#i am 29 now!

[support-ponies]

it is my birfday!!!

[sparkles-rule-4eva]

Reread the IDW Sonic 30th anniversary comic the other day and found this golden panel of the bros. Tails is just coated in leaves as they're running/flying and Sonic completely glazes over that 🤣

They're so sillyyyyy brubbers

[sleepsucks]

[rox-of-iu]

sike sorry im not done priestposting actually. here's also today's doodles from the note app from when i was waiting for my soup to cook.

[domysterio]

"What more is there to say about Tom and Nick?" | RAW - January 29th 2024

[wanderingibon]

inquisitor lark, of clan lavellan

(they/them) very nervous fledgling hunter who was set to get their vallaslin but instead got the anchor and the unbearable weight of the world placed upon their unwilling shoulders! fun! (don't worry they're doing much better by veilguard, luckily- unlike my rook) 😭💙

[takemyeternity]

.

[isawken]

hey jesties guess what

it's my birthday!!!! and my doc needs to see me in person before approving my next years’ worth of medication refills (for some reason they don’t like handing out several hundred mgs of lamictal and seroquel for free) and since my ass is uninsured and i live in the grand ol usa it’s gonna cost me a few hundred buckaroos. if you are willing and able to throw me some dough, here is my ko-fi, within which you can find lots of pictures of me in clown makeup and also some small posts outlining various niche fool-related history topics.

also, as further incentive, check out this freakin' gnome generator i made if you haven't before and make yourself some gnomes with randomly generated images, names, and stats!

use it to make your gnomesona. use it to make a fictional gnome family. use it to create a single player ttrpg where you just create a bunch of different gnome factions and have them fight to the death and the last gnome standing gets printed out and placed on your fridge as a reward. whatever you do just be sure to tell me about it in my guestbook on my website. oh and also check out the other pages on that site. there's some other cool shit in there i promise ;o)

[capseycartwright]

Every year, the night before my birthday, I write myself a letter. I’ve done it every year since I was eighteen, the first of these written the summer before I turned nineteen, at the end of my first year of university. That means this is the tenth year I have done this: a whole decade of my life immortalised in these self-reflective letters. I started doing this because I had just lived the best year of my life, and I didn’t want to forget it. Eighteen was an utterly transformative year for me - I started university, and my life changed for the better in ways I feel like I am only appreciating now. It feels fitting, somehow, that my twenty-eighth year of life has been transformative too - just, in different ways.

The end of my twenties has felt like a rapidly approaching freight train - quick, and entirely out of my control. After I started university, I didn’t think too far ahead. I had worked so hard for most of my teenage years to be able to study my dream course, and to have that opportunity to reinvent myself, and when I finally had it - I drowned in it, in the very best ways. I think I made the most of every second of university. I joined societies - I was even president of one, for a while - and I was elected to the student union, and I felt like I made a difference in my university community. I went on trips, and I studied the most fascinating subjects, and I never, ever wanted it to be over. Except it ended - because as much as we want these times of our lives to last forever, chapters end, so that new ones can begin.

I’ve felt like another chapter of my life is coming to an end, this year. I don’t quite know how to articulate why I know that - I haven’t made any wild, or significant changes to my life this year that would warrant it feeling like a new chapter: and it doesn’t feel like a new chapter. No, it feels like I am living out the final pages of a chapter of my life I have loved so much, and that the end is on the horizon - not quite here, yet, but close enough that I can see it in the distance. Change is coming, the writing is on the wall - I am just not quite sure how that change is going to manifest. It’s strange, to grieve a life you are still living, but it isn’t an unfamiliar feeling. My final few months of university, I felt that grief so deeply - it was the end of one of the greatest chapters of my life, and I couldn’t imagine then how anything could ever match up to the joy I felt every day of the four years I did my undergrad. I need to remind myself now, more than ever, that while nothing ever matched up in the exact same way, the chapters of my life that have come after that have all been incredible adventures in their own right.

