#just maintain yourself

[thevoidstaredback]

How To Balance Your Daytime and Nighttime Activities So That You Don't Burn Yourself Out More Than You Already Have

It had been a long few minutes since he'd opened the door and there were a lot of questions running through Dick's head. Most pressing of which was how this kid seems to have information he should not have.

"How did you..?" he asked, but the words wouldn't leave completely. There's so much he wants to know, so much he wants to ask.

"How do I what?" Danny tilted his head like the child he seems to be is.

"How do you know?" Dick knows he sounds weak. There's no hiding that, but there are a lot of implications in what the kid has said so far and none of it is painting a very happy picture for him.

"Oh!" Danny had the audacity to smile, "You want to know how I know you moonlight as a vigilante!" And of course he knows. Dick knows he knows, but he'd held a little bit of hope that the child Danny was mistaken. Danny's smile softened a bit as he explained, "Your hair and voice match up in both jobs almost perfectly. Not to mention your build and how you hold yourself. There's also the matter of your overall vibes, but that's not something living beings can normally pick up on." Excuse him? "Well, not living humans, at least, so no worries on that end!"

"Excuse me?" Dick was fairly sure his heart just stopped beating for a moment there.

"Anyway, I was a hero back home for a while, too. I know what it's like to have to walk the tightrope between maintaining a civilian cover and a hero persona. I know how it feels to have to keep secrets from everyone because anyone who knows will be in danger." he rambled, Though, admittedly, our circumstances are quite different. I was working as a hero all hours of the day as well as going to school. You only have to worry about properly balancing between day and night jobs. Either way, me having more to bounce between just makes me al the more qualified to help you!"

Oh. Oh he did not like that. He didn't like a single thing that just came out of the kid's mouth. Because that's what he is, a kid. "Are you...Are you alright?"

"Not in the slightest," Danny admitted with an even smaller smile. Then, it brightened, not quite to a grin, but to something similar, "But I'm here to make sure you are."

He gets points for being honest, but Dick felt his heart shatter. He knew for a fact that he'd never worked with this kid before. He also knew that the Justice League didn't know about him. If they did, he would've been picked up and dropped with either the Young Justice team or the Titans.

Dick wasn't going to ask why he became a hero because that's not his place. It's more of a 'third mission with the team' kind of questions, anyway. Most of the heroes didn't have many options when they took up the mantle. Asking what Danny can do is a more appropriate question, but he wasn't going to ask that, either.

"Now that that's out of the way," Danny turned a few pages from the table of contents to another one that was topped with 'Why Sleep Scheduling Is Important' in the blue glitter pen that Dick was starting to suspect he favored. "You're not getting enough sleep. Following you around - no one's been able to find me for a while, so don't worry about that - for the last two weeks has given me some really worrisome information on you."

Dick was worrying. He was worrying a lot and even more questions were coming to the forefront of his mind.

"Your dayjob is as an officer on the Bludhaven Police Force, or BPD for short." He was looking over the page he'd turned to very aptly and Dick realized that the kid had notes written on him. "The average hours per week for police across the country is forty hours. Gotham and Bludhaven are the exceptions. As a member of the BPD, you work a solid two days and two hours. Six nights a week, you work as Nightwing from eight in the evening to three in the morning. The last day, you take off, which is good. No deserable pattern, so good on you for that. Regardless, that's seven hour nights and ten hour days, with one day off and one day on call as an officer. Seven hours are now left in your day for personal time, eating, and sleeping. That's not a healthy way to live."

Oh, god, the kid had honest to god notes on him! What the hell!

