#how much harder we have it etc

[savcir-faire]

In times of absolute horror and destruction I wish for you all the transformational creativity of an utterly beautiful madness, and I offer you the blessing of a holy human freak.

she was such a queen for this

[wonder-worker]

Thinking about Elizabeth Woodville as a gothic heroine is making me go insane. She entered the story by overturning existing social structures, provoking both ire and fascination. She married into a dynasty doomed to eat itself alive. She was repeatedly associated with the supernatural, both in terms of love and death. Her life was shaped entirely by uncanny repetitions - two marriages, two widowhoods, two depositions, two flights to sanctuary, two ultimate reclamations, all paralleling and ricocheting off each other. Her plight after 1483 exposed the true rot at the heart of the monarchy - the trappings of royalty pulled away to reveal nothing, a never-ending cycle of betrayal and war, the price of power being the (literal) blood of children. She lived past the end of her family name, she lived past the end of her myth. She ended her life in a deeply anomalous position, half-in and half-out of royal society. She was both a haunting tragedy and the ultimate survivor who was finally free.

[hirazuki]

I love watching failed cuts videos, so thought I'd post some of my own!

My training partner and I are getting back into tameshigiri after a long time away, and aiming for one session every week or every other week to keep up for practice. My kesagiri has gotten pretty consistent in terms of success rate, so I'm working on kiriage now.

Cutting is lots of fun and lots of failures XDD

[wreckedhoney]

cant fuck with fandom takes that defuck extremist characters. blorbo set fire to multiple buildings killed dozens and will do so again. every incident is accompanied by a rant about some warped issue or pathetic self perspective and a lot of bared teeth. then enough people who watched the same thing i watched will just.. not register that this is an angry personality. objectively bad and toxic. among other things. like suddenly seeing takes about this genuine asswipe being a normal chill person. where did u see this. what happened. where is my genuinely unwell off-putting blorbo. who the fuck is this

[13eyond13]

.

[mrfoox]

.... I feel bad bc my friend is sad ) :

[everdreamtree]

Ugh

[notanotherblorbo]

The problem with having friends is that I want to hang out all the time and do things for 1 million years but I am also. Tired. And having a job. And having a family that has a bunch of shit going on all the times.

[the-cooler-king]

Oh yeah..... midnight gospel be hitting.... sitting in my bed fuckin. Crying. Get a grip girl

[aethersea]

another thing fantasy writers should keep track of is how much of their worldbuilding is aesthetic-based. it's not unlike the sci-fi hardness scale, which measures how closely a story holds to known, real principles of science. The Martian is extremely hard sci-fi, with nearly every detail being grounded in realistic fact as we know it; Star Trek is extremely soft sci-fi, with a vaguely plausible "space travel and no resource scarcity" premise used as a foundation for the wildest ideas the writers' room could come up with. and much as Star Trek fuckin rules, there's nothing wrong with aesthetic-based fantasy worldbuilding!

(sidenote we're not calling this 'soft fantasy' bc there's already a hard/soft divide in fantasy: hard magic follows consistent rules, like "earthbenders can always and only bend earth", and soft magic follows vague rules that often just ~feel right~, like the Force. this frankly kinda maps, but I'm not talking about just the magic, I'm talking about the worldbuilding as a whole.

actually for the purposes of this post we're calling it grounded vs airy fantasy, bc that's succinct and sounds cool.)

a great example of grounded fantasy is Dungeon Meshi: the dungeon ecosystem is meticulously thought out, the plot is driven by the very realistic need to eat well while adventuring, the story touches on both social and psychological effects of the whole 'no one dies forever down here' situation, the list goes on. the worldbuilding wants to be engaged with on a mechanical level and it rewards that engagement.

deliberately airy fantasy is less common, because in a funny way it's much harder to do. people tend to like explanations. it takes skill to pull off "the world is this way because I said so." Narnia manages: these kids fall into a magic world through the back of a wardrobe, befriend talking beavers who drink tea, get weapons from Santa Claus, dance with Bacchus and his maenads, and sail to the edge of the world, without ever breaking suspension of disbelief. it works because every new thing that happens fits the vibes. it's all just vibes! engaging with the worldbuilding on a mechanical level wouldn't just be futile, it'd be missing the point entirely.

