#just anecdotal things

[ellora-borealis]

15 Questions + 15 Friends

Thanks for the tag @stochastiz!

Are you named after anyone?

No? Kinda? I'm named after a place, the Ellora cave temple in India, but I think my parents also liked the name from the movie Willow (1988), which has a character named Elora :)

When was the last time you cried?

Oh boy I think it was Thursday, I had a doctor's appointment get cancelled for like the third time and I was fucking Done

Do you have kids?

Nope, and I certainly don't plan to have any biological children. I could maybe see myself adopting or being a foster parent to an older kid at some point in the future

What sports do you play/have you played?

I rode horses for like five years. At school I played field hockey and softball just because we had a sports requirement (I converted to full-time Theater Kid as soon as I possibly could)

Do you use sarcasm?

I think everyone does sometimes, it's part of human language. I guess I don't use it as much as I did when I was younger, I'm too afraid of being misinterpreted now lol

What is the first thing you notice about people?

Hmmm maybe eyes? I notice them immediately on meeting a person and then subsequently struggle to make eye contact until I've known them for at least three years

What's your eye color?

Brown (so soulful... like [insert food comparison here]...)

Scary movies or happy endings?

I like a happy ending tbh, never really been a horror fan

Any talents?

Drawing and writing, I've been told, but idk if I really believe in the concept of innate "talent"? Like I've had a lot of practice doing the things I'm good at and I enjoy them, so that's all that matters to me

Where were you born?

Massachusetts baybee, New England gang rise up

What are your hobbies?

Writing, baking, playing Animal Crossing, making extremely niche playlists

Do you have any pets?

No but I am DYING to get a cat or a dog I am 90% certain it would cure my depression

How tall are you?

5'2" (.. smol)

Favorite subject in school?

English and Latin :P I was so excited when I got to college and discovered that Linguistics was a thing, like... wait these two subjects are connected?? you can study ALL the languages at the same time?? wild

Dream job?

God I don't fucking know, some days I want to be a tenure-track historical linguistics professor and some days I want to move to a tiny rural town and open a cat cafe and some days I want to have a stained glass studio in my garage and some days I want to publish six fantasy novels. What is life

Tagging?

I know it says 15 friends but I do not have 15 friends so I tag anyone who feels like it, go forth and overshare on the internet amigos

[inbabylontheywept]

bad dating stories time: the shoe incident

so in highschool, my best friend wasnt allowed to go on dates unless there was another couple there to keep an eye on him. part of this was his parents being insane, but also, part of it was him being insane. in a problem with no reasonable parties, there are no reasonable solutions.

at some point in my junior year, my sorta-gf broke up with me, and i just wasnt feeling dating, which was bad for my friend, because he had a good thing going with a girl he met in court.

he kind of hounded me about it. kept pushing me to just put me feet back in the dating pool and i wasnt real thrilled about it, because i knew he was pushing me for his own benefit, not mine, so i kept telling him to fuck off, and after a few weeks of being told that i would date when i was damn well ready, he eventually said: okay. what if i paid for the date AND found you a blind date AND all you had to do was show up?

and i shouldve said no, i know, but i let him wear me down, and i will own my fault in that. a date starting on such a stupid premise could never have gone well.

but he still managed to find a way to make it worse.

i dont know how long he tried to set a blind date up. it couldve been multiple attempts. he couldve stooped to this immediately. but what happened in the end was that he called a girl from the ward he attended - a girl that he knew had a giant, mushy crush on him - and he said: hey! how would you feel about going on a date this weekend?

