#exhausts me

[bam-monsterhospital]

catching up on the critical role episodes where the party split and were joined by guests because I adore Aabria Iyengar and was curious about Deanna and FRIDA specifically, and i'm skimming the tvtropes sections on their characters, and I come across some..... hmmm, well you know how tvtropes is biased and edited by biased parties? And how fandom loves to bend over backwards in attempts to villainize Black women and Black women characters specifically? Yeah that.

'egocentrically religious' hmm? Then I read the rest of the section. "Okay, that's a very negatively-bent trope to list for what amounts to 'is practical about her religious relationship/critical of the gods'", I thought, having read everything before this and getting a vague picture of this character. For those who don't want to go looking "egocentrically religious" is exactly what it sounds like: a trope where a character is only concerned with how their deity responds to them.

Then there's the link at the end of it.

The final sentence, the part that says "Deanna becomes angry" links to the trope "entitled bastard" (which again is a trope meaning exactly what it sounds like).

and with the wording and choice of what to link, pretty sure whoever wrote this bit didn't intend for the trope to apply to her god. -__-

(i mean if it is intended to apply to pelor -with the deity as the entitled shit-, which would make sense and support what information is put down in this lil section, then good! excellent! but it does not come across that way and instead reads like another case of misogynoir.)

[immortalsins]

every holiday i berate myself for not working harder during term time and i wonder how i so easily slip into the cycle of missing lectures -> spending free time catching up on lectures -> missing lectures to catch up on coursework/revision rinse & repeat etc and why can’t i keep up all-day productivity when it should be easier to do so if i’m already up&out for lectures ... but the start of each term has been overwhelmingly stressful and i fail at all-day productivity immediately then its like oh i have a diagnosis.

[martyrbat]

i dont know who needs to hear this but you do not need to go on a diet. you do not need to lose weight as a new year revolution. you do not need to feel shame for gaining any weight over the holidays and for enjoying yourself and the food. you do not need to tolerate diet talk after setting a boundary and if someone cant respect that then theyre being the asshole. you already have a summer body. you already are hot. theres no moral failure or shame in being fat

[silentsockfeet]

actually unreal how much i hate my goddamn job

[hinamie]

9 / 266

[skellydun]

who wants to lay on top of me like a weighted blanket and fix me

[nunutiny]

Mingi ☆ Summer Sonic 2024

[arcanegifs]

ARCANE LEAGUE OF LEGENDS: 2x03 - “Finally Got The Name Right” ↳ "You must declare martial law. Appoint a general to lead until this threat has been vanquished. Someone who will not pale when faced with Zaun's degeneracy. Whose conviction never wavers. A pillar of your community whose house has always stood for progress. Who may consider my experience and my entire detachment of Noxian soldiers at their disposal. Until all our families are safe. Of course, I could only be referring to..."

[ms-demeanor]

I don't care about data scraping from ao3 (or tbh from anywhere) because it's fair use to take preexisting works and transform them (including by using them to train an LLM), which is the entire legal basis of how the OTW functions.

[cametotheshowinsd]

TAYLOR SWIFT: THE ERAS TOUR (2023)

[timethehobo]

Oops. Head empty, just visuals of a dishevelled Emmy. 😔

[madeline-kahn]

@pscentral event 31: faceless

Dancing in Film: Footwork appreciation

[shizunitis]

Ghostfire Shen Yuan loyally following the lonely, undying, forgotten Luo Binghe from the original outline.

They never even met.

Shen Yuan had died long before Luo Binghe’s story was set to start. Abandoned by his System, he was left wandering the realms, searching for anything to latch onto, anything to stave off the darkness encroaching on his consciousness whenever he stopped. He keeps himself entertained with little jokes and references that will never reach anyone. At least back home, there were other people on the opposite side of his screen reacting, seeing. Paying attention.

He never would have thought he’d miss the times he was perceived by others. He’d give anything, though. Anything.

He stumbles upon the protagonist as he’s ascending the stairs of Cang Qiong Mountain Sect for the first time. Dressed in rags and heaving with the effort, Luo Binghe is exactly as Shen Yuan had pictured: a little bun, soft and kind and so very brave.

The excitement wears off soon enough. When the tea ceremony is held, Shen Yuan watches, hopelessly trying to stop the cup from hitting Binghe’s head. He lunges at Shen Jiu; let him be identified and exorcised, at least he would have done something with himself, however useless. It doesn’t work. Of course not—nothing can come between Luo Binghe and his fate.

Shen Yuan thinks about leaving. Many times. But every time he considers the possibility of going back to wandering the world, or just passing on… Well. There’s still a lot to see, isn’t there? It will get better. It will.

Only, it doesn’t. Not really.

There’s no harem; there’s no warm comfort offered to Luo Binghe by a sympathetic beauty, no wedding celebrations, no moments of gentle companionship, however brief, however superficial. There’s no camaraderie with the demons underlings, his generals, his allies; it’s all casual cruelty and dismissals, before it’s violence and subjugation.

There’s no joy. There’s no hope. There’s no ‘better’.

Something is wrong, that’s clear. Something is wrong, and Shen Yuan has no one to blame.

This is clearly not the Proud Immortal Demon Way he knows.

