#he doesnt have fleas but this happened right after he was hanging out with another dog for many hours

[3liza]

everyone say OHHH poor churchgrim he is the best boy ever and puts up with so much

grim grew some sort of heinous lump the size of a half grape in the course of what seems to have been several days, I know this because I have been combing and brushing him daily (not that you can tell from this photo) and he also just had that dermatology appointment where the vet looked all over his skin. i noticed the lump last week, it was raw and hairless and he was licking it. of course it's right on his flank in an area I cannot meaningfully bandage or cover without putting him in his double elizabethan collar (it's two maximum size collars taped together left over from his neuter, one wasnt big enough to block him from his stitches) which makes him incredibly depressed, so I don't want to do that to him jnless I have to. so we settled on duct tape gently pressed into the guard hairs around the lump. the lump has been cleaned and antibioticked twice, and he hasn't touched the tape, even overnight, because he's simply the most tolerant and obedient dog in the world and all I had to do was ask him once to please leave it alone.

i don't even know what could have caused this thing but my best guess based on timing and size is a really exaggerated reaction to a mosquito or flea bite. I've been giving him dog antihistamine hoping it helps and I'm going to contact the vet but I really doubt the vet will be able to diagnose or treat it any better than I can, the poor guy just has some sort of mystery problem we're all hoping isn't nodular fibromatosis. this particular lump looks more like a keloid than the others have, which is weird.

[mousehole5000]

 this is it... the final post.... 226 through THE END!!!!!

this shit with mu qing and the river of lava is SOOOO dramatic im loving it

oh my god theyre on a FUCKING bridge of course they are okay let’s go boys

“You’re right. We’re alike. You think me odd, I think you to be rather weird too.” - so what im getting from this is that xie lian and mu qing are the only characters in this book with working gaydar okay yup got it this checks out

god... the fact that xie lian is ready to be like “look mu qing we can just forget about the past it doesnt matter we dont have to be friends i know you dont like me but im not gonna let you die over it” and then mu qing is like “.... god i really do admire you huh”

“You...certainly...are rather amazing. You’re...also...a better person...than me. Long story short, I...very much wanted...to become your f-f-friend.”  - going to think about this for the rest of all time im about to become utterly unintelligible im overcome with emotions

“And, at the end of the white silk band, Feng Xin was gripping Ruoye with one hand while the other was holding on to a steel-faced Mu Qing, and he shouted towards him.” - the fucking IMAGE of this im gonna cry this is everything i could have asked for im so happy also mu qing dangling there like “ welp. guess ill live“

“Feng Xin was almost burnt by that pillar of fire, and he shouted in outrage. “WHAT’S WITH THIS BAND OF DOG SHITS, ATTACKING PEOPLE WHILE THEY’RE DOWN, SO VILE! FUCK YOUR ENTIRE FAMILY!” Xie Lian responded, “IF THEIR ENTIRE FAMILIES ALL LOOK LIKE THAT, YOU SURE YOU WANT TO FUCK THEM??” - theyre so funny!!! and theyre best friends!!! theyre joking together now in the middle of all this i could cry theyre back!!!

“Using sticks as arrows, he held the bow with one hand and used his teeth to bite back the bowstring.” - no clue how practical this is but okay archer boy. hot

i actually have so many little quips between the three of them highlighted but we’d be here all night if i included them all. im literally so delighted by this omg worth the wait

“Each sabre strike slashed to the bone. It wasn’t like Xie Lian had never seen Hua Cheng use the sabre before in the past, but his style had always been easy and leisurely, nonchalant and casual. Rather than say he was handling a weapon, it was more like he was toying with a small knife. Yet those blade marks were filled with killing intent. It was easy to imagine just how skilled the one exchanging blows with him was, and how perilous this battle.” you have no idea how mad i was when i read this and thought we missed witnessing the fight between hc and jw omg

