#i guess you can call it development

[sadaroacegirlflux]

don’t take my old tumblr posts too seriously, i really thought i could get to know myself in less than a week after finding a few terms that fit

[rearranging-deck-chairs]

the doctor isnt neurodivergent or autistic or adhd or nonbinary or genderqueer or asexual. what the doctor is, is Not From Here

[icewindandboringhorror]

I occasionally wish to reach out to old friends/acquaintances I haven't spoken to since high school/some other even earlier time in my life, but I have SOOO little social energy even for required tasks (like making dr phone calls or etc), I never have any leftover for extra ones, and it would be very odd to message someone I haven't spoken to in like 5 years out of the blue but then take 4 entire months to respond back lol.. My natural curiosity with nostalgia/collecting details of the past/etc. (literally if I were born a little earlier I would definitely do scrapbooking or something lol) is very strong, but, alas, not strong enough to beat out the Social Issues Demons apparently

[theres-whump-in-that-nebula]

55-75 dollars an hour for being a therapist? And all this time I’ve been giving services to adults for free since I was 10.

[raininyourblackeyes]

My cousin, a published writer, a well-known poet in my country and a literature professor, for whom I've always been no.1 support ever since her first attempts at writing in high school, told me that I must stop writing as a hobby because that's her thing and since I'm writing fantasy mostly my writing could never have any important artistic value anyways.

[msmc-796-official]

Fair greetings! Lord Torrentes the Third of Venerable House Bilal, a Minor House underneath the Major House of Smoke here; This may come as incredibly strange, as one such as myself would not be expected to contact, hire nonetheless, a group of "Dirty" and "Uncouth" mercenaries from outside the Karrakin Trade Baronies, but I frankly do not give quite the amount of fucks required to please my Noble contemporaries, but I do indeed desire your security services. Not only do I offer two-thousand units of Manna for each of your mercenaries, but I also offer gossip, dirty secrets, free seats for several Pankration Mekhani matches, and perhaps a bursting a Hagipgraphic Noble's nerve by sheer annoyance. Transport to the Baronies will be paid for by yours truly. Why do I require these services? Let us say that upsetting Stonelord Ferdinand Cannamos, the baron of the House of Stone, which is deeply Hagiographic and affiliated rather closely with the infamous House of Sand, may not be a good idea in the long-run. Unfortunately, Lord Cannamos is incredibly amusing and easy to upset, so I could not help myself. - High Lord Torrentes the IIIrd of Venerable House Bilal.

// ...well. This is certainly a first for our squadron; we have served many clients in our time with MSMC, but to be called to service at the direct behest of the Baronies themselves? I... I'm not entirely sure what to say in response; this is uncharted territory.

hang on a sec - isn't Torrentes the same guy who kungpowpenised the House of Stone a while back? and now he wants to hire us to piss the same person off again??? holy shit, the absolute stones (er, no pun intended) on this motherfucker - I hate to admit it, but I kinda respect the hustle

> Slipshod is correct; High Lord Torrentes is indeed the same noble who orchestrated the public humiliation of Lord Cannamos. I will openly admit to my suspicions regarding this contract offer, as we have already desecrated the Baronies once prior. Furthermore, declaring open alliances among warring houses in such a volatile political climate is unlikely to fare well for us, especially with two of the most dangerous Hagiographic houses openly conspiring against our would-be contractor.

// I fully agree, Kennedi - this offer puts not only our would-be employer's life at risk, but all of us as well. That being said, two thousand Manna apiece is nothing to scoff at, and the offer of receiving potentially incriminating information relevant to the Baronies is rather tempting. The payment suits the job, does it not?

> ...hmph. Consider me sufficiently intrigued; you have my permission to accept this contract. Dress uniforms will be a must, of course - the last thing we need to do is leave a poor impression of MSMC on such influential hosts as the Karrakin Trade Baronies.

look, I'll be completely honest here - I dislike dealing with the KTB as much as you two do, but this I have to hear more about; stuffy dress uniforms be damned. sign me the fuck up, chief!

// Then it appears we have reached a consensus. High Lord Torrentes III of Venerable House Bilal, MSMC-796 "Heaven's Fury" accepts your offer of employment. Allow us a brief time to prepare for our term of service, and we shall be ready to depart for the Baronies shortly.

-- Angel, Slipshod, & Lockbreaker

[emdotcom]

*remembers what they did to Vanny* 500 FUCKING PIPEBOMB ATTACK.

