#tenet of adulthood

[dungeon-strugglers]

✨New item!✨ Chain Devil’s Embrace  Armor (chain mail or chain shirt), very rare (requires attunement by a lawful creature)  This mass of chains slithers with sinister sentience, threatening to constrict anyone in reach. Each chain ends in a rusty hook or wicked blade, perfect for snaring and lacerating victims. Donning the chains as a suit of armor is an unpleasantly confining experience, but the living metal adjusts to provide ample protection and mobility to its wearer. You can choose to don it as a suit of chain mail or a chain shirt. You have a +1 bonus to AC while wearing this armor.

Infernal Oath. In order to attune to this armor, you must declare an oath that will bind you together. The oath can be any goal, set of rules, or moral tenet that you choose, however it must be clearly defined and actionable. If the oath is of sufficient clarity and importance, it appears in written form and must be signed in blood before it burns away. 

Grasping Chains. The armor has 7 charges, and it regains 1d4 + 3 expended charges daily at dawn. As an action while wearing it you can expend 1 charge to shoot out hook-tipped chains to ensnare a creature that you can see within 10 feet of you. Make an attack roll against the target with a +8 bonus. On a hit, the target takes 2d6 slashing damage and, if it is Huge or smaller, it is grappled (escape DC 16). Until this grapple ends, the target is restrained, takes 1d6 piercing damage at the start of each of its turns, and you can’t use Grasping Chains. 

Devilish Form. While wearing the armor, as a bonus action you can invoke its infernal essence for 1 minute. For the duration, you gain the following effects:

Your skin turns blood red, your eyes glow like coals, and chains writhe across your body. 

Grasping Chains’ range increases to 60 feet. It deals an extra 2d8 fire damage when it hits a target.

You are immune to fire damage.

As a reaction when a creature starts its turn within 30 feet of you and you can see one another, you can create the illusion that you look like one of the creature's departed loved ones or bitter enemies. It must succeed on a DC 16 Wisdom saving throw or be frightened until the end of its turn. Creatures that can see through illusions are immune to this effect.

Once you’ve used Devilish Form, it cannot be used again until the next dawn.

Sentience. The Chain Devil’s Embrace is a sentient, lawful evil suit of armor with an Intelligence of 11, a Wisdom of 12, and a Charisma of 14. It has hearing and darkvision vision out to a range of 120 feet. The armor communicates telepathically to the creature attuned to it and can speak, read, and understand Infernal and Common.

A sadistic chain devil named Tyrastr lives within the Chain Devil’s Embrace. The armor yearns to inflict pain and tyranny on others. It doesn’t care what the beliefs of its wearer are, so long as they are enforced meticulously and transgressors are punished without mercy.

Curse. While wearing this armor, Tyrastr demands strict adherence to your oath. If you act contradictory to your oath or do not seize an opportunity to mercilessly pursue it, the chains constrict around you and you take 1d8 piercing damage. The damage increases by 1d8 with each subsequent transgression. If this damage reduces you to 0 hit points, you immediately die and your soul is sent to hell, where it is imprisoned by a chain devil warden.

Until your attunement to this armor ends, you have disadvantage on ability checks, attack rolls, and saving throws while wearing any other armor. A soldier kneels before you, defeated. Blood and sweat mats the hair to his face. Up close, you see he is a year or more from adulthood. The boy’s trembling rattles his armor. “The cur prostrates itself before you, make it suffer!” Tyrastr’s vile, metallic voice pierces through your mind, dripping with sadistic glee. “This one was there, watching your home burn!” Despite your commitment to destroy the Malefic Order for razing your temple, your rage falters. Killing this boy would be wrong. You turn your back and listen to his fleeing footsteps.  “Spineless worm! How will you avenge your brothers if you cannot do what is necessary!?” As these words reverberate through your skull, your chain armor constricts. Links of jagged iron bite into your flesh, reopening half-healed cuts. Blood mingles with rust. The pain is exquisite. - 🖌🎨 Like our work? Consider supporting us on Patreon and gain access to the hi-resolution art for over 200 magic items, printable item cards and card packs, beautiful creature art and stat blocks, and setting pdfs with narrative hooks and unique lore!🧙‍♂️ Thank you so much for your support! 💖

📜 Credit. Art and design by us: the Dungeon Strugglers. Please credit us if you repost elsewhere.

[theworldvsyoshiko]

If you just wandered in here for some reason, I've been rambling about this for a while. The short version, though: I forgot to swap people around while I was setting up my initial colonists, so I accidentally started the game with a randomly-generated 13-year-old with almost no skills. She almost immediately picked up an ancient beer from the ground and chugged it, so needless to say, she immediately endeared herself to me.

Since this whole thing started happened by accident, I never documented the basic situation here, so might as well start with that.

Meet Yoshiko "Happy" Russell. She started as a solo mechanitor, which means that she installed a chip in her brain that allows her to control robots mechanoids, got discriminated against as a result, and decided to flee to the edge of known space to live by herself.

As if that wasn't bad enough, this is the backstory the game gave her:

Thanks to this, the game often displays her name as 'Happy, Pushover.'

