#so its a stupid cycle of come with idea. write it. wow i hate this. have no more ideas. want to write. repeat.

[jacqcrisis]

I have the urge to write and create but it's like I'm incapable of coming up with ideas at the moment. Very frustrating :/

[aresrl]

I hihi I am!!! A little nervous w/ doing this bc I've never done this b4 so please bear🐻 w// me💦 May I request a match up? A vision, a romantic partner and maybe a friend and/or enemy? If that's too much feel free to just assign me a vision + partner, ehe/// Preferably male for a romantic match-up, but either gender is fine with a friend and enemy match-up^^ I tried to be as detailed as possible but I think I ended up just ranting, so im v v sorry if it's long! I sort of fluctuate when it comes to being an introvert/extroverted. W// strangers and irl, I'm very introverted and shy!! Rarely speak and if I do it's just the usual "Hi how are you? That's good. I'm good too, thank you for asking:)" yeayea I'm not too. Keen on social interaction irl. But I always do my best to be very nice!! I never wanna come off as mean bc wow what a bad first impression that would be. But with friends / ppl ik online?? Whew I am very very friendly n chatty ^^ Either very high energy or very chill, there's rarely any inbetween. Sometimes I like to jokingly tease my friends but I'd never go too far / make them uncomfortable!! And if I do I always apologize right away!! I like to say that I'm affectionate?? My strongest love language is def physical affection, if not quality time. Idk man there's just something about vibing with someone or hugging them that just aaaaa/// Although I usually display affection w// words of affection bc. Literally most of my friends are online friends so I can't actually hug them, sad times. Idk if this is needed/important info but I just remembered: I'm 5'6 around??? Need glasses bc. Whew i am blind (near sighted), I'm poc (specifically black) anndd, hm. Actually I think thats it for this section, aha. As you can see I'm, not really all that organized. Also I don't have the best attention span - while writing this I'm circling between 4 different apps - and I'm a bit of a mess. And also a little stupid. Just a smidge dumb. But I have my moments - I solved like. 2 puzzles in Inazuma by myself so I think that counts for something. I also find that I tend to talk a whole lot when I have an idea or smthn to say abt a thing I'm super interested in!! That's info-dumping. I info dump. Yes. I also really like to listen to other people talk abt things they like!!!! Its so nice :) I'm protective over people I care about!! I've never done it but 100% would bark at someone who messed with someone close to be. Arf arf yaknow. I tend to he impulsive. I'll do something, and be all "YEAH>:D" and then regret it later. And then I'll do it all over again in a fun little cycle :) I consider myself an optimist, but quickly turn into a pessimist whenever it concerns myself. Fun funfun. Should probably mention that I am. A very insecure person w/ dangerously low self esteem, which is super fun esp when you mix that with the fact that I'm rarely ever motivated to improve. Yayayay Also sort of a pushover?? Like most often than not I'll be convinced to do something, even if I'm not too keen on doing it. Also afraid of confrontation when it comes to my friends and strangers (that is, if it's concerning me!! I'll order smthn for my friend but if I need to order for myself?? uhh stutter time aha). I'm also a mega simp ahah! Srsly though if I fall for someone/get infatuated with someone I. Will be so obvious abt it even though I try very hard not to be. Would gush over that person probably. I don't really like mean people tbh. Like yes I'll be nice and civil with them but!!! I cannot stand!!! Rude people!!! Esp when they're mean for no reason like sir??? maam??? homie??? chill pls ty<3 People who aren't necessarily mean, but moreso have bastard energy and are just really "hehe>:D" but playfully are p poggers tho!!! I think I get along with kids!! I have a little sister,, around like. Nine? And we get along really well!! I also try and match a kid's energy whenever I'm tasked with looking after them. I take pride in the fact that kids like me >:].... even if they sometimes scare me-- Ok, interest time!!

I like art!! Quite a bit!! Less of a realistic artist and more of a cartoonist!! Idk there's just something fun abt drawing cartoons, hehe. I also like self ships - I have quite a bit of them, actually ! Idk its comforting drawings your fictional crushes loving you idkidk. I like writing too! Both original stories, and one-shots or personal fics that are associated with already created media!! Writing character backstories and personalities and stuff is also fun too! I've even made my own fictional world with a full fledged backstory n everything! It's very fun to think about. I'm a day dreamer!!! Yea remember when I said I write stories? I day dream abt potential stories even more. Mmm daydream world so nice so warm so fun I read aswell!! Mostly fantasy books, or stories where animals are the protagonists. Think Warrior Cats. But my favorite book series has got to be Guardians of Ga'Hoole. Fantasy owl books, anyway! X Readers are also things I enjoy reading :) Again, s I m p Also gaming!!! Is something fun I do sometimes!!! Although it's usually Genshin Impact, or Wii Sports/Resort w// my little sister. Oh, also pokemon! I rlly like Primarina, Vaporeon, Sylveon and Vulpix/Ninetails! I absolutely adore sweet foods, and baking is smthn I'm def interested in! Don't like foods w// weird textures though, like beans or mashed potatoes. Also I. Love spice so much. Mmm love it when my mouth burns so bad. Don't have a favorite animal but I've had three cats in my lifetime (btw not important but my current cat is named Sylvester and. He's my baby boy) so I am. A very big cat fan. Probably not needed but I really like sword and claymore characters. Literally all of the characters I main are either sword or claymore users. Although I did get Diona, so I miiight start forcing myself to learn how to aimmm. I see that I tend to like people/characters that are a little more extroverted than me. Upbeat, happy type beat!!! Nice sunshine babies, :) I think thats it! I hope this was good enough? Again, first time doing this (at 2am nonetheless) so forgive me if I got too rambly or did anything wrong ^^ Thank you for taking the time out of your day to read this! And I hope your day is good / you had a good day, depending on when you read this, ehe!

Hey! Sorry if the wait has been long! I also love Warrior Cats (I promise myself, one day I'll finish it.)

You received... A Pyro vision! Optimistic, enthusiastic, impulsive, reckless, and a lot of energy are the general characteristics held by the Pyro vision. • I hesitated between the Pyro and Hydro vision, but your energy distinguishes you from the Hydro vision. • You said you were impulsive, always doing something you might regret later but still doing it. • You react quickly: as you said, if somebody hurt someone you love, you won't think twice before barking. Your partner would be... Xingqiu! “This feeling was unexpected.” • At first, you were just friends, and Xingqiu really loved to tease you. Actually, you both teased each other. But eventually, a feeling of love towards you grew into Xingqiu. And that was reciprocated. • Your relationship is filled with teases, jokes, and good/funny moments where you mostly share what you commonly appreciate. • He also knows when to get serious: for example, he does everything to support you during your moments of struggle concerning your self-esteem. Your friend would be... Childe! “Luckily, I'm here!” • You two also share funny moments, especially during situations where your “stupidity” is overtaken by his insight. • Sometimes, he finds you cute. • He likes the fact that you get along well with kids. It leads you to great moments with him and his siblings. • You're quite the opposite in terms of self-esteem. I think it's a good thing because it makes you complementary. Your enemy would be... Albedo! A misunderstanding. • You wouldn't hate each other, but I think Albedo wouldn't like the way you use your energy, and when you're more in a chill mood (meaning you're more available for him to talk), he could get pissed at how much times he'd have to repeat himself for you to understand something. • He's very patient, but he understood quickly that his interests would maybe not be within your reach. • You would just be too different. Worth to mention • You and Venti are like drama queens in Mondstadt. You are good friends. But you both know that you can't be more, as it would eventually both drag you down (because of similar problems). • Klee is also your best friend: both of you share decisions that you definitely will regret later. Or maybe not. • Hu tao and you are kinds of silently competing over who's the best tease, and she beats you. My goal is definitely not achieved. I hope I can catch up tomorrow. And don't worry, it was surprisingly good for a first description!

[gotbts7fics]

Breaking Seven | Prologue |

Prologue | One |

[WARNING: This fic is about the cycle of abuse. It may be triggering. It deals with super heavy shit, but this needs to be talked about. You are not alone, you are worth it.]

Every couple goes through rough patches, it is completely normal. At least that’s what you’re telling yourself for the third time this week after your boyfriend of two years and you had a fight over something stupid. How were you supposed to know that your childhood friend was going to snap chat you a picture of himself shirtless, saying you were missing out. And really, was it that big of deal? He was at a pool with your brother and other friend Taehyung. Your brother, Jimin, also had snapped you pictures of him and Tae, telling you how much fun you were missing. They had invited you to go swimming tonight, but once you had mentioned it to Keith, he shut that idea down and said he wanted a movie night. Now you were sitting on your couch, crying over such a stupid fight. You wished your brother was there. Yet you were all alone, pulling a blanket up to your chin, tears streaming down your cheek, as you waited for your boyfriend to return home and tell you he was sorry for yelling at you.

“Why doesn’t your sister ever come to hangout anymore” Jungkook asked, staring at his phone. He had sent you a snap a while ago and yet you haven’t replied after opening it. Lately it seemed you were never around, something far different from the childhood friendship he was used to.

“Get over your crush, you know she’s been with that dude for like two years now, ain’t going to happen” Jimin retaliated as him and Taehyung sat across in the booth at the sports bar.

“Crush aside, he’s not wrong though, she never hangs out anymore.” Taehyung said sipping his beer. Lately it seemed you were too busy with your boyfriend to do anything. It was annoying to the trio of men sitting eating wings and drinking beer, but they chalked it up to being in love. Jimin knew you would do anything for your boyfriend and even though he didn’t like him, he accepted him. He did miss you though. You two wore thicker than thieves. Add in the neighbours Taehyung and his little brother Jungkook, the four of you were the trouble makers of the block. It also was known between the boys that Jungkook had always had a soft spot for you, despite you being the eldest of the four. He never tried to pursue but that didn’t mean he wasn’t insanely protective of you. In fact all three were, because you were you and they all loved you dearly. So for all three of them to feel your absence wasn’t entirely unreasonable. Lately you were honestly never around, save for classes at university.

“I really hate Keith” Jungkook mumbled as he took a large gulp of his beer.

“Yeah we all do” Jimin sighed out.

“Hey guys, isn’t that him” Taehyung asked, pointing towards the bar where a group of guys were walking to sit down.

“Yeah, wait… where is Y/N aren’t they having movie night, that’s why she couldn’t come swimming” Jungkook asked.

“That’s what she said…” Jimin replied, glaring at the back of your boyfriend while he pulled out his phone.

[9:23pm] Broski: Hey, what are you up to? We’re having a few drinks want to join.

[9:23pm] Y/N: Nahhh, I’m good, remember it’s movie night haha.

“You know, I really hate when she lies to me” Jimin sighed reading your reply. If he was going to be honest, it seemed like lately you lied a lot, he never let you know he caught you though. He wasn’t sure why you were trying to make it seem like your relationship was all great, when he could clearly see your stupid boyfriend at the bar taking shots with his friends.

“Well, unlike you, I’m not a chicken shit to call her out!” Tae said as he snapped a picture of the scene in front of him and sent it to you.

“Wow Tae, way to go easy.” Jimin said.

“No, fuck that douch bag, he doesn’t get to make our girl upset.” Taehyung said as he typed you a message.

[9:29pm] Tae bear: .jpeg

[2:29pm] Tae bear: We’re three blocks away from your place, your douch bag is here. Fuck him and come have fun with us. You deserve it.

You looked at the text messages on your phone from Taehyung. You should have known Keith would go out with his friends after yelling at you. Of course he wouldn’t be coming home and be apologizing. So you took a deep breath and decided you would not stay home this time. You were going to have fun with your brother and friends.

[9:32pm] Y/N Boo: Okay, I need a night out. Give me 20.

“Ha, see, she’s coming” Taehyung said triumphantly, waving his phone in their faces.

“Why the hell….. she is so closed off to me lately” Jimin grumbled out. He was irritated on how things were between you two.

“She’s coming, that’s all that matters, lets just give her a good night” Jungkook smiled at Jimin, he knew he was feeling the distance as well, and even though he played it off, it was really bugging him.

Twenty minutes later you arrived at the bar that your brother was at. You had made yourself look decent, deciding that tonight was about you. You pulled out your tightest jeans and a shirt that made you look and feel like a million bucks. You wanted your boyfriend to notice you, and to feel sorry for starting such a petty fight. You saw your brother right away and walked towards him, not sparing anyone else a glance.  

“Well look at you, gorgeous as always” Tae said with a low whistle. Jungkook shuffled over so you could sit beside him.

“Ha, thanks Tae.” You smiled.

“Are you okay?” Jimin asked, concern lacing his features.

“Yeah…I’m fine” you said grabbing Jungkooks beer and taking a gulp

“Seriously, you can talk to us… talk to me. I won’t judge you.” Jimin urged on.

“Jimin, I’m fine. Couples have arguments. We spend so much time together, it was silly. Let me just have fun with you guys tonight. I’ve missed you all so much!” You said with the biggest fake smile you could muster up. You were not going to let your brother know how bad it was, he would probably go over and punch Keith right away. Instead you flagged the waitress down and ordered two rounds of shots for your group.

“Okay boys, lets see who can last the longest!” You declared.

Several shots later, you found yourself pleasantly intoxicated and unaware of the death glare burning into the back of your skull by your boyfriend. He had noticed you a little while ago, sitting there in a booth. And man, he was furious. Yet, you were so oblivious as you throw yourself into Jungkooks shoulder, laughing hysterically over something Jimin had said, which resulted in Taehyung laughing so hard tequila came out his nostrils, so basically you guys were just a big mess of laughter. Clearly, all very drunk.

“Y/N” You looked up to see your boyfriend beside your booth, looking pretty pissed off.

“Oh hey!” You giggled.

“Let’s go home” He said through gritted teeth.

“No thanks, I think I’m going to stay a little while more” You smiled at him, completely unaware you were making him angrier by the minute.

“Baby….” He smiled leaning down to whisper into your ear, simultaneously grabbing your wrist. “I said lets go home. Pull yourself together, you’re acting like the slut you look like.” He yanked you out of the booth.

