#also 2 other works in progress

[idontcaboose]

Haunted car au part 19

Previous. Masterpost

Out of all the days the past week, today was pretty good. He has an actual day off that he plans to use by getting to hang out with his little brothers. He hasn't spent time with Duke in a while. Maybe he should plan a brother bonding hour with him, then have lunch with Tim, take Damian to that one documentary about the ecosystem of Madagascar, and wrap up the day by dragging Jason back to the manor to have an impromptu kids dinner. Alfred might be convinced to make a pot of Mac and Cheese and hot dogs if he gives him some pictures he snuck of Tim and Damian ‘tolerating each other's presence’ while comparing lighting in a picture Tim took vs a painting Dami did of the same alleyway. Dick was proud of his little brother's artistic abilities. Even if they all use it to mock his fantastic skills at drawing stick figures. 

Dick was just about to open the cave door when it opened without his input and the Batmobile roared out, barely missing him. 

“Ooooh someone is going to get Grounded™.”

Dick sped into the cave and changed into his gear in record time, and followed where the Batmobile may have gone. It wasn't hard with all the daytime gothamites filming and excitedly talking about the Batmobile showing him where to go. He caught up soon after, making ‘wee-woo’ noises in his com to try to get whichever sibling in the car to respond. 

“ACAB!”

“Hood, please pull over.” Dick asked, voice full of affection and exasperation.

“Only if you ask Danny nicely N.” Duke laughed out.

“Ok? Danny, could you please pull over?” 

Dick was half deafened by the song ‘Fuck Tha Police’ over the coms before the Batmobile revved it's engine and went faster though Gotham.

“Well, Sugar Honey Iced Tea.”

@kizzer55555 @sebas-nights @candeartist422 @trappednyourheart @fandom-life-corrupted-me @tkiesai @2lbballpeenhammer @admiralwidow @rewrittenwrongs @whotfevenknowsanymore @symmetricalastigmatism

@thespacedragons

@atinygracie @okami-love

@lesbian-spider-drone @1n0sss @forgetmenot-bluepurple @ehobep

Next

[hinamie]

atla!au designs part 3 !! one of these things is uh. not like the others

first year trio gojo/choso/nanami

[wildrbst]

Test print time

[necrotic-nephilim]

i recently remembered DickTim Week 2024 is happening very soon and i looked at the prompts again to see if i could get anything out for it and. the Hades & Persephone AU prompt for day 1 has got me really thinking so here's a vague concept i plan to write.

i've been pretty burnt out on modern Hades & Persephone retellings because of how they always seem to fall into the same generic "innocent wide-eyed girl runs from her evil mean mother into the arms of a dark mysterious man because actually she went willingly and chose to marry him" which has gotten repetitive for my tastes. (for clarity i don't care if this retelling is your cup of tea personally, so long as you're not actively trying to rewrite the original myth and claim untrue things about it, if this is your favorite flavor i sincerely hope you enjoy the buffet i just have little interest in it since it feels overdone for me and exhausted of it's supposed commentary atp)

but? but. biblically accurate Hades & Persephone AU has me all kinds of interested. because wait listen so hear me out right. Hades!Dick and Persephone!Tim, obviously. i feel it'd be more loosely inspired by with themes and imagery (though playing with death and nature powers could be interesting, i haven't decided) rather than explicitly making them gods and all. but. something dark and fucked up where Dick and Bruce are especially estranged. maybe to do with Jason's return, maybe to do with them just clashing and having their usual explosive arguments. and Bruce knows the peace needs to be kept, if he and Dick are at odds then everyone starts to pick sides and things just fracture so he needs a peace offering.

and the peace offering is Tim.