Danny didn't even skip a beat as he pulled Dick's attention back to him and his binder. "I've drawn up a schedule for you to follow." The back of the page had a meticulously drawn schedule, complete with blocks of time to eat, sleep, work both jobs, travel, personal time, and still have a bit extra left over. It was titled 'Ideal End Result' in green marker. "Drastic changes right away will only affect you negatively, so we're starting off smaller." The next page over had another schedule titled 'Where To Begin'. "I've only pulled one hour from your Nightwing hours because I know important that time is to you and the city. I am, however, going to be having you submit an appeal to your boss to cut back your hours from fifty a week to forty a week. That way, you'll only be working eight hours a day and not ten. You'll still be on call for one day, and you'll have that last day off. Altogether, you'll be going be going from working seventeen hours a day to fourteen hours a day. Nine in the morning to five in the afternoon, and eight in the evening to two in the morning. Not including breaks at work or travel time. It opens up a few more hours for you to sleep!"

"You really think the chief is going to pull back my hours?" Dick raised an eyebrow in question.

"He will if he knows what's good for him."

"You know I can arrest you for that threat, right?"

"Yeah, but you won't." And, damn it, he's right.

Although, there was now another thing he had to know. "How to you plan on enforcing this schedule of yours?"

Danny seemed to have been waiting for this. He got a gleam in his eye as he pulled a black folder from his bag, not breaking eye contact with Dick. He placed it on the table and pushed it across. "Congratulations, it's a boy."

Part 1 Part 3

[thepenguinlad]

This stuff gets a lot easier when you let go of the need to control things. Lesson learned during freshman chemistry lab (with a required lab partner). I wanted to keep an eye on every single thing to make sure it was correct, but realized that not only 1. there was not enough time to double check all her work, but 2. I was being kind of annoying! Now that I'm older, I realize more and more that I fucking *hate* being micromanaged. Having someone just staring over your shoulder can really get to you; it feels like they have no confidence in you, even when you've demonstrated competence. Which just like, really, *really* can make you feel like garbage especially if you're already dealing with self-esteem issues.

This is just coming back to me now as I start in as the Story Guide for Coyote and Crow for the first time - both in this system *and* as a DM. It's fun, but also anxiety inducing as someone who is still getting to know the system. And it doesn't help that I deal with self-esteem bullshit anyway.

But like, as we moved along this module, stuff definitely came up that I didn't expect, and I had to search around and correct myself a lot of the time. It felt kind of embarrassing! And I found myself wanting to exert control over the story because it was playing out differently than I expected.

One thing I think Coyote and Crow does well is emphasize the fact that you're telling a story together with your friends. When they wanted to do something I hadn't anticipated, I had to make a conscious effort to be open to what that would mean for the story, and then figure out how we could do what they wanted. I know it's a very baby DM (Story Guide, here) issue to have. But I think I struck a pretty good balance. Letting that go, acknowledging that some things are not a big deal and consciously processing through them - it feels nice.

I don't know, thoughts of someone who was an emotionally-stunted teenager just now getting a hold of literally understanding what it is I'm feeling. Still haven't had many relationships? I feel like I'm doing all this stuff on like a 10 year delay. It almost doesn't feel that important though, because I'm only able to approach them from a healthy place because I have a good support network, especially my roommates. Idk. People get so cheesy about practicing gratitude and surrounding yourself with good vibes and good people, but tbh that's like half of what helps you actually be happy. And not the fakey happiness either, I'm not talking about continual toxic positivity. It's this kind of contentedness u get from trying your best (even when that doesn't feel like enough), living in line with your values, and respecting yourself solely as a human being, who despite anything else always deserves to be treated with basic respect and kindness.

Letting go of these things erodes you.

That erosion isn't your fault. But it's your responsibility now - not to anyone else, but to yourself.

Of your eroding riverbank, flowing through your life, where will you plant willows and grasses to create and maintain the banks which define you? At what point do you say "no more"?

And the thing is, you're none the lesser for it. Sure, you'll never be the same as you were before - but why would you want to be? even if some of the bank eroded, new soil can be deposited. The snowmelt will slow a little, once spring gets a little further on. And then you can assess: what changed, and what can you do about it? What can you heal? What can you only remediate?