Seven years ago, I upended my whole life and moved to a city I had never even visited before. That’s crazy. Every time I see it written down like that, I think - who let me do that? But I have always been unstoppably determined, and so my sweet, kind, loving parents waved me off and knew that they had to let me go. Loving someone - or something - means letting it go, sometimes. That sounds quite grandiose, I know, but it's another reminder I need. Sometimes you can love things and know that it is still over - that is it time to let go, even if you still feel that love so deeply. That you can love, and know it isn’t right anymore - that it doesn’t fit quite right, like an old pair of shoes, still comfortable but your toes are squished at the front, a clear sign they’re not destined to be your favourite shoes anymore.

I love the life I have built for myself. I will carry this life with me wherever I go, for as long as I live. That sounds dramatic, I know, but it’s the truth. I moved here, all alone again, at twenty-three years of age, and I made my dreams come true. I’m really fucking proud of that. It’s cliche, but being in your twenties isn’t easy. You become so many different versions of yourself, breaking down and rebuilding over, and over, and over. It’s exhausting, to have to grow into yourself so constantly, but it's rewarding, all the same. I think if I sat down across the table from the girl who wrote the first of these birthday posts, completely unaware of what a staple of my life they would become, we’d have a lot to say to each other.

I’d tell her - he doesn’t want you back. I know you want him to, but he doesn’t. He’ll stay your friend, and he’ll love you - and tell you he loves you - but it will never be in the way you want it to be. It’s okay, really, because if he had loved you the way you had wanted him to, you would never have left - and you needed to leave. He did you both a favour. There will be other boys. Some will be kind, and some won’t be, but you’ll learn more about yourself with each person you date. Sometimes it will be small things - like, you really don’t like to play chess - and sometimes it will be bigger, more fundamental things, but they all add up to give you a clearer picture of the person you want to be with. You know what you’re looking for now. You know what you’re worth, now. You are not a consolation prize, a girl that should be loved in secret because her body is heavier, softer. You are deserving of love, and someone will. We haven’t found them yet, I’d have to admit - but if there is a trait I have never lost in my life, it’s my affinity to be a completely hopeless romantic. We’ll find them. There’s someone you’d like it to be - but that needs time, and it needs decisions that aren’t yours to make, and so it needs patience, which is not a natural skill of mine but is necessary in this moment. I hope twenty-nine year old me has more to say about it when she sits down to write this post a year from now.

Your family is going to look different to how you’d like it to. I’d tell her that too. It’s a long, sad story that I’m honestly tired of telling now. But, different isn’t bad. I’d reassure her of that. Every Easter, you’ll travel with your mum and dad, and you’ll see new cities and climb countless towers in pursuit of good views. You’ll eat good food with them, and cheers to your mum and dad still being your best friends, and you’ll file every single one of those memories away for when you need them most. You’ll be closer than ever to one of your brothers - you’ll encourage each other to be kids again, and his kid helps with that too. Your first nephew made you feel a love you’ve never felt before and sometimes watching him grow up makes you feel like your heart is walking around outside of your body. Your niece likes to let you do her hair and you twist perfect braids into the perfect blonde and remember the little girl you once were too and you’ll promise to be everything she ever needs. Your youngest nephew is your brothers double and he smiles so sweetly at you as he learns to walk, and talk. It’s different - but it's still good. Life doesn’t have to look picture perfect for it to be good. I’d tell her that too.

I’d tell her so many things. I’d tell her she gets really into hiking, because the people she does it with are so much fun. I’d tell her that she gets really into football, for a boy, at first, and then for the love of it, for the excuse it gives to spend time with one of her very best friends. I’d tell her that she really, really gets into rugby - as a balm to soothe the homesickness, at first, and then because it’s a good excuse to call her dad more often. I’d tell her she finally buys that camera, and it brings her more joy than she even thought it would - capturing the people and places I love has been a revelation in learning to appreciate them all more. I’d tell her that you don’t just find your tribe once - you find your people over, and over, in the most unexpected of places, and there will be lonely times where you realise how much the people around you truly do care, and you’ll come to accept you don’t just have one place in this world: you have so many places you belong, and to never forget what a privilege that is.

