorrectly identified the person. Kinda like how if you plant a seed and start growing a plant, but in the early stages of growth you can’t determine exactly what species of flower it is. But someone looks at the early growth, says ‘this looks like a tulip’s early growth,’ and then gets angry when the flower ends up actually being a rose or smth

In the Image of God

A recent study found that Jews are the demographic group most accepting of trans individuals in the United States.

When certain Christians assert a religious freedom right to discriminate against trans individuals – particularly, a right to misgender them – their argument typically proceeds something along these lines:

1. They believe every individual is created in the image of God.

2. Part of that image is the person’s sex (and by extension, gender).

3. In particular, a person’s sex/gender is inalterably assigned by God from conception.

4. They are forbidden from lying or falsifying God’s choice.

Therefore, they say, they are religiously obligated to refer to people by their chromosomal sex, regardless of how they identify or publicly present. This religious duty, in turn, is used to press against rules and policies which require respectful treatment of trans individuals (including refraining from deliberately misgendering them, deadnaming them, and so on).

What’s interesting about this framework is that a lot of it actually resonates with how I view the relationship of my Jewish faith and trans individuals – with some crucial alterations. To wit:

1. I believe every individual is create in the image of God.

2.  Part of that image is the person’s sex (and by extension, gender).

4. I am forbidden from lying or falsifying God’s choice.

The major distinction, of course, comes in prong 3:

3. A person’s sex/gender is not necessarily or inalterably assigned by God from conception, but rather can be part of a person’s own process of discovering who they are. Where such self-discovery leads to a person to conclude they are trans, non-binary, or any other identity that departs from the sex they were assigned at birth, they are not deviating from God’s plan. They are uncovering their authentic self as God has created them.

The result of this process is part of God’s image. Those who refuse to accept it are not cleaving to God’s image, they are rejecting it.

God’s process of creation is not, in my understanding of Judaism, a set-and-forget sort of deal. It is not a matter of passively being puppeteered by a divine hand. It something we do together – we are partners in creation. To deny the results of that partnership is, for me, a denial of God’s plan and practice just as much as it is for adherents of other religious views who adhere to a more static and calcified notion of the role of the divine.

And so for me, and I suspect for many Jews, the religious freedom obligation pushes in the other direction. Many conservative states have, or are considering, laws which require (at least in certain contexts) non-recognition of trans identity. For Jews (and others) who share my religious precepts, these laws would force me to deny – to bear false witness to – a key attribute of how God created some of my peers. I do not believe – and this is a deep, fundamental commitment – that God’s “image” of trans persons was for them to be locked in a body or sex or gender identity that clearly is not authentically theirs. When they find their full self, they are equally finding God’s image of themselves.

Consistent with my lengthily expressed feelings on the subject, I suspect that what’s good for the goose will not be good for the gander. Despite the clear parallel, liberal Jews who assert religious liberty rights to be exempted from laws seeking to enforce by state mandate a transphobic agenda will not meet with the same success enjoyed by their Christian peers.

Nonetheless, there is value in promoting this sort of framework, and in unashamedly asserting Jewish independence from hegemonic conservative Christian notions of true religiosity. It is not woven into “religion” that God’s image requires rejection of trans individuals’ full selves. That is a choice, an interpretation of some religions or of some who call themselves religious. Other religions, other religious persons, have a different interpretation of how to respect and dignify the facet of God that is in every one of us.

via The Debate Link https://ift.tt/vlsH4T2

[railingsofsorrow]

Hiii i saw ur tortured poets department requests and these two came to mind instantly!!

idk if u still write for TVD but I feel like “who’s afraid of little old me” for Klaus mikaelson would fit, (it’s could be him 1000 years ago before & after he was a vampire) x reader

As well as Kol mikaelson w ‘guilty as sin’ x reader (it could be human reader watching him from a distance before he notices and makes a move??)

Even if u don’t write for these characters anymore/atm I appreciate u reading this :)

Guilty As Sin

[kol mikaelson x reader]

A/N: your idea was amazing (need more kol mikaelson requests tbh!) and I immediately thought about turning it into a slight darker plot... I hope you don't mind. since you didn't specify, reader will be gender neutral, though they will have some characteristics regarding hair and eye color and style, but that's it, gender isn't specified. and the klaus mikaelson request is in the process of being made.

A/N²: you will see "month signs" at some point but that means zodiac signs, this error is on purpose to depict that kol has no idea what astrology means. (he would probably hate it lol)

summary: and so the lion fell in love with the lamb. . . but what if the lamb also became the lion? pairing: kol mikaelson x gn!reader w.c: 2.9K warnings/content: blood and gore; descriptions of child abuse; sexual activities (my attempt on trying to write smut); moral values are twisted; good vs. evil; graphic descriptions of violence; language; morally grey characters!!; there’s fluff; paragraphs in italics mean it’s a memory.

navi

masterpost

the originals masterlist

the vampire diaries masterlist

[requested]

━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

❝ my boredom's bone deep 

this cage was once just fine 

am I allowed to cry?❞ 

━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

The Devil, for him, had short hair with dyed ends, dressed in ripped jeans, and carried the darkest pools in their eyes he had the pleasure of letting himself drown over and over again. He fell in love with the blood dripping from your lips and the taunting before proceeding for the final kill. You liked games when he created them. He thought he enjoyed the hunting, but you were born for this much more than he ever would. 

Kol Mikaelson met Evil when he was only a child. He watched as he beat his brother until he passed out from the pain and he turned a blind eye to it so he wouldn't be caught in his bad temper of every evening. Evil had a name and a last name, but he hadn't spoken these or acknowledged it existed from the moment he felt blood on his lips and life draining from a human body. Because now, he had power. Now, he had strength. Now he didn't need to corner and lower his head for a man whose only language was cruelty. He had defeated Evil.  

Kol was never a believer in God. He believed in the grey area between good and bad because he constantly leaned towards both once in a while — mostly the bad. Depending on his mood on the occasion. He didn't believe in a higher power, in month signs – because apparently, that's a thing in the modern world? People just have to seek something to feel less ordinary – or say something countless times for it to become true.  

He did, however, believe in magic. Not only believed, but he trusted magic. Kol was skilled enough to use it with pride and knowledge even after he lost his powers due to having become undead.  

Magic. 

It was exhilarating. The world was in his hands and he could burn an entire forest or make a flower grow.  

Some days, he missed magic like he missed breathing. So he would dig out his grimoire from an old box he kept his stuff and read it all over again like he hadn't memorized every single chanting and spell throughout his entire life. 

They called him Devil after seeing the wreckage he could cause in five villages in a week. The carnage that was left for the Earth to claim back as its own. But, one thing that nobody knew was that Kol met the Devil when he was casually strolling through a college party on Whitmore College's campus.  

Actually, the Devil was staring at him. And, surprisingly, it had blood pumping strongly to their heart. Life coursing through their veins. The Devil was human. And Kol was drawn to them like a moth to a flame. Like a man starved for months without food or water.  

━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

❝he's a paradox, 

I'm seeing visions, am I bad?❞ 

━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

He thought he had found his prey that night when, in reality, he had been the one falling into their trap.  

"I think you look too bored to be here." You observed, a normal tone of voice for someone who wanted the other person to hear in a loud party full of drunk people speaking loudly and fast. Kol heard it well, of course. Your voice was smooth like honey if he were to compare it to the awful music they had playing.  

"And you look like you're enjoying this." 

You lifted a brow, a teasing smile spreading across your mouth. "I'm not. My friends dragged me, I couldn't say no." 

"You've got a problem saying no?" He glared at a drunk kid who bumped into him and turned to look at you, who still had that look of satisfaction on your face. He didn't know why, not back then.  

"Not really, but I lost a bet so..." You shrugged. "It was my dare. Part of it, actually." 

Kol nodded. Why had he been so interested? Don't ask him. He won't know the answer. Maybe because the Devil had their ways of playing their little games, to turn saints into sinners. And what was Kol Mikaelson if not a sinner? 

"What was the other part?" Kol found himself asking. He was about to take off at any second. He was only in town because of Klaus's stupidity and his family needed him again. Until they didn't. He could be halfway out of town by now. Why wasn't he? 

You approached him slowly, head tilting as you surveyed Kol up and down. He noticed the ink in your neck, right where your pulse laid. A strong and inviting pulse.  

"Well, the first part was that I had to come to this stupid party..." You said, tongue moving between your teeth and forming a teasing grin. “the second part,” You drawled out, lifting a hand to his shoulder, fingers rising to the back of his neck. Kol didn't move away as he was pulled closer. He didn't move away when your breaths mixed. “they dared me to take a handsome stranger home so I could have some fun.”  

It was Kol's turn to smirk. And just like that, it took one night, a few minutes, for him to be whisked away into your world with no turning back. 

A human.  

How could he let himself get carried away because of a human? 

Perhaps because it had been so long since he was a mortal and you reminded him what that felt like. A tad nostalgic and a lot euphoric. This is how Kol felt every time he was in your presence. The strangest thing was that there was no magic.  

“I'm starting to think that paranoia may run in the family.” 

He offered you an eye roll, perching against your windowsill as he watched the street. It was fairly empty. Quiet. Two of the five vampires he compelled to keep an eye on you were by the parked Black SUV. 

“Kol.” You closed the book with a thud. He glanced at you, schooling an unimpressed look. “I do not need protection. I can handle myself.” 

“Alright.” 

You scoffed, annoyed at his ability to turn down a conversation because that would end in his favor.  

“Alright doesn't mean shit if you're going to be a controlling prick.” 

He raised a brow, “I'm being controlling? Do you know who my family is? How many times has my brother threatened y— Try to walk out of here without losing a limb, will you? That's what he's capable of.” 

“I don't care.” 

And maybe that had been the whole problem. You truly did not care.  

There were few things you cared for, fewer were those you considered worth your time. Kol should have felt flattered to even be worth a minute of your time, but he took a lot of things for granted, including your safety. 

Immortality was not something he asked for. It had been imposed on him like the heavy burden of life previously had. 

He felt guilty for learning to enjoy it over time. He felt guilty for finding someone to keep him alive when he had been dead for decades.  

━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

❝why does it feel like a vow  

we'll both uphold somehow?❞ 

━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

Then, he lost you. 

Because of retaliation. Because of his family. Which was always the reason for his undoing.  

He lost the human and met the Devil. Except that those were the same person in one and he only found out when he saw the glint of joy and the absolute exhilaration as you sucked someone dry and then tossed the body with a sigh.  

“I was sad when you stopped looking for me.” You whispered into his ear like his nightmares would on particularly bad nights. This was real, he just couldn't believe it yet. “Thought I was important for a minute.” 

“What happened?” 

You leaned back against the wall, leather jacket scrunching as you crossed your arms over your chest.   

“You sound disappointed.” 

Kol forced himself to move and you watched as he took a cautious step towards you. That was the first time you saw Kol Mikaelson hesitate about anything. When you reappeared in his life. 

Tilting your head a bit, you said in a casual tone, “I'm no longer fragile and broken, so your interest has vanished, is that it? The idea you had of me, that I needed your protection, it's completely shattered now. You're disappointed.” 

The Devil, for him, had slightly longer hair than the last time he saw them, still dressed in ripped jeans and the ink in their body had grown in numbers. The eyes didn't change. They were still the darkest he had ever seen, the night sky was jealous of them.  

Kol wasn't disappointed in you. He was disappointed in himself for not being able to protect too. Maybe he had grown a hero complex, Elijah had rubbed off on him, after all. 

To grasp the fact that he didn't lose you — because you were still here — wasn't easy. There was the fact that you were always on a different wavelength. Two extremes. Mortal and immortal. Human and vampire. Protected and protector. Destroyed and destroyer.  

There was no such a thing anymore. 

But he never saw you as fragile or broken. 

“Bonnie asked to turn my humanity back on.” You told him during a dinner in the Mikaelson compound. Kol placed the wine glasses on top of the counter, glancing up at you with careful eyes.  

“Did you? Turn it off?” 

He remembered thinking how cute it was when you scrunched your nose whenever confusion drowned your line of thought. He had never thought someone was cute. The person in front of him, nursing a glass of red wine as they pouted over something someone said to them a few days back, had killed around fifty wolves for threatening his family and somehow managed to acquire animosity with the Strix as well.  

He found you cute. What was going on with him? 

“How does one even do that?” You cracked a laugh, shaking your head at the idea. “What, you turn off your conscience to do unspeakable things to not remember them later? Is that a thing?” You placed the now empty glass of wine in front of the bottle so he could pour your another glass. “Then that means I'd have to grow a conscience first, wouldn't I?” 

Kol blinked, his lips stretching slowly into a soft smile that he couldn't hold back.  

He knew what was going on. You know, it's been known that Kol Mikaelson was an exceptional sinner and all the gods loathed him. So it made sense that he fell in love with the Devil, didn't it? 

━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

❝crashing over my grave, 

without ever touching his skin, 

how can I be guilty as sin?❞

━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

“Do you remember your human years?” 

You questioned him late in the evening. You were both in bed, you reading a book as he answered a text from Hope with one of the only memes he owned in his phone.  

“Yes.” Kol replied, turning his phone off and putting it in the nightstand. It wasn't until a few months ago that he stopped complaining after texting people. Big technophobe. You said he sounded like an old man whenever he complained about modernity. “Vaguely.” 

“Do you like remembering it?” 

“It depends.” A pause, the bed shifted. His hand wandered through your body, ending up on your hip, the shirt raising a little as he drew circles with his thumb. “Those weren't my favourite times.” 

You turned a page, avoiding his curious eyes on you. “Yeah?” 

“Mhm. I like it better now.” 

You stayed silent.  

He gently pulled the book away to be able to take a look at your face. 

“What's on your mind?”  

A lot.  

“Nothing.” 

Kol pecked your lips once. “Really?” He did it twice. “You don't know how to lie to me.” The corner of your lips lifted in amusement, which was always his intended goal. 

“Do I need to remind you what an awful liar you are?” 

He shrugged unapologetically, “That's why we're a good match. We're terrible liars.” 

You snorted, pursing your lips.  

“Is that what you think?” You said. “That we're a good match?” 

His forehead creased in confusion. He knew you were a bit odd during the day but he didn't push it when you didn't want to talk, figuring you would, eventually. But that? What did that mean?  

“What's going on?” He asked, thumb traveling across the back of your hand.  

“I don't know.” You bit your lip. “Sometimes I just feel like your life could be different. Without me.” 

He withdrew his hand to sit down on the bed, one leg under the other. The blanket falling on his lap, exposing his naked chest.  

“Yes, it would,” he said as if it was obvious. “It would be different in a way that I would never like to find out.” 

Your face twitched into a grimace. “Are you sure? Because people have a lot of opinions. About you and me. They say I make you worse.” 

“I was worse before you,” Kol interjected. “I didn't know you cared about people's opinions.”  

“I don't.” And that wasn't a lie. Oftentimes you had to stop Kol from shutting you out because of other people, mostly his family, interfering in your relationship. “But I'm a vampire now. And you... you're a Mikaelson. You're destructive and selfish and a lone wolf, except when you're with me. Do you really need someone who's the same?”  

“We're not the same.” He promptly disagreed. 

“Kol, we're both destructive.” 

“We were destructive before, what difference does it make now?” 

You sighed. 

“It doesn't bother you? That I'd kill and rip limbs out for you or my own benefit and not feel guilty about it?” 

With an arm beneath your legs, he brought you closer to him with a pull.  

“No. And neither should you.” He cupped your face, thump grazing your cheeks lovingly. “You didn't make me who I am—” 

“I'm aware, Kol. Your body count was above average way before I met you.”  

His forehead fell on yours as he chuckled in disbelief. “Fair enough.” 

You managed to smile a little.  

“If people tell you you make me worse, what do they say I make you?” 

Shrugging, you replied, “Satan, probably.”

━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━  

❝oh, what a way to die 

my bedsheets are ablaze  

I've screamed his name 

building up like waves  

crashing over my grave  

without ever touching his skin  

how can I be guilty as sin?❞

━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

He hummed into your skin, kissing down your collarbones and your chest and your stomach, until you exhaled with your eyes falling shut.  

“It's funny.” Kol mumbled against your lower stomach, his chestnut eyes boring into yours. “I thought you'd bored me out when I first met you, but it was the other way around, wasn't it?”  

You were about to respond maybe when there was a slight tug in your shorts and your body just worked on automatically lifting your hips so he could get rid of it. 

“You had a grip on me the first moment I heard your voice, darling.” He pressed soft kisses down the inner skin of your thighs with his raspy voice due to his position. “You don't make me worse, you make me better. Infinitely better.” 

The mattress beneath your head crumpled under your hold.  

“That's why I pledged my spot in Hell the first moment you laid eyes on me. I was yours. I am yours. And I will always be yours.” Your back arched as his mouth reached its final destination. “Proudly,” he whispered but you could hear it perfectly through the sounds that echoed throughout your bedroom. “Undoubtedly. . .”  

The Devil, for you, had the most beautiful chestnut brown eyes you've ever seen, a rather basic sense of style and carried an uncontrollable thirst for blood like you. He knew how to dance but he hid that ability out of embarrassment. He knew how to love and was too scared to lose that capacity of feeling after centuries of working through it.  

If people claimed that he was responsible for Hell on Earth, 

“. . . Unrepentantly.” 