Bruce (the stand-in for Zeus) offers up Tim. agrees to have Tim move to Bludhaven and be Dick's... whatever Dick wants him to be. knowing that with the implication comes the likelihood of Dick grooming Tim. and Tim has no real say and is hesitant to put up a real fight. he doesn't want this, he knows what this is going to imply Dick will do to him, but he also knows if he says no things have the possibility to just... fall apart. so he's the unwilling bride, dragged off to the metaphorical underworld (Bludhaven) with Dick, away from his family, his friends, the life he built.

and on the flip side, i think weirdly enough, your best pick for the Demeter stand-in is *Jason*. just, hear me out on that. not necessarily on the side of it being motherly, but on Jason being just estranged enough from the Batfamily to be the one willing to call it out for being bad and wrong and raising bloody hell to get Tim back. maybe it's because Jason wants Tim for himself, maybe it's truly out of a concern for Tim to have autonomy, i'm toying with the idea of it primarily being Tim's POV and him genuinely not knowing which of these is true. (and the truth possibly ends up being a complicated middle ground) and because i like Helena, i think you can use her as the Hekate stand in, the one who strikes a tentative alliance with Jason and tries to go find Tim and bring him back. Tim stuck with Dick, getting groomed and hyperaware of it, possibly even getting fucked the whole time as well, knowing he can't go back without causing massive issues for Dick and Bruce because well, Bruce did promise him to Dick. so he has to adjust his whole life, try to figure out being a vigilante in this new city with Dick breathing down his neck the whole time.

and then much like the ending of the myth, a sort of compromise is struck that's a shaky deal for everyone involved. Tim is put on an essential timeshare, going back and forth between Gotham, where he has friends and family and a support system, then getting dragged right back to Bludhaven with Dick in this brutal cycle that he slowly gets used to and stockholm'd into even liking it. Dick isn't so bad, once he gets used to the quirks of their unbalanced 'relationship'. the sex is even something he can adjust to as well. not quite a happy ending but one that sits in this realistic grey area that becomes Tim's life.

i will write this, eventually, but i don't know if i'll get to it before DickTim Week ends so by posting the idea i'm essentially putting it out into the world so the peer pressure holds me accountable. i just. really like the potential of making Hades/Persephone AUs as fucked up as they can be simply by adhering to the source material and making it a raw story of being stolen away and forced to like this new home you didn't ask for.

also a less fleshed-out aspect of this idea i have ties into Persephone becoming the Queen of the Underworld when she's taken and how the transition from Kore to Persephone could be reflected in Tim. how he makes the best of the worst situation and becomes something far more dangerous and dark when he's in Bludhaven, possibly takes on a new vigilante name/identity and leans into the worst quirks of his personality he tries to tamper because there's no point in not going full tilt Obsessively Weird if he has no choice anyway and it being one small way he takes back his autonomy, and that inevitably making Dick *more* into him, because he gets to see Tim finally just. let loose.

[koszmarnybudyn]

So this episode was great :')

[icewindandboringhorror]

finally finished all of one character's entire quests/optional dialogue/questions/etc.... 100,000 words... .... aughhh

[grison-in-space]

Since the dental Tribble has been on a strict no kibble, no crunchy, no chewing diet. (In a week or so she'll be allowed to use her teeth again a bit more, but no one wants to see a dog get dry socket.) Spouse feels that canned dog food (perpetually on hand to make into pupsickles) is not experienced as filling enough, and we do know that Tribble has done better on grain inclusive foods for the past decade, so... the rice cooker has been simmering with chicken stock rice too bulk out the canned food all week, and Matilda and Benton have both gotten a fair bit of overflow rice as a treat.

Unconnectedly, tonight happens to be my first night alone as the sole human all evening in quite a few months. Matilda has been doing her job of enforcing bed, of course, but I can also rely on other humans to help make routine happen if she's too tired to be on it.

If I was worried that Tilly hadn't worked out her evening routine enforcement functions before now, I shouldn't have been. I don't think I've ever seen a dog so excited to move the evening along towards the part where dinner and the good cookies are.

[solradguy]

Complete rando here, but I just wanted to pop in and say thank you for your translations. <3 I'm reading through the GG Comic Anthology right now because I cannot sleep and they are delightful and a wonderful bit of comfort.

Thanks for reading them!! Sorry it's been so long between updates on that manga, but it sounds like this is maybe your first readthrough of it so perhaps the gaps between updates hasn't been that bad haha

[rigelmejo]

some basic language learning thoughts (based on some common questions i see on reddit forums). as usual, if you don't like the suggestion, feel free to ignore and throw it out! what works best for you will be what works best for you - everyone is different. at the end of the day, if you continue studying (hours add up), study some new stuff (expand your knowledge), and practice/review some stuff you've studied (improve comprehension of what you know), then you'll improve. You can achieve that in a ton of different ways, and any way which motivates you to keep doing it is great.

