#and one was like a 4-5 star

[warblingandwriting]

So I wrote a short review of this book on goodreads... like forever ago, but I’m still thinking about it, and I wanted to write some more words about because I think it’s interesting, and also a potentially interesting case of an author feeling ‘stuck’ to a style? To be clear I pretty much don’t know anything about her except that I read this book and a few other reviews of it, but those other reviews made me a bit interested in why this book is structured in the way that it is. Full, longer review will be below the cut!

See, this book has three (really four, but maybe more like 3.5? I’ll get to it) sections. We begin with Rob, Now about a woman is a truly terrible marriage trying to manage her two daughters, the seemingly troublemaker-type Callie, who often bullies her younger, seemingly angelic, sister Annie. When Callie nearly chokes Annie, Rob decides she needs to go back to the place where she grew up, a sort of hippie compound called Sundial, and bring Callie with her to try and help her. As they embark on this road trip, we get the second perspective in the novel: Callie. Callie it seems can see ghosts, figments of dead animals, when she preserves and puts together their skeletons, as well as ‘Pale Callie’ who seems to be an alternate version of herself. As mother and daughter try to reconcile, they are inter-cut with what I think is the best, most compelling section: Rob, Then wherein Rob’s childhood is related to us through a series of extended flashbacks.

I rated this book 3 stars mostly for that third section. The relationship between Rob, her sister Jack, and their father and stepmother is an interesting and increasingly convoluted dynamic, and the tension between their genuine care for this compound that is all they’ve ever known, vs their desire to explore the world they’ve glimpsed in haphazard media left behind by the college students who come to visit Sundial and study the dogs raised there are genuinely interesting and affecting story beats, especially when Jack and Rob are written so sympathetically. I enjoyed the Callie sections as well, she’s an interesting character, and although young, also clearly has a compelling conflict, and the mystery of her pale friends is genuinely intriguing. She’s written well, and she feels young, but not too annoying. Still though, I wish that section wasn’t there simply due to the amount of distaste I have for the Rob, Now sections. I found Rob, Now exhausting, and it sort of felt like it only existed to foreshadow and hint at the far superior Rob, Then sections, which reveal certain mysteries as the book goes on. Thematically, the whole thing ties together, I just wish it had gone in a different direction both story-wise and theme-wise in general.

Present-day Rob feels almost nothing like her past self, which on the one hand can be explained away by many years, two children, and a terrible marriage, but to me it seemed more like a cheap way to bolster the ambiguity between Rob and Jack. At the end of the novel certain events take place that imply that the character we know as ‘Rob’ may actually have been the Jack of the flashbacks, something that ultimately didn’t seem to mean anything. Maybe that she is more dangerous than she seems (Jack apparently has some inherent aggression genes that were successfully suppressed in Rob). But since they attempted to suppress Rob’s in the same way, I’m just not sure if there’s a meaningful difference between ‘It was Jack the whole time and she’s dangerous!’ and ‘Rob’s special serum is actually wearing off and she’s dangerous!’

And then there’s the 0.5 section. Rob, in order to cope with her shit marriage writes some extremely dark fiction about children at a boarding school. I do not know why it was included in the final book, the sections are well-written, but they have absolutely no affect on the story, and don’t really tell us anything about Rob that we don’t either already know from the beginning (for instance, her animosity towards Callie) or find out about her by the end (mommy issues). I just think the story would be neater without it, and as much as on their own I enjoyed the segments, I felt like they didn’t add anything to a story I felt had too many different parts in regards to the content already.

It makes me a bit sad because I think I would really have loved the book it was only the Rob, Then sections (and if the ending of that particular section was slightly different). But, ultimately that’s a matter of personal taste, and as I mentioned in my other, shorter review, at this in my life I can relate a lot more to a young woman trying to figure out her place in the world than I can a grown woman dealing with a bad marriage and a rebellious child, so that may have coloured my thoughts. See, thematically, the book seems to largely be about recursion, and here’s where I’ll put in all the big plot twist spoilers, and talk about why I think marketing potentially had something to do with the reasons this book turned out the way it is, so be warned, there are actual (good) twists in this book, and they will be spoiled.

