#part three is like half done

[imaginethathaikyuu]

here we are. the road to 25k starts now. gulps

[milkweedman]

Fig and apple pie with pecan-cardamom crust. The figs and the apples were both foraged, which is always fun. Smells super good !

It was supposed to be in a pie tin, but I had 3/4 of a pound of figs rather than the half pound the recipe called for. And then needing to scale the recipe complicated the already confusing situation of reading while dyslexic. So I largely gave up on reading, and this is more inspired by the recipe than anything else, but here it is nonetheless: Fig, Apple, and Walnut Tarts. Anyway, it ended up too big to fit in a pie tin, hence the cobbler dish.

[sleepy-bear-tm]

Dimitri in Three Hopes watching Edelgard and Claude radically change their countries in Fodlan while his hands are tied with having to protect the church

[icewindandboringhorror]

Recent game related things .. hrmm...

[moe-broey]

Mmy thumb hurds sooo baad..............................

[sysig]

Noooooooo

[doctorwhoisadhd]

there's a certain quality the harmonies of like... early to mid 2000s alt rock has. which i am obsessed with... like i wanna do that. i NEED to figure out how to write harmonies that sound like that

[deathofdolls]

I had a dream they added fujoshis to IDV and after they updated the game, you’d have to unlock the exit gate by putting in your favourite mlm ship though only one ship would work for each match (if you put in the 'wrong' ship you couldn’t try again, and needed to let someone else try)

[rad-roche]

i talk about gloria spoiler timeskip appearance shakeup of changing circumstance and that's fun and i can't wait to get to it but nick also has one. that i. CANNOT wait to get to. and i've been very good about keeping secret for literal years now

[peridots-pixiwolf]

yknow I play a lot of hard games but usually not "took 73 days to beat" hard

[tiktaaliker]

back on my baldurs gate 3 bullshit and I now have a total of three major ocs for this thing: Arkadin (pact of the blade warlock dragonborn dark urge), Garuke (circle of spores druid githyanki), and Tav (symbiotic fungus entity)

as a synopsis of all of their deals:

Garuke's creche was raided + destroyed leaving them as, if not the only, one of the very few survivors of the incident and completely on their own. they're found and raised by a druid circle that live symbiotically with fungi. some druids choose to become hosts for a fungus, and Garuke becomes one of these druids.

Garuke bonds with the fungus and they're chill and yada yada so on and so forth. Mindflayers show up, Garuke gets abducted and tadpole'd. unfortunately Garuke is NOT one of the cool and special protagonists with mindflayer plot armour. When Garuke's brain is getting fucked with, their fungus buddy is kinda kicked out. it freaks the FUCK out and while in panic survival mode dips into the first living thing it can find in order to figure it's shit out, because the symbiosis was SUPPOSED to be permanent and splitting them up should not have been possible

So, the fungal entity hops into the first guy it comes across. Which happens to be Arkadin, dark urge Baalspawn, who is currently Very Brain Dead due to their pod getting fucked up in the githyanki raid. And whoops, turns out you can't just hop into a guy for a spell with no consequences, because now the entity is kind of stuck. alone. Except, nope, they're not even alone in there, because this guy's ALSO got a tadpole. at least this one's kinda quarantined off (because Arkadin WAS lucky enough to get main character plot armour. at least in that aspect)

so now the fungus entity has to figure out on the fly how to pilot this meat body alone and get the hell out of this place. It does the normal baldurs gate storyline stuff, meets up with La'zael and Shadowheart and everyone else, makes up the name Tav on the spot, and tries so so so hard to be normal (and only barely succeeds). And it also doesn't help that while Arkadin is pretty much dead, all the neurons are still in there and Tav is kind of artificially keeping Arkadin at least partially "alive", so it keeps having to deal with Arkadin's memories and Urges coming up unexpectedly and inconveniently. and also other entities keep thinking that tav IS arkadin and that has made things. complicated

