#i do not recommend it

[cruxbatface]

I broke a bone in my thumb + sprained the muscle while fencing two weeks ago. I drew this without using my thumb before they put my arm in a cast

[houseki-no-suffering]

HIII are you still alive? how are u doing? I just found out about your account because of a cinnaphos post you made on 2018 (one of them, i dont remember which tho) that randomly popped up for me while I was searching a panel from the manga and since then I have been looking through your tumblr and reading all of your analysis (especially the ones about Phos & Cinnabar) during all night and i loved them all so much and i totally agree with you in everything and you just put every thought and feeling and worries and doubts i have about hnk (and about cinnaphos) ans I just lost a whole night of sleep HELPPPP

as i was looking from your oldest posts till your latest one, i got a feeling that you kind of slowly died inside through all those years and from 2022 to now you seem to have gotten very tired (and more hopeless) about hnk, since your posts started to take longer inbetween gaps and you seemed to be talking less in your newest ones and posting less analysis so i got a little worried (though i know Ichikawa has started to take a liiiittle bit TOO LONG gaps between releasing new chapters and us hnk fans have been forced to take some painful breaks of the series) if you were actually doing alright and if everythings okay in your life in general, is it? (゜.゜)

by the way, i really wanted to ask you a very important question (i know that i will probably sob about it but i might also get hopeful depending on what you think):

do you think that there's canon evidence or, at least, a slight possibility that Phos and Cinnabar may end up being together? or at least come into terms, apologize to each other and have a happy ending for them and their relationship?? that something may happen and make that possible??? waiting anxiously for your answer! hugs, sweetie

hello there, this ask is the main reason i resurfaced for a few secs.

I am definitely alive and okay, sometimes I even update my twitter, I simply feel a disconnect with HnK and Tumblr after everything that happened. Also, now that I am a full time nerd with adult responsibilities, I have little free time to dedicate to this space, even if sometimes I miss this community and how we used to scream all together anytime a new chapter would drop.

Thank u for sticking by and enjoying my posts, carry on the cinnaphos legacy for me but do NOT lose sleep on these pebbles, take it from your internet grandma, take care of yourself. As for your question, I do not think Phos and Shinsha will ever end up together (except in the form of the seventh treasure, which I believe Shinsha ended up being, so yay?). Also, I hate to break it to you, but these rocks are no longer part of this plane of existence thanks to Phos praying everyone away and initiating 3rd impact. We can always dream tho, that's what fanfics are for.

[bfdreaming]

(I've mostly absorbed MDZS by osmosis and am basing this on discussion of specific, unambiguous events and/or excerpts, so please correct me if I'm wrong here.)

I think part of why the SVSSS fandom is less contentious than the MDZS fandom is that MDZS is more subtle in a lot of respects? It seems a lot of the... interesting takes I've read stem from taking the narration at face value. Even if you know WWX is an unreliable narrator, it's not always obvious how much this influences the narration, I think? (Again, correct me if I'm wrong.)

Meanwhile, by the end of SVSSS it's pretty clear you can't trust anything SQQ says about anything. He doesn't know shit, misinterprets much of what he does know, and lies about himself (badly) more or less continuously. I adore him.

[thechaseofspades]

I hate that we have been conditioned to work sick.

The mindset that if you can still walk, you can still work. The idea that if you need to take some time off you're lazy. The fact the entire time you're at home recovering you feel guilty because you're "supposed" to be working.

I thought that covid would have broken that conditioning, but instead it just made covid the one bad one. If anything, it minimized the perceived effect of other sicknesses. It put the phrase "It's just the flu" into my language.

[liliummmmm]

i started watching game of thrones a couple of months ago just to see brienne of tarth in action, get to know her story and the character herself a little better, and i ended up falling completely in love with almost every single character and the whole show in general (i've been living in pure agony ever since)

[promithiae]

People who draw aziraphael skinny and people who whitewash beelzebub deserve to be put in the same jail cell

[theninthmember]

I know after the last one I said never again, but this one was for a good cause (my mommy).

Happy Mother’s Day!