[the-maladjustedjester]

Found used copies of the blackgaard chronicles books, only to find out the fifth book in the series will arrive A LITERAL WEEK before the other four. Why has god forsaken me?

[overdevelopedglasses]

The Last Essence Lore Post (for now)

I've been itching to talk about Essence plot + other things, but thankfully, this should be the last of the explaining to do!

(Ig it's what happens when a story is set in an original world and is based off of said world's mechanics....)

Asumming you've read the previous posts, let's continue...

ANYWAY, I mentioned those special gift children, right?

They're called vessels, and you've probably seen me throw this word around. In a sense, vessels are any human that has a stable light/dark/abyss energy presence in their bodies. Because of this, they are able to bond with a spirit. The more energy contained in a vessel, the more powerful they are. In modern times.... I'm not sure how many humans are vessels. It's not everyone, but it's not super rare. Still trying to workshop that one. But, humans are also able to quantify energy levels within themselves as a percentage. Think like a blood type, in a way. You're 15% Light, or 23% Dark, etc etc you get it (hopefully)

There's a special type of vessel that is super rare, called a Blend. Blends are a vessel that has an equal concentration of 2 different creation energies. The higher ratio of energy, the more powerful they are. Ex: a 10%/10% Blend is more powerful than a 5%/5%.

With this new pseudo-evolution thingamajig, it was discovered that the elemental spirits and vessels could form bonds with each other. This started as a new fad, but quickly became a way of life, in a sense.

As a refresher:

Bond: the link formed between a vessel and a spirit. For shelter and some nutrients from the vessel to the spirit, the spirit would grant the vessel usage of their powers, and if needed, a weapon, whose form is decided by the spirit.

In order to form a bond, a vessel and spirit partake in a ritual called...... (....name pending. Only now realizing the word choice on that was a 3/10 and 1 thought away from a bad joke. So. Putting that in the workshop).

Essentially this ritual consists of some fancy words/whatnot, and at the end, the somewhat-crystaline heart of the spirit is pushed into the right hand of the vessel, and it travels up the right arm to just below the collarbone. If the bond is successfully made, the heart flies out of the vessel’s chest (no harm done) back into the spirit.

Occasionally, this can fail, and the ramifications haven't quite been decided yet.

But also occasionally, something special can happen. Instinctually, a heart from a spirit can stay within a vessel's body. We call this a True Bond, and a couple things change, mainly:

-the summoned weapon is different, but doesn't change in function. (EX: spirits weapon is a bow. With a true bond, it could become a crossbow.)

-the vessel gains a small pattern of scars on their chest where the heart "tried to fly out"

In Essence, we witness 2 True Bonds happen (at least ones that are planned so far), that being Lily + Omega, as well as Alex + Zephyr.

...and that's it. If you've read all the other posts, congrats! We can....finally....talk about the plot.

Next time, since this post is L O N G oops :)

[hecksupremechips]

Girl like. The reason he said "this is how it should be" and faced death with a smile....is cuz he wanted to die. For 2 years he sat there thinking he was worthless and deserved to die. If he hadn’t be shot, his death would’ve been suicide, he was fully planning to die in a gutter somewhere undetected. When saying "this is how it should be" hes literally saying "don’t cry because I’m dying, my death is a good thing actually because I fucking suck and you are better off without me". I don’t think that’s badass even slightly, it’s actually really sad and really shitty. Shinjiro is so convinced that he deserves to die and hates the idea of anyone giving a shit about him because he literally can’t wrap his mind around the idea that he will be missed when he’s gone, that his death is a bad thing actually. And his last words were meant to be comforting because he fully did not intend for anyone to be there when he died, he intended to die alone, so he says them as a reminder that he’s not worth crying over

Personally, if it were me, if I was holding my dying best friend in my arms who was deeply depressed and suicidal and he said "this is how it should be" uh. I wouldn’t admire him for it??? Like am I losing my mind when I say the way this game handles Shinji is bad or is anyone else seeing this too 😰

[reallyghostlypost]

Headcanons about the train station

Since I'm thinking about making my farmer an artist I decided to look at some places in the game from a more artistic perspective, although I'm not exactly the most philosophical person.

Basically, I'm trying to nail Thad's voice down so I've written a small analysis of the train station area from his perspective.

The train station, another potential way out of town that just didn't truly work. Being here makes him feel even more isolated, proof that you can't leave the town for good, not by travelling nor dying. While the station is technically functional and trains are passing through, he never saw any of them stop here. Ever. Plus there was something here too, especially in the bathhouse - just lurking, waiting for an opportunity.