So essentially the woman that Rob thinks is her stepmother, and the man she thinks is her biological father are both her and Jack’s adoptive parents. Their real parents were horrifically abusive, and Rob killed them so that she and Jack could escape, but they lived out in the desert middle of nowhere (apparently because they sold drugs) and so when Rob and Jack got out the first place they found was Sundial. The two owners took the girls and apparently let them name themselves (and they gave themselves the names of their abusive parents-Robert and Jacqueline). However, as they put it in the book, the two girls were still in ‘survival mode’ and were basically feral. Especially Rob, who apparently tried to kill both her adoptive parents, and Jack at different intervals. In order to calm down both the girls they basically started experimenting on them, and they are actually testing dogs at the facility with the same serum they used on Rob and Jack to try to mitigate any side-effects they might have.

This makes Rob lose her memory of what happened before, so her sister creates a sort of fantasy for her where their adoptive father had a wife who died, who was their mother, and their current adoptive mother is their stepmother. This is all revealed non-linearly, as the actual story of these two girls basically deciding whether or not to leave Sundial takes place. Jack has started to have visions (that seem really similar to Callie’s current visions of dead creatures), and has been acting weird and distant from Rob. She eventually tries to run off with one of the college students studying there, but Mia (the adoptive mother) catches them and brings her back. Jack says, basically, that she wanted to escape. This also gets the guy she tries to run off with kicked out of his fancy school because she’s underage at the time.

Eventually Rob decides to go to college, but Jack says she can’t come since her violent tendencies have come back too strongly for her to live a normal life. At college Rob meets the same guy Jack tried to run off with, and they date for a while, then break up because she’s not trad enough for him, but the break up is sort of the catalyst for Rob making friends with her previously distant roommates, and college life starts to look up for her (plus that guy sucks anyway, so really everything is going great). Then Jack shows up and gets Rob to come back to Sundial with her. They find out they’re pregnant by the same guy, and during a fight between them, Rob loses her baby. She really wanted to keep it, but everyone resolves to basically stay at Sundial and raise the remaining baby together. After she’s born, though, Jack hurts one of the more dangerous dogs and lets it in the house because she doesn’t believe she can continue to be good, or be a good mother. Basically she wants to ‘test’ the serum by putting one of the dogs in distress, because she thinks she’ll act the same way if she becomes distressed.

Everyone dies except for Rob (or maybe Jack, this is the point where present day Rob, who is telling this part to Callie, may be lying) and the baby, who Rob resolves to raise. However, the shitty guy that dated both of them shows up at this point (Rob’s roommate/friend called him because she was worried about her) and basically says they can pretend they just showed up and found everyone dead from the dogs, and she should marry him so they can raise the baby, and so that he can have the ‘traditional’ life he’s always wanted.

When present-day Rob finishes the story her husband shows up, wanting to kill her and take Callie (who is his favourite) back. Instead Callie and Rob kill him, and bury him in the desert, then head home. On the drive back Callie reveals that she hasn’t been the one killing animals and making them her pale friends, Anna has been killing them the whole time, and Callie, out of compassion, collected their bones so that they could have a new new afterlife with her (and Pale Callie is of course implied to be Rob’s biological fetus that was miscarried). She also reveals that Anna loves her mother so much she has plan to kill the neighbour because the husband was having an affair with her. They race home hoping to catch Anna before she does anything, but also resolving to help her cover it up if they arrive and the neighbour is already dead.

And I get the themes here, the recursion in Callie and Jack, the sins of the parents passed down to their children (from the original Robert and Jaquelin, to the main sisters Rob and Jack, and then down to Callie and Anna), but I just think an ending with Rob, alone with her niece, unsure of what to do next, would be a much more effective ambiguous ending. Then we don’t know if the sins of the mother are passed down, there is hope there, and despair, and potential for Callie and Rob. But perhaps I’m just too invested in a somewhat happy ending.

