#SO CLOSE.

[boeing-787]

SHOULDA HAD BETTER FUCKING AIM

[bestworstcase]

How much of Ironwood's decision making do you think is informed by his semblance? Or is it a non-factor?

ooh this one is fun because i don’t agree with ✨any✨ of the common takes that i’ve seen across the spectrum from “mettle is auto-brainwashing” to “mettle is just the trigger he pulls on a gun”

and i need to preface by saying that i have adhd, and i experience EXTREME hyperfocus. extreme like i work from home and enjoy my job so i accidentally pull 14-16 hour days about 2-4 times a month because i’ll get going on a task after lunch and blink and it’s four in the morning. extreme like before i went on meds i needed to set alarms for mealtimes to avoid starving myself to death and that still only worked half the time. extreme like i have to be careful about reading books because i will not stop reading until i’m finished and very long books can prevent me from sleeping multiple nights in a row.

that said i do not and have never experienced hyperfocus as involuntary. i am always surprised by how much time has elapsed, because it never feels like more than maybe half an hour tops and it is always actually more like 10+, but for me hyperfocus is preceded by about 15-20 minutes of normal focus during which i’m fully aware of what my brain is doing and am able to step away if the thing i’m doing isn’t something i want to sink the rest of my day on.

it’s both a fairly debilitating symptom and something that i make a deliberate choice to do for a variety of reasons that are not especially important here. there is risk-benefit analysis involved.

this is basically how i think mettle works, with the sole difference being that hyperfocus requires a specific kind of trigger [complex high-interest tasks] and mettle does not, so ironwood can induce this state at will for any task. besides that, my interpretation of mettle is that it’s deep hyperfocus on a particular task, lasting anywhere from a couple minutes (for very short-term goals) to an entire day but averaging around 8-10 hours at a time for anything involved (paperwork, strategizing), possible to interrupt with difficulty, and involving a mildly altered state of consciousness in the form of a dramatic reduction in sensory and temporal processing i.e. no perception of time passing and inability to perceive sensations like hunger, fatigue, discomfort, people talking to you without getting your attention first, and so forth. it does not cause changes in personality or cognitive function, nor inhibit decision-making except insofar as it takes conscious effort to step away from the task.

mettle as described is “like an iron resolve […] that powers him to [keep going], almost like a very stubbornly, narrow focused mindset on things […] to push himself to do what he’s decided he’s gonna do” or to “push himself through something like searing the flesh off your arm, like if this is the goal he needs to accomplish, everything else goes by the wayside.” and for some inexplicable reason this has been widely interpreted to mean that mettle is a switch ironwood can flip to make himself willing to kill people. no! mettle is how he’s able to flay and cauterize his own arm to escape watts’ trap! mettle is how ironwood keeps himself awake and lucid for a solid forty-eight hours after his fucking arm gets amputated! mettle is why he’s composed and reasonable at the top of volume seven and gradually unravels into an unhinged frazzled lunatic over the months that follow because he’s using his semblance to force himself past the limits of what his body is physically able to endure.

ironwood is a soldier born and raised and indoctrinated into a military state that never quite escaped its prewar fascism. he was always perfectly willing and able to kill people at the slightest justification—“if you were one of my men i would have you shot” was, um, not a joke. that’s who he is. that’s what atlas molded him into, same as it molded clover and harriet and elm and vine and marrow and winter and goddamn near everybody else it touched who didn’t have the means to get out.

mettle didn’t turn ironwood into a murderer—atlas did.

but hyperfocus is not a healthy superpower, ok? it feels fucking great to effortlessly glide through a week’s worth of work in a single afternoon but you have to balance that against the physiological and psychological toll that will take if you try to make that your normal. it’s a day of absolute peak performance and then a crash, and you have to be able to crash. you HAVE to let yourself rest. hyperfocus feels like infinite energy and that feeling is a lie your brain tells you after unplugging all the early warning systems so that your body can’t interrupt you with petty things like hunger or pain, and you HAVE to remember that.

ironwood goes off the fucking rails in volume eight because he believes that lie. he desperately needs to eat and sleep and take it easy while his body recuperates from losing an arm, but mettle can make all of that pain and exhaustion fade away—only it doesn’t actually. the physiological need is still there, getting worse for every minute he spends neglecting it. all through volume seven it’s building up and up until it hits a critical mass after he flays his arm and his cognitive functioning just fucking implodes because his brain physically does not have what it needs to work correctly anymore and the result is this sudden explosion of acute irrationality and emotional lability that just keeps rapidly getting worse and worse and worse because ironwood keeps trying to brute force his way through it with mettle.

i have done this. it sucks. for me the stakes were high school so it mostly looked like a prolonged meltdown and some screaming fights over college applications, but the underlying psychological mechanism driving ironwood’s dramatic tailspin is exactly hyperfocus run amok. in its worst extremity unmanaged hyperfocus is just a horribly destructive and insidious form of self-harm and it will make you completely fucking batshit until you stop.

[sndwave]

the ads in between units on the spanish learning i picked up.... are ads In Spanish to learn English

[weakly-skoodge]

Week Forty Nine!

The hatch falls shut behind him.

If Zim doesn’t want help, then Skoodge won’t help.

No siree! Absolutely no helping going on here whatsoever!

He’ll just sit down there, somewhat near Zim – but still at an acceptable distance! – and watch him instead.