Then you would gladly fall into the clutches of his undoing.  

━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

[nasty-creeps]

Welcome to my little mental breakdown

I hate constantly being torn between caring and protecting myself.

There are so many issues in this world that I do care about and that I want to address and do my part in by idk spreading the message, educating people to provoke real change. But I can't. I have difficulties prioritising. There are things to help people right now that might be solved over the next 20-30 years but also issues that threaten the existence of humanity as a whole and that need action soon or it might be to late and become a chain reaction that triggers even more problems for people that are already struggling right now.

And it's so frustrating that so many of these problems are deeply rooted in capitalism and the patriarchy. We need systemic change but the people in power don't care. Having power seems to be so toxic and turn people who had ambitions to make a change into hypocrites. Do we really all have a price?

I also have a conflict within myself. I don't wanna be alive. I didn't choose to be here and I don't really get why anyone would. But I know that they do so I want to help.

I feel like a lot of people in my generation are educating themselves before joining a movement but don't really put the information in context if that makes sense. Yes, Russia shouldn't have attacked Ukraine. Sure, the right thing for russia to do would be to just give up and leave the borders as they were before. But that's not going to happen. And Ukraine isn't a Saint either. There's a lot of nationalism playing into their narrative and nationalism is never good. There's a lot of conservativeism in their politics, that we critic in other countries but right now all everybody talks about is that Ukraine is the good guy with a gun and Russia the bad guy with a gun. And that we have to give the good guy more guns.

Yes, there is war crimes committed in this war. Which is happening in every war. Using rape as a weapon is very common. It makes people feel in control and like they have power over someone. But even in times of peace that's not not happening. Statistics show that rate of rapes are higher around US military bases in Germany, than in the rest of the country. And here we're back at patriarchy being a original reason for this to happen. They see it as their right to get what they want. But that's an illusion. Nobody has the right to use your body without your permission.

There's no winners in war. People die, get abused and traumatized. Because of some people in power, trying to make life better for themselves.

It's not about their people. It's not for the "small man". It's for them to gain more power.

Then there is climate change. An issue that affects everyone but people refuse to do something about it or even believe in it.

Politicians care more about being reelected than making tough and partly unpopular decisions. Nobody wants to give up their privileges. But the thing is they probably wouldn't even really have to if cooperations would get their shit together. And here we are again with capitalism and the addiction to (financial) growth. There is no way to maintain infinite growth when we have one planet. At some point it HAS to stop. But they always try to convince us that their growth is something positive even tho it just means they exploit nature and people even more. Resources are limited. Space is limited. You can't expand infinitely

And they know that. But they want to profit of it as long as they can. On the cost of all others trying to survive this hellhole.

We need change but change seems impossible. Looking at the big picture there are two ways this whole thing could go. Either we get away from the idea of nationalism as a whole. Even if it's not necessarily present in an extreme way right now. We need to see us as humanity. Every single one of us has the right to a good life. So when resources are getting low, we would need to bond together, work together so we can benefit and share all the resources that different areas on earth have and can produce. Care about the issues some regions have and find ways to change it, eliminate it or how to help people affected by it.

Or we become more and more nationalist. Sure for now we have alliances between countries but if resources get low everyone is gonna fight for their own life. People in regions with bad conditions to produce food and clean water will just die. And it's gonna be a downward spiral. There are gonna be wars over resources and only the richest countries will survive.

Seeing humanity as it is now, I don't see option one being in the cards.

There are too many people who don't care. That just live their happy little lifes. But their children and grandchildren are crying for help. They know that we need to work together to make a change. But instead we see so many countries going backwards. Making laws that only rich (white) people benefit from.

Then there are people indoctrinated by the capitalist system. I don't blame them, it's force-fed to us from the day we are born. But there's also no functioning alternative for capitalism. The concept of communism is good. But it doesn't take greed in consideration. We would all have to be willing to live with the same opportunities. But privileges are hard to give up. And that won't happen. We are not able to create a society where everyone is truly equal.

And people still care more about changes in language or things that don't affect them personally, than improving the lifes of people that struggle and are discriminated against. What's the problem with using a * when addressing people? Who the hell cares if someone wants to be addressed with they/them or the pronoun of their choosing? It does not affect you. Just do it. We're so used to seeing everything through the lense of "western christian morals". We think being non binary is a new idea by confused teenagers. But it's not. Other cultures throughout history had "a third gender" or even more genders that were commonly used by people that now identify as non binary or trans. They say it's unnatural when people feel like they were born in the wrong body when in biology there are literally animals that can change their gender based on what they need to be to procreate. That not a new concept either. Let people live their lifes. You're scared of gender neutral bathrooms? 1. Thats no fucking reason to deny people do be happy and safe and 2. Advocate for bathrooms with real doors and walls. That's better anyway. I don't need my coworkers to hear if I'm going Nr 1 or 2. Even if they are the same gender as me.

There's no valid arguments against giving trans folks the same rights that everybody else has.

There is no reason to hide the fact they exist from children. It's not giving them ideas or turning or pressuring them into being trans or gay or whatever the thing they are talking about is. It's showing life. It's education. It shows that there is nothing wrong with them if they have the feeling like they don't conform with the "norm".

So there is no solution for any of these issues. There's nothing concrete we can work on to turn things around. We have to accept that things are probably gonna get worse and worse till humanity eventually goes extinct.

So does it really matter to be an activist? To spend all this energy when you can't expect it to permanently make minorities lifes better? Should we just enjoy it as long as we can? Pretend to "do our part" by using paper straws and not buying so many clothes? Is it good to boycott brands or is it just causing people to loose their livelihood? Even if the work they have to do is under horrible conditions and severely underpaid? Stop eating fish and meat if companies still mass produce or over fish our oceans? If the plastic trash that we are disposing in the ocean is killing marine life anyways?

Should we wait for the environment to be so run down, that we just don't have Oxygen to breathe anymore?

Excistential dread.

And there are so many people with different opinions on those issues. And we all judge each other for the life were living. Questioning our intentions, our priorities, how we try to make a change, if we're extrem enough, or how consistent we are. You can't slip up because that makes you a hypocrite and you did all the things you've already done for nothing.

I want to care. I want to help with every issue and every minority that needs more advocating voices. But I barely have the energy to get through the day. Even if I'm off work it's a struggle to get up and feed myself and keep my home somewhat in order. Is it doing anyone any good if I give myself up in order to being another voice in the crowd that has very little clout or power and influence? The people in my life share most of my views. They know all that.

Can I afford it? In this economy? With the inflation we're having? I don't really think I can. I can't afford to only buy biologically and regionally sourced food. And if something I need breaks I can't afford to buy a more pricey but better quality replacement. I can't even really afford to get the help I need to fight my own mental illnesses.

I feel stuck. And frustrated. I'm mad at the world and other people and myself. I feel unheard. Misunderstood.

Every day is a struggle. I felt like I don't have the energy to get through another day for years now. But my body keeps functioning and I hate it for that. I know I'm not alone or the only one that feels that way but in the end you still have to figure it out by yourself. Nobody is able to take life off your shoulders. So you are alone with it after all. And all the validation of my feelings is not changing anything when it comes to getting up, making breakfast, going to work, showering, ... .

You're alone with all that. And even more with what goes on inside your head.

So what is it? Stems my depression really from chemical imbalances in my brain? Or is it the world around me, around us, falling apart? I will never have the same possibilities as the generations before me.

Teachers that say, that 2 years after my apprenticeship I should have saved enough money to make a down payment on a house. When i struggle to buy food at the end of the month. How do you find joy if you work most of the day need to make food and do housework and sleep enough and commuting to and from work? Yes, consumerism helps us to get our little serotonin hits. But 1. You need to be able to afford that and 2 it again plays into the cards of capitalism.

People say you don't need to spend money on doing fun things in your free time. So what do you do? If you live in a city, most things you'll be able to do there will cost you money. Going to cultural events or sights please get your tickets. Wanna go to the gym or swimming? Get a membership. Wanna get out of the city to be in Nature? Pay for transportation. Wanna persue Hobbies? You need to buy gear or materials. Except for sitting in a park doing nothing or in a library there are no things that are free.

So how can you be happy. Basically don't think about stuff. You can either create your own bubble and let no upsetting things inside and/or deny everything you don't want to hear or you can care and get mad and worried and anxious. And you can soothe these emotions by buying a cool new mug, a cozy sweater, paints for a new project you're never gonna finish or concert tickets to see your friends. And at the end of the month you look at your bank account and think where did all my money go?

So capitalism and the patriarchy huh? What has that to do with not being able to keep track of your spending habits? Pretty much everything. Our current model of the 40 hour work week was not created for the "lifestyle" that we have right now. It was intended for one person to be the breadwinner and one person to be at home doing housework, run errands and Carework. Because they knew, of you work 40 hours a week, you don't have time to do that. And the salary was supposed to be enough for 2 adults and children. Now people have to take on serveral jobs to just barely survive. Capitalism controls the market. It controls prices and what you can afford. And it's goal is to make a maximum profit for a few people at the expense of the rest of humanity.

[notwarriorswiki]

Will StarClan be changed in anyway? Also did any other books go differently? Such as Leopardstar's honor or the Forbidded Spottedleaf's Heart?; or did even some cats change besides the ones you already have mentioned? Is not everyone related to Firestar. (Also your art is amzing, I loaf in so much). Ahhh more questions? Will names be changed; IF Twigbranch is made a warrior in any of the Clans will her name be changed or stay the same. Twigbranch is one of my faves so...

I just want to say how much I’ve missed writing for you guys, answering questions, and just fleshing out the Warriors world. What an amazing fandom it is, and I just appreciate everyone who interacts with and supports me so sincerely much. Thank you! <3

StarClan change - there’s a higher power above StarClan, like one single all knowing being. StarClan is just a bunch of dead cats and they interact with the living here and there as needed to pass on the higher power’s foreseeable word. This higher being, known as Chi (a very large chimera cat) is concerned though as the barrier between living and dead is wavering. These cats are leaving physical marks and can harm the living, something Chi doesn’t want. This is the catalyst for Power of Twelve, Chi granting powers to the mortal 12 in hopes they can find the way to sever the connection and push both StarClan and The Dark Forest away.

This is very hard for the 12 to learn as time goes on. They realize what they must do, but they’re all young and have grown up with StarClan being the brightest of lights and the most trustworthy. However, upon having their faith shaken and realizing not all of StarClan is alright with what they’re attempting to do, the 12 understand light and darkness are two sides that must exist in equal parts. To dispel the Dark Forest, they must also dispel StarClan.

Books that went Differently - Spottedleaf’s Heart was extensively changed. Thistleclaw doesn’t even attempt a relationship, he just tries to manipulate her to give him favor with Sunstar so that he might become deputy and then leader. It’s kinda like a Hawkfrost/Mothwing situation where ambitious warrior bullies medicine cat to fake signs and get what they want.

As for Leopardstar’s Honor, I’d remove her having romantically loved Frogleap and Tigerstar. Idk, she always read as ace/aro if anything - just very much thinking about RiverClan and making them the best. It just feels very unnecessary for her story, especially when I find it far more compelling the way she adopts Whiteclaw and tends to him after the death of his parents. Her being this single mother who cares for him like her father and the clan did for her I think is far more poetic than her little romantic bursts, but that’s just me.

Finally I think I would’ve either made it clearer her disdain for half-clan cats that she’d kill some of her closest friends, OR lean into it being the ThunderClan problem because Leopardstar was endlessly bothered by ThunderClan. I mean losing her best friend, losing Whiteclaw, Oakheart, Sunningrocks quarrels, Silverstream, and then Tigerstar whispering in her ear and the usurping, and now she learns about two of her close friends Mistyfoot and Stonefur?? Like pick a narrative and I guess sell that a bit more because it feels like there’s something there and they have the pieces but they’re not really tying it into that bow that I’d personally like to see.

I guess those are more writing critiques than event changes, but geez I’d also sell Leopardstar’s actual honor and redeem her better than whatever book did. Oh yeah, what if they acknowledged her diabetes?

Name changes do happen! Sparkpelt is now Sparkfire and Twigbranch is now Twigshade. I chose Twigshade so then she matches with her sister Violetshine.

[lemonlurkrr]

@aureateart​ ok. My favourite parts of twilight princess  (and some other random thoughts about TP sprinkled in there) taken from my monster TP word vomit google doc :

Link lmao

Ok but for real, I like this incarnation of Link :)

I love Ordon (it just seems like such a chill and cozy village)

ALSO love how easy it is to interpret Link as being a sort of older brother figure to the Ordon kiddos. It’s just,, super cute? AND GHHH nice nice good thanks nintendo for giving me characters to care about/characters that I can imagine Link caring about

He didn’t sign up for any of this (tbh, none of the Links really signed up for this jshdjsd). But I mean like, dude was just going to take a trip to castle town, drop a gift off for the royal family, and come back. But haHA oopsies he did get to castle town eventually but definitely not the way he expected hsjdhsd

He’s just a little dude?

AND FUCK. HE REALLY HAD NEVER BEEN OUTSIDE OF ORDON UNTIL ALL OF THAT

everything is new for the player AND Link

Midna

She’s cool :)

she really just

*teleports into your jail cell* hello whore.

I am no master at writing but AYYYY she do got a character arc!!!

She was actually pretty helpful sometimes, I ALWAYS checked in with her before turning to a game guide

Other NPCs

NICE

Love all of the TP character designs (ASHEI’S ARMOUR??? AOWOAOAOOAO)

Saving Zelda and all of Hyrule was important yea but thinking back maybe it was more like, the Ordonians and the kids were what was pushing Link to keep on going

I like the Resistance members :) Very video gamey of them to have one NPC assigned to each dungeon but hey!!! Kinda cool getting to see a little glimpse of each of em

Idk, it’s just fun to imagine Link popping into Telma’s bar after each dungeon and taking a little rest :) (or to celebrate? maybe just chat, idk, give this man some downtime!!)

Honestly it was just kind of nice that Link wasn’t entirely alone. I mean, I know Midna was there the whole time, but I am always for giving Link a big group of friends (see my love for hyrule warriors, age of calamity, and LU LMAO)

Hero’s shade, very very cool, kinda sad he died with regrets but HEY. He got to pass on his knowledge eventually

AND the connection to OoT?? AND assumed to be related by blood too????? GOOD SHIT

Ilia, I REALLY really wanted to like her (er, it’s not like I dislike her, she’s just,,, kinda there for me).

It definitely seems like Nintendo was pushing to make her the romantic interest, but GHHHHH they really threw that out of the window for me by having her lose her memories

I saw a text post a while ago that said it would have been interesting if Ilia was Link’s sister instead and YES!! That would have been cool too :0

Wish we got to know Zelda a little more

I feel like we barely know anything about her

Idk man, like I said earlier, I never really had any sort of drive to save Zelda during my playthroughs

She obviously knows Midna, so maybe if they gave us just a little bit more of that relationship I’d be more interested in her?

TP WORLD BUILDINGGGG

Botw has good world building too, but each race felt kinda,,, isolated? I absolutely love the different architecture and vibe each town has (and all the the weapons too) but ghhh yea everyone felt so separated. As far as I can remember, we don’t see tooo much of the races interacting with each other? Now that I’m typing that out maybe that’s to be expected because of the calamity but KLSJDKJFD ANYWAYS THIS IS ABOUT TP

The world feels nice and alive, love how populated everything is

Castle town I like castle town a lot, it feels dense and busy and I really like how you can’t talk to every NPC you see

Very cool very fun that we got to see the Gorons hanging out in multiple spots

kinda wish we got to see the Zoras a little more (I guess they are a bit limited since they need water but GHHHH the tp zoras are so prebby,,)

BUT HEY, I do remember seeing a zora or two hanging out in the hot springs around death mountain after beating the lakebed temple (I think, might have been a different dungeon) 

but aaaa would have been nice to see them in at least a couple of other places. I think it would have really added to the “congrats Link!! You’re restoring peace to Hyrule” feeling you get from seeing the Gorons hanging out in Kakariko and Castle Town

ORDON

Love how chill it is and how it’s kind of separate from Hyrule proper

They really do seem to be doing their own thing apart from the rest of Hyrule

Just kinda adds onto the “he’s just a regular dude minding his own business” kind of vibes I get from TP Link

Also I like Ordona :)

THE LIGHT SPIRITS,,

Love their design

And love how they’re not exactly like a pure white?

Different spirit representing each aspect of the triforce my beloved

But yes hi I think Ordona is very cool

Who are you, how did you get here, which goddess do you represent? Do you even represent one of the three golden goddesses? Do the Ordonians know about you? Have any of them ever SEEN you??? Do they worship you? Does anybody even know about the existence of the light spirits?? FUCK so many questions but ghhh I like how they broke the status quo a bit by throwing in a fourth spirit :)

I feel like this one is kinda weird but I like that voice sample they used in the light spirit music. It’s spooky and pretty at the same time :)  

cutscenes mmmmm

Ok ok, the spooky lanayru cutscene is very good

BUT THE “Link, Chosen Hero! Lend us the last of your power!” CUTSCENE MMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMM LOVE IT SO MUCH

IT just

Idk man

It just hit different

I like the music

And seeing the light spirits swimming around in the light juice water whatever it is

Summoning the light arrows?