“Hey, what the fuck man” Jimin stood up, not liking how you were being treated.

“It’s okay Jimin, I think I should go home. I am pretty drunk” You laughed nervously.

“Let us all walk you home, it’s on the way to our place” Jungkook offered standing up.

The hand on your wrist squeezed you tighter.

“No, its okay guys. I have Keith to walk me home” you let out, grimacing at the pain. Sometimes Keith didn’t know his own strength, and he accidentally squeezed to hard, you thought.

“Yes, lets go” He said dragging you away from the table. Jimin was trying to keep his temper under control as he watched you go. He did not like how Keith treated you, but now he was convinced you deserved more.

“Look, I’m not saying I hate the guy, but I fucking hate that guy. Did you see how he man handled her. Why would she go with him!” Jungkook let out. He was just as angry as Jimin watching how you were treated. Taehyung stood up from the table, with a look of concern writing on his face.

“Guys, I’m not saying I’m right, but… do you think… I don’t know. It’s all there, us not seeing her as much, her change in personality, him controlling her, treating her like shit in front of us none the less, man handling her….” Taehyung looked in the direction of the door you had just exited.

“Holy shit….”Jungkook exhaled.

“He’s an abuser” Jimin sighed. Keith wasn’t just a run of the mill dick head, no, he was abusing his sister. You were in an abusive relationship. And the worst part was, you didn’t even see it.

[lynnesgalaxy]

I'm sorry, I just love writing these two dorks bickering and Cyel's too tired to even try anymore.

I've been meaning to write this part for a really long time! In fact, this old piece was a small reference to this scene! It ended up changing with time, of course... but you get the idea.

(Drawing Cyel with her old design feels so weird where are hER FRECKLES)

Carnelian sat down in front of the pile of branches Cyel had decided to set on the ground, "What even is that for?" she asked, aiming with both her arms towards it.

"To start a fire," Cyel replied, "we need a way to guard ourselves from the monsters in the area while we wait for the sun to come up again."

"...We can just fight them off!" Carnelian exclaimed, "They're just mindless, stupid beasts. Let's just continue our way and be done with it."

"Yeah, we can handle a few animals." Sphalerite nodded as her gem started to emit light. She reached it and pulled out her hammer from it, "We could easily just knock them unconscious and leave," she swung her hammer around.

Cyel glared at Fire, "I'd rather avoid unnecessary conflict, thanks," she shifted in her spot and glanced at Carnelian, "Besides, we can't find the piece of the ship we need without light. It's better if we wait it out until we can see better."

Carnelian scoffed, "We wouldn't be in this problem if she hadn't wrecked the ship," she pointed at the taller gem.

"Woah, hey! That was your fault for attacking me!" Sphalerite planted her hammer on the ground with a loud 'thud'. Both of her teammates shook on the spot due to the strength of the hit.

"It was your fault for being a careless piece of dross!"

"WHO ARE YOU CALLING A PIECE OF DROSS, YOU..." Sphalerite pointed at her rival, trying to come up with something, "You... ALSO PIECE OF DROSS!"

Carnelian clapped and rolled her eyes, "Wow. Very clever," she commented sarcastically.

Cyel groaned. It was routine by now, but that didn't mean it tired her any less than the first time they'd been set on a mission together.

She knew both of these gems' favourite hobby was fighting, but it always resulted in ridiculous amounts when the two of them were involved at the same time. From simple, casual bickering to actual punching, they never seemed to be in good terms for longer than a minute. At times like these, as much as she hated it, she seemed to be the one in charge of carrying out plans; the other two wouldn't cooperate any other way.

And it was the reason why she was sitting in front of the weak, thin pile of branches. It was all she managed to get so far, but it would be enough for them to stay somewhere for a while. She stared at the other branches and rocks at her side; somehow, she would have to manage to use them to light the fire.

Sphalerite held her hammer again and took a few steps away, trying to look for something to hit away her frustration with. Seeing as nothing seemed to be around, she looked back at them and swung her hammer, hitting directly on the pile of branches Cyel had placed.

Once again, Carnelian and Cyel shook due to the ground's movement.

"Hey!" Cyel started arguing before Sphalerite lifted her hammer, revealing a small flame that was starting to form underneath, "...Huh, guess that helps."

"What-?" Sphalerite made the hammer disappear in a blink of light, "Oh- Yeah! Just like I planned!" she grinned, trying to show off, "I've been starting to get the hang of this thing."

"Congratulations! And it only took you three hundred years!" Carnelian smirked, keeping her sarcastic tone from before.

"...that was uncalled for-" Cyel tried to defend Sphalerite, but the tall gem interrupted her.

"Hey, at least unlike you, I do train to get better!"

"I don't need to train if I'm already good," Carnelian shrugged.

"Good at being pathetic, sure," Fire grinned, proud of coming up with an answer.

"Hey! I didn't ask to come here with you two idiots!" the other gem replied, offended, "I could have perfectly handled this mission on my own! If anything, you're the pathetic losers here for having to be assigned to me to save your sorry butts."

"Save us? Like we would ever need the help of a stupid egg-head like you!"

"Okay, that's it," Carnelian stood up and launched towards the orange gem, jumping over the fire.

Cyel laid on the ground, sighing. She could hear the grunting and punches being thrown away at one another, but she was simply too tired about it to care; it always ended up the same way: Carnelian would start bickering, Fire would lash out, and Carnelian would throw the first punch, fighting against her until one of them –or the two, as it usually happened– ended up exhausted on the ground.

She felt bad for Fire sometimes. Tourmaline had no idea how it really started, but Carnelian always seemed to want to pick up on her and her teammate would always fall for all of her tricks. It felt like an endless cycle of arguing, even during the few circumstances where they actually did collaborate with each other.

Fire grabbed Carnelian from the shoulders and pushed her away, her cheeks and arms swollen and her hair absolutely frizzled.

Carnelian, however, took the chance to kick her in the stomach; the strength sent the gem flying away, crashing towards the ground.

Sphalerite grunted, feeling sore due to both the hits she had already received and crashing against such a solid, rough area. She quickly glanced at her gem to check if it had been damaged at all, and sighed in relief when she saw the surface intact.

She lifted her head to get up, but quickly dropped it with an 'Oof' when a foot stomped on her stomach.

Carnelian grinned at her side, pointing with the axe in her hand towards her opponent's gem, "You're lucky I'm not allowed to crush you into a million pieces."

Sphalerite glared at the axe and then at its owner, but stayed in silence. There wasn't anything she could do; she knew Carnelian was telling the truth. If it weren't because they were both on the same team, she would have gotten rid of her long ago. Wasn't her regular job to find and capture traitors, nowadays?

She knew all about the "accidents" in which she had to shatter the most rebelious gems; Carnelian wasn't someone to hesitate about crushing someone else's gem or ending some creature's life simply because they were in her way, and she was certain all those cases she had heard about had met the same fate.

Carnelian scoffed and dissolved her weapon in a blink of light, returning to where they'd left Cyel. Fire sat on the ground, brushing her gem to make sure it was okay while she glared at her rival.

After a while, she finally stood up and walked towards her team. She slapped the back of Carnelian's head and sat next to Tourmaline, grinning mischievously.

"Hey!" Carnelian complained, glaring at her, "Chill it before I poof you, you clast."

Sphalerite shrugged. Even if she had lost their fight, that didn't mean she was done bothering the other gem, "Sure thing, you bort."

"...Stupid."

"Idiot."

"Useless piece of junk."

"Dumb."

Cyel grumbled, still lying on the ground. It was going to be a long night.

[semi-imaginary-place]

fe3h blogging 5 because I’ve been posting on discord and I can’t remember what number I was on oct-feb???

So I'm doing another no recruit run and realizing how much planning I need Me: why do I do this to myself  Specifically its SS usuing none of the black eaglea So Byleths going to be soloing until I can recruit all the church staff... or flayn comes along... 

Lambert and the death knight have the same voice actor. Lambert=death knight. Mystery solved

Loog was only able to gain faerghus independence because the emoire was already weakened from its failed invasion of dagda

Also its part if the seiros canon that a great evil darkness came out of the north. That couldn't posaibly feed into racism

The greatest sin this game has commited was giving gilbert a redemption arc

if only the devs weren’t cowards...

Why does dorothea even have A supports with guys? Her head is filled with only girls. has she ever shown interest in a guy?? Beyond a I want to be financially secure and tolerate your presence. everyone else is bi/pan[ Except caspar Hes just an idiot 

I'm gonna post hot takes for the sexuality of each character and yall cant stop me

Edelgard: lesbian Hubert: Edelgard Ferdinand: pansexual Linhardt: grey spec pan but prefers men+ Caspar: too stupid to evaluate Bernadetta: "I want friends" Dorothea: big lesbian Petra: pansexual

Dimitri: confused and repressed Dedue: gay Felix: swords redheads Ashe: pansexual Sylvain: pansexual prefers women Mercedes: pansexual prefers women Annete: lesbian Ingrid: pansexual prefers men

Claude: Demi pansexual/romantic++ Lorenz: ~~noble obligations~~ pansexual and repressed Raphael: grey ace/aro+++ Ignatz: pansexual prefers women Lysithea: pansexual++++ Marianne: pansexual Hilda: pansexual but usually dates guys Leonie: grey ace

+Linhardt feels romantic/sexual attraction but not strongly. He feels romantic love but he doesn't get crushes. ++Claude is the type to fall in love slowly after an emotional connection has already been formed and then get a crush after they've been going steady for 10 years. +++Raphael feels romantic/sexual attraction but not strongly and usually prefers queer platonic relationships ++++more to do with the individual than gender, but girls are cute

Game crashed and I lost like 4 hours of progress TT^TT

I'm on SS (which is the only route I haven't played) and hnnnnng I miss claude its been like 3 months since I played VW. Also I need to write down a time line some time but the stuff the agarthans have been pulling feeds the world builder in me. especially hyrm

as nice as the idea of all the lords getting along and talking things out is, it wouldn’t work out in canon, Edelgard has tunnel vision. Dimitri is irrational and would rather listen to his hallucinations that evidence. And no one trust Claude enough to believe him

Hilarious really how Edelgard will call for Hubert to carry you despite her massive strength and how hubert looks like a gentle wind will blow him over

Macuil/Indech:  Shun society. Run off into the wilds. Have vaugue legends be told of you. Be a crpytid

linhardt is such an unrepentant bastard

I had a dream where I could make male units pegasus knights. And then I woke up to cruel reality

Alois is growing on me. At first I was like uuuggg another bumbling idiot. But you know what? Fuck Seteth for not giving Alois more vacation time to see his family

Cavalry units be like: crushes a watermelon with their thighs

Some of the knights were bullying Alois. Who was it. I will bring them untold pain.

Reason #??? to punch Gilbert: he saw this poor child struggling to control his strength and went this boy doesn't need to learn how to control his strength, what he needs is more strength training.  I mean absent emotionally distant and all over shitty father to annette is reason number 1. But dimitri is reason number 2.  Oh let's make this kid lift rocks and run around the moutains at night in full armor in winter. Instead of being able to pick something up without breaking it and you know be able to perform basic daily tasks.  Let's make a human shaped weapon instead of a functional person.  Gilbert single handedly ruined AM for me because he just wouldn't stop messing up everyone else's lives

Each character's recruit requirements are what they admire/respect in a person

I forgot hubert becomes unavailable in month 2. and now I'm stuck with his stupis razor

Hot take. BotW Link and part 2 Ingrid have the same haircut

I'm on my last route (SS) but i hate rhea so much...

why do you think maurice/the beast's crest was used to make aymr?

Also all the nameless backgound characters have brown hair but of the main cast, its only dorothea and claude

Annette’s handwriting: Neat and cute.  Linhardt writes in cursive because he cant be bothered to lift his pen Sylvain has nice handwriting. Ingrid's is very functional, felix's is half way to chicken scratch lots of sharp angles. Dimitri cries on the inside at the thought of picking up a pen. as a kid Dimitri has terrible handwriting and breaks a pen every 5 min. He practiced so hard. Most of what people think is his handwriting is Dedue's (neat and pretty) because dedue writes most of his letters for him

me playing azure moon: I want out. get me off this death train

Finally getting alois's support and wow he's like a human shaped puppy in the sahpe of a middle aged man.  Always falling over himself. Ridiculously happy. 100% all the time. Running and barking everywhere

Fact of the day: dorothea hates eating fish

Alright. Seteth and Flayn's descriptions of her mom are very different.  Where is the truth???  Seteth was like shes demure, quiet, pious, and honest. And Flayn's says she's like Judith

game is forcing me to flirt with Alois? Can I not please!

I keep saying it but Lorenz grows on you like a fungus. He has excellent supports

 i want to weave gold thread into claudes hair

Under rated character development: Dorothea. Every one of her lines in part 2 makes me want to cry.  "every rose has its thorns" -> "only thorns left on this rose" Her character development is that she just gets worn down by the war and I want to bundle her up in a blanket and give her a cup of warm milk.  Dorothea is so full of love. So she feels the sorrows of the war so intensely.

FE3H needs better dads. I mean even jeralt and seteth aren’t great dads. They're just not down right horrible.  Jeralt is emotionally distant with an alcohol problem that byleth had to clean up after him. But there are worse dads Alois seems decent but he needs to spend more time at home. Seteth should have given Alois more vacation time.  They aren't terrible dads. But they aren't getting medals either.  Love their kids but have flaws of their own.

ANNETTE DESERVED BETTER THAN GILBERT Burn him at the stake No wait. He’d want that

My loathing for gilbert is beyond description.  He hurts everyone around him, then doesn't listen to what they have to say, and then keeps continuing his existence as a sad sack of shit.  1. Emotionally distant, strict, and often absent father. Clearly cared about his work for than family.  2. He then straight up leaves with out a note or telling his family anything.  3 knows that annette is looking for him and avoids her.  4. Annette just wants her dad back. That's what would make her happy but he denies her that because he's a selfish bastard.  5. Then he goes on and on about his man-pain while not helping anyone. he self flagellates and blames himself a lot but he never tries to change and so he stays there, is this cycle of self pity.  "Ohhh I have sinned and can not be forgiven" .and I'm like why not do right by the people you hurt? And he's like "no no I have sinned. I cannot see them" or some other bullshit.  He also gets some bullshit redemption arc that I want to scrub clean from my memory because he doesn't deserve it.  Annette's support is all about oh i forgive you. And it puts all the emotional labor on annette and just makes me real angry. And i am going to stop thinking about that disgrace of a human now.