What's the easiest language to learn? My thought on this question is... it doesn't matter as much as it might feel like it does. If any language is going to take hundreds or thousands of hours of study, you will probably want to have goals that motivate you to study for THAT long, for years. If Danish 'takes less hours to learn' than Thai, but you watch Thai shows everyday and follow thai webnovel writers and twitter, and don't have much interest in anything Danish (and no friends that speak the language), then Thai is going to be 'easier' because you have more reasons to USE it. If Spanish and French seem to take a similar amount of hours to learn, but you're planning to go to school in a French speaking country and get a job there? Well you have a more pressing Need to learn French, that will hopefully help motivate you. The 'easiest' language to learn is the language you have REASONS to learn. The language you will use, and keep using. If you have no pressing reason to learn any language, but want to learn a language? Find reasons. Make goals that require the language.

(Here's one from me - I wanted to learn Japanese, in theory I can mostly do anything I want by just reading/watching/playing translations, however I am the kind of person that really enjoys reading originals in their original form... so that's motivating. My recent kick to study more? A show I want to watch is untranslated, so I better get to studying so I can still watch it.) Your goal can be anything from: I want to visit X, I want to talk to X friend/family better, I want to blog in multiple languages, I want to watch untranslated media, I want to sing my favorite musicians songs easier, I want to work in a country that speaks it, I want access to more recipes in X language, I am into history and want to read a history book from X time period in X language, I want to play a video game before localization, really the sky is the limit on goals you can set. Your goals, and how much you want them, and how often you do the sub-goals (so if reading untranslated cnovels by an author you love is your goal, maybe along the way you read easier webnovels to motivate you and find more writers you like), is going to push you to keep studying. Even if your goal is 'pass language B2 test' if it has a deadline, and it's a goal connected to other goals (like going to work in a country with the language, translating work, writing better), that will keep you motivated. Motivation is what will make a language 'easier.' If you can't find the motivation, even the languages which should take the 'least amount of time' will feel hard.

All that said, I am now about to contradict myself. While I really think motivation is the biggest factor in if you'll keep studying and keep learning... there are languages which due to their similarity to languages you already know, will take less Total Study Hours to make progress. As an English speaker, it only took me 6 months of very lazy unorganized studying (half hour most days) to be able to start reading non-fiction French with only a handful of word lookups per page. A lot of that was because French (especially science words and proper nouns like places) has so many cognates with English. I basically 'had' thousands of words of French I already knew, just because I knew English. It took about a year to read fiction books in French only looking up a handful of words per page, for 'general main idea' comprehension. When studying Chinese, it took me also about 12 months to read fiction, look up a handful of words, and understand the 'general main idea.' But I was studying 2 hours a day. So I studied around 182.5 hours to read French fiction with word lookups, and 730 hours to read Chinese fiction with word lookups. And the Chinese also took longer to learn to read with NO word lookups, since there was no english-cognate carryover to sound-out and over rely on like with French. (Although at a wonderful certain point, you know enough Chinese hanzi that new words are built of mostly hanzi you know, and you can use that to guess the gist of a LOT of new words when extensively reading with no word lookups - that happened for me at about 2 years). My point is: Chinese DOES take more hours of study to reach language skill milestones as an english speaker, compared to French! It took me the same amount of months, because I studied Chinese more hours per day (to make up the difference - and I had a better study plan with Chinese). But if you are a total beginner, and unmotivated and KNOW you will study maybe 1 hour per day and probably not more, then learning a language that is more similar to one you already know WILL take less study hours total to reach skill milestones. And that will hopefully be motivating.

(Another example: I spent 3 months of 1-2 hours a day studying Spanish, and can read Spanish nonfiction - thanks to the similarities to French and English. I can read fiction too but it requires word lookups. Japanese, due to kanji, also got 'easier' to read once I had learned more Chinese hanzi. So if your goals include learning languages with some similarities, then once you learn some of those similarities it will make future learning 'faster.')