However, I don’t think this is a terrible book, and my summary is truncated so if you read this and it sounds interesting I wouldn’t ward you away from it. That said, after I read this book, I learned a little about the author’s previous novel, The Last House on Needless Street that was apparently a huge success, and it made me wonder...

Now this is all complete speculation, created whole-cloth from observing media trends, and reading the reviews of Sundial that compared it to the author’s previous book, The Last House on Needless Street, and I think some of the nature of this book, in particular the Rob, Now sections may have been to appease a publisher that wanted something similar to her previous novel. See, that book is about a man who was suspected of the murder of a child many years ago, but no one could ever prove it. And to me, the sort of blurring of morality, and the uncertainty of which characters are good or bad, seems very in line with what happens in Sundial, in particular the obscurity and twists around Rob and Jack’s life. And a part of me wonders if the book was supposed to be at one point just the ‘then’ sections, and the ‘now’ sections were added later because they fit in with the previous book more. And, on top of that, the twists and turns that certain reviews implied were evocative of Needless Street as well.

Again, I have no proof, it was just a thought that crossed my mind. Anyway, I have written a lot of words on what I still think is a three-star book, fun read but not life changing, so I’ll end things here. If you are a fan of psychological horror, I think you’d really enjoy this one.

[buttercupshands]

I started drawing this next day after I finished Act 6

13 or so days and it's finished!

Main things are traditional and Loop's body was edited digitally after

Unedited it looks like this

I've been torn on how to do Loop's body for the entirety of lining, also

A bit sad the main lines are visible only as a wip, most of this thing is literally just a ton of sharp lines

I think it's also my first day of drawing, Loop is just a sketch here (feat. my leg)

I even finished the beans before it so they were a moral support, because if you let me things like this take a year

[shoezuki]

Thinkin bout Sampo Koski rn as like. His character n what we get of him in honkai star rail and he fucking. He confuses me like. There has to be So Much more to him like

The general vibes of him and especially how other characters treat him is that of comic relief, a punching bag, a goof, just a slick conman causing trouble. It's genuinely difficult NOT to insult him n treat him badly with dialogue options and any time he's even mentioned March 7th hisses at him. He's literally a cryptid in belobog. He's a joke.

But. But. There's his light cone. It makes me insane. It contradicts all of that.

In it he's competent. He's badass. He's omnipotent. He's able to somehow know a sniper from however far away is locked on him and address them specifically.

And even like... in the entire plot of jarilo-vi he's spoken of like he's not much. He's a 4 star character. But he's practically as present as bronya and seele and Gepard and his involvement in the story is ASTRONOMICAL. He has a part in every major event. He's the one who drags the Trailblazers and bronya into the Underworld. He's the one who takes you to svarog, to the overworld again. He gets Natasha and saves you from svarog. He's the first character you ever meet on jarilo.

And he seems to just vanish before you confront cocolia. But no. Sampo is the one who has the last word and wraps up the entire mission on jarilo-vi. He fucking breaks the forth wall. Jarilo-vi both begins and ends with Sampo.

He calls himself shadowy comic relief yet he seemingly orchestrated everything. What is he. What the fuck is he doing. What else is up with him and when will we get more of him. I want to bite into him and tear him apart.

[lunar-alden]

Okay yall I’m CONVINCED this has to be because it was my birthday!!!!!!

Like the game let’s you celebrate your birthday in game for 1 week and literally since the day it started my pulls have been fucking wild????

Like I got Rafayel in my first 10 pull and then when I did a 10 pull with the pity guarantee, I got not just Zayne who was my precise wish, but Xavier too (so both the limited cards I didn’t have) AND an extra Zayne so I could rank him up a level?????

This cannot be a coincidence, especially with getting a 5 star on two separate non-pity 10 pulls, there’s just no way skdjksks

If anyone else has a birthday coming up soon and they have the means to test this theory out please do and tell me the results because this has been absolutely insane!!!!