the reason I started off calling this aesthetic-based is that an airy story will usually lean hard on an existing aesthetic, ideally one that's widely known by the target audience. Lewis was drawing on fables, fairy tales, myths, children's stories, and the vague idea of ~medieval europe~ that is to this day our most generic fantasy setting. when a prince falls in love with a fallen star, when there are giants who welcome lost children warmly and fatten them up for the feast, it all fits because these are things we'd expect to find in this story. none of this jars against what we've already seen.

and the point of it is to be wondrous and whimsical, to set the tone for the story Lewis wants to tell. and it does a great job! the airy worldbuilding serves the purposes of the story, and it's no less elegant than Ryōko Kui's elaborately grounded dungeon. neither kind of worldbuilding is better than the other.

however.

you do have to know which one you're doing.

the whole reason I'm writing this is that I saw yet another long, entertaining post dragging GRRM for absolute filth. asoiaf is a fun one because on some axes it's pretty grounded (political fuck-around-and-find-out, rumors spread farther than fact, fastest way to lose a war is to let your people starve, etc), but on others it's entirely airy (some people have magic Just Cause, the various peoples are each based on an aesthetic/stereotype/cliché with no real thought to how they influence each other as neighbors, the super-long seasons have no effect on ecology, etc).

and again! none of this is actually bad! (well ok some of those stereotypes are quite bigoted. but other than that this isn't bad.) there's nothing wrong with the season thing being there to highlight how the nobles are focused on short-sighted wars for power instead of storing up resources for the extremely dangerous and inevitable winter, that's a nice allegory, and the looming threat of many harsh years set the narrative tone. and you can always mix and match airy and grounded worldbuilding – everyone does it, frankly it's a necessity, because sooner or later the answer to every worldbuilding question is "because the author wanted it to be that way." the only completely grounded writing is nonfiction.

the problem is when you pretend that your entirely airy worldbuilding is actually super duper grounded. like, for instance, claiming that your vibes-based depiction of Medieval Europe (Gritty Edition) is completely historical, and then never even showing anyone spinning. or sniffing dismissively at Tolkien for not detailing Aragorn's tax policy, and then never addressing how a pre-industrial grain-based agricultural society is going years without harvesting any crops. (stored grain goes bad! you can't even mouse-proof your silos, how are you going to deal with mold?) and the list goes on.

the man went up on national television and invited us to engage with his worldbuilding mechanically, and then if you actually do that, it shatters like spun sugar under the pressure. doesn't he realize that's not the part of the story that's load-bearing! he should've directed our focus to the political machinations and extensive trope deconstruction, not the handwavey bit.

point is, as a fantasy writer there will always be some amount of your worldbuilding that boils down to 'because I said so,' and there's nothing wrong with that. nor is there anything wrong with making that your whole thing – airy worldbuilding can be beautiful and inspiring. but you have to be aware of what you're doing, because if you ask your readers to engage with the worldbuilding in gritty mechanical detail, you had better have some actual mechanics to show them.

[communistkenobi]

(taken from a post about AI)

speaking as someone who has had to grade virtually every kind of undergraduate assignment you can think of for the past six years (essays, labs, multiple choice tests, oral presentations, class participation, quizzes, field work assignments, etc), it is wild how out-of-touch-with-reality people’s perceptions of university grading schemes are. they are a mass standardised measurement used to prove the legitimacy of your degree, not how much you’ve learned. Those things aren’t completely unrelated to one another of course, but they are very different targets to meet. It is standard practice for professors to have a very clear idea of what the grade distribution for their classes are before each semester begins, and tenure-track assessments (at least some of the ones I’ve seen) are partially judged on a professors classes’ grade distributions - handing out too many A’s is considered a bad thing because it inflates student GPAs relative to other departments, faculties, and universities, and makes classes “too easy,” ie, reduces the legitimate of the degree they earn. I have been instructed many times by professors to grade easier or harder throughout the term to meet those target averages, because those targets are the expected distribution of grades in a standardised educational setting. It is standard practice for teaching assistants to report their grade averages to one another to make sure grade distributions are consistent. there’s a reason profs sometimes curve grades if the class tanks an assignment or test, and it’s generally not because they’re being nice!

