#and so if youre finding the deriv you cannot use it

[sunless-not-sinless]

(i am too tired (and ill) to figure out if yall are being serious or not - so ill just treat it as if you are)

if you try to prove d/dx sin x = cos x or d/dx cos x = -sin x you will get this exact limit*. because youre finding the derivative you cannot use lhoptials. so its usually circular reasoning to solve this limit with lhopitals.

.

*d/dx sinx = lim_h (sin(x+h) - sin x)/h

= lim_h (sin x cos h + cos x sin h - sin x)/h

= sin x lim_h (cos h - 1)/h + cos x lim_h (sin h)/h

we do not yet knos d/dx sin x = cos x, so we cannot lhoptials. unless we are evil.

Use l'Hopital's rule to find the limit of sin(x)/x as x tends to 0

[vikasmama]

that mean caitlyn drabble you wrote nghh *short circuiting noises*

distracting her while she's trying to work, filling out some ridiculous paperwork or something that means nothing to you. so desperate it hurts, trying not to make it obvious how you rut against one of her office chairs watching her work. her long fingers twirling her pen and her brows furrowed in concentration, all fueling your neediness until she stops pretending she doesn't hear you and reprimands you for being such a whore omgggg

��� need to be her dumb office pet.

⋆౨ৎ ₊cw. — (men + minors dni!) afab!reader, mean dom!caitlyn, fingering, choking, edging, degradation, dumbification…. gulp. no aftercare ˊᴖˋ use of “whore”, “slut”, “my love / dear”. i fully ran w this teehee!

“sit in my office with me, dear.” caitlyn airily suggests, trailing her slender fingers down your arm, squeezing before passing you in the hall.

“please. i work better with you around.”

it’s hard to deny caitlyn of anything, and usually you wouldn’t. you won’t because her hair is down, cascading down her shoulders and back, and she’s wearing that tight, black turtleneck you love. so, yes, you will sit pretty in her office like she wants, even though you hesitated from how needy you’d gotten with her simple touch in the hallway.

now, it is becoming more difficult by the second to ignore the warm ache between your legs. she’s reading something, analyzing it? she’s completely engrossed, eyebrows creased in the same way they appear when she’s concentrated on stuffing her cock into you just right. she readjusts in her seat, leaning fully back against the chair and bringing the document closer, giving you a full view of her pillowy thighs begging for you to have a seat. her favorite fountain pen is twirled back and forth between her fingers, and you’re suppressing whines at the thought of being the object.

you’ve become incredibly thankful for the armrests that the chairs in her office have. your hands dig into the cushioning, holding all your restraint to not moan and make a scene in your grip. your thighs clench together just watching her, slowly grinding yourself into the chair as best you can. it isn’t enough, it never stood a chance of being so. just a weak imitation of her fingers, her tongue, her dick - anything your imagination could conjure. still, you find a decent angle every few rock of your hips and that’s enough to satiate you for now.

( fast forward to her recognizing your labored breaths, calling you over and demanding you display yourself on top her desk since you want to act so “perverted”. )

“you cannot sit still for more than a few minutes?” caitlyn chastises you, a bite to her words you often hear when she’s irritated. your once suppressed whines come out full throttle now, arching off the desk when her slender fingers push deeper into you.

“so desperate. you’re pathetic.”

“c-cait-”

“shut up. stupid sluts don’t get to speak to me. you’ll cum and then leave me to my fucking work.” your eyes are tightly squeezed close, though if they weren’t you’d see how her cold gaze doesn’t once leave your face. her one uncovered eye watches you, the sadisticness in her deriving pleasure from how utterly dumb she makes you. she lets out a sigh as your bucking hips knock a few papers off the desk, her jaw clenching.

pushing you further back atop the surface, caitlyn invades your space more. her fingers deftly increasing in speed, highlighting the dirty, depraved squelching sounds your cunt makes. you suck her in so eagerly, wetness pooling under you, over her documents. your lover grabs your face, focusing your withering attention on her. still, her eyes remain on yours. even as her thumb finds your clit and you thrash a little from the overwhelm, she stares. caitlyn’s always been one for nonverbal communication, actions are louder than words and all that. she’s learned with much time how much she likes to watch. to see how you tremble, the pout you wear and extra whines you let out when she calls you names. caitlyn thinks you’re so beautiful like this, a sweet, dumb mess all for her. her poor baby.

“tell me, do you have any idea how important this work is?everything i must fill out, sign off, to keep this city going?” a third finger is added to her strokes somewhere during her questioning, you don’t even remember feeling it. you can’t remember much of anything. she squeezes your cheeks hard, pursing your lips adorably as your sounds become garbled. she scoffs out a dry laugh, “of course not. this is all you think about.”

you nod, too excitedly for the way you’re being spoken to. she lets your face go and you moan out her name, digging your nails into the grooves of wood to steady yourself. the stretch caitlyn gives you has your eyes crossing, and you’re quickly teetering over the edge of cumming.

“cait, pl-please,” the only thing you can think to do is beg because you know she knows. she always does. “let me cum, please! ohmygod, fuckfuck- mmph!” and she lets you beg, even if she also knows she’s not going to give you what you want.

“you want to cum, my love?”

her accented voice leveled, unaffected, just sounds so fucking good. you're pulsing. squeaking out series of pleads and yeses, your thighs twitch uncontrollably and almost squeeze around her arm. you can feel it, your lower stomach tightening and it’s so hot; your mind goes blank and you’re ready to scream— and she stops.

“hm. dumb whore. how naive.”

all the adrenaline, titillation you’d built falls flat. the sudden loss of stimulation makes you sniffle, breathing heavy as your beating heart does its best to still. she doesn’t pull out, just lets you grapple with how full you are with nothing to do about it. you have half the mind to whine and be a brat about it, call her mean and turn your nose up at her advances. but then you’d be like this for hours, taking her fingers or whatever else she decides you deserve and maybe you wouldn’t get to cum at all… yeah, you’ll be good and take it.

“do you honestly think you deserve to? tearing me away from my work like this, dripping all over my documents. i should just leave you like this.” her scolding has you whining like a kicked puppy. she shifts her fingers ever so slightly to tease, fighting back a chuckle with how quickly she feels your pussy clench and try to suck them deeper in. “i’m just reinforcing bad behavior, aren’t i?”

“no, fuck- please! please, it won’t happen again,” it will. “i’ll be good, caitlyn, i swear!” you won’t.

shit, you’re breathtaking. the sheen of sweat covering your forehead, the tip of your nose, makes you glow akin to a star. she wants to kiss away your frown, pinch your rosy cheeks, pamper you as she usually does. and of course she wants to see you cum, right after she’s taught you a bit about patience.

a gasp catches in your throat when she leisurely starts circling your clit once again. it’s too slow, you need more, more. though before you’re given the chance to consider complaining, fingers wrap around your neck and press deliciously into your skin. fuck, what were you even thinking about? she pulls you forward by her hold, looking down on you with a merciless smile. you try not to buck or squirm under her touch so she keeps going, your wrecked moans strained while you let her have her way.

“you do know how to sit still, then.” eyes meet and a whimper escapes you at her unwavering gaze. you feel completely brainless by now, unable to compute anything other than getting her to keep fucking you. you attempt a nod to show that yes, you’re learning. please, please just go faster. caitlyn seems to appreciate it, humming and bringing her lips to your ear.

“good sluts that wait get rewarded.”

and then her forgotten fingers are curling inside you, dragging along your walls and hitting your favorite spot with more speed she’d given you previously. caitlyn’s fingers squeeze tighter around your neck, muddling your brain more and keeping you in place for her viewing pleasure. her entire study smells like sex, the air is hot and so are you, so hot and warm — she just started again and you feel the warmth building up as quickly as before. “thank you…thaank youthankyou-” your gratitude messily falls from your lips, but you’re cut off by your girl’s annoyed tone.

“stop whining and cum.”

her permission gives you the final push you needed. feeling yourself reach your peak, whole body tensed and seeing white, it’s so much. it’s so good. you claw at caitlyn’s arm holding your throat for stability while her fingers fuck you through it expertly. she hums in approval when you start trembling, thighs burning and tired and overstimulation starting to build from her mercilessness. she releases your throat, and with some last few strokes she also pulls out, inspecting the stickiness coating her now pruned fingers.

“open.” and immediately your jaw falls slack like the trained slut she’s made of you. you suck like it’s all you know, eyes rolling back from her prodding on your tongue. for once, caitlyn coos soothingly, rubbing one of your thighs to ease your comedown.