With a bit of shimmying and effort, and maybe some goo from a source far too horrifying to be imparted through writing, Skoodge makes his way through the vents to the lower levels of the base. It doesn’t take any effort at all to find Zim. Even without his rambunctious laughter or demeaning voice, there are still lesser known ways of finding him. Things that someone would have to pick up by being in his direct presence for a prolonged period of time. Smell, habits, preferences.

Zim has multiple labs. Everyone knows this.

But, not everyone would know that these labs all have their own, individual purposes, would they? Skoodge hopes not. It makes it feel like a fun secret that no one else is privy to, knowing the inner workings of Zim’s PAK.

There’s a lab for every stage of Zim’s plans, and then, extra ones, ones meant for pet projects or random spur of the moment ideas.

Right now, Zim would be in the lab meant for the second beginning stage of projects.

Skoodge takes a turn, and falls in front of a hatch, confirming his theory as he spies the familiar shape of Zim’s hunched figure, sat down at one of his many workbenches.

He lifts the hatch.

… It’s not… really helping, to hand Zim a few things that he needs when he needs them – is it? Or, even to just watch him? With how engrossed he is in his current work, it’s very possible that he won’t even notice Skoodge’s presence.

Skoodge grins, wide and closed and spread completely across his face, and he allows himself to drop silently to the metal floors, from where he was in the vents up in the ceiling.

Not so much as a single flick of an antenna comes from Zim.

Wow. He really is engrossed.

That’s just more fuel to encourage Skoodge to start sneaking around, occasionally peeking up to ensure that Zim still hasn’t noticed him. More reason to give Zim a hand, in his mind – because if Zim can’t notice Skoodge plopping down right into his lab, then who’s to say Zim will notice… oh, who knows… one of his tools being handed to him?

Skoodge looks to the table at his side – and it’s actually at his height level, something that he notices right away, considering most other furniture tends to be on the taller side. There are some important looking papers on top of it. Unused schematics for plans that never came to fruition, blueprints…

There’s a pretty looking doohickey on the next table over that Skoodge really wants to touch that he just barely manages to convince himself not to. Who knows what doing that would result in. Maybe it’d explode the whole place! Or maybe it’d just make a really annoying beeping sound before fizzing out. And then explode. So many possibilities!

So many, that he doesn’t want to test his luck with!

Exploding does not feel good. Something someone would only know as intimately as he does from experience.

With that experience in mind, Skoodge carefully sneaks away from the doohickey, steadily making his way closer over to Zim.

Still somehow completely undetected, he comes to a stop behind him.

Like a statue, Skoodge stands, silently watches over Zim as he works, peering over his shoulder and ducking whenever it looks like he’s about to turn or spot Skoodge.

He tries reading whatever mysteries are on the screen in front of Zim, to get the gist of what he’s doing. Nada. He tries looking at the progress he’s made, the mess on his bench. Zilch. Skoodge can understand that there’s a prototype of some sort, definitely not to scale, of something. But not of what that something is.

Another few quiet moments of Zim mumbling pass. Skoodge tries listening to those, too.

Nope. Still don’t understand.

Zim pats around his workspace without looking away from his screen, searching for something on his left. Skoodge takes a guess and grabs an unpolished tiny dome-thing from the right side of the table, handing it to Zim.

His brow furrows. He opens his mouth –

Skoodge hands him the point one unit spiral wrench he was using earlier.

“Ah. Thanks, Skoodge.” Zim mumbles, not even turning to look at him, and continues to work, affixing the dome-thing to an equally small flat circle-thing.

Once finished with that, Zim reaches his hand over to the side again, emphasizing it with some finger-flexing. Skoodge drops a tube of some sort of metal binding agent into his waiting hand.

Zim begins to work, then slows to a stop, and finally processes what just happened.

He places everything in his hands down on the table in front of him.

Slowly, his head turns, over to the side…

… and his eyes meet Skoodge.

[ssunspotted]

67

[dacuslucy]

heartbreaking. good job uconn you did amazing with what you were given

[single-malt-scotch]

i dont think it would happen. but boy it sure would be something if bdubs won limited life, the time themed life season. or i guess, it would also be something if he died first (and i think we can say that wont happen. hopefully.)

[slimmestslime]

im throwing a tantrum im throwing a tantrum im throwing a .

AAAGGHGGAAA NOOOOOOOO

HE DIDN’T WIMBLE HARD ENOUGH :(

[pinkseas]

so close to getting myself a switch and botw

[darkestrellar]

[sodiummustdie]

reminder that we could have gotten a story of how gerard wanted to wear a dress in texas before if the light was taken off of him fast enough :)

[ghost-buddies]

*sighs* ☹️

daydreaming about writing: 🥰😍🥹❤️😊🌺✨😘

the act of actually writing: 😭😰😵‍💫😭😰😭☹️😖

[into-the-groove]

favorite photo of all time not even joking

[black-quadrant]

this couldn’t be said any better

[yourfavecharacterisqueer]

hypothetical scenario for you all: the real king arthur returns. you meet him and you welcome him into your home. what is the first thing you do with him? keep in mind, this is a man from the 500s (he died in 542), and you are from the 21st century (2024).

[froody]

my mom is soooo upset because she dropped and cracked one of her chicken’s eggs that she knew was fertilized. it’s her first time trying to hatch chicks and she was so excited. this was one of two eggs she’d seen moving while candling them. she feels so bad.