#real life rambles

[hurricane105]

So I've got writer's block going on, and I think I need to take a bit of a break from actively writing, and come back to it in the new year. What kinds of restorative activities do y'all suggest I do?

[perpetualexistence]

Yep, immediate coughing fit after the chocolate cake. I regret nothing.

[aesethewitch]

When I was a kid, we moved into a house that had a huge lilac tree out front. It was mostly rotten, and it needed to be taken down before it fell. It took a while, but eventually, it was gone.

Mostly. A couple years later, little lilac babies popped out of the ground in its place. My mom was determined to get rid of them, because she'd planted a beautiful flower garden there, and the lilac trees would overshadow and kill the whole garden. I insisted on saving at least a few saplings. She said fine, but I had to dig them out and put them in pots myself.

So, I did. I spent days digging little lilac bushes out of the ground and putting them into pots. Some couldn't be saved, but some could. When all was said and done, I had five brand-new lilac saplings. Seven or eight years old, and it was my absolute pride and joy.

Three died due to sun scorching, severe drought that no amount of watering could save, and perhaps just being moved from their place in the ground. But two survived, and I was awfully proud of them! I'd go out and talk to them every single day. I watered them by hand and made sure they were fertilized properly. I learned all about their favored environments, and I was determined to make sure they lived.

One of my mom's friends saw what I was doing with the lilacs. She asked if she could have one to put in her backyard, and I agreed on the condition that she take very, very good care of it.

It's now fucking enormous. I'm talking ten feet tall and bursting with beautiful purple flowers every spring. My mom still gets updates each year as they start to bloom, which she forwards to me. And all I can think is, "That's my friend! Thriving some twenty years on, there it is."

The other tree nearly died, too. It lived in a pot for far, far too long. I wanted to plant it somewhere in my parents' yard, but my mom was reluctant. Eventually, we agreed to put it in the far back garden. It grew okay for many years, despite the shade, but in all these years, it's never bloomed.

Last year, the massive tree casting massive shadows over the lilac and the garden cracked in half and fell. It tumbled into the garden, crushing part of the nearby shed and destroying a few plants beneath it.

It missed my lilac by inches.

The clean-up is long done. The rest of the tree has been cut down, and my lilac has full sunlight for the first time in fifteen years. It won't bloom this year, I know. But it's got new shoots up. It's taller than ever. I spent half an hour a few weeks ago praising it for surviving all this time, dreaming about its future and telling it how I believe it'll become the tall beauty it's always been meant to be.

I think next year, I'll see flowers.

[whump-it-like-its-hot]

So earlier in art class today, someone drew a characters hands in their pockets and mentioned that hands are really like the ultimate end boss of art, and most of us wholeheartedly agreed. So then, our teacher went ahead and free handed like a handful of hands on the board, earning a woah from a couple of students. So the one from earlier mentioned how it barely took the teacher ten seconds to do what I can’t do in three hours. And you know what he responded?

“It didn’t take me ten seconds, it took me forty years.”

And you know, that stuck with me somehow. Because yeah. Drawing a hand didn’t take him fourth years. But learning and practicing to draw a hand in ten seconds did. And I think there’s something to learn there but it’s so warm and my brain is fried so I can’t formulate the actual morale of the lesson.

[morganmnemonic]

I can't stop thinking about the relationship between Jon and Helen as perhaps one of the most important ones in the entire show. They are narrative parallels for each other, and they both know it. They've both known it from the very start!

Helen walks into the Archives, paranoid, unsure of who to trust, and Jon sees himself in her. And he thinks "If i can help her, maybe there's hope for me too." Then he can't save her. The next time they meet, she's a monster. They're both monsters. There was never any other way their stories could have gone, their fates entwined from the very start.

And Helen answers his original thought with one of her own: "Maybe if we can help each other, there's hope for us both." But Jon looks at her and sees everything that he fears becoming, and so he turns her away, and refuses to accept that their stories are still one and the same.

Helen went to the last person who was ever kind to her, the only person who both knew her as a human and had the context to understand what she'd become, and he hated her. He hated her because he liked Helen, and told her that she couldn't be Helen.