Sure, the river will never be the same again - but it doesn't mean you're less beautiful or valuable. Even after the floods, or storms, or clearcutting developers, those around you will still value and appreciate your presence. There will be little helps, from the seeds which get carried on the bottom of shoes and are left to enrich your soil, to the kind people who protest the factory that pollutes upstream. You are an ecosystem in the best way, but that also means you're susceptible to the hurts of your many environmental factors.

I think I lost the plot a little but

Tl;dr: you are a beautiful jungle river; do not let some motherfucker dump toxic waste in your waters.

[jasontoddenthusiastt]

The compelling thing about Jason as a character is that I never doubted that he cared about the world just because there weren’t panels of him being overly zealous about “restorative community care”

I’m not coming after anyone who wants to see that kind of stuff, but I do think seeking | that | as confirmation that Jason cares about the world is pretty narrow

[heythereimbodie]

You're doing such a great job!! Be proud of yourself for being so strong and so super <3

[dxxtruction]

Not to psychoanalyze (Yes, to do that), but given Armand's history, his only preconception of what love is, is to view it through pure desire. Love - and more broadly accurate, his life purpose for like half a millenia - as only he's ever known it, has only been experienced through transactional wish-fulfillment fantasies, of which he was the one typically sought after to complete such an exchange. And so naturally, in his own seeking, he replicates it. Though to some degree he also replicates the fantastical existence of fictional romances to compensate.

This lack of true experience of love without desire or fantasy, making his always unfilled 'objet petit a' - his object of desire - (a partner he desires a particular love from but does not receive to his fulfillment) - the catalyst for believing there is no other form of love to be had. That he can simply love the person, and be altruistic to their personhood, without them filling a role or desire for him, just would never occur. He's egotistical and overly pragmatic towards others by the fault of formative experiences denying him his own personhood. In being groomed into the object of desire, he no longer sees anyone else but as such. It's equal parts lack of self-awareness, meaning he simply has no way to counter-reflect upon himself the way one should behave, and developed coping mechanism, either consciously or unconsciously, taking on the role of those who inflicted upon him their desires to gain a sense of control over it.

In never escaping this cycle of love as desire, he always denies himself his full person, and simultaneously denies the personhood of others.

[shadowpeachyuri]

feeling mentally ill about wukong holding himself apart from the main group in s3

[bacchuschucklefuck]

Can you expand on what you mean by Baron being "too cool" to really fit a horror monster? It's a very interesting concept and I'd love to hear your thoughts. Is it that they're too active/involved/tangible and it detracts from their scariness?

I feel like I should preface this with a wall of disclaimers lmao 1/I am a hardcore, down-to-the-marrow, avid, deeply sincere horror enthusiast, esp. horror creatures. this usually means my mileage is vastly different from the average populace's, and my scaredy bone has been disintegrated by longterm exposure. most things in a piece of horror media won't scare me! so I practically never use that on its own as the scale to talk abt horror experiences, but when something does scare me it's always a special occasion to be treasured. 2/canon d20 is never really meant to be horror horror, and for good reasons: it doesn't fit the company's output, it takes a kind of carelessness in production estimation that is always a huge risk, it's often vulnerable in a way that kinda goes against how TTRPGs usually facilitates vulnerability, and for most people it's just! stressful! d20, even with the "horror-themed" seasons, generally just plays with horror tropes and stays focused in its goal of being a comedy improv tabletop theater show. 3/fantasy high's chosen system is DnD, which as I've mentioned before is before all a combat-based game system, which means the magic circle of play is drawn based on stats that facilitate and prioritize combat. want or not this affects every interaction you have in the game, and given fantasy high's concept from the ground up (everyone's going to school of DnD stuff to get better at DnD) it's doubly relevant. 4/This Is Fine I have no quarrel with this. my meters are internal, I do not ask this show to be anything it doesn't advertise itself to be, and what it is is fucking great! I like it! when I expand on this ask's question it will be like a physicist going insane in a lab. that's the mindset we're going in with.

