#can i feel anything else?

[cashew-milkk]

i’m sad again. why am i always sad. i’m so tired of always being sad.

[blueboyluca]

“When I first heard it, from a dog trainer who knew her behavioral science, it was a stunning moment. I remember where I was standing, what block of Brooklyn’s streets. It was like holding a piece of polished obsidian in the hand, feeling its weight and irreducibility. And its fathomless blackness. Punishment is reinforcing to the punisher. Of course. It fit the science, and it also fit the hidden memories stored in a deeply buried, rusty lockbox inside me. The people who walked down the street arbitrarily compressing their dogs’ tracheas, to which the poor beasts could only submit in uncomprehending misery; the parents who slapped their crying toddlers for the crime of being tired or hungry: These were not aberrantly malevolent villains. They were not doing what they did because they thought it was right, or even because it worked very well. They were simply caught in the same feedback loop in which all behavior is made. Their spasms of delivering small torments relieved their frustration and gave the impression of momentum toward a solution. Most potently, it immediately stopped the behavior. No matter that the effect probably won’t last: the reinforcer—the silence or the cessation of the annoyance—was exquisitely timed. Now. Boy does that feel good.”

— Melissa Holbrook Pierson, The Secret History of Kindness (2015)

[aroaceleovaldez]

i have suddenly become obsessed with a theme that HoO established but never proceeded to extrapolate on, which is:

You are Percy Jackson, and you have been swapped with a boy who was allegedly everyone's favorite person, but they have decided to replace him with you. They just met you. You stand next to his best friend and the people he's known his entire life. In his home. In his cloak. In his place. They stopped looking for him.

You are Jason Grace, and you have just found out you have a long lost sister who completely replaced you in her life with this girl you just met. Your lives and personalities are mirrors. She is you, living the life you were robbed of.

You are Annabeth Chase, and you have just become starkly aware that you have been inhabiting the void left behind by your best friend's long lost brother. You and Luke were just replacements for him. Now you have to look him in the eyes when he has nothing and know you took that life from him.

You are Piper McLean, and you have just found out your relationship is fake and built entirely on the memories of Annabeth Chase. You have been given a boyfriend when hers has been taken away. You have no idea how much of it is real or not but regardless you feel like if your relationship isn't exactly in their image that you have failed.

You are Leo Valdez, and you have just learned that you are the echo of your great-grandfather. You are not your own person. You just exist to be a mirror of him. A doppelganger. An actor and stunt double facing all the danger he never had to but wearing his face. To be there for his best friend decades later simply because he couldn't. You are playing a role. A seventh wheel and a pawn for a goddess who carefully sculpted your entire life for her own purposes.

You are Hazel Levesque, and the only reason you are alive is because your brother couldn't save your his sister. You are a consolation prize. An apology. Your existence here is misplaced in every way but you inhabit it anyways.

You are Frank Zhang, and you are a shapeshifter. Inhabiting your own body feels strange and clumsy when you could be literally anything at any time. You are anything and everything and live your life with the simple certainty of knowing exactly how you will die.

[poorly-drawn-mdzs]

The musical episode.

[First] Prev <–-> Next

[roorreer]

Something something. Making Solas a liar in Veilguard actively brings back a problem they fixed working on Inquisition.

On December 20 2019 VGS posted an interview with Trick Weekes about their work on Solas. This whole sentence is a link so its large enough for mobile but also disclaimer this is before they changed their name so deadname warning.

Here's a transcription I found here which is where i took the screenshots above. Since I know not everyone has 40 minutes to listen to an online radio interview.

I however highlighted the main point since most of you are not reading the screenshots anyway but skimming through. Rant under Read-more. Also bc i try to not be too negative on people's dashs but also i wanna ramble some more.

"But he lied a lot more. And it really weakened his character."

You can tell this happened during the game. Solas lies only once within Inquisition. He says something he can't be vague about and you push him so he lies, badly. He usually tells the truth vaguely. Typically Solas lies no more than Blackwall.

I fully believe that if in Inquisition your inquisitor figured out that Solas was Fen’harel and asked him bluntly to his face he'd confess. He might even be impressed. But why would you ever start to think that. No one assumes that their coworker is actually Poseidon regardless of how much they love the beach and ocean.

He hides in your expectations.

You can't ask him about being an ancient elf or being Fen'harel of myth because those aren't very probable. They're astronomically low to be truth within that universe. And outside, no one finished DA2 and went i wonder if one of our next companions is the Dread Wolf. Sera said, impossible things can't be surprises. He doesn't have to lie so when the truth comes out it's becomes obvious on a second playthrough.

They then actively bring back a problem they fixed in Inquisitions development. That they were open about fixing. That having a character that outright lies to you makes you have no intention of even hearing out the character. It retroactively undercuts Inquisition bc i see people trying to find Solas' lies in it when they aren't going to find any beyond the court intrigue.

