#and so I just included a small bit of it

[uncanny-tranny]

I think so many people are so deeply alienated from themselves that they have no clue how to exercise their free will and autonomy. For some, this alienation runs so deep that they are afraid of their own autonomy and humanity. It is completely understandable why one would have those feelings, but it can be worrisome.

I want to help others who feel this way, so here are small things I have done to exercise my free will:

Add "guilty pleasure" songs to playlists and actually listen to them (I have a ton of late 1990s-early 2000s music I listen to now proudly that I never listened to in the past out of shame)

Getting the décor item, bath set, bed spread, ect. in the patterns you like, even if it's "childish" (I got a dinosaur-themed wastebasket from the kids' décor section and I adore it)

Taking a new route to get to a place you go to often

Eat dessert first

Celebrate well, and often

Collect things that are "odd" or don't seem like an "acceptable" thing to collect (somebody on my "for you" page collects dandelion crayola crayons and it was so cool!!!!!!)

Incorporate one new piece in an outfit you wear frequently (e.g., a new chain, a necklace, ribbons, bracelets, ect.). Challenge yourself to add onto the outfits if you feel up for it.

Sing along to songs without worrying that you sound "good" or your intonation is completely accurate

Read a book from a genre you weren't allowed to read as a kid (comics, thrillers, mysteries, anything!)

Walk without having a specific destination or goal

Pick up a new craft without expecting yourself to master it or to ever be "good" enough. Get your hands messy.

I don't want to shame anybody for not feeling as though they have free will or that they are exempt from exercising it. However, I wanted to give ideas so that you might read this list and find your own ways to express your intrinsic autonomy and will. You deserve to be a person, to feel alive, not just living. That is what our lives are for.

[days-light]

wing, scales, fire? :3

Wing: share a snippet that you daydreamed about before writing it (or a snippet that you were really looking forward to writing.)

The song is dark and commanding, like Belladonna is in control of the entire room. I can almost see the glimmers of magic seeping between the keys of the piano. 

It feels as if she's channeling her entire life force into this one piece of music, and if she performs like this every night it’s incredible that she’s even still alive.

Scales: share a snippet that describes something. (can be a person, a place, a feeling, etc.)

Her fingers tap anxiously at the glass. I take it and place it gently on the table when it starts to tremble in her hands. “You look horrible.” She definitely does, with old, dirty clothes and dark circles carved under her eyes, but it’s less of an observation and more of a hint to push her to notice how badly she’s been neglecting herself. “And you’re at the peak of beauty yourself,” Gwen hisses. “What do you want?”

Fire: share a snippet with some dialogue you’d like to show off.

“I trust Roko about as far as I can throw them, which at the moment is most likely less than a foot,” Gwen replies, running her fingers through her hair in a useless attempt to tame it. “And you need to have some faith in Luscin.”

[zo-lost-and-confused]

I am finally finished! I didn't go with ships and instead more of their personalities, so don't look too deep into how they are paired up. All six of them got in trouble together anyway, I would imagine.

Also went with their default looks, because I didn't feel like figuring out something new lol

[plumbus-central]

i love imagining scenarios where morty and summer meet rick and minnie when they were their age, whether through time travel, parallel universe, age regression, or some other sci fi nonsense.

god bless him mortys trying hard to relate to his teenage grandmother from the late 70s

[skunkes]

might sound weird to say as a person with a couple ocs who have Big Horrible Event(s) in their backstories or as a person who has like 3 ocs total bc he sucks at writing and as a person who hopes their ocs arent too Boring with [the thing im about to mention] but the thing about writing [characters] and [people] is that like.

any little thing a person experiences can take up their whole existence... its actually something "fun" to experience as i meet new ppl and do more things. My friend had something happen that she'll be talking about forever. I had several things happen last year that ill never stop talking about, some of which other ppl think werent that bad actually. In the same way I'll forever remember about the way my sister accidentally insulted me almost 10 years ago, it's really interesting and Fun to find and assign smaller things like that to characters...its really Real. some people's dealbreakers are other people's solvable problems etc etc

[trifoliate-undergrowth]

I went to a thrift store after work in my NPS uniform and a little old lady asked me if I worked there. At the thrift store. The National Parks Service manages your local Savers

[creatively-cosmic]

missing numbers was secretly a ploy to get really really into doing worldbuilding based on this extremely specific in-universe pseudo-meta horror based in the pokemon franchise. a lot of stuff we're cooking past gens 1+2 is original content based in the spirit of the classic trainerpastas based on those games... something something its all about the natural next step and the world of Pokemon is so fundamentally fucked. idkkkk smiles

[justalittlebluetiefling]

I haven't been involved with coaching for almost 3 months now and somehow I am still getting dragged into the drama.

[vickysaurus]

"Just because I have a model's body doesn't mean you can use me as one!"

King's season 1 outfits!