“Behind him, Feng Xin muttered, “Dear fucking god, may all the gods and buddhas grant their blessings, that better absolutely be Crimson Rain Sought Flower, otherwise he’s gonna go mad!” “Stop your rubbish,” Mu Qing berated. “We’re all the gods and buddhas ourselves and we can’t grant shit, just keep up with him! Look at the stumbling way he’s running, he’s gonna trip and fall to his bloody death before he even sees the man!” - okay i know i said no more quips but this is literally too funny i just wanted to read it again

“ However, for whatever reason, that vicious ghost, in its muddled state, took that large group of live mortals under its wing and fled for many days. In the end, they were still surrounded by millions of ghosts, trapped in a dead end, and it was going to be eaten along with those humans.” [...] “That vicious ghost almost made a move against those humans, but for some reason, in the end, it didn’t. It instead used one of its own eyes as the price to forge a blood weapon. That vicious ghost was already forcibly hanging on with its last breath; after digging out its eye it should’ve broken apart completely. Yet somehow something had shocked it, and it instead woke to its senses completely. “ - THIS IS AMAZING ARE YOU KIDDING ME???? IS THIS ALL WE GET ABOUT HIS GHOSTLY LORE?????? HUA CHENGGGGGGGG

“What a terrible offence, his old habit had come out, and he quickly apologized. “I’m sorry! You don’t have to listen to me!” Hua Cheng, however, only smiled happily. “Everything gege tells me is the best advice, so why wouldn’t I listen?” - this isnt the fucking time afjdkfjsdkl they really never stop

“So you can hold the illusion of a perfect Crown Prince of Wuyong to face and dismiss the Jun Wu now. Isn’t that your objective? Did you think I don’t know what you’re thinking?” “THAT’S NOT IT!” Guoshi cried. “Stop getting tied up in right and wrong, victories and defeat, I’VE NEVER THOUGHT THAT WAY BEFORE!” - jun wu only being able to see xie lian as his successor and believing that thats all anyone else sees too... okay

honestly this whole final showdown was a blast i cant put everything in but it was so much fun to read. the DRAMA the LAVA the SHOUTING t

“Hua Cheng had poured too much spiritual power into him. There really was too much, so much that it was completely outside the amount the cursed shackle could withstand.” - okay.... okay... the love you give will set you free... okay....

“With Jun Wu in his grip, he carried both their bodies and forcefully slammed into the incomparably-solid rock wall! He used all of his power in this smash, and in the rumbling and crashing of rocks, he also heard the sound of something breaking.” [...] “A moment later, Jun Wu suddenly asked, “That move. What is it called?” “...” Xie Lian raised his sleeve and wiped away the blood on the side of his face. “Shattering boulders on the chest.” YES!!!!! YES!!!!! xie lian actually lived that life!!!!!! i loved this detail so much

“After a moment of silence, Xie Lian took off the bamboo hat carried on his back, took it in his hand, and covered it over Jun Wu’s face.” - xie lian... good... another detail i love. a hat that protects from the rain, given in a moment of need, even to someone who has caused you hardship... we do not forget the kindness granted to us

“There was gratefulness, there was shame, there was heartache, there was wild joy, but above all else, there was incurable love.” - :pleading: i wish it was just that easy tbh. “i have to tell you about the worst parts of myself” “ive already seen them and i dont care i still love you“ truly the dream

“ It’s been so long since anyone listened to me talk, won’t you stay? Don’t...actually do this. I won’t be able to take it. Twice, it’s been twice already! I really don’t want there to be a third time!!!” - the bit about just wanting someone to listen to him talk... xie lian... :(

emily corpse bride moment.... i knew it had to happen.... butterflies.... death and rebirth.... inevitable

xianle trio bickering about ruoye..... mu qing complaining but not letting anyone else fix it... im so happy

“The Rain Master sat down on the spot, looking like she was going to perform a passing service for her. After all, Xuan Ji was the only one left of the Kingdom of Yushi besides herself.”  - xuan ji you sure the hell were... a character. this little moment tho..... yushi huang... many thoughts