“there you are. come, dear, let’s get you cleaned up.”

maybe she’ll bend you over the desk next time.

— 𖦹₊⊹ vikasmama.

[dduane]

Okay, now I'm cranky

Not that I even do more than glance at LinkedIn every few weeks or so, as I have friends there. But THIS is beyond the pale. (Or even the Pale, which is another story. Is this actually a real person based in Limerick?? [I have my doubts.) But if so, they should be ashamed.)

(transcription:)

Hi [(theoretical) person whose name I've obscured],

I'm not at all sure why material from your employer is winding up on my feed.

I am a NY Times bestselling novelist and screenwriter with pushing fifty years' experience in traditional publishing and other media created by actual living, breathing beings out of genuine human experience. AI-based prompt "writing" is utterly antithetical to everything I do in my work... especially as it is founded on machine-based excreta derived from routines trained using material illicitly sourced, without our permission, from myself and thousands of my colleagues.

Assuming that you actually exist except as a prompt-based construct yourself (which is by no means certain), please do us both a kindness and remove me immediately from whatever list caused the system to recommend me to you—as if there is a worse possible fit for our two schools of thought anywhere in this solar system, I can't imagine where that might be. (Somewhere in the Oort Cloud, possibly. No other possibilities immediately suggest themselves.)

Meanwhile, I wish you well in your further endeavours (doing you the possibly unwarranted courtesy of assuming that you're real). ANY possible further endeavours that have nothing to do with this horrific and deeply unethical area of employment, which cannot conceivably do anything in even the short term but damage your (theoretically) immortal soul... not to mention the ecology of our (theoretically) shared planet. 

With the best possible regards under the circumstances, and hopes for your eventual (if not swift) rehabilitation,

Diane Duane

PS: Please try to find an avatar that looks less like it was created by AI.

And also: please say to your heartless and conscienceless employers, on my behalf, "FUCK YOU AND THE HORSE YOU RODE IN ON."

[daretoassume]

77 quotes to change your perspective

carl jung

"if the path before you is clear, you are probably on someone else's."

"until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life, and you will call it fate."

"the world will ask who you are, and if you do not know, the world will tell you."

"it all depends on how we look at things and not how they are in themselves."

"there is no coming to consciousness without pain."

joe dispenza

"can you accept the notion that once you change your internal state, you do not need the external world to provide you with a reason to feel joy, gratitude, appreciation, or any other elevated emotion?"

"if you want a new outcome, you will have to break the habit of being yourself and reinvent a new self."

"if you were to start investing your attention and energy into the unknown, your body would then be able to follow your mind into the unknown—a new experience in your future."

"if you cannot get beyond your stresses, your problems, and your pain, you cannot create a new future where those things do not exist."

"if you focus on the known, you get the known. if you focus on the unknown, you create a possibility."

eckhart tolle

"the primary cause of unhappiness is never the situation but your thoughts about it."

"life is not as serious as the mind makes it out to be."

"you find peace not by rearranging the circumstances of your life but by realizing who you are at the deepest level."

"pleasure is always derived from something outside you, whereas joy arises from within."

"most of the so-called bad things that happen in people's lives are due to unconsciousness. they are self-created, or rather ego-created."

wayne dyer

"when you judge another, you do not define them, you define yourself."

"you are not stuck where you are unless you decide to be."

"begin to see yourself as a soul with a body rather than a body with a soul."

"be miserable. or motivate yourself. whatever has to be done, it is always your choice."

"you are what you choose to be today. not what you have chosen to be before."

louise hay

"every thought we think is creating our future."

"i do not fix problems. i fix my thinking. then problems fix themselves."

"you have been criticizing yourself for years, and it has not worked. try approving of yourself and see what happens."

"there is no written law that says that because you once believed something, you have to continue to believe it forever."

"the more we love ourselves, the less we project our pain onto the world."

jen sincero

"if you are serious about changing your life, you will find a way. if you are not, you will find an excuse."

"your life is your party. you get to choose how you invite people and experiences and things into it."

"you need to go from wanting to change your life to deciding to change your life."

"what you tell yourself on a daily basis is more powerful than you know."

"comparison is the fastest way to take all the fun out of life."

tony robbins

"it is your decisions and not your conditions that determine your destiny."

"you cannot have a plan for your day until you have a plan for your life."

"belief in limits creates limited people."

"the only thing that is keeping you from getting what you want is the story you keep telling yourself."

"if i could uncover what beliefs and values control me, i could literally redesign myself."

marcus aurelius

"the happiness of your life depends upon the quality of your thoughts."

"our life is what our thoughts make it."

"the best revenge is not to be like your enemy."

"every living organism is fulfilled when it follows the right path for its own nature."

"today i escaped anxiety. or no, i discarded it because it was within me, in my own perceptions—not outside."

jay shetty

"the more we define ourselves in relation to the people around us, the more lost we are."

"actually, the greatest detachment is being close to everything and not letting it consume and own you."

"it is impossible to build one's own happiness on the unhappiness of others."

"if you are satisfied with who you are, you do not need to prove your worth to anyone else."

"the grass is greener where you water it."

mel robbins

"if you only ever did the things you do not want to do, you would have everything you have ever wanted."

"you are one decision away from a completely different life."

"when it comes to change, goals, and dreams, you have to bet on yourself."

"change your decisions, and you will change your life. and what will change your decisions more than anything? courage."

"if you have the courage to start, you have the courage to succeed."

alan watts

"man suffers only because he takes seriously what the gods made for fun."

"never pretend to a love which you do not actually feel, for love is not ours to command."

"you are under no obligation to be the same person you were 5 minutes ago."

"a person who thinks all the time has nothing to think about except thoughts. so, he loses touch with reality and lives in a world of illusions."

"hurrying and delaying are alike ways of trying to resist the present."

ram dass

"the quieter you become, the more you can hear."

"your problem is you are too busy holding on to your unworthiness."

"i can do nothing for you but work on myself…you can do nothing for me but work on yourself."

"free yourself from the illusion of good and bad days. labeling time makes us nostalgic for the past and demanding the future. there is only here and now. let it be."

"no matter what someone else does to you, never put anyone out of your heart."

lao tzu

"care about what other people think, and you will always be their prisoner."

"the best fighter is never angry."

"respond intelligently even to unintelligent treatment."

"if you do not change direction, you may end up where you are heading."

"nature never hurries, yet everything is accomplished."

muhammad ali

"if my mind can conceive it, and my heart can believe it—then i can achieve it."

"do not quit. suffer now and live the rest of your life as a champion."

"he who is not courageous enough to take risks will accomplish nothing in life."

"i have never let anyone talk me into not believing in myself."

"i am the greatest. i said that even before i knew i was."

steve harvey

"you cannot leave what is important to you up to someone else."

"stop wasting time looking at someone else's reality while doing nothing about yours."

"the dream is free, but the hustle is sold separately."

"your dream has to be bigger than your fear."

"you cannot tell big dreams to small-minded people."

albert einstein

"i am enough of an artist to draw freely upon my imagination. imagination is more important than knowledge. knowledge is limited. imagination encircles the world."

"anyone who has never made a mistake has never tried anything new."

𓍯 entryfromsane004 (extracted from the old blog two years ago)

[thewertsearch]

Resolution to the summoner's mutiny is foggy, as I only understand what has 8een rel8ed to me through the 8rief answers I thought to solicit. Ultim8ely, the ire of the Condesce would 8e such that in the settling dust of the conflict, she would 8anish all from the homeworld, except the young. […] I cannot imagine how she would come to enforce such an upheaval in our civiliz8tion. Though I suppose she will have on her side the advantage of an unparalleled lifespan, and the leverage extended 8y the hideous psychic prongs of her deep undul8ing monstrosity.

Attention is drawn to the prodigiously long lifespan of the Condesce - the empress of Mindfang's time, and Feferi's probable ancestor. I used to think that the modern Empress was a different troll, but now that we're aware of fuchsiablood longevity, I'm pretty sure the two are one and the same.

Based on a line from Feferi's introduction, I was assuming that she was the only fuchsiablood in the universe - but let's take another look at the way that line's phrased.

You are 'the only of your kind' known to possess this blood.

That doesn't necessarily mean she's the only fuchsia troll, does it? For example, it might just mean she's the only Alternian with fuchsia blood, because the Empress doesn't actually live on the planet.

I really want this to be Mama Peixes, because the existence of a living Ancestor has so much story potential. Just how much does she know, and what's her agenda?