[spirirsstuff]

fuck i need to work on my fic

[july-19th-club]

celebrating the first few hours of wire day the only way i know how.....with crippling, panic-inducing insomnia

[inbabylontheywept]

i did wrestling in middle school. on one hand, i was actually quite good at it, which was nice. being good at any sport was a new achievement for me. on the other hand, i was bi, and i was trying very hard not to notice that i was bi, and getting folded into knots by very kind, very muscular dorks made that task somewhat difficult.

adding fire to the problem was that my parents and my grandparents wanted to watch my matches, because they were very proud that their Gangly Nerd Son was actually Sporting, and they wanted to cheer me on. which would've been sweet and all, but if there are four people you do not want there during a key part of your Burgeoning Sexual Awakening, it is your mom and your dad and your grandma and your grandpa.

right? i mean, imagine some guy's got your head in his armpit, and you're going you know, old sweat smells bad, but fresh sweat has a sort of and then you make eye contact with your grandpa in the stands and you remember you're swearing spandex so if you pop a boner people aren't just going to be able to see the outline, they're going to be able to count the veins, and the only way you will be able to restore your family's honor after that would be by moving to siberia and renouncing joy, forever. that, or lift your entire body up by your kneck then twist 180 degrees without paralyzing yourself.

it’s a lot of pressure, is what i’m saying.

still it did motivate me to win my matches really fast. because i was so tall and skinny, i was stupidly good at the double leg takedown, and then once someone was knocked down, i'd just do the half nelson and kind of flip em over for the pin. then the ref would count to three and i’d win. EZPZ.

i had one match where that went great. won in the first ten seconds, sat back down, and prepared myself for a good hour or two of doing fuck all. didn't even feel bad the parents/grandparents were gonna be bored. the matches went up from me in 5 pound increments (i was in the 115 lbs division) and it was going great until we got to the 145 lbs division. the other school's wrestler stepped onto the mat, and she turned out to be a girl so our guy flipped, because for straight guys, wrestling a girl is not a pleasant experience.

i'm not entirely unsympathetic. my experience wrestling dudes was definitely a little traumatic. but also, i dealt. guy could've dealt too. instead, he refused to wrestle, and the coach went - fine. not even worth fighting over.

so he went to the 140 pounder, and that guy said, nosir, my mom said mormons can't wrestle girls. next guy down, 135 pounder, now he knew he could pull the same card and thus did. 130 pounder, 125, both tapped out. he got to the 120 guy, and that guy was catholic, but he said he was considering being mormon, and thus would have to pass. as a precaution.

coach blew up a little at that. he said "is there anyone - anyone - on this entire goddamn team that is willing to wrestle a girl?" and then he pointed at me and said "YOU. MAT. GO."

and i'll be real, if i'd been paying more attention, i'd have pulled the mormon card too, but i'd just been putting all that audio into a buffer file because i was reading, so i was halfway across the mat before i even processed what had been said and by then it was too late to turn back.

still i had a plan. and my plan - my beautiful, perfect plan - was to do what i'd always done. tackle, flip, pin, win. sit down. read. bore my family to death. move on.

i got the first part right. she was bigger than me, but she wasn't taller. just an incredibly stout woman. god built me like a snake with glasses, just as he built her like a combat cube. the problem was the half nelson. soon as she was down, i tried hooking my arm under hers from behind and for both genders, the defense for this move is just clamping your arms really fucking tight against your sides. if you're a guy, that's whatever, but if you're a girl - especially if you're god's chosen combat cube - that pins your opponents hand right against your boob.

so, i got the hook in, she clamped, my whole arm pressed against something soft, my coach was yelling THE HALF NELSON. BABYLON! JUST FINISH IT! FINISH THE HALF NELSON! and i was just trying to press hard enough to finish, when then my brain went

...oh.