AND HHHHH “Lend us the last of your power!” THIS IS IT. This is the final battle.

Seeing Zelda bow down, and then Link putting his hand out 👌👌👌

Link: ok bud, let’s do this together :)

Connection to OoT (did I already mention this? Maybe., Whatever)

Very cool nintendo :)

I love seeing connections between all the diff zelda games.

Because like, on one hand, they’re all separate from each other because of yknow, individual hero stuff. BUT ALSO, they’re all connected because of the reincarnation stuff

Grrrr walking through the sacred grove and going “The Hero of Time walked around here a long time ago” FUCK THATS SO COOL

Is the Hero’s Shade watching me? What does he think of me? DIsappointed? Proud? The Hero of Time went through HELL so this timeline didn’t have to deal with any of the shit Ganon was gonna pull with the triforce, better not fuck this UP Link!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Midlink is cute

Kinda hurts that she smashed the mirror but that was probably so Nintendo didn’t have to worry about people going “but what about the twili??????” for any of the other games LMAO

BUT ALSO LIKE SKJDKLJFJ There are some pretty massive plot holes in TP anyway so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ whatever it’s fine we’ll just use this for angst because GOD do y’all like angst

So is Shadlink

Honestly don’t know where this ship came from but it’s cute so whatever

THE MUSIC??

Love Midna’s theme and how they referenced the dark world theme from ALttP (I remember trying to learn the dark world theme on the piano and doing the Leonardo DiCaprio point meme at the little jingle I recognized from Midna’s theme)

Hyrule field theme SLAPS.

Apparently references a couple of the other over-world themes from the previous zelda games (I got this from 8-bit Music theory’s video on the over-world zelda themes, he talks about TP at around 11:40 but def recommend watching the whole video if you’re into music analysis stuff)

So there’s this bit of the Hyrule Field theme, I don’t know the official name for it but I remember seeing somewhere it being called the “at an advantage theme” since yeah, you hear it during the boss music whenever you expose their weak points. FUCKINGGG LOVE THAT. Didn’t notice it during my first playthrough, but hearing it during my second was like a little easter egg for my ears every time :)

Midna’s lament is very pretty (and fun to play on the piano)

COURAGE THEME.

I didn’t care for it too much when I started playing the game but hearing it in ZREO’s arrangement of the Hyrule Field theme literally makes me turn into a puddle of emotions. Also hearing it around and of the Ordon kids (I think it plays after Link saves Colin) AAAAAAAAAAAAA

Orchestra piece #1 and #2 HOLY SHIT???????????????? 

Literally, the first time I listened to those I just,,,, plugged in my headphones, volume 100, layed on the floor/against my desk and silently vibed. I don’t know what the hell it is, but those two just fit so well with TP?? I still avoid listening to them nowadays cause if I DO I definitely will get overwhelmed with the “god I love this game so FUCKING MUCH” kind of feels.

Wolf link sucks at singing

the first time I heard him howling Zelda’s Lullaby I lost my shit because LKSJLDKSGLKJFSKG god that was.,, Bad. Anyways, hearing him howl some of the songs from OoT was cute :)

TP STAFF ROLL??? 

VERY GOOD. IT’s like 10 minutes long and GOD do I love every single second of it. It doesn’t have the same energy as the skyward sword staff roll or the orchestra pieces but GOD does it hit good??

Nice and calm after that big exciting adventure. Maybe it would have been more fun or emotional to have a higher energy piece but it was really nice getting to sit back and watch the camera fly around Hyrule. Seeing like, the Gorons and the Zoras having a good time, the kids returning to Ordon? GOOD SHIT.

and AAAAA that end, when you hear the main Zelda theme and see Link riding off out of Faron woods on Epona… good shit. It gets you thinking, where the hell is he going? What is he doing? Off ot do more adventuring? Going to help out the resistance or something? Going to help Zelda? Or maybe he’s trying to figure out a way to restore the mirror of twilight? Whoooo knows.

hhHHHHhhh it’s just that final reminder that YES!!! YOU JUST PLAYED A ZELDA GAME. JUST ANOTHER STORY APART OF THE WHOLE EPIC OF THE ZELDA SERIES AS A WHOLE

I also want to acknowledge the instrument/samples they used for all the twili stuff.

They’re all just so unique and contrast SO well with the rest of the TP OST. LIKE FUCK!! Anytime I hear the screech from the Twilit Kargarok? Sends a shiver down my spine. I associate those sounds SO strongly with the twili realm. (Like, the same way you associate the BSHEWW VVWWMMM sounds with light sabers)

I love it so god damn much

literally any time there’s a certain sound or motif associated with something I lose my shit

Sacred grove sacred grove sacred gro-

lovely lovely lovely so much fun playing that on the piano. AND again, I did the Leonardo DiCaprio pointing meme when I heard the theme from the lost woods come in GHHHHHHHH

shoutout to TP Faron Woods for helping me study and get through all of my schoolwork

BLEGUUHHH can you tell that I really love music?

and also yea I guess TP is kinda cool too :\

IF YOU READ ALL OF THAT THANKS I GUESS

[sdr2lovemail]

I just noticed that you are alive again! So um.. I've been thinking for QUITE a while of a relationship Ultimate Impostor x Ultimate Leader (in the killing game ig?), idk why. If the requests are closed feel free to ignore this. Thank you!

You could say that I am a fan of Imposter's work. Even tho there is not a lot of content about them out there I still love them dearly.

And yes I died for a minute but have risen from the grave to continue my writing career. I hope you enjoy what I have written my friend because I absolutely love it.

⚔Mod Peko⚔

Spoilers for chapter 1

The Ultimate Imposter disguised as Byakuya Togami and the Ultimate Leader butt heads but also kinda wanna kiss each other

Teenagers and a killing game are bound to fall into chaos. Teenagers, a killing game, and no supervision will cause more chaos. That’s why they need a leader. Someone strong and brave to guide them. However two ultimates wanting to be that leader, teenagers, a killing game, and no supervision will cause even more chaos.

Breakfast was a usually calm time. Everyone just wanted to eat and get on with finding a way off this forced school trip. However there were some mornings where everyone seemed to be full of energy. Akane and Nekomaru were engaged in a fierce 1v1 training session. Chairs, tables, and food flying throughout the air from the power of their moves. The restaurant was in total disarray and with your talent of being a leader you must do something to calm the crowd. Standing up you set your arms behind your back and call out to your classmates.

“Everyone! This is-”

“Sit down, common folk. You will all cease this foolish behavior and stop wasting food.”

“Huh?”

At the mention of wasting food Akane quickly stops her fighting. She then pulls up a table and chair from the mess of the restaurant and begins to chow down. You look at where the voice came from and see Twogami sitting at a table with a plate. Just because this guy is loaded he thinks he can be a better leader than you? Oh you will just have a quick word with him to set the record straight. With quick strides you tap him on the shoulder giving him your best stern look. This look helped you strike the feeling of order into people. But Twogami doesn’t look impressed at all?! No you can’t let him see you falter. Standing up straighter than ever you begin to speak.

‘Hey what’s the big idea? I’m the Ultimate leader. I don’t need your help guiding our class.” You told him with a grim expression. Twogami gave you a look over before setting down his fork. He wipes his mouth off with a napkin before standing to face you. His intimidation factor was off the charts. Can money buy such a scary aura?! After adjusting his glasses he begins to speak with a sigh.

“Listen I, Byakuya Twogami, am much better suited to be in charge. You may have your impeccable wits and title but that is nothing compared to being next in the Togami line. Now are we done here? I would like to finish my food”

Not even giving you a chance to respond he goes right back to eating. Even with your ultimate status this guy intimidates you a lot. But you will not be backing down. He thinks he’s so high and mighty you’ll show him high and mighty.

The days feel like they’re getting heavier. Monokuma’s annoying voice rings in your ears. There’s no way you’d believe that memory loss garbage….And even if you did, you had to stay strong for everyone. Twogami’s party did nothing to calm the tense feeling in the air. You decided you were going to check this abandoned building from top to bottom before anyone steps foot inside.

You do not see Nagito when you first step in. Maybe he’s cleaning somewhere else. Teruteru was said to be in the kitchen. Entering the main room of the building you see Twogami rifling through what looks to be a metal case. Hearing the floors creak under your weight he looks over. Upon seeing you he sends a glare.

“And what are you doing here? I don’t remember you having to prepare anything.” There was a doubtful tone to his voice. Twogami was trying to let this party go off without a hitch. And he wasn’t going to let some commoner ruin his plans. Though behind the rich boy costume Imposter did feel kinda bad. They felt like they were trampling all over your pride with their Byakuya act. However this was their ultimate. And as Twogami….No. Just as themself, if that even existed, they will keep their classmates safe. Even if they have to hurt some feelings.

“As a leader it is my duty to keep everyone in order and assure maximum safety. I plan to do a total sweep of the place before the party.” And like he did to you, you did not give him a chance to answer. You quickly turn around and exit out into the hallway missing the look of awe on Twogami’s face. Walking past the fire door you come up to the kitchen. Before you can reach for the door it swings open revealing Nagito. Strange….If Teruteru was already in the kitchen there was no need for Nagito to be in there. The lucky student passed by with a smile yet spoke no words towards you. Also strange. Nagito usually said something when passing. He deemed it rude not to say hello to an ultimate.

Entering the kitchen you see Teruteru at the counter. He doesn’t seem to notice you coming in. The usual smile on his face is replaced with a look of fear and he’s shaking like a leaf. Stepping closer seems to have caught his attention as he jumps. The look of fear is swiftly changed into a smile yet he’s still shaking. Teruteru then grabs a knife and begins chopping at some vegetables. Seems as if he’s trying to make it seem like he was simply taking a break.

“W-Why hello there. Heh, what could I do for you?” He’s shaken up quite a bit. Not a single flirty remark in that sentence and Teruteru sure did like to tease about your strong authority. You stand tall and look down at the chef. He visibly shrinks back. Looking him dead in the eye you start to command him.

“You will tell me what you have discussed with Nagito Komaeda.”

This caused Teruteru to tense up. Setting down the knife he grabs a comb from his pocket and begins to bring it through his hair. Though there isn’t a hair out of place on his pompadour. Appears to be a nervous habit.

“I uh….I have no idea what you mean mon ami~. We were simply discussing plans for the upcoming party.” Teruteru had tried to come off as collected but you knew better. He wasn’t making eye contact and he was constantly fidgeting. Nagito told him something and you were going to find out what.

“Teruteru Hanamura! I command you to tell me what Nagito had told you. Simple party plans would not have such an impact on your demeanor.”

This seemed to have caused a reaction in him. He began to blubber as words poured out of his mouth like a dam cracking under pressure.

“He came in here and told me that he had plans to murder someone at the party with the knife he had hidden under one of the tables in the dining room. He planned to overload the breaker in here with irons in the storage room to cause a blackout so he could grab the knife and kill someone during the party. I-I begun to form my own plan of stopping him….by….killing him?” The last part of his word vomit stuck with Teruteru. He would’ve had someone’s blood on his hands and would send the rest of his class to their own demise. “Oh my god I was going to kill him!” Teruteru then sinks to his knees before you.

Your face softens as you see the mess of a chef on the ground. Nagito was planning a murder? Why would he share this information with Teruteru? Dropping down to his level you set a careful hand on Teruteru’s back. “Listen. I’m going to go grab Twogami and you’re going to tell him what happened. And we’ll come up with a solution.” You normally wouldn’t call for backup, but as this was his party you felt he had the right to know.

You cautiously leave the kitchen and begin to look for the blond. Not able to find him in the building you exit to the hotel grounds. Noticing the while suit and blonde hair you call out to him and ask for him to come back. Leading him to the kitchen where Teruteru still sits slumped on the ground he listens to what you already know.

A look of disgust crosses Twogami’s face before he sets off to the main room. After announcing your departure to Teruteru, you follow him. Nagito is there setting up tables and dusting the furniture. He was about to offer the two of you a cheerful greeting but is cut off by your demand for him to exit the grounds. Not wanting to upset an ultimate that is clearly in higher ranks than he is, Nagito does not question it. He leaves the abandoned building to rest in his cottage to wait for permission to be allowed back in.

Looking under the tables you find the knife that Teruteru had mentioned. Grabbing it proceeds to coat your hand in wet paint. So Nagito had just planted this. But what’s the paint for?

“Set the knife in the duralumin case I brought on the left. I am currently using it to store anything I deem unsafe.”

You let out a scoff before setting the knife in the case. He sure does love bossing people around even in dire situations. Well….I guess that’s your talent so you can’t really speak. After doing a check of the rest of the tables, Twogami walks up to you with something in his hand. It’s a handkerchief with the Togami family crest. Imposter spent many hours perfecting the stitching of the symbol. You give him a confused look about the offering. Seeing the expression he rolls his eyes.

“Close your mouth before flies start to swarm. This is to wipe your hand off. I don’t need paint smears ruining the image of my party.”

“What? I can’t wipe paint on something as expensive as that. That handkerchief probably cost more than my house. I’ll just go wash it in the bathroom.”

Upset by your stubborn nature, Twogami grabs your wrist and begins to wipe the paint off himself. After your hand is clean he drops the cloth into your hand. “I expect that to be washed before it’s returned to me. Now I have some important matters to discuss.”

Stuffing the handkerchief into your pocket you give Twogami your full attention.

“I have decided that after this little incident we need to up the security. I would ask Nekomaru but I wish to keep this between us. Letting the public know that two people were planning a murder would cause chaos. When it’s time for the party you will help me conduct body searches. I’d like for you to keep an eye on the party with me to make sure no suspicious activity is at play.”

While normally you would make a fuss about him bossing you around with people’s lives at stake it was simply not the time for that. Nodding once he finishes speaking, you and Twogami complete one last look of the place before the party starts.

It’s time for the party and the two of you are set up outside of the abandoned building. After checking everyone and confiscating anything deemed dangerous, the party is in full swing. Everything is going smoothly. 11:30 was nearing and at the corner of your eye you see Nagito inch closer to the table. Knowing you shut the irons off you pay this no mind. There’s no way he’d try to pull anything when everyone can see him. A quick look of confusion crosses his face as the lights are still on. The confused expression is swapped for one of despair. There’s a creepy smile on his face and his eyes are clouded. Even if the blackout did not occur Nagito can still pull through with his plan.

He suddenly flips the table cloth over and goes to reach for his knife. Everyone at the party has eyes on him. Before he can fully register that his knife is in fact missing Nagito is pushed to the ground. His arms are pressed against his back and his face is squished into the floor. Multiple confused cries echo throughout the dining hall. Nagito recognized this tactic. After hours upon hours of researching the ultimates he’s sharing a class with he could easily tell that this was your work.

Twogami with Nekomaru in tow walks over to you and the detained lucky student. An agitated expression is on the heir’s face. He looks down at Nagito.

“You dare to think that I would let your plan continue? [Name] and I knew about your scheme and were quick to put a stop to it. And the fact that you would try to pull through with it in broad light is despicable.”

Anger, disgust, and confusion are present in the crowd of your classmates. Trying to make sense of it all Akane speaks up.

“I’m so friggin’ confused. What plan did Nagito have? Need me to beat him up for ya?”

You were quick to diminish the violent thought. “No, that will not be necessary as he has already been disarmed.”

“Nagito had planned out a murder.”

Twogami’s words caused a commotion in the dining hall. After hearing the noise from the kitchen, Teruteru cautiously enters the room fearing the worst. Though a feeling of relief washed over him after seeing Nagito on the ground.

Nekomaru lets out a strangled noise. His teeth are clenched and his fists tightened.

“You were going to murder one of your classmates? THAT’S INEXCUSABLE! Please [Name] allow me to detain him somewhere away from everyone. SOMEONE LIKE HIM CANNOT WALK FREEEEE!”

Looking over to Twogami as if silently discussing what to do he sends you a nod. Removing Nagito from your grasp he is quickly put into Nekomaru’s. The coach is quick to remove him from the premises. With a sigh Twogami faces your classmates. Pushing his glasses up he begins to apologise.

“I am sorry you all had to see that. And I am sorry that my exquisite party must draw to a close here. Exit the building and head to your cottage for the night.”

Though shaken, everyone proceeds to leave in groups. No one wants to walk back alone fearing that someone will try something. With just you and Twogami left he turns to face you.

“That was quite impressive. What you did back there was helpful in getting Nagito detained. I believe that we should come to an agreement. Yes we are fine separately but together I feel that we could do an outstanding job at keeping everyone safe.”

Twogami extended a chubby hand out for you to shake. This handshake would seal the two of you into a partnership. One of which would keep your class safe. Looking from his hand to his face then back to his hand you sit there in thought. This could be a wonderful idea. With two people working together that’s like double the safety. With a smile you shake his hand giving it a tight squeeze.

“I think I’d like that Twogami! From here on out the two of us are now Jabberwock Island’s health and safety committee.”