Seteth is controlling. Wont let flayn have friends. Boys arent qllowed to talk to her.  She can't go out. He has to know where she is 24/7. Seteth really is suffocating Flayn. Early in the game Flayn compares herself to a hot house flower, confined to a green house, doomed to die outside it. It bring up the question which is better, to live a long life in constant fear and isolation (remember flayn is very much a people person), or to live a short fulfilling life. The answer of course is that it should be flayns choice. But Seteth denies her autonomy. Flayn is not quite an adult, but even discounting the decades* that she has lived, even a teenager should have some say in the direction of their life. Time and time again Flayn expresses her will and Seteth ignores her. She is allowed little existence outside of him.  Its also hilarious how bad their cover story is.  Its true they love each other but Seteth causes Flayn a fair bit of suffering. Its played for comedy sometimes. And Flayn to some degree tolerates it because she understands that he does it for her sake, and she understands the real danger she is in. They just disagree with what is an acceptable degree of risk. Seteth tolerates no risk which at that point can't be called living. Flayn accepts the danger and believes it is worthwhile to enjoy life and help people despite it. the counselor box also reveals that seteth has been stalking her and think her talking to dudes is bad despite that having nothing to do with the danger of the agarthans.

A fun thing to think about is if Flayn was born of 2 nabeteans, she's a human halfie, or someother sothis bullshit.  I reviewed the sea nd sky paralogue recently looking for answers and there were some hints? Maybe? nothing definative. all we know for sure is that flayn’s mom died in the nemesis war.  Also I have a hypothesis that flayn was in a regenerative coma for most of the 1000 years so she's been active less than 200 years which is why Seteth treats here like a waylaid toddler.

the flayn seteth c support is great Seteth.exe crashes and then reboots right in front of our very eyes

Catherine has such big wlw energy. I didn't quite realize it until I got her supports but hooboy.  Saw a lady so pretty she forgot she almost died pfft.  And this is just with rhea.  The catherine-shamir supports themselves are gold.

Catherine: ever see a woman so beautiful you forget you almost died and decide to devote your whole life to her?

Catherine->Shamir: i get worried when you go out on missions on your own. I'm not there to protect you. I'm scared of you leaving me behind. I never want to leave you side. Between my life and your life i'd choose your life me: ! Shamir: i don't know what the future holds, but let's get married me: !!!!!!!!!!!!

Also catherine/christoph was a thing in the past. Highschool sweethearts. Before she executed him for treason

Ahahahhha this is great! And by great I mean hilarious. Dimitri dies even more offscreen in SS than in VW.  Ghost dimitri in ss made me laugh but  do we ever get an explanation for ghost dimitri or it like the cf finale? Themetically significant. Sure lets go with that

I'm really starting to see where the parts of vw and ss were smushes together

Embarr has the best night life

Recruiting sylvain into the gd feels mean. I'm taking away the only one with 2 braincells to rub together

Under all the noble bullshit, Lorenz really is a great guy

Do you think every demonic beast looks unique and its only that the devs didnt want to make more models that they dobt look different in game?

Recruiting sylvain into the gd feels mean. I'm taking away the only one with 2 braincells to rub together in the blue lions

Sylvain is warm

I wish we got to explore derdriu

PETRA DESERVES BETTER WRITERS. and give her a fluffy coat. She's gotta be cold in garreg mach

Count Varley is at the top of the hit list

Add alois onto team i'm scared of ghosts (lysithea, ashe, annette)[5:44 PM] That's it. I'm kidnapping alois from the church's clutches and taking him home. The church doesn't deserve him. And he hates his job

W h y  i s  everyone from faergus so eager to give up their personhood

Does faerghus seem really backwater to anyone else? Faergus reminds me of like 900's europe while leicester and adrestia are more like 1600's europe.  they still have that germanic warrior culture thing going. This is deep in the dark ages. I will accept the later half of the dark ages though since its post introduction of christianity. Leicester and Adrestia feel more like 1600-1700s They feel not quite french revolution, but getting there.  Yeah like the old institutions (crown and church) are still there but the cracks are showing.  Also the clothes

I thinki talked about this before. But when I say dorothea deserves the world. DOROThEA DESERVES THE WORLD. she’s been through so much

I need to go compare this with the verdant wind scene, but I was under the impression that sothis was in a regenerative coma after the war with the agarthans. But nope according to ss she was straigt up dead huh

i know I'm suppose to be fighting but I spent the last 30min exploring shambhala again

Damn it Shamir! Why'd ya have ta crit. I was trying to get dialog!January 2, 2020

gatekeeper > you < gatekeeper's identical twin brother who's on the opposite side of the war Its a sandwich

Oh wow the church really was up to some bloodborne level stuff

I turned every single one of the black eagles into a brigand (except linhardt and hubert).  Brigand gang brigand gang

The devs knew Claude and Lindhardt would just be too powerful. They had to be separated. thats why they dont have a support chain.  Sylvain and Claude has more energy but Sylvain has the conscious that Lindhardt lacks.  I mean Lindhardt singlehandedly lock picks  the holy tomb and disables rhea's magic mechs all while complaining he's sleepy.  Sylvain can be bullied into doing things and I love him for it.  Ah. I want both support chains

After Jeralts death both Claude and Edelgard both tell you that the world will continue spinning regardless of what befalls you personally but they do so in rather different ways. Edelgard phrases it like pull yourself together or the world will leave you behind. Claude phrases it like personal tragedies are such a small thing in the face of the world. You may have suffered a loss but there is so much to the world beyond that. There are still worthwhile things in the world. Both of say the world doesnt stop for you but mean different things.  And both are trying to motivate you to pull yourself together.  Whereas dimitri is like: you want vengence? You should go for vengence. I'll help you rip them apart. I'll kill for you.

Edelgard is socially awkward and blunt. She's also very practical minded so she doesn't know how to won't say something comforting when she can say something useful.  She's trying in her own way  To motivate byleth to start picking up their life.  Edelgard doesn't get people. Social interaction is a total mystery to her. She's just too stubborn to realize it.  At a couple points you can tease her and she thinks you're threatening her. She's not good at the people thing.  While she can come off a little rough because she doesn't understand how other people work. Hubert understands other people rather well and is an asshole anyways. List of characters who have threatened byleth: dimitri, hubert, sylvain, jeritza, catherine

Was sothis one of the divine dragon tribe? a lot of the other divine dragons had green hair especially the ones worshiped as gods (duma, mila, naga, tiki). But not fae or nowi.  I always got that dragon stones were like a dragon's essence sealed away so that while in human form they could stave off dragon degeneration. But what are crest stones. Were they made by the agarthans (artificial dragon stones) or are crest stones a natural part  of the nabeteans and the agarthans just harvested them. Or... ARE THERE BOTH. But the pov characters cant tell the difference.  This one group has messed with how many nations now?? SS has an interesting tidbit that's  been stuck in my head:  In the final map of SS its revealed that all high ranking church officials recieve Seiros' blood and a crest stone shard. WHERE ARE THE SHARDS COMING FROM. DAMN YOU SETETH YOU CANT JUST SAY THINGS LIKE THAT AND LEAVE ME. because if they are seiros crest stone shards that neans crest stones are not an Agarthan invention. But that condridicts VW where rhea says creststones are made of nabateab hearts. tldr: I'm confused. where are those fragments coming from??? Wait. This is all assuming a nabetean needs their heart inside them to live. Given how violently rhea reacts to losing even 1 crest stone I don't think she used the ones of her brethern. Which logically leaves only one weird possible answer. That rhea took her own heart/crest stone and has been giving out fragments. I mean she probably retrives the fragments when the priest dies.... this also means that nabeteans can survive with their heart outside their body... like a litch.... which I mean given sothis isn't too suprising? ??

VW and SS have such wacky endings. Let's go fight the cyberpunk mole people now!. Zombie invasion?  : check Weird bloodborne stuff and then we fight rhea?: check

Yeah VW was my first route and whew that was a wild ride. AM is so tame is comparison. but SS and VW lack the setup to pull out twists like that.  If this was like Nier: Automata where you get endings sequentially, it might have worked. But on their own the last 2 maps don't have anything at stake

hmmm  switching the final battles of verdant wind and silver snow? What would make a better story and why?  rhea kinda works because SS is all about rhea and saving her from herself as well as a revival of the church. But Nemesis also brings closure to Rhea's arc. She's been stuck for the last 1000 years to to fight the man who killed her most important person for good is like also really good thematically. VW is all about something new. Doing away with old structures and what better than to kill the pope? But facing the 10 elites also works for VW because that's the begining of the crest/nobility system you are literally killing.  I just like recruiting everyone and then killing the 10 elites with their own weapons wielded by their descendants.  its symbolic

Byleth is an excellent brigard. Went beigand and then wyvrn and their strength was higher than dimitri's

Claude: Rule? Nah. Gonna go be a scholar in an isolated mountain range. Books

Sylvain is a himbo wannabe

I should recruit annette and let her kill gilbert...  The one thing I'm worried about is that it'll hurt her more than it'll hurt him ... can I get crusher in crimson flower? If I were to recruit everyone and then get them all killed, what route would that be best in? Guess I'll be doing a death pact AM run some time in the future

Also koei tecmo and intsys are cowards for gender locking classes.  From a gameplay perspecrive too some characters are locked out of their ideal classes (war master for catherine and gremory for lindhardt). And then there's the in lore significance. Let hubert ride a pegasus.

Dorothea spent the entirety of their paralogue hitting on Ingrid. And then the RING at the end??? and they can’t support. Also Ingrid should have gotten an A support with Mercedes. They get along so well

Edelgard got the best designs in the game but Dorothea got the next best

Its canon. Edelgard thinks Claude grew up to be hot. Edelgard acknowledging that Claude is hot but but that she’s going to kill him anyways is just so good ....aaaaand one again I'm a coward who couldn't bring themself to kill Claude. But the completionist in me really wants to. The scene after sparing cluade between him and edelgard has kept me up too many nights.  What are the emotions here? My first guess was loss, grief. Someone else has interpreted it as aggtession though. And maybe we are both over thinking this but to me Claude's lines here say "I have failed"

Dorothea deserves a dragon

Caspar is actually real good for bernadetta. Its like talking to a sack of potatoes and doing so forces her to communicate better, firmly express herself, etc. Caspar has such great supports with all the ladies really

I really am just linhardt. I too disregard authority and despise being woken up...

I feel like we should all appreciate dorothea more. Death to the haters

ingrid equipping the duscar cavalry battalion is like  "I can exploit their labor so it’s alright"

I found felix was my solace in AM just because everyone else goes full death cult. despite how much i wanted to punch him when he told ingrid to go get a husband.  Also I should note I'm not sure felix whole heartesly believed what he said to Ingrid. I got the impression he said the thing he knew would upset her the most.  Not necessarily what he believed. That said he may actually believe it too.  Ingrid and felix remind be of squabbling siblings just saya the worst stuff to each other.  Unless felix has actively confronted the notion of faerhgus patriarchy he probably has internalized some of the beliefs. We all do. Thats why theyre so hard to dig out

Since we talk a lot about dads. Let's talk margrave edmund. tldr: complicated and interesting relationship with marianne.  What we know: he adopted marianne some time after her parents died, before she enrolles into the officers academy. Marianne says he's usuing her as marriage bait to marry up and increase the standing of house edmund.  This tracks with what others say about edmund: he's politically ambitious. And he's good at it enough to have gotten house edmund a seat at the round table.  In pretty much all her endings, he tutors mariannne until she's a political savant.  He forbid her from leaving the monestary in part 1.  Now let's go in between the lines. In part 1 marianne seems nervous of margrave edmund, but she also seems nervous of everything is part 1. In part 2, along with being more comfortable with herself she seems more familiar with him.  After the end of part 1 she likely returned to house edmund despite the attack being the perfect cover to disappear.  We don't get get much on edmund's personality buy he comes across as ruthlessly practical. The sort that goes "I can and will use everything to get what I want".  He likely adopted marianne not out of charity or compassion but so the house could have a crested heir and so he could use her as a bargining chip to other houses. But he sees enough potential in her to train her to be the next head of house. I think what started out as "ah another piece i can use" transitioned into a more friendly relationship as marianne began to assert herself and margrave edmund came to acknowledge her as more than how she could benefit him. I don't think he ever got over the "how can i use this" mentality but I'd like to think that after some years they came to get along. Ah yes I meant to do a hyrm thing and put it off for months. The Agarthans had long been infiltrating the empire and slowly increasing their influence on the government. In an attempt to stop this emperor ionius ix attempted to gain more power for himself to counter them by centralizing the government and taking power away from the nobles. House Hyrm attempted to defect to the leicester alliance with the help of house ordelia. In retaliation the Agarthans under the guise of the empire killed the members of house hrym and took control of hrym and ordelia. Also in response to ionius' move, the top ministers of the empire backed by the Agarthans began the insurrection of the seven where all political power was taken from the emperor. The Agarthans than experimented on ordelia and the royal family to implant crests while usuing hrym as a base of operations. After Emile killed that scrumbag baron bartels as well as the rest of the bartels family. Edelgard thought he could be useful as a piece not already controled by the Agarthans, and with their helped fabricated him a new identity as jeritza von hrym since hrym was a puppet for the Agarthans. Lord Arundel (Thales) then ensured jeritza a spot at garreg mach so he could act as an inside agent.

