#substantiation

[totesmccoats]

The Substantiation

~Spoilers for The Substance & Oshi no Ko~ It’s been about a week since I saw it, but I haven’t been able to stop thinking about Coralie Fargeat’s The Substance – a film I, to be completely candid, didn’t particularly like. I like a lot about The Substance. Co-leads Demi Moore and Margaret Qualley are both fantastic, with the former going from raw and vulnerable in the first act to whole ham…

[zytes]

this manatee looks like it’s in a skyrim loading screen

[mentagenesis]

An Insistence on Persistence!

by Daniel Wolfert. “Damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead!” – Admiral David Farragut. During the American Civil War battle for Mobile Bay (August 5th, 1864) Admiral Farragut was commanding a squadron of Union warships into Confederate controlled waters that were known to be mined with explosive devices. One of the ships exploded and the others began to turn around. To inspire courage and…

[dragonomatopoeia]

i'm always a bit unsettled by disdain for intellectual or creative labor in leftist spaces. there's this commonly held belief that academics are a bunch of rich old white men, rather than a wide variety of people who are barely getting by. most lecturers in universities are adjuncts living paycheck to paycheck. authors make very little money as a general rule. most researchers are overworked and underpaid. and yet there's still this idea that academics are overcompensated to sit around and smoke cigars together while making shit up

[salmonrowe]

Bad art is better than no art

[thecpdiary]

Validation of The CP Diary

The CP Diary is now on Medium! Below is the first paragraph to one of my mental health blogs, followed by a response from a reader, Julia Kalman. I am grateful to Julie for her validation.

"Writing on my blog for 12 years, I have seen many mental health changes, but I have never seen a change as I have in Covid-19 and we’re not through it. Emotions impact our thoughts, our mood, our ability to relate to others, our behaviour, and any decisions we go on to make."

Julie's response:

"Your reflections on the mental health impact of Covid-19 are deeply insightful. Your experience in blogging over 12 years has clearly honed your ability to capture the shifting emotional landscape. This piece resonates strongly with the current global sentiment, making it a must-read for our times. Thank you!"

Julie’s validation, strengthens, enforces, confirms, and establishes The CP Diary’s worth and value. It makes me, my factual writing and my blog worthy. That’s worth its weight in gold and I couldn’t be happier.

For more inspirational, lifestyle blogs, please check out my site https://www.thecpdiary.com

[transyashiro]

[doodledrawsthings]

recent oc doodle pages

[maxgrowth]

https://www.flyingsolo.com.au/news/dont-get-caught-out-by-the-new-work-from-home-tax-rules/?fbclid=IwAR2tmCWqssgR7N13falSC-K8jVOX-V_ON1jNtRXlbfqfweSO7PA91DWLTLE . The biggest burden of the new fixed rate is the amount of substantiation required to claim! . Working with a tax agent like @maxgrowthhq can help you get it right! . Maximising your growth with @maxgrowthhq #maxgrowth #burden #fixed #substantiation #claim #taxagent #accountant #bookkeeper #loveourwork #togetherwemakeadifference https://www.instagram.com/p/Cp1yhgoPJAk/?igshid=NGJjMDIxMWI=

[giganticmarshmallow]

Who needs therapy when you can spend all evening drawing feanorians

[washingtonwhitemarkiplier]

divine intervention

[torchtour]

Pt 1, Pt 2, Pt 3, Pt 4

as promised, here's one of the unposted photos i took while (and i hate to use this word but unfortunately it's the most correct) possessed by bill cipher. if you've been keeping up with my blog (specifically the influx of asks), you'll know that i am no longer his flesh puppet! hip hip hooray!! 🎊🥳🎉

i'll try to explain the context of this image anyway. this is my basement, and it's hard to tell with the camera artifacts + flash but im in my pajamas (they have little pine trees all over them and they're very soft 10/10 pjs would rec) so im assuming he dragged me out of bed and right on into the workshop. where all of the dangerous power tools are. yay.

i probably took this picture because i was "enamored with the beauty of my muse 🥰" or whatever but good lord he scares the piss outta me now. his eye looks like an open wound in the hip of the universe.

(inspired by @/squidflavoredsoup)

[meshimellow]

oohh im washin me and my mouth

[royaltea000]

POV they just told their da shixiong on you

[sunderwight]

Liushen AU where SY transmigrates into SJ's older brother, and subsequently nopes them right out of the slavery backstory by using his general knowledge of the story and actually being an adult in a kid's body to just leave (basically) with SJ and YQ.

