#i... i don't have a good explanation except that i feel a migraine coming on...?!

[nshi-ao3]

I, uh, accidentally deleted the ask, but-- I got asked if I could draw a little Akechi... and I do need to test out my new tablet, so... Here you go??!

(It's... a reference to this. Make of it what you will??)

[calextheneko]

Kingdom Hearts is Complicated

So my wife decided to write a Kingdom Hearts fanfic to cheer up a friend which can I just say is she not just an absolute sweetie. A friend is feeling bad and has a stressful event coming up I won't go into for privacy reasons so she tries to make them something.

Only one problem. She hasn't played a Kingdom Hearts game. But she knows I played every single one. So she comes to me to ask questions and get an explanation of Kingdom Hearts and I'm just like

"You just stepped into a mine field."

And so very straightforward questions go in weird tangents.

"Can someone lose their soul in Kingdom Hearts?"

"Sort of, I mean they can lose their heart."

"Ok so losing their heart is basically losing their soul, so someone can be without a soul."

"Right but the heartless aren't actually heartless and are actually made from the hearts stolen from people, and are beings of darkness attracted to people's hearts. But if somebody has a really strong heart and will then their body can continue on its own becoming a being called a Nobody that both exists and doesn't exist."

"So Nobody's don't have hearts."

"Yes and no. I mean they didn't have hearts but they we found out they did have hearts or at least they grow new hearts... But were given cloaks that helped slow the progression of their developing hearts to make them believe they could never have hearts or emotions even though all of them were obviously displaying emotion and making it really obvious by this point."

Later

"So can Goofy use a keyblade."

"No."

"What does he fight with?"

"A shield."

"And who does Goofy fight"

"Well, it started as Disney villains and Riku except it wasn't really Rikut here was time travel and possession involved and Riku's body was possessed by Ansem. Then he was mostly helping Sora fight Organization XIII led by Xemnas who is also Ansem but his other half. The Nobody to the Heartless. But it turns out that Organization XIII wasn't the real Organization XIII and so the real villains he had to fight with Sora were the True Organization XIII let by Xerahort, who is the two halves of Ansmen and Xemnas combined. As well as Ansem and Xemnas who are able to exist at the time time due to time travel nonsense. And his angsty teenage self due to more time travel. And a bunch of people selected to become Xerahort clones."

"Ok, who can use a keyblade on team good guy?"

"Well there's Sora... Rikku, eventually. Kairi, but she shall neither say nor do anything while holding a keyblade. Axel, for about 5 minutes of one game and 20 minutes in another before his keyblade is broken. Then there's Roxas who doesn't really exist but does. And I guess Xion but she got retconned out of existence when Sora reabsorbed his memories from her but also exist again because of more time travel stuff."

Me Later

oh frick, I forgot to tell her about Aqua, Terra and Ventus as good guys who can wield keyblades... And also that Ansem and Xemnas are actually Terra's body after it was split into Heartless and Nobody after he got possessed by Xerahort, this time no time travel required and... You know what this extra knowledge would have just makde things more confusing.

Quick edit, I want to add I was trying to explain the plot of Kingdom hearts to her while I was also flat on my back in bed barely able to move because I had a migraine so bad my body was basically paralyzed in pain.

[yourgamemasterthewhiterabbit]

Actually the most annoying thing my dreams have started doing is a combo of

I don't realize I am dreaming which for me is weird

2. I "wake" from one dream into another dream

3. Each layer of dream is progressively more probable and realistic until I examine how I got there

Thankfully once I am actually awake I can tell and immediately think to check in with myself so it isn't as confusing as it could be for someone who might struggle with feeling like they are actually necessarily awake when they are, but this has resulted in weird shit like:

I have a really fucked up dream where I end up fighting a government conspiracy with my mind powers, then I 'wake up' and am friends with my first husband again and we're joking about how he used to be able to borrow my clothes and I try to tell him about my fucked up dream. the effort of remembering the first dream wakes me from another dream layer.

Finally I am annoyed and fully awake laying in bed, pissed I have been interrupted multiple times trying to relay my weird ass dream to someone, only to realize now I am alone and saying the dream out loud accomplishes nothing because no one is there listening.

It's also started resulting in this thing where I have a dream that seems really mundane and move on, logging it like a memory basically, and then it isn't until I am triggered to recall the dream while awake that I think "Oh hey, that's not something that happened, that was a dream that makes no sense!", but like, until trying to recall it, it was just sitting there in the "mundane shit I did today" pile.