Nevertheless, I take the prediction as truth, and find it amusing that a homeworld domin8ed 8y children will 8e the gr8 summoner's legacy. One of them, at least.

Anyway, the Summoner - the boy who could fly - is the reason Alternia is a planetary Neverland, making it clear that he was the original inspiration for Pupa Pan.

It's also notable that we've only just started delving into Alternian history, and we've already learned about two massive rebellions against the social order. Contrary to what Alternians have been led to believe, this oppressive culture clearly isn't natural to them, and they've been fighting it every step of the way.

They don't want to be a murderous empire - they're forced to be, again and again and again.

More importantly, and less amusingly, his legacy will 8e my demise. You see, I first learned his name when I asked who would 8e the one to kill me.

And here's yet another layer to the Quest Cocoon Incident. Vriska wasn't content with living like Mindfang - she wanted to die like her, too.

Given that Vriska knew about the Summoner, one can only imagine how weird she must have been around Tavros. Not only was she constantly berating him, she was also putting him on this bizarre pedestal, comparing him to someone I'm damn sure he never knew existed.

And she'd never tell Tavros about the Summoner, either, because that would allow him to derive confidence from something other than her tutelage. No - she just silently compared him to a legendary hero, and he constantly failed a test he didn't know he was taking.

Seems like something's going very wrong in the Veil.

This seems like a sign that the session is on its last legs, and we're running out of time before it completely turns to static. We're entering the endgame.

The oracle I will resolve to part with. I will conceal it in a crypt 8earing the sign of the expatr8, with a map to its loc8tion hidden in this journal.

The cueball was sequestered in an Expatriate chest, which makes me speculate about whether Equius ever got his hands on it.

He can't see inside it himself - but like Mindfang said, it shouldn't be too hard to find a technological workaround, and Equius is a roboticist. I wonder if either Zahhak ever used it for themselves?

To whomever finds it, 8e wary, for the truth it tells may leave its new keeper 8lind as I was. Though no more.

She warned you, Vriska.

She told you it would leave you as blind as she was.

And it did.

[hyuckswoman]

“are you going to bother me again?” you sigh seeing jisung putting his stuff in the empty spot next to you

“of course i am, how is that even a real question?” he says smiling getting ready for the class “do you have a major degradation kink or something? I fail to understand why you would take so much time off your day to piss me off” you ask your eyes trying to scrutinize him. “you talk weird ‘fail to understand’ okay mrs english major” he laughs taking his pen out of his pencil case writing down calculus quietly sighing at how this class was going to beat his ass “whatever” you sigh getting your stuff out to also get ready for the class. your teacher was pissy and scary also you did not want to get overwhelmed so quickly during the semester. in other words, you were not going to let jisung win.

“do you need help jisung?” the teacher was doing quick rounds in the class, assuring that his students were not getting overwhelmed by the exercise he had just assigned. the multivariable calculus class was almost empty for a reason and he did not want to lose his job, so he had to at least make sure the few students attending his class weren’t failing.

upon hearing the teacher’s question, jisung’s first instinct was to look up at you to see if you were making fun of him or not. call him insecure but he had kind of always been jealous of how easy the material was for you. when you threatened to haunt him to- and i quote- mess up his academics he kinda laughed because in all honesty? he was capable of that all on his own. and judging by the look on his teacher’s face when jisung replied “no i’m fine thank you”, he wasn’t the only one who knew that he and him alone could fuck up this college year.

when the teacher quietly called for your name and asked you to help jisung you wanted to laugh in his face and to tell him no, but something about an older man that’s a figure of authority in your life made you immediately respond “yea no problem” because in no way were you ever going to say no to this scary scary man. jisung debated in between being super embarrassed by the fact that he was the only one who struggled with the material (he wasn’t but he’s self-centered so he doesn’t notice other people) or in being slightly happy that the teacher was giving him an easy way to make your life living hell for the next 30ish minutes.

you mentally sighed as you knew what was coming but still glided your paper over to jisung’s side to at least give it one fair try and then automatically give up when he doesn’t take you seriously. so you began to explain. “in this example we’re trying to find this partial derivative so x is the constant right? so basically what you have to do is apply this limit formula since y is the constant and the derivative is with respect to x. the reason why we can use this limit formula is because the limit definition of this partial derivative is basically the same as the one for the derivative. im sorry if that wasn’t super clear but just yea i’m shit at explaining” you say fully expecting him to throw a jab at you for being a nerd (as if you guys don’t share the same classes)

“no i get it, thank you. i just don’t understand why we’re not considering the other variables” he says furrowing his brows further “it’s because that’s not what’s asked when doing partial differentiation that’s it. we’re focusing one variable at a time that’s why it’s partial…i think” you answer “oh okay that makes sense. so for this one this would be the answer?” he asked showing you his notebook. he has neat handwriting. atypical for a man. “yea, at least that’s also what i found but we might both be wrong” you shrug not too confident in your own answer (even if you literally cannot think of any other way to solve this mess).

and if him taking you seriously when you explained the material instead of bothering you or making fun of you did not surprise you enough, him constantly showing you his answers and asking you questions for the rest of class did. what really shocked you to your core was when he asked if you could tutor him with some classes some day, seeing as tough you guys literally shared every class.

he was also very shocked when you replied “no, suck my dick you ass. im not forgiving you for snooping through my phone just yet”. and he laughed a lot. this semester was really going to be fun for him.

4. no tutoring

last chapter masterlist next chapter

notes : sorry for the late chapter!

taglist: @kgyam4 @sunghoonsgfreal @injunnie-lemon @nctrawberries @222low @multifandomania @joyzluvr @starwonb1n @222brainrot @sinsgaybutthatsokay @defzcl @lostinneocity @junviadinho @mrshwang-park @skepvids @wonbin-truther @jkslvsnella @jising-jisang-jisung @nanaxwi @polarisjisung @amrqxz @jirsungs @haechansbbg @dalsosapple @pookime @pinklemonade34 @lotties-readings @roseangelxfuma @jiiieun @inosfavgf @mystverse

[windvexer]

Your thoughts on chaos magic as a whole, not just sigils?

You often talk about rules in magic, so I am interested about your opinion on mort "fuck around and find out" and "I create rules myself" school of thought. Thank you!

I have not researched so very much into chaos magic. But both of these things can be said to be true for witchcraft; it's more or less how I learned it, although things are very different for me now.

I think all the best witches have very personalized rules that they did create for themselves, and they all fucked around lots and lots.

Witchcraft having rules does not mean those rules come from a central authority of human practitioners.

Witchcraft having rules means 3 things to me.

The first is that you are operating within a living universe of magic which has laws (like the laws of physics) you cannot break.

"Raising energy makes you tired" is not a rule because an authority figure wants to limit you. It's just how it works. You can't out-rule your way out of it.

The second is that spirits and magic actually exist, and therefore it's wise to build rules around your interactions with them to keep you safe.

"Don't steal power from land where you are a stranger" is a rule in the same way that "don't touch a hot stove" is a rule. Fuck around all you want; the finding out always comes.

The third is that you are an individual, and what works best for you is not necessarily the same as what works best for others.

"Use a candle or else the spell won't work" is a rule a practitioner can discover for themselves, which may be true for them, but not for anyone else. Why is this true? Maybe their familiar is most easily conjured within flame. Maybe they were a salamander in another life. Who knows.

Regarding my recent rant about sorcerous witchcraft having steps: It's a well-developed school of sorcery. "Cast a circle and call the quarters" aren't what I would call rules. But they are very important steps to accomplish a functioning spell within this system, which IMO 90%+ of witches are using a Wiccan-derived system whether they realize it or not.

You don't have to cast a circle or call the quarters. Your rule can be, "I never need to cast a circle for the spell to work." That's fine, but if you're eliminating a step within this system of magic, then you should be aware you're eliminating a moving part from a machine.

You can take the almonds out of the cake, and the lemon rind; but at a certain point if you start taking out the milk, the eggs, and the flour, you're going to need to come up with solutions before you can have a cake.

It's not a rule that a cake needs cow milk and almonds. But that doesn't mean that you can just do whatever you want and have a cake, either.

Fuck around all you want. It's a great way to come up with new recipes. Make all the rules you want and work with them until they become true or wither and die.

It isn't rigidity and rules that make witchcraft what it is; I don't believe it is flexibility and autonomy that makes chaos magic what it is, either.