SY carts them both up to Cang Qiong for the next sect trials. It's actually not all that hard, the trickiest part is getting enough to eat and finding safe places to sleep between leaving the slavers and taking the trials (SY manages just barely, with considerable help from his new little brothers.) Nobody bothers to go after them because it's before Qiu Jianluo and this style of human traffickers mostly operate by virtue of their merchandise having nowhere else to go. Chasing down runaways is an expense not worth indulging, given that most of them either come straight back or die of exposure.

Anyway, they take the trials, and as expected YQY gets chosen to become a personal disciple for the sect leader, and SJ gets chosen by the Qing Jing Peak Lord, but also as (kind of) expected (by SY alone) nobody wants SY. He's older the Yue Qi, so too old, and unlike YQ and SJ his cultivation potential isn't striking enough to make any exceptions for him.

SY, however, can't leave it at that. He's spent more than five minutes with the street kid codependency gang, so he's gotten attached to both of them. And he knows what will happen if they're left to their own devices and The Plot proceeds accordingly. (Also, they keep threatening to not stay at the sect if SY doesn't stay too, for some reason.) So with a heavy heart and internal candle lit for himself, SY heads to Bai Zhan Peak. Which is the only peak that accepts disciples by way of them turning up and refusing to leave.

SY's not much of a fighter. He actually really hates the atmosphere on BZP, he's not bad at physical cultivation (his health's pretty good in this life, ironic considering how much worse his situation was) but the random ambushes and survival-of-the-fittest stuff is just not his brand. But that's okay, because it turns out that BZP actually DESPERATELY needs disciples on the actual peak who are interested in things other than fighting and cultivating their own strength. Stuff like, filling out requisition requests for An Ding every time things break, apologizing to An Ding every time things break again, organizing schedules, browbeating senior disciples into actually teaching, educating disciples on virtually any artistic or social skill, hosting lectures on how to beat vicious beasts without just overpowering them, and etc.

Okay so some of this stuff isn't and has never actually been on Bai Zhan's curriculum but Shen Yuan is going to make this place tolerable. And stop these children from needlessly getting acid burns or lyme disease or scurvy or whatever. He keeps internally chewing out Airplane for designing a sect system that means there are a lot of largely unsupervised 12-year-olds running around the wilderness on a mountain picking fights all the time. (When he actually meets Shang Qinghua and figures him out he switches to doing it in person, of course, in twice-monthly bitching sessions that look a lot like budding friendship.)

Of course one of the worst offenders is the Liu kid, who SY would suspect was actually raised by wolves if he didn't know for a fact that Liu Qingge has a younger sister, and also the kinds of nice clothing and letters from home that strongly imply not only does he have a family, but that the family is pretty well-off. Liu Qingge is at first deeply offended by SY being a BZP disciple. He rarely fights anyone, and uses tricks and evasion tactics whenever a fight can't be avoided. And he does other annoying stuff, like pestering him about meals and baths and lecturing him on identifying dangerous plants and the early signs of qi deviation. This is not what their peak is about! He should get with the program already! Just fight stuff until you're too tired to keep fighting stuff!

Also SY's younger brother, SJ, is pure evil (at least according to baby Liu Qingge) even though his other younger brother (?) is cool and nice.

Anyway, Liu Qingge stops complaining about SY after their first mission together, where Liu Qingge doesn't lose a fight but does get into a kind of pyrrhic victory situation where he's really badly hurt, and it's SY who helps him win (correctly identifying the monster and then pointing out its weakness) and takes care of him afterwards and gets him safely back to Cang Qiong. SY expresses surprise at LQG actually being polite to him, and LQG realizes that he's been a colossal ass if people think he wouldn't be grateful to someone who saved his life, so the usual Liushen dynamic proceeds from there. Liu Qingge starts bringing SY fans he leaves behind and hunts down animals that are supposed to be useful for bolstering weak cultivation, SY invites LQG to tea and keeps the critters as pets, etc etc.

SY doesn't get the Head Disciple position, because that's only acquired via beating the current peak lord in combat and lol no. Also he's not interested in stealing it from Liu Qingge, to whom it rightfully belongs (in his mind). But that's fine, because Liu Qingge takes the position when the next generation ascends and then he lets SY exclusively handle all the peak duties SY actually likes (mainly teaching). It's perfect -- Liu Qingge gets to focus on his War God antics and occasional administration/meetings without having to deal with students his has no patience for, but the disciples of BZP don't get neglected because SY is actually teaching and organizing classes and student care. BZP hasn't enjoyed a golden age like this since it was founded!