I’d tell her none of this, in reality. It would be disingenuous of me to write this and pretend as though every moment of the last decade has been a collection of beautiful life lessons that I’m grateful for having gone through - some of those lessons were less than beautiful and I wish I hadn’t lived through them, but one of the things I am trying to accept - and more than accept, embrace - this year is that some things are entirely out of my control, and the only thing I can control is how I react to them. I’m trying to take these things as lessons to learn - each of these tough seasons of my life teach me something, even if I wasn’t quite ready to learn it.

Twenty-eight has been a strange year. I’ve had a tough time with my mental health in a way I wasn’t quite ready for - there has been some of my very best ups, and some serious downs. I don’t necessarily think that is going to change tomorrow morning when I wake up a year older - but what has changed this year is my willingness to ask for help. I have long since described myself as independent to a fault, and this year, I have worked hard to be different, to rely on the people who love me - and to accept that they do really love me. Whether it’s been asking for support at work, or asking for company on my sadder evenings, or just learning how to ask for a hug - I’m able to ask now. I’m really proud of that.

Twenty-eight has been strange, but it hasn’t been all bad. I’ve been thinking back on this year as I write this, and there’s been some truly beautiful moments. I took my dad to the rugby World Cup - a first for us both - and we spent five days in the south of France, swimming and sightseeing and watching rugby. I’d never been on a trip with just my dad before, and it was the most special trip of my life. We made memories I will treasure forever - and the look of sheer childlike joy on my dads face when we walked into the stadium is something I’ll never forget. It was worth every second of the hours I spent virtually queuing to get my hands on tickets.

I’ve spent more evenings that I could count at football matches with some of my closest friends, yelling for our local team as they won - and lost, more often than not - and each of those evenings brought me closer than ever to some of the people I love the most. Living abroad is strange, and creating a family for yourself can feel like an insurmountable task, but I have more good people than I can count and they have soothed the bad days in big and small ways this year - and I’m very grateful for it. Last year, when I wrote this post, I said that I was sure my new flat would be my best move yet - and it has been. My flatmates are some of my very favourite people, and I have spent countless evenings putting the world to rights over our kitchen table, or sitting on one of their bedroom floors as they get ready to go out - and it’s been the dreamiest year in the kind of flat I couldn’t have imagined living in when I moved away six years ago.

That’s been on my mind a lot too. I moved abroad and left Ireland behind six years ago, next month, twenty-three and freshly out of university with the world at my feet, and now I’m 29 (almost, at least) and the world has changed so much. I don’t know if I’m going to live abroad forever. I don’t think you ever know for sure where you want to be when you’ve built your life away from the place you grew up. But I know one thing for sure - this has been one of the greatest chapters of my life, and I am forever grateful for that twenty-three year old girl for being brave enough to get on a plane alone and not look back. It’s not that I never looked back - I did, I do, every so often - but I stopped myself from lingering too long and have embraced this hectic, brilliant, often mundane life abroad. I’ll always be glad I spent my twenties living abroad. It’s changed me for the better, and how could I not be grateful for that? For the experiences, the people - the ways the world has grown to feel so much bigger and so much smaller at the same time, friends dotted in every corner of the world now: some gone home, some moved on, and some still here, in the same place I am, living a life together I am so glad we share.

A chapter of my life really is ending. There’s no denying that. Tomorrow, the final year of my twenties begins. I always thought I would be afraid of it, that the idea of leaving this decade behind would scare me to my core. It does, a wee bit, but not as much as I used to think it would. Getting older is a privilege I have been afforded, and more than that - my twenties have been an adventure I couldn’t have imagined up got myself even in my wildest dreams. I know my thirties will be more of the same - and I’m learning to embrace the uncertainty of what lies ahead. But before all that - I have my 29th year to live, and I have started a list, of all the completely arbitrary things I would like to do this year as a sayanora to my twenties - but I’ll tell you more about that this time next year.

Tomorrow I turn twenty-nine, and the lines around my eyes get a little deeper every time I laugh, and I don’t understand teenagers and pop culture sometimes passes me by - and I am oh-so grateful to get older, and a little wiser, a lot more uncool in the eyes of my nieces and nephews, but most of all, happier. How could I not be, when the life I used to dream of as a lonely teenager in my bedroom on tumblr is the life I actually get to live now?