Anyone know the significance of rhea's mech's names (wilhelm, iris, etc.). past friends?  lol would it be messed up or what if its powered by his corpse 

Jeritza really is an acquired taste... wow

... I wonder sometimes if I like making things hard for myself... like I'll make rules like 4+ units have to attack an enemy before I kill them... or certain units can't be next to each other or just other abitrary rules. Anyways I'm just complaining because I did all this on the final map while under leveled last night (?) and am now just going "...why" at myself

Also, I wish we got the option of keep class headgear.  Some of it looks really cool and some of the classes (bishop??) look incomplete with out it.  Let me have my little hats!  Like mortal savant gets an oni mask which looks rad. And warlocks get flowery witch hats! Just finished crimson flowers again with warlock and then gremory dorothea and was like hmmmm.... she needs flowers in her hair

Also if you look up dimitri's dancer skirt you'll see he's wearing black short shorts

Team heretic: edelgard, hubert, petra, claude, leonie, linhardt in the closet: lorenz

So for those of you that keep up with my rambling... remember how i said the funal cf cutscene makes no sense? Did sothis self terminate? If she dud than why arent there records of other crest stones disintigrating? Or is it a sothis specific thing? Its possible sothis’s consciousness is stored in her creststone/heart but then how can you still s support her in CF? i've been trying to logic and reason this for several months and i cant get it to all fit. But on a symbolic level its like the coming of a new age, sothis' hold on the world (and her influence on byleth) disappears. Live on without dieties (literally in byleth's case). The new age of humanity and all so byleth becomes a normal human, no god powers yada yada. I think claude is the only one that knows byleth has no heartbeat?? (Maybe? I cant remember) since claude reads jeralt's diary. Thematic significance > narrative consistency. There's also that rhea goes beserk in SS and not VW, when the same stuff happens to her in both. Which doesn't add up for me. And Nemesis ...is he still sitting there in the other routes... Where did he get an army anyways? I assumed the agarthans just had a whole army frozen...But then why didn't they use it earlier? And can you imagine just a whole city of cryo pods underground. Just there.

Anyways I'm off to kill all the blue luons and solo with dimitri on maddening!  Can I get gilbert killed in AM or is he too plot important. I've been playing on casual like a coward so far

Ah ashen wolves shadow cinders looks edgy. I wonder why they have 4 kids in a dungeon. Theres that npc that talk about hiw garreg mach needs the abyss to survive. I wonder why they keep this system

I dont keep up with english VAs but it'd be funny if yuri was voiced by yuri lowenthal

anyone with a crest has less of a chance of  demonic beasting than someone with no crest in lore. In gameplay you can use any crest weapon as long as you have any crest. You just wont get the added benefits of that specific crest

Yuri is very pretty and I’m weak for beautiful long haired men.  But i kinda wish the nintendo would let us have BEEF

If only i could have 300 save files...

Yuri really just is Leon with amnesia. Down to the red eyeliner...

Who let balthus into a highschool

I have that insistent desire to punch the writers for putting dorothea and mercedes through all that

Manuela. Has. So. Much. Love!  And her line about how [as teachers] we cant lose the students to violence or cowardice

The head of felix plopped onto a generic brawler body will always be funny to me

Yeah... sylvain really treats you different when male.  There was a reason were many reasons I really wanted to punch sylvain when I first started playing. namely the misogyny

male Byleth just looks really good as a swordsmaster

From a gameplay perspective I think divine pulse should have been removed for maddening.  From a story perspective they did a pretty good job integrating time mechanics as god powers

I wonder if Jeralt reminded Rhea of Wilhelm

i love giving bad advice for the advice box

why is tea time is the hardest part of the game

Seriously. How does garreg mach even work? Fail school and you get sent to the dungeons for life. What.

Sylvain would totally be one of those dudes with too much money dolling out patronages

Let hilda be warmaster

Hmmm edelgard... fatalism....

Please mod gilbert out of the game Lorenz has got a good heart. But the words that come out of his mouth sometimes...

Oh yeah you know that rainbow flash dream sequence right at the begining of the game? Is it me or did I see skyscrapers in it

The inside of byleth's head is a smash tournament

Seteth can die and I'll kill him.  (Ok ok I don't actually hate the guy. But I don't like him either. He's the type I'd tolerate working with but want nothing to do with outside of the professional setting)

Caspar and linhardt really are THAT comedy duo. I need a whole book dedicated to their paired endings

Sylvain's dick is still the funniest joke on the internet

The weirdest part of part 2 felix's hair isn't even the aggresive side sweep. That can be explained by having stiff straight hair. Its the limp pony tail. If your hair is that stiff, any ponytail that length is going to stick straight out like as anime character. I have this hair type. I've succeded in replicating the side sweep, the ponytail doesnt work

give mercedes a gun cowards

Marianne with a cute bob. Marianne with short hair. very home of phobe of intsys not to make marianne like an actual werewolf or something

devs should have let Bernie learn how to beat her dad to death with her bare fists

I've returned home to my boy. I love Claude!

Mortal savant ignatz. I mean strength in swords and budding talent in reason. Youre going to ba a magic samurai ignatz!

I had forgotten how much gd plays like a mystery game. Also, whatever I said earlier I take it back. Lysithea has a crush on Leonie

I keep trying to imagine an adrestia that isn't tropical (because why else would they wear heavy coats), and failing...

I really love raphael. He's so good

Claude's this interesting mix of cynical and idealistic yeah. He has a number of strong ideals and believes in the potential of humanity to do good, to grow and learn, to come together and built. But he also struggles because at the same time he also believes humans will usually choose the easier path of ignorance and hate. People are cruel and don't care.[5:30 AM]He's really cynical about what people are actually going to do

Sylvain's just layer upon layer of unhealthy coping mechanism

I don’t really like the ingrid/claude ship. ingrid tends to fixate on one shallow quality in a person and then ship them shit about it. and that’s the support. and the writers don’t have her ever acknowledging the rest of the character’s personality or admitting her first impression might have been incorrect.  that especially doesn't pair well with Claude who hides so much of himself. Out of all the characters Claude can A support Ingrid's the only one I where I went "whyyyyyyy"[10:02 AM]It really felt like the typical C-B support. Of i cant stand you because of 1, 2, and 3. To hey maybe you aren't so bad

i can't help but think the empire and alliance are incredibly stupid for making lorenz a cavalier. He's terrible at it.

Hold the phone. Was jeralt a soldier in the leicester independwnce war? (On thw faerhgus side).  But thats 300 years ago. All we know is that hexs older than 100.  The almyra unvasion is another option. Its also possible that jeraly wasnt involved in any war

So I'm trying to get rhea killed on the last chapter of part 1 for GD and wow its really hard to lose the fight this way. Enemies will avoid her like the plague. I cant believe I'm struggling to lose a fight Rhea is unkillable. I have taken no actions for 15 turns are she is still not dead Starting to think its impossible to lose by rhea death in this battle Turn 31. Its only raphael and hilda left Yeah as long as you have 1 unit to keep enemy infanty out of the pink squares this map is inpossible to lose on hard mode  60 turns. All of Rhea’s spell and weapon uses are gone and she still wont die. I give up

I've been thinking of hilda dimitri hypothetical supports recently and i think they"d be halfway between her lorenz+ferdinand supports and her marianne supports.[1:48 AM]Hilda is the QUEEN of suckering people and dimitri is the biggest sucker in the game[1:51 AM]But like marianne's clumsiness, dimitri can't do basic tasks well so hilda hoisting her chores on him is sure to backfire hilariously. He also has that kicked puppy pitifulness that part 1 marianne has so hilda will end up feeling  sorry watching him struggle and help out[1:52 AM]But these 2 are both deeply compassionate so they could actually get along.  You know... i can see ferdinand and claude hating each other's guts. But there's such potential for personal growth...

Why is it that the agarthans have the most named npcs out of any factionJump

If gilbert is what it means to be an "exceptional knight". Then i dont want it. I dont want knights and i especially dont want execptional knights

I like playing on hard because i never have to worry about winning a fight only about how many style points I can rack up.

Why does fodland new year start on month 3.  Look i get that the japanese adopted the chinese calendar system of new year in early spring before adopting the gregorian calendar so "new years" events ended up split between month 1 (new years celebration) and month 3/4 (start of school). But that makes no sense for fodlan. In universe it doesnxt make sense. Why not have month 1 start in spring or have the new year in winter. Ok let's be real. The real reason its like this is that due to globalization and post ww2 american influence not to mention european colonialism, the gregorian calander is the one the world runs on. So its for us players benefit that month 1 is in winter and month 6 is summer. But in universe it doesn't make sense! Not unless you start making really convoluted excusrs[4:00 AM](Sorry southern hemisphere   No representation for you today) This only works for chinese new years because its 2 different calender systems being used at the same time. Which doesn't make sense in fodlan because why would rhea allow a new calander system in given her isolationist policy. Or if its a remnant of an old calender system, there's no way it lasted 1000 years

If jeralt hadn't been killed by kronya, he would have been consumed by the hivemind in SS and you would have been forced to kill him

The devs really went out of their way to give jeritza a unique class huh. He's a dark knight+swords. You can say it. He's just a dark knight. Yet they really went and slapped death knight on him[2:49 PM]Also as a pc his crit rate in underwelming

The s suport cgs are more stylized and its a little jarring

Is it only me than. Who get ways too many support points thant hey know what to do with.

We need a cats remake but its called rats and is dimitri in every role

I want a lysithea hilda a support[5:48 PM]Hilda's the only ine lysithea likes from the start[5:48 PM]They have mutual respect for each other[5:48 PM](Also side note. Wow lysithea is mean to ignatz. Poor baby)

Reminder that its Marianne who title drops vw

Did I miss something? Felix becoming the top advisor for all of fodlan seems like a bad idea. The only thing that comes close to showing he's competant is his ingrid support where it shows he's decent at tactics. Reason number 76 for why I'm worried for fodlan post AM. Along with ... ya know .. the Agarthans still running around.

One part of vw i didn't like was when the merchants went woohoo no regulations and free trade yay!Jump

I'll be honest. 7 year old me would have swindled dimitri out of his good halloween candy

[thundertempest]

Cliche

“Today is going to be terrible. Everything is absolutely, positively, without a shadow of a doubt, going to go wrong,” I said, as I climbed out of bed and turned off the alarm by my bed. And for a moment, I thought my little trick had worked. Nothing seemed to go wrong for all of five minutes while I checked my phone, and rubbed the sleep out of my eyes.

Then, as I was heading out of my room for breakfast, I stepped on the remains of my kid brother’s LEGO sculpture, and tumbled down the stairs.

“Motherfu-” I managed to say, before I fell into the glowing portal that had appeared at the base of the stairs, still in my pyjamas.

Welcome to my life.

----------

Usually, my days don’t start so dramatically. Heck, sometimes I even get weeks of pure, blessed normality. Well, as normal as I can be, because I don’t think I’ve aged in what feels like ten years. Every year, I turn sixteen. I’ll probably turn sixteen again this year, exactly like I did last year. I'm even willing to say that the same people will show up to my birthday party. Anyway, as I was saying; normality. Sometimes I get weeks of it at a time. But most of the time, I’m a victim of what are often the most clichéd ‘Call To Adventure’ situations you could imagine, and I can’t not follow through. Call it a morbid curiosity if you want. I’ve fallen through multiple portals to other dimensions, I’ve discovered powers inside of me that I never knew I had, I’ve lived entire lifetimes in other worlds and come back home to find that not even an hour has passed, and I’m back in this body.

But the worst thing is that after about seven or eight of these adventures, I go to sleep, and everything resets, and I’m just Casey, a few months before my sixteenth birthday. At least I can usually maintain some semblance of personality across these experiences. The closest that I've gotten to an answer is that time is sort of fluid around me. Cause and effect still happen, but exact dates are difficult.

Heck, most days I'm lucky if I remember if I have homework for school to do.

------------

I woke up on cold ground, leaves tickling my face. Instincts from countless battles half-remembered in places almost too fantastical to describe scream at me to get out of the open, to find shelter, and figure out where the heck I am.

Also, I was mentally placing bets with myself as to when the elf, or animal person, or dwarf, or whatever was going to show up and declare me the saviour of the land. Best current odds were on between ten and thirty minutes.

I stood up slowly-portals tended to leave me nauseous. The last time that I'd fallen through a glowing portal in the air, I'd moved and eaten too quickly afterwards, and spent an hour throwing all of the food I'd eaten back up. Now standing, I could begin to get a proper look at where I was. It was definitely a forest of some kind, and definitely not the kind that was around my house. Senses that I had half-forgotten sparked into life, telling me that this world had magic of some form, but attempting to manipulate it when I had no clue how it worked would be a very bad idea.

So, my very first priority was to figure out where the heck I was in this world. If there was a village or something nearby, I could use that to figure out what the heck I was supposed to do here, unless something found me first, but aside from the soft chirping of birds and skittering of animals, I couldn't hear anything approaching me.

So, time to climb a tree. Get up somewhere high, find out where the heck I am, and where I potentially need to go.  I picked a tree that didn't look too difficult, and began to scale it, making my way through the canopy. Once I could go no higher, I poked my head as far as I dared out of the branches, and scanned the horizon. Nothing immediately jumped out at me in the way of destinations or things of importance.

------

"Hey-o!" said a voice, just as I  was about to start my climb down. Startled, my foot slipped, and I began to plummet with a yelp.

A minute passed, and I couldn't feel anything hit me. I couldn't even feel that I was moving, so I gingerly opened my eyes. The world had taken on a greyish tint, and I seemed to be suspended in mid-air. My body was frozen in position, only my head was still free to move.

"I've stopped time for a sec. Hold on, let me get you down from there," said the same voice as before. I felt a hand grab onto the back collar of my pyjamas, and pull me down towards the ground. A few moments later, I was back down on the ground, and the man who had saved me walked into view. He was tall, but bulky. Heavy, not stringy like some of the guys at school.

"Let me just check something with you, okay? You are Casey, right?"

"Yeah," I said.

"Casey Bell?"

"Yes?"

"Casey Isadore Bell?"

I grumbled another yes. I hated my middle name.

"Great," said the man, clapping his hands together, "Now, to state the blindly obvious, you are a very long way from home, Casey."

"Yeah, no shit," I said, "please tell me you're here to help me stop this stuff happening to me and get me back to a normal life."