I spent a month once studying Esperanto (a constructed language). Do I ever use Esperanto? No. Did I find the experience helpful? Yes. Because Esperanto is designed to be fairly easy for european language native speakers, has no exceptions, it had 1. a lot of similar-words to english so I could practice 'guessing similar words' (a skill I'd use a lot with French and Spanish later), 2. practice guessing what word endings mean grammatically (since Esperanto has no exceptions the grammar patterns are much more obvious than say grammar patterns in French). 3. Practice recognizing spelling to sound connections. Those 3 skills are useful in learning any language, but natural languages will have more exceptions to the patterns.

After spending a month on Esperanto, I saw HUGE progress after studying a few hundred words, noticed a huge amount of grammar patterns and how to notice them, and just generally got the experience of 'this is what skill milestones feel like.' Later, when studying French, I used that experience to recognize French word endings and what they tend to indicate, word functions, patterns in pronunciation, guessing with cognates/similar words, and I knew what the first 'milestones' I was aiming for would be. In a similar pattern: French milestones took me a few months each to hit, so when I studied Chinese later and it was taking 2-3 times as much study time... I knew which milestone to expect myself to 'work toward' and achieve next, and knew what making progress should feel like (even if it felt like it was moving slower) so I didn't give up. I was aware that Chinese language skill milestones might 'take more hours' so I didn't panic when it was taking me almost a year of reading graded readers in Chinese to move on to simple webnovels, whereas in French I'd only been reading graded readers for half a year before I felt ready to move on. I knew the general process, because I'd done it before in a shorter timespan with French, with Esperanto.

Is Esperanto useful to you? Only you know that. I personally did not find it useful in general for me, and didn't continue to study it. But it did teach me 'how' to study a language, what progress to monitor, and gave me the confidence that I was capable of learning.

If you really feel you're incapable of learning any skill in a new language, then spending some time on a language more similar to what you already know (if possible - a language you have motivating goals with), may help you see you are capable and can learn. An addition to this: spend a LOT of hours studying as a beginner, if lack of progress demotivates you. Once you push past the beginner stage, you'll be able to do goal-related things in the language you study and that will keep you motivated. But in the beginning, progress feels slow and you feel very confused. So the more upfront studying you do, the quicker you will push through that hard-to-motivate stage.

Is learning a language that is more similar to ones you know going to take less hours of study? Probably. But either way, motivation over hundreds or thousands of hours, for years, is going to be needed. So the goals you wish to achieve will be more important in your success, rather than how many 'hours' it will take.

What do you do if you get demotivated that it's taking SO LONG to hit the next language skill milestone? Fair concern. I got demotivated OFTEN by how much longer it took to reach milestones in Japanese compared to in French. First: try to keep perspective. It's normal for it to take more hours to understand certain things, if the language is not very similar to ones you know. You have to build a bigger foundation of understanding for lots of totally new stuff. Second: you're going to hate me but I'd suggest upping the study hours per day (or week). Studying Chinese RARELY demotivated me, despite it taking more actual hours of study to hit milestones compared to French, and why? Because I increased my study time for Chinese so I was still REACHING milestones in a reasonable amount of months (very similar to the months it took to hit French milestones). 2 hours a day of Chinese study was more than 1/2 an hour of French study, but 2 hours was doable. And it meant I still got to watch shows and read within a few months, and watch/read without looking many words up (depending on difficulty) by the end of year 1. Once you are doing the goals or sub-goals you have, it becomes so much easier to stay motivated. Once I could watch cdramas before they got translated, or read any novel I wanted using Pleco or Readibu to help? It was very easy to stay motivated and do things I WANTED to do in chinese. From there it was just practice/learn using activities I had the goal of doing.