This is the fuckery I start to deal with when I force myself onto a regular sleep schedule. This, the migraines, insomnia, and other bullshit is why I have never been able to maintain a regular schedule.

If my sleep cycle is 'too' inconsistent my body will just sleep when it's tired, get more restful sleep and dream only if I have the energy for it and am sleeping at a time I have tended to be awake really often lately.

If my sleep schedule is regular, my brain starts thinking I need less and less sleep. I stop getting restful sleep, I start getting insomnia, migraines and really weird sleep related cognitive errors.

Looking forward to the possibility of sleep paralysis, night terrors, and mild auditory hallucinations as I am falling asleep coming back to haunt me the way they did as a child when I had parents forcing me onto a schedule for school.

They say regular sleep reduces stress and is better for your health but I am really starting to question if that is always true.

I am putting it to the test as hard as I can though. Edit: For the record I probably have some kind of sleep related disorder and this isn't an argument against anyone else needing regular sleep, this is just an explanation of why I have always struggled with it, in addition to other issues I have mentioned. People are individuals and sometimes a person with a disorder can be an exception to something that's generally a "universal" rule. If you suspect regular sleep is actively not good for you, you should probably talk to a doctor about that. Do not take my experience as an excuse for why it's okay to stay up late or sleep like shit, I am very broken.

[scienceoftheidiot]

So you know what it’s wednesday you’re getting an infodump on Desden’s blindness.

Beware. I’m a biologist. I’m a nerd. And I’m a teacher. You know what’s coming, right ? 

I just reblogged an extremely interesting and great post about writing blind characters that I advise you to go and read now (I haven't finished yet) because it's just full of info and contrary to usual posts like that it's not guilt tripping or anything. I love this post and OP for this. However I've noticed there's a bunch of advices I don't follow myself and I felt like I could expand and why and how I think it's not a bad thing. Here's the first one : don’t make your character blind through an accident. Because drama. 

So yeah. Desden lost his sight due to some kind of accident. Which is thoroughly described by a mysterious bystander’s flashback in chap.3. So that’s not a spoiler. But how can a brick through the head make you blind ? 

Brain. Brains are evil. You know I got a PhD in biology : I am sad to admit I couldn’t go through with my love of neurology because it was competing with my love for bacteria and parasites that can kill you and happily live everywhere. Life’s though. No neuro for me, welcome to viral ecology (viruses are obligatory parasites, sue me). But not only can’t I help being a nerd... I have an uncle in my family who lost part of his vision from a brain haematoma (not due to trauma, but the result and how it works is the same). Who’s also a nerd. (And a PhD in physics cause like that’s what nerds do, right ?) And he explained in details how he lost his vision (and gained back some of it over time) to us.

If you cut blood supply to parts of the brain for long enough, this part will die. Logic. Head trauma can do that and more. So, what happened is that Desden’s visual cortex got cut from blood supply for a relatively long amount of time (he can thank the extremely cold weather of the day it happened, which makes your body turn into “low survival mode”, when the “accident” happened for 1) being still alive and 2) not losing more than most of his sight, some balance, and a bunch of memories). But the brain is a funny little thing and some times it does stuff (not going into the haematoma part, I’m not a doc, it’s long and not very relevant, but it has to be taken into account cause it’s what can make part of the lost sight reappear). So Desden was totally blind for a while, then his brain managed to get some of his sight back. Very little. 

But what and how does he see ? 

See, the brain is constructed so that the visual cortex’s position reflects the visual field you have, except in reverse. Sorry. I’m a teacher. I’m going to add a schema. But in French because I actually work with this (well. Nope. They changed the program but I have old program lessons lying around just in case) and I’m lazy today. Just look at the pretty colours. It shows you what I just explained very badly because I’m used to use schemas, but here’s what you need to understand. 

SOOOO. Basically make most of the colour disappear except for a very small part of blue at the far right of the visual cortex. Meaning that in the end, what Desden can see is an extremely reduced part of peripheral vision. Try to fix your eyes on a point in front of you and describe what is at the far corner of your left eye. Good luck. (and let me tell you I know I have extremely good peripheral vision myself, it’s still composed by what your brain KNOWS is around. From seeing it with the other parts of your field of vision. Because your brain is constantly MAKING UP what you’re seeing from a lot of information including past ones when you didn’t even think about it but your eyes brushed that part. Your senses are fucked up. Deal with it. Your brain is playing tricks on you right now.)