She isn't good at anything except research. The only other thing she's competent at is shooting. She's not a horrible artist, but she's not good, either. I think she's only managed a single work with a quality above Poor.

She's also now 17 years old, because Rimworld accelerates aging for anyone under 20 to get them to adulthood faster. Going from 13 - 18 takes 2 actual years.

Also, if you are familiar with how Rimworld handles ages, you will notice that she's 3433 chronological years old (i.e. she was in cryosleep for millennia), which has to be one of the highest that I've seen. It's also confusing, because it's now the year 5501, which means that she was born in 2068. According to the fiction primer, humanity started spreading out from Earth around 2100. So this kid was, like, the first person off the planet. I'm gonna say that relativity bullshit is to blame.

She follows the Creticonian Creed, which came from the game's 'randomly generate a lightweight ideoligion and develop it through play' option. I added a couple of precepts to it before starting, and the result can basically be summarized as "it is a moral imperative to automate as much work as possible so I can spend more time on Space Reddit." This is a philosophy that makes her constantly a little bit happier because she has automated turrets outside her front door. The randomly-generated title for the leader is 'Great Great Automancer,' and they are entitled to wear a beret. Which is all to say that it sounds exactly like something that a 13-year-old who's too smart for her own good would come up with. I swear that apart from the tenets, I didn't touch any of this.

[maxiemumdamage]

I think part of why I am super fixated on Thistle’s age as part of his tragedy is because of the autism.

Thistle was a child when all that went down in Melini which led to the creation of the dungeon and his descent into madness. He was a child and Delgal was an adult when Delgal, terrified by mortality, demanded Thistle make the kingdom live forever and then blamed Thistle for giving the kingdom exactly what it’s king asked for.

Thistle was a child. But he was a child constantly being treated like an adult because his so-called adoptive family didn’t understand that he matured at a different speed than them. Because they adopted and lowkey enslaved a kid from another race and didn’t bother learning about any of the things that made Thistle different from them.

And maybe it was just my experience, but I think a lot of autistic people remember being told how mature they were when they were little kids. Only to have people demand to know why you didn’t understand something they viewed as a basic tenet of adulthood or social life once you’re supposed to be all grown up.

(Obviously there’s also a racial bias at play — it’s not an accident that Thistle is one of relatively few dark-skinned characters in the show while the Melini royals are white. But I don’t feel as though I can speak authoritatively on that, especially since the autism is something I’m more familiar with.)

Thistle was a child when Delgal demanded immortality and a the Golden Lion offered it. And because he didn’t age or mature, he functionally stayed a child for the thousand years the dungeon existed. But he’s treated like an adult who holds the sole blame and culpability for his actions, despite how many people who were of far greater privilege and maturity pushed him to that point.

[anddreadful]

I never want to seem like i’m holier-than-thou-ing or dunking on whoever the most recent sad fans of cancelled TV shows are, or on people genuinely mourning that their favorite big name author turned out to be a creep, or whatever, because this comes from a place of love and sympathy, but truly one of the most important tenets of creative adulthood is to prioritize your investment in the art you and your friends make over anything else.

I’m not saying you’re not allowed to care about a star wars/ dragon thrones/ YA book tv show, but mainstream corporate media is to be enjoyed at a remove and it should not be made a pillar of your identity or an innate part of your own artistic expression. the power you invest in fandom belongs to YOU, not to the object of your fixation, and you can choose where you put it. the only way to get off the carousel of capitalistic disappointment with this shit is to love and create your own self-sustaining practices within a network of real, present people, and decide that that’s what matters.

[ladyzirkonia]

Mandalorian tenets or the six actions.

Early Mandalorian culture, originating with the ancient Taung species, was believed to have begun as a religious warrior society, War was practiced as a form of ritual worship to their multiple gods and because of this, many of the Mandalorians' earliest conflicts were seen as holy wars and their warriors known as the Mandalorian Crusaders.

After the Great Sith war where most of the Taung had perished , the Mandalorians began accepting beings of other races and species into their culture and transforming what it meant to be a Mandalorian. Those who considered themselves Mandalorian were bound by a single, unifying culture rather than any one race, and they believed that an individual was defined by their actions rather than the circumstances of birth.

Resol'nare

Young Mandalorian children were taught a rhyme to help them learn the tenets of the Resol'nare (basic: six actions) These six tenets defined what it meant to be a Mandalorian, and any who wished to be considered as such was expected to follow them.

Ba'jur, beskar'gam, (Education and armor)

Ara'nov, aliit, (Self-defense, our tribe)

Mando'a bal Mand'alor — (Our language, our leader)

An vencuyan mhi. (All help us survive.)

This code is self-perpetuating and was directly responsible for ensuring the survival of the Mandalorian culture and society.

Wearing the armor (beskar'gam or ''iron skin'')

Once Mandalorians reach adulthood, they assemble a suit of armor that suits their needs and skills. It is both a tool and a symbol of their cultural identity. Aside from its defensive capabilities, armor served another function: in a group formed from so many different species, often times it was only the armor that displayed an outward sign of the culture that bound these individuals together. The paint scheme of a Mandalorian's armor occasionally represented a soldier's state of mind, or their personal mission.