This has been twenty eight - and this has been a decade of writing myself these letters. Tomorrow is twenty-nine - and we’ll see how it all goes.

[eff-plays]

Astarion, having no concept of anything: Can I talk to you about how the others might taste. It's not weird.

Hiraeth, having a concept of nearly everything: Yeah it's not weird. I would bite you like a hamburger btw.

Astarion: Nice.

[stinkard]

Management (yk the ones who make the schedule) gets upset when people who are scheduled at the same time take their breaks at the same time. It seems to ME that if you wanted to circumvent this issue you would simply schedule your employees to come in at different times. It SEEMS like this is not our problem, but management's! So I am taking my mandated once-every-two-hours break whether i spend it off the floor or locked in the gender neutral bathroom. Fuck you and your "needs of the business"

[redge]

【OSHI NO KO】 Season 2 Episode 19

If I seem very biased with my reactions, please note that she is my favourite OnK character. 😊

This expression looked so sad like she just resigned and enjoyed looking from the sidelines as the actors acted their part. Another post, another please grant happiness to this character, I beg you Akasaka-sensei 🥲

"My gosh Uchiyama Koki as the voice actor of Himekawa Taiki is just really making me hope Taiki gets more more screentime" was my reaction when I first watched this scene. Some of my adored anime characters are voiced by Uchiyama Koki :D

The same script, and the same characters, but with added flavour is what this season does every time. ♥

My real-time reactions when I first watched this scene: "I can't believe the most skinship we get from Aqua and Kana is through a play hahaha"

"Why is this so elaborate compared to the manga I am screaminggggggg"

🤣🤣🤣 Also can you see Himekawa's smile in the anime like why the smirk Taiki?! In my head, Taiki and Aqua planned this together hahahaha

Last June 18, Mengo-sensei posted this on Twitter (X) along with that panel and it sure came as a shock to me because it just came out of nowhere! Season 2 was not even airing at that time yet and this was chapter 62 and the latest chapter when she posted it was chapter 152 (beginning of the last arc of the story). I guess we'll never know what these mangakas are cooking until the feast is done. 😅

No manga comparison because these frames were anime-original. Like I was just expecting this chapter to be animated as it is but anime production went above and beyond I am truly grateful. ♥

In Aqua's She shines brightest when her face screams "Look at me!” thoughts, I was wondering why the catch ball scene didn't make it there and when I watched this episode, "Oh. that's why ♥" I don't know why this episode paid homage to all these scenes in the first season but whatever the reason, I truly enjoyed watching every bit of it. 🥰

This episode is a mixture of 😍😍😍 and 😭😭😭. Oh, Kana Arima. My heart breaks for your child self. 💔

Oh, he sure does. 😂 Not to mention he's also always confusing Kana like what is she to you, really?! Will we ever hear you say it from your own mouth?! 🤣

Akane's heartbeat 😍 I'm afraid I can't compete with Akane as a fan of Kana. Like if Kana has a membership fan club, Akane's member number is probably 000001 and I'd love her for that 🥰

This panel getting animated showing how the director really knows and understands Aqua🥹😭 This episode is really crazy because it made me happy with that Touki-Tsurugi adlib then sad about Kana's childhood then happy about all those frames of Aqua and Kana, delighted with Akane's reaction when Kana finally acted the way she used to and now I feel sorry for Aqua like this episode needs to make up its mind what do you really want from me?! 🥲

The voice acting, the animation, and all those flashbacks with Ai oh this episode ended with a bang.

I just saw posts and Tokyo Blade indeed ends in episode 20. But am I ready to see Aqua's dream? T_T

[pinkinsect]

the special edition of blue lock volume 30 has kurona and hiori pins and stickers... guys.....

[starbuck]

FIVE monologues to write

[kathybluecaller]

when I give up on fully drawing Strive so my boy despawns for a solid 6 frames

(don’t mind the animation rant in the tags that I may continue on a later date)

[blue-eli]

Ink October day twenty-nine: Wilder

To bewilder; to perplex.

Comparative form of wild: more wild.