this is why AI and chatgpt so quickly expanded into academia - it’s not because this new generation is the laziest, stupidest, most illiterate batch of teenagers the world has ever seen (what an original observation you’ve made there!), it’s because education has a mass standard data format that is very easily replicable by programs trained on, yanno, large volumes of data. And sure the essays generated by chatgpt are vacuous, uncompelling, and full of factual errors, but again, speaking as someone who has graded thousands of essays written by undergrads, that’s not exactly a new phenomenon lol

I think if you want to be productively angry at ChatGPT/AI usage in academia (I saw a recent post complaining that people were using it to write emails of all things, as if emails are some sacred form of communication), your anger needs to be directed at how easily automated many undergraduate assignments are. Or maybe your professors calculating in advance that the class average will be 72% is the single best way to run a university! Who knows. But part of the emotional stakes in this that I think are hard for people to admit to, much less let go of, is that AI reveals how rote, meaningless, and silly a lot of university education is - you are not a special little genius who is better than everyone else for having a Bachelor’s degree, you have succeeded in moving through standardised post-secondary education. This is part of the reason why disabled people are systematically barred from education, because disability accommodations require a break from this standardised format, and that means disabled people are framed as lazy cheaters who “get more time and help than everyone else.” If an AI can spit out a C+ undergraduate essay, that of course threatens your sense of superiority, and we can’t have that, can we?

[thedarknessthatloveindespite]

today was such a good morning u know. i had slept. GOOD NIGHT SLEEP N ALL. i even got up and got breakfast for me n my mom. I ATE. I CLEANED THE DISHES I USED. i even changed out of the shirt i was wearing for over a week! very productive. wait omg i forgot to mention. I ACTUALLY REALLY HAD PUT MOMS CLOTHS THAT WERE DONE IN THE WASHING MACHINE IN THE DRYER. I have to say. forgetting everything else, this is such a phenomenal act for me. it’s like fcking idk a meodorite fallen down. ITS A REALLY BIG THING. doing that is soooo hard for me. and i always have an immediate ‘no’ body reaction to the whole act but i didnt just fall into it. i like. toook a moment, you know and actually accessed it. and ! literally tho if mom told me i had to put some clothes in the dryer that would have been too much for me

BUT

anyways. i literally fcking did it. fcking hells

ANYWAYS it really was such a good morning day you know. baby steps!!!! and yeah u know i really do know that i dont do enough as i should etc. i really do know. its just really frustating how my mom doesnt see anything of this tho. yeah she needed someone to go n get the glasses and im really sorry for her but going outside was literally too much of a hurdle for me to just do. especially on short notice. like. really. my mind cant even think of trying it. visualling it

[songofwizardry]

r/ukvisa is a treasure trove of useful info and experience and has saved me so many times by digging up home office policies buried on the website that could get a visa rejected but boy does it not take a lot for several people on that sub to throw disabled people/"illegal" immigrants/asylum seekers/the entire concept of taxation and socialised healthcare/etc under the bus

[sabertoothwalrus]

do you think Falin's chimerism would affect her lifespan and behaviors? or just her body? maybe she can make more animalistic noises or has vague dragon-like instincts?

that’s a really good question! I think we could probably figure this out by taking a look at what we know about Falin, what we know about red dragons, whether these things would apply to Falin, and go from there.

The obvious external changes Falin has are: her eyes, her teeth, and her feathers.

It’s hard to pin down what Falin is like! Throughout the duration of the manga, she wasn’t really a character so much as a plot device. We have almost nothing told from her point of view, and the majority of her unbiased (as in, we’re seeing her through a neutral lens and not another character’s perception of her) characterization is from the post-canon omake.