"Yes and no," said the man, "I can't pull you home now-you've crossed The Gap. The prophecy is in motion now, and I can't interfere directly with that. But yes, I am eventually going to get you back to a normal life, so you'll stop falling through portals, or being teleported at random."

I breathed a sigh of relief, then my mind caught onto something the man had said.

"Wait, prophecy?"

He sighed, and then took a deep breath.

"Yeah. You've probably read books, or seen films or whatever it is you kids do these days, about young teens getting pulled into fantastical worlds, to help bring it back into balance, and in the process, learn the value of self-confidence or whatever."

"Yeah, but they're just-" I trailed off as the man raised an eyebrow at me. "So all those stupid books are real?"

"Not all, but some are. Those kind of events, as I am sure you have discovered, are capable of happening."

"But that would mean magic is real. Why hasn't anyone talked about this?"

"Who would believe a seventeen-year-old girl who said she found a magical land of elves and dwarves in her closet and adventured with them to find the meaning of courage?" said the man.

"Okay, fair point," I said, after thinking for a bit, "but how do you know about all this?"

"I'm the guy who's in charge of regulating this shit. So it is, indirectly mind you, my fault that you've ended up in the situation you have. My name's Andrew, by the way."

"Your fault?!" I half-screamed, trying to reach him, but I still couldn't move anything but my head.

"Look, a few centuries ago, I implemented some automation into my job, to take care of lapsed prophecies. Somehow, the system fucked itself and they all got shunted to you very recently."

I blinked.

"At last count, this now-disabled system has given you..." Andrew paused for a minute and a glowing square appeared in the air, with what looked like computer code scrolling down it. "Eight thousand and eighty five lapsed prophecies. Now, I can't just cancel these things, or delete them. They have to be fulfilled, but the original people these were intended for either died, can't be found, or out grew the need for them. Thus, we arrive at your situation, Casey. For some reason, they all defaulted to you, but because most of them demand that you be within a few months of your sixteenth birthday, rather than lapse the prophecy again, it has somehow instituted a form of time loop."

I watched as Andrew's fingers danced over the glowing screen, swiping things left and right at almost random.

"You get from exactly four months before your sixteenth birthday to four months after your sixteenth birthday. And let's see...you've done that cycle seven times and out of the eight thousand and eighty five prophecies that you were assigned, you've completed forty-three. Wow."

"How does this help me stop this stuff from happening, though?" I said.

Andrew coughed, slightly embarrassed.

"Right. Helping you. Technically, it doesn't, but the information is helpful. However, we do have a problem."

"What's that, besides the obvious one?"

"I am technically not allowed to help any person who has been assigned a prophecy. Even me being here is technically a bad thing. Once they've crossed The Gap-the space between their world and the world of prophecy-I can't do anything to help directly." Andrew paused for a moment, and dug something out of his jacket pocket, and dropped it on the ground.

"Whoops," he said, with a half-manic grin, and then clicked his fingers, and the colour bled back into the world. Finally able to move again, I picked it up.

"The Hero's Journey- A Guide to Fiction? A writing guide?" I said, "how the heck does this-Oh. Oh, I get it."

"You're not half dumb, Casey. Not everything is going to be exactly as it is in there, but you've already gotten a sense of how this whole scene works. You are, in essence, the protagonist of  a young adult fiction novel right now. Use that knowledge, and abuse the shit out of it. Prophecy magic says that you more or less have to live through this intact, so go wild. I'll be in touch with you later," said Andrew, snapping his fingers. The world instantly regained its colour, and he vanished into thin air.

---------

"Go forth, brave Casey, and hold your head high as you walk through life," said someone from over my shoulder. I wasn't sure who, because all that mattered was the portal in front of me. I felt the people that I had come to know over my fairly standard adventure pat me on the back as I strode into the portal.

Then I remembered exactly how I'd gone through the portal when I arrived.

"Motherfu-"

"-ker!" I finished, as I bounced off the last step, back in my pyjamas.

"Language, Casey!" yelled my mother from the kitchen, and I grumbled a few more curse words under my breath as I picked myself up off the floor. Despite my annoyance with the whole 'falling into portals every other week' thing, it was an escape from the drudge of my everyday life.

I shuffled into the kitchen, nursing the bump on my head as I sat down and a bowl of cereal was shoved in front of me. Partially on autopilot, I dug in, trying to remember if anything important was happening at school today.

As my mind churned through its gears, I finished the bowl of cereal, placed it in the dishwasher, and wandered back upstairs, and begun to get ready for the day at school.

'I'll be in touch with you later.' That was what Andrew, whoever he really was, had said. But he'd said he could help. And I'd certainly never met anyone who could control time like that, but there was definitely something slightly wrong about him, as my half-awake magic sense told me.

"Casey! We're leaving in five minutes!" called my mother from down stairs, interrupting my thoughts.

"Coming!" I called back, throwing my backpack on my back, and hurrying down the stairs.

------------

Found this while I was cleaning out a laptop of mine that I don’t use so much any more. Cleaned it up a bit, added some stuff, and here we are.

The initial prompt was from @jllongwrites

The prompt: Write a story where the protagonist is fully aware they’re the protagonist in a story.

[wellhalesbells]

so.  i just found this in my drafts, partly finished, before i apparently flopped to the floor and decided, ‘i shall type no more, i am weary of this life, and i think there might be string cheese in a corner of the fridge.’  (there probably wasn’t, then i probably flopped there and thought, ‘i shall eat cheese no more, i am weary of this life, and then a dog licked my face.’  that sounds like an average day at least.)  anyway, i was tagged by @andavs eighty-fafillion years ago and i imagine she is now telling a story about not sharing some plywood with a blond dude, watching him drown and then throwing a necklace that i totally could've pawned overboard, like the selfish jerk she is.  that’s what getting older is like, right?  that’s a summation that is primarily a guess but backed by some solid titanic-based science.

Rules: Tag 20 followers that you would like to get to know better!

NAME: madeline (MAD - UH - LYNN not to be confused with MAD - UH - LINE okay?  i've never lived in an old house in paris covered in vines and i can’t walk a straight line to save my life, all right?)

NICKNAME: maddie, shmads, madsmonster, shamdsie, shamdseline, stinkypotamus, pie, squid, cal, bells, but i literally respond to anything because i have a sister who has a new nickname for me every few seconds.

STAR SIGN: pisces

GENDER: female

HEIGHT: oh.  5′, we really had to start my day with that reminder?

FAVORITE COLORS: oh all of them.  i adore all the colors, but in a way where they’re also somehow too insignificant for me to have favorites.

TIME RIGHT NOW: 4:07 pm

AVERAGE HOURS OF SLEEP: average, HA HA HA, ohhhh you do make me chuckle.  it’s all or nothing when it comes to sleep and most often it is nothing.

LAST THING I GOOGLED: the names of the powerpuff girls or, in my sophisticated-speak: ‘red powerpuff one.’  in fairness to me, i meant to write ‘girl,’ answered the phone and got distracted.  because i’m an adult.  working hard, at her job.  and the thing is i KNEW all their effing names, too, but i couldn’t remember which one was the red-haired one and i was like: it’s blossom, right?  but that didn’t sound right at all.  it still doesn’t.  i feel like she had a different name and it’s been redacted from all written record, scrubbed from the interwebs and replaced with this imposter name.  i’ve stumbled upon another conspiracy, guys, get out your staple guns and satellites.

NUMBER OF BLANKETS: that depends entirely on where i’m living.  florida or dc summers and it’s one that’s easily flingable.  anywhere that gets legitimately cold and i open all the windows, drag out every blanket i own and pile it atop me like a reverse princess and the pea.  i’m the pea and oxygen is the princess.

FAVORITE FICTIONAL CHARACTERS: oh gosh.  well.  derek hale.  that’s an obvious.  that’s number one, that’s my guy, that’s my squid-fish, my asshole hummingbird, my delightful dingo.  and you know what?  i don’t want to dilute the waters.  he’s number one and also only one.

FAVORITE BOOKS: *forgets every book to ever exist in the history of mankind*  um.  well, the harry potter series.  that’s a given too, i hated reading before those books came into my life (why does the education system pick the densest, most horrible literary works in history and then read them for forty-thousand weeks so you can’t ever escape them?  stamps out any idea that reading can be a fun escape pretty much immediately), after them i was voracious.  uhhhh i’ll go with what i’ve read in the past year or so because that’s about as far as my memory stretches: the raven cycle by maggie stiefvater, the night circus by erin morgenstern, i’ll give you the sun by jandy nelson and i just finished station eleven by emily st. john mandel three days ago and that was awesome!

FAVORITE BANDS: i’ll do this by: if they came in concert, would i go see them?  because that list has DWINDLED since my teenager-dom, lemme tell you, so: the killers (whom i’ve never seen before and would like to) and stars (whom i have seen before and would again in a heartbeat)

DREAM JOB: mattress tester?  in my fantasy of it, a man with a bulbous nose and gills leads me to rows upon rows of mattresses in this cavernous airplane hangar-type place, so huge i can’t even see the wall parallel, and he looks at me sternly and says, “now we don’t appreciate rush jobs, little lady (he’s kinda sexist but i’m staring at his gills so i think it’s partly defensive).  we’re going to need you to sleep, properly sleep, on every single one of these and report back.  we don’t care how long it takes, as long as it’s done right.  quality over quantity, eh, missy?”

and then i say, “eh, gill,” and we fist bump.

WHAT AM I WEARING RIGHT NOW: work clothes - leggings, boots (well, no, my boots are off but i was wearing boots), jigglypuff socks, c3po underwear, a flimsy top that looks professional, an uncomfortable bra with tape on it and a hoodie jacket that looks wholly unprofessional and is designed with paint splatters and iron-on punk patches.  bossman loves it.  we have been not-making-eye-contact over it all day, despite his best attempts.  the other 99% of the time the answer would’ve been: a deadpool onesie.  and i would’ve been way happier about it.

WHEN DID YOU CREATE YOUR BLOG: uh.  is there a way to know that?  WAIT.  i feel like tumblr sent me a ‘your blog turned five years old today’ email a couple months ago and i trashed it with the thought: wow, you’re outta this kid’s life for five years and you breeze back in with a half-assed ‘happy birthday’ and no gift.  WHERE’S MY GODDAMN ALIMONY?

CURRENT AMOUNT OF FOLLOWERS: 3,160+ (i’m gonna guesstimate it ‘cause at all times i’m hemorrhaging them with the occasional gain so it’s always like an ‘ish’ number but it was 3,164 last i looked), which is stupid as hell because i don’t do anything.  for a lump of laze that regularly looks at an untied shoelace and shakes her head with a murmured, ‘too far,’ that’s pretty goddamn exceptional.

WHAT DO YOU POST ABOUT: CAN’T PUT NO CHAINS ON ME.  i mean, yeah, um, it’s pretty much a gigantic mess of messery that is whatever catches my eye/heart.

DO YOU HAVE ANY OTHER BLOGS: no.  well, yes.  but no.  i have a sense8 side blog that i shouldn’t have because i’m not a responsible blog owner and where in the hell did i get this idea that i could handle a second one?

WHEN DID YOUR BLOG REACH ITS “PEAK” (WHEN DID YOU GET MORE FOLLOWERS, HAVE POPULAR POSTS, ETC): uhhhhh.  my most notable peak was probably right after i finished there’s monsters at home.  i hadn’t really been posting on tumblr that long and i still didn’t really know how it worked (that streak lives on, woo!) but i knew this is where teen wolf lived so i was trying, badly but trying.  then i finished it and went up by about 1,000 followers in a month and it was all very exciting.  then, as always happens, people get bored and wander away because i am not very exciting and WHATEVER, I DON’T EVEN CARE, I NEVER LOVED YOU ANYWAY.  I HAD MY EYES ON YOUR BEST FRIEND, HOECH, THE WHOLE TIME, SO THERE.

WHO IS YOUR MOST ACTIVE FOLLOWER: is there a way to know this???

WHAT MADE YOU DECIDE TO GET A TUMBLR: getting into teen wolf was what did it.  i was eljay-based before that because that is where hp lives (or was living at the time) and then i got into teen wolf and realized i had to learn a new platform and drank heavily, cried pitifully, and read sterek fanfic and decided: no, i really have to do this because i am in love as i never have been before.  (or since.)

DO YOU GET ASKS ON A DAILY BASIS: ew.  no.  HOW DO YOU LIVE LIFE WITH THAT?

TAG 20 PEOPLE: wow, we’re assuming that i know twenty people?  if you guys haven’t done this and want to, go for it and tag me as the tagger if you’d like, i’ll come plonking over and check it out!

[thejustinmarshall]

Alastair Humphreys On Traveling The World At 10 mph, Microadventures, And Not Quitting

NOTE: In 2018, I started recording interviews with creatives (writers, filmmakers, podcasters, photographers, editors, etc.) in the adventure world. I’m publishing the highlights of those interviews monthly in 2019.

I would argue that what makes British adventurer Alastair Humphreys interesting is not the big things he’s done (like spending four years cycling around the world or rowing across the Atlantic), but how he’s learned to evolve and do smaller things—like walking around the M25 (the 117-mile freeway circling London), or trying to eat at a London restaurant from a country representing each letter of the alphabet, A to Z.

Or, as he did in his new book, re-trace Laurie Lee’s early-20th century foot journey from England to Spain, funding the trip only by busking with a violin—which he didn’t really know how to play. That’s the subject of his new book, My Midsummer Morning: Rediscovering a Life of Adventure, available in the U.S. on July 25.

I first heard of Alastair back in 2011, when National Geographic named him one of its Adventurers of the Year for his “microadventures,” the quick escapes he popularized from his London home, and that are much more within the reach of most working folks. (He later turned the idea into a book, Microadventures.)

I wanted to sit down and interview Alastair because he’s had to evolve a couple times in his career, starting as a kid who knew nothing about adventure and then pedaled 46,000 miles around the world, and then becoming a guy who trekked across Iceland and rowed across the Atlantic. Then he turned that into a career as an author, keynote speaker, and filmmaker. And he got married, had kids, and had to figure out not only how to fit adventure into a “normal” life, but how to be happy doing that.