[handweavers]

listening to the tides of history ep about pre-dynastic egypt and it's sooo interesting i hadn't really thought about this specific point before so it feels like my brain is unfolding, i love archaeology sm. i'm gonna ramble for a bit about it

in the episode they talk about how archaeologists esp egyptologists have been thinking for a while now that the way statehood is conceptualized as a historical socio-economic event where non-"states" don't engage in complex organized cultural works or rituals or institutions and that is solely the domain of what ppl think of as the "state" or empire, "civilization" is false when evidenced by the actual archaeological record, with variations and nuances from region to region. the formation of a state isn't necessarily the creation of elaborate socio-cultural or economic systems, smaller kingdoms and cities have done that individually for sometimes hundreds of years, the concept of the "state" as traditionally discussed in terms of egypt specifically is when that power and organization is consolidated in a centralized authority eg the pharaoh, but things associated with the existence of the pharaoh and dynastic egypt like complex social and religious rituals, elaborate material culture, extensive trade networks and such existed previous to this centralization. typically a strong distinction is made between dynastic and pre-dynastic egypt when that really isn't the case in terms of the archaeological record; a lot of these things exist on a timeline across upper and lower egypt and into the sudan prior to the pharaohs.

this translates as well into other regions of the ancient and pre-modern world, just in different ways. the idea that a powerful centralized state is what inherently produces these complex institutions and elements of human societies isn't necessarily true, but rather that these things exist on smaller scales and often what happens is each of these smaller regions are consolidated into a single power - sometimes a central council or group of elders, as seen in the haudenosaunee confederacy, or a king or pharaoh or emperor, as seen in dynastic egypt. there's a common misconception that complex material and social culture comes out of statehood, rather than that it exists already in some capacity and often leads to centralization and consolidation, and that just isn't reflected in archaeological evidence.

this position makes sense to me bc it's very similar to how things like settlements and social organization have occurred in history - villages weren't made and then people developed the technology and complex societies to manage the village, that doesn't make sense. the technology and complex societies developed and necessitated things like grain storage, people to manage the grain and figure out how it gets allocated and when, etc. for example, a greater need for pots due to rising populations requires more organized efforts to gather the clay and create the pots and people who can do this primarily rather than alongside other tasks, thus we get professional potters, and so on and so forth. as there are more and more potters, the logistics required becomes more complex and necessitates more complex forms of organization. what the type of organization is changes, like whether it establishes a strict hierarchy with major socio-economic benefits for those "higher up" or whether things ultimately remain more or less equitable varies from place to place, but logically it makes sense that the concept of centralization and statehood in early and pre-modern human societies would work the same way. idk I could think about this all day lmao

[vaugarde]

i should wait til ive replayed them all but if i had to rank my current favorite special episodes itd be like this

5. today’s oh my gosh. i like sunflora, and it feels appropriate to focus on another guild member and guild life, but feels like it’s only there to have five episodes instead of four, which is a more awkward number. the diary entries tell you everything you need to know about this story, so we don’t get much insight, and it’s not much fun to play through either. i mostly just play it for completion’s sake honestly. the only one i’d just call average at best.

4. bidoof’s wish. definitely a very strong way to kick off the special episodes! i find this one to be extremely charming and it makes bidoof so much more wholesome in the main game. like yes, this SHOULD be the one character that comforts partner at the end of the game. his wishes are both so cute and the one he goes with is just adorable and actually saves your life. you’re alive because of a bidoof and fuck the memes i think that’s the cutest shit ever. idk in general it’s just so sweet. it’s only low because it’s so tedious to play with snover’s hail and the boss battles. not terrible but not what i’d call fun.

3. here comes team charm. i love this episode i love lesbians. i love the lore on the second time gear and i love seeing team AWD in action since they were advertised as villains but then didn’t do anything bad in the game or anime special. and i love that the guardian is a ditto! thats so cute and charming compared to the lake guardians! it’s only number three because i happen to have more sentimental value for the others but its a fun time. also team charms theme song is a banger.

2. into the future of darkness. i hate to sound like an edgy contrarian but man i can never quite say this is my favorite, even though it is for so many people and is my second favorite. i love grovyle, dusknoir, and celebi, and playing as them, i love dusknoir’s character arc, i love small moments like grovyle being teased by the snorunt and dusknoir mulling over his personality, or the entire speech scene, the sableye running to attack primal dialga when they hurt dusknoir, its all SO good... but damnit dusknoir feels so OFF here. i know the stakes are higher and he’s panicking or he’s acting or something, but i don’t like how much of a brute he is here when he punches the sableye. it’s uncomfortable and it doesn’t feel right for his character? like... i dunno. it makes me feel less confident in his redemption arc even if it’s still neat overall. and yeah, the fandom jokes surrounding the “are you wary of me at your back grovyle?” line just make me a little more uncomfortable on recent replay. it’s still extremely good, one of the highlights of pmd2 and why i recommend sky over darkness and time, the morning sun scene still makes me cry, the art is beautiful, i love the final dungeon, it’s so good, but it’s just got little things holding it back from perfection for me.

1. igglybuff the prodigy. it’s wholesome, it’s emotional, it’s fun, it’s heartbreaking, it is the whole damn package. i love playing as baby wigglytuff and starting off his dream. i love the extra scenes on his freaky god powers being played both for laughs and for dramatic crutch. i love that ending, oh GOD that ENDING. i love how you trample everything as an igglybuff to show even further how powerful wigglytuff is for one, i love his mentor/student relationship with armaldo where it’s actually him knowing everything and teaching armaldo himself how to enjoy honest exploring again. i love how this is the origin of the “truly bad pokemon don’t exist anywhere” line. i don’t think i have a single problem with this episode besides nitpicks that don’t hold it down in any way. it’s just wonderful and an absolute joy to play through. it is my absolute favorite special episode.

[sole-cuore-amore-e-droga]

Cyprus brings shampoo to Rotterdam 2021

I FELL IN LOVE, I FELL IN LOVE, I GAVE MY HEART TO PRODUCT PLACEMENT.

Though I do see where they come from. Everyone from Panik Records, from her to Eleni Foureira featuring Perfectil on the “Fuego” MV, gonna need that sweet sweet money all of the time. But has Greece’s economy not really recovered for them to constantly need to advertise products on music videos or am I just losing my mind overthinking things?

Eitherway, this review may or may not appear before or during their rehearsal day, so see how do I make a fool of myself by trying to estimate Cyprus’s chances!

ARTIST & ENTRY INFO

This year we have a 26 year old Elena Tsagrinou from Greece here (the way they were last represented by a somewhat Cypriot on 2017?). She did music early on in her age, also participated in the Greek version of Got Talent. Though, before breaking out as a solo pop sensation in ways you cannot imagine, she used to be in a pop band OtherView. Strangely enough, I’ve heard of them because of this song below but I could’ve NEVER estimated it was her and never could have I predicted she would land herself a Eurovision entrance all alone:

The band has had quite a few successful enough singles with her, she did some music shows participation and hosting, her band switched labels midway through (guess into which one they eventually landed, hint: some of the screenshots in this review have this peculiar logo), and in 2018, she had to “withdraw” from the group to go ahead and pursue the aforementioned solo career, somewhat. She continued doing a lot of shows (particularly seen on the MAD music channel related events), and doesn’t have as many singles as she had with OtherView right now, but she’s possibly well on her way to blossom as an artiste. Some of those reading (lol who am I kidding who even reads these) may be familiar with this little song of hers:

You’ve heard way too many things about “El Diablo”, her 2021 entry, so idk if I feel like explaining the technical side of things all by myself or you already know everything. But in these reviews I repeat everyone else regardless, so let me just say that “El Diablo” is an obvious pop song, with a lot of Swedish related touches to it, because at least one person on this song also worked on Alvaro Estrella’s Melodifestivalen 2021 entry that glorifies at least a handful of the same cliches that “El Diablo” does lyrically. Dear Eurovision lyricists, you can use more foreign languages than Spanish for your obligatory foreign language incorporations, thanks~

Although I’m not sure about whether it is more Laurell Barker’s fault as much as it is Joker Thörnfeldt’s, but it’s easier to blame them equally, because the former probably came up with “ta-taco, tamale” and the latter couldn’t get enough of the word “mamacita” they used for the aforementioned Melodifestivalen entry. Anyway, the lyrics, from what I get, is that she’s in love with an eeeevil guy because he’s sweet talking her, they do some sexy stuff together (presumably), pour sauce on their bodies for no explicit reason other than “obligatory-foreign-reference-itis”, she’s breaking the rules (and idk if it was “mama-mamacita” telling her to do it), got the icy edges that the spicy is melting for her, throws eyelashes on the floor when she’s got no wigs to throw (but that doesn’t matter because even without a wig, she can flip her hair and make him look twice), and there’s as much as you need to know about the song’s lyrics as I feel like I should show to you, because eh. Eurovision has suffered from worse cookie-cutter lyricism through the years, “El Diablo” is painful but not the worst.

REVIEW

But I do like the song somewhat!

“El Diablo” was initially compared to Lady Gaga’s “Bad Romance” upon release, and I totally kind of see why, because in all the right spots you can absolutely hum over the chorus to that over the one of “El Diablo”’s, it just exchanges gratuitous French translation of one of the already sung lines on the bridge for obligatory inserted Spanish terms just for the sake of being trendy with the crowds of the nowadays, because as we learned nothing these days, having a lot of Spanish in your song is apparently trendy. And Elena does nothing absolutely batshit insane on the music video (other than advertising) - no lapdance for the devil Lil Nas X style, no being forced into a bath, no person to sell her body to (not even the titular diablo), no dancers that rise out of their Christian sleep pods. Just Elena singing behind lots and lots of trash bin bag wrap.

Honestly the bigger issue for me than the song being “sAtAnIc because it is called “the DEVIL!!!”, aside from the lyrics, is that the MV does not come with any forewarning whatsoever for the people that are seizure prone when they see strobe lights? And that happens for some extended periods of this clip? I know you are indulged in your advertising and good for you but don’t just care for the companies that pay you if you use their products, do care about people’s wellbeings too, sometime.

But enough about the MV.

The song is decently sounding. It has interesting uses of what sounds like hi-hats during the verses (e.g.: a moment when this happens for the first time on the song is after Elena sings “tonight we’re gonna burn in a par-tY” the second time, and then there’s something that sounds soaring - that’s what I think that the hi-hats did.). It also has some sort of a synth piano on the second verse to boost the song’s sound rather than just relying on 808s and beats. I quite like how the chorus is so instant somehow, idk why but it is for me. Might have a gripe with that childish choir singing “I LOVE EL DIAB-LO” in the tune of standard kindergarten children teasing tune (aka ”NA NA NA BOO BOO”), as well as the constant breathing sounds, but they don’t distract me from generally “fucking” with this song, lol. It’s just that likeable imo.

I just can’t cope with the fact that Cyprus can’t seem to dare to go at least a little bit original with their song, yanno? Ever since 2019 they were called out as being a ripoff of something... hell, everyone since 2016 except Eleni was a ripoff of something. Alter Ego? “Somebody Told Me” by The Killers. Gravity? “Human” by Rag’n’Bone Man. Replay? “Fuego” itself. Running? “Lose Control”, Meduza x Becky Hill. Now we have a Lady Gaga song wannabe that even caught the attention of another singer that the music video looked like it was ripping off, and the Eurofandom caught up in hysterics:

Heads up, folks: not EVERY short haired blonde with messy hair, silvery tank top and shortpants that writhes on the floor is a Zara Larsson clone. And I don’t know who stirred controversy first - her or the fans - but this was ridiculous to see, even for me.

Although for a second I saw where they were coming from.

Now see why I want Cyprus to go original for at least once? Because I guess that the way “Fuego” was conjured up, it brought Cyprus so much success with how the package was, how Eleni sold it, and how the song sounded. You know the first thing of everything potentially going wrong for you later on is if you find the formula you’ve been looking for, but you proceed to be using the exact same formula that got you this far in the first place, without realizing what was it in the formula that you needed to bank on to further to make it click, but instead proceed to copy everything like it was an easy, fill-in-the-blank form. You can and should do better than that.

Though that doesn’t stop me from ranking it 11th this year.

Thing is, I really expected it to be the one female pop song of the year I would have the constant impulsive need to replay, replay, yeah. Ever since the chaotic entry MV drop that occured on some random-ass Cypriot TV show where three guys talked a lot (and before that, we got a cooking show), and kept growing increasingly agitated that no one is liking their show, until at some point one of them erupted in “IN TWU MEENETS... EL DIABLO... ON UR TEEVEE”; I was really devastated I couldn’t be able to break the replay button because of Panik Records deciding to rather benefit for themselves to have the MV on their app, then on Youtube, THEN on Spotify in that order. So I listened to a few video rips that I received / had for myself, and it was a fun time... until I realized the desire to play it declined much faster than I thought it would when it actually dropped on Spotify, oops. So I can’t really let myself rank it higher, when there are at least some catchier female bangers with better overall sound, better lyrics, and better multiple-replay factor. But I can’t really settle for a much lower rank for her than 11th, anyway. Girlbanger 2021 power y’all!

That and vocally she’s actually not that bad, even if she has shown up singing her song drunk in a handful of Instastories for some event of some party house, and at the time people overreacted, but I think that at least a large audience of those same people has collectively dropped their “Cyprus obvious NQ” talks come the pre-parties.

Panik Records, when will you put the yeehaw El Diablo on streaming? Now THAT’S a version that has replay value, and I might never get bored of it instead :(

Approval factor: Yeah, there exists some for me in it Follow-up factor: CyBC did one of the nastiest in terms of following up their 2020 arc of “Bring Your Artist Back for Revenge Year” that was 2021, straight up ditching Sandro probably right after Eurovision was done (well it doesn’t look like the case because CyBC published a statement later, but I sense that it might’ve been the case), because “Running” wasn’t doing so well with the “YAS QUEEN” branch of the Eurofandom. Which sucks because Sandro would’ve actually been down to be asked again for Eurovision, as he revealed it to NikkieTutorials during many of her interviews with last year’s class of. “Agreement from both parties” my ass, unless Sandro secretly realized that like Tom Leeb, he was too busy for 2021 Eurovision, which I doubt. It actually sucks imo that Sandro can probably be considered as even a forever non-returnee, because Sandro is more of German roots than Greek, and if we learned anything about the Mukuchyangate 2021, is that Germany will never send a returning artist, at least one that didn’t represent their country first and foremost. So Greece could only ask Sandro nicely only if the contest comes on to Germany, I guess? How do you think they decided on getting Stefania, who still ever so regularly appears on Dutch music, to represent them this year? So on that regard the follow-up from CyBC stinks, eventhough I think that entrywise the follow-up was rather decent, at least in the usual Cypriot way of sending female pop (going from “Replay” to “El Diablo” which I like more than “replay”), and eventhough I’m falling out of the hype for Cyprus I once used to have, their 2015-2021 entry streak had entries that I largely feel positive for overall, so in that regard, the follow up is decent. Qualification factor: In a year of Semi 1 Female Banger Slaughterhouse, Elena goes out in my eyes with several scratches, but not enough to completely kill her chances. If anything, given the divisiveness of Ireland’s rehearsals, Elena is likely to obliterate any last memory of Lesley Roy any first time viewer has ever had, except for her stage graphics. Even if Elena’s staging will not be as mindblowingly cartooney as the last, once a bop comes on, everyone forgets the slower song and gives into the bop, at least that’s how the draws work when choosing what insignificant song to put on 2nd and wedge in between the opening banger and some lesser-key banger, right? I know that “Replay” barely qualified, but I find “El Diablo” slightly better, and it all goes well, it will barely just as qualify as well. Because in a Semi 1 Female Banger Slaughterhouse, she can’t be the losing one, really.

INTERNAL CORNER

I already told everything that was noteworthy about Elena’s journey in previous sections, honestly.

• That I said that CyBC likely ditched Sandro right after cancellation just like Hooverphonic ditched “Release Me” should they have had a chance to keep or toss their entry. It doesn’t present itself as the case, but I just feel like it is.

• That the song was revealed on a Cypriot talkshow where three dudes were aware that we were waiting for “El Diablo”, trying to throw some gratuitous English our way, hating that we didn’t like our show, but promising that “El Diablo” MV will be shown in “TWU MEENETS”, which wasn’t but worth the wait eh?

• That people were cackling at Zara Larsson joining in the talks of Elena’s MV having aspects of her own song’s MV plagiarized.

• That Elena performed her song in a private-ish event when drunk and having heaps of fun and people cried that it was gonna be a NQ.

And do I really need to elaborate about the local Cypriot church scandal? It just so happened that a bunch of people read into a song’s title so much, thought it was rude of their country to sing about the devil (eventhough the bigger offenses made here is the gratuitous Spanish more than anything), and hoped that the broadcaster will disqualify the very song they okayed to be internally chosen because they are displeased with it - and if it’s not disqualified, they even threatened to burn the headquarters down. No, really. That’s like the most amusing part of that whole spectacle. Imagine burning a broadcaster headquarters down for a song... if I did it for every favourite of mine that lost to other broadcasters, the broadcasters would run out of locations to rent, because everything else good is pre-occupied or the ashes of their lost headquarters staring back at them.

Imagine being toxicly Christian in 2021... How long until Elena’s face gets photoshopped on the main protagoniste of The Unholy?

ANY LAST WORDS?

Even if I’m with this song, part of me kind of wants me to fail to make Cyprus realize that their formula is starting to wear thin and they got to be somewhat of a versatile nation in Eurovision if they want to be on the radar of not just one specific niche. But then again, they learned nothing when they flopped with Tamta, because she sneakily qualified as opposed to failing even harder than Tulia, ah well. Will they ever learn?