Even Falin believes that her wanderlust might come from her dragon side, but she's not sure. Personally, I think it’d make a lot of sense if it kind of does, in the sense that she has 20/20 vision now, haha! For most of her life, she could probably only see clearly within a relatively small sphere surrounding her, and now she can see everything. She can look up and around freely in a way she couldn’t before. Fuck man, if I had magic lasik I’d probably go out more too.

Some other quirks that are really unclear whether it’s typical for Falin or chimera-influenced:

she enters rooms through windows, sometimes. And given the leaves in her hair, I think it’s reasonable to assume this is not the first floor 💀 But who knows! Maybe that’s not new for Falin.

She points out that Laios’s scent could deter monsters. Maybe she has enhanced smell. But again, it isn’t unreasonable to think this is something she would have said before. (I think even Chilchuck and Izutsumi, whose senses of smell are enhanced, can’t identify scents well. Kuro, however, can.)

VIOLENCE! But again, we’ve seen her beat shit with her staff before, and she also used to wield a flail. It IS a trait for red dragons to fight any large threat, so if anything, she’s got even better monster fighting instincts than before. I don't think this would carry over to people. Falin has always been better with people, and I'm personally not a fan of seeing her depicted as territorial or possessive. Marcille is already the possessive one, and didn't need dragon blood to be like that.

Ultimately, I don't think her dragon traits extend much farther beyond this. Especially when you consider How Little the dragon is represented as in her conscience.

it's not like it's a 50/50 split. She's like a person with a dragon ratatouille. I don't think she'd be able to make dragon noises. I don't think her body is built for that. I know there's like, a set list of tropey characteristics that are given to almost every non-human character in fiction. and sure that's FINE but they tend not to be especially personalized to the character, and tend to just be an excuse to write them OOC. Like, sure, dragons may have instincts regarding sleep habits, hunting, courting, raising young, etc etc, but so do humans! And we don't compulsively act on every instinctual whim we have. I don't see why it'd be any harder for her new dragon instincts.

If anything, I think she'd feel more affected by the fact that she has part of the demon in her.

I don't think Falin's in any sort of trouble. All the demon was was a way to communicate with people. Here, it's representing Falin's tether to the infinite realm, to mana itself. The winged lion no longer has the desire to consume anymore because, yknow, Laios has that now. This is very likely why she no longer needs to chant to cast magic.

But what else does this mean for her? She already had unusually high reserves of mana + an innate connection with spirits, but is her mana essentially limitless now? How would that affect her lifespan? I'm leaning towards, it wouldn't really?? But is she immune to mana sickness now? Is it more like her magic is just sort of amplified like it would be in a dungeon?

We can infer that having more mana doesn't increase your lifespan, because-- while elves and gnomes have both naturally high levels of mana and longer lifespans-- dwarves live longer but have lowest levels of mana of all.

So to answer your question! Maybe a little bit?? But I don't think she'd change a whole lot.

[drivemysoul]

oh my fucking god

[osachiyo]

'TRYNA GET YOUR BABY MAMA FULL OF THAT DICK !

𝐟𝐞𝐚𝐭𝐮𝐫𝐢𝐧𝐠 — jing yuan, blade, luocha x fem!reader

𝐰𝐚𝐫𝐧𝐢𝐧𝐠𝐬 & 𝐧𝐨𝐭𝐞 — n/sfw content, cheating, squirting, dumbification, neglect (from the husband), overstimulation, toxic relationships, dirty talk, petnames, reader is married, cucking, cowgirl, possessiveness (blade), vouyerism, luocha is your family doctor, etc • i never thought id write something like this but here we are lol anyway, happy reading and i hope you enjoy !! minors dni & not proofread

𝐉𝐈𝐍𝐆 𝐘𝐔𝐀𝐍 ⊹ ࣪ ˖

"bounce on me just like that, baby," jing yuan groaned, palming the fat of your ass as you rode him on your husband's couch. "s'big — you're so big, ji," you bit your lip, trying your best to suppress any moans — not wanting your neighbours to suspect anything.

"yeah? even bigger than him?" a sleazy grin adorned jing yuan's lips, your back arched so sinfully as he thrusted up into you. "ngh —!" you threw your head back, clawing his broad shoulders with your pretty nails, that your husband paid for you to get done.