(you know, implying it was with him, but never actually saying it.)

and she said YES WOW I WOULD LOVE TO and he said great! and then he called me up and said he found me a date.

i did not learn about his crimes until several weeks later. i will die swearing before god almighty that i would never have allowed this travesty to happen if i had known.

that was on a monday. the date of the date rolled around that friday evening, and im sorry to confess, i really phoned the whole thing in. i showed up in my favorite comfy outfit, which was also a fashion crime: basketball shorts and flipflops and a baja hoodie. it was super comfy but it made me look kind of crazy. i picked him up first, and then i picked up his date next, and then we went to pick up my date, and thats where you're gonna get the play by play.

i arrived, walked across the yard, and knocked on the front door. she opened it almost immediately, like shed been waiting right by it, and i could see her expression go from OMG IM SO EXCITED to super disappointed, then disgusted and finally pissed. and because i didn't know about my friends sins, i thought it was from my outfit. which seemed... harsh. like, hey, im allowed to be quirky, fuck you. also its a blind date, i thought the deal was that we were both going to be sad broken sacks of mortality.

anyway, we looked at each other for several seconds before she slammed the door in my face.

i looked back at my friend. he was sweating bullets. i dont know what he expected from this, but there was this big long pause where we both tried to figure out what to do, and then the door opened up, and her dad invited me in, and he said she was gonna need a few minutes to finish getting ready, and that in the meantime we could sit and talk.

we did not talk. we did sit. i sat down on the couch, and he sat down in a chair across the couch, and then instead of talking he cleaned his pistol on the coffee table. i wasnt actually sure if it was a threat, or if it was just a fidget thing for 40+ year old republican men, but when i tried to help he got snappy so i just watched him put a pistol back together.

he was okay at it.

eventually my date came downstairs, still mad as hell for reasons beyond my ken, and i felt pretty guilty for being such a mess because i thought that was why she was so angry. i tried to make up for by walking her to the car and getting the door for her, just generally trying to be extra polite, but before i could make it back to the drivers side, her dad called me back to the door. so i flipped around, went to the door, and immediately regreted my decision.

soon as i was within range, her dad got waaaay too close to me, leaned in, and said "whatever you do to her, i will do to you," and my brain went into overdrive making three consecutive realizations.

realization one was, damn, the pistol thing was a threat. that sucks. what an asshole. realization two was, wait, im autistic and even i know theres a 0% chance me and my date even hold hands, least of all boink. does this guy actually think there's even a 1% chance of anyone in that car getting laid tonight? is he an idiot? and then realization three went through, which was wait, is this guy threatening to fuck me? and unfortunately, with my brain doing so much processing, my mouth was left to run amok, so somewhere between realization 2 and 3, i said:

"i can't get pregnant"

which, i swear, wasn't actually me trying to be a smartass, it was just me pointing out that he couldn't actually follow up on that threat. it just wasn't possible. we do not live in the omegaverse and im not scared of you.

still, it was an insanely catastrophic thing to say, and the moment we both heard it, we bluescreened. that single sentence obliterated both of our momentary streams of consciousness like a saltine in front of a sand blaster. problem was, he'd probably gone his whole life not even realizing someone could say something that stupid, and making that realization was going to cost him a lot of thinking time. me though? i had been saying shit like that for 17 years, i didnt have to rewrite my expectations of human nature, i just had to plan an exit and start striding. so i was already halfway back to the car before i heard "hey. hey come back. Hey. Hey. HEY. HEY WAIT. HEY GET BACK HERE. HEY-"

and then i was in my car, and i drove away.

if this happened today, he'd have called her, and the whole thing wouldve imploded then and there, but back then, there were still a decent number of teenagers without cell phones. especially the teenagers of insane, gun toting parents. so she just said: whoa what was that all about? and i said: dont worry about it, he'll tell you about it when you get home.

and she said: ok and went back to staring daggers at me and my friend.