ON GROWING UP I grew up in the Yorkshire Dales, which is a national park in the north of England. It’s a beautiful part of the north of England, and I had a nice rural childhood of riding my bike and climbing trees and playing in rivers and being out until sunset and all those other clichés, which I found incredibly boring at the time but now look back on with great nostalgia.

I didn’t really do anything very interesting in my entire life, at all, and certainly nothing adventurous until I was 18 when I finished high school and a friend and I decided to spend a year in Africa teaching in a little rural school. I always think of that as being the end of my childhood and the beginning of my actual life. The 16th of June is the day I finished my high school exams. I still celebrate that in my head every year as the beginning of my life.

We were teaching a bit of everything. We were in a really rural, poor school in the middle of absolutely nowhere in northern South Africa. We were only 18, but we had a lot of fun, and that’s completely opened up my eyes to this whole new wild, exciting world that existed beyond rural northern England. I think from then that’s when I always think of being, got hooked on wanting to travel and to see more countries in the world.

From there I went to university in Edinburgh and Oxford. While I was at university, I got quite into physical challenges. To earn money there, I joined the army. Britain has this weird part-time weekend army, like the army reserve, so I joined that purely because I got paid to run around the hills and they had good parties and cheap beer.

I always hated anything we had to do with a gun, but I always liked the parts where you had to go run around the hills. Doing that really opened my eyes to the first time that I was actually quite good at endurance stuff and suffering and having a miserable time. I’ve never been good at anything in my life, so to suddenly be quite good at being miserable, I started to love that feeling.

By the time I finished university, I decided I wanted to somehow combine my fascination with trying to explore and travel the world, like a lot of young people do, with wanting to have a really miserable, tough time to prove to the world how tough I was, and to prove to myself how tough I was, I suppose. That’s directly what led to me deciding to cycle around the world for a few years.

ON THE GENESIS OF THE IDEA OF ADVENTURE I started reading adventure books when I was 18 in the summer, just before my big exams. They’re called A-levels, key exams you do to determine what university you go to. They’re basically the biggest exams in your life, and obviously it’s quite boring studying for them. I discovered in the school library two books, Living Dangerously by Ranulph Fiennes and Mad White Giant by Benedict Allen.

I read these two, particularly the Ranulph Fiennes book, this crazy story of his incredible life adventures, and I just read that and go, “Wow, that is the way to properly live a life.” Until I was 18, I’d had no inclination of the world of expeditions at all. It was actually through my university years, I read Kon-Tiki and all the climbing books and all the books you’d expect to read and got completely obsessed with travel writing and expeditions. It was actually wanting to be a writer that made me go and cycle around the world. I wanted to be a travel writer, therefore I had to have something to write about.

ON HIS PROPENSITY FOR SUFFERING I think it mostly just came about from being miserable—at school, not being picked for all the teams that I wanted to be picked for, not hanging out with the cool kids who I wanted to hang out with, just generally feeling slightly on the margins of life. I don’t want to paint a huge sob story because my life was fine, but as a teenager small things seemed big. Even from before a teenager, I always just felt that I was on the margins and a bit anonymous and never really shone at anything, wasn’t really good at anything.

I was all right at stuff but never good enough to actually stand out at anything. I think I just had a massive chip on my shoulder, really, and just wanted to try and stand out a bit, I suppose. I think that is probably the driving factor for then just becoming incredibly stubborn. If you’re lying in a cold, wet ditch on some stupid army game pretending that the imaginary enemy is going to come and kill you and you know you’re just pretending and you’re getting paid hardly anything, I was always the person who could lie in the ditch the longest because I just stubbornly refused to get out of the muddy ditch.

There’s nothing very noble or intelligent or anything, but I think that’s the basis of the next 20 years of my life.

ON NOT QUITTING Rowing across the Atlantic Ocean was probably the only thing I’ve ever done in life, where there was literally no option of quitting. Once you’re out in the middle of the ocean, you’re just out there. Nothing at all could’ve gotten me off that boat, and it was just impossible to quit.

At first, I found that very frightening, and then I found it hugely liberating, this realization that, “Wow, I can’t quit, I can’t get off this boat.” All of those thought processes now become irrelevant, so, “Oh, I might as well just get on with it.” It was interesting how much of a shadow normally hangs over the things that I do, which I only noticed once that went away, because it was impossible.

On my cycle trip, I actually had a couple of very conscious strategies to deal with wanting to quit, because a lot of the time I was really quite close to quitting. I had a couple of rules.

The first rule was, I was not allowed to give up at nighttime or when I was cold, wet, scared, or hungry. I could only give up after a good night’s sleep on a sunny, warm morning after a large breakfast. That was, I think, a really important check and balance thing to stop that gut feeling of, “Oh, I just want to go home.”

Then the second clause in my contract with myself was, if I still wanted to give up, that was fine, but I could only give up if I thought of something better to go do with my life. I didn’t want to be shackled to this stupid bike ride for four years. If I had a better option, if some more exciting project came up, I always wanted to feel that I was free to go do that better thing. However, I couldn’t just quit until I thought of a better thing, because that was just a bit pathetic. With those two safety catch things, that’s what helped me overcome the regular urge to want to quit.

ON THE PEOPLE WHO UNEXPECTEDLY CHANGE YOUR LIFE The whole plan of that bike trip was, “Go do a big adventure, get it out of my system, and then go and become Mr. Humphreys, high school science teacher.” That was the life plan.

For the first year, cycling down Africa, I was doing it to prove myself to other people like all the teachers who didn’t pick me for the high school cricket team. Then the second year, which was basically cycling through South America, I was doing that to prove whatever to myself.

By the end of the second year, the end of South America, I felt at peace. I though, “I’ve now cycled a long way, I’ve cycled for two years. That’s a good effort. I can go home with my head held high.” To get from Colombia to Panama there’s the Darién Gap, the jungle, there’s no road. You have to take a little boat route, so I decided that when I got to the end of Colombia I was going to give up, come home, and that was the end of the trip, and that was fine. I completely decided upon that.

I got to Cartagena, Colombia, and I needed to take a photo of my bike by the sea, and the easiest place to get access to the sea was at the sailing club. I cycled in there, I walked my bike down to the end of the jetty to take my end of continent photograph, did that, and started walking down the jetty in order to go to a travel agent and book my flight home and get on with life.

Walking back down that jetty, some American guy on a little yacht shouted out to me, “Hey, are you looking for a lift to Panama?” which is exactly where I needed to go next. Well, I just had to say, “Yeah, I guess I am,” so I hitched a lift with him. Then, for the next two years, I thought, “Jeez, I can’t give up now,” so that’s an interesting pivotal moment in my life.

Some American guy owned the yacht, and then he had these two reprobate friends who moved it around in the off-season, and they drank an astonishing amount of alcohol.

One of them lived in a trailer park somewhere in California, and the other lived in Seattle. We sailed together out of Colombia through some big storms. Their response to storms was just to really drink a lot, and it was quite an interesting experience with them. Dale sends me an email probably about every three years at about, I guess, about 2 a.m. Seattle time, probably when he’s just drunk a massive amount of gin and dived back through the depths of my website again to remember our glory days together.

ON HOW CULTURE SHOCK DISAPPEARS AT 10 MPH It really struck me cycling around the world how often I felt culture shock. It was so rare on the trip as to actually really stand out when it did happen, whereas if you jump on an airplane to anywhere, well, it’s weird. Flying anywhere, you get through a terminal, you walk past the ATMs and the Starbucks and the guys with the iPads picking up taxi people and you could be anywhere in the world, but eventually at some point culture shock hits you hard when you travel by plane and you suddenly realize you’re somewhere very different.

Cycling, for example, one of the culture shocks in my trip was taking the ferry from England to France, which is only two hours, because that suddenly was a change in language. From France until South Africa, it was pretty much land the whole way, just creeping across continents. The land changed at 10 miles an hour, so you just don’t really notice it changing. The language occasionally changes at borders, but the landscape you’re moving through and the general wealth of a place and the cultures of it was such a slow-moving change that I really felt comfortable pretty much everywhere I went. The few exceptions to that in the world were very jarring because they were so rare.

A real joy of traveling across countries by bicycle is that you move so sly that you can feel like you actually belong, which is an illusion, of course, but it’s quite a pleasant one to feel that you’re part of the place you’re going through, rather than just being a voyeuristic observer as I zoom into a place by taxi from an airport.

ON SEEING THE WORLD I’m a human, and cycling all the way around the world at 10 mph made it really just feel like one world with some random little arbitrary borders and some strange foods along the way. By and large now, I’d be entirely happy to be dumped at random in any country in the world. As long as I could find somewhere to sleep tonight, I’d wake up tomorrow morning excited and curious to go have a look around.

My general feeling now from going to so many countries of rich and poor and all sorts of flavors is just how normal most people’s lives are. There’s the superficial weirdness and differentness, but very, very quickly you just realize the flow of life, people waking up and they find breakfast and they take their kids to school and they go to work. Maybe they’ve got a pig on the back of the bicycle or maybe they’re in a shiny car with an iPhone, but they’re just going to work.

Anywhere I’ve ever been in the world, people have always given me water when I’ve asked for water. No one ever makes you pay for water. No one ever says no to that. Just these little constancies that made me feel very much just like I, and this sounds like the most ridiculous hippie thing, but I’ve really started to feel that I just live in the world rather than I’m an English guy.

ON AMERICA AND THE MIDDLE EAST I cycled around the world in a pretty volatile political era of the George Bush years and 9/11 and Iraq and all that sort of stuff. In those years particularly, it very much felt like America versus the Middle East in summary. I cycled through the Middle East and I loved it, and then I cycled through America and I loved it.

The thing that struck me time and again riding through America was how much it reminded me of the Middle East. In so many ways, it felt, the people and the hospitality and the tribal insularity, it all felt so similar. I found that really interesting, the ostensibly different places actually felt very similar to me. On that, as I’ve mentioned to you a few times, I’m such a romantic sucker for America. It’s one of my very favorite places in the world, and I’m continually having to defend it to people who bash America.

ON HIS CREATIVE CAREER My pie chart of my income for about the first 10 years or so of which I was making my living out of adventure was pretty constant: 90 percent speaking, 10 percent books and magazine articles. Over those 10 years, the total of the pie chart increased, but the percentage never really changed. Then about four or five years ago, there was a new slice of the pie which was brand work, being a brand partner, making films for or with brands, which I suppose all fits under the hat of being an influencer.

Working with brands has become now probably about a third of it, maybe even a bit more of what I do now. I used to do millions of talks at schools to little kids, which paid my life for the early years. It felt very worthwhile, but it took up huge amounts of my time.

These days, quite a lot of schools are reading my book, The Boy Who Biked the World, and when they get in touch with me I tend to either do a Skype interview with them or record them a little video for YouTube to try and participate in their reading.

ON HIS SPEAKING CAREER In my talks, I like to talk about my most recent adventure and I like to talk about the breadth of my experiences for my own self-respect and sanity, but I’ve come to learn that audiences only want to hear about me cycling around the world, walking around the M25, when I walked around London and the Microadventure stuff, and then playing the violin in Spain, people like hearing that. I think they’ve become the three hits in my life, I think. I’m at peace with that now, I accept that.

I’ve been now giving talks about cycling around the world for way, way, way longer than I was actually cycling around the world. There have been considerable periods of time when I’ve been doing my talks when I just felt like a total fraud, and I’ve really hated myself that I’m just still talking about that same thing I did so long ago. It really made me feel I needed to do another adventure. I needed to have another story. I needed to know what’s next just for my own self-respect, really.

ON THE IMPACT OF HIS ADVENTURE STORIES My very first book, Moods of Future Joys, is about a young guy going for his first big adventure. I get regular emails from people who are now in some far-flung corner of the world because they’ve read that book and gone off and cycled around the world. I always feel quite a sense of pressure from that, but I hope it matches up to their expectations. And the Microadventures book has been really good. I hear regularly from people for whom it’s helped them.

With email, people are very willing, it seems, to send quite honest, cathartic emails to this random strange guy, me. I get emails about people’s depression and divorces and affairs and all sorts of stuff, and how that in some way or another going to sleep on a hill has helped with that side of things, which is really nice because adventure, essentially, is such a ridiculously selfish first-world type thing to do. Whenever I feel that I’m actually doing something a little bit useful and helping someone else, that makes me feel a bit better.

I did a talk about a month ago. It was an evening talk at a dinner, and I finished my talk and sat down. Some lady walked over to me and said, “I just emailed my boss and I’ve quit.” She did it right then in the room.

The boss was also in the room. I hope that was the right outcome for everyone. I think companies want me to be inspiring people. They don’t want me to be getting people to quit.

ON FILMMAKING I bought a Canon 5D Mark II in 2009 having never filmed a single thing in my life and actually never had the slightest interest in doing it. Then I saw a little thing on the Internet of that camera, I just thought, “Wow, this is amazing,” so I took a punt on that. I remember it cost £1,600. The fact that I remember it shows how astronomically expensive it was for my life at the time.

I’d never filmed anything, never had any interest in it, and I never really watched films myself. It was a completely new thing. Basically, then, for five or six years, I was just Googling how to make films and doing it as I went and making literally zero money from it, literally no money. I was doing it purely because I really loved, I find filming stuff when I’m out there really enhances the experience for me. I really, really enjoy charging around with a camera and a tripod, I love that.

Then I find when I’m at my computer trying to edit, I find that captivates me more than anything else I do. The whole day just zooms by in a blur, and my head then feels it’s going to explode. I go deeper into that than anything else I do, so I just love filming and editing stuff. That came about long before anyone gave me any money to do anything with film, so it’s purely just something I really enjoy.

The other thing that I love about films is pretty much everything I do, writing, speaking, is solitary. I’m just on my own, in my shed. Often when I do a film, it’s with somebody else. That’s the only time I get to work with other people, and I love that because it’s a chance to work with people who are much better than me at different parts of the process. That, I absolutely love that, I love doing that. I don’t get enough of that in my life.