[intergalacticfop]

Minoan Heanos

The distinctive open-front dresses worn by Minoan women are probably even more iconic than the multi-layered kilts. Over time, there's dispute whether the garment is one piece or a separate bodice and skirt, but currently the one-piece theory is in ascendance.

The word heanos is derived from the Linear B logogram *146, wehanos. The wes- prefix, which is the squiggle in the middle, indicates a garment. Bernice Jones believes that this logogram represents the garment worn by Minoan men and women.

Marie-Louise B. Nosch, The Textile Logograms in the Linear B Tablets, pp 133-138

More research and construction below the cut:

The theory that the garment is a full-length tunic is further supported from imagery from the time, like these figures from the c. 1400 BCE Hagia Triada Sarcophagus. This detail from the sarcophagus shows three figures in some kind of procession, 2 women and 1 man. The woman at left wears a tunic with some kind of pelt as a skirt, and the other 2 figures wear tunics without anything over them, showing that they are one continuous, ankle-length garment.

Some of the most important resources for interpreting how the heanos was constructed comes from the two women depicted in the House of the Ladies in Akrotiri, wherein the side seams of the tunic are clearly visible running along the side of the body and under the arm.

details of figures from the House of the Ladies, Akrotiri, via Wikimedia Commons

advadbsvasb

Diagrams from Bernice Jones' book Ariadne's Threads, p. 82, via Gorgeous Tangents

The heanos itself is made of 3 pieces of fabric: 1 back and 2 fronts. These diagrams show a concave hem like on the labrys-shaped kilt but I went with a straight hem, which is an equally valid option. The end of the sleeves are level with the edge of the hem at the widest point. This would probably be the width selvage-to-selvage on the fabric, being narrower than fabric widths commonly are today. There are 4 seams: the shoulder seam, the two side seams, and a front seam (optional, but recommended if you would prefer not being arrested.) It may be tempting to fold the fabric across the shoulder, so the only sewing is side seams and a neck hole, but this makes a weaker garment overall. I used this as a shortcut in my fitting muslin and it caused tears and weak points at the three points of the front opening.

my fabric was a lightweight, moderately loose-woven cotton with a supplementary weave pattern in squares and diamonds. Linen or wool would have been more accurate but also? much harder to find from online quilting stores selling fabric for affordable prices. The main fabric is dark orange and the pattern is made out of pink/lilac threads. This weaving technique resulted in a LOT of long floats (unsecured expenses of thread) on the back--you can see how the wrong side of the fabric is much pinker than the right side. These floats could snag easily if I wasn't careful, so while it made a very effective visual for this tunic, I do not think that this fabric type would be viable for everyday wear. I'll leave it to people who actually know about weaving to ponder what more accurate weaving techniques would be.

Construction

The overall pattern is basically a T-shaped tunic, and the most important measurements are shoulder circumference, shoulder width, bust circumference, and the shoulder-waist length. In addition, you need measurements for the bicep, waist, shoulder-navel length, and hip circumference. After working out the fit with a muslin, I ended up with this pattern, 1 of 4 identical quarters.

Your first impulse may be to make the tunic very close-fitting, since the depictions in frescoes are skin-tight, but since the pattern has no added gusset this is a recipe for Cannot Move Arm. So I gave a very generous curve under the arm, which also made the dress look better when my arms were down, avoiding armpit wrinkles. I continued that ease into about an extra 2 inches added on to my waist measurement and plenty of extra space around my hips so that I could do exciting things like Sit Down.

I sewed the shoulder and side seams using the machine, and felled the raw edges on each side of the seam by hand with a whipstitch. I foided back the front edges of the v-neck instead of cutting them, which was a tip I got from the Gorgeous Tangents blog. This strengthens the neckline and keeps it from stretching, and also means that everything can be readjusted if you have size fluctuations or just want to modify the tunic into something more or less modest.

I whipstitched the front edges together by hand--the contrasting selvage didn't matter because it would be covered up by trim. I ended up cutting the tunic a liiiittle shorter than I wanted, so I finished it with some leftover bias binding instead of hemming it to conserve as much length as possible.

Trim

I custom-ordered the woven tape trim from Long Creek Mercantile. Both are made of wool--the "header band" and the hem trim are 1 1/4" wide and the center-front and cuff trim are 3/8" wide. I observed that most images of the Minoan heanos show trim with two colors at most, in a simple geometric or linear pattern, so I consciously restrained myself from ordering anything more elaborate. The clothing on Minoan frescoes is characterized by strongly contrasting colors, so blue trim was the most obvious, and best-looking option. Orange tunics with blue trim appear multiple time in art like the "Dancing Lady" fresco from Knossos:

Dr. Jones suggests that the band across the shoulder would historically have been a header band--a band of threads woven at the beginning of a project in order to properly space the warp bands (see her diagram at the beginning). That may be a reason why the shoulder trim often depicted under the front or sleeve trim, as shown above. Regardless, the trim almost always coordinates.

I sewed on the shoulder trim by hand, the sleeve and hem trim by machine, and the center-front trim with a combination of both.

Tassels

Many frescoes from Akrotiri and Hagia Triada show the ends of the supposed header band turned into tassels. This embellishment is not universal among heanoi, as you can see from the "Dancing Lady" above, but it does add a fun little something!

(yes, my Lounging Pants are very fashionable)

I turned the excess ends of the shoulder "header band" trim into fringes, knotting the yellow ones into a lattice and turning the blue yarns into tassels. The lattice-tassel appears on a fresco from Hagia Triada:

Reproduction of fragmentary fresco from Room 14 at Hagia Triada, Crete

The saffron gatherers from Akrotiri shown below have clearly displayed fringes at the ends of their sleeves. The one on the left has red fringes that appear knotted or ravelled/unravelled in an undulating pattern, and the one on the right has fringes that may be either beaded with papyrus-shaped leaves or cut into short tassels.

Another option is leaving the fringes loose, as seen in the Akrotiri frescoes from Xeste, room 3:

The final garment was super comfy, actually! It's much simpler to create than I thought it would be based on the frescoes, which made it all feel pretty magical when everything came together. I did think it was a little unusual how tailored this garment is, and the potential waste of fabric that comes from a shaped garment, especially compared to how later ancient greek clothing was mainly rectangles. I don't know enough about bronze-age and earlier clothing to have any idea how typical this was, since I'm extremely Not an expert on this subject, but am always open to learning more!

[paper-mario-wiki]

"no art is good bc it's a misconfiguration of the natural world to suit man's vanity" Is an extremely misanthropic take on art. Is humanity not part of "the natural world"? Can one not make pigments from flowers or minerals? You say that the universe would never align so that a piece of art is made without human intervention, but the universe did align so that it could be made, you just assume humans aren't part of it. I understand that this is some faux-deep shit I'm on, but I love art and while I think good is kind of useless adjective when talking about art in general, to compare the concept of art to a tumor is a pretty bad faith take. Sorry if that was like, ironic or something and I just sent a rant into your inbox for nothing.

your faux-deep shit could never reach the faux-depths of my even shallower faux-deepness.

i think the main problem when establishing this argument in the first place was saying "all art is bad" because someone asked me if i liked any bad art, and i answered using "bad" as a shorthand for "not good". if i had known i'd be getting into this pedantic of an argument about it i definitely would have changed my wording, because things that are "not good" are not inherently "bad", which seems to be where the majority of the misunderstandings of my stance come from.

i'd ask you this: what could be considered "good" outside of something that affects humanity in some capacity? to be clear, you're absolutely right, humans ARE natural, humans ARE part of the world. but the idea of something being "good" didn't exist until humans came up with it.