It undercuts any lore we do get from Solas bc people dismiss it outright as being a lie from Mr "I abhor blood magic". I feel like shaking people's shoulders like no, dont do it.

They retconned him guys i have proof from 2019.

And its like if you hate Solas is this even satisfying? Like that's not Solas. His motivations are gone (that's a whole other post) and so is his core personality trait. It's like they went here's the Dreadwolf but during the ten years they replaced the smug asshole who was insufferably right with a 20 yo senior chihuahua that doesnt have any teeth.

My favorite villains are those that tell the truth. Because nothing hurts more than the truth. Can you imagine if he told you the truth. If he told you horrible things that you dismissed as lies to only be true. Wouldn't Varric’s death have more weight if he told you Varric was dead only for you - for everyone - to see him in the Lighthouse. If it was a spirit who took his shape to help you or even because it saw something worth reflecting in your memories.

So you dismiss him until it's revealed near the end oh he was telling the truth and you have an oh shit maybe he was right about other things but its too late to try and stop any of the truths he told you which could be from allies/companions betraying to stuff about Ghilan'nain and Elgarnan.

Like the only way to redeem Solas was to listen to him and by going out of your way to address problems he sees and you can find the alternative to tearing down the Veil by a series a little puzzle pieces throughout the game.

Have it be he will only listen to you if you listen to him. That he'll reject your other solution bc why the hell would he trust you if you couldnt extend the same.

Like Solas couldve been a great villian and he should've been great for both the haters and those that liked him. Not only the romance but for those who became his friend. Like i keep coming back to if i hated Solas would i be satisfied with Veilguard.

And the answer is no because that isnt Solas.

Tricking him has no weight bc he's an idiot in Veilguard like not even in the ending bc doesn't notice you switch the dagger around like right in front of him but none of his actions make sense. Ppl have mentioned the regret prison makes no sense for Elgarnan and Ghilan'nain bc they don't have regrets.

Attacking Solas has no weight because he literally needs the shit kicked out of him by a dragon for it to even begin to work. They literally need him to be at deaths door before its realistic that Rook could take him in a fight.

Redeem has no weight bc of the massive retcons to his motivations. They had to retcon the post credits scene bc even if Flemythal went hey i don't want you to do this Dai Solas wouldve went okay but that doesnt solve my other problems with the veil including the corruption of spirits and the fact its in literal shambles so i guess is still coming down.

I'm just disappointed. By the end of Trespasser they had a great villian and they just tossed it to the side and reverted him and people are arguing about a character who's sole defining trait in Veilguard is a problem they solved before Inquisition launched.

Basically we can sum it up with a screenshot.

[mixmangosmangoverse]

If you ever needed to know the extent of how the I/P conflict is fandomized, there is a popular post going around with a Sailor moon sticker saying Free Palestine and all the comments are talking about how it's their aesthetic and they totally need to buy it

Because this doesn't matter to them, it's just the cool hip and trendy thing

[cnl0400]

Character references for the undateables

I love all the little details!!

Sharing these because knowledge should be #free and #available to #everyone

[bunnieswithknives]

Thanks.

Prev

[benevolenterrancy]

("Always. Continuously. With increasing apprehension, and decreasing hope. I will love you if I never see you again, and I will love you if I see you every Tuesday. I will love you as a corpse loves the beak of the vulture. I will love you no matter what happens to you, and no matter how I discover what happens to you, and no matter what happens to me as I discover this." -- paraphrased from The Beatrice Letters, Lemony Snicket)

[duckprintspress]

Urgent: Help Us Not Get Screwed

Anyone who follows us has seen us screaming from the hill-tops about our current crowdfunding campaign for Aether Beyond the Binary (17 aetherpunk stories! Outside the gender binary main characters!). We've only got 50 hours left...and we just got screwed.

Our Anthology Kickstarter is being scammed.

About two hours ago, with us still roughly $1,500 from our goal, we got a junk pledge for almost $2,000. This pushed us into being marked as "funded" but there is zero chance it's a real pledge, it's from a shell account marked as being in Turkey. This kind of money doesn't just fall like a miracle into the laps of small business like ours.

The timing on this attack is devastating. The final 48 hours of a campaign are absolutely critical, especially for one as close to meeting our goal as we are. We were very likely to hit our target, but doing so was going to require appeals to y'all that started with "hey, we're so close, please help spread the word." Further, the campaign has hundreds of followers who will get a notification at the 48 hour mark, and many who might have backed to help get us to the finish line will now think "oh, they're there, they don't need me," and not back. Meanwhile, one of two things will happen with the spam pledge: either it will get removed by Kickstarter, which could take hours or a day+, totally nuking us during this crucial window, or it won't get removed until the payment bounces post-campaign, at which point we won't actually have enough money to do fulfillment.

Either way, we are fucked.

Please, please don't let these dipshits ruin the love and passion that 30+ people have poured into this project for over a year.