[daisychainsandbowties]

I got very strong night fury vibes from the cat🥰😩🥰🥰

me too! i think toothless is a slightly inauspicious name for a cat since she cannot retract hers at will, but she does hiccup after i give her milk… 🤔

so far we were thinking Frodo (on account of the literal sopping wet kitten vibes) or Apollo (because we watched a moon landing documentary tonight) or Artemis (because we watched a moon landing documentary tonight and this makes one think of the mars missions). i did my due diligence and suggested we call her Sushi but i was shot down fall of icarus style 😔

[novelconcepts]

fleeting

Van's always been the kind of person who develops fleeting crushes on friends. There's a kind of relief in the temporary nature of these feelings before they level out. She doesn't mind.

Most of the time.

(based on conversation with @owltrifecta)

T, 6807 words

Some things, Van reasons, just aren’t meant to last. Some things aren’t meant to last, and that’s fine. More than fine. Refreshing. Fantastic, in its own way. They’re like summer rainstorms: brief, punchy, and easily forgotten. Not everything’s like this. Her mother’s always predictable, always gonna be. Off at five, drunk by six: the Vicky Palmer way. Movies, too, are a certainty. Feelings for Michelle Pfeiffer, for example, are eternal; god bless Grease 2, god bless Catwoman. But other things—things like the warm, gooey feelings that drum up when another girl laughs at her jokes—don’t stick around long. It’s good that way. Reassuring. None of them last, so there’s no reason to worry. No reason to think about it much at all.

[thebuttsmcgee]

Ive seen some people get mixed up (also sorry if this comes off pompous I swear I'm not I just really fuckin enjoy these movies ghggb) so I'd like to clarify that the Big Bad Wolf is an already established character in the Shrek world.

And he's just some guy. He also might transform into a human woman with a strong accent when there's a full moon according to a halloween special but ya know.

The wolf that chases Puss in Last Wish tho is, Death, straight up, as he said.

Some promotional media did advertise him as the double b wolf but that was just to not spoil the surprise. (Apparently some promos would also just call him The Wolf so yeup.)

However, it's also not unreasonable to mix up the 2 since in Shrek's ogreverse (ogre universe I NEED to coin the phrase c'mon now) there's been a few number of soft rebooted characters from a lot of Shrek media.

But to go off strictly from the movies, the 2 most obvious examples are Rumpelstiltskin and the 3 bears.

The left depictions are really just one-off jokes/background characters that rarely appeared in more than 5 scenes from previous movies (Shrek 3 and 1 respectively), while the right depictions are the later focused antagonists that got plenty of screen time (Shrek 4ever after and Puss in Boots 2 the Last Wish respectively).

The difference tho is that the original depictions are really Just one-off jokes. Nothing more than just something in the background. The Big Bad Wolf however is an already established part of Shrek's friend group alongside the 3 little pigs, Pinocchio and Gingy.

Basically, not someone they could just easily make a soft reboot about like with the aforementioned 2 examples.

It is incredibly likely tho that DreamWorks did base Death a bit off of the real life folklore of the Big Bad Wolf. Considering how much they love old tales, and how much old stories had him as the main antagonist. (Plus c'mon. Wolf from Bad Guys literally says he's the big bad in every story, they're definitely self aware at this point.)

Having the penultimate depiction of the end of life itself in their fairytale inspired long-running world be loosely based on the most popular antagonist from old folklore stories is most likely on purpose, and I gotta say, based.

It's also likely that Death can take whatever form he chooses. But I'm cool with gnarly wolf form. 👍

[aplusod]

Happy new year! Today is Shizu's 14th anniversary as an UTAU, so to celebrate, here's some new art.

[averlym]

which is gayer? SIX or Adamandi (real)

adamandi

[pastafossa]

I'm going to be really sad about losing a bunch of my art supplies/pieces so if that's not your thing, feel free to scroll by.

Nothing like going out to the garage to get some wood for your upcoming projects only to find there had been a leak, water pooled on the floor beneath the boxes in your work area, and had ruined a bunch of the wood you'd been painstakingly collecting for carving for years.

The irony: most of the wood that was ok? Common basswood that's easily replaced. It was mostly my rarer woods that were ruined.

Cherry, maple, walnut, cedar, buckeye. Woods with beautiful grains. Precious butternut that's going extinct. Gifts from my wood carving teacher and mystery wood castoffs from other woodworkers who didn't need them. Odd shapes and pieces I had plans for. Gone. Everything in this pic, from what's inside the box to what's in the can (some of which can't be seen) had to be tossed due to mold from the water damage. You can't put a price on this wood emotionally. I literally just want to cry. Fucking years, some of them already partly carved and I just hadn't had time to finish them since moving here.

The only silver lining I can think of is that I have another box of wood in the house, with some rarer woods in it. But this still really, really hurts.