disclaimers done. my stance on horror as a genre is that it's a utility genre rather than a content genre or a demographic genre; it is the discard of narratives. it's the trash pile. horror, above being scary, is about being ugly and messy, it's the cracks on the ground any story inevitably steps over to stay a genre that isn't horror. the genre's been around long enough to develop a codex and a general language that medias and makers and enthusiasts of the genre can use to talk about and build onto, but if you go into individual pieces there's really no unifying Horror Story. one person's beautiful life can be another's horror story, it's just how it is.

this makes The Monster a deeply intriguing piece of the genre. thing is a monster is in a decent percentage of any story - it's just when the antagonist force steps into something past a certain line traced out in the story's world. monstrousness is in pretty much every western fantasy story, it's in any story with a hero and something to vanquish or win; more than anything it's a proxy of that thing up there. the line in a narrative's world. the monster is the guard of the unknown lands, where heroic, civilized people don't tread.

what does this mean in the context of horror? the genre is about that perceived lawlessness, that "unknown land" so to say. we're in the monster's home. that's the literary context that we often walk into a horror piece with; the monster knows more than you about where you are. it may not understand you, but it holds more information than you, and with that it moves swifter than you, has more covered than you, and is more assured in its existence in this context than you. it's a struggle to catch up to it, it's nigh impossible to get one over it, and you're never sure it'll 100% work, because you just don't have the information necessary to.

with that framing you can kinda see where I'm coming from here: horror's often about the breaking of rules. I always think a monster's most effective when it breaks well-established rules of both existence and visual storytelling. think Possum (2018) or Undertale's Omega Flowey or the Xenomorph Queen - unique change in medium, unique change in graphic, unique change in design language, etc. in that sense I actually really like how canon baron plays out: they don't really function like anything else in the fantasy high universe, the bad kids have not managed to kill them when they've felled literal gods, their domain in fhjy literally introduces new mechanics to encompass their existence! from an experience design standpoint they slap mad shit. BUT! I can't help finding their character, like as a character riz (and the other bad kids, eventually) interact with, to be very... coherent? in design. this is kinda hard for me to articulate in words, it's more often a sense you get once you've looked at enough of these scrumptious fuckers, their general design and the way they show up is just kinda too clean, so to say. always kinda newly made? fresh unboxed. it, once again, makes sense for their lore - they are looking for more about themself from riz - and their function - they're an antagonist in a game experience, they're meant to be interacted with in a way that produces results and meshes with the existing magic circle - but that shininess takes away from the implied history they should have dominion over and the person they're haunting doesn't.

from another angle there is kinda something there about how put-together canon baron is as a concept; the domain they call home is riz's deep-seeded fears, extremely vulnerable things he's drawn borders around to quarantine and refused to walk into. things that from his perspective would irreversibly shatter certain pleasant fictions his world is built on top of. canon baron, While Extremely Cool, I feel is kinda too neat to connect with and signify the apocalyticized mess that'd result from this paradigm shift. the part where they're in riz's briefcase and looking through every mirror is Very Cool And Fucked Up! but ultimately the show draws a line around them as well, by making game-physical, tangible spaces they're in (the mirrors and the haunted mordred manor) and put riz and the bad kids there only when they need to confront stuff. riz is meaningfully narratively away from baron's unknown land for most of fantasy high.

with that and all of my disclaimers in mind my conclusion here is if canon baron wants to be a Horror Monster they'd have to cross way more lines. be a Lot more invasive. hence (holds up my class swap baron like a long cat)

[veliseraptor]

sometimes i wonder if certain...people who hate characters...spend more time thinking about them than people who like them. like, sometimes it seems very much this kate beaton comic

and you just. you know. gotta wonder what they're getting out of it

[mxtxfanatic]

I’m wondering something though -

When Xie Lian and the others learned of He Xuan’s background, it was made clear He Xuan had extremely bad luck.

“Although this scholar He’s family was very, very poor, he was a talented man. Since his youth, he was frighteningly intelligent and picked things up quickly and expertly. He was also widely known as a good son; there was really nothing bad to say about the guy in any respect. Unfortunately for him, he was also very unlucky. For him, nothing good ever lasted.”