But why would I openly wish this to a top 11 song of mine, oh dear. Good luck Elena, may God be on your side, I guess. :P

[selenuntius]

Zhang Longevity - Southern Archives

Hello I know I just wrote about this at length but like I acknowledged in that post, I hadn’t read Southern Archives. Well now I have, and I’ll make a couple of additions/speculations based on the information in that. Don’t read if you haven’t read Southern Archives. Some of this information is related to plot points.

The main takeaway from Southern Archives that’s truly unambiguous is that there is a way to destroy the Zhang longevity (quite violently it appears).

Two other ones that have ambiguity to them are related to qilin blood. It’s a bit hard to just give a conclusion so I won’t be giving one here. My take beneath the break, or just read the novel.

Again, I’m trying to make clear what’s speculation and what’s actually in there, but I think even just by pointing out ambiguity, I’m making an argument. Just read the goddamn novel, really, especially to draw your own conclusions about the qilin blood things.

There are some other takeaways from Southern Archives about Zhang clan lore but I thought I should make a followup of sorts to my previous post with new info. Also Southern Archives was a pretty good read. I enjoyed the third-person POV and the period atmosphere. Zhang Haiyan, Haixia and others are some very engaging characters. I feel I may be a little attracted to Zhang Haiqi but I also want to call her mommy, so you can say I’m in a bit of a Haiyan predicament.

Zhang longevity can be destroyed

Probably one of our biggest takeaways from Southern Archives. This was achieved here via some kind of gas. The people who became aware of this in Southern Archives are Zhang Qishan (and some of his clan?), Zhang Haiqi, Zhang Hailou, Mo Yungao.

This may give support for the Zhang Qishan died because he found a way to age normally theory.

Zhang longevity is in their “blood” (not said to be the same blood as qilin blood; might just be blood as in they’re born with it)

This one is more ambiguous. The quote I’m drawing this from is in c.55:

“That German nerve gas was not produced in Germany, and its origins are unclear. It seemed to be able to destroy the mechanisms within Zhang people’s blood. Mo Yungao mentioned in his records that he found this by chance, and only possessed a single cylinder of it.”

If you’re checking your sources and see that this translation and merebear’s edited MTL is different and want to know why, I will leave a note at the end about this.

Anyways, like I said, I feel like immediately saying that this blood refers to qilin blood is a bit of a leap. I, for one, mostly read it as like a Zhang inherited trait rather than qilin blood. I went into a bit of why I felt the qilin blood is directly linked to their longevity theory wasn’t the best in my previous post, and I did see a reblog also theorising about that but I was too tired to finish writing my response (and I didn’t want to seem like I’m trying to start shit; I really just have too much time on my hands).

If qilin blood is directly linked to longevity, then everyone who has lived for longer than usual has to have a bit of qilin blood. That would mean there’s some kind of threshold for recognising qilin blood, and below that threshold it counts for longevity, but isn’t strong enough to detect.

To confirm the theory, we need some kind of confirmation that an in-between state between full-on qilin blood and non-qilin blood exists. The blood has different degrees of strength - this is true. Wu Xie speculates that the Qiling is chosen by who has the strongest qilin blood (book 8 c.81; N.B. that in Shahai 3 a different reason for selecting our Qiling was hypothesised), and Zhang Haike talks about hearing rumours as a child that our Zhang Qiling had the strongest form of their kekkei genkai blood (ZHH 2 c.7).

However, I still think there’s a distinction between the ones who do and the ones who just don’t, and it’s not all about how strong the blood is. Going back to the Qipan Zhang sect, they wielded quite a lot of power within the clan because they “held the qilin”, which Wu Xie guesses to mean the qilin blood (book 8 c.50 p1). Don’t know if that meant only Qipan Zhang had qilin blood, or if there was just a higher occurrence and a greater strength (I’ve read a headcanon that it’s because the Qipan Zhang absorb anyone who has the blood). Also, Wu Xie says in the 2017 short of Zhang Hailou, “You’re from the branch family… like me, you have to worry about mosquitoes.” Wu Xie, by this point, is quite knowledgable about the Zhang clan so what he says is kinda? reliable. In fact, all three of the Zhang that have qilin blood are from the main family or descended from a sect of the main family (Haiqi is one of the few Hai-generation main family members, southern archives c.47; Qiling was part of the main family according to Haike; Foye is a descendant of Ruitong of Qipan Zhang and Wu Xie speculates at the end of book 8 that Foye’s father brought their entire sect out of the Northeast Zhang’s control, which makes Rishan a descendant of Qipan Zhang too). So is it only the main family that ever has proper qilin blood? If it’s a thing all Zhang have to a degree, surely sometimes it pops up in the branches too.

This is pretty much a joke but I was going to say that maybe bare min qilin blood only protects you from mosquitoes and nothing else but still counts for longevity, and I can’t even make that joke anymore…

The problem here is at what point do we stop saying the longevity has to do with qilin blood and just say the longevity runs in the family, and for some reason, Foye didn’t get it (or died for other reasons). And even if we take a step back and say, yes, longevity does come with the Zhang blood but qilin blood makes you live even longer, not enough time has passed for us to say that.

An addendum about qilin blood, not directly related to longevity: Can qilin blood be an acquired trait?

Mo Yungao believes qilin blood to be an acquired trait, because he asked Zhang Qiling about it and he said it was acquired (Archives c.55).

This is contradicted in other places, for example, by Zhang Haike in ZHH 2 c.7, where he specifically talks about qilin blood as an inherited trait. The two previously mentioned passages about Qipan Zhang and from Wu Xie duking it out with Xiao Zhang Ge also support this, though less directly.

So, why did Zhang Qiling tell Mo Yungao it’s acquired?

There are a couple of possibilities, including Zhang Qiling lying and this actually being true and everyone else being wrong, but I think this was a misunderstanding.

Mainly because I don’t think the line is entirely without ambiguity.

He had asked this strange person if he had been born with his extraordinary abilities or if they were acquired, and the person had replied that they were acquired.

(I have another note about this line but it doesn’t matter for the ambiguity bit, so I’ll leave it at the bottom too.)

The key here is that Mo Yungao, in this omniscient narrator recollection, did not specifically ask about his blood. Mo Yungao clearly meant his blood, because a couple of lines above, Mo Yungao is saved by this person and his blood, and his later obsession is with this blood. But what he actually asked was his extraordinary abilities (plural) so maybe Zhang Qiling took it to mean combat ability rather than specifically his blood?

Again, there are other possibilities, but I prefer a simpler answer rather than a complicated one that takes more speculation to support.

Nerve gas line note:

The original contained the phrase 张家人血液中的肌理, literally “the skin texture of Zhang people’s blood”. This is because 肌理 (skin texture) was likely a typo of 机理 (which I translate as mechanisms here; not necessarily the best one. Could also use principles but I felt that sounded less physiological and more philosophical). These two words have the exact same pronunciation. XL makes these mistakes quite a lot, and because most of our stuff is sourced from his serialisation and web versions, these mistakes don’t get corrected. I suspect this is why merebear uses the vague sentence “but it seemed to specifically target the Zhang’s family blood” instead. It’s not a huge difference, but I thought I should explain my addition of mechanisms and using destroy instead of target (this I don’t quite understand, the original says destroy and I don’t see an issue with simply using destroy) so it doesn’t seem like I’m making stuff up.

Acquired abilities line note:

“Extraordinary abilities” is actually my guess of what XL means when he wrote 无常的能力, because I feel the adjective used is a misuse of the word. 无常 can mean changeable, can be a reference to a Buddhist concept of the cycle of life and death (don’t have the best grasp on this, but bear with me), can be a euphemism for death, or can be a kind of ghost? spirit? that collects people’s souls, kind of like the Grim Reaper I guess but they work for the king of hell. None of these quite fit here. The two characters, taken on their own can maybe mean something like extraordinary, so I’m thinking maybe that’s what XL’s trying to get at but used a slightly different word to replace what you might usually use for extraordinary (不凡 or smth idk), but not to great effect.

[codylabs]

Having the Time of My Life Overanalyzing Voltron Science, A Visual Novel

The team’s little mantra in the original show was “ Activate interlock! Dynotherms connected! Infracells up! Mega thrusters are go! Let’s go Voltron Force!” And they said this each and every single time their 5 lions formed together into the combined robot.

In today��s essay I will be deeply examining and wildly speculating about what exactly interlocks, dynatherms, infracells, and mega thrusters are, why it’s entirely crucial that these 4 items be part of the Voltron preflight checklist, and explaining why (or at least inferring that) you should take it all seriously.

Interlock

The Interlock is easy. It’s probably whatever system is used to attach the 5 lions together. So what are they? Magnets? Docking rings like on spacecraft? Just mechanical latches? Hard to say. But something as simple as a mechanical latch isn’t something you’d have to ‘activate’ or actively call out during pre-flight, so I would suspect ‘interlock’ is likely a catch-all term for not only the mechanical attachments, but also the control circuit used to synchronize the computers onboard all 5 lions. It would be a complex integrated system within the black lion, which also explains why they refer to it in the singular instead of plural.

Without the interlock, Voltron would just be the 5 lion with their individual brains tied together like duct-taped dogs. The interlock synchronizes them into a common intelligence, under the direction of the centralized black lion.

I don’t know what the mechanical structure of the interlocks would be. Conventional material science would suggest that a robot as large as Voltron wouldn’t be able to even stand, let alone run and jump and fight, so even if we assume nearly-indestructible exotic alien materials, I think you would still want something more than hooks and pins to connect the various pieces together. It would be best if the actual structural elements could somehow fuse at the molecular level. Welding is the most obvious method for that, but there’s also Vaan-Der-Waals forces, which could bond together flat surfaces that could then be slid apart. And maybe if you had superconducting cables running between the elements and then ran a ton of current through them, then you could use magnetic binding? I’m not sure if that would work, but it sounds futuristic enough to be true. IDK.

Dynatherms

I can’t tell if this is ‘dynatherms’ or ‘dinotherms’, but the first sounds less prehistoric, so I’ll go with that. So it sounds like pieces of the words ‘dynamic’ and ‘thermal’ mashed together, which don’t really mean anything except in the context of thermodynamics, so.... What is this? A reactor? A steam engine?

Of all the various components this one puzzled me longest, but I think I’ve got it.

The dynatherms are the cooling system, meant to radiate away the massive amounts of heat its engines and motors would generate. Most spacecraft, heck most vehicles in general, have a system analogous to this. Here’s the one the ISS uses:

Voltron doesn’t have any weird extendo-wings like this, but it’s conceivable that they could be built directly into the outer layer of its armor. The black lion’s little red wings are likely a part of the system too. If you ask me, the surface area of its armor isn’t nearly enough to dissipate enough heat to keep a thing like this cool, but I think I can ignore that.

So anyway. At first this explanation doesn’t seem to fit, since they say ‘dynatherms connected’, not ‘coolant pumps started’ or ‘refrigerant levels maximum’ or something. You don’t ‘connect’ the heat radiators, they’re always connected. You just pump water through them. Right?

Wrong! Here’s my sufficiently futuristic explanation: Voltron’s cooling system doesn’t use coolant and pumps or any type of conventional refrigeration at all! Instead, the ‘dynatherms’ are a network of thermally superconductive cables connecting all its motors and engines to radiative armor panels on the exterior. Thermal superconductivity is a concept I learned from Star Wars and later found out is a real-ish thing. Basically any vibrations in any part of a thermally-superconductive material can frictionlessly travel to any other part of the material. Since temperature is based on vibrations, this means that if a hot thing touches one part of the material, everything else touching the material can instantly feel that heat, and even dissipate that heat. You can think of it as Marvel vibranium or as warmth communism.

Since there’s no fluid flow, the only way to control this cooling system or increase or decrease its dissipation is to connect and disconnect individual cables. Hence why they would have to connect the dynatherms before forming Voltron; combat in combined robot mode is one of the most taxing conditions of the machine’s operation, so they need all the cooling they can get.

Infracells

Now HERE’S where it starts to get interesting. ‘Infra’ roughly means ‘below’. To take the most common example, take ‘infrared’ light, that is, light existing at frequencies lower red light, which is itself the lowest frequency in the visible spectrum. Infrared is invisible, so the only way to describe its color is ‘somewhere below red’.

So as far as I can tell, ‘infracells’ could mean one of three things. They could be some kind of infrared light sensors, like FLIR imagers used for night vision and targeting on modern military equipment (which I consider unlikely, since that’s not the type of thing you would specifically call out during the preflight, or something intrinsically useful to the Voltron assembly process.) Or it could be an armor layer consisting of some kind of cells literally ‘below’ the rest of the armor (which I also consider unlikely, because why would that be important to the Voltron assembly either? You wouldn’t need to even worry about it until you take damage to the outer armor layer, right?) Or, finally and most interestingly, it could have something to do with lower frequencies or lower speeds in general.

Here’s my theory:

The infracells cause time itself to run differently. You all saw the movie Interstellar, where time aboard the spacecraft passed slower for the crew whenever they were inside powerful gravity wells. If you had high buildups of negative energy within cells inside Voltron, it would produce the opposite effect, causing time to move faster inside the cells than outside. Anything inside would experience the rest of the universe in slower motion, meaning lower acceleration, lower forces, and lower stress.

Therefore, if such ‘infracells’ were installed around Voltron’s skeletal frame and motors, it may explain the machine’s great strength and indestructibility. And it would make sense that this would be the type of thing they would call out during the pre-flight, as even one down infracell could spell disaster once that section of the frame is attempting to support the entire weight of the robot; it would buckle and break. Every infracell needs to be up before forming Voltron.

Mega thrusters

Now, this just sounds silly. They’re likely the engines that Voltron uses to fly, but the show creators put ‘mega’ in front of the name to sound cool. Might as well call them ‘super rockets’ or ‘the ultra drive’, right? But mega is an interesting word, as it’s actually a scientific term in the metric system meaning to multiply by a million. Like a kilometer is a thousand meters and a kilogram is a thousand grams, a megameter is a million meters, and a megagram is a 1000 kilograms. You may have heard of ‘megaton’ when referring to nuclear explosives; a three-megaton bomb is a bomb with the explosive yield equivalent to three million tons of TNT. A lot.

So, uh,

Why would you call a thruster a ‘mega thruster’, then?

Well, I know approximately jack-diddly about the original show, but I know that in the newer show, most large spacecraft in the universe get their energy not from nuclear reactors or solar cells, but rather from Balmeran crystals. The crystals are able to produce apparently infinite energy so long as you don’t damage them or overtax them. I don’t know where the crystals get their infinite energy, but that’s not what I’m here to speculate about, so I’ll just treat that as one of the universe’s rules, like bending in Avatar.

So! How do you set that up to make an engine? Well, infinite power is good! Higher power to the engine means hotter, faster exhaust, and hotter, faster exhaust means higher fuel efficiency and higher thrust. So the question becomes, how do you get the most power in the safest and most efficient way possible?

For the sake of some rules, let’s say that you need to give the crystals a little bit of stimulating energy to make them produce energy. That seems fair, I think. Let’s say they produce 5 times the energy they absorb.

So you give a crystal 1 watt, you get 5. That’s great; that means if we need 50 billion watts to run the thruster, we just need to get a big crystal, and feed it 10 billion watts. However! Where do we get that initial 10 billion watts?  Well we could just take a portion of the crystal’s own output and cycle it back around to the input, but that’s a dangerous game to play, since if the percentage you cycle around is even slightly more than 20%, you could create a “positive feedback loop” where more input means more output, which leads to greater input which leads to even greater output, and so on and so on until the crystal breaks or the ship blows up or something generally unfavorable happens. This is approximately the experience of the people at Chernobyl, and is not recommended.

So instead of having crystals feed themselves, you’d instead want them to be fed exclusively by an external source, like a battery or an entirely separate smaller crystal. So the initial crystal would feed larger ones, which would feed larger ones, and so on, each stage in the chain becoming more powerful, but always stable and dependent on some initial external input, so as to never go out of control.

And now, I’m thinking it would be nice from an engineering perspective to have all the crystals together in one shielded location. And from a tactical perspective, it would be nice not to have a bunch of bulky, vulnerable, high-energy cables running around the entire vehicle. So, you would want as many crystal stages as possible in the places where the power is needed most. Namely, the engines.

Therefore, a big part of the engines would be made of armored shells to contain dozens of stacks of crystal beds. They would accept a small amount of power at the top, and multiply it internally to get enormous output at the bottom. Hence, ‘mega’ thruster. It multiplies input by a million.

Boom.

Done.

Headcanon deployed.

So now the next time you’re watching some stupid show and think that something doesn’t make sense, pause to consider that maybe you’re just not using enough imagination, or else I will be with you in spirit to wrong-shame you.

(If you use your imagination and it still doesn’t make sense, then don’t worry. This means that the show is trash and you are right.)

Now go to bed.

[bunnis-babes]

Hellooo ok so idk if you write for oikawa but if you do can I please have some hcs of being with him? Like what’s it’s like I.e, how you got together, first kiss, first T I M E 😳, moving in with each other, getting engaged, getting married, having kids, it’s ok if not and that’s too much I just thought it was a cute idea

Oikawa and Life with his Lover.