WHICH SURPRISINGLY isnt even how the story ends.

we went to an improv comedy show, and it was a disaster. it shouldve been like, 7/10 tops, but between my date being mad, and my friend having a good time, and me having the existential terror of knowing that a guy with a pistol was probably waiting outside his house for me to come back, it was easily 11/10. i laughed way too hard at everything. especially the jokes that flopped. id sit there in this mostly silent room and laugh until i dry heaved a little, and my date was absolutely disgusted, and even my friend was a little embarrassed, which would just make me laugh harder. i laughed so hard that night i could barely talk the next day. and then the show ended, and my friend said, you know, that was a good time, but i think we should maybe do something a little chiller? who wants to walk around the park? and his date said yeah, and my date said no, and i finally had mercy on the poor woman so i said, look, im gonna drop you off. and i am so, so sorry about this, but im dropping you off like a block away. super duper sorry.

do talk to your dad about the pistols thing if you dont want this happening more in the future tho.

and she said: okay. so i dropped her off, and she walked a block down, and that was that.

then i drove my friend and his date to a park that was good for wandering. i figured they wanted something more private, so instead of following them around point blank, i chose a park with this 30 foot rope tower, and i climbed to the top and i said: hey i can see you anywhere from up here, you are officially chaperoned from a distance. get panopticoned idiot. except my friend really is an idiot, and he didnt really get the whole 'now i dont have to third wheel so insanely hard with you guys' thing so he climbed up the tower too, and then his date followed behind him, so there are three people basically sitting together on top of a telephone pole.

and then they started making out.

i was close enough to hear it.

i didnt really know what to do so i was just kind of sitting there, dissociating, when some college kids came around and started shaking the tower. my friend's date went aaaaaaaaaa im afraid of heights :( and my friend went oh, dont worry, ill hold you tight ;) and i went hey, im gonna climb down and ask them to stop.

so i did climb down, and i did ask them to stop, and they flipped me off, which i wasnt even mad about. at that point i was i was like yeah, it would be weirder if this wasnt a mess. gods plan has been to fly this day like a 747 into my metaphorical twin towers and brother he is close enough for me to see him grinning through the cockpit window. still, eventually the college students got bored, so they climbed up the tower, which gave my friend and his date a window to climb down, and together we walked back to my car.

now, i cant explain why this is, but sitting back in the drivers seat was my carriage-back-into-a-pumpkin moment. i'd been chill about all the chaos, just rolling with the punches, but sitting down made me realize how much of a shitshow the day had been, and while i couldnt go back and fix all of it, i could go back and fix one thing.

so i told my friend and his date, hey, you two, stay here and don't do anything weird. don't. then i walked back to the rope tower, and i started picking up the shoes the college students had left at the base in order to climb.

about halfway through this, i realized that if i took all their shoes, they might think i was in it for the money, and i actually wanted them to know i was in it specifically to spite them. fuck those guys. so i put all the right shoes back, gave myself a 100 foot headstart, yelled "nice shoes, assholes", did a little jig, and started running.

my advice to everyone is that college students are faster than you think. even with the headstart, and the whole climb down the tower thing, i was still only fivish seconds ahead of them by the time i got to my car. i flung the door open, looked in the backseat, didnt see anyone, flung the stolen shoes in the backseat, heard two "ow"s, took that as proof of presence, jumped in and pealed out of the lot.

my friend and his date popped up a few seconds later. they were, uh, doing something weird in the back seat. my one request - obliterated.

they climbed up to ask where the hell all the shoes had come from, and i was like yeah i stole them from the college students, and they were like oh. cool. hope you had fun. and i was like, i did. i did. but speaking of fun, what were you doing back there?

and for the first time in my buddies life, i think he was actually embarassed.

[unlimited-nobu-works]

my group chats on private MMO servers

[mellosdrawings]

ITS THE FACT THEY STILL HOLD HANDS EVEN WHEN JAMIL SWITCHES TO LEONA’S LEFT 😭😭🙌

YOU HAVE SUCH AN EYE FOR DETAIL

Little details make everything :3

I can't claim I always do those things, but hand placement or little details like changing the side with which you carry a bag when you walk alongside someone is important. It shows thoughtless care, which is the cutest, most important show of silent love to me.