As many soldiers preferred the inconspicuousness afforded by camouflage, Mandalorians believed in the saying:

"It's one thing to see us coming, it's another to do something about it."

Speaking the language (Mando'a)

While most Mandalorians know and speak Basic and other languages, all are raised speaking Mando'a, the language of the Taungs. When among themselves, they speak Mando'a almost exclusively. The language itself is very fluid and simple, reflecting the culture of which it is a part, and like the culture, it has changed very little over the centuries.

Mando'a was often thought of as easy to learn, a trait highly desirable in a culture that regularly adopted adults from numerous races and species. But there were difference speaker of Basic had to adjust, including Mando'a's expression of tense, and its gender-neutrality.

It was not unheard for Mandalorians to speak other languages such as Huttese and Basic alongside Mandalorian as it was necessary to communicate with others when working as a mercenary or bounty hunter.

Defending oneself and the family

While the Mandalorians are best known as a warrior culture, they are also strongly family oriented. Each member of a family is expected to protect the others, garaunteeing their survival and through this, ensuring the survival of the clan and culture.

Adoption was extremely common in Mandalorian culture, to the point where even adults could be adopted. Because of the Mandalorians' constant connection to war, widows and orphans became an inescapable fact of life.

Contribute to clans welfare

Each individual and family is expected to contribute to the welfare and prosperity of their clan, which in turn helps provide for the family and individual as needed. This act is far from the socialist prop it first seems, as it is a neccessity for a society that spends a great deal of its time at war to provide for such neccessities as food, shelter and manufactured goods when a large number of a clan's adults are on other worlds fighting.

Raise children as Mandalorians

It is a Mandalorian's responsibility to raise children in the traditions of their culture. However this is not simply an imperative to breed, as it might seem on the surface. Mandalorians often adopt their children, caring very little for blood lineage and bowing to the neccessities created by their lifestyles as nomadic warriors. This act is a mandate to perpetuate the culture, as are the majority of the Six Acts, by passing it down to both offspring and adopted war orphans.

Rally to the cause of the Mand’alor

While the social structure of the Mandalorians is very simple, revolving around family and clan, each clan and family answering to itself, in times of war all families and clans are expected to answer a call to war by the Mand'alor, the leader of the Mandalorian people.

The old and the new way.

In order to retain their heritage in the face of outside influence, Mandalorians placed a high value on rigorously carrying out the Resol'nare's tenets in a daily manner. However, interpretation of the Resol'nare differed, and at least one group of Mandalorians, the New Mandalorians, potentially followed an alternate interpretation of the Resol'nare by doing away with personally-owned sets of armor and refusing to aid the Mand'alor.

The New Mandalorians was the pacifist movement who placed great importance on the virtues of pacifism, neutrality, and nonviolence rather than martial prowess and military strength as the Old Mandalorians did. They were led by a Duchess of Mandalore up until its dissolution following the coup in 19 BBY.

Similar to Death Watch, the Old Mandalorians were exiled from Mandalore, but unlike their Death Watch counterparts, did not seek vengeance on the New Mandalorians. Instead, the Old Mandalorians resettled in other parts of the galaxy and worked for the highest bidder, maintaining their Mandalorian warrior heritage as bounty hunters, mercenaries and other professions.

"Here's why you can't exterminate us, aruetii. We're not huddled in one place—we span the galaxy. We need no lords or leaders—so you can't destroy our command. We can live without technology—so we can fight with our bare hands. We have no species or bloodline—so we can rebuild our ranks with others who want to join us. We're more than just a people or an army, aruetii. We're a culture. We're an idea. And you can't kill ideas—but we can certainly kill you."

― Mandalore the Destroyer

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

By; Andrew Doyle

Published: Feb 28, 2024

Many years ago I gave a talk at the London Metropolitan Archives in which I outlined my reasons for rejecting the then fashionable theory of social constructionism in relation to human sexuality. In the coffee break that followed, I was approached by a lesbian activist, who claimed to have chosen her orientation as a means to oppose the patriarchy. She demanded to know why I would not accept that sexuality had no biological basis, even though I had spent the best part of an hour answering this very question. ‘I’m sorry,’ I said, ‘but I’ve already explained why I don’t agree with you’. ‘But why won’t you agree?’ she shouted in response. ‘Why?’

Primary school teachers are familiar with such frustrated pleas. The anger of children is so often connected with incomprehension, a sense of injustice, or both. When it persists into adulthood it represents a failure of socialisation. We frequently hear talk of our degraded political discourse – and there is some truth to that – but really we are dealing with mass infantilism. Its impact is evident wherever one cares to look: online, in the media, even in Parliament. Argumentation is so often reduced to a matter of tribal loyalty; whether one is right or wrong becomes secondary to the satisfaction of one’s ego through the submission of an opponent. This is not, as some imagine, simply a consequence of the ubiquity of social media, but rather a general failure over a number of years to instil critical thinking at every level of our educational institutions.