U h m. HELLO???? Of course I want to write this its the perfect time to redeem myself from the atrocity that is my Oikawa relationship head cannons. They fucking suck, and I’m going to use this as a chance to kind of re-write them. Reader is female team captain for reasons.’ Also, this is gonna be long as fuck…

👽Oikawa. The king of the court. The pretty-boy-heartthrob of Seiijoh. The bane of Iwaizumi’s existence. And incredibly, incredibly single.

👽And it’s not as if he doesn’t understand why he’s single, its always the same reason: Volleyball.

👽He dedicates his life to volleyball, its one of the most important things in the world to him, but not a single one of his previous girlfriends understood that or cared at all.

👽There was also the fact that he was incredibly closed off emotionally, not really feeling any sort of a connection with them, other than a mutual pretty face.

👽It left him sad and almost empty most of the time, wanting a relationship that’s deeper than physical attraction, someone who he can open up to and will understand him and his love for volleyball.

👽Then he meets the new girls captain at Seijoh.

👽At first he doesn’t really pay her any mind, she’s not really his “type”. Though he doesn’t even know what his type is.

👽There was no denying how beautiful she was, even without makeup she glowed - even more so on the court. She lit up the room when she walked in, and all eyes including his were drawn to her. Her personality is what really got him, though.

👽She was scrappy and boyish, not afraid to speak her mind and lead her team proudly. She never let people put her down, and took pride in her skills and talents - never letting anyone step on her. He’d never been all that attracted to the free souls at the school - not until her however.

👽He wasn’t immediately in love with her, actually just intrigued by her - kind of like with Hinata and Kageyama. He’ll vehemently deny any attraction to her, but wether he knew it or not, he did feel something for her. He wanted to know her more.

👽The problem was: how did he get to know her?

👽She knew about his reputation, and she knew better than to let herself get pulled in by him and his little lies. It almost had him wishing he’d never acted like that in the first place.

👽So he devises a plan to get to know her, under the ruse of some extra practice. Captain to captain! (Which he kind of wanted to do anyway - so win-win!)

👽Who is she to deny a little extra time on the court, so of course she accepts. However, she makes it very clear she is not going to take any flirting or advances from him, because she isn’t down to fuck with a playboy.

👽So they start practicing every other day together. It’s kind of tense and awkward at the beginning, despite how easily their conversation flows together. She doesn’t trust him, and he doesn’t know how to feel about her yet so its just a weird mess of trying to figure things out.

👽A few months of this and eventually the awkward tension resides and they are able to practice relatively peacefully. They even joke around with each other, and talk to each other in passing - yet Oikawa still wants more.

👽He becomes more active in searching her out in crowded hallways, sometimes stopping by her at lunch to say hello and set up another time for extra practice. Which he doesn’t need to do.

👽She doesn’t mind, enjoying talking Oikawa as he does make for really good company. But she notices he’s different from when they practice alone - his smile is forced and his words are laced with fake happiness.

👽It’s annoying as hell, and she’s fed up with it after a while. So obviously being the outspoken person she is, she immediately confronts him about it, which upsets him and starts a fight that gets blown way out of proportion.

👽And just like that, all that relationship building Oikawa worked for was thrown down the drain - all because he couldn’t swallow his pride.

👽He acts like things are fine - like he isn’t fucking bothered by the fact she’s smiling with other guys, and acting like that thought meant nothing to her. It hurts, but he keeps smiling.

👽The only person who notices his forced smile is - of course - his team. More specifically, the only person who does anything about it is Iwaizumi, who’s very fed up with this relationship drama bullshit.

👽At first Oikawa acts like its nothing, it doesn’t bother him Iwa-chan, why are you so worried. But this is Iwaizumi, and he’s not here to take any of Oikawa’s dumb deflecting, so he isn’t stopping until he gets it out of him. (Though he already knows what’s up, he just wants him to admit it.)

👽So once he finally, finally, gets it out of his dumb mouth Iwaizumi just tells him to talk to her. Like its the best option and “You’re an idiot for not doing it already.” Is all he says. And that’s all it takes for it to finally get through to Oikawa.

👽Finally he gets to a point where they’re alone and he can talk to her… but she won’t listen to him at all. So he sets his pride aside, and begs her to just meet him after school and talk over some extra practice, like old times. She isn’t sure about it, but something about his big brown eyes pleading with her makes her weak enough to accept.

👽They meet up after school that same day and its tense, both parties quiet as the stood across from each other on the court. Oikawa is the first to speak up and apologize for not being more open with her - then she chimes in after a few seconds of thinking with her own apologies. They both insist that they were in the wrong, and it eventually fades from a tense argument to a laughing fit between the pair about how stupid they both felt.

👽Things go back to relative normalcy after this, both of them talking to each other freely and hanging out with each other - but now Oikawa is more open with her before, during, and after school… Just when they thought things were fine, Oikawa’s feelings just had to come into play. Making it so hard for him to be around her without thinking about how cute she was - or how much he just wanted to hug her and tell her everything he feels about her.

👽He thought that if he just supressed these feelings and ignored them things would be fine. She didn’t show any interest in him, so sucking it up and remaining friends was his best option - or so he thought.

👽Little did he know that: yes, she did in fact return his feelings, and she was planning on confessing to him after school after practices.

👽So as their practice started nothing seemed off, but he noticed that the closer it got to them leaving, the more nervous she got. He assumed the worst, thinking maybe a ruthless suitor or some creep was trying to come after her - and tells her he is so ready to kiss anyones ass to keep her safe. He’s already grabbing her things and getting ready to walk her home when she stops him.

👽”Oikawa, no one is… there’s nobody trying to come after me… I was just nervous to tell you that I like you… a lot.”

👽It takes his brain a second to catch up, but boy when it does his heart is doing backflips in his chest. His smile is so wide and genuine, and his eyes are sparkling happily.

👽He can’t stop himself from picking her up and swinging her around, shamelessly shouting out his own feelings. There was no one around to hear anyway, so why should he care about how loud he was being?

👽Thats the start of Oikawa’s life long relationship with his darling girlfriend. One he cherished and loved more than anything else in the world, and he thanked whatever higher power there was everyday for giving her to him to love and care for.

👽Their first kiss was equally as unplanned, and just as sweet as their confession.

👽It was an impulsive decision on both of their parts, as they were just relaxing together on Oikawa’s couch, cuddling while watching Disney movies and occasionally talking about anything that came to mind.

👽They were watching Snow White when it happened, nearing the end where the kiss scene was coming up. Oikawa started complaining about ‘how unrealistic is this’ and ’thats not how you actually kiss’

👽To which she challenged him to show her what a real kiss was to him - and Oikawa was never a man to step down from a challenge, especially not one like this.

👽With a confident smirk he tilts his head to the side and kisses her deeply, chuckling a little at her squeak of surprise - she was so cute and innocent.

👽When he pulls away she’s red and staring slack jawed at him, not able to collect herself fast enough before he spoke up again. “I’ve been waiting to do that for forever.” Which earns him a little smack on his shoulder as she finally recovers.

👽He’s all cocky and confident until she grumbles about him stealing her first kiss, and suddenly he’s apologizing for ruining her first kiss for a stupid joke - which obviously isn’t true, but she’s not going to not use this perfect blackmail just handed to her. Uses it against him all the time (as a joke, she would never actually hold it against him)

👽For the most part their relationship was great, having the normal ups and downs, but it was never anything that would make them hate each other. It was by far the longest relationship Oikawa ever had, lasting through high school and past college and through his demanding volleyball career as an adult.

👽She moved around with him and came to all his games, supporting him from the side while pursuing her own career side by side with him. The two were practically inseparable - scratch that - they were inseparable and neither of them could imagine a life without the other

👽Thats why Oikawa took a small vacation, deciding it was finally time for alone time with his beautiful girlfriend - and time for him to pop a very special question.

👽It’s just a simple little getaway, he rents out a beach house and they stay out on the beach for a week. He takes her out to dinner every night, and they wander around the city just doing whatever they want wherever they want however they want without a worry in the world.

👽It’s when they’re walking along the beach - stereotypical romantic sunset while the hold hands as water splashes over their feet occasionally - that he finally makes his move.

👽He stops her from walking and tells her to close her eyes, which she does with minor reluctance. He fumbles around in his pocket to grabs the velvet box holding the… admittedly overly expensive ring inside. What can he say, she deserves nothing but the best from him.

👽He gets down on one knee, a wide hopeful smile that reaches past his eyes.

👽”Okay open them…”

“No way.”

“Yes, would you-“

“No no, wait wait wait!”

👽That wasn’t he reaction he was expecting, he was expecting her to throw herself into his arms or cry or shout out a yes… but not this. It kind of hurt, but he waited patiently as he watched her fumble with something in her jacket pocket before pulling out a velvet box and getting down on one kn- Holy shit no way.

👽He can’t help but laugh at the situation with them, what a stupid coincidence to happen. He knew they were in sync, but this was a little ridiculous.

👽”So… is that a yes?”

“Yes, now shut up and kiss me.”

👽Both of them decide to have two weddings, a big and extravagant one so they can show off how much they love each other to friends and colleagues that they don’t consider close, but do want to invite. This one comes second, and is purely just to be showy and big like Oikawa has always imagined his wedding would be.

👽The first wedding - the real wedding - is back in Japan with old and new friends who the pair would consider family. It’s considerably smaller, taking place at his wife’s parents house - which isn’t all that small in and of itself but its not as extravagant.

👽He cries when she walks down the isle both times - more so the first time. They picked out the second wedding dress together, but when he sees her in the one she picked out for herself he sobs like and idiot. (Iwaizumi has to literally slap him out of it he’s such a mess)

👽Matsunn and Makki are the men of honor, much to Oikawa’s chagrin. The three of them have been planning this since high school, they weren’t going to back out now.

👽Overall the wedding is by far the most memorable part of Oikawa’s life - marrying the one he loves more than anything in the world in front of the people he grew up with, who mean everything to him. It’s the most emotional he’d ever felt - well until he was told he was going to be a father.

👽When his wife said told him she was pregnant he called literally everyone on his contact list to tell them the news. Iwaizumi is the first to find out and is going to be the Godfather.

“I’m going to be a father, Iwa-chan!”

“Oikawa it’s like three AM over here, shut up.”

👽He’s a mess during the whole pregnancy, worrying about her so much. Like, he doesn’t want her to do anything, and will be at her beck and call; anything she wants she gets, even if its four in the morning.

👽”Toru, would you get me some ice-cream?”

“You at it all last night, but I’ll go to the store right now okay, just rest up babe.”

👽Protective too, like he’s super cautious about who’s around her and who’s touching her when and where. If someone is touching her, he’s watching them like a hawk - no way is he letting anyone hurt his wife and baby, not if he can help it.

👽Also very wary of health risks, checks into everything a million times over to be safe.

👽Actually has his wife worried for him because of all this, but he just assures her he’s never been better.

👽Talks to her tummy anytime she lets him, sometimes he even sings to it because he’s so soft for her and his baby.

👽When the baby is actually delivered he’s so anxious, worried about both of their wellbeing. He just wants them to be okay, and while he knows his wife is one of the strongest women out there, he has no clue what could possibly go wrong.

👽Luckily, nothing goes wrong and he’s brought in to see his child and wife.

👽First thing he does is rush over to his wife’s side and make sure she was okay, and despite how tired and sweaty she was he swore she’s never looked more beautiful holding their baby against her chest.

👽And his baby, god she is just the most adorable child he’d ever seen. He could immediately tell she was going to stress the hell out of him, and he couldn’t have been happier.

👽Just looking at his wife and daughter made him happy that he listened to Iwaizumi all those years ago, made him happy he sucked up his pride and chose this beautiful woman to spend his life with.

A/N: Man, I talk a lot. I decided to exclude the nsfw, because it didn’t really fit the feel of the fluff - hope that’s not a big deal. I hope that the drop in writing quality wasn’t, like, noticeable until I pointed it out rn. I’m doing so much I’m so sorry - I’m just trying not to make a whole bunch of empty promises again! I’m trying to be more healthy in my writing, and just working on things as I go between school and other things. (Also I didn’t edit this so :p)

[botanyshitposts]

hey i remember you saying that you took ap bio a while ago? and i just wanted to ask if you had any tips or resources for that class, because it's already march and my teacher still hasn't covered a lot of content and i really wanna learn about biology and do well on the test

and now for a post on 

𝓋𝒾𝓉𝒶𝓁   𝒷𝒾𝑜𝓁𝑜𝑔𝒾𝒸𝒶𝓁   𝓉𝑜𝓅𝒾𝒸𝓈

a lot of AP biology is just….repeating over and over again some very core stuff. this is the same stuff that, if u go to college for biology, you will hear over and over again in all your specialized classes so you can use that base knowledge to build off of. learning some of these things in AP bio in high school suddenly made me understand what the fuck i was reading about in random botany papers on the internet.

here is a list of some of these things that i can think of right off the top of my head, followed by a no-means-comprehensive brief description 

-cellular respiration: 1. food bits enter the cell. 2. food bits go through some processing right outside the mitochondria. 3. Special, Refined Food Bits™ are invited into the mitochondria, where they are processed a little more before their electrons are ripped from them and shoved over like….u know those old timey flour mills powered by the big water wheel things?? the electrons are the water going over the big water wheel thing, the old timey mill is this one protein embedded in the inner wiggly parts of the mitochondria, and the flour is a chemical the rest of the organism can use as energy. so thats that on that

-photosynthesis: 1. there are a few kinds of photosynthesis that all argue over how one should get water into the actual photosynthesis chemical reaction. different kinds of plants sometimes use different kinds of photosynthesis. 2. it happens in chloroplasts, which are green because they can absorb red and blue light but can’t absorb green light and therefore reflect all that shit out and we see green. 3. there are a couple proteins that do the actual capturing of light (they don’t actually capture the light itself despite this wording you hear; the light just excites some electrons from water, and those get passed around. long story) that are cool as fuck that you should look at. 4. there are ‘light’ reactions and ‘dark’ reactions. light reactions turn sun energy into high-energy molecules, dark reactions are the plant taking those high-energy molecules and using them to turn CO2 into usable sugars it can send around the plant and digest when needed (by digesting them as the food bits mentioned in cellular respiration)

-the so-called ‘central dogma of biology’: this is super important. like every advanced biology class ive taken in college has drilled this with us. basically, it’s the process DNA takes to make itself into actual proteins that get expressed in an organism. the steps are: 

1. start with DNA. DNA is replicated using the enzyme DNA polymerase. the process of DNA replication is called…well, DNA replication. 

2. a little portion of relevant DNA is copied into a little strip of RNA, which is single stranded and can be safely moved out of the nucleus into the cell (this is because if u were to actually export the raw ass DNA into the cell, if something fucked it up it would literally fuck up the entire DNA strand and that would be really, really bad). it does this using the enzyme RNA polymerase. this process is called transcription (as in like, you transcribe something you hear someone say by copying it down. this sounds obvious but its really easy to get this step and the next step mixed up)

3. after the RNA gets processed into mRNA (which is just an edited version with extra shit on the ends to keep it from getting nerfed upon contact with the outside world), it gets exported into the cell and imported into an organelle called a Ribosome, which reads the mRNA and attaches amino acids to a chain of amino acids in the order that it the mRNA says to (this is one of those things that seems like…impossible for something to do just with chemistry, but once u learn about it ur like ‘ooohhh thats how it does that’). the ribosome then releases the chain once it hits a point on the mRNA strand that tells it that the chain is complete. once the chain of amino acids is like, out there floating around, it’s own chemistry (and sometimes other enzymes and stuff) causes it to fold into an actual protein, which can like…actually do stuff and things. this is process is called translation, as in, you translate something from one language to another. 

-speaking of cells, cell stuff: 1. most cells go through cycles of life towards the goal of dividing from one cell into two cells. the process goes G1, S, G2, M  (unless you’re a cell that isn’t supposed to divide once u reach maturity, like a neuron, in which case u exist in a state called G0). before one phase, the cell checks itself to make sure that everything is in place and ready to go to the next stage. if something is wrong in this checking process, it can be a physical manifestation of cancer, the uncontrolled and unregulated growth of cells. 2. the M phase- Mitosis- has a whole ass process all of it’s own that’s super important that i wont go into here. 3. the creation of genetically recombined cells (reproduction) undergoes the process of Meiosis (different from mitosis!!! idk why they named these so similarly!!!! oh my god!!!!). this is….kind of like mitosis, but most definitely not mitosis. do not let a question on a test fool u when it asks u if its the same thing. it’ wild process that i can 100% guarantee you’ll get tested on at some point in ur biological career and i want to let u know right off the bat that it took me learning this three (3) separate times in three (3) separate classes to actually understand it bc that shit is confusing as fuck so. just lettin u know right off the bat there 4. cells are full of smaller compartmentalized organ things called organelles that do stuff and things, the most important being the nucleus, which holds the DNA (unless it’s a bacteria. bacteria DO NOT have nuclei and their DNA literally just floats in there, whole ass out in a kind of….weird special region called the nucleoid. this is another thing that teachers love to ask on tests). 