“ Who hasn’t made promises, or swore to the mountains and the seas when they were young? Talking of affection, of love, of forevers. But, the longer I hang around in the world, the more I understand, something like ‘forever’ is impossible. It’s never going to be possible. Having it once was already good enough. No one can truly achieve it. I don’t believe in it anymore.” - jian lan im happy for you bummer it didnt work out with feng xin but yeah that was looooong ago. also this quote me same mood kin but its chill. having it once was already good enough

although yeah tbh if theres anyone who can have a forever like that... it would be a ghost and a god

fasdfjadklfj GOD... pour one out for ling wen.. but is that not the truth of this world? the one can be pardoned for being good at paperwork that no one else wants to do? isnt that the plot of the shawshank redemption?

okay but the fact that all xie lian’s friends come to visit him while he waits for hua cheng is making me feel all warm and fuzzy inside.... fengqing coming together to try to get him out of the house but get scared off by his cooking... amazing

“Last time, they spent eight hundred years running towards each other. This time, it only took an instant to fall into each other’s embrace.” - im completely unaffected by this. im not lying i swear (i am lying im very emotionally affected)

okay i love this final wrap up chapter party its so fun. mu qing moving on from the broom thing!!! good for him!! the beggars get their reward!!! the fun ghost city chefs!! SQX!!!! and he xuan is?? here too??? he’s hungry??? fjadlkfjsdl

“The grounds that Feng Xin and Mu Qing had just swept were once again filthy from that giant crowd of muddy feet. Mu Qing gripped his broom, looking like he felt someone had infected him with fleas, and his eyes were wide.” - me when my dad comes into the kitchen when ive just finished washing dishes i get it king

the little folklore bit... fun!!! oh my god its over..... :(

that was really fun i had a blast reading it and on the whole really liked it i WISH soo badly that hua cheng had gotten more outside of being cunty and devoted even tho those are both important i just wish there was more about like how he got by during those 800 years and like did he ever have doubts? what shaped his worldview was it all xie lian or was it his experience as a mortal as well? why is he so mean to e’ming? theres bits and pieces here and there and i know it was already SO long but that really would have been great if there was more about hc cuz tbh by the end, at least for me, the hualian relationship didnt actually feel as fleshed out as the xianle trio relationship like i still liked hualian’s dynamic and it was really sweet how much they clearly really liked each other and  everything but i kind of wish some of the other subplots had been dropped or diminished in favor of more hc development i think that would have been cool

but anyway thats some of my thoughts and i really did enjoy the hell out of book 5 that was a riot and uhhh thanks to everyone who read these or commented *lends you spiritual energy through a high five*

[xxxdragonfucker69xxx]

Then how *should* 4-through-whatever-number dimensional place/being be portrayed? And how do popular depictions line up?

trappedinavelociraptor said: Please tell me about the eleven dimensions and how we would even begin to, like, figure out this fact. Like is it something you can tell with observation of something or is it a lot of hyper-theoretical math

ok moderately long spiel

first a clarification: “dimension” is not the same as “universe” or whatever. to say an alternate dimension or mirror dimension is totally wrong. a dimension is just an extra dimension you can move in.

let’s start with a stick figure on a piece of paper. two-dimensional. they can move left/right and up/down, and that’s it. if they were a real person in 3 dimensions they could move left/right, up/down, and forwards/backwards. but for the purposes of our imagination they live in the paper, and they’re 2d forever.

what would a one-dimensional world look like? an infinitely long straight line. on this line, i guess, there can be something like beads on a string. beads can be different color, different length, but they can only ever talk to their neighbors, the bead on the left and the bead on the right. a bead can’t “go around” its neighbor to get somewhere else on the string because there’s nowhere for it to move. if it had two dimensions, it could come up off the string and go around to the left before coming back down onto the string, but the bead’s never imagined that.