So she stopped trying to be Helen, and embraced being a monster. Reveled in it even. Then Jon wakes up from a six month coma, more monster than person, and tries so hard to cling to the things that mattered to him when he was human. Even with no support, even with the entire archives staff against him, he chooses humanity and compassion over and over again.

And this is a direct threat to Helen's world view. Their stories are entwined. If Jon can continue to be a person even after everything he's been through, then she could have clung to her humanity too, if only she'd tried a little harder. And that terrifies her! She wants to conceptualize herself as someone who was completely overwhelmed by forces beyond her control, who never had a choice but to become a monster. She want's to be an innocent victim. But Jon argues with his actions that they'd both had choices.

And, Jon, in turn, holds out hope that she might make better choices until the very end.

This is the conflict between them for all of season 4 and 5. Jon wants to prove that they can both be decent people, and Helen wants to prove that they were never going to be anything but monsters. This is why she's so devoted to trying to goad Jon into enjoying his newfound godhood. She knows that they are the same, and wants that to mean that he has a spark of evil inside of him, and not that she was always capable of doing good.

When Jon kills her, she loses her life, but wins the argument. Helen is nothing but a dangerous monster who needs to be killed for the good of everyone, and in the moment he decides that, Jon dooms himself to the same fate. Their stories are one and the same. "If i can help her, maybe there's hope for me too." he thought. But he couldn't help her, refused to, even, in the one moment when it actually mattered. And thus, there was never hope for him.

[juniemunie]

[Abandoned by the Lightners, his heart became cracked with hatred.]

Hitting a lil' too close to home?

[autism-disco]

tumblr mutuals are so strange. i have never had a conversation with you but somehow i have adopted your speech patterns into my dialect

[sbc-movedaway]

There’s nothing wrong with wanting unconditional love from your f/o, there’s nothing wrong with being ‘the exception’ there’s nothing wrong with making ur self ship super lovey dovey- there is nothing wrong with making your f/o love you in the way you want to be loved!!!!! It’s your ship do whatever you want

proship/variants + neutrals and RPF DNI

[hurricane105]

Favorite books of 2024!

Ok fair warning: most of the traditionally published stuff I read is nonfiction. Lots of science and prehistory stuff in here.

I Contain Microbes by Ed Yong: This was a reread. I had forgotten how beneficial most kinds of bacteria are - and that disinfecting every single thing in our houses isn't always the best move (spoiler: it's linked to rises in autoimmune disorders).

Eager by Ben Goldfarb: This one is all about beavers (be prepared to get some weird looks when people ask what you're reading). Beavers are a rodent, and there's a tendency to treat them as vermin. But they're an important part of the ecosystem, creating wetlands much more efficiently than humans can.

This got long so I'm putting the other recs under a cut

Kindred: Neanderthal Life, Love, Death, and Art by Rebecca Wragg Sykes: Story time! I was raised in a religion that didn't think any humans other than homo sapiens had ever existed - they made fun of people who believed in evolution and thought it was all a bunch of baloney based off of like, two teeth and a fingerbone. Spoiler! There's dozens of Neanderthal skeletons (and that's not even counting other species of humans, like Denisovians and heidelbergensis; the rant about hiding evidence to be misleading can wait for another day). What I didn't realize before reading Kindred was that Neanderthals weren't the stumbling, grunting hairy humans I had always subconsciously assumed. This book is top tier for me, solely because it has so much new information.

Never Home Alone: from Microbes to Millipedes, Camel Crickets, and Honeybees, the Natural History of Where We Live by Rob Dunn: This was also a reread. You might think you're the only one living in your house - but there's zillions of other animals in there with you.

Entangled Life by Merlin Sheldrake: Also a reread. Along with a lot of other people, I had always overlooked fungi as being rather uninteresting. However, I was wrong! There's so much packed into this book (the author's experience taking a fermentation bath, how mycelium can be used to make furniture, and how cordyceps take over ants) - it completely rearranged how I see fungi.

Brilliant Green by Stefano Mancuso: I wound up reading this one twice, back to back, to look for things for BOTW Zelda to ramble about in Link Goes Undercover. It's short but has a lot of examples of how plants live just as vibrantly as we do - they move, sleep, and signal to one another, in ways science is only just starting to understand.