Things are pretty good overall, but Shen Yuan knows that it's only a matter of time before The Plot shows up, and so he can't rest completely easily.

Meanwhile, the will-they-or-won't-they bets on Liushen have been going strong for a while now. The thing is, most of their martial siblings are convinced that these two are already "together", and just being circumspect about it. Those who know SY well (like SJ, YQY, and SQH) know better but think that SY's romantic obtuseness is to blame, whereas those who know LQG well (LMY, WQW, and MQF) are pretty sure that it's actually LQG's obtuseness that's the problem. Of course it's actually both of them, so efforts to "fix" matters by getting through one of their thick skulls inevitably run afoul of the other's.

An additional complication is of course: SJ doesn't like LQG (mutual), and now that he's the leader of his own peak, he wants to poach SY to come and live there. Not only so he can have one of the 2 people he trusts actually close at hand, but also because SJ also hates actually teaching the atrocious little brats on his peak, and would like to have SY come and do it for him. YQY is still a total pushover for him too, and is also now the sect leader, so YQY agrees that SY can change peaks if SY and LQG both agree to it.

Liu Qingge, of course, is a no, but he's a variable "no". He's not going to hold Shen Yuan against his will or anything.

As for Shen Yuan, it's... complicated. He doesn't really like BZP, but it's gotten a lot better than it was at the start. These days he's actually pretty proud of his accomplishments, and it's more comfortable, but it's still a rough and rowdy place with fewer creature comforts, libraries, or other appealing points than QJP. Also, if he goes to Qing Jing to teach, he can personally ensure that SJ doesn't go around persecuting any of his students!

But... SJ never lived with the Qiu family in this AU, and even though SY's not totally clear on what the PIDW backstory for SJ was, he knows he's a better guy now than the scum villain in the book was. He has a reputation for making cutting remarks, not for being an abusive snake or a lecher. SY's honestly less worried about him doing anything bad at all, and there are other people on QJP who can teach. It might even be good for SJ to promote more people to fill out a social circle he can rely on! That guy needs more friends, seriously.

And QJP really doesn't need more layabout literary intellectual types who get into pointless arguments, which is all SY would be if he went there. Just yet another nerdy scholar for the rich kids with middling cultivation that the peak favors to ignore. At least on BZP he's filling a gap.

SY is clearly torn, and the fact that SY's considering it has LQG upset, and LQG doesn't handle being upset very well, so of course they have an argument about it. SY storms off to cool his head and LQG is like, this is it, he's gone to Qing Jing Peak, I've drive him off by being too aggressive and he's probably remembering all those times I told him he didn't belong here and oh no what have I done maybe if I build him a heated bath and get him books he will come back???

Turns out that SY just went to An Ding to vent at SQH while SQH was like "I think you would have fewer problems if you and Liu Qingge just got married and my disciples could call you Shigu to your face instead of behind your back" and SY threw melon seeds at him and sulked on his fainting couch (which is always cold for some reason...)

Thus begins the Liushen Divorce Arc where SY tries to be anywhere but BZP or QJP, Liu Qingge tries to figure out what thing he can punch to fix this not-punchable problem, SJ is like "I don't see what the big deal is they should break up Liu Qingge is awful and I want my brother to teach my classes for me" like the spoiled youngest sibling he's finally allowed to be, YQY is trying to moderate this Hades vs Demeter situation and is all "well maybe SY could spend half the year on QJP and half on BZP?", and Liu Mingyan is going "I know my brother if this doesn't work out he is going to die single and pining like an idiot" and so keeps conscripting other disciples to y'know, lock SY and LQG into storage closets together (ineffective: LQG can punch through walls) or at least get them in the same room (underestimating SY's willingness to yeet himself out of windows to avoid awkward social interactions.)

By the time Luo Binghe joins the sect (as a Qiong Ding disciple), the drama is in full swing and is the main topic of gossip across most of the peaks.

[trek-tracks]

Times "Jim Kirk is a survivor of the Tarsus IV massacre" is brought up in TOS episodes: 1

Times "Jim Kirk is an absolute shit pool/billiards player" is brought up in TOS episodes: 2

(don't @ me with "this line from this episode can be interpreted as a reference to Tarsus," I just love that Kirk being unable to work a pool cue properly is actually a recurring gag, intentional or not)