similarly, a 2d stick figure could walk through the walls of their 2d house if they could just lift themselves up off that paper, slide over the top, and slide back down into the paper. are we getting a picture of how it looks to move in dimensions that are outside what you should be able to move in? you can even imagine the effects of a 3d object moving in 4 dimensions, although pretty much nobody can actually visualise a 4d object. but a 3d person could slide 4d-”up” out of our 3d space, 4d-”over” the 3d wall, and 4d-”down” back into 3d space on the other side of the wall. to us in 3d that looks like a guy dematerializing and then rematerializing on the other side (after a short time spent walking over in 4d-”up”, it’s not teleportation)

let’s come back to that 1d string for a minute. imagine we zoom in super close and discover that it’s not actually an infinitely thin string. it’s actually more like a really tightly rolled paper tube -- so tightly rolled the beads never even notice. to them its just a string. but a tiny little flea on that surface sees it as the 2d surface of a tube. it can walk around the tube in a circle, it can move along the line, and if two fleas meet they can walk around each other -- an idea that mystifies the beads. notably, if the flea walks around the tube in a circle, the beads dont really get what’s happening to it -- its moving, but it seems to be in the same place the whole time.

what’s happened is that the 1d string actually has a second dimension, but we say the 2nd dimension is “rolled up” so tight you can’t see it on a macroscopic scale. 

let’s take a detour. the current big problem in physics is that gravity is a problem about things that are very big, and quantum physics is a problem about things that are very small, and when physicists try to put them together they get a lot of infinities everywhere, which shouldn’t happen. so they have a lot of wacky ideas about what might solve this. one idea is string theory, the idea that all particles are really just tiny loops of string wiggling at a certain frequency. (note: this means that when somebody talks about string theory and the strings connecting us, they’re totally wrong. the strings in string theory dont connect anything except when particles like merge or decay. theyre like vibrating rubber bands)

the problem with string theory is that it doesnt make sense mathematically. “well shoot,” all the string theorists say, “guess we fucked up.” but then one guy is noodling around and he goes, hang on, it doesnt work if they only move in three dimensions, but if they move in TWENTY SIX dimensions then the math works out. and everyone gets together and starts arguing. “fuck you,” alice says. “what the fuck do you mean 26 dimensions. there are very clearly 3.” “hang on,” bob says, and he explains the whole parable of the flea. “we could totally imagine 23 rolled up dimensions.” “we could have a world of mice living inside your asshole,” eve says, “i can imagine it very clearly, but that doesnt mean its real.” 

“hang on,” some other guy says, “i did a bunch more math and it also works if theres 11 dimensions. or 10 in this other version of string theory.”

this convinces some people and continues to piss some other people off. if its true, then we can imagine the following: slice that string/tube at any given point. what you have looks like a dot, but it’s really a microscopic circle. so if you imagine slicing a piece of paper out of a 3d box, what you really have is a crazy convoluted 10 or 11d curve. (google calabi yau manifold for what some guy thinks this kinda maybe looks like, ish.)

the problem is that, while we can imagine some really roundabout experiments to prove or disprove this, they are not currently feasible (some of them require like a majillion suns to set up, and we can barely use the one we have right now). so people are kinda like “well cool math cool idea but its not science.” and the string theorists are like “well what are you gonna do name ANOTHER particle? fuck you” and then they throw coffee at each other and make a big mess at the physicist conference

[thoughtsbecomehim-blog]

i dont feel like i have anybody i can talk to so this is all just going out into empty space for the sake of posterity

i feel like i am being torn apart. sorrow, self pity, anger. hopefulness. the usual shit associated with heartbreak i guess. ive for now and potentially forever lost the person i want. she intermittently wants nothing to do with me and it makes me feel like something less than dirt. we built our lives together, not without mistakes and hardship, for four years. in a number of very important ways i have failed to be what she needed or became it too late. you can’t make somebody want to be with you. i just know that i want her. my memory tells me that most things i do are for her, from the small fires to put out before they turn into big ones for her, from the big ones like moving across the country twice to be with her. i breathe this person. seeing her happy from something i’ve done for her is the best feeling in the world for me. the road to hell is paved with good intentions i suppose. 