An Immense World by Ed Yong: This book is about how animals perceive the world differently than we do. Not just in terms of different colors of vision and scent sensitivity, but also in things like how whales and birds migrate using the earth's geomagnetic field (which is why there are more whale strandings when there's a solar storm - their internal GPSes are messed up). Top tier for this year for sure!

Underland by Robert Macfarlane: An in-depth (lol) look at what's going on under the earth's surface. For example, what potash mining looks like, what scientists study when they pull ice cores out of the Arctic, and did you know that there's a cave in China that creates its own weather system - clouds, rain, the whole nine yards?

Joyful by Ingrid Fetell Lee - also a reread. Several years ago I went on a 'what exactly does comfortable home design look like' reading kick, and this was one of the books I found the most helpful. For example, circles tend to feel bouncier and brighter than other shapes - think of things like bubbles and those round windows on staircases in Victorian houses.

What If? and What If? 2 by Randall Munroe: these are together because they're very similar content - if you liked one you'll probably like the other. These are just fun applications of physics.

Breath by James Nestor: Okay I'll admit it, I was extremely skeptical about this one. The author claims that everything from waking up at night for the bathroom to fuzzy thinking can be solved by breathing through your nose. So I tried it, sure it wouldn't work but figuring I had nothing to lose. And shockingly, it does help everything he said it would AND MORE. I've never had much stamina for things like running - I'd get out of breath before my muscles gave up. But breathing through my nose solves that and all the other problems he discusses. So it's definitely worth a shot, even if you're also sure it won't work for you.

[perpetualexistence]

Perp at work: Hmm, today is a deadline. If I know people, there's going to be some who're doing things last minute and might have questions for me. I'm just going to send an email to everyone on my caseload reminding them of the deadline, and reply or set up last minute meetings as needed.

Perp, not ten minutes later:

Perp: ...Yeah I don't know what else I was expecting here.

[forestshadow-wolf]

Price gets some bad news, soap just so happens to be there to take the brunt of the wave of negative emotions that washes over price, and he roars something along the lines of "DO YOU EVER SHUT YOUR FUCKING MOUTH, SERGENT!" And so soap shuts up, a nauseating hurt washes through him, but he swallows it.

It's obvious in the coming hours, days even, that soap is hurt, but price is to stuck in his own head to see.

Gaz becomes privy to what happened to make price lash out. At some point he goes to soap to try and cheer him up, and he tells him why price lashed out at soap like that.

Only soap himself is privy to the hurt that flashed through him. Because now he understands, he can't even be mad at the man. He sympathizes with him.

And it's only more reason for him to do as he's told. And he doesn't cave when Gaz spends time with him; he's not silent, but he's quiet, more amicable. And he only caves a little bit when Ghost is with him; jokes and laughs, but less firey and abrasive. And he still talks to price, still spends time with him; with all of the team; but he speaks less, says what he needs, resigns to listening more often than not. Price said shut his mouth, so he has.

And Ghost nags him about it, notices the obvious change after a day to chalk it up to an off day. He asks, and looks, and pokes. But soap doesn't tell him. It's Price’s business, so it's not his to tell. And he won't rat him out because he knows Ghost will do something about the supposed injustice. He'd do it for any of them, and had done it before. And soap appropriates it. Truely. But it makes it harder to do what price told him to. Luckily he's not so easily beaten by his own wishes. Hasn't been for awhile. Because as much as his desire to simply be able to talk to Ghost again like he did before is so much stronger than his desire to be in a relationship with him, his want for a relationship with the man has persisted for far far longer. It gets easier with time. He just needs to wait for the plateau.

[lazylittledragon]

forgot to post this the other day but i gave myself a little nameless ghoul :3

[wasyago]

the brainrot won

[chimerafeathers]

i know we love to rag on Siffrin for feeling so miserably guilty and manipulative for the crime of [checks notes] “doing nice things for their friends so that they’ll be happy and care about him even if it’s not perfectly sincere on his end”

but like. in context i don’t think that thought process is anywhere near as nonsensical as it always sounds written out like that

i’m sure i’m just stating the obvious here but it’s not really about the “crime” of making people happy. it’s about what he’s not doing, which is anything that would allow their friends to have any real knowledge or agency over the situation they’re all in.

it’s about never acting according to his real feelings in the moment and letting them see the messier version of him that exists now, never allowing their relationships to evolve or develop meaningfully beyond the “safest” iteration, the thing that is Known and produces the Correct Results, because anything else has the possibility of leading to negative emotions towards Siffrin.