[bettsfic]

sometimes it's hard to go from arguing to questioning, and sometimes people say things so wrong and/or abhorrent you have no desire even to understand where they're coming from. so here's an easy script you can follow that has always worked for me.

person: [tries to convince me of something flat-out wrong]

me: hmm, that's going to be a hard sell for me.

meaning i'm acknowledging that they're trying to pick a fight and/or persuade me of something, and i am simply not entertaining their perspective as a possibility.

person: [digs in and provides more "evidence" or starts repeating themselves]

me: i don't know, i'm still not buying it.

at this point well-meaning people often run out of steam. not-well-meaning people may begin to show frustration and try to make demands of your engagement.

person: [more bullshit]

me: i don't know what to tell you, you're not going to sell me on this.

if someone continues past this, i just say "okay" with an increasing degree of boredom until they give up. i try not to use this tactic a lot because

i learned it from my father who was about an inch away from being a straight-up sociopath and this is the method he used when he took me with him to buy a car once (he'd been a car salesman for a long time). i remember how deeply uncomfortable it was watching him sit there stone-faced, arms across his chest, more or less just saying the word "no" until he worked the salesman into a panicked state and we bought the car for basically nothing. later he told me, "you can get anything you want if you're always willing to walk away."

it's a blatant power move that i think can hurt people who are earnestly trying to engage but struggling to communicate their opinion, and those people need patient discussion, not condescension, especially if you're already in a position of power or authority over them. but for the people who aren't speaking in good faith, this script basically asserts, "i know so much more about this subject than you do that you sound like a child to me, and i will listen to your perspective but you are offering me no reason to entertain it."

one of the best decisions i've ever made was to stop arguing.

i'd always been an arguer. i was defensive about everything and mindlessly contrary. it wasn't all my fault; i was (and still am) talked down to and patronized a lot, and when you live your life that way, you become kind of a raw nerve and dedicate a lot of energy to trying to prove yourself. someone even told me once, "it's just fun messing with you. you get so upset."

at 23, i was working in an environment where about a half dozen middle aged conservative men were always telling me what to do and explaining things to me. i either argued with them when they said heinous things or stewed about it for hours or even days. and so my new year's resolution one year was simply: no arguing.

it felt a little like defeat at first, like i was no longer standing up for what i believed in, even though no matter how right i was or how much proof i had for my claims, no one had ever been swayed by anything i told them. part of that was because they had no respect for me and didn't take me seriously; the other part was the simple truth that arguments are almost never productive. when someone says something and you immediately reply with, "you're wrong and here's why," a wall goes up and nothing can go over it.

i couldn't just let these men talk at me though, so i started asking questions. not leading questions, not with an intention to prove a point or walk them into a corner. i genuinely wanted to understand how they came to shape the opinions they held. i realized that understanding and agreeing are two different things, and just because i seek to understand doesn't mean i condone.

a truly fascinating thing happened: these men walked into corners all by themselves. it turns out nobody had ever actually tasked them with speaking their opinions aloud to a neutral audience. no one had ever been sincerely curious about them and their views. sure, their loved ones probably asked, "how are you doing?" all the time as a show of affection, but that's much different than, "what do you think?"

knowing what i know now, i think that's true of everyone. how many people ask you for your opinion and listen to what you have to say without speaking their opinion back to you? without judging you? how many people actively and intentionally try to understand you?

it's been over ten years since my resolution and i think i can count the arguments i've gotten into on one hand. one finger, even. it's amazing what happens when someone tries to rile you up, pick a fight with you, and your only response is, "can you elaborate on that?"

you can work someone into a very open and vulnerable state when you ask questions. they eventually run out of their usual talking points and move into the personal. when i do this, it's not like therapy; i'm not trying to help anyone. and it's not like teaching; i'm not trying to educate anyone. i just want to understand how people reach the conclusions they've come to. even after all these years of asking questions and not arguing, it still amazes me how few people in this world feel understood, and how easy it is to get them to open up when you say, "i want to know what you think."

[ruhua-langblr]

Duolingo Sucks, Now What?: A Guide

Now that the quality of Duolingo has fallen (even more) due to AI and people are more willing to make the jump here are just some alternative apps and what languages they have:

"I just want an identical experience to DL"

Busuu (Languages: Spanish, Japanese, French, English, German, Dutch, Italian, Portuguese, Chinese, Polish, Turkish, Russian, Arabic, Korean)

"I want a good audio-based app"

Language Transfer (Languages: French, Swahili, Italian, Greek, German, Turkish, Arabic, Spanish, English for Spanish Speakers)

"I want a good audio-based app and money's no object"

Pimsleur (Literally so many languages)

Glossika (Also a lot of languages, but minority languages are free)

*anecdote: I borrowed my brother's Japanese Pimsleur CD as a kid and I still remember how to say the weather is nice over a decade later. You can find the CDs at libraries and "other" places I'm sure.