-evolution: 1. evolution is descent with modification. if a mouse gets its tail cut off, then has babies, the babies will still be born with tails, because evolution does not pass on acquired traits (this sounds super obvious but in the victorian era they literally, actually determined this by cutting off mouse tails and having them have babies bc everyone thought an offsprings’ resemblance to it’s parents came from ‘’’’’essences’’’’’ from every part of the parents’ bodies physically migrating to the reproductive organs to have offspring, which like……they were on the right track but that’s really, really not how that works lmao) 2. we have two copies of every chromosome so that if a gene in one copy is Fucked Up, the gene in the other copy can cover it so it doesn’t bother anything. genes in this context are called ‘alleles’. this leads to a system where alleles can be dominant or recessive, demonstrated by a capital letter (dominant = A) and a lowercase letter (recessive = a). note that a recessive allele doesnt necessarily translate to a Fucked Up allele, but that Fucked Up alleles in general, regardless of how they affect other alleles, are generally selected against. you can see how a Fucked Up dominant allele could be much be more destructive than a Fucked Up recessive allele, though; dominant alleles get passed on to offspring at a higher rate, and will ‘cover’ less fucked up alleles. it’s a mess in there man 3. a pair of two of the same kind of allele (two dominant or two recessive) are referred to as ‘homozygous’, while a dominant allele paired with a recessive allele are called ‘heterozygous’. 4. the genetic makeup of an offspring in regards to a single pair of alleles in it’s parents can be determined by something called a ‘punnet square’. behold: 

this is referring to yellow-colored and green-colored beans. the Y dominant allele will cover the recessive green allele, showing the effects of the Y allele in the offspring. one parent his homozygous for recessive y alleles while the other parent is heterozygous. this means that half the offspring will turn out yellow while the other half will turn out green, because half of them will be heterozygous for Y while the other half will be homozygous for the recessive y if that makes sense (note: the ‘genotype’ of an organism is the state of it’s alleles, the ‘phenotype’ of an organism is what actually is expressed. so a bean pod with the Yy genotype and a bean pod with the YY genotype will both have a yellow phenotype). punnett squares can be kind of tricky to learn, but practice helps a lot once you get going. 

this post is getting to be like 800 miles long so im gonna stop for the sanity of everyone reading this but other biology people of tungle feel free to add on more core biology concepts, i know im covering mostly molecular stuff here but there’s also like…population biology, anatomy, reproduction, basic biological diversity, and all that stuff that doesn’t deal with genes and cells and all that (which by the way isn’t for everyone; some people despise this part of biology, so anybody wondering if they should go into bio reading this post thinking ‘god oh no i hate this’ know this post swings heavily in the direction of the portion of bio i prefer lmao)

[icewindandboringhorror]

Questione...

Possibly just shouting out into the void, but wondering if anyone has some information on a game...

The game pieces are hexagons with two differently colored sides, and three numbers in sections on them. It’s a two player game (each player being one color), and the point is to try to put down your piece in a place that will flip as much of the board as possible to your color, based on what number is largest on the sides that are touching each other. Your goal is to have the majority of the board in your color at the end of the game (when all pieces are used up). You can also see the pieces your partner has, so part of the strategy is also predicting their moves/ basing yours on what they have to put down (like which side of the hexagon their largest numbers are on, etc.).... An example move looks like this image below (with Purple vs. Blue being the colors) 

I was introduced to this playing a game on kongregate, called The End (link here even though the game itself  doesn’t seem to work anymore and the official site for the game doesn’t either so idk), BUT this is not the main point of the game, it was just a mini-game inside the main game. I liked the mini-game so much I made my own version with pieces of cardboard, to have one I could play with others not solely within the kongregate game, but the nature of the game just seems like...something that there’d be a version of somewhere else?

I’ve tried googling like ‘hexagon numbers game’ ‘number tile flip game’, etc. and looked up the company that made the game as well, but as far as I’ve seen they don’t list much about it (this is just one tiny mini game within a tiny game out of many others I think are more popular) or etc., though there are some images of game development that make it seem like they created the concept themselves, they could have been inspired by something. Either way, this just seems like too enjoyable and cool of a game to be lost forever as merely a tiny mini-game hidden within a long abandoned flash game!!

---- So, my main question: Is anyone aware of anything similar to this?? Is this an actual game somewhere, that could be purchased as a boardgame or something?? If the game creators took inspiration from somewhere, is there a known game it’s based off of? OR, even if it is wholly their creation, is there at least anything else out there that operates very similarly?

Additional info (images and the videos I could find of gameplay) under the read more for extra details on how it works..

----------------------

Here’s a screencap of the actual game from some youtube video i found

And see there’s also some powers you can use to make the game more interesting, like for example a ‘+2′ power would allow you to add 2 points to one single side of your hexagon- so if you had a 6, you could make it an 8 and maybe then overcome your opponent’s 7 on that side, etc. (though you’re limited in how many you can use, obviously. The strategy is also picking the right ones). There are many of these, and I unfortunately don’t remember what they all are, so I can’t incorporate them into my handmade cardboard version T u T ;; , but they also added a neat twist !

Here’s a video I found of like, actual official gameplay, it’s from the people who made the game so it shows in good detail how the game actually works: 

https://vimeo.com/23525726

and then here’s there website or like, something where they wrote stuff about the game - 

https://preloaded.com/work/channel-4-education-end/

'The End’ was primarily like, just a usual jumpy puzzle platformer sort of game, the ‘death cards’ section was only a side-thing you did at the end of levels, if I remember correctly. Though for me I basically ONLY played the main game to earn additional powers (like the +2 bonus) for the side game, and pretty much spent all my time playing that instead gghg 

But like.. LOOK at the gameplay!!... it’s just.. fun..I like the little strategies of going into corners or playing in a way where you try to trap pieces of your own color in places they can’t be turned or accessed by the opponent, and like how you can look at their numbers and predict their moves or etc. Idk it’s like one of those things where it still requires you to pay some amount of attention to what you’re doing, however it’s still casual and easy enough that you rarely have to sit down and intensely focus so it can kind of fill this tiny “Vaguely Occasionally Challenging But Primarily Just Relaxed And Fun” niche where it’s so enjoyable to just hang out and mindlessly play 10 rounds or so every once and a while when you have 30 minutes to waste or whatever.. 

So like idk,, I hope it’s an actual thing somewhere else???

Whenever I google anything like ‘hexagon number game’ or even specific stuff like ‘flip tile two player hexagon boardgame’ or ‘different color shape flip number game’  or ‘tile number game’, ‘ tile number game flip tile’ etc. It’s only ever stuff like this (or math learning games, or some weird rummy game)  that comes up - 

which from what I’ve seen, is not really the sort of thing that I’m looking for at all. I want something where you compare multiple numbers of one tile based on it’s placement on the board, flip tiles or something similar in order to win, basically the same mechanics/premise as ‘death cards’ etc. 

It could very likely be that the people who made The End just made this from scratch with no inspiration and there’s like...not anything even remotely similar around, which would be unfortunate (since I’ll just have to stick to my cardboard version then lmao) , but I thought I could check with the masses first perhaps, since looking on my own for a little while I couldn’t find much. 

Admittedly, I only looked for like 45 minutes or so but idk, usually if you can’t even find a hint of what you’re looking for after searching google for even 20 minutes then you’re either using wildly incorrect search terms (which maybe people could give me leads on better terms to search instead) or the thing you’re looking for is pretty obscure (in which case maybe someone out there still knows about it) so, idk. 

 I would just feel really bad for a premise that is really cool to die as only ever having been a mini game in some random browser game about philosophy or whatever. I would think maybe at some point the game-creators would release it on it’s own as a separate thing or something, but the game has been inactive for a while and whatever’s going on with it, I don’t think anyone seems to care that much, or is really rallying to bring it back or anything. 

But anyway,  I would just like to play this game in a more official way, somehow, if it actually exists somewhere?

Particularly due to the issue of game balance. In my handmade versions (since first drafting this post, I now have like 3 of them, experimenting with different tile shapes and amounts of tiles lol,, lov to become preoccupied with random concepts and spend hours making tiles out of cardboard), there’s really no way to completely ensure that there isn’t an element of luck involved. 

Part of the reason I like some strategy games is that they can feel more like each person is starting out on a level playing field, and it’s all about just utilizing tools the right way, or what you can think about and come up with. You ‘’win’’ more by skill than just random chance. But with this being a numbers based game, inevitably, to some degree, a player with higher numbered pieces is more likely to win, which when the pieces are drawn randomly, is hard to control for.

In my cardboard versions, I handled this by making different colored marks on the center of the pieces, green for very good, purple for in the middle, and I think red for pieces that have mostly low numbers (which is based on what all the numbers add up to, like if all three numbers on a tile are over 22 (meaning there must at least be some 10s/9s/8s), they’re green, if they’re from 21 - 10 they’re purple, under 10 they’re red, etc. etc. Something like that, I don’t remember the exact numbers I used). Then each player gets a set amount of greens, reds, and purples, so each person will have an equal amount of good/bad/etc. pieces. But even this, I don’t feel is precise enough and am still concerned about it influencing the game results. 

For the digital version, I’d guess there’s probably some sort of algorithm or something that like.. generates the numbers of the pieces in a way where each players pieces add up to a certain number, or something like that, so that one player can’t end up with ALL 10s (highest number in the game) on all sides of their hexagons,  and the other has none. Obviously there will always be SOME element of chance, but I don’t know if it’s COMPLETELY randomized, as they must have done something to make it more even, I would imagine???

So, this is a main reason I’d like a more official version, if I could like.. buy a board-game that’s already been balanced for me, or play an online version of basically the same game etc. etc. 

(Though if any of the 3 of you who have actually read this far have any advice on how to better balance my cardboard versions, please let me know! There may be a better solution than color coding into categories lol)

(ALSO it may be hard to imagine or boring looking if you’ve just watched videos of it and have never played but, hHH, trust me that it’s really cool! It’s one of my favorite games but, obviously it being relatively obscure and the main game it was attached to being now nonexistent, nobody is ever excited about the concept as much as I am lol... just try.. to imagine... ) 

ANYWAY!!!!... I just... really like this game for some reason and in my quest to find an actual version of it or something, now amplified by the fact that the actual game seems to not work anymore, I thought.. berhaps... other people in the general public would have suggestions or know of similar games (like with flipping tiles based on number calculation)???? sir, may I have some flipping hexagons based on number comparisons? please sir, some coloured hexagons flipped based on numbers?? sOME NUMBERED HEXAGON TILES ON A BOARdggh hvhjflkfnkelnhekltnhlnklkl kh iohnkl k;m klm klm 

[amoebo-id]

a o t d !!!

no more than 1 release per artist to keep it interesting. selection and ranking is arbitrary and would prob be wildly different if i did this tomorrow. also i only went down to #42 cause everything after that didn’t feel like real aotd status - at least as far as the specific relationships i built over the past 10 yrs with the music i was listening to

#1 laurel halo quarantine

nobody did machine-body dialectic like laurel halo in 2012. i loved everything else from her this decade too but every time i listened to Carcass it made me leave my body physically. absolutely unreal album art too

https://laurelhalo.bandcamp.com/track/carcass-2

#2 e+e the light that you gave me to see you

2012 was a good year. pop/ambient/noise/radio-dj-tag sound collage ascended to spiritual intensity. makes you feel like a child experiencing awe. also fire-gut used to have probably my favorite music video ever but i think it’s gone now

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-p-SSuwW9cw

#3 ilovemakonnen 5

not to be confused with Drink More Water 5, this one’s from 2010 during his mostly-forgotten diy outsider-pop phase. off-key singing and amateur beats and the sheer absolute joy of making cool songs. all 5 are perfect

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ORKpg_-z0Mk

#4 macintosh plus floral shoppe

would’ve made top 10 on album art alone. music, aesthetics, and cultural impact are inseparable here but going back to the album reminded me just how engaging its 2010s-updated chopped-and-screwed sound is, musically not just conceptually

https://vektroid.bandcamp.com/track/420

#5 jason lescalleet this is what i do 17

hard to pick a favorite from jason lescalleet’s semi-monthly document of his electroacoustic / field recording / tape loop practice but i’ve cried to multiple tracks on tiwid 17 so it gets the nod. couldn’t find any of them online so here’s something else of his

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t33x8OOm68E

#6 barrio sur बड़ा शोक (heart break)

dedekind cut guy’s weird one-off side project ended up being my favorite thing to come out of the last few years’ obsession w cowboy/western/country music/aesthetics. pure mystery

https://soundcloud.com/user-366783613/redemption-7inch

#7 cities aviv come to life

i think maybe people thought cities aviv was just another no-flow pseudo-”conscious rap” type rapper in 2014 but actually this album is nuts. hyper-energetic vaporwave rap? what if death grips were happy? idk

https://citiesaviv.bandcamp.com/track/url-irl-2

#8 beach boys the smile sessions

this cool fresh 1960s rock myth arrived fully formed and way more fun than the other ones. brian wilson’s concepts and songwriting got so unwieldy we had to wait 50 years to hear the sessions. i don’t care about conversations about his genius or whatever these songs kick ass

https://oldmasterpainter.bandcamp.com/track/surfs-up

#9 mindspring memories & intl. debris international memories

did this really only come out in 2017? i feel like i’ve been listening to it since i was born. tangential lateral kind of wormhole out of vaporwave into two meditative spiritual infinite-feeling loops that perfectly complement each other

https://noproblematapes.bandcamp.com/track/sad-horizons

#10 nyege nyege tapes sounds of sisso

absolutely obnoxiously insanely high energy high pitch high bpm dance music. i can’t believe this isn’t what people mean when they say future bass. set me down the path of historical and contemporary non-”global north” ideas about dance/rhythm/bass which i’m still on

https://nyegenyegetapes.bandcamp.com/track/mshamba-video-mster

#11 blithe field face always toward the sun

the most gorgeous implementation of the sorta-ambient guitar-looping vignette aesthetic. is this a real trope or did i listen to this album so much i convinced myself it was a thing? for me this is the sound of what its like to feel completely content with life and at ease in the moment

https://blithefield.bandcamp.com/track/zen-den

#12 anohni hopelessness

listening to this album and singing along while driving my car made me feel absolutely disgusting. unbelievable hooks, grossly hi fi sound design, and overblown drama add up to imo a scary effective type of explicitly political or ‘protest’ music

https://anohni.bandcamp.com/track/drone-bomb-me

#13 21 savage, offset, & metro boomin without warning

why is these 3 pop stars’ vaguely halloween-themed one-off collab my favorite trap album? 21 savage, offset, and metro boomin were all wildly corny in different ways but everything was perfectly balanced. i hope metro boomin makes like one seriously ambient album next decade

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bWv-bR_X-VM&list=PLC1uUM4twa8i6zsD_Sn1LRUq4vhl_PLCx&index=11&t=0s

#14 laura les big summer jams 2018

‘crying in the club’ type bangers with no fear of ugliness and no fear of beauty and no fear of wildly unfashionable tropes like skrillex-y dubstep and guitar solos. so much input from other trans/queer artists it felt like a big t4t party

https://osno1.bandcamp.com/track/the-river-feat-scum-yung-skrrt-and-99jakes

#15 triad god nxb

the other triad god tape from 7 years later is just as good. what was this man doing in the intervening time? i just imagine him riding london public transit while it rains or something. i love knowing that most of his cantonese spoken-word/rap parts are insults and jokes rather than like, melancholy observations

https://soundcloud.com/hipposintanks/triad-god-remand

#16 dj koze knock knock

what if pop music sounded like this? somehow every song on here is wildly danceable, wildly sing-alongable, and also wildly detail-oriented. feels like a transmission from an alternate present where things are okay

https://djkoze.bandcamp.com/track/club-der-ewigkeiten

#17  ocora world of traditional music

box set of “world music” recordings from the label that french electronic composer pierre schaeffer started in the 1950s as a project to teach people in rural west africa how to dj. ethnography can be a fucked up idea but afaik ocora is one of the good ones and if you can sorta try to disengage from the tropes/cliches that get imposed on it, the music is phenomenal. hard to find a track specific to this box set but here’s another from the label

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XJm8rn6gW5I

#18 oneohtrix point never replica

opn feels like an artist i’ve ‘grown out of’ i guess but samples never felt more alive or more dead than they did on replica. set a template for the kind of melancholy ‘soundscape’-y vibe that i spent years trying to find more of after

https://oneohtrixpointnever1.bandcamp.com/track/power-of-persuasion

#19 rihanna anti

the most perfect imaginable pop album. i keep trying to move it higher up. i almost put club chai vol 1 on this list purely cause of the Woo remix but then i remembered the original is better

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_dDCUKElEwk

#20 colleen a flame my love a frequency

colleen’s ultra deadpan singing and wriggly rhythmic synth put me in a trance. everything sounded dry as hell even though it was covered in reverb. i think maybe some people were put off by the corny song names and lyrics

https://colleencolleen.bandcamp.com/track/separating

#21 dj paypal drake edits

back when drake seemed like a sorta-shitty dude rather than seriously creepy, dj paypal used the power of footwork to expose both the melancholy-ambient modality and the serious-bass-music modality latent in his voice and beats

https://mallmusicinc.com/track/brand-new

#22 huerco s. for those of you who have never (and also those who have)

not really as ambient as it first seems imo, but rather like a really intense focus on what we mean when we describe things as ‘static’ or ‘dynamic’. i know it’s corny but i wanna say these tracks are fully both and fully neither

https://brianleeds.bandcamp.com/track/promises-of-fertility

#23 girls rituals reddishness

for a track so deliberately shitty-sounding I Know had no right to be so fucking danceable. persona and production synthesized into the only ‘singer-songwriter’ music i could really get into

https://temporaryenjoyment.bandcamp.com/track/i-know

#24 chromatics kill for love

fakeass 80s retro melancholia digitized and pushed so far past pastiche it turned into pure slime. the phone call in There’s A Light Out On The Horizon came straight from the void

https://soundcloud.com/johnnyjewel/chromatics-kill-for-love-album

#25 actress ghettoville

the only genuinely post-apocalyptic music. specifically the postapocalypse in wall-e but if there was no wall-e to clean it up