He only visited the bathhouse once, immediately after the landslide was cleared. He couldn't relax at all despite nothing happening - there was something watching him, stalking him. The odd angles of the walls means that he could never see the entire room from any spot and the milky white water could hide anything in it's depths. He was tense at all times, could feel his magic tingling under his skin, ready to lash out at any sign of danger.

The worse part was that he can't figure out what is actually there. It isn't a one of his own, not a dark creature or a corrupted being nor a ghost or anything undead. He would be able to tell in that case since his own magic is so similar. It's not a fairy, they would never accept someone to just walk through their territory like that. Nothing related to the forest magic that's all over the valley either, since there isn't a single plant in the building. What else could it be? Until he could figure out what creature is there he decided to avoid the bathhouse.

But that doesn't mean he can't visit the train station. There is a constant theme of being out of place here that he loves. There's the ever avoided bathhouse - oddly luxurious and clean despite no one ever visiting, a perfect trap if it wouldn't be so obvious. Then there's Susan, originally from Grampleton and not quite integrated into Pelican Town, still longing for her old home and for somewhere else, constantly travelling in search for that place but never finding it. And then there are the trains. They don't belong here and they know it. They would never stop here and they would never allow anyone from this station to climb onboard.

But his favourite part was the oddly placed adventurer graveyard, full of heroes forgotten by the townspeople despite giving their lives for the town's safety, unmourned and left to rot. Obviously he likes spending time in the graveyard, especially with how overgrowned and abandoned it is. But he especially likes walking on the train tracks and looking up at the graveyard, sometimes he could barely see a shadow pass between the headstones, mourning their wasted lives and their defeat at the hands of the dark magic now keeping then prisoners here, with the same mountain they died fighting in slowly eating their graves and bones and souls. Eventually they would realize they have never actually escaped the mines.

Standing in certain places around the area he can still feel the dark energy of the mine, calling for him to go inside. Always hungry, always promising something - riches, glory, adventure, or in Marlon's case forgiveness for the mistakes and the guild of the past. Everything to gain new victims. It's slowly eating at the wards Magnus placed around it knowing that it will outlast every single person here, that it will eventually win.

He's sure that even the townspeople can feel it's pull. He can sometimes see in some dark nights how someone will glance towards the mountains and quickly look away, and he can feel how cold fear spreads around the saloon when someone mentions it, even with the room full of people and bright lights, and all the warming alcohol being passed around.

[axellis-archv-2]

did i mention the name thing yet abt him btw or is that just my freak imagination

[sinkingtime]

That still gets you elven Sam Vimes, complaining that the poor stay poor because they're forced to buy cheap human shoes, which they'll have to replace in just a few decades, while the rich can afford a proper dwarven pair and not worry until 12 or 15 centuries later.

[mortalityplays]

This is a dangerous sentiment for me to express, as an editor who spends most of my working life telling writers to knock it off with the 45-word sentences and the adverbs and tortured metaphors, but I do think we're living through a period of weird pragmatic puritanism in mainstream literary taste.

e.g. I keep seeing people talk about 'purple prose' when they actually mean 'the writer uses vivid and/or metaphorical descriptive language'. I've seen people who present themselves as educators offer some of the best genre writing in western canon as examples of 'purple prose' because it engages strategically in prose-poetry to evoke mood and I guess that's sheer decadence when you could instead say "it was dark and scary outside". But that's not what purple prose means. Purple means the construction of the prose itself gets in the way of conveying meaning. mid-00s horse RPers know what I'm talking about. Cerulean orbs flash'd fire as they turn'd 'pon rollforth land, yonder horizonways. <= if I had to read this when I was 12, you don't get to call Ray Bradbury's prose 'purple'.

I griped on here recently about the prepossession with fictional characters in fictional narratives behaving 'rationally' and 'realistically' as if the sole purpose of a made-up story is to convince you it could have happened. No wonder the epistolary form is having a tumblr renaissance. One million billion arguments and thought experiments about The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas that almost all evade the point of the story: that you can't wriggle out of it. The narrator is telling you how it was, is and will be, and you must confront the dissonances it evokes and digest your discomfort. 'Realistic' begins on the author's terms, that's what gives them the power to reach into your brain and fiddle about until sparks happen. You kind of have to trust the process a little bit.

