#You Are Not Your Brain

[twinliches]

(grabs you by the shoulders) you have to make room for new experiences in your life. you have to go through the unpleasant work of leaving your comfort zone, even if just for a few minutes at a time. because if you don't, your brain will trick you into stagnation. you will start to believe that the world can barely fit you in it. but that's not true. it's the opposite way around. you can fit the whole word inside of you. your task is only this: to welcome it with open arms

[junkworldusa]

you make me want to draw again

here you go! this is also for my future self.

[rheill]

This has been in my mind since August but I couldn't figure out which character would say it. Then I started a Karlach Origin run and realized: Karlach. Karlach has a face that knows what The Grinch is.

[orbitganymede]

self proclaimed guard dog simon who’s never held a conversation with you or even really tried to interact with you at all. he had caught a glimpse of you out on the town and traced you back to your current job, lucky for him, on base. you’re a little freaked out, this mammoth of a man randomly shows up one day and pulls a chair up to your desk, takes out a book and just hangs out for a few hours? even leaves an extra lighter for his cigs in your pen holder. introductions were a quick back and forth on names and that’s about it, sometimes he comments on your clothes or jewelry, he saw your dainty little chain on your neck and purchased an S charm the next day, left it on your desk and that was that. you really shouldn’t be okay with this but he’s kinda intriguing, and the guy that has the office next to yours hasn’t bothered you in weeks, something you’ve been begging for mentally, so really what’s simon doing wrong? he sometimes even brings you a stray pudding cup from the mess, how sweet.

but what really gets you is when you’ve just got in your car, setting your things down, buckling your seat belt, the works, but simon slides in your passenger seat, gives you a look (his eyes look so pretty in the sunlight) and tells you to “take us home”, you’re nervous to say the least, you heard what happened to janet in admin when she told him one of his stacks of paperwork was filed wrong, that she wasn’t gonna take his next one until he fixed his mistake (she’d left crying, cursing his name to high hell, and asking for a transfer) so really what choice do you have.

and maybe he walks into your place, goes straight for where you always store your remote and turns on the channel you like to watch, almost as if he’s seen this routine before, he even asks what face mask you’re gonna do tonight, you wonder how he guessed that you do a face mask every friday night (he suggests the blueberry charcoal one, says it makes your skin glowy (he did not use the word glowy)) you shrug and go on with your nightly tasks, make dinner, do dishes, shower. but what actually makes you stop in your tracks is when he walks out of the bathroom, still steamed up from his shower, butt ass naked and asks you what your favorite position is, pet.

[gongyussy]

fascinated/horrified by this set of tweets…

[lord-m]

pathetic isn’t really a word I‘d use for colin bridgerton. simon rather dying than marrying daphne was pathetic. anthony going through with marrying edwina until SHE mustered the courage to call everything off was pathetic.

colin contemplating his feelings, calling out his male acquaintances for their chauvinism, seeking advice from his mother and then immediately taking action and putting himself out there without even knowing if his feelings are reciprocated is the complete opposite of pathetic. that requires a whole lot of bravery.

[hellspawnmotel]

intimacy between an evil spiteful building-sized supercomputer and the lone scientist left behind after everyone else ditched and forgot about her (in which computer wants to kill scientist really bad but her programming wont let her so she just attempts to make her as miserable as possible instead, which also doesn't work because scientist is a freak)

[vitreouspositive]

THE FISTBUMP STILL LIVES!!! but through... exchanging blows...

[noodles-and-tea]

twins in time continuation of that blue doodle comic thingy, but fidd is forced to take care of stan when Ford gets into the portal stuff, leaving him behind.

I reckon he teaches him math…

[datcravat]

DMG

[shadowtraveled]

"mithrun is the only real monsterfucker in dungeon meshi" is objectively the funniest bit you can get out of his everything, but in all seriousness i think his attraction to his love interest is deliberately overstated—and that makes sense, because romantic jealousy is a classic and digestible motive, which is explicitly what kabru was aiming for in condensing mithrun's backstory, and also because until chapter 94, mithrun wasn't willing to admit to the true nature of his desires.

but because romantic envy is both classic and digestible, it probably isn’t a unique enough or complicated enough desire to tempt a demon’s appetite. mithrun’s wish, as far as we can figure from kabru’s reduced retelling, was to have a life in which he had never become one of the canaries, and that carries like 3857 implications and desires within it. that’s delicious. his love interest acts as sort of a red herring to his motivation for making it, though. (side note: i'm saying "love interest" here because, keeping in mind that i barely speak japanese on a good day anymore, "想い人" is something i'd usually take as just kind of an old-fashioned and romantic way to refer to a lover, but in context i wonder if both the connotation of yearning and the vagueness are intentional, and i think this phrasing gets those aspects of it more effectively. anyway.)

mithrun considered his love interest to be untrustworthy. there was a minute where i thought that comment might be about a similar-looking elf (yugin, one of his squad members), but comparing the two…

the "sketchy" arrow is definitely referring to the elf we know as his love interest—the bangs go toward her right, she only has the one forehead ornament, and, most notably, her ears aren't notched.

every time she’s given a full-body depiction in his dungeon, she’s drawn as a chimera, with the body of a snake from the waist down. (side note: the “what if a dungeon has chimeras before reaching level 4?”/“then the dungeon lord is unstable” exchange just being mithrun grilling his past self alive is so funny. he’s so. but anyway) there are a couple things about this.