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QcCPdfUFq6k

#26 playboi carti die lit

every beat on this album was reducible to a 4-second loop that perpetually demanded its own repetition and playboi carti somehow knew exactly what to do with them

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-2pjiKmhlAI

#27 charli xcx vroom vroom

the charli xcx that came after this was fun, but there was black hole levels of power compacted into when she said vroom vroom on Vroom Vroom

https://soundcloud.com/vroomvroomrecordings/charli-xcx-vroom-vroom

#28 pacific breeze: japanese city pop, aor & boogie 1976-1986

it’s kind of amazing to think that this compilation only exists because vaporwave aesthetics made ‘japanese grocery-store kitsch from the 80s’ a marketable thing in the us. anyway every single one of these is an absolute bop

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jl91bvEKj20

#29 young thug barter 6

i can’t get enough of listening to young thug’s voice. i’ve seen his rhythmic-melodic-textural sensibility described as virtuosic and i don’t know really if that term means anything but it feels right to me

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qg9ZxQKSDuw

#30 magic eye babylon

smeared dreamy lo-fi guitar music w wistful buried melodies pushed to an extreme. every song sounded the same and i wish there was more than the one cassette

https://magiceye.bandcamp.com/track/flame

#31 tirzah devotion

you could say this was ‘stripped down’ r&b but i think more accurately what separated it was that every sound stood exactly and only for itself

https://tirzah.bandcamp.com/track/basic-need

#32 mount eerie clear moon

it’s amazing how well mount eerie navigated the move from a lo-fi sound/mode/affect to a hi-fi sound/mode/affect. clear moon wasn’t his first attempt but it was the one that most embodied the feeling of the new possilibities that had been opened up

https://pwelverumandsun.bandcamp.com/track/through-the-trees-pt-2

#33 kelela aquaphoria

this mix was such a good idea it immediately seemed shocking nobody else had tried afaik. and kelela executed it so well you forgot the tracks already existed in other contexts

https://soundcloud.com/kelelam/aquaphoria

#34 james ferraro skid row

not sure what it means that the only james ferraro i really love is also the one i think of as the least abstract/conceptual. his recited lyrics had a rare spoken-word-poetic power

https://breakworldrecords.bandcamp.com/track/to-live-and-die-in-la

#35 salyu x salyu s(o)un(d)beams

absolutely unbounded sense of joy and creativity and possibility hovering between bangers-lite and ‘soundscape’-y electronic manipulation

https://soundcloud.com/snouu/salyu-x-salyu-s-o-un-d-beams

#36 dj rashad just a taste vol 1

double cup got all the press but it was so smoothed-over it could never have done something as absurdly beautiful as Ghost or even Go Crazy

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OZuHPAbte9U

#37 yves tumor serpent music

i’m sorta put off by the high-gloss sheen of music like this but serpent music somehow had the right combination of total cohesion and a ridiculous density of impactful moments

https://soundcloud.com/pan_hq/yves-tumor-the-feeling-when-you-walk-away-pan-73?in=pan_hq/sets/yves-tumor-serpent-music-pan

#38 maral mahur club

lo-fi beat collage elevated to something that could actually genuinely be called world music

https://astralplanerecordings.bandcamp.com/track/avesta-khani-reggaeton

#39 lucki ecks watch my back

did not expect this super low-stakes sadboy trap to end up on this list but i love his min-effort flow and somehow every beat is exactly the vibe even when the tracks aren’t volume balanced

https://soundcloud.com/boob7/leave-wit-you-prod-plu2o-nash-clams-casino?in=boob7/sets/watch-my-back

#40 arca stretch 2

not sure why i get more out of arca’s nonsense broken-beat non-rap than any of her later projects

https://unonyc.bandcamp.com/track/tapped-in

#41 klein only

a new way to do fucked up noise w pop leanings. ‘audacitycore’

https://klein1997.bandcamp.com/track/pretty-black-2

#42 city arcadia

another mysterious transmission, this time w lots of harp

https://soundcloud.com/halcyon-veil/city-arcadia

[driftinglightofthewoods]

🖊️🖊️🖊️🖊️🖊️🖊️🖊️🖊️🖊️🖊️🖊️🖊️🖊️🖊️🖊️🖊️🖊️🖊️🖊️🖊️

Send me a “🖊+an OC“ and I will talk about that OC! It can be a headcanon, a fun fact, a small paragraph of backstory- anything!Alternatively, send in just a “🖊“ and I will talk about any one of my OCs at random!

You sendin’ 20 pencils? you gettin’ 20 ocs. You asked for this.

1. Sileves

I love Sileves, I love her big generous heart and how eagerly she accepts friends of her children and her husband as honorary family members. I wish I could talk more about her job as a healer because she takes such immense pride in it and she is what I would want any nurse or doctor to be; so caring and patient and kind.

2. Methenor

Methenor is a soft boi hidden under layers of icy indifference, sarcasm and dry etiquette and I love it. He cares for his family so much ;-; And like I feel incredibly bad for him because no wonder he’s cold as ice when pretty much his entire family left him in Rivendell; His parents sailed, his older sister is who knows where, his younger brother ran for Lothlorien and now his only son left him too.

3. Malgelir

Chirpy social butterfly with a small bit of a “ME FIRST” complex towards her siblings. Malgelir always wanted to get married and have a child, and the fact that she did so before her siblings does make her prouder than she probably should be. Thankfully this isnt out of pure malicious intent because I don’t think she ever had an evil thought in her life.

She also cares so much about her hubby and her son ;-; i cry

4. Rhoscthel

Fun fact I aint got a single clue about what goes into fashion design and yet here Rhoscthel is being a tailor. Send help. Plz. I’m making this up as I go and I just hope nobody notices I’m bluffing my way through anything that takes half a glance at her skill as a tailor.

I also wish I knew how people Actually Flirt TM because Rhos is supposed to be a charming she-elf with bargaining powers that could almost rival Caranthir’s but idk anything about either flirting or haggling. The woes of an introvert trying to play a socially savvy extrovert TM

5. Amathel

With Amathel I’ve been contemplating switching her social status of engaged to married but Amathel kind of has concerns and worries about the act of getting married so idk how to really.. change her status? Like should I just change it or drabble it or..

Like it’s not that she doesnt want to be married to Lagoron, she loves him very dearly, but there’s certain expectations that comes with having a wedding especially as a highly valued member of the Rivendell guard.

Idk I kinda want to dive more into the complex nature of her always wanting to be on top and number one in her class despite the fact that she has a lot of… performance anxiety, I guess you could call it?

She doesnt like to be put on the spot or even necessarily in the spotlight even though she has an ambitious drive and is always looking to improve as a guard.

6. Innith

With Innith I’m kinda having the opposite problem I do with Rhoscthel. I don’t get to use her much because she’s a shy, introverted scholar who would really only want to interact with coworkers and patrons of the library in Rivendell; and unfortunately there’s not a lot of those muses around.

this is very much me asking you to throw Pan at her sometimes I think they could be fun together plz

I’m also a bit sad the one ship I had for her has long since sailed away. F/F ships are so hard to come by.

7. Nethel

You would think I have a similar problem with Nethel like I do with Innith but since Nethel is such a drastically different character I actually dont find it hard to find interactions for her lol. People seem to be rather drawn to her even though she’s brutally blunt. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, Nethel is a lot like Feanor just minus the genius linguistic part. 

Plus while Nethel is cooped up in her workshop most of the time she does need to come out and tend to her biological needs like eating, bathing, sleeping, much to her dismay as she has little patience for small talk.

Aside from that I think most of the muns I toss her at are aware that she’s a deeply insecure person under all that brutal facade, and people generally seem to have a little more patience with a character like that? like idk, just something I noticed. 

8. Miston

Honestly without Miston this blog wouldnt exist and I wouldn’t be here to gush about all my characters, so needless to say Miston is incredibly important to me. I feel like he has grown as a character a lot since the beginning of this blog but that he has also remained true to the description I give him in his about section. He is still a character who doesn’t like sharing his feelings and rather deflect them, ignore them entirely or distract you with conversations about literally anything else.

Miston is very near and dear to my heart.

9. Eredhon

Baby. Precious soft child. Eredhon is such a sweetheart and it’s truly thanks to a lot of brainstorming with @legolasgoldy that he has been crawling out of his shell because for quite a while I myself didnt even know all that much about Eredhon.

He is a soft, gentle soul with a lot of deep running emotions and his social anxiety can definitely play cruel tricks on him, but with the right support system he blossoms into a very sweet and devoted friend who will always try to help you through any emotional problems. He’s also a lot more emotionally intelligent than I originally gave him credit for. He’s usually paired with social butterflies (see Malgelir) because he does get those type of characters to kind of.. relent the walls they build around themselves and let him see the emotional struggles they tend to ignore

He’ll also never apologises for feeling his emotions. He’ll apologize for snapping, for raising his voice, for letting his anxiety drive him up a wall and for anything that deserves an apology, but he won’t apologize for feeling sad or anxious or happy or in need of comfort.

10. Calithilon

I’ve been thinking about aging canon Cali up to at least a talkative elfling because honestly because he is so young in canon I haven’t really gotten a chance to use him all that effectively in the main storyline.

Most of Cali’s development comes from modern aus with @hclliish where he’s a teen, dating her Sleipnir (another precious child, just not one of mine lol)Cali takes after his mom in looks and unfortunately for him after his dad in personality, making him a rather shy and quiet person with a lot of insecurities. Being born to two singers makes him a natural singer as well, and his voice is higher in tone than that of his father.

Despite being an anxious teen (because when is puberty ever kind) he does find a lot of comfort in his parents unconditional love for him. They’re a very solid parents-child unit tbh.

11. Lagoron

Another character that I don’t get to use all that much, which is unfortunate because I find Lagoron an incredibly funny and interesting character. He’s a very un-elvish elf, in fact he’s more a hobbit in an elven disguise. While also being a guard, he is an entirely different type than Amathel; where Amathel yearns to be the best and the strongest, Lagoron is a team player who believes in the strength of numbers and strong bonds between guards to drag them through the most difficult situations; and that hasn’t exactly made him the top performer of the class. 

He is however truly the kind of person you want on your team, and in a fight he’s surprisingly endurant and likely to exhaust his opponent by focusing on dodging their power attacks rather than wasting his energy in fighting back.

Always has food on him and will offer it to anyone he feels like stricking up a friendly conversation with. 10/10 good friend.

12. Hinnoron

Hinnoron is definitely more of the tradtional elf. He’s radiant, and ethereal, and pleasant to be around. He also has a natural calmness about him and a certain kind of wisdom. Y’know, typical Tolkien Elf TM stuff.

Hinnoron gets interesting when you dive into his deeper relationships. His relationship with his eldest sister is on a very low pit, and the one he has with Methenor has definitely taken some blows. When Gelwenil left to follow the stars, Methenor got rather clingy towards Hinnoron, who felt suffocated in return.

Hinnoron left for Lothlorien, and to this day regrets that he abandoned Methenor when Methenor was clearly struggling with the departure of their parents and their sister. While they have mended their bond since, this kind of guilt does seem to creep into his relationships with Haldir ( @thehiddenhero ) and Oropher ( @oropherrrrr ) He often doesn’t tell them when things about the relationship upset him and bottles his emotions up to an unhealthy degree, all because he fears of upsetting their feelings or even damaging the image they have of him if he’s not the perfect, ethereal and unconditionally supportive partner. For someone who gives love so easily and unconditionally, he seems to have a hard time believing that the love he receives doesn’t come with the condition that he has to be a perfect lover or it’ll be revoked.

Someone plz teach him that he’s allowed to have needs and that he’s allowed to have those needs tended to.

13. Gelwenil

Ah yes. The lost one. Well no, not lost, she knows exactly where she’s going but nobody else does. Gelwenil honestly never meant to upset Methenor or Hinnoron when she left to follow the stars. Like Methenor was definitely struggling when his parents left for Valinor, but in retrospect Gelwenil left several years after that. Maybe not enough for him to have healed and moved on, but I don’t blame her for thinking that with his wife, children and their youngest brother Methenor would have enough of a support net to justify her wanting to explore the skies.

Gelwenil is an avid believer in the power of Varda, and also deeply respects Tilion and Arien. Any type of celestial Maia can be expected to be treated with the deepest respect from her.

Out of all my characters Gelwenil deserves the most TLC tbh I feel like she’s underdeveloped compared to everyone else because I dont use her a lot.

14. Faerveren

Uuuugh I miss Faerveren so much. Mistons second cousin twice removed, and probably the only person to ever leave him flabbergasted and when Miston is the voice of reason in a duo, you know somethings up.

Faerveren is also an interesting character because with her I wanted to present the idea of people assuming you’re always emotionally fine as long as you’re physically strong enough to be virtually invincible.

15. Nengelon

Local edition of the “I’m so fucking done with this shit I don’t get paid enough to deal with” club, together with Feren and Lindir. Nengelon tends to fall into an elven variety of Welsh when he runs upset with the leader of the Sabaid elves, and just about no one knows what he’s saying.

There’s also the implication that he basically ran away from the Riunnag (waterelves, maybe related to the Teleri through distant blood but sources (ie me) dont confirm that yet so its just rumors) tribe he belonged to because of his secret romantic ties to said leader, but Nengelon doesn’t speak of his romantic outings to anyone so it’s just a rumor.

16. Braigon

Ah, big, bulky, burly, 7 foot something Sabaid leader Braigon. Rides a grizzly bear as a warmount, wields a gigantic twohanded battle axe, and is an absolute terror on the battlefield… when he bothers to get his tribe of warrior travelers involved. Braigon tends to stroll around like he owns the place, because not many dare to defy this mountain of an elf.

Maybe thats why people are so bewildered when 5′9 sized Nengelon curses him out on his bullshit in some incomprehensible tongue they don’t know.

Braigon is actually a pretty solid leader of a tribe where elves can pretty much do as they please as long as they do their job as either warrior or provider (finding food and other supplies) outstandingly. The Sabaids aren’t a big tribe, there’s only a couple hundred of them, but they make for fantastic allies… but only if you can manage to convince Braigon to risk any of his people in any given war; and he usually isn’t concerned with fighting the battles of others for them without a good reason. 

 17. Bereneth

Bereneth is an interesting case. An accident between a Sinda lady and a Noldo refugee, at a time when those relationships weren’t exactly accepted after the reign of destruction left by the line of Finwe. (I like to believe thats something that took a generation or two for elves to get over dont @ me.)

Because of this, Bereneth was relentlessly bullied to the point where as soon as the oppertunity rose, her mother left for then newly settled Rivendell. Being under the rule of Elrond, she figured her daughter would be safe there. Bereneth remained there and bore three children to Carandolon and sailed to Valinor when their daughter in law was pregnant with her first child

18. Carandolon

Chieftain of a squadron while Greenwood was under the rule of Oropher, Carandolon was a bright eyed and wanderlust filled soul, born to two fullblooded Silvan elves. When on a mission to Rivendell, where he had to accompany a diplomat, he saw Bereneth and for him it was love at first sight.

When the mission was over and he returned to Greenwood, he immediately requested to be dismissed from his chieftain status and to be allowed to move and live to Rivendell.

A reckless and bold move, and it did take him a while to woo Bereneth, but they ultimately fell in love, got married, and had three children. He sailed with his wife when their daughter in law was pregnant with her first child

19. Nemiron

The missing link that connects Miston to the line of Finwe. Nemiron is the bastard son of Írimë and an unknown father of Vanyarin descent. Nemiron lost complete vision in his right eye when the healer tent he worked at got raided by the enemy in that war; and he threw himself as a shield between the blade and the wounded soldier it was aiming for.

During the war, he was usually found in the company of either Finrod or Edrahil, as he needed help to adjust to his new lack of depth perception. Sometimes during that same war, he left to settle in Lothlorien, where he met the weaver apprentice Dillothés. They married and moved to Rivendell as a position for an experienced healer was open there, and they had their family there.

Nemiron remained in Rivendell, despite yearning to sail, for the sake of his only daughter, and he ultimately sailed for Valinor when she was pregnant with her third child.

I havent decided if the power of Valinor heals Nemiron’s injury, but if it does (and I doubt it), it would do so only partially. His right eye will never be 100% functional.

20. Dillothés

The third and last born daughter of her parents, Dillothés worked as a weaver’s apprentice in Lothlorien before moving up to becoming a weaver of her own, selling her selfmade fabrics to tailors and others interested and making a comfortable living out of it

She became infatuated with Nemiron, who was often found in the library studying Lothlorien native herbs to aid in his small healer practice. After she learned of his injury she never backed away from him once, and helps and supports him to the best of her ability. This remains the case when they went to Valinor and whether or not he partially heals from his injury