seeing my roommates happy with each other is like a hammer to my heart as well. their happiness is gut-wrenching and makes my recently deteriorated spirit shrink more and more. they have been a large stressor on our relationship since shortly after we moved in with them. everything was fine, in fact very good at first. i was excited to come home to our house and despite the looming debt of a 4000 dollar bill to get my vehicle back having a place to call our own again negated that. they do not live the same way we do though, they do not respect our things the way they should be nor do they treat shared space with much if any mutual respect. 

i told a close friend about some of this over drinks and found out last night that he was doing something bad to another friend of mine. so the guy i was at least willing if not comfortable talking about the turmoil in my life about has lost a ton of respect from me. i dont think i can look at him the same way for a while. i can tell my mom anything but she just doesnt really get it and it’s hard to counsel somebody when they are explaining why and how their relationship between two mentally suspect/unwell people has failed. 

ive found some refuge in listening to more music but that doesn’t last. every time my brain isn’t occupied it’s agonizing over what is going to end up happening which is just so unbelievably unhealthy. it is hard to hide whats going on at work and i cant magically be in a work mood when i need to be so when people inevitably ask whats wrong i mostly just want to scream out loud and die. i’m not under the assumption that break ups should be easy but i don’t know how you can ever really be ready to deal with it. 

starting a new schedule at work is also not an appealing idea and when i have days off by myself i have no ability to fill the entire day with productivity. those activity gaps are equally agonizing and the time spent in them seems to last three times longer than in reality. i realize the onus is on me to fill those gaps but part of the issue is knowing one is coming and then the anxiety setting in makes it hard to accomplish anything. 

we are also dealing with a flea infestation that our roommates are under the impression we, but specifically me, am responsible for. it has solidified the financially unwise but necessary decision to leave after the lease is up in march, along with my now ex partner potentially back to florida for good. 

i just feel like a lot of things have stacked against me in a very short amount of time. My relationship deteriorated quickly after we went out with our roommates for one of their birthdays where we felt obligated to go, spend basically all of our money doing so instead getting groceries or whatever. we both had an extremely bad time and took it out on each other. weeks after that her coworker let loose that another coworker has falsely claimed that she and i had ‘fooled around’ which was both completely removed from reality and a vicious attempt to hurt my partner at the expense of my own life and privacy over a crush she has on a guy my partner occasionally hangs out with as friends. the seed of doubt planted, my partner broke up with me because she could not believe me saying it wasn’t true. among a mountain of other more important things, true, but that was the final catalyst. the following two days were filled with hard, crushing words that make me shrivel even remembering.

i know the ways i have failed her as a partner. i know the ways i have loved her and done the right things for her as well. the bad outweighs the good for her. that’s life. i hope we choose to begin anew. as the adults we are. i cannot imagine ever wanting to take care of another person the way i do with her, nor can i imagine being more willing and eager to do so. it is very, very challenging to not let my anxiety about this affect the space i need to give her. being around her literally dissolves my insecurities, this was the first year i have been without a shirt around people who arent extremely close friends or family in 11 years. her being good for my mental health isnt a reason to stay with me though. 

ive been thinking about getting a therapist. just somebody to talk to that i dont have to associate with on a regular basis. the first 15 years of my life were intermittently spent in therapists offices with questionable results. i dont know that i can cite any tangible benefit directly related but i know that i dont have any desire to do to somebody else what was done to me so maybe thats a win for therapy. i cant see myself getting seriously suicidal, outside of the momentary contemplation we all experience when things are very tough. but there are some self harm issues, body image issues and other various things that i dont believe i work out myself. there’s also the realization that sometimes stuff like that you just have to carry. it’s not going to leave no matter who you talk to or what pills they give you. whatever facet of my personally that makes me feel like talking about my feelings with my friends is just unloading unwanted baggage for them i truly resent. 

every bad feeling you can have about yourself is something i’ve experienced daily for the last two weeks. i want to both collapse and explode at the same time. i want to feel your hand in mine and your lips against mine. i know it’s not going to happen for a long time, if ever.