[janeirl]

★ BUY THE STARS ★

[ep2nd]

@remy-a

Don't have specific theories but here's some I like and/or made myself

- Macaque's creator is the Wind, or how I call them, the Winds of the World

- The other 2 Celestial Primates, Baboon and Gibbon, are older than Wukong and Macaque and have lived another life time before them

- Erlang Shen was probably sent on a mission far away so he doesn't know what's happened, I'd like to think he's on Vacation, but with Wukong once again chasing trouble and Heaven in danger, seems unlikely he'd be on vacation without anyone trying to get his help

- Okay this is a long one- back in the Spider Queen special when the gang went to Heaven and it was weirdly empty- I feel like someone on the inside, Heaven, knew what they were doing and cleared most of Heaven to help them

- Same as above, mostly, I feel like that same person ordered the noodles in Seaspn 1 a Hero is born. 1, PIF hadn't tried Pigys Noodles till later in the season, Redson only cared about 'His moment' in freeing his father and probably wouldn't order noodles in case that's ruined, the Bull Clones can't eat what's the point, and FINNALY, Wukong didn't know MK so how could he just order noodles specifically for MK to be there?!

Just feels like someone's been helping the Gang since the beginning

And my theory is that it's the Gold Star of Venus

Why?

The only member of Heaven to usually have a brain cell qnd voice of reason, 2, he's helped Wukong and Tripitaka before, 3, he's weirdly been absent, especially in season 4 considering he's the Jade Emperors assistant

- Oh and also I think Wukong didn't know Nuwa created him till Season 4

[chimerahyperfix]

You are a scientist. You like testing theories, making hypothesis. Working with dangerous materials that get you scolded. You are a scientist, and you are also a writer! You’ve swung at a few things before: sappy poems, work papers, crab, you’ve even attempted a horror short at Mirabelle’s inquiry. You’re favorite thing to write, though, are just basic letters.

You like to write letters. It's easier, to you, to write your thoughts on a piece of paper and hide it somewhere the recipient can find than to tell them what you think face-first. You’ve done it for years, long before you even came to the House to learn about the Change religion. A childhood habit that’s rolled over through your life like a wave on the sea.

So, of course, when time begins to loop, you write. Many, many letters. They all get lost to time when it twists back, and now, many loops in, that leaves a hole in your heart and a spot in your brain you can’t itch, for the words of each letter are mostly forgotten before you fight the King. It’s… fine, you guess? You can word things as many ways as you need to. Anything described can be described some more, after all.

For the first handful of loops, you wrote the same letters. Rather sappy, lovey things, your specialty. The furthest depths of your heart smeared onto a page for eternity, for you love and love and love, and you want those around you to know it.

Though as time trudges on, the same twenty four hours over and over in a nice single circuit built for it to run through, built by wishes and stars and twisted leaf-baring branches, so do your thoughts; therefore your letters move so, too, to adapt. More theoretical things. Questions. Ifs, ands ors buts and whys. Sadder ones after the bad loops, wailing and endlessly upset and mourning those who froze and those who were killed for standing in the King's way.

They get angrier as time goes on. More enraged. Wrath melts into the corners, edges fold and tear and warp under the weight. You stop delivering them, because you're here in this time loop hell to protect the ones you love, and you'd just make it worse if you gave them a letter like that.

You write a scathing letter, once. You write it after an absolutely abysmal loop, ending with blood and tears and probably the loudest you've ever screamed. It flows onto the page easily, and you leave it out on your desk, because you were hungry and hadn't eaten that loop with how beside yourself stressed you were.

Mirabelle finds it. Asks you, quite worried, if you're okay. You must've said something, and it had to be bad, because she flinched away from you like you'd tried to light her ablaze.

You panicked. Time looped.

Never again.

You hide them, after that. Shoved in your pillowcases or in piles of books, stacks of other papers. In the barrels. When you write only one or two you shove them in a bottle and push them to the back of your potions.

You're a shedding snake, a leopard changing its spots. Time is your prisoner and you are it's, and that melts into you as a human being until you are flesh and blood and twenty four hours that shouldn't continue.