To be a freethinker has little to do with mastery of rhetoric and everything to do with introspection. It is all very well engaging in a debate in order to refine our persuasive skills, but it is a futile exercise unless we can entertain the possibility that we might be wrong. In Richard Dawkins’s book, The God Delusion (2006), he relates an anecdote about his time as an undergraduate at Oxford. A visiting academic from America gave a talk on the Golgi apparatus, a microscopic organelle found in plant and animal cells, and in doing so provided incontrovertible evidence of its existence. An elderly member of the Zoology Department, who had asserted for many years that the Golgi apparatus was a myth, was present at the lecture. Dawkins relates how, as the speaker drew to a close, ‘The old man strode to the front of the hall, shook the American by the hand and said – with passion – “My dear fellow, I wish to thank you. I have been wrong these fifteen years.” We clapped our hands red’.

This is the ideal that so few embody, particularly when it comes to the unexamined tenets of political ideology. We often see examples of media commentators or politicians being discredited in interviews or discussions, but how often do we see them concede their errors, even when they are exposed beyond doubt? There is a very good reason why the sociologist and philosopher Herbert Spencer opened his First Principles (1862) by asserting that there exists ‘a soul of truth in things erroneous’; but such concessions can only be made by those who are able to prioritise being right over being seen to be right. Too many are seemingly determined to turn difficult arguments into zero-sum games in which to give any ground whatsoever is to automatically surrender it to an opponent.

The discipline of critical thinking invites us to consider the origins of our knowledge and convictions. A man may speak with the certainty of an Old Testament prophet, but has he reached his conclusions for himself? Or is he a mere resurrectionist, plundering his bookshelves for the leather-bound corpses of other people’s ideas? Hazlitt expounded at length on how sophistry might be mistaken for critical faculties, noting that the man who sees only one half of a subject may still be able to express it fluently. ‘You might as well ask the paralytic to leap from his chair and throw away his crutch,’ he wrote, ‘as expect the learned reader to throw down his book and think for himself. He clings to it for his intellectual support; and his dread of being left to himself is like the horror of a vacuum’.

The natural human instinct for confirmation bias presents a further problem, one especially prominent among ideologues. Anything can be taken to bolster one’s position so long as it is perceived through the lens of prejudgment. We can see this most notably in the proponents of Critical Social Justice, who start from the premise that unequal outcomes – disparities in average earnings between men and women, for instance – are evidence of structural inequalities in society. They are beginning with the conclusion and working backwards, mistaking their own arguments for proof.

Worse still, such an approach often correlates with a distinctly moralistic standpoint. Many of the most abusive individuals on social media cannot recognise their behaviour for what it is because they have cast themselves in the role of the virtuous. If we are morally good, the logic goes, it must be assumed that our detractors are motivated by evil and we are therefore relieved of the obligation to treat them as human beings. What they lack in empathy they make up in their capacity for invective.

Again, we must be alert to the danger of cheapening argumentation and analysis to the mere satisfaction of ego. One of the reasons why disagreements on social media tend towards the bellicose is that the forum is public. Where there is an audience, there is always the risk that critical thinking will be subordinated to the performative desire for victory or the humiliation of a rival. In these circumstances, complexities that require a nuanced approach are refashioned into misleading binaries, and opponents are mischaracterised out of all recognition so that people effectively end up arguing with spectres of their imagination. The Socratic method, by contrast, urges us to see disputation as essentially cooperative. This is the ideal that should be embedded into our national curricula. Children need to be taught that there are few instances in which serious discussions can be simplified to a matter of right or wrong, and fewer still in which one person’s rightness should be taken as proof of another’s wrongness. In the lexicon of Critical Thinking, this is called the fallacy of ‘affirming a disjunct’; that is to say, ‘either you are right or I am right, which means that if you are wrong I must be right’. One cannot think critically in such reductionist terms.

To attempt seriously to understand an alternative worldview involves, as Bertrand Russell put it, ‘some effort of thought, and most people would die sooner than think’. In the study of psychology this is termed the ‘cognitive miser’ model, which acknowledges that most human brains will favour the easiest solution to any given problem. These mental shortcuts – known as heuristics – are hardwired into us, which is why being told what to think is more pleasurable than thinking for ourselves. I remember an English lesson in which I had initiated a discussion with my students about the representation of Satan in Milton’s Paradise Lost, a topic that routinely comes up in exams. I wanted to know what they thought, and why. One student was sufficiently bold to ask: ‘Can’t you just tell us what we need to write to get the highest marks?’

This was not the fault of the student; there has been a trend in recent years, most likely influenced by the pressures of league tables, for schools to engage in ‘spoon-feeding’. Schemes of work and assessment criteria are made readily available to the pupils so that they can systematically hit the necessary targets in order to elevate their grades. The notion of education for education’s sake no longer carries any weight. I have even seen talented pupils marked down by moderators for an excess of individuality in their answers. In such circumstances, even a subject like English Literature can be reduced to a kind of memory test in which essays are regurgitated by rote.