[dimespin]

PENWELL WHAT HAPPENED

This happened when Pen was about 110. His brother Clay had moved out decades before and didn't find out what happened for a long time since he had lost contact with his family at the time (the saratoan bachelor lifestyle is not always super stable)

And unfortunately in the intervening 70 years he outlived those joeys, but not all at once as what triggered his tusk development.

[peachdoxie]

Rereading Oathbringer, and it's once again so painfully clear to me that Lirin pushing Kaladin to become a surgeon was his desperate attempt to keep Kaladin from going to war. As a surgeon's assistant, Kaladin was exempt from being conscripted into the Alethi military, and sending him to Kharbranth would get him even further away from the war. I know Lirin gets a lot of flak for trying to push his views and desires onto Kaladin, but all I really see is a father trying his hardest to protect his son from the horrors of war while living in a society that venerates it.

[annabelle--cane]

I was at dinner with a friend the other day and they said something about me being bisexual and the girl beside me said "well your water bottle says otherwise," pointing to a sticker I have of some crystals in the colors of the asexual flag. I then turned my water bottle around 180 degrees and, bam, showed the sticker I have on the other side of a flower in the colors of the bisexual flag, and said "I contain multitudes." that might have been the greatest moment of my life thus far.

[uncanny-tranny]

I love when a person is so trans you can't really tell exactly how they might be trans - all you know is that they are trans-something

[ellora-borealis]

Thanks for tagging me @lemonizzy! :D

last song: took a break from the new Hozier album just to wind up listening to Paint the Town Red by Doja Cat on repeat... apparently I contain multitudes

last movie: hmmmm I think it was The Whale? lmao twas depressing as fuck. But the last movie I saw in theaters was Barbie

currently reading: in a bit of a reading slump at the moment but two books I finished last month were The Employees by Olga Ravn (trippy sci-fi cosmic horror) and Loveless by Alice Oseman (which I have *spicy opinions* about but that's a post for another time)

currently watching: Wheel of Time!! it's so good! why isn't everyone obsessed with it it's literally so gorgeous!!! For less violence and more lols tho I'm also catching up on Abbot Elementary and Ted Lasso

current obsession: well. there's always Critical Role. But more importantly I downloaded the app version of the board game Wingspan (collect birds, destroy your opponents with bird facts) and I have been playing it nonstop. Astarion Baldur's Gate who I only know roseate spoonbill and pied-billed grebe

I tag all my followers! all six of you!! you know who you are (but no obligation ofc)

tag people you want to catch up with/get to know better

tagged by @shinraalpha

last song: Fire Away by Dirty Honey. i'm never not a fan of loud alt-rock with classic rock roots

last movie: i genuinely can't remember. i watch movies, especially 'new' ones, incredibly rarely. it might've been Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves, which was pretty fun.

currently reading: Mort by Terry Pratchett. this is my first Pratchett book (apart from Good Omens) and i'm really liking it so far! i've been wanting to dive into Discworld for some time now, and i recently found myself in need of a break from the hard sci-fi kick i have been on so it seemed like a perfect opportunity.

currently watching: i'm up to date on Critical Role and Worlds Beyond Number at the moment (*sob*) so i'm sort of in limbo. i've been getting back into long-form video game stuff, so i'm catching up on streams from Johnny Chiodini (they're so wholesome and their community of Lovely Skeleton Pals make their streams very comforting to watch) and started watching Nerd³ Completes: Starfield last night now that there are a few streams up on Twitch i can binge.

current obsession: my ttrpg hyperfixation streak is still going strong. i'm looking forward to watching Dimension 20: Mentopolis once all the episodes are out (bc i'm incapable of consuming content in a healthy way and require binge-ability). i've been trying out some newer crafting stuff recently too. i used alcohol inks for the first time yesterday and had fun experimenting on galvanized metal icons from Dollar Tree, and i've ordered some ceramic ornament blanks to work on.

zero pressure tags (fun mutuals i'd like to get to know!): @itisizzy @nerdygingerandproud @comet-cowboy @taavicleric @ellora-borealis @heewalle

[niamhthefae]

ok just imagine: after the launch they post a compilation video of all the things they had to cut from videos because their relationship wasnt public yet. stuff from all the way back in the first few years they probably found on an old drive,going all the way up until stuff now, with blonde phil and a much happier dan, little comments,kisses, pet names, 'love you's, maybe even a recording of what was going to be the launch before they changed their mind and scrapped it. i think i would die.