Centuries later, when Luo Binghe begs for the heavens to allow him to die, Shen Yuan hears. When Luo Binghe rages against the passage of time, alone in the wreckage of his palace, left behind by everyone he’d ever known, Shen Yuan accompanies him. When Luo Binghe lies down in the Holy Mausoleum and refuses to get up, Shen Yuan waits until he opens his eyes again and leaves the palace.

They end up in a hidden realm so filled with Yin Energy that Shen Yuan can channel it to manipulate his form into that of his former body. It’s not detectable by the living, but it’s there. He feels stronger, too. He can walk, float, fly, interact with what few other ghosts they encounter.

Still, Luo Binghe cannot see him.

Luo Binghe doesn’t talk much. Well, that makes sense, he was never in the habit of talking to himself, but still. It’s lonely.

They end up in a town where a diviner takes one look at Luo Binghe and offers him a free reading. Shen Yuan can’t enter her tent, so he waits outside.

She tells Luo Binghe of the little hanger-on he’s got. A powerful one, too, though he’s still getting used to his powers. He’s been here for a long time, she says. Since he was a child. He comes from far away—farther than even the most distant star.

Luo Binghe begins talking to him. Shen Yuan isn’t sure why, but he’s not complaining!

Luo Binghe also begins meditating again, trying to soothe the damage done by Xin Mo over the centuries. For every meal, he places a few fruits across from him on a plate he’d made himself, which he eats only after finishing his own dish. He makes space by his side whenever he walks on a narrow road. He stops at every landmark and tells stories about them, always starting the same way.

“Do you remember when…” becomes Shen Yuan’s favourite phrase.

One night, Luo Binghe sighs and looks across the table. Shen Yuan places himself so that he’s in Luo Binghe’s focus.

“What is it, Binghe?”

Luo Binghe doesn’t answer him, of course. Still, it feels like a conversation, when he says:

“I wish I knew your name.”

Shen Yuan frets. He’s been trying to manipulate the physical world, but he never got the hang of it. He’d tried drawing in sand, with water, just pushing things off shelves. And yet, nothing.

“I’m sorry, I wish—” he tries, but Luo Binghe is already talking again.

“I wonder if we ever crossed paths when you were alive.” He’s expressed this thought more than once. Shen Yuan never likes to think about how they’ve missed each other, how they’d been set up for failure from the start. “I wonder if we would have been friends.”

Shen Yuan scoffs. Of course not. Him and the protagonist? No way.

But—those cold star eyes, blindly searching for him, trying to land on him… They make him want to say, I would have liked that.

He reaches a hand out to touch Luo Binghe’s forhead. He’s taken to doing it whenever Luo Binghe broods, or makes a silly joke Shen Yuan wishes he didn’t find funny. It’s soothing.

He wishes Binghe could feel it.

When his finger touches the demon mark, it blazes. Luo Binghe gasps, that heavy gaze settling on Shen Yuan’s face.

Shen Yuan startles, and jumps away.

“No! Wait!”

Shen Yuan hesitates. Luo Binghe is looking around himself, eyes begging for even a wisp of Shen Yuan’s shadow.

He can’t deny Luo Binghe this.

He can’t deny himself this.

He reaches out again. This time, he cups Luo Binghe’s cheeks. When those eyes clear of panic and widen in awe, he whispers, softly, “Shen Yuan. My name is Shen Yuan.”

Luo Binghe looks like he’s been handed a treasure so precious he’s afraid to touch it. He hesitates, raising his hands in careful starts and stops, before taking Shen Yuan’s face in them, gently caressing the soft, cold skin of his face. His eyes dance with the haste he takes in memorising Shen Yuan’s features.

Then, he smiles. Helpless and weak and so, so precious. Shen Yuan has not seen hope so bright in Luo Binghe’s face since that fateful day on Cang Qiong Mountain.

“Hello, Shen Yuan.”

[baph0meat]

this is the Gaza Family Funds Directory, a spreadsheet of palestinian families' gofundmes, sorted by the amount of support they've received thus far. please choose as many as you can from this list to donate to, even just a dollar.

in addition, the sheet also contains a link to a gdrive folder with designs for flyers/stickers that you can print out and place in your community. if you truly can't spare anything directly now, please consider doing this so you can get these links in front of people who can donate!

it also remains urgent to keep the people of palestine connected in the face of communication blackouts; please contribute esims! it is very easy to do and is fully explained on this page: https://gazaesims.com/

if you cannot afford the price of an esim individually, there's a campaign currently running on twitter to which you can contribute whatever you can afford ($1, $3, whatever) to a larger pool which will then be used to buy esims collectively. there's also the crips for esims for gaza fundraiser, which operates similarly. there are probably more than this! i chose these two for this post bc they are currently active + both have easily vettable proof of donation (screencaps in the qrts of the twitter campaign, financial accountability document in the crips for esims campaign.)

finally, look into local grassroots organizations in your area so you can stay in the loop on protest activity. many such orgs have accounts on instagram. if you are in the us, looking for local chapters of the PSL, the palestinian youth movement, or national students for justice in palestine can be a good start.

please, please, please: pick something here and do it. i know it can feel overwhelming and there may be an urge to tell yourself that you'll reblog this now and get around to it later. instead please choose one thing. even if it's just finding orgs in your area and following them so you'll be notified the next time there's a protest. even if it's just downloading the flyer designs and looking up a print shop where you can run off a stack of copies. make a decision to do something tangible right now, even if it's just a first step.

[sensitiveheartless]

One Summer Day

[hinamie]

alongside someone like you