#but if it sucks??? hit the bricks!!!!!

[venusiancarbondioxide]

some notes on fun

this is perhaps one of the more stupid things i've ever written in my life, but i feel like it might be important to make some notes on having fun because god forbid, another human being may run into these issues, and i'd like to give them a hand. in fact, i suspect most of them have, but i'm running into them later than most. i'm 25 years old and trying to figure out the concept of having fun in a way that i'm sure most people have figured out by age 10. but hey, better late than never, right?

some background: for most of my life, i've been an achievement-focused planner, all the way back to elementary school. i was the type of kid who would get a 93% on a test and then get mad at myself because i could've gotten a 100%. i really cared about doing well on standardized testing as a third grader. it was essential to me that i do well in those early school years so that i would get into the right classes in high school, and thus get into the right college and complete the right program to have a Good Career That Makes Me Happy, the kind of career where it's more of a thing that you are versus a job that you have. i was convinced that having the right career as a grown-up made you a happy person, and nobody in my life took any efforts to dissuade me of this notion. 

there were stumbles (thinking i wanted to be a professional novelist, that flopping because of the prospects of writers in the modern day, wanting be a lawyer, that flopping bc of my waning faith in the justice system, my brief forays into considering grad school, etc.), but even when i didn't have a plan, i was always Making A Plan. and having fun was allowed. i did things that were fun along the way! i was in girl scouts and irish tap and marching band and had a small group of friends and all of that. but the most important thing was always sticking to the plan. in my defense, there is a lot of societal messaging that says that this kind of career-and-education-focused life is the path to happiness and i was only a kid, so i don't blame myself for getting stuck in that trap. if you believe in astrology, blame it on the fact that my sun's in virgo, i guess. however, i owe it to myself to try and get out of it, especially now that i'm at a point in my life where all plans are gone.

like, really. i have no long-term plan for what the hell i’m doing. my last two "this is where i'm going with my life from now on" plans went up in smoke, most recently another attempt to go back to school. and i was in the process of trying to make another plan, my third "this is where my life is going for sure" plan in two years, when i realized i straight up don’t know what i want to do. i don’t know of anything that sounds enjoyable to me, honest-to-god. and i finally thought to myself, “what if i just have fun? what if my plan is to just have fun?” 

within reason, of course: i’m not going to quit my job with no backup plan just because my job isn’t fun. going to work is a bummer, but you know what’s worse? being evicted. i pick the least-evil of the two unfun evils. but really, what if my only plan was just to have fun? 

i threw that thought at my therapist thinking that she would say something like "having fun is important but it shouldn't be the main thing you focus on in your life" but she was like "yeah no, i think you should just try to have fun for a bit. i think you've been so focused on plans that you're not even sure what you think is fun anymore."

which, ouch, but she's not wrong. ii would not use the word "fun" to describe my current life, nor would i have used "fun" at any point in my life. fun was a thing you had on occasion when you had behaved well and earned it, not a thing your life could be.

but i want my life to be fun! so far, it hasn't, and i think that sucks. what’s the point of being alive if i’m not having fun? and the reasons i’m banned from trying to kill myself are too long to list, so i might as well try to enjoy my life. i am actively attempting fun and imparting the first lesson of fun i learned onto the uhhhhhh three people that have read all of this so far. 

if you have too much fun, it circles back around to not being fun anymore.

as a person who's had alcohol before in their life, you think i might have already known that one. to some extent, i did. too much drinking results in a hangover, too much fun running around the city makes your feet hurt, etc. a physical body has its limits. i have more than one chronic illness—i know that! but it also emotionally makes you feel like shit, which i didn't know. i was familiar with post-fun fatigue, but it was either a) physical exhaustion but mental satisfaction or b) a situation where something had gone wrong in the fun-having process. but now i have Learned. 

the way i learned this was exceedingly simple: i played stardew valley for 11 hours out of a 24-hour period. 

at the beginning of active fun-seeking (literally like, last week), i rediscovered the joy of stardew valley. i’ve always had fun playing stardew valley! so i played some after work when i would normally doomscroll and hey, much better. much more enjoyable. Having Fun, having a more fun day because i am actively taking time to do a thing i think is fun. but then i had a bad day at work on friday, came home, and played stardew valley for about five hours straight. i only realized how much time had passed once my ass physically started to hurt from sitting in the same spot for so long. and it was already close to midnight, so i had a late dinner and went to bed. 

the next day, i woke up at 7:30am and was annoyed that i had woken up so early, so i decided to play some more stardew valley about it. i stopped six hours later. i skipped breakfast and lunch in this process. my eyes were burning like a motherfucker. my ass hurt again, not to mention my wrist. i had a headache so bad that i had to take a four-hour nap (this was also partially due to the weather—my head always hurts when it rains). and emotionally? i felt somewhere between entirely empty and vaguely ashamed. nothing at all like my little post-work stardew sessions. i was so focused on the fun of the game that i had neglected food, consistent water intake, and basic cleanliness (i forwent a shower), and surprise, surprise, it turns out that makes you feel emotionally kind of shitty. getting that wrapped up in the fun circles back around to not being fun anymore. 

i assume all activities have a similar wall. the fun has to stop for basic things like food, water, showering, that pile of laundry i have to do, the dishes, all of that. doing a fun activity when you’re parched from not drinking any water for six hours and you have the dry mouth disease actually isn’t that fun. the same goes for if your hair feels slimy and your wrist kind of hurts and really any of that kind of discomfort. stop what you’re doing, do the minimum self-care stuff, and then you can go back to having fun if you want. 

so now i have a stardew valley limit: no more than three in-game days in a row, and i’m experimenting with no more than five in-game days per regular day total. that would be a little over an hour of stardew valley per day, which is around what my post-work stardew sessions were anyways. it turns out that a small part of me had it right from the start; good for her! hopefully i’ll get lucky and her accidental wisdom will strike again. 

[cobble-stone]

[bismuth-209]

[dreamerdagn]

my tears of the kingdom experience so far

[illzazzorino]

[poorly-drawn-mdzs]

with Luo Qingyang and Lou Binghe having the same last name I got start thinking of an au: like what if lbh was her little brother

tho what's funnier lbh in the mdzs universe or that means tlj is lou qingyangs dad in that au

I wanted to give this a genuine answer but I kept getting distracted by Lou Binghe...so...yeah.

[canisalbus]

There he goes

[grineerios]

[xray-vex]

IF IT SUCKS...ABANDON SHIP

[mephoj]

late night chat

[undead-knick-knack]

The Raven Queen to Bells Hells:

Glad someone else finally said it to them 🙏

[thebrainrotsreal]

I am begging y'all to please watch The Batman (2004) animated series, legit had to draw a screen cap redraw about it, please. "The Laughing Bat" episode did more than the Batman Who Laughs comic could ever hope to do. The Laughing Bat? I saw Batman giggle. 10/10, that's just insane. Solid episode. Delightful, even. The Batman Who Laughs comic? Boring, trash, snooze, yawn, -100/10.

[wheeble2252]

IF IT SUCKS... HIT DA BRICKS!!

[a-scary-lack-of-common-sense]

Not me genuinely in a dilemma of whether or not I should block someone just for one absolutely ASS take even though it literally won't make a difference from their POV

[evilfarmin]

hunter when anything happens to him. at all.

[c-ptsdrecovery]