This is why, btw, he’s often described tilting his head on the right. He doesn’t have much control on his eye movement so he tries to get some info on people (mostly light and colours but since his visual memory is fucked up, it’s not very useful)

His eyes move. He just doesn’t really control them. In fact they’re often if not constantly moving because head trauma is often linked to the apparition of a nystagmus, which is a rapid eye movement to the side or up and down - my brother has that, vertical, did you know it existed ? well I do. A friend of my parents has a horizontal one that is a lot more visible. Constantly. She’s not blind, her brain compensates this. Brains are both evil and awesome. Deal with it.

Oh and his eyes are perfectly normal. Even quite pretty, as he describes them himself. He still wears sunglasses because his brain doesn’t like strong light which give him migraines, because it has a hard time processing visual info. 

His eyes also work perfectly (well as perfectly as they did before his accident, which is okay but a little nearsighted) which leads to the only thing that sounds like a superpower that isn’t one : blindsight. If you research it you’ll learn about people who can do absolutely crazy things like catch stuff that’s thrown at them or avoid most obstacles on a path while being totally blind, because BRAINS, AGAIN. Your brain doesn’t only process visual cues through the visual cortex; there’s a slight part in the “primitive brain” or “lizard brain” that does, too. So basically Desden’s body can see stuff but he’s not aware of it consciously. He’s NOT using it and he’s NOT as good as the people I cited above. But for example he has insights he souldn’t have on people’s moods, because his lizard brain picks their faces up. Not always, and it’s often more when someone’s in a VERY bad mood that SHOWS. And since he’s not aware of it he takes that as hints from his other senses. It’s NOT compensating for his blindness - if anything, it’s a silly trick. BUT I AM A NERD, REMEMBER ?

Anyway. Now you know. Desden still lost his vision through an accident which, as said in the reference post i’m refering to (haha) would be bad if it was used for drama but, in fact, I try to avoid most of it because apart from the accident, which is witnessed by someone else who is important to the later plot, nothing from Desden’s life before or after it is described in details. My novel starts 9 years after the accident. He’s got time to get used to being blind. 

*I* know everything that happened in his life, or most of the important things anyway, that lead to the opening of the book, but you will only get scraps of it because it’s not what’s relevant. It’s important for the construction of the character, but what I want to show here is not Desden’s journey through being used to being blind. It’s his journey through accepting his family heritage, which has nothing to do with being blind, and sharing it with the rest of his family while it stayed hidden to them until then because the person who kept this before him was an arsehole. There are a lot of plot points that are linked to Desden’s blindness, including said arsehole arseholery (I be good with words), but it’s not the point of the book. 

Y’all know I’m a Daredevil fan. That’s where I got the idea of a blind character (not only), but now erase that from your mind. Desden doesn’t have any superpower that compensate his blindness. He’s got pretty good hearing because he’s used to use it a lot more than when he was sighted. It’s not better. He loves music, but he’s absolutely tone deaf so forget the blind piano tuner/musician cliché (this is a joke in one of my AUs, in fact)(explanation : in France, which is the country I research for because I’m French and my story takes place in France, the most prominent school for the blind used to primarily teach people to become piano tuners during the 20th century). He’s got a very good nose, but that’s just how it is, and since I’m using my own experience of rediscovering my sense of smell after years of living with smoking people (don’t smoke) (yeah, even you, Desden) I know it’s not superhuman. In fact my own nose is pretty shitty compared to my mom’s. Who is a fucking hunting hound. Anwyay I digress. 

Desden often chases any comment that restrict him to being “the blind guy” by stating stuff he does or likes to do, like “I’m also a good tarot player but no one ever mentions that” or “my brownies are the best ones and I don’t even need to add pot to it”. This is how he feels about it. He’s blind. It’s okay, it’s part of him. But it’s not his sole characteristic. 

I think I’m done here. I haven’t touched on other people’s reaction to him that much, and if you’re interested you can ask questions. Basically remember he’s a 1,98m guy, with broad shoulders, and that’s the first thing you see from him. Also there’s his guide dog Kalinka. 

Lot more things to talk about, not that much time. So if you’re interested in knowing more, poke me, and I might write more about my character. 

Lastly and more importantly : if you see things that you can correct in this post, please do so. As I said, I’m a nerd, but I’m not a neurologist. I’m going the vulgarized version. And I like to be taught things. So if you see mistakes, tell me. 

Peace !