Finally, similar to the suggestions above, if you find yourself in a motivation rut what can you do? I personally try to do 'study sprints' when I'm getting demotivated and need to see significant progress. What I do is pick a small goal, then spend 1-2 months studying as much as I can to improve in that goal. Suggestions: A beginner may make the goal to study the alphabet, a pronunciation guide, and 300 common words and see how far they get by the end of the month. (If at the end of the month the pronunciation is easier to hear and alphabet is easier to read then they succeeded - and they likely will). Another beginner may make the goal to read graded readers 1 hour per day or more all month and see how much they can read. (If the first graded reader they read is easier to read at the conclusion of the month, such as less unknown words or faster reading speed, then they succeeded - and they likely will see progress). A beginner/intermediate learner into flashcards might try to study as many flashcards in Anki as they can for a month. An intermediate learner may pick an audiobook and try to listen to AS MANY chapters as they can in a month, or may pick a novel and look up every unknown word while reading for 1 hour per day or more, until the end of the month. The idea is to pick a goal where you KNOW you're current skill level, work HARD on studying to improve that skill for a month, and then try to do the skill again and see how much progress you've made. I find it very motivating. It can take months to broadly notice progress milestones like managing to improve in your overall reading skill to tackle more difficult novels. But it can take just A MONTH to learn a few hundred new words and make the current novel you're reading become much EASIER to read, or the current show you're watching to become much EASIER to follow, or for the listening skills you're struggling with to become much more instant and reliable.

Example: one of my most recent sprints was to improve my Chinese listening skills. So for a month, I listened to audio flashcards of chinese-english sentences audio, and audiobook chapters (re-listening to each chapter a few times). I saw progress in 1. The audiobook got easier to understand over time, and 2. I tried watching a cdrama I've watched before, only this time I watched it without any subtitles, and it is now much easier to quickly comprehend and follow the lines (even without chinese subs). A sprint I did after a 2 year funk with minimal japanese progress was to cram study 2000 words in memrise Nukemarine's LLJ decks (took 3 months) then try to play a japanese video game I'd tried playing before the sprint. Another japanese sprint I did was listen to japaneseaudiolessons.com free lessons for a month, to work on improving my listening comprehension and recognition of word-order faster, and it did really help with seeing an improvement in those things.

As a beginner, I think the sprints can help with staying focused on small achieveable goals and seeing your progress (like reading daily, watching a show daily, studying X new words daily, going through a chapter of a grammar book weekly, etc). And then as you get farther and can actually do some of your sub-goals, can help with pushing yourself to some significant improvement in a particular area. (Like if you reached a sub goal of reading easy webnovels, it might be a month where you read a webnovel with more unique words that's 'harder' and look all unknown words up, and by the end of the month you see that medium-difficulty webnovels now feel as easy as the 'easy' ones did at the start of the month).

And then... if you study like me, which tends to be periods of a LOT of study followed by lulls where I might watch/read/listen to the language but not do much active study, then the sprint goal months tend to help cram in 100 hours of study every so often. So that you'll still (on average through the year) have studied 1-2+ hours a day. I do not focus well, and sprint goal months along with more relaxed months where I just watch/read/listen to stuff when I feel like it, is the only way I can get myself to study regularly. If you can consistently study daily, then sprint goal months can help you make Significant progress in a very specific area if some slow-progress area has been demotivating you. (And you can turn the sprint goals into challenges with friends, or tests to see what study methods work great for you versus bore you).

[natandacat]

Did too much yesterday (got very excited about standing before bed and i was like ooooh its just a few minutes before bed... what could happen) so today is gonna be strictly bed ridden but hey at least yesterday i baked delicious stuffed red peppers and apple terrine (with minimum help, i figured out how to use a low chair to stir things off the heat since the stove is too high for my wheelchair)

[juuria]

ghhhhh i want the school year over i feel like this cat but without the fun zaza jar

[boyybites]

Not redoing his whole ref, just his humanoid form since I am getting into getting comms of my ocs after about 12 years of vehemently not buying any for whatever reason.

Figured I'd use this ref for comms for key points I want the artists I commission to pay attention to because if he gets drawn with eurocentric features, hair, or god forbid abs I will cry in distress.

[disengaged]

alright anorexia is boring, let’s get yolked

[polux-aka-hyakunana]

The Dark Future - Chapter 5 - Sketch WIPS

[crowleyanthonys]

.

[beesorcery]

google how do i tell my dad that the reason i keep bringing up elon musk's transphobia isn't that i've got gen z political tunnel vision that makes me blind to his "innovation" in electric cars but because i am desperately crying out for you as the father of a trans child to feel just as outraged and angry as i am that that man has so much power