ON THE TRANSITION TO REAL LIFE Like a lot of people, I found becoming a parent the hardest thing that I’ve ever done. I found it particularly hard because I’d spent the last 10-15 years living this carefree, wild, vagabond, incredibly selfish life traveling around the world, and that was not in any way good preparation for becoming a selfless stay-at-home person prioritizing other people’s needs. I found it really hard.

By that point, my job was adventure, and adventure requires you going away for long periods of time doing stuff that is dangerous and often stupidly dangerous. Neither of those things were compatible with being a respectable, sensible dad. When we had kids, I essentially stopped doing big expeditions.

With the loss of my hobby, my job, I felt my whole identity disappeared, and I felt completely empty, really. I also, because I was trying to make a living as an adventurer, I felt a total fraud, that I was still talking about adventures and I was still talking about cycling around the world and stuff, and yet I wasn’t doing anything adventurous myself. I found it a really hard process, and I felt that way for years, really. I never talked about any of this stuff publicly at all, partly because I just felt that my private life is quite different to my adventure online life, but also partly just because I just felt such a fraud and such a loss of my own individual identity.

It’s been a gradual resolution. I’ve been a dad for nearly 10 years now, but the last of three years or so, it essentially came when I went to do my trip through Spain. That was really the upturn of things just getting better. I’m now at a point whereby I accept now that my days of spending four months going to the South Pole are over. I accept now that I’m, to most people’s minds, Mr. Microadventure, rather than Mr. Tough Guy South Pole Adventurer. Not only do I accept that, I’m now really pleased and happy that that is the way it’s turned out.

I feel now I’m getting a much better balance at trying to squeeze adventure in around the margins of family life, and that’s much smaller. Microadventures, sleeping on hills, climbing trees, swimming in rivers, squeezing that stuff in around the hours of taking my kids to school and picking them up. Between 9 a.m. and 3 p.m. Monday to Friday, I’m Tough Guy Adventure Al in my shed, and all the rest of the week I’m Dad/taxi driver.

It took me quite a while to get there, because for quite a few years I wanted to just still prove to the world that I was tougher than anyone else, and going to sleep on a small hill in suburbia didn’t seem to achieve that goal. I find it interesting, actually, and I feel that through accident as much as design my career, such as it is, is now in a much healthier and more creative and more original position than it would’ve been had I been able to choose the route and map it all out when I was age 25.

ON HIS SHED I spent all of my royalties advance from my Microadventures book, my biggest ever, on a little wooden shed. It’s about, I guess, about 10-foot square,. All the walls are papered with the maps that I used when I was making the Microadventures book. Gradually over time, it’s just become covered in maps of the world. I’ve got a great map of the rude place names of Great Britain, a big world map, a Bruce Springsteen record cover, a picture of Shackleton, loads and loads of books, a massive poster of myself, and a chili plant.

I love it. It’s become, now, somewhere that I just come and I feel like I escape into just the stuff that I love, books and writing and travel and adventure. Then when I’m done with it, I walk away and get on with life.

For a few years, I was trying to work in my house, in every room in the house, spare bedroom, kitchen. There’s all the usual annoying things of working at home, but I got the shed because of two things: One is I’m a complete workaholic, so I find it very hard to stop working. The second was I had young kids running around being annoying, and I was finding it really hard to either do a good job working or do a good job being a dad. Putting a shed in the garden was a real physical separation of work life, home-life, husband, and dad. That has been the greatest success of the whole thing.

ON MICROADVENTURES VS. MACROADVENTURES Having done the Mircoadventures thing has opened up so many, well, opportunities and, well, I’ve earned more money from Microadventures than I ever have from rowing across an ocean. It’s much more interesting as well, and it feels like it’s got more imaginative, creative potential. It’s great. I’m really delighted with how it’s turned out. The same with going to play a stupid violin in Spain, that’s really surprised me with how that’s resonated with people.

Sometimes these things that you don’t really set out to do by design work out well. I think another thing that’s interesting is that the things that I’ve done in life, in terms of trying to make a career out of it eventually, whenever I’ve done something in order to try and earn money or get famous, and I’ve tried both at times, firstly they never make me happy. They just make me feel like a dick, and secondly they’ve never worked.

The occasions when I just felt, “Aw, screw the world, screw everything else, just do what I want to do,” like choosing to go cycle around the world rather than getting a proper professional job, choosing to do Microadventures rather than still doing big stuff, and then going to walk through Spain for four weeks rather than doing something tough—those three things, I think, have probably led to the most interesting stories that I’ve ever had, and from the interesting stories also comes more money eventually.

ON EVOLVING HIS CAREER I think, when you’re on a long bike ride, you don’t really notice you’ve gone very far, and then a few weeks later you stop, turn around, realize you’ve cycled halfway across the continent. I think that’s similar with the creative side of what I do. It evolves from initially talking in elementary schools and then trying to become a blogger and then learning how to make little films, and then Instagram now, starting to try and tell short stories on that and starting a newsletter. I’ve just started a different newsletter, it’s one of these automated series ones, which is very different to anything I’ve ever done before.

I think I try to just evolve my ideas and the things that feel creatively exciting. That’s generally how I end up choosing my next book, is one of the things at least makes me choose, is just trying to find something that’s new and a little bit fresh and exciting.

ADVICE I think the one thing that I bang on about to myself continuously is how hard it is to begin things. Trying to overcome the hurdle of beginning, so not being put off by beginning but just making yourself do that and then realizing that whatever it is you’re doing after that is usually, you’ve cracked it and done the hardest part. I think that’s a hugely important thing is the idea of beginning.

Then the thing that I found useful for myself is to try to learn to measure the progress in my life rather than chasing success. For example, the time this sank into me was when I was cycling through Bolivia. I’d been going for about two years and I was trying to get to Alaska, and Alaska is so far from Bolivia. I was really depressed in Bolivia. “Oh, man, I’m never going to get to Alaska.”

I was on the Salar de Uyuni, this huge salt plain, and I walked about 200 meters away from my tent, really foul mood, and I just stopped. I turned around and I looked away from my tent back the way I’d come, and it was a real clear moment for thinking, “Wow, I’ve actually come a really long way. To get from England to Bolivia, that’s two years of riding. I’m doing all right here.”

Since then, I’ve tried to make myself look back and congratulate myself on how far I’ve come rather than just beating myself up that I haven’t yet reached the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow.

[all photos courtesy Alastair Humphreys]

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Alastair Humphreys On Traveling The World At 10 mph, Microadventures, And Not Quitting

NOTE: In 2018, I started recording interviews with creatives (writers, filmmakers, podcasters, photographers, editors, etc.) in the adventure world. I’m publishing the highlights of those interviews monthly in 2019.

I would argue that what makes British adventurer Alastair Humphreys interesting is not the big things he’s done (like spending four years cycling around the world or rowing across the Atlantic), but how he’s learned to evolve and do smaller things—like walking around the M25 (the 117-mile freeway circling London), or trying to eat at a London restaurant from a country representing each letter of the alphabet, A to Z.

Or, as he did in his new book, re-trace Laurie Lee’s early-20th century foot journey from England to Spain, funding the trip only by busking with a violin—which he didn’t really know how to play. That’s the subject of his new book, My Midsummer Morning: Rediscovering a Life of Adventure, available in the U.S. on July 25.

I first heard of Alastair back in 2011, when National Geographic named him one of its Adventurers of the Year for his “microadventures,” the quick escapes he popularized from his London home, and that are much more within the reach of most working folks. (He later turned the idea into a book, Microadventures.)

I wanted to sit down and interview Alastair because he’s had to evolve a couple times in his career, starting as a kid who knew nothing about adventure and then pedaled 46,000 miles around the world, and then becoming a guy who trekked across Iceland and rowed across the Atlantic. Then he turned that into a career as an author, keynote speaker, and filmmaker. And he got married, had kids, and had to figure out not only how to fit adventure into a “normal” life, but how to be happy doing that.

ON GROWING UP I grew up in the Yorkshire Dales, which is a national park in the north of England. It’s a beautiful part of the north of England, and I had a nice rural childhood of riding my bike and climbing trees and playing in rivers and being out until sunset and all those other clichés, which I found incredibly boring at the time but now look back on with great nostalgia.

I didn’t really do anything very interesting in my entire life, at all, and certainly nothing adventurous until I was 18 when I finished high school and a friend and I decided to spend a year in Africa teaching in a little rural school. I always think of that as being the end of my childhood and the beginning of my actual life. The 16th of June is the day I finished my high school exams. I still celebrate that in my head every year as the beginning of my life.

We were teaching a bit of everything. We were in a really rural, poor school in the middle of absolutely nowhere in northern South Africa. We were only 18, but we had a lot of fun, and that’s completely opened up my eyes to this whole new wild, exciting world that existed beyond rural northern England. I think from then that’s when I always think of being, got hooked on wanting to travel and to see more countries in the world.

From there I went to university in Edinburgh and Oxford. While I was at university, I got quite into physical challenges. To earn money there, I joined the army. Britain has this weird part-time weekend army, like the army reserve, so I joined that purely because I got paid to run around the hills and they had good parties and cheap beer.

I always hated anything we had to do with a gun, but I always liked the parts where you had to go run around the hills. Doing that really opened my eyes to the first time that I was actually quite good at endurance stuff and suffering and having a miserable time. I’ve never been good at anything in my life, so to suddenly be quite good at being miserable, I started to love that feeling.

By the time I finished university, I decided I wanted to somehow combine my fascination with trying to explore and travel the world, like a lot of young people do, with wanting to have a really miserable, tough time to prove to the world how tough I was, and to prove to myself how tough I was, I suppose. That’s directly what led to me deciding to cycle around the world for a few years.

ON THE GENESIS OF THE IDEA OF ADVENTURE I started reading adventure books when I was 18 in the summer, just before my big exams. They’re called A-levels, key exams you do to determine what university you go to. They’re basically the biggest exams in your life, and obviously it’s quite boring studying for them. I discovered in the school library two books, Living Dangerously by Ranulph Fiennes and Mad White Giant by Benedict Allen.

I read these two, particularly the Ranulph Fiennes book, this crazy story of his incredible life adventures, and I just read that and go, “Wow, that is the way to properly live a life.” Until I was 18, I’d had no inclination of the world of expeditions at all. It was actually through my university years, I read Kon-Tiki and all the climbing books and all the books you’d expect to read and got completely obsessed with travel writing and expeditions. It was actually wanting to be a writer that made me go and cycle around the world. I wanted to be a travel writer, therefore I had to have something to write about.

ON HIS PROPENSITY FOR SUFFERING I think it mostly just came about from being miserable—at school, not being picked for all the teams that I wanted to be picked for, not hanging out with the cool kids who I wanted to hang out with, just generally feeling slightly on the margins of life. I don’t want to paint a huge sob story because my life was fine, but as a teenager small things seemed big. Even from before a teenager, I always just felt that I was on the margins and a bit anonymous and never really shone at anything, wasn’t really good at anything.

I was all right at stuff but never good enough to actually stand out at anything. I think I just had a massive chip on my shoulder, really, and just wanted to try and stand out a bit, I suppose. I think that is probably the driving factor for then just becoming incredibly stubborn. If you’re lying in a cold, wet ditch on some stupid army game pretending that the imaginary enemy is going to come and kill you and you know you’re just pretending and you’re getting paid hardly anything, I was always the person who could lie in the ditch the longest because I just stubbornly refused to get out of the muddy ditch.

There’s nothing very noble or intelligent or anything, but I think that’s the basis of the next 20 years of my life.

ON NOT QUITTING Rowing across the Atlantic Ocean was probably the only thing I’ve ever done in life, where there was literally no option of quitting. Once you’re out in the middle of the ocean, you’re just out there. Nothing at all could’ve gotten me off that boat, and it was just impossible to quit.

At first, I found that very frightening, and then I found it hugely liberating, this realization that, “Wow, I can’t quit, I can’t get off this boat.” All of those thought processes now become irrelevant, so, “Oh, I might as well just get on with it.” It was interesting how much of a shadow normally hangs over the things that I do, which I only noticed once that went away, because it was impossible.

On my cycle trip, I actually had a couple of very conscious strategies to deal with wanting to quit, because a lot of the time I was really quite close to quitting. I had a couple of rules.

The first rule was, I was not allowed to give up at nighttime or when I was cold, wet, scared, or hungry. I could only give up after a good night’s sleep on a sunny, warm morning after a large breakfast. That was, I think, a really important check and balance thing to stop that gut feeling of, “Oh, I just want to go home.”

Then the second clause in my contract with myself was, if I still wanted to give up, that was fine, but I could only give up if I thought of something better to go do with my life. I didn’t want to be shackled to this stupid bike ride for four years. If I had a better option, if some more exciting project came up, I always wanted to feel that I was free to go do that better thing. However, I couldn’t just quit until I thought of a better thing, because that was just a bit pathetic. With those two safety catch things, that’s what helped me overcome the regular urge to want to quit.

ON THE PEOPLE WHO UNEXPECTEDLY CHANGE YOUR LIFE The whole plan of that bike trip was, “Go do a big adventure, get it out of my system, and then go and become Mr. Humphreys, high school science teacher.” That was the life plan.

For the first year, cycling down Africa, I was doing it to prove myself to other people like all the teachers who didn’t pick me for the high school cricket team. Then the second year, which was basically cycling through South America, I was doing that to prove whatever to myself.

By the end of the second year, the end of South America, I felt at peace. I though, “I’ve now cycled a long way, I’ve cycled for two years. That’s a good effort. I can go home with my head held high.” To get from Colombia to Panama there’s the Darién Gap, the jungle, there’s no road. You have to take a little boat route, so I decided that when I got to the end of Colombia I was going to give up, come home, and that was the end of the trip, and that was fine. I completely decided upon that.

I got to Cartagena, Colombia, and I needed to take a photo of my bike by the sea, and the easiest place to get access to the sea was at the sailing club. I cycled in there, I walked my bike down to the end of the jetty to take my end of continent photograph, did that, and started walking down the jetty in order to go to a travel agent and book my flight home and get on with life.