and i flipped out. of course i flipped out. i like girls, and touching a boob is an elemental experience, and i was not ready. i was not prepared. i had not committed the sacred rites. i recoiled like i'd just brushed my arm against the surface of the sun, stood up, and backed away. nobody in the room knew why i'd given up. all they saw was me, right about to win, suddenly flailing around and scrambling. so everyone started screaming at me to just get the half nelson again, and i couldn't really yell back there's a fuckin' boob in the way and it was very distressing, and the only way i could think of to make them stop was just doing it over again the right way.

so i did.

i hunkered down and prepared myself for Wrasslin' Attempt #2: The Sequel.

i knocked her down again, EZPZ. i went for the half nelson again, but she knew what i was about to do so she super clamped, and i knew she was gonna super clamp, so i wound my arm back like a pop-eye cartoon punch before swinging my arm through the gap between her bicep and her side, but the amount of time i spent winding back super signalled what i was about to to do, which gave her time to clamp even harder, which somehow redirected the entire force of the popeye punch to the bottom of her bra.

it spat out a single boob the same way an action hero might spit out one single tooth after getting a solid crack across the jaw. as if to say:

*ptooie.* "that all you got?"

i did not actually see this. my experience was that first there was an arm, then there was a bit of boob, but i was braced, i was ready, forward at all costs, tatakae motherfuckers, and then the boob went away, and i didn't know where it went but my team, and the audience, and everyone who was in front of me, they all gasped like i just kicked them in the stomach. except for my coach. he was behind me, and thus one of the four people in the room who did not see the boob. now my mom, my dad, my grandma, and my grandpa, they all got flashed but nooooooo, coach thunderbutt was behind me, and he didn't see shit so he was still yelling NOOOOOO BABYLON WHAT ARE YOU DOING JUST FINISH THE NELSON! GO FOR THE KILL! BABYLON! BABYLON!

but i did not go for the kill. i stood up and she stuffed her boob back real fast, and we just kind of circled each other awkwardly until time ran out and i won on points. that's not technically allowed, but the ref had some mercy on me.

my coach did not.

i barely had time to sit down before he strode over to the bench to chew me out.

"babylon," he said, in that very calm way people get when they're too pissed to yell. "why didn't you pin?"

and i didn't know how to say well coach, i tried, but there was a boob, and it kept getting in the way, and my mom was watching, and so was my dad, and so was his dad, and his mom, and god (like bible god) and that's a can of worms because i'm pretty sure he was already mad at me, and i'm wearing spandex, and i think i might have to move to siberia, so instead i said

"i uh. i forgot how to do the half nelson."

which is actually impossible. forgetting how to do the half nelson is like forgetting how to swallow your spit.

and he looked at me, like i was the dumbest person in the entire world, and i looked through him like i'd just survived my 250th day in a trench at verdun, and he said: fine.

fine.

but we're all going to practice it for an hour tomorrow because you forgot.

and then he left.

and my buddies had the gall to be salty about it. i got so many comments saying "dude, why didn't you just tell him the truth?" and i said "you can if you care so damn much. you could've wrestled the girl too. maybe someone else should do the hard thing today."

but they didn't. so the next day, we did an hour of half nelson drills, and i spent a decent amount of time getting thrown around the mat, and it was pleasant in exactly the way that i hated and the year after that, to the surprise of everyone but myself, i quit wrestling and joined the trivia team.

and if you want more reasons to love my mom, my grandpa joked after the match that i might have to talk to my bishop about it, and my mom told him he would be allowed to make jokes after he stood in front of a crowd of 110 people in spandex underpants while wrestling a woman that was not his wife.

he paused for almost five seconds after that. then he said: aw. hell. sorry babylon.

and i'd have preferred my apology from god, but getting it from him was pretty good too.

[macbcth]

.

[queenerdloser]

i sent off my docs (sop, writing samples, etc) to my other potential letters of rec profs yesterday night so now i keep jumping every time my phone buzzes. it won't be the end of the world if they say no (i mostly just needed one (1) person to say yes and i've got a confirmed yes so we're set) but it will make me cringe if they say no after looking over my stuff lol. not a good sign.