"answer me, sweet girl," he whispered, fondling your bouncing tits before pulling and pinching at your hardened nipples. "d-don't tease!" you swatted at his hand, which only made him pinch harder.

" 'm not teasing, so serious right now baby," his droopy eyes were glinting with mischief — he knew he looked good. you gasped when his hand reached down to flick and rub at your clit, licking his lips at the way you clenched down on his cock.

"gonna cum, pretty?" he captured your lips in a heated kiss before you could even answer him — as if he already knew what you were gonna say. you could practically feel your eyes rolling from the pleasure behind your closed lids, pussy gushing all over his thighs and abdomen — drenching his cock in your juices.

" yesyesyes — 's so big, so much bigger than him —!" you babbled into the messy kiss, back arching even more and pressing your tits against his own chest —

"that's what i thought."

𝐁𝐋𝐀𝐃𝐄 ⊹ ࣪ ˖

muffled grunts of complaint escaped your husband's gagged mouth, hard cock straining against the rough fabric of his slacks.

"enjoying the view, cheating piece of shit?" blade had you spread eagle on you and your soon-to-be ex husband's shared bed — with you chanting his name like a prayer everytime his cock hit that one spot with unbelievable precision.

"mmph!" your husband growled — veins popping out from his forehead as he tried his best not to hump the air. fuck, you looked borderline delirious getting split open by your co-workers cock; pupils dilated with lust — practically having hearts swimming in your eyes for blade.

"look at 'em, baby — look at how fuckin' hard the bastard is," he forcibly turned your head over to your husband and the man almost didn't recognise you — tongue lolling out with each heavy thrust from blade, sweat dripping down your sinful body.

you didn't even pay attention to the tied-down man — all too focused on the way blade's thick cock rearranged your guts. "see how she turns into a dumb little slut for my dick?" blade spat, cockiness dripping from his words — sharp hipbones digging into the soft skin of your thighs with each slam of his hips.

"who does this pussy belong to?" blade turned your head back to face him, licking the tears that rolled down your heated cheeks. "y-you! all yours — it belongs to you!" you babbled mindlessly, causing a devilish smile to appear on blade's lips —

"oh yeah? and what's my name?"

"bladeee—! oh fu-fuck, bla-de!" you cried out before spraying your juices all over him — some of it even coating his abs.

"good fuckin' girl."

𝐋𝐔𝐎𝐂𝐇𝐀 ⊹ ࣪ ˖

"are you sure you wanna do this?" luocha whispered against your lips, his minty breath filling your senses. "please," you begged, rolling your hips on his lap to show your want — no, need for the blonde man.

it's not like your husband was a good man either — always out drinking and partying, while you stayed at home. alone. he brushed you off everytime you asked about the lipstick stains on his collar — saying you were being dramatic, you were sick of it. could he really blame you for wanting luocha? the young, handsome family doctor — who was also a gentleman at heart.

"i've got you," luocha's smooth, velvety voice cut off your train of thought, a gloved hand tilting your chin up before pressing his lips to yours. his other hand found purchase at your hip, before snaking up to wrap itself around your waist, pulling you closer to him.

you couldn't help but moan into the kiss — he was certainly good at this, better than your husband, at least. luocha was elegant but warm — the complete opposite of your husband, who was rough and neglectful. the softness of the kiss had you melting in his touch.

a gasp left your lips when luocha flipped you over, your back now turned to him while you laid on your tummy. "luocha.." you all but whined, pushing your ass back against his rigid cock, earning a soft groan from him. he pushed your sundress up, bunching the thin fabric at your waist — "no panties?" he mused, landing a playful slap on your plush ass. gloved hands found your cunt before you could answer, rubbing your bare folds.

an amused chuckle left the man once he felt how damp you were, "already this wet? hmm.. the mister has been neglecting you quite a bit, hasn't he? worry not, i will take great care of you."

©osachiyo— do not copy, plagiarize and repost my works to any platform, reblogs are very appreciated♡