Walking back down that jetty, some American guy on a little yacht shouted out to me, “Hey, are you looking for a lift to Panama?” which is exactly where I needed to go next. Well, I just had to say, “Yeah, I guess I am,” so I hitched a lift with him. Then, for the next two years, I thought, “Jeez, I can’t give up now,” so that’s an interesting pivotal moment in my life.

Some American guy owned the yacht, and then he had these two reprobate friends who moved it around in the off-season, and they drank an astonishing amount of alcohol.

One of them lived in a trailer park somewhere in California, and the other lived in Seattle. We sailed together out of Colombia through some big storms. Their response to storms was just to really drink a lot, and it was quite an interesting experience with them. Dale sends me an email probably about every three years at about, I guess, about 2 a.m. Seattle time, probably when he’s just drunk a massive amount of gin and dived back through the depths of my website again to remember our glory days together.

ON HOW CULTURE SHOCK DISAPPEARS AT 10 MPH It really struck me cycling around the world how often I felt culture shock. It was so rare on the trip as to actually really stand out when it did happen, whereas if you jump on an airplane to anywhere, well, it’s weird. Flying anywhere, you get through a terminal, you walk past the ATMs and the Starbucks and the guys with the iPads picking up taxi people and you could be anywhere in the world, but eventually at some point culture shock hits you hard when you travel by plane and you suddenly realize you’re somewhere very different.

Cycling, for example, one of the culture shocks in my trip was taking the ferry from England to France, which is only two hours, because that suddenly was a change in language. From France until South Africa, it was pretty much land the whole way, just creeping across continents. The land changed at 10 miles an hour, so you just don’t really notice it changing. The language occasionally changes at borders, but the landscape you’re moving through and the general wealth of a place and the cultures of it was such a slow-moving change that I really felt comfortable pretty much everywhere I went. The few exceptions to that in the world were very jarring because they were so rare.

A real joy of traveling across countries by bicycle is that you move so sly that you can feel like you actually belong, which is an illusion, of course, but it’s quite a pleasant one to feel that you’re part of the place you’re going through, rather than just being a voyeuristic observer as I zoom into a place by taxi from an airport.

ON SEEING THE WORLD I’m a human, and cycling all the way around the world at 10 mph made it really just feel like one world with some random little arbitrary borders and some strange foods along the way. By and large now, I’d be entirely happy to be dumped at random in any country in the world. As long as I could find somewhere to sleep tonight, I’d wake up tomorrow morning excited and curious to go have a look around.

My general feeling now from going to so many countries of rich and poor and all sorts of flavors is just how normal most people’s lives are. There’s the superficial weirdness and differentness, but very, very quickly you just realize the flow of life, people waking up and they find breakfast and they take their kids to school and they go to work. Maybe they’ve got a pig on the back of the bicycle or maybe they’re in a shiny car with an iPhone, but they’re just going to work.

Anywhere I’ve ever been in the world, people have always given me water when I’ve asked for water. No one ever makes you pay for water. No one ever says no to that. Just these little constancies that made me feel very much just like I, and this sounds like the most ridiculous hippie thing, but I’ve really started to feel that I just live in the world rather than I’m an English guy.

ON AMERICA AND THE MIDDLE EAST I cycled around the world in a pretty volatile political era of the George Bush years and 9/11 and Iraq and all that sort of stuff. In those years particularly, it very much felt like America versus the Middle East in summary. I cycled through the Middle East and I loved it, and then I cycled through America and I loved it.

The thing that struck me time and again riding through America was how much it reminded me of the Middle East. In so many ways, it felt, the people and the hospitality and the tribal insularity, it all felt so similar. I found that really interesting, the ostensibly different places actually felt very similar to me. On that, as I’ve mentioned to you a few times, I’m such a romantic sucker for America. It’s one of my very favorite places in the world, and I’m continually having to defend it to people who bash America.

ON HIS CREATIVE CAREER My pie chart of my income for about the first 10 years or so of which I was making my living out of adventure was pretty constant: 90 percent speaking, 10 percent books and magazine articles. Over those 10 years, the total of the pie chart increased, but the percentage never really changed. Then about four or five years ago, there was a new slice of the pie which was brand work, being a brand partner, making films for or with brands, which I suppose all fits under the hat of being an influencer.

Working with brands has become now probably about a third of it, maybe even a bit more of what I do now. I used to do millions of talks at schools to little kids, which paid my life for the early years. It felt very worthwhile, but it took up huge amounts of my time.

These days, quite a lot of schools are reading my book, The Boy Who Biked the World, and when they get in touch with me I tend to either do a Skype interview with them or record them a little video for YouTube to try and participate in their reading.

ON HIS SPEAKING CAREER In my talks, I like to talk about my most recent adventure and I like to talk about the breadth of my experiences for my own self-respect and sanity, but I’ve come to learn that audiences only want to hear about me cycling around the world, walking around the M25, when I walked around London and the Microadventure stuff, and then playing the violin in Spain, people like hearing that. I think they’ve become the three hits in my life, I think. I’m at peace with that now, I accept that.

I’ve been now giving talks about cycling around the world for way, way, way longer than I was actually cycling around the world. There have been considerable periods of time when I’ve been doing my talks when I just felt like a total fraud, and I’ve really hated myself that I’m just still talking about that same thing I did so long ago. It really made me feel I needed to do another adventure. I needed to have another story. I needed to know what’s next just for my own self-respect, really.

ON THE IMPACT OF HIS ADVENTURE STORIES My very first book, Moods of Future Joys, is about a young guy going for his first big adventure. I get regular emails from people who are now in some far-flung corner of the world because they’ve read that book and gone off and cycled around the world. I always feel quite a sense of pressure from that, but I hope it matches up to their expectations. And the Microadventures book has been really good. I hear regularly from people for whom it’s helped them.

With email, people are very willing, it seems, to send quite honest, cathartic emails to this random strange guy, me. I get emails about people’s depression and divorces and affairs and all sorts of stuff, and how that in some way or another going to sleep on a hill has helped with that side of things, which is really nice because adventure, essentially, is such a ridiculously selfish first-world type thing to do. Whenever I feel that I’m actually doing something a little bit useful and helping someone else, that makes me feel a bit better.

I did a talk about a month ago. It was an evening talk at a dinner, and I finished my talk and sat down. Some lady walked over to me and said, “I just emailed my boss and I’ve quit.” She did it right then in the room.

The boss was also in the room. I hope that was the right outcome for everyone. I think companies want me to be inspiring people. They don’t want me to be getting people to quit.

ON FILMMAKING I bought a Canon 5D Mark II in 2009 having never filmed a single thing in my life and actually never had the slightest interest in doing it. Then I saw a little thing on the Internet of that camera, I just thought, “Wow, this is amazing,” so I took a punt on that. I remember it cost £1,600. The fact that I remember it shows how astronomically expensive it was for my life at the time.

I’d never filmed anything, never had any interest in it, and I never really watched films myself. It was a completely new thing. Basically, then, for five or six years, I was just Googling how to make films and doing it as I went and making literally zero money from it, literally no money. I was doing it purely because I really loved, I find filming stuff when I’m out there really enhances the experience for me. I really, really enjoy charging around with a camera and a tripod, I love that.

Then I find when I’m at my computer trying to edit, I find that captivates me more than anything else I do. The whole day just zooms by in a blur, and my head then feels it’s going to explode. I go deeper into that than anything else I do, so I just love filming and editing stuff. That came about long before anyone gave me any money to do anything with film, so it’s purely just something I really enjoy.

The other thing that I love about films is pretty much everything I do, writing, speaking, is solitary. I’m just on my own, in my shed. Often when I do a film, it’s with somebody else. That’s the only time I get to work with other people, and I love that because it’s a chance to work with people who are much better than me at different parts of the process. That, I absolutely love that, I love doing that. I don’t get enough of that in my life.

ON THE TRANSITION TO REAL LIFE Like a lot of people, I found becoming a parent the hardest thing that I’ve ever done. I found it particularly hard because I’d spent the last 10-15 years living this carefree, wild, vagabond, incredibly selfish life traveling around the world, and that was not in any way good preparation for becoming a selfless stay-at-home person prioritizing other people’s needs. I found it really hard.

By that point, my job was adventure, and adventure requires you going away for long periods of time doing stuff that is dangerous and often stupidly dangerous. Neither of those things were compatible with being a respectable, sensible dad. When we had kids, I essentially stopped doing big expeditions.

With the loss of my hobby, my job, I felt my whole identity disappeared, and I felt completely empty, really. I also, because I was trying to make a living as an adventurer, I felt a total fraud, that I was still talking about adventures and I was still talking about cycling around the world and stuff, and yet I wasn’t doing anything adventurous myself. I found it a really hard process, and I felt that way for years, really. I never talked about any of this stuff publicly at all, partly because I just felt that my private life is quite different to my adventure online life, but also partly just because I just felt such a fraud and such a loss of my own individual identity.

It’s been a gradual resolution. I’ve been a dad for nearly 10 years now, but the last of three years or so, it essentially came when I went to do my trip through Spain. That was really the upturn of things just getting better. I’m now at a point whereby I accept now that my days of spending four months going to the South Pole are over. I accept now that I’m, to most people’s minds, Mr. Microadventure, rather than Mr. Tough Guy South Pole Adventurer. Not only do I accept that, I’m now really pleased and happy that that is the way it’s turned out.

I feel now I’m getting a much better balance at trying to squeeze adventure in around the margins of family life, and that’s much smaller. Microadventures, sleeping on hills, climbing trees, swimming in rivers, squeezing that stuff in around the hours of taking my kids to school and picking them up. Between 9 a.m. and 3 p.m. Monday to Friday, I’m Tough Guy Adventure Al in my shed, and all the rest of the week I’m Dad/taxi driver.

It took me quite a while to get there, because for quite a few years I wanted to just still prove to the world that I was tougher than anyone else, and going to sleep on a small hill in suburbia didn’t seem to achieve that goal. I find it interesting, actually, and I feel that through accident as much as design my career, such as it is, is now in a much healthier and more creative and more original position than it would’ve been had I been able to choose the route and map it all out when I was age 25.

ON HIS SHED I spent all of my royalties advance from my Microadventures book, my biggest ever, on a little wooden shed. It’s about, I guess, about 10-foot square,. All the walls are papered with the maps that I used when I was making the Microadventures book. Gradually over time, it’s just become covered in maps of the world. I’ve got a great map of the rude place names of Great Britain, a big world map, a Bruce Springsteen record cover, a picture of Shackleton, loads and loads of books, a massive poster of myself, and a chili plant.

I love it. It’s become, now, somewhere that I just come and I feel like I escape into just the stuff that I love, books and writing and travel and adventure. Then when I’m done with it, I walk away and get on with life.

For a few years, I was trying to work in my house, in every room in the house, spare bedroom, kitchen. There’s all the usual annoying things of working at home, but I got the shed because of two things: One is I’m a complete workaholic, so I find it very hard to stop working. The second was I had young kids running around being annoying, and I was finding it really hard to either do a good job working or do a good job being a dad. Putting a shed in the garden was a real physical separation of work life, home-life, husband, and dad. That has been the greatest success of the whole thing.

ON MICROADVENTURES VS. MACROADVENTURES Having done the Mircoadventures thing has opened up so many, well, opportunities and, well, I’ve earned more money from Microadventures than I ever have from rowing across an ocean. It’s much more interesting as well, and it feels like it’s got more imaginative, creative potential. It’s great. I’m really delighted with how it’s turned out. The same with going to play a stupid violin in Spain, that’s really surprised me with how that’s resonated with people.

Sometimes these things that you don’t really set out to do by design work out well. I think another thing that’s interesting is that the things that I’ve done in life, in terms of trying to make a career out of it eventually, whenever I’ve done something in order to try and earn money or get famous, and I’ve tried both at times, firstly they never make me happy. They just make me feel like a dick, and secondly they’ve never worked.

The occasions when I just felt, “Aw, screw the world, screw everything else, just do what I want to do,” like choosing to go cycle around the world rather than getting a proper professional job, choosing to do Microadventures rather than still doing big stuff, and then going to walk through Spain for four weeks rather than doing something tough—those three things, I think, have probably led to the most interesting stories that I’ve ever had, and from the interesting stories also comes more money eventually.

ON EVOLVING HIS CAREER I think, when you’re on a long bike ride, you don’t really notice you’ve gone very far, and then a few weeks later you stop, turn around, realize you’ve cycled halfway across the continent. I think that’s similar with the creative side of what I do. It evolves from initially talking in elementary schools and then trying to become a blogger and then learning how to make little films, and then Instagram now, starting to try and tell short stories on that and starting a newsletter. I’ve just started a different newsletter, it’s one of these automated series ones, which is very different to anything I’ve ever done before.

I think I try to just evolve my ideas and the things that feel creatively exciting. That’s generally how I end up choosing my next book, is one of the things at least makes me choose, is just trying to find something that’s new and a little bit fresh and exciting.

ADVICE I think the one thing that I bang on about to myself continuously is how hard it is to begin things. Trying to overcome the hurdle of beginning, so not being put off by beginning but just making yourself do that and then realizing that whatever it is you’re doing after that is usually, you’ve cracked it and done the hardest part. I think that’s a hugely important thing is the idea of beginning.

Then the thing that I found useful for myself is to try to learn to measure the progress in my life rather than chasing success. For example, the time this sank into me was when I was cycling through Bolivia. I’d been going for about two years and I was trying to get to Alaska, and Alaska is so far from Bolivia. I was really depressed in Bolivia. “Oh, man, I’m never going to get to Alaska.”

I was on the Salar de Uyuni, this huge salt plain, and I walked about 200 meters away from my tent, really foul mood, and I just stopped. I turned around and I looked away from my tent back the way I’d come, and it was a real clear moment for thinking, “Wow, I’ve actually come a really long way. To get from England to Bolivia, that’s two years of riding. I’m doing all right here.”

Since then, I’ve tried to make myself look back and congratulate myself on how far I’ve come rather than just beating myself up that I haven’t yet reached the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow.

[all photos courtesy Alastair Humphreys]

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