100,000,000,000,000,000 light years away, two planets crash into each other, each with their own forms of biological life so different from earth's that we would find it difficult to even classify it as life if we were given the chance to observe it, but that doesn't matter because we would have never been given the opportunity to reach those planets anyway under any circumstances. is this a good thing? is it a bad thing? i don't think it's either, it's just something that happened.

because "good" and "bad" are code words used to reflect the societal values of the person using them, they cannot exist in a vacuum.

so if that's the case, and "good" and "bad" only exist to us, what does it mean to us?

well, something "good" is something with objective benefit or subjective enjoyment-- but subjective enjoyment of something can also contradict the nature of its objectivity. soup can be considered "good" because it sustains us and is therefore beneficial. soup can be considered to "taste good" because someone might enjoy the flavor. but "torture" can only be seen as "enjoyable", but it benefits nobody-- even if the person doing it enjoys it. that's just them subjectively enjoying it.

conversely, something can be objectively good but still subjectively unenjoyable, like having a soup that's healthy in a way you think tastes bad! you'd still benefit from it, even if you didn't enjoy the experience. but regardless of whether or not you enjoyed it, what has the greatest bearing on something being considered "good" is its objectivity, as it's something fewer people can debate.

now, all of that being considered, what can "art" do that is objectively good, without it serving some secondary purpose? something that is objectively good can be artistically created, like a children's hospital designed by a genius architect-- but its goodness in that case would be derived from its benefit, with the subjectivity of it being something that only enhances its good.

a piece of fabric, stretched across a wooden frame and painted using colorful oils, creates no benefit objectively, it exists solely in the world of subjectivity. how can something be "good" if the only thing it does is hold the potential (not the guarantee) for a person to look at it, and enjoy looking at it?

more importantly though, is that bad? it's not.

but it is superfluous.

^ please forgive me for typing all of this. im so sorry. it's just so easy to be pedantic. i promise im not a stick in the mud and i love art, i just also happen to be someone who is personally deeply concerned with rhetorically whittling communication down to the bare knob of its meaning (XRA style).

because it is something i find subjectively enjoyable.

[yermes]

Time to lock in for some tests 🍁

Humans really looked at fall and said *test szn*

↟ ⋆ ❅↟ ⋆ ❅↟ ⋆ ❅↟ ⋆ ❅↟ ⋆ ❅↟ ⋆ ❅↟ ⋆ ❅↟ ⋆ ↟ ⋆ ❅↟ ⋆ ❅↟

Pick a meme

123

↟ ⋆ ❅↟ ⋆ ❅↟ ⋆ ❅↟ ⋆ ❅↟ ⋆ ❅↟ ⋆ ❅↟ ⋆ ❅↟ ⋆ ↟ ⋆ ❅↟ ⋆ ❅↟

Disclaimer: please take what I say with a grain of salt and not as the gospel. I just want to share some ideas of practicing and giving advice using the medium as often as I can with school, work, and my own personal studies and practice. But I am working on sharing my notes soon so that will be exciting! Liking and sharing does a lot 🥰

↟ ⋆ ❅↟ ⋆ ❅↟ ⋆ ❅↟ ⋆ ❅↟ ⋆ ❅↟ ⋆ ❅↟ ⋆ ❅↟ ⋆ ↟ ⋆ ❅↟ ⋆ ❅↟

Follow me?

↟ ⋆ ❅↟ ⋆ ❅↟ ⋆ ❅↟ ⋆ ❅↟ ⋆ ❅↟ ⋆ ❅↟ ⋆ ❅↟ ⋆ ↟ ⋆ ❅↟ ⋆ ❅↟

The cards

Iodine 💧 

Babe you need to think of all the greater contributions you will eventually make. The seed of knowledge within you will bloom into something much greater and you do more for this earth that you would have ever thought possible. Being small does not mean you cannot be part of something much greater and being on the road to something much greater will help you study and motivate yourself through this hard testing szn which seems like for some classes just never fucking ends. You may be derived from natural means however you will be added to something much more and much greater and that is worth studying for.

Copper 🖌️

You can find the energy to do something, you can get through exams, the knowledge will connect from course to course and you will be okay. But be warned, take care of yourself. Take care of yourself, do not get nervous, do not get scared, keep yourself in check and understand that the knowledge will come. Over working yourself to the point of breaking is ultimately the worst thing you can do. Be calm, have your knowledge down, study effectively through the whole year and don’t panic study and sabotage yourself.

Vanadium 🌾

Do you actually like your degree? Are you at the stage where you want to run into the woods scream cry and open a library bakery? Me too. But get your degree first. Take care and be sure to ground yourself not just in the knowledge that you are intaking but in your environment, in your friends, remember life is about balance and burning yourself out and being in a highly reactive state all the time helps no one.

↟ ⋆ ❅↟ ⋆ ❅↟ ⋆ ❅↟ ⋆ ❅↟ ⋆ ❅↟ ⋆ ❅↟ ⋆ ❅↟ ⋆ ↟ ⋆ ❅↟ ⋆ ❅↟

Extras:

Story/vent:

I doubt therefore I think therefore I am

↟ ⋆ ❅↟ ⋆ ❅↟ ⋆ ❅↟ ⋆ ❅↟ ⋆ ❅↟ ⋆ ❅↟ ⋆ ❅↟ ⋆ ↟ ⋆ ❅↟ ⋆ ❅↟

[srbachchan]

DAY 5961

Jalsa, Mumbai June 13/14, 2024 Thu/Fri 2:26 AM

🪔 ,

June 14 .. birthday greetings to .. Ef Ajay Supeda from London 🇬🇧 .. and Ef Anu Verma .. 🙏🏻🚩❤️

.. pertinent thought and words from Ef of Ooty .. a title word that means nothing .. the real name is Udhagamandalam, derived from the Toda word "othakal-mund" which means "house in mountains".

'Udakam' (உதகம் in Tamil and उदकं in Sanskrit) means 'water'. Mandalam (மண்டலம்) means 'Abode' Thus Udakamandalam is a place that contains/ filled with water.

So .. Ef of Ooty .. pertinent thought ..

when there is nothing to think about or have nothing to look ahead or look forward to ,about the future , you start thinking about the past ..

so true ..

so the days at Allahabad .. the Allahabad University and the swimming pool and the University student who did an endurance swimming feat .. which I spoke of early .. and the one tune that used to play as music to keep the endurer awake and going, still in mind ..

and the BHS sporting event at Founder's Day .. the Victory stand and the various standing at the 1 .. the first .. and Ma with her box camera taking pictures ..

just cannot find them anywhere .. lost or gone during transfers and change of addresses .. which seems to be the pattern .. so many incidents and events all gone .. all records lost or ..

pity ..

and they ask me for details .. the ones that collect them for their need .. the need to say it is for the record , but is nothing of the sort .. it be for some vulnerable gain for them ..

we often hear your 'life is valuable' .. of course it is .. but not for someone else .. NO .. !!!

aah .. stop this trend of philosophic trash .. no one is interested .. keep it with you .. for only you shall understand and comply ..

😴

Love you ..

Amitabh Bachchan

[yallemagne]

Dracula like, this kid's been in a coach of terror all day and I kept driving him into circles and he kept drifting off and he was scared out if his mind and he waited an hour outside the door in the cold. I'll have chicken with sides prepared next to the hearth and he'll be putty in my hands.

And the worst part is that he's right.

Jonathan graciously accepts the Count's hospitality. It is reassuring to him, and he feels his worries melt away as he slowly winds down from the hectic journey he just weathered.

The light and warmth and the Count's courteous welcome seemed to have dissipated all my doubts and fears.

But... if there is any reassurance to derive from this... putty is only so easily moldable when you play with warm hands.

...he moved impulsively forward, and holding out his hand grasped mine with a strength which made me wince, an effect which was not lessened by the fact that it seemed as cold as ice—more like the hand of a dead than a living man.

Jonathan is willing to power through his weariness, but he's not blind to the fact there is something very wrong with the Count. He's just unwilling to broach the subject, he hopes he shall not have to, that he'll get his work done and go home to Mina, making his stressful business trip seem like nothing more than a bizarre dream. In the meantime, he will take comfort in the Count's odd geniality.

But JESUS I SHOULD REALLY TALK ABOUT THE COUNT! SORRY!

Dracula relishes in this. The shame of being a boyar with no staff or subjects and having to do all the work himself is outweighed by the thrill of pulling the wool over an innocent lamb's eyes and leading him to slaughter. Even as Jonathan notices all the little things wrong (we were simply going over and over the same ground again–– for a moment I doubted if it were not the same person to whom I was speaking––his breath was rank––), he cannot voice any of his concerns, and Dracula takes full advantage of this. From the very start, he is gloating:

"Ah, sir, you dwellers in the city cannot enter into the feelings of the hunter." 

This is the Count's hunt.

I decided to wait till today to answer because May 7 provides more of Dracula's perspective. He's been planning this trip to England for a while, as evidenced by his numerous books and just how perfectly he speaks English. But he's unsatisfied with his speech. He knows it makes him unfamiliar, a stranger. When he travels to London, he wants to blend in as one of the sheep, such is his excuse for requiring his solicitor to come to him. He intends to use Jonathan as a study for what to expect of the faraway land he longs to conquer. And, in the meantime, he shall also teach Jonathan the ways of his land.