Words spill from you, your mind, onto the page. You don't read them anymore. Just write and write and write, and tuck them away and pray no one finds them. You long for the days you could sit and write sappy love letters-- and sometimes, you still do them, but they're tinged with something, regret or rage or the absolute despair you feel, they're wrong, so they're tucked away as well. Letters just wrong, noticeably so. You’d be asked what’s wrong. Cornered. You can hear it now, “What’s wrong? What does this mean?” And all you can think of is the horrors you’ve seen.

One of these loops, whenever you get out, you expect to have a pile of ramblings with time-burnt letters and tear-stained edges. Whenever you get out, if there are any, you'll burn them. As a rite of passage, or something. A Change. Because time changed you, and the less people have to know about it the better. You can't get rid of your rotten voice or the tiredness in your bones or the way your brain has twisted to think, but you CAN get rid of letters.

You like to write. The horrors you write, of twisted time and dying and what being frozen in time is like— it can go. No one needs to know. No one WILL know. It’ll all fall on you, like every other crabbing thing in the time loops. And that’s okay, it’s enough.

[robotsandramblings]

i had a really funny revelation that Crosshair and Echo were [during S3] and still are sharing the Havoc-4 call sign, probably even playfully fighting over it, now that Crosshair is back on the team,,

then i realized that Crosshair probably took up the Havoc-2 call sign because Tech is gone

IT STARTED OFF CUTE AND NOW I'M JUST REALLY SAD ALL OVER AGAIN 😭😭😭😭😭😭

[gosteon]

TWO! OF! THEM!

[planetarythorns]

Who.

Whose Nene am I stealing.

[burnxngslash]

❝ I'm gonna ｆｉｇｈｔ for what's right, today I'm speaking my mind and if it 𝙠𝙞𝙡𝙡𝙨 me tonight 𝐈 𝐖𝐈𝐋𝐋 𝐁𝐄 𝐑𝐄𝐀𝐃𝐘 𝐓𝐎 𝐃𝐈𝐄. ❞

➥ Rules. Muses. Starter call. Symbol starter call.

It’s ya boy Jay here. Finally out of the abyss of laziness to make a decent promo for the blog. If you’re interested in interacting with a blog filled to the brim with characters from various anime and games then give this a like or reblog and I’ll come find you. I ‘preciate and love all y’all.

[rubydreamsuwu]

Day 23: Adult Cartoon

[buttercupshands]

Had a random thought of sketching some of the save files of isat I had after completing the game

Each one actually had a specific role, place and dialogues checked

It's also the achievement runs I had

Some closeups of the ones I liked

Runs for two hats achievement specifically one before the fight and one after, Twin Siffrins! Because the saves look exactly the save if you don't know them

Two different epilogue saves one before 100% and one after

A normal Act 4 ending save but with Siffrin being the same Siffrin from OP save

OP achievement save Siffrin one fight and Mirabelle is at max level

Original "main" save of the folder before dagger save replaced them. First time I saved a game twice and left save 1 as it was.

Dagger save for all it's worth is actually harmless created from ng+ to get all Loop dialogues

[niuniente]

Client: I'm going to leave you a bad review. Me: That's okay, spiritual reading services can sometimes be off the spot so I understand. No one can score perfect 100% in any field, in any job. Besides, I always encourage all clients to trust their own guts anyway so good that you did that. Client: 5/5 stars, didn't like this one. Me: ... Okay. I guess?

[nyxofdemons]

honestly fascinated by the realization that blitz... is one of the only main characters that hasn't ever sung. if you discount moxxie's bad trip (which i do), like. blitz is the main character and yet out of the whole main + major supporting cast, he's literally one of three figures that hasn't ever had a song. when do we get to see this happen

[raisinchallah]

there was truly something special in the really good episodes of season 3 tbh i think they have this fascinating blend of elements and weird haunted energy like things are literally falling apart or you cannot actually see the stage that are kind of unmatched anywhere else in the show... tholian web spectre of the gun the empath is there in truth no beauty enterprise incident all have this weird undercurrent there is something just slightly off a bit haunted.... truly delightful...