It is hardly surprising, then, that pupils who opt for Critical Thinking courses at GCSE or A-level often perceive it to be a light option, a means to enhance the curriculum vitae without too much exertion. Courses are generally divided into Problem Solving and Critical Thinking, the former concerned with processing and interpreting data, and the latter covering the fundamentals of analysis and argumentation. Pupils learn about common fallacies such as the ad hominem (personal attack), tu quoque (counter-attack) and post hoc, ergo propter hoc (mistaking correlation for causality), along with others derived from Aristotle’s Sophistical Refutations. The Latin may be off-putting, but in truth these are simple ideas which are readily digestible. If one were to discount arguments in which these fallacies were committed, virtually all online disputes would disappear.

That said, the existence of Critical Thinking as an academic subject in its own right might not be the best way to achieve this. As the psychologist Daniel T. Willingham has argued, cognitive abilities are redundant without secure contextual knowledge. Critical thinking is already embedded into any pedagogical practice that focuses on how to think rather than what to think. The increased influence of the new puritans in education presents a problem in this regard, given that they are particularly hostile to divergent viewpoints. Any institution which becomes ideologically driven is unlikely to successfully foster critical thinking, and this is particularly the case when teachers are at times expected to proselytise in accordance with fashionable identity politics. The depoliticisation of schools is just the first step. Critical thinking requires humility; this involves not just the ability to admit that one might be wrong, but also to recognise that an uninformed opinion is worthless, however stridently expressed. Interpretative skills are key, but only when developed on a secure foundation of subject-specific knowledge. This is the basis for Camille Paglia’s view that art history should be built into the national curriculum from primary school level. In her book, Glittering Images (2012), Paglia explains that children require ‘a historical framework of objective knowledge about art’, rather than merely treating art as ‘therapeutic praxis’ to ‘unleash children’s hidden creativity’. Potato prints and zigzag scissors have their place, but we mustn’t forget about the textbooks.

When I was a part-time English teacher at a private secondary school for girls in London, one of my favourite exercises for the younger pupils was to ask them to study a photograph of a well-known work of art for five minutes without speaking, after which time they would share their observations with the rest of the class. So, for instance, I would give them each a copy of Paul Delaroche’s ‘Les Enfants d’Edouard’ (1831), which depicts the two nephews of Richard III in their chamber in the Tower of London just prior to their murder. My pupils knew nothing of the historical context, but after minutes of silent consideration were able to pick out details – the ominous shadows under the door, the dog alerted to the assassins’ footfall, how the older boy stares out at us with a sense of resignation – and offer some personal reflections on their cumulative impact. To create, one must first learn how to interpret.

The kind of humility fostered in the appreciation of great art could act as a corrective to the rise of narcissism and decline of empathy that psychologists have observed over the past thirty years. According to the National Institutes of Health, millennials are three times more likely to suffer from narcissistic personality disorder than those of the baby boomer generation. Writers such as Peter Whittle, Robert Putnam and Shaylyn Romney Garrett have traced the rise of hyper-individualism in Western culture. One particular study revealed that in 1950 only 12 per cent of respondents agreed with the statement ‘I am a very important person’. By 1990, this figure had risen to 80 per cent and the trajectory shows no signs of stopping. One of the ways in which this trend manifests itself is the now common tendency for arguments to deteriorate into accusations of dishonesty. After all, it takes an extreme form of egotism to assume that the only possible explanation for an alternative point of view is that one’s opponent must be lying. In order to think critically, we cannot be in the business of simply assessing conclusions on the basis of whether or not they accord with our own.

An education underpinned by critical thinking is the very bedrock of civilisation, the means by which chaos is tamed into order. Tribalism, mudslinging, the inability to critique one’s own position: these are the telltale markers of the boorish and the hidebound. A society is ill-served by a generation of adults who have not been educated beyond the solipsistic impulses of childhood. At a time when so many are lamenting the degradation of public discourse, a conversation about how best to incorporate critical thinking into our schools is long overdue. Our civilisation might just depend on it.

This is an excerpt from The New Puritans: How the Religion of Social Justice Captured the Western World. You can buy the book here. It’s also available as an audiobook.

[blurban-form]

Bluey’s School (Glasshouse School) (2/?)

References in this post are primarily from this link: https://academics.hamilton.edu/government/dparis/govt375/spring97/Teacher_Training/tt4.html

Waldorf Schools

Any episode that includes Bluey’s school… right away you can tell that it is an atypical school. It is: it’s a Waldorf school. The teaching style, curriculum, etc. are all distinct from standard approaches.

Here’s a deep dive on this based on some online research…

Rudolf Steiner, the founder of the first Waldorf school in Germany in 1919, believed that all children should be given "individualized" attention (rather than just those with special needs.)

This style of education emphasizes a focus on the 'individual' rather than the 'group', with each child being valued for their individual accomplishments: every child is deserving of the same attention typically given to gifted and learning-disabled students in conventional educational streams.

Classes within these schools are structured in a unique system of "blocks" that focus on particular areas of study for a period of three to four weeks rather than the same subjects for the whole school year or semester.

As children grow older, more concrete and technical areas of subjects are introduced. Through this method, not only are the developing child's needs met, but so are their interests. As a result, students are kept actively engaged.

Features of this style of education

Key elements of the Waldorf educational approach include:

Teachers try to fully engage the individual student at each step by gearing the curriculum to their age and needs.