first, the snake part of the chimera appears to be modeled after some species of coral snake mimic

which, in the biology-for-fun manga, i… doubt is a coincidence, especially with the added context of the “untrustworthy” comment. the dungeon’s conjured illusion of mithrun’s love interest was a harmless copycat of a venomous original. for whatever reason, he felt this person was a threat and made up a "safe" version of her to be in a relationship with, and while it’s definitely possible to be attracted to or even love someone you find to be toxic and/or intimidating, when you take that into consideration alongside the configuration of her body, you get some interesting implications.

which brings us to our second point: if we assume that mithrun was not in fact fucking a snake, then sexual attraction, at least, was so far removed from his idea of a relationship with this person that he did not even bother to keep her dungeon copy human enough to maintain the illusion of the option of a sexual relationship. this is somewhat echoed in the depictions of their interactions, which also imply a frankly unexpected romantic distance. she kisses his cheek and he doesn't seem to react; she's at the edge of a narrow bed with only one set of pillows, on top of his blankets while he's underneath them.

the kiss is particularly interesting because it seems to contrast the text. kabru's narration tells us this was everything mithrun could have asked for, but mithrun is there looking unreadable to pensive, likely because this is right before the panel that makes it clear things in the dungeon are beginning to go wrong.

walking through this backwards for a minute, we have the physical barrier of his bedding and the spatial separation inherent in a bed made for one person, the emotional barrier of his mounting anxiety getting in the way of his ability to enjoy the affection he sought, and... the snake, which historically carries the connotation of temptation, yes, but also mistrust, barring physical intimacy. okay. ok. if a dungeon reflects the mentality of its lord, all of this might suggest that mithrun was not able to have any real desire for a relationship with this person. his unwillingness to be vulnerable or let another person in was insurmountable. but in that case, why was she such a focal point that she remained to the end, after his dungeon had stopped creating iterations of his friends to come and visit him? why would he get so upset over her meeting with his brother that he became lord of a dungeon about it?

well. mithrun's brother was also interested in her, probably genuinely. and mithrun had to win.

you have an older brother who your parents completely ignore, probably in part because he is chronically ill/disabled and almost definitely in part because he received a ton of recessive traits that resulted in rumors that he was an illegitimate child. you are aware, most likely because those same parents fucking told you, that you actually are an illegitimate child. but they keep you around because you had the good fortune of looking just like your mother. what can that possibly teach you but that you, like your brother, are disposable?

it's utterly unsurprising that mithrun, under these circumstances, developed a pathological need to be better than everyone around him. people don't keep you otherwise. i'd argue this is also why he says he looked down on everyone he knew while milsiril claims his dungeon reeked of feelings of inferiority—he sought out people's worst traits and prioritized them in his mind to protect his already extremely fragile sense of self-worth, and all the while he tried to be as likable and high-performing as he possibly could be. his parents disposed of him anyway, but even then he tried to keep up the performance. he was kind to everyone. he never once lost to a dungeon.

when he saw his "love interest" meeting up with his brother, what he saw was himself being replaced by a person his parents had always treated as worthless, and if that was what they thought of the child they'd kept, what value could anyone possibly see in the bastard they'd given away to die? mithrun and kabru tell the story like he wanted to win this unnamed elf's heart, but it was never about being with her. it was about cementing his worth, proving that he didn't deserve to be thrown away.

and so it's particularly cruel that his demon discarded him, too. but maybe it's also particularly gentle that, in the end, there was someone who refused to even consider giving up on him.

kui laid it out in three panels better than i could hope to.

yeah. it's love. you wanted to be loved, even when the only way you were able to understand it was through the desire to be wanted, and you wanted that so badly that the idea of being consumed felt like the promise of finally mattering to someone.

[egg-noodle]

Spider web collar.

[buggachat]

something so fucked up about Chat Noir’s whole deal is that he is in a lot of ways Adrien playing a character. Like Adrien picked up his miraculous and was told he’d be a superhero so he was like “ok, time to act like a superhero!” and he lets himself have fun w it and play up the role and let loose and kind of just allow himself to be silly and goofy and have fun and for once in his life not care about performing Perfection™.

But. But none of the other characters KNOW THAT. So everyone just sees Chat Noir and is like “look at this guy’s ego. He’s so full of himself. Surely it’d be fair to knock him down a few pegs” without being aware of how few pegs he actually HAS. He’s like the “insecure character who overcompensates in ego” trope except he’s really not doing it unironically, he’s just having a fun LARP pretending to have self worth in his off-hours but nobody else is on the same page about it being a game and he refuses to tell them. He just dramatically pouts about it and lets them laugh and pretends like he’s not internalizing it and it is almost 3 am and my brain forced me to write this instead of sleeping I’m gonna take a melatonin

[adhdandcomics]

"adhd is the easiest disability to have" “sure plenty of people have adhd but most people are faking” “people are abusing the resources that WE need so that’s why i can’t get my adderall!”

there has been an artificial shortage of all adhd medication for the past 4 years in the US. every investigation into this shortage has returned with the unequivocal result that simply nobody thinks we need it enough to solve the problem.

so they point fingers at the “faker” gaming the system to get adderall who “thinks” they have adhd or is “abusing stimulants to get ahead” for a problem that Our system MANUFACTURED.

so we would be at each others throats instead of realizing that our government and big pharma is to blame for all of this. because their First priority is to punish addicts and to punish folks with adhd and to punish anyone who relies on medication. over everything else. even over profit.

[pickled-flowers]

Sex positivity is also about not calling Ace people prude and using virgin as an insult 👍 hope that helps