This ultra-orthodox attitude to writing shares a lot of common ground with the tight, tight commodification of art in online spaces. And I mean commodification in the truest sense - the reconstruction of the thing to maximise its capacity to interface with markets. Form and function are overwhelmingly privileged over cloudy ideas like meaning, intent and possibility, because you can apply a sliding value scale to the material aspects of a work. But you can't charge extra for 'more challenging conceptual response to the milieu' in a commission drive. So that shit becomes vestigial. It isn't valued, it isn't taught, so eventually it isn't sought out. At best it's mystified as part of a given writer/artist's 'talent', but either way it grows incumbent on the individual to care enough about that kind of skill to cultivate it.

And it's risky, because unmeasurables come with the possibility of rejection or failure. Drop in too many allegorical descriptions of the rose garden and someone will decide your prose is 'purple' and unserious. A lot of online audiences seem to be terrified of being considered pretentious in their tastes. That creates a real unwillingness to step out into discursive spaces where you 🫵 are expected to develop and explore a personal relationship with each element of a work. No guard rails, no right answers. Word of god is shit to us out here. But fear of getting that kind of analysis wrong makes people hove to work that slavishly explains itself on every page. And I'm left wondering, what's the point of art that leads every single participant to the same conclusion? See Spot run. Run, Spot, run. Down the rollforth land, yonder horizonways. I just want to read more weird stuff.

[monsterfactoryfanfic]

if I've learned anything from grad school it's to check your sources, and this has proven invaluable in the dozens of instances when I've had an MBA-type try to tell me something about finances or leadership. Case in point:

Firefox serves me clickbaity articles through Pocket, which is fine because I like Firefox. But sometimes an article makes me curious. I'm pretty anal about my finances, and I wondered if this article was, as I suspected, total horseshit, or could potentially benefit me and help me get my spending under control. So let's check the article in question.

It mostly seems like common sense. "...track expenses and income for at least a month before setting a budget...How much money do I have or earn? How much do I want to save?" Basic shit like that. But then I get to this section:

This sounds fucking made up to me. And thankfully, they've provided a source to their claim that "research has repeatedly shown" that writing things down changes behavior. First mistake. What research is this?

Forbes, naturally, my #1 source for absolute dogshit fart-sniffing financial schlock. Forbes is the type of website that guy from high school who constantly posts on linkedin trawls daily for little articles like this that make him feel better about refusing to pay for a decent package for his employees' healthcare (I'm from the United States, a barbaric, conflict-ridden country in the throes of civil unrest, so obsessed with violence that its warlords prioritize weapons over universal medical coverage. I digress). Forbes constantly posts shit like this, and I constantly spend my time at leadership seminars debunking poor consultants who get paid to read these claims credulously. Look at this highlighted text. Does it make sense to you that simply writing your financial goals down would result in a 10x increase in your income? Because if it does, let me make you an offer on this sick ass bridge.

Thankfully, Forbes also makes the mistake of citing their sources. Let's check to see where this hyperlink goes:

SidSavara. I've never heard of this site, but the About section tells me that Sid is "a technology leader who empowers teams to grow into their best selves. He is a life-long learner enjoys developing software, leading teams in delivering mission critical projects, playing guitar and watching football and basketball."

That doesn't mean anything. What are his LinkedIn credentials? With the caveat that anyone can lie on Linkedin, Mr. Savara appears to be a Software Engineer. Which is fine! I'm glad software engineers exist! But Sid's got nothing in his professional history which suggests he knows shit about finance. So I'm already pretty skeptical of his website, which is increasingly looking like a personal fart-huffing blog.

The article itself repeats the credulous claim made in the Forbes story earlier, but this time, provides no link for the 3% story. Mr. Savara is smarter than his colleages at Forbes, it's much wiser to just make shit up.

HOWEVER. I am not the first person to have followed this rabbit hole. Because at the very top of this article, there is a disclaimer.

Uh oh!

Sid's been called out before, and in the follow up to this article, he reveals the truth.

You can guess where this is going.

So to go back to the VERY beginning of this post, both Pocket/Good Housekeeping and Forbes failed to do even the most basic of research, taking the wild claim that writing down your budget may increase your income by 10x on good faith and the word of a(n admittedly honest about his shortcomings) software engineer.

Why did I spend 30 minutes to make a tumblr post about this? Mostly to show off how smart I am, but also to remind folks of just how flimsy any claim on the internet can be. Click those links, follow those sources, and when the sources stop linking, ask why.

[always-a-slut-4-ghouls]

All I can do until we see what happens with this election is hope, distract myself, and try to get others to vote, because if I think too hard about it my anxiety and depression gets worse and the voice in the back of my head that tells me to hurt myself and go hide in the woods or something gets louder