Volume 4, Chapter 53 page 28

———

If the Reverend of Empty words can only shout misfortune upon its victims (and their loved ones) causing them to despair so much they commit suicide, does this mean He Xuan had bad luck all on his own even without the fate switching? 🤔

Or does the Reverend actually draw bad luck to his victims? This would actually make a lot sense but from how Xie lian explains things , this isn’t how a usual venerable works and explanations about the Reverend do not explicitly state this. 🤔🤔🤔

He Xuan couldn’t have had bad luck all on his own without the fate-switching, because his fate was to ascend. However, I think a full answer to this question would need to be a meta, cause I think that a core point of tgcf is that fates are not set-in-stone from birth, that fortune is what you make of it rather than what makes you, and that we shouldn’t fall into traps of letting superstition rule our lives, thoughts, and morality. The Reverend of Empty Words specifically chose prey amongst those with great fates, and most of those people had terrible ends. The Reverend was only able to speak on Shi Qingxuan—who had a fate of wealth—once before his family masked his presence, and yet the family still went into decline and lost their fortune. Were all of those fates fake? Was Guoshi not as good a fortune-teller as he so claimed? Or is all of this more changeable than people want to believe?

[reuptakeinhibitor]

i love stobin working retail jobs and sharing a resume so much but consider this. steve follows robin to bloomington, indianapolis, west lafayette, wherever she decides to go and they get a little apartment. maybe they decide to go out of state but i think they stay in the midwest. then st takes a page from buffy and steve works construction while robin goes to school.

[thresholdbb]

Me with anyone who shows an inkling of romantic interest towards me

[mihai-florescu]

I appreciate the dedication to preserving niches but im too bored with the concept of labels and ultimately uncaring towards circlejerk communities and maintaining a "lifestyle", perhaps at this point of burnout uncaring towards aesthetics altogether, to be able to meaningfully participate.

[gifti3]

What if MC had to go back home for the holidays

im only bringing this up cause ik (some of) the brothers would be like huh??? ur not gonna be here????????

an MC with a decent relationship with their family or even if they just wanna go spend time with their human friends, they would probably wanna head back for a few days you know!

so theyre like....yea sorry but ill help yall decorate tho!!

oooo other possibility... MC: i can bring one (1) of you back with me.

no way that it would end with only one person coming! everyones trying to tag along if they can lol

[i-spilled-my-soup]

could we get an asklepious au update? pls id read thousands and thousands of words of words abt this au

i'm getting the almost-ending fleshed out, but the beginning, beginning-middle and end-end all need more work/reworking

hopefully i can actually write it out after ... two years of brainstorming... which i only recently realized

clarisse is getting a lot more screen-time than i'd anticipated, and i'm having a tough time figuring out where cecil and lou ellen play into it seeing as they have little screen-time in the actual books (i forget, were they mentioned in tsats?)

doing my best to make will take deliberate action as opposed to being swept up by circumstance, which has resulted in more morally grey territory that i have to flesh out more

as far as worldbuilding goes, i'm blurring the time between the titan war and the giant war, decreasing the number of pjo-classified monsters but increasing their respective significance and lethality, eliminating demigod-inherent control over the natural world and instead the natural world is manipulated through prayer and currying favor with the gods (somewhat like a boon in the hades game, power that is temporarily gifted), and modern medicine principles are in an otherwise fantasy-esque setting (germ theory, anesthetics, et cetera)

thinking about other callbacks to famous stories like the homeric hymns to dionysus and demeter, the iliad and odyssey, ovid's metamorphoses etc. don't know how much of the character-driving monologuing i can emulate without making it unbearable though

[camvrin]

spit balling 🤓

self depreciation aside I'm AWARE that I'm one of the most generous and caring people you could come across if you're not a terrible person

and I will try and be there for you even if I don't like you

so sending me death threats over something that isn't even true when I literally looked out for you is a crazy thing to do 😭

[theflyingfeeling]

yes it's just me whining about the same thing for the billionth time, pls just scroll past nothing new to see here 👋