When I go there I shall be all alone, and my friend Harker Jonathan—nay, pardon me, I fall into my country's habit of putting your patronymic first—my friend Jonathan Harker will not be by my side to correct and aid me.

This "mistake" appears very intentional. By addressing Jonathan according to his country's rules, he, however passively, asserts his superiority over him. Think when someone gets your name wrong on purpose, it's a tactic used to deny you ownership of yourself. I'm not prescribing this intent to anyone who makes a mistake like this, but Dracula speaks in such a measured way that I doubt he truly slipped up. It's so small of an inconvenience in this case that Jonathan voices no thoughts on the matter. But Dracula is priming him for his stay in Castle Dracula. As Jonathan teaches him the way of the Englishman, Dracula shall teach him the way of the Transylvanian peasant. Quite literally when he speaks of the blue flames.

"Why, even the peasant that you tell me of who marked the place of the flame would not know where to look in daylight even for his own work. Even you would not, I dare be sworn, be able to find these places again?" "There you are right," I said. "I know no more than the dead where even to look for them."

Such an obvious HINT! It's another "for the dead travel fast". Jonathan acknowledges "only the dead would know where to look", and Dracula just goes "...anyway--"

Dracula does not hesitate to drop hints about his nature. Oh, he cannot live in a new house? He would die in a new house? He travels to England in search of newer, broader horizons, but he does not wish to stand out. He intends to insert himself into the history of London, becoming one of England's many ghosts, once more a master but of a different people who don't know the danger he poses. Right now, Jonathan can find nothing wrong with this–

I felt that it was getting very late indeed, but I did not say anything, for I felt under obligation to meet my host's wishes in every way.

–and again, he is bound by the Count's good graces. Dread creeps in his mind and he thinks of death as morning sneaks up on him.

They say that people who are near death die generally at the change to the dawn or at the turn of the tide; any one who has when tired, and tied as it were to his post, experienced this change in the atmosphere can well believe it.

Dracula keeps him awake through sunset and sunrise, forcing him to experience the change in atmosphere and foreshadowing his plans for him. He's playing with his food in a way Jonathan doesn't consciously but subconsciously recognizes.

[sokuuuu]

saw a post on my fyp a few hours ago that got me thinking about the game again. I've also been deep into Greek mythology so forgive me for somewhat combining two of my interests.

A common trope for characters who are gods or deities is their lack of humanity. They aren't bound by the confines of mortality, therefore they do not live by our rules. Our human concepts of community, society, and relationships are utterly beneath them because they exist in the scope of inevitable destruction. The mortal ones are the empathetic ones in the story of the gods, the victims who struggle to cling to our human desires beneath the whims of gods. Slay the Princess, however, subverts this expectation. In fact it turns it on its head by humanizing the deities and complicating the mortal man.

The Princess and Quiet are not people to the Narrator, and he makes that blatantly clear - they're constructs. Objects to be used to fulfill his desires. There's a fragile relationship between the three where the Narrator holds most of the powerful information over these characters' heads. He watches and observes their actions the way a "God" in the most general sense of a word would. In fact, he created the world the two inhabit. For the most part they're just living in it.

It's especially interesting to me that what the Narrator seeks is immortality. He fears death, a concept so meaningless to Quiet and the Princess. Their roles are so uniquely swapped. The powerful mortal man yearns for the strengths of the struggling, clueless gods.

As we expect from someone human - or at least, mortal in this world of this story - the Narrator is complicated. But the story doesn't derive the Princess and Quiet of their humanity either despite their larger roles. In fact, despite the two being two halves of the same larger concept, STP pours so much attention into making the two feel alive. Making their lives matter. We don't want to die even though we know how many chances we have. Each time we die, The Voice of The Hero fears the upcoming. In the mirror, facing the end, they are afraid. It's the closest these two unending beings can get to understanding the Narrator's fear of death.

They share our fears. Do they share our human desires?

The post that inspired me to ramble like this in the first place (I certainly wish I could find it) brought me back to this part of The Princess and The Dragon:

Although they aren't aware of the limits of their own existence, the Princess and Quiet know what they feel fulfilled when they are with each other. Even after everything. The Princess is angry at you in this chapter, both you and your voices, and yet she still wants that part of Quiet back. The part that makes her feel whole again. It's an obvious calling to their connection to each other in hindsight, as two parts of the same god. But they don't fit together anymore. They cannot fit together anymore as two separate entities. Part of their beings complete each other, but they are two separate beings created by the Narrator now. They can no longer be each other, but they know they belong with each other.

It's a... romantic way of thinking about it. We know soulmates, two souls destined for one another. They make each other complete despite their imperfections. Despite their existence as two separate organisms. They are not one in the same and yet they fit perfectly together. It's fantastical. It's unrealistic. It's a portrayal of love only imperfect beings like mortals can strive for. And yet the irony is that the two are anything but.

The Narrator even admits it to himself: he's wrong about Quiet and the Princess (although mostly Quiet in this instance, the same can certainly apply to her). They are not just gods. They are not just constructs. They are people. People with free will, with empathy, with desires, with longing. He's just like them, and we're just like him. The Narrator dwells on this boundary between life and death, mortal being and god, while we find these barriers so unimportant to us. The ending of Slay the Princess is about shedding the boundaries between ourself and the Princess and letting the two complete each other in a perfectly imperfect way. The very essence of mortality and humanity, displayed by two gods.

There's a beauty to imperfection.

[opashoo]

Do you have any advice on how not to get so overwhelmed when it comes to conlanging? I get overwhelmed way too fast with the information I read on the conlang subreddit David j Petersons book I have or YouTubers I just get burned out.

I start out on my phonological sounds and sometimes I add a new sound or get rid of a few I find unnecessary phonotactics is where I end up getting stuck/frustrated and stoping completely. I don’t know why but my brain just cannot compute when it comes to phonotactics no matter how many videos I watch of people explaining it or looking through Wikipedia just doesn’t register in my brain. I’m assuming this is happening because I’m autistic which is even more frustrating I’m so slow when it comes to learning or I end up comparing myself to others for understanding/learning things faster than me. I get motivated to make a language and then I get overwhelmed it’s just a repeat cycle to the point where I just want to give up. I’m not even sure if it’s possible for me to make a conlang at this point. And then I stumble across something I never heard before from someone else said and I stress about that too and I constantly worry I’m going to make a conlang I spent so much time on only for someone to point out that it’s a reflex and I need to scrap the whole thing and start all over :(

So I have two big pieces of advice that have helped enormously with this sort of thing and they are to work small (the big picture will come together) and to know your goals. It's gonna be a lot so I'm putting it past a readmore. I also talk a bit about my own project, but it's all the way at the bottom.

First, focus on one thing at a time and take small steps. As your familiarity with your own work grows, the bigger picture will start to come together, just focus on one thing at a time.

If there's a linguistic phenomenon or grammatical construction or concept or something that you want to explore but you don't understand it entirely, then just focus on that for a while. I like to make toy languages, really, really small and simple conlangs with extremely simply words and sounds that are meant to focus specifically on one or two concepts at a time. I don't worry about anything else but those concepts; no phonotactics, no worrying about how pretty or ugly the language sounds, I don't worry about naturalism or sound changes, I don't focus on any of these things unless those things are what I'm making the toy language to explore.

My current project, Yongasabi, has a consonantal root system inspired by Arabic, but understanding the concept in a satisfactory manner where I felt confident including it in a project that I plan on publishing took actual years. I made three separate toylangs, one of which I revised and overhauled three times before eventually using that as a basis for Yongasabi. I needed that time and work to focus on absolutely nothing but sound changes and how a system like this evolves in natural languages. While I was playing around with sound changes in one toy language, in another toy language I was also trying to figure out how a system of derivation like this could into systems of nouns, adjectives and verbs. I did not focus on anything else with those toy language but those core concepts because to do any more would be overwhelming and confusing.

It's the same when you're working on a more complete language project, you build it little by little. Focus on one aspect at a time, one concept at a time. As you become more familiar with your own work and you use and apply it, you will start to see the things that work and the things that don't, and you'll be able to make decisions accordingly. It'll happen over time, but you have to avoid stressing about the whole thing.

And if there's something causing you trouble that's stopping you from making the language, there's no one stopping you from avoiding it until you're ready. I never actually properly wrote down Yongasabi's sound inventory, assimilations, and allophones until the grammar document was at 204 pages because I hate working on that stuff. :huntershruggy: That's usually the first thing a lot of people like to work on for some reason, but I hate it and I just went by instinct for 204 pages and five months. If I let that stop me, I never would have made any progress. There were some things I had to go back and update because of it, and that took extra time, but extra work with progress is better than no work and no progress.