"I have a pretty neat library card"

Mango (Languages: So many and the endangered/Indigenous courses are free even if you don't have a library that has a partnership with Mango)

Transparent Language: (Languages: THE MOST! Also the one that has the widest variety of African languages! Perhaps the most diverse in ESL and learning a foreign language not in English)

"I want SRS flashcards and have an android"

AnkiDroid: (Theoretically all languages, pre-made decks can be found easily)

"I want SRS flashcards and I have an iphone"

AnkiApp: It's almost as good as AnkiDroid and free compared to the official Anki app for iphone

"I don't mind ads and just want to learn Korean"

lingory

"I want an app made for Mandarin that's BETTER than DL and has multiple languages to learn Mandarin in"

ChineseSkill (You can use their older version of the course for free)

"I don't like any of these apps you mentioned already, give me one more"

Bunpo: (Languages: Japanese, Spanish, French, German, Korean, and Mandarin)

[shesmore-shoebill]

"I had choice paralysis :(" is a KILLER line.

He's such a comedic powerhouse, I'm glad more people are getting exposed to him :'D

[pineyw00dsshesquatch]

Just wanna gently add to stay mad at the church, but to be kind to young missionaries. If you don't have the spoons, just ignore them . Cult yes, colonizers yeah, but unleashing that justified vitriol at the kid elders on bikes is just what their church wants.

In many ways, they are prepped to expect the worst from outsiders to where their mission is as much about reinforcing their isolation as it is conversion. According to some ex-mormons, proving the outside world to be hostile to barely legal kids is the true use for missions cuz they know their efforts to convert people are met with slammed doors and jeers. They're already vulnerable coming from huge tight families and being cut off from them and their friends for weeks before they even start proselytizing to people. It's a devious manipulation by the church to cement their dependence on the church.

Your best weapon is kindness. Show them you don't need to be Mormon to be a complete person as their church insists. When my old apartment complex was full of missionaries, I gave em a few boxes of pies from Thanksgiving. We gave them tamales, all kinds of stuff. Made small talk, asked about where they were from, what they wanted to do in college etc. Just show them it's indeed possible to be kind without the cult. I've heard of people making human, community connections with missionaries who eventually left the church and made sure that kind person knew they were a domino in their deconstruction.

mormons undoubtedly in the top 5 worst things the united states has ever invented which is really saying something

[fleshadept]

looking at (vetted) gofundmes for people trying to escape palestine and i don't know how many of you actually click on the gofundme links you reblog but i would like to point out, for what it's worth, just how amazing it is that so many have raised so much money. it may overall feel like a drop in the ocean but the fact that several gofundmes have raised tens of thousands of dollars is amazing. it is so expensive to leave gaza right now, and people still need money after they escape. but regardless of what propaganda the US, UK, canada, and other western nations are trying to pump out, people across the world are doing what they can to help these people survive. many of them are still very far from their goals (like this one and this one and this one) and some of them are very close to high goals (like this one), and some of them have reached almost double their original goal.

and that's not even addressing direct aid or organizations that take continuous donations for distribution of food, menstrual products, etc. the PCRF has raised $16,000,000 of their target goal of $20,000,000 to fund current aid and long-term relief efforts in gaza. ANERA's febuary 13th update discusses the material ways they helped palestinians today:

(ANERA donate link)

my point is, it often feels like the world is turning a blind eye to palestine. but i would like to point out that there is an important difference between "the world" and "western political leaders and media narratives". a breathtaking amount of real people, the people who make up the world, are trying to help. in the face of israel attempting to commit genocide, the world is saying No. These people deserve to live. and literally sending millions of dollars internationally, through the internet connection that israel has desperately been trying to destroy.

it may not feel like it matters in the grand scheme of things. but to the people who get fresh clothes, or a hot meal, or blankets, or the kids who get new toys, or to the people who are able to bring their families to safety, it matters to them. go make someone's day better. i've linked so many options with ways to do that.

[poorly-drawn-mdzs]

Hey now, Let her cook!

[throesofincreasingwonder]

"A story doesn't need a theme in order to be good" I'm only saying this once but a theme isn't some secret coded message an author weaves into a piece so that your English teacher can talk about Death or Family. A theme is a summary of an idea in the work. If the story is "Susan went grocery shopping and saw a weird bird" then it might have themes like 'birds don't belong in grocery stores' or 'nature is interesting and worth paying attention to' or 'small things can be worth hearing about.' Those could be the themes of the work. It doesn't matter if the author intended them or not, because reading is collaborative and the text gets its meaning from the reader (this is what "death of the author" means).

Every work has themes in it, and not just the ones your teachers made you read in high school. Stories that are bad or clearly not intended to have deep messages still have themes. It is inherent in being a story. All stories have themes, even if those themes are shallow, because stories are sentences connected together for the purpose of expressing ideas, and ideas are all that themes are.

[firefighter-diazbuckley]

trying this new fun thing where i stay up until 3am with an insatiable yearning for a girlfriend, i highly recommend it!

[tokenducks]

Please for the love of god let Edwin say twink