[ellora-borealis]

At work we have a large shop vacuum cleaner named R2-D2 and an air filtration unit named Gonk. We also have a 6ft metal ruler which I have nicknamed Tall Boi.

Today my boss asked me why I use he/him pronouns for all of these inanimate objects and I was forced to reckon with what turns out to be a central tenet of my gender ideology:

All inanimate objects must be he/him, because my default is to talk to them as if they're pathetic but adorable little creatures trying their best (e.g. "Gonk is beeping again because I was spraying air freshener and he can't tell the difference between good smells and bad smells, bless him") and using she/her pronouns with this kind of tone feels antifeminist.

[schneiderenjoyer]

Aracnist's UDIMO

There's not many conversations about it and what people mostly chalk their UDIMO (animal/item suitcase form) up to is that it represents the arcanist as a person. Like symbolism to their personality.

But I also like how it also reflect how they're raised and what their upbringing is like.

The main ones being people raised under the Foundation, or taken it at a young impressionable age, are all dog UDIMOs. Sonetto, Horrorpedia, Medicine Pocket. Arcanists that are likely taken in by the Foundation before their arcanum has fully manifested. They're all dog UDIMOs so far. (It could as be a jab at Pavlov reference to having experimented on mainly dogs, which is fucked up) And even arcanists like X is a lil lab rat UDIMO.

I find it fascinating that UDIMO has so much more symbolism to them than just their nature as a person, but also reflects their upbringing and overall viewed by a greater narrative.

[askcometcare]

OOC: Can you explain what objectum means/is please? I’m genuinely curious and I’ve never heard of it outside of your blogs.

OOC: Objectum is being attracted to objects in the way you would be attracted to a human. It's just an orientation, can be romantic or sexual or both just like any other orientation. :] Your "partner" is called a beloved object, some people have several and some just have 1. I am objectum myself actually

[crownedwille]

Today I learned there is an ice hockey player called Simon Edvinsson and I can't help but find that really funny

[doll-elvis]

“At one point Elvis had to go to the bathroom which was next to the room where we were sitting. Elvis excused himself and we heard the bathroom door open. All of a sudden we hear ‘clunk’, ‘clunk’, ‘clunk’, and Priscilla started laughing and said ‘it sounds like a knight taking off his armor doesn’t it?’. Evidently, when he went to the bathroom, he’d need to take off a couple of guns just so he could pee”

- Interview with Jerry Scheff

[peachdoxie]

Your resume should include any relevant work experience and skills you have and it's good to include your volunteer work and internships (ideally four of them) as well as your multiple graduate degrees and the certifications you've earned during the process, and also your resume can only be one page in a font that's easy to read. This field is hard to break into because we have a lot of applicants for not a lot of openings and we'll keep them open for years until we find the perfect candidate. A great way to distinguish yourself is by taking any adjacent job you can find even if it means you have to work two or three part time jobs to make ends meet until a new opening is made. It's also good to tailor your resume to the companies and jobs you're applying for so that they know you researched the role and didn't send out mass applications, and oh, I highly, highly recommend that you keep your resume updated and a digital copy on hand so that you can email it to people at a moment's notice because it's good to keep an eye out for opportunities as they come up. Everyone around you has a master's degree and it's basically the new bachelor's and a PhD is the new master's and we really like seeing several years of work experience because there's a lot of stuff you can't learn in a classroom setting. It's a great field and I love working in it and you should pursue it if you're passionate about it!