Our campaign IS NOT FUNDED, and it won't be without help. I'm begging, help spread the word about how we're getting screwed, and help spread the word about Aether Beyond the Binary (visit the link for so much info!) so that we can get enough real pledges to fund this project we've poured our hearts and souls into.

SUPPORT THE QUEER ANTHOLOGY KICKSTARTER FOR AETHER BEYOND THE BINARY (with your pledges or with signal boosts!)

[classicslesbianopinions]

the other thing about being disabled in academia is everyone is like "yeah we can't do much about the buildings they're old :/" as if "old" being a synonym for "inaccessible" isn't just a constant reminder that the people who built the school did not imagine that someday someone like me might study there

[seiwas]

cw: suggestive, just iwaizumi being hot in a muscle tee, use of 'baby', sweat, unedited sawry (this is my pure carnal desire for this man)

iwaizumi hasn’t worn a muscle tee in years—

it hangs off him like a singular piece of cloth, haphazardly cut to show off as much skin as possible. slutty, the way mattsun and makki had intended for it to look when they gifted it to him in his third year of college.

which, to be fair, maybe he was one—a slut, that is. whoring himself out completely with those ‘subtle’, ‘lowkey’ thirst trap instagram stories on his fitness account. the way his skin flushed a darker peach after your joint gym days was always borderline inappropriate, the strands of his hair sticking up in what you could easily mistake as sweat-matted sex hair.

iwaizumi’s muscle tee days are well associated with him being the image of absolute sin.

but it was all for you anyway: the instagram stories he set on ‘close friends’ only, the hours he kept free so he could align his gym schedule to yours—

“oh! that’s perfect!” you beam at him, your smile completely unaware.

“yeah. it all worked out…” he casually brushes it off.

—it was oikawa's idea in the first place.

"you have to sell yourself better iwa-chan," the brunet whines over the phone.

and so he did; followed every embarrassing idea oikawa came up with, posed and posted in ways extremely un-iwaizumi, and stocked up on muscle tees. a lot of them. only for him to be called—

"simp," oikawa snorts on the call. iwaizumi groans, rolling his eyes.

—"baby," you stop dead in your tracks, your breath on hold.

yeah, he thinks, it was all worth it because this is what you call him now.

"is that—?" you inch closer, mouth falling slightly open. he thinks there are stars in your eyes as you ask, "are you wearing—?"

oh.

iwaizumi looks down at the muscle tee hanging off his body and feels a little bit exposed. he just came from the gym and he hasn't worn a muscle tee in years, his collection of them having dwindled over time. the only reason he kept this one is because of its sentimental value, and the fact that it came from makki and mattsun.

compression shirts are his thing now, which you approve of very much, but you're both in the middle of moving, and some of his clothes are still in boxes.

you approach him slowly, "is this a comeback?" the smirk on your face grows when you reach him, your hands fiddling with the fabric.

this is the same muscle tee he was wearing the first time you told him you loved him.

he moves away before you can come any closer.

"sweaty," he scrunches his nose as he takes your hands into his, kissing your fingertips.

you scoff, pressing yourself right into his chest, "even better."

your hands cling to his sides, slipping underneath the damp cotton of his muscle tee as you rake your fingers down planes of taut muscle. he shivers, breath hitching as the heat travels up his body, flushing the sides of his neck deep peach.

you peer up at him and grin, placing small pecks at the areas of his collarbone that peek through.

fucking—

his hands grip your waist, keeping you in place as he tilts his head low, lips grazing just the tip of your ear.

"don't tease," he warns, voice low and hoarse, but his hands show no signs of moving away.

notes: i would like to thank @pastelle-rabbit for asking me the hardest question of all time, otherwise this little blurb wouldn't exist

[froggerland]

Heard it was jirvs bday………

[feelo-fick]

"it must be the caffiene."

"...? we didn't have anything caffinated?"

//

CHILAIOS WEEK DAY 2 : Changeling

HI THIS IS SUPER LATE BUT ART HAS BEEN. HARD. AND YES I SKIPPED ONE DAY THAT ONE IS GONNA GO LAST BECAUSE ITS TAKING SO LONG TO MAKE.... ill get to the others when i find the time.

Bonus :

[xxplastic-cubexx]

🧙‍♀️🐈‍⬛

[cj-the-random-artist]

Let us dance into the night as the fire rages on....

Gonna add a greyscale version, the sketch this was based on under the cut, but all I really have to say about this is that this is the first time in a long time. Maybe even years. That I've sketched up a simple doodle and had it grab me by the soul and rip and illustration out of me. This is also the first illustration in a long time where I enjoyed the whole process. I also tried different techniques and stuff here and I'm in love with how this turned out actually

But yeah greyscale version and sketch this was based on under the cut

I was gonna add some rambles down here about the way I think about Narinder and the Lamb's dynamic and the stuff going on in the background and other things but after spending like an hour and a half writing and rewriting this caption. Uh. Nevermind lol

Enjoy the chaos that is this drawing and, if you're reading this, may something good happen for you today