Siffrin knows he’s not really doing all this for their benefit, not entirely, because the “right” thing to do would give them the full context to choose how they feel and what to do about it. they’re happy, but in a way they don’t get to keep. they’re happy, but in a way that keeps Siffrin safe from anything more complex and real. they’re happy, but only because some Siffrin in the past said the right things once, and this new, bitter, lonely, desperate version wouldn’t know how to get the “correct result” without a script to follow. they’re happy, and it was real once, it meant something once, but not anymore.

they cared about that Siffrin, yes, but would they still care about this one, if they knew? if Siffrin ever allowed them to know? (he won’t, he can’t, he refuses.)

and there’s something that could have been said in favor of Siffrin allowing himself this “selfishness” if it made him happy anyway, if it could be a genuine source of comfort in a difficult situation—but it doesn’t! not really! because that guilt is there, because that fear is there, because of how flimsy it all inevitably feels.

so they’re not doing it for their family’s benefit, because that happiness is predicated on lies and ignorance. he’s barely doing it for his own benefit, because they’re torturing themself by revealing things they no longer want to reveal, concealing things they no longer want to conceal, acting out of fear of rejection rather than genuine desire for connection. who benefits from this hollow “kindness,” really?

that’s why the last loop had to be the ugliest one. Siffrin had to see that the worst could happen and there could still be love and connection on the other side. that even when the party sees the worst of him, when they have the agency he’s been knowingly denying them, they will still choose to love him.

[screwpinecaprice]

Just a silly guy, with silly silly thoughts.

@glowweek Day 2

Casual | Surprise

A casual surprise?😬😬😬

[coolseabird]

Random Musings on Gale and His Relationship With Mystra

I find Gale's relationship with Mystra to be one of the most fascinating parts of his story. It’s a dynamic that can be viewed in many different ways, depending on how you approach it and I think that’s part of what makes it so compelling. While some might see it literally, I’d like to explore it through a more allegorical perspective, though I want to be clear: this is just one way to interpret their relationship, and other viewpoints are just as valuable. This isn't even the only way that I personally interpret them haha. (I just have to be nuanced, it's a compulsion truly.)

In literature and mythology, take Greek mythology, for instance, relationships between gods and mortals can often carry deeper, symbolic meanings. The gods aren’t always just powerful beings they can represent larger forces like nature, fate, or human desires. This approach, called allegorical interpretation, is something I find really enjoyable! It adds layers to a story.

Consider the famous story of Paris’s judgment of the goddesses. The goddess Eris, seeking to sow discord, throws a golden apple inscribed “for the fairest” into a wedding attended by Athena, Hera, and Aphrodite. They decide to have the mortal Paris judge who deserves the apple most out of the three of them and is thus the fairest.

Each goddess offers Paris a gift in exchange for the title. Athena offers great tactical ability, Hera promises leadership over vast kingdoms, and Aphrodite tempts him with the love of Helen, the most beautiful woman in the world (who happens to already be married). Paris chooses Aphrodite, gains Helen as a lover and this leads to the Trojan War. Beyond the literal reading, this story can be seen as desire (Aphrodite) overcoming both wisdom (Athena) and marriage (Hera). Paris's fatal flaw is his lust for Helen. The story can also be interpreted as Paris losing due to declining to accept both of the other offers. He fails strategically in the ensuing war and also causes the collapse of his own kingdom.

Mystra, as the living incarnation of the Weave, can be interpreted similarly. She isn’t merely Gale's ex-lover. She is magic itself, the force that gives Gale his entire identity. Their relationship transcends romance; it’s more like that of a man consumed by his craft to an unhealthy degree. Like a mathematician to mathematics, or a physicist to physics, he's in love with something that can't love him back.