Teachers focus on the child's learning processes and achievements in all areas, not just the academic. In this way, the children can be developed as complete human beings.

Waldorf classrooms don't include computers, televisions, etc. Note how in “Typewriter”, Bluey thinks she needs a typewriter for a story but her teacher takes the focus off of typing a story and onto Bluey and her friends actually having an adventure.

The Waldorf curriculum integrates arts and music into all areas of study. Daily activities include drawing, painting, singing, instrument playing…

Even the aesthetic atmosphere of the classroom is different to a standard school: The Tampa Tribune described a Waldorf school setting: "Imagine a classroom with old wooden tables, a backyard garden and children learning to knit and crochet. Where art and music is intertwined with every subject, students write their own textbooks and the toys are all handmade". Which is definitely the look/feel in Bluey’s school…

Additionally, a tenet of this style of education is that a focus on art and nature in education can lead to a greater appreciation for the beauty of life later on.

Waldorf schools encourage children to keep working on their imagination skills beyond kindergarten, using these skills to learn how to co-operate, share and interact. This concept of letting children progress into adulthood at their own level is a unique cornerstone of the Waldorf education method.

This concept of letting children progress into adulthood at their own level is a unique cornerstone of the Waldorf education method. This last piece is very key -- we seldom see anything being taught to the children; they’re free to do their own thing, make up activities, interact with one another, problem-solve, etc. and Calypso is there to gently guide them towards solutions occasionally.

So Why is This in “Bluey”?

The show “Bluey” is somewhat based on the show’s creator, Joe Brumm’s life experiences as a parent. Joe Brumm chose to have his daughter educated this way after she started the first grade. This is explained by Joe Brumm in an interview with the website The Father Hood:

"Bluey was still in embryonic form when Brumm’s eldest daughter started school. Her experience changed the course of the show.

'Play time was suddenly taken away from her, it was just yanked and seeing the difference in her was horrendous,' he says. 'There was no playing, there was no drawing, it was just straight into all this academic stuff. And the light in her eyes just died.'

Brumm researched alternatives for schooling and researched the value of play for child development. It is said that this is what led him to select Waldorf-style education for his daughter.

'Bluey is just one long extrapolation of that,' Brumm says. 'It’s to encourage people to look at play not just as kids mucking around, but as a really critical stage in their development that, I think, we overlook at their peril.'

Quotes from Joe Brumm from this link:

Closing comment & a caution

Personally, I think it’s interesting to see a different approach of educating children depicted in a TV show. It’s not “oddball”, it’s just a part of these dog-children’s lives.

I feel like the public is exposed to a lot of examples of children’s education on television and it’s generally portrayed in a negative light: e.g. The Simpsons, Bob’s Burgers… and even on shows like “Arthur” the kids were often complaining about school, or having something unpleasant/stressful take place while at school.

My only concern for Bluey and her classmates (and maybe it’s a long-term issue, nothing to worry about in the short term) is this: a potential downside to a Waldorf-style education would potentially be the sharp adjustment a student will encounter transitioning from this nurturing environment to one where that isn’t the case. It could well be unsettling.

…phew, ok, maybe one or two more posts about the school to come.

(Maybe, because of the source material, some of this post may sound a little like a giant sales pitch… it’s not meant to be. I think it’s interesting because it’s different; something else to learn about, etc.)

[cellphishthekaiju]

OC Ramblings: Ja'l'on & Kalach Hallowleaf - Firstborn of Omega Lae'zel and Alpha Shadowheart

Yes, this is ABO/Omegaverse nonsense and OC brainrot cause I'm neck deep in the Shad'zel brainrot. I have a WHOLE series of smut fics about Omega Lae'zel and Alpha Werewolf Shadowheart.

Anyway, onto the characters themselves

(clears throat)

Because Selune has a sense of humor and Shadowheart is her Chosen (at least in this canon), every time her and Lae'zel breed, they end up with twins. Their firstborn were no exception.

Ja'l'on, Alpha male and twin brother to Kalach. He inherits the lycanthropy of his sire though due to his mixed blood, Ja'l'on's werewolf form is not as 'elegant' as Shadowheart's werewolf form (his form is more akin to the Underworld Lycans). As all those who inherit Shadowheart's werewolf 'blessing', he has silver hair.

He is very close to his sister and holds both his mothers in high regard, especially Lae'zel. In his younger years, he strove to emulate his githyanki mother as well as uphold the tenets of the Moon Maiden. As he reached adulthood, he focused himself on becoming a paladin of Selune but has yet to swear his oaths.

Kalach, Beta female and twin sister to Ja'l'on. She is named for the late 14th Century hero that battled the the King of Shadows and was known for the shard of Gith's Silver Sword embedded in their flesh. (Some mistakenly believe she is named after Karlach, the 2nd half of the Blades of Avernus and Hero of Baldur's Gate... deeply missed friend of Shadowheart and Lae'zel)

In appearance, Kalach takes more after Shadowheart than Lae'zel yet did not inherit the lycanthropy 'blessing' like her brother, so her hair remains black with a reddish sheen that looks much like Lae'zel's hair.