Second, understand your goals.

A piece of advice I got from David Peterson's videos and several other conlanging youtubers is to know why you're making your language and what your endgoal is. As long as you understand what your goal is, you can prioritize and decide what steps you need to take to get there. You need to understand what you want or else you'll never be able to work towards it, and you reduce the chances that you'll be happy with it.

For example, I've known some conlangers whose goal is to make some kind of secret, diegetically constructed language for a fictional setting, or maybe a secret language to use with their friends, but they get caught up on rules of naturalism and worry about naturalistic development. You don't need naturalism if the point of your language is that it didn't develop naturally. That's just a waste of your time.

Conversely, I've known some naturalistic conlangers who feel obligated to add every new concept they come across with the idea that "Well if it evolved in a real world language, then it must have some use to real speakers and thus belongs in this language" but they miss the point that a natural language doesn't need to contain every naturally developed phenomenon. In the end they're left with something bloated, hugely redundant, and incredibly disappointing to them.

I've also met conlangers whose goal is to make a naturalistic conlang for a fictional setting only to be hugely dissatisfied when they follow the rules of naturalistic development and it makes a language that doesn't sound the way they want, or it doesn't evoke the feeling they want, or they find that their progress is unnecessarily bogged down by learning rules they find boring, because they don't actually want a naturalistic language, they want an artlang that services their story.

In all of these cases, the authors of these conlangs didn't understand their goals. They did work they didn't like to make end products they were dissatisfied with because they failed to meet their real goals. These goals can shift over time, but in the end that's fine as long as it makes you happy. You need to be making your conlang for you and your purposes! You say that you've gotten stuck on phonotactics and that's stopped you before, but Yongasabi doesn't even have phonotactics outside of literally one single rule, and it's that there can never be more than two consonants in a cluster. I hate working with phonotactics too, so I made my language in a way that let me minimize that work. It doesn't interfere with my goal so I'm totally fine with that.

I know this is a lot but it really does boil down to those two points: work small so that you don't get overwhelmed, and know your goals so you can set your priorities. My goals with Yongasabi were:

Make a language that allows me to explore this fictional culture I made for the slugcats of Rain World

Derive sounds from Mongolian, Korean and Filipino (And a little bit of Vietnamese)

Explore grammatical concepts that I find cool from these languages and others (My main focus was converbs and agglutination in tandem with a consonantal root system, but in general there's a lot of Chinese, Japanese, and Korean in the grammar)

Make sure I like the sound of the language

My main guiding forces were:

Have a rough basis in naturalistic sound changes, but if it leads to sounds or situations I don't like, change it; the readers won't notice because they don't see the development process

If something starts to feel weird or stops fitting in with the rest of the language, don't be afraid to change it or get rid of it entirely because that in a way reflects organic change in the language (and extra work for progress is better than no work for no progress)

If there's an opportunity for the culture to express itself in the language, take it

If you want to judge how well I've realized those goals, you can check it out here (I'm making this post free to reblog unlike the last one because the link is hidden under all this text and 1st edition release is super close anyway I am so excited).

Anyway, good luck! I hope my advice helps!

[sunsetofdoom]

but I cannot come in unless you dream of me

"I would enter your sleep if I could, and guard you there, and slay the thing that hounds you, as I would if it had the courage to face me in fair daylight. But I cannot come in unless you dream of me..." -Peter S. Beagle, The Last Unicorn

-

Blitz’s knee rattled against the wobbly side of the barstool, tapping his leg compulsively as he scanned the dim bar. Everybody was fucking obnoxious, was the problem. Girls with judgy laughs, smug jocks, arrogant hipsters with their post-post-irony bullshit. Everybody copying the last trend, but really making fun of it, because they were soo over it, actually. What he wouldn’t give for Stolas’ full-throated fucking sincerity, sometimes. Maybe he was cringe, but he didn’t have the dead-eyed ‘look how cool I am’ syndrome that infested this fucking shithole like a plague.

He tapped his fingers against his phone laying facedown on the bar. If he flipped it over, he’d just have to look at the fucking weather app announcing the full moon, and the ghost of Stolas’ cancellation text lurking in his notifications.

“-and she just thinks she’s soooo,” some woman drawled, and Blitz’s eye twitched at the thought of talking to her for long enough to get his dick in her mouth and shut her the fuck up. That was a no.

“Better than workin’, though, innit,” said some guy, and Blitz leaned over, trying to figure out who. The accent was familiar. Not Stolas’, but the imps that worked for him all seemed to have that low-class, ‘allo guvnor’ shit going on. When Blitz exchanged two words with them, at least. Which he tried not to.

“You still workin’ at the Palace like your dear old Dad did, Reg?”

“Nah,” ‘Reg’ said, and Blitz caught him as he spoke- short-horned imp about Moxxie’s size, hair slicked back like he thought he was cool. Clearly dying a slow death of Hipster Prick disease. “Got to be too much for me. Pay sounded alright but there en’t enough money in the world to put up with those rich fucks.”

“Oh, tell us the good shit, Reg,” the girl at the table gushed, obviously thirsty for his shrimp dick. “Nick hasn’t heard your stories, ooh, Nick, they’re sooo funny-”

“You never came out with us,” Reg said, pointedly.

“Hard enough to when you don’t work two rings away,” Nick put in, and Blitz could have yelled at them to get on with the stupid story, because it was his only excuse not to find somebody to fuck in the nasty ass bathroom.

“Tell ‘im about the prince, Reg,” the girl begged, and Blitz slouched deliberately to look like he wasn’t listening. His nerves tingled.

“Oh, just a sad sack, it’s the wife that’s a real piece of work,” Reg said, sounding worldly and uninterested. “D’you know I once watched her smash a vase worth more than my mum’s house? Just hucked it overhand like a shot-put. Horrifying.”

Blitz filed this away. Like most mistresses, he had a looming blank space in his brain labeled The Wife, and he thought about her as little as possible with an angry, guiltless nausea.

“Why!?”

“Oh, her shit husband opened his mouth, what else?”

Stomach tying itself into a knot, Blitz reminded himself that he didn’t actually know who they were talking about. Maybe he was hallucinating Stolas in places where he wasn’t, like letting his name slip while fucking somebody else.

“Prince Stolas says the word divorce and she gets an extra health bar and a choir starts singing in Latin,” Reg continued, so there went that theory.

“This isn’t even my final form,” smirked the other fucking idiot.

“That’s, like, so derivative,” the girl snorted, and Blitz took a second to imagine shooting them, except then he wouldn’t be able to eavesdrop on horrible stories about his sad fuckbuddy.

The bartender cruised by, giving him a hard look, and Blitz flicked two fingers at him for another drink. The first one was pretty much a prop that he’d intended to ditch on his way to Bonetown, but apparently that wasn’t happening because this place was full of miserable assholes. The second would be something to nurse while he tracked this stupid conversation. Blitz took a drink. He tried not to drink when he was pissed off. This felt like a special fucking occasion.

“What was the worst, Reg?” 

“Oh, fuck’s sake,” Reg sighed, leaning back in his chair until two legs were off the ground, and Blitz wanted to shove him over. “Gotta be- right, I come in when I’m s’pose to, end of the night, clean up after the gentry are in bed, except this one’s on the bloody floor, right? Demon prince dead drunk on the fancy rug. So I scarper.”

The other guy cracked up, booing him and throwing a crumpled-up napkin. “Coward!”

“Oi! Shut up! I was right to! The wife comes in screamin’ her bloody head off about what a fuckup he is, winds up, kicks him in the stomach-”

Blitz choked on his drink. He swallowed frantically, eyes watering.

“-and what’s he do, cover his head? No! Rolls over and throws up everywhere, she’s still screaming bloody murder, only thing out of his plastered mouth is not to let the kid hear, she smashes a vase next to his head and leaves. And there’s me behind the curtains, stuck there until he peels all ten miles of himself up off the floor and fucks off, and I have to clean up the sick and all the bloody shards-”

The other two ghouls at the table with him were fucking laughing, and Blitz hadn’t come with his usual kit but he wasn’t unarmed, either; he could throw his knife and give this little dickhead some new holes to fuck. He toyed with it, but what would be the point. Instead, he took another drink, trying to wash down the taste of bile at the back of his throat.