His attempt to give Mystra a gift she's never received before, something truly incredible, is due to his belief that transcending all limits to somehow earn Mystra’s (and thus, magic’s and his life's work's) recognition is both possible and necessary. It was 100% done with the best intentions but tragically any all-consuming passion carries the risk of blowing up in your face. (Just look at Alfred Nobel, pun intended) And, due to the aforementioned "blow up", his emotional low and his measurable low in his abilities correspond quite directly

There is a cut dialogue from early access about how much of his power he lost after this:

You see, this fire – there was a time that I could make it come alive. That it would take the shape of a dragon and roar in delight. There was a time I could silence a Beholder with a word, and lift a tower from its foundations with a flourish. There was a time I was all but one with the Weave. But no more – a mere shadow of the wizard I used to be. Why? Because I’ve lost.

A key theme in their relationship (in my opinion) is not just Mystra’s rejection but what her rejection represents: The collapse of Gale’s identity as a powerful magic user. (An identity he's built his life around and sacrificed for ever since he was a child)

Without this, he starts self destructing. He has to make do with consuming scraps of magic rather than the all encompassing sort he used to receive from Mystra's presence.

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While Mystra’s treatment of Gale is undeniably harmful, I think it’s important to recognize that she is not cruel in a personal, calculated way. She is so out of touch with normal people that she’s more akin to a force of nature. As an arbiter of natural laws, she wants to control him/kill him because he represented a destabilizing influence, not out of any targeted animosity. (Which is arguably worse than outright hate depending on your point of view)

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Now for a bit of a change in topic I wanted to go over his different endings:

His "good" ending comes from the realization that magic, or any external force, cannot be the source of true self-worth. The deeper theme here, beyond just getting over an ex-relationship, is that Gale must learn to build relationships with people and and find a healthy balance between his work and personal life, rather than devoting himself wholly to impersonal things at the cost of his well-being. He has to learn that he is "Galenough," as @ekansbot once put it. Ultimately, his growth in this regard is best shown with his choice to embrace his ordinary, human last name "Dekarios", rather than defining himself solely as the archmage "of Waterdeep."

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More evidence about the meaning of names to him, earlier during the conversation with Mystra in the tabernacle, she will either call him "Gale Dekarios" if she's displeased to remind him of his humanity, or"Gale of Waterdeep" when pleased to inflate his ego with a title. This shows how revolutionary it is for him to willingly forego having a title at all in this ending as it had been something he sought in the past.

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Alternatively, and more fun for my tragedy-loving psyche, he can totally succumb to his flaws and lose himself. In this case the orb's desires fully supplant him as a person. He becomes a power hungry god, doomed to perpetuate the same callousness Mystra showed to him. His grand dreams of bettering the world fades, and his only goals shift to slowly gathering more power and followers and eventually challenging the rest of the gods. He entirely gives up on being a "person" he's the god of ambition now, and you can see it in the way he speaks how much he has mentally separated himself from the mortal world. He has fully given up on having a life outside of his obsessions. It’s quite dark. (Though not quite as dark as my absolute favorite, the Absolute ending, where you use thousands of mind controlled innocents to become Kratos.)

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Something that's extra sad for you. If the player character chooses to break up with him after becoming a god he says "so I'm still not enough for you" Aghh it's horrible. His insecurities only get worse as a god.

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Or... he could kill himself. Literally destroying his darker hungers (the orb) for an altruistic purpose, but he also, obviously, destroys himself in the process. Very sad indeed.

Now, here’s something I find fascinating:

If Gale chooses not to use the crown, nor to surrender it to Mystra, but instead lets it remain in the water, the orb stays within him but rather than being a catastrophe it actually becomes harmless and inert.

Why does this happen? Gale speculates that it's because he has found contentment due to the player character's romance with him.

Clip sourced from this video: https://youtu.be/gikRKEIpvQs

This reveals something crucial: the orb, from the very beginning, was tied to his own emotions. It was basically an extension of him all along. He was inadvertently the one driving the orb’s power. It was his own despair and obsession that were indirectly killing him the entire time! It's very tragic but also supremely interesting!

It is this somewhat gut wrenching realization, though, that makes this the best "good" ending. He doesn't have to apologize to Mystra to get a happy ending out of pity. Instead, it is his own emotional catharsis that resolves the problem of the orb internally, rather than it being fixed through external means. It also has a sort of Jungian quality to it that I really like. With the idea of integrating and accepting all parts of oneself (allowing the orb to remain, but becoming settled and integrated), rather than trying to shed them being a theme I think fits his character well. Additionally, he keeps the orb scar, which looks pretty neat. :)