She is far less 'disciplined' than her brother, adopting a more 'devil-may-care' attitude with a desire to explore Faerun and carve her own fate from the planes. Though she honors Selune, she has no desire to commit to the priesthood. She would like nothing more than to go on adventures with her brother at her side; making their mark on the planes like their mother's did during the Absolute Crisis.

Once they reached adulthood, these siblings find themselves bristling under the pressure of being restricted to living in Moonhaven. Shadowheart and Lae'zel both fear their mortal enemies; Shar and Vlaakith CVII respectively, would quickly bring harm or worse to their children, having attempted to do so ever since they were born and all subsequent children they've had since.

The twins also play a role in my Lae'stra X Omegaverse crossover, which you can read here, in all it's smutty insanity.

(Kalach is smitten with Hestra, to say the least xD)

I hope you enjoyed another installment of my OC ramblings. If you liked, I love talking with folks.

[callme-secret]

And They Where Neighbors

TASM Peter Parker x Oc

Plot - peter parker sucks as an upstairs neighbor.

not my best work, but i want to get back into writing so sometimes you just gotta put stuff out. Please leave any helpful comments!

×××××

Suspiciously cheap rent is always suspicious for a reason. Brie knew this. Everyone in New York did, it went without saying. Cheap rent meant rats, or mold, or a creepy landlord that talked a lot. Cheap meant no one else wanted to live there. 

So when Brie found a one bedroom apartment in her budget, walking distance from her school, and with working ac, she knew to be cautious. It even claimed to allow pets. (Normally code for the place came with its own pets already.) She couldn’t imagine what they were trying to sugar code. It must have a bed bug infestation, or it was haunted by a poltergeist. Maybe it was all some elaborate way to kidnap her and sell her into sex trafficking. There had to be a catch.

Brie knew of a million things that cheap meant in New York, but she was desperate. So when she went to tour, she wore a face mask in case the walls did in fact contain the next bubonic plague, and her thickest boots, in case she had to stomp her way past whatever vermin lived there too.

But there was no vermin, or mold. It was actually quite nice?

The landlady, Mrs. Zhang was kind and in her mid forties. She explained that her and her husband owned quite a few buildings, but this was their first one so they felt quite attached to it. They themselves had once lived here when they first moved to New York, and had spent nearly all of their young adulthood living here.

They took good care of the place, made sure to keep up with renovations, and all of the other upkeep. It really did show too. The building looked warm even from the outside. Red brick walls, black rimmed windows, and a navy blue front door, all screamed home. Even the entrance was clean. A tan hallway with a well organized mailroom and a black staircase. There wasn't even a missing floor board.

The apartment itself was even better. Sure the kitchen was small, and the appliances a decade old, but there was a big window in the bedroom with a fire escape right beside it, and enough space to fit her desk. There was nothing growing in the pipes, no sign of rodents or bugs. It was perfect.

“Why is it so cheap?” Way to look a gift horse in the mouth.

Mrs. Zhang pursed her lips. “To be honest with you, we can't seem to keep a tenant for longer than three months and we don’t know why.” 

Okay, first red flag. Apparently three tenets had come and gone in the span of the last year, all without reason and with quick getaways. The weird thing was, this problem only seemed to happen to the one apartment, everyone else in the building had been living there for years now with no incident.

So, Brie reasoned what was life without risk? If no one else had issues maybe it was all some big coincidence.  She and her cat moved in the next week.

And for a while Brie wondered why no one could last longer than three months. As far as she could tell there was no better place to live. Her neighbors were nice, one had even brought her cookies after she moved in. (an older woman named Tony, who smelled like pickled sugar.) She only had to contact Mrs. Zhang once about a flickering light in the hallway and it was fixed within the week, and nothing could beat her commute. What once was a twenty minute subway ride, and a bus ticket, was now a ten minute walk. Brie was actually showing up early to her classes, just to prove she could.

There was absolutely nothing wrong with this apartment. Brie thought she might have actually been in love with the place from how perfect it was. Then the other shoe dropped.

It started small at first, or maybe she just started to notice it slowly. Her upstairs neighbor was a night owl. Not that big of a deal, except for the fact that y/n could hear him at 3 a.m. seemingly breaking into his own apartment. Every night like clock work, he would scale the fire escape like it was his own personal entrance, and struggle with his window. The wood swelled with the summer heat and Brie knew from personal experience it made it nearly impossible to open any window. Yet, her upstairs neighbor forced it open, everytime, before he fell face first into his apartment with the loudest thud possible. Waking her up. Every time.

Even when he was successfully inside, her upstairs neighbor had no idea what keeping it down was. All night he would stay up, eventually she put together he must have been an engineer of some kind. The vents carried broken conversation, mainly curses, but Brie could put together the few words she had. He complained a lot about things not working, and said a lot of math equations that sounded like gibberish in her ears. Either way, his voice filled her apartment, even at the crack of dawn.

There was also the annoying fact that everyone in the building seemed to love him. (Of course they did, they didn’t have to live below him.) Tony raved about the boy upstairs who always helped bring up her groceries. Mrs. Zhang always mentioned how if her husband couldn't make it out, Peter, as everyone referred to him as, never minded helping her fix squeaking door hinges or leaking pipes. Even Mr. Harbinbridge, the grumpy old man that lived on the first floor, liked him! One time he mistook Brie for this Peter. It was the only time she ever saw him smile.

Fine, Peter couldn’t be that bad, just noisy. Brie could live with that. She’s had worse neighbors, even roommates. Then her cat got stuck in the window.

Sir Issac Mewton had never been a skinny boy. Even when Brie first adopted him, the orange tabby cat weighed nearly fifteen pounds. Still, he wasn't fat, he just carried a lot of muscle. At least, that was the mantra Brie repeated in her head.

The mantra died however, when she first saw the ball of wiggling orange fur. Brie had memorized the exact amount of space to leave her window open in order for Mewton to slip through. He liked to explore, and who was she to take that away from him. She wished she took it away from him as she watched him howl from between the window sill. 

So maybe she had notice Mewton putting on some extra pounds, but this was excessive. Brie knew it wasn't from her, he had been explicitly banned from anything that wasn’t his veterinarian approved diet cat food. As far as she knew, that's all he ate.

The investigation lasted less than a minute, before Brie peaked her head out of the window, now lined with orange fur, and spotted what looked to be a bowl on her upstairs neighbors stoop.

This was the last straw. This so-called Peter could be loud at ungodly hours, he could even be annoyingly loved by all, but he could not make her cat fat. This is where she drew the line.

So at 11 p.m. on a Sunday, in her hello kitty pjs, and her untied yellow converse Brie found herself in front of his door. Mewton clutched between her hands as if the feline could do something to protect her from the clearly bad idea forming in her head. Most of the heat she had felt downstairs had smoldered on her walk up. Mainly the idea of how silly she was being.

Brie lived with mewton and knew from experience how persistent the cat could be to get some extra kibble, no doubt he had conned poor upstairs peter into thinking he was a starving stray. The whole complex always raved about how kind of a person he was, he was probably just trying to help. A kind person just doing his best.

Yes, she was being silly. She’ll go back downstairs and try to catch him in the morning. Explain that Mewton was not starving and actually is on a weight loss journey. Brie was sure Peter would understand.

And then, Sir Issac Mewton, the traitor he was, meowed. Loudly.

The shuffling of feet behind the door made Brie freeze. This looked bad, didn’t it? She was in her pjs for god's sake, how the hell is she gonna explain this one?

Peter opened the door rather quickly, for how late it was. For a beat the pair just looked at each other. Brie thought to herself a few things. One, well at least he was also wearing pjs, though she did not peg him for a pokemon man. Two, of course he was cute. The boy had to be at least 6 '2, with fluffy brown hair, and brown eyes hidden behind cute, in a dorky short of way, glasses. He smiled. Y/n forgot the other things she was thinking about.

“You found my cat!”

She’s going to kill him actually.

“Your cat?” She echoed back, her voice sounding flat in her own ears.

Peter smiled rather sheepishly. “Well I suppose he’s not my cat, I just feed him from time to time,” he reached out to scratch Mewton’s chin. “Poor thing always comes crying, like he hasn’t eaten in days.”

Mewton, still being the traitor he is, started to wiggle in her arms like she hadn’t fed and raised him for nearly five years. If Brie was thinking level headily, she probably would have just blamed her stupid chubby cat. It was him that was manipulating everyone in this corridor right now, but she was not thinking level headily. Months of letting things go had pushed her to a point of no return.

She smacked his hand away from her cat, and glared straight into his stupid brown eyes. “Sir Mewton is not starving. He eats twice a day, with very expensive diet cat food I can only get from the vet’s in midtown, so if you would please stop feeding him!” she should stop there. “And for god sake, do you know people live below you? Have you ever thought once why they can't keep a tenant down stairs? It’s you! And the routinely 3 a.m. fight with your window, or how about the fact that you can’t use a front door? The fire escape is not your own personal entrance Peter! Do you ever think outside of yourself? Christ!”

That was too far, Brie regretted it the second she said it. Especially when the poor boy just looked so confused. But she was a coward, a very angry coward, that turned on her heel and quickly bolted to the staircase. Not without a “He’s not your cat!” shouted over her shoulder.

Mewton meowed rather pathetically in her arms.

Peter Parker stood, rather dumb folded, and admittedly rather confused in his doorway. The smallest "sorry" leaving his lips before he could even fully process her steps receding down the stairs.

[amazing-spiderling]

For the "random get-to-know-me ask game" camellia ⇢ what were you like when you were younger? do you think you’ve changed a lot?

<3

To answer this backwards, I think I've changed in a lot of superficial ways. That is to say, I think there are a lot of my core beliefs and tenets that still exist, and I appreciate a lot of the same things and dislike a lot of the same things I did as when I was younger, but now that i'm mumblemumble years old, I have the freedom to enjoy them and express myself without fear or embarrassment. It's liberating!

As a child, I have distinct memories of being a bit of an outsider, but it didn't really bother me. I recall being pretty young, maybe 6 or so- and hearing (in books or cartoons etc) that we should always be ourselves and not worry about