“Really. Surprised the miserable fuck hasn’t slit his wrists in his fancy fucking bathtub,” Reg shuddered mockingly. “I en’t gonna be cleaning it up when he does.”

“Good on you for quitting, Reg.”

“Oh, I didn’t quit. Got caught stealing the silver.”

And then they were laughing again. Blitz chugged his drink and tried to drown them out.

They stopped talking about Stolas after that, even though Blitz listened in on them long enough to want to blow their fucking brains out. Or maybe his. Somebody’s. Drink number three went down numbly, and then the group of fucking idiots left. Blitz stayed hunched over at the bar, drinking more than he’d planned to because it was better than thinking. He brushed off the couple of people who tried to talk to him, because his dick was so out of commission it may as well have been in another universe.

A notification on his phone snapped him out of the tunnel-vision haze, and it wasn’t anything, some fucking app trying to get him to open it; but it pulled up the fucking weather app with its little moon icon, which he stared at for a solid minute before opening the rideshare one, because he definitely wasn’t okay to drive home.

The guy’s car pulled up in the parking lot, and Blitz shook his coat to make sure he still had his keys (he’d get the van in the morning, or better yet make Moxxie do it) and got in. “There’s a puke bucket back there if you need it,” the guy said, and then proceeded to ignore him for the twenty minute drive.

That was fine by Blitz, who was still silently processing. Half-formed thought glopped around in his mostly-drunk brain like a lava lamp, putting disparate images together. Stolas, quietly uncomfortable as he stated one of his only limits was being hit in the face. Stolas, cringing and apologizing over and over with a rictus grin. My knight in shining armor, come to rescue me! That empty fucking house. Wine bottles stashed in weird places, the bedroom, the bathroom. Stolas sinking into the pretense of affection in Blitz’s subpar aftercare with starved desperation.

It’s like drowning, Stolas had said once, nonsensically, stuck in a subspace haze. Not just once, actually. Over and over, rolling it around. Feels like drowning. Like drowning.

C’mere and lemme give you mouth-to-mouth, then, Blitz had leered at the time, which made Stolas do that high-as-balls giggle that reached into Blitz’s chest and twanged a discordant note on his out-of-tune heartstrings.

At home, he hung up his keys and paced back and forth in front of the couch a couple times, tail lashing, full of manic energy that had nowhere to go. He flipped his phone over and over in his hands, tossing it in the air and catching it, seeing how many times he could do it before it fell. He wasn’t stupid, the juggling game was an excuse to keep him from opening the fucking thing, from making whatever stupid decision was lurking in his impulse-ridden brain.

Giving up, Blitz took off his coat and threw it in the general direction of the chair, tugging off his shirt and pants until he flopped down face first on the couch, took his horns in his hands, and groaned.

Not letting himself think about it long enough to realize it was a bad idea, Blitz grabbed for his phone, opened it, and texted Stolas.

u ok?

He slammed it facedown on the cushions, face heating up. Stupid. Stupid. Fucking stupid idiot. He made a policy of not texting first. He was gonna get back three six-paragraph texts that would take forever to decipher and when he did would tell him nothing except that Stolas was a double-texting asshole who ate dictionaries for breakfast.

The wife wound back and kicked him- Fuck, Blitz wished he’d killed that fucking kid. Maybe then he wouldn’t feel so awful now.

His phone buzzed.

I’m perfectly hale, thank you so much for asking, Blitz. I do appreciate that. Perhaps tomorrow we could meet up for coffee and complete our requisite trade of my grimoire? You can have it back straight away, I don’t mean to keep you from your important work

Blitz squinted. He could smell the avoidance on that bird.

Thot u wre sick ?

Typing bubble. No typing bubble. Typing bubble again. Blitz gnawed on the inside of his cheek.

I was unwell this afternoon, but I feel much btter now. Thank you for thinking of me <3

It took a second, and then another message dinged:

*better.

Squinting again, Blitz looked at it hard. Stolas didn’t make typos.

Blaming it on the drinks, Blitz closed his eyes while he typed, like not seeing it would mean he wasn't really sending it.

r u lkie fr ok

He opened his eyes. Looked at it. Thunked his head down on the sofa again.

Surprised the miserable fuck hasn’t slit his wrists in his fancy fucking bathtub. Except he couldn’t, because they’d played with knives before and nothing actually broke Stolas’ unbreakable immortal shell. He was untouchable. Un-hurt-able.

Right?

Determinedly, Blitz swallowed hard and followed up. Another rule broken: No fucking double-texting.

i worie abt u smtms

He tossed his phone onto the floor, crossed his arms under his head, and tried to go the fuck to sleep.

The next morning, he got up, nursed his stupid fucking four-drink hangover because being thirty-five sucked absolute ball sack, and got dressed for work. He didn't find his phone until he was almost fifteen minutes late, and going to be later since he'd have to walk; it had ended up wedged under the bean bag chair.

He opened it. A text message from Stolas waited there. 2am, almost an hour after he'd sent his, which was a record- Stolas usually responded instantly, like he had nothing better to do than wait by the phone.

Everything will be okay.

Somehow, Blitz thought as he slipped his phone in his pocket, that didn't make him feel better at all.

[gremio0]

your limbus oc looks SO cool do you have any info on him.... he compels me i want to know more about him

HI HELLO thank you for opening the floodgates I have a lot to say about Bentinho actually. in the wise words of oomf I’m like a vampire and need to be invited into talking about my ocs otherwise I physically cannot do it

Don’t expect any structure from this I’m not particularly sure half of the words I’m saying even exist

Alright. So.

He’s based on the book Dom Casmurro by Machado de Assis (actually my favorite author of all time! I have a physical silver medal from a national literature olympic on this shit). Though it’s not really possible to directly translate the title, “Dom Casmurro” is a nickname given to Bentinho in his old age, “Dom” being a mockery of his high status and “Casmurro” meaning something between “stubborn”, “spiteful” and “grumpy”. His full name Bento Santiago is also interesting with “bento(a)” being a rarely used word for “holy” (as in “holy water”/“água benta”) and “Santiago” being derived from the word for “saint”, neither of which actually fucking apply to him; “Bentinho” is the diminutive form of the name. As an LCB Sinner, Bento is kind of an insufferable little bitch who I created with the explicit purpose of suffering the consequences of his actions as much as possible because he doesn’t get nearly enough shit in the book for being such an asshole all the time.

The Sinner Bentinho has a rather erratic demeanor, always literally and figuratively looking over his shoulder. He’s an arrogant and bitter man who doesn’t seem to be looking forward to much in his life. Although he does his best to maintain an appearance of collected elegance, his paranoia and jealousy often slip through the very plentiful cracks for all to see. He’s distrusting of most of everyone, and a pathological liar; talking to him can be rather difficult if you’re not careful with your words, as he has a way of finding non-existent malice in every other sentence, but it’s not particularly difficult to gain his favor if you know how to stroke his ego.

As for general Limbus stuff:

He has Midnight Green (#004952) as his signature color, and I generally use ☕️ as the emoji to represent him. The reference should be clear if you’ve read Dom Casmurro <33

He does not have a sinner number yet, but I’ve been considering #18 (because Machado de Assis, and consequently Bentinho, lived around the 1800s)

The word engraved in the hilt of his rapier, “Desprezo” (NOT to be confused with “depressed” it’s happened too many times by now) is, in portuguese, the feeling of despising something or someone.

His base EGO is called “Tu Serás Feliz”; “You Shall be Happy"

In his LCB Sinner Identity, he has Lust, Pride and Envy sin affinities.

His Canto is called “The Truth Revealing”. It would be placed somewhere from mid to end game, as the way it’s structured would require Bento to already have established relationships with the other sinners. I’ve taken a lot of inspiration from the philosophy he presents in one of the earlier chapters in the book: “life itself is much like an Opera”. Notably, the majority of it takes place in a theater, visually inspired by the Rio de Janeiro municipal thetaer. I’ve reduced the cast of the book a bit to focus on the conflict between Bentinho, Capitu and Escobar, though characters like Ezequiel, José Dias and Dona Glória also play a part.

He has a lot of associations with opera and theater but it’s hard to elaborate on those without a full summary of his Canto. Maybe one day.

I think that’s just about enough information for a decent introduction but I’d be very happy to elaborate if there happen to be any questions. wink wink nudge nudge. He’s been very rudely occupying my brain without my consent for the past few weeks and I doubt he’ll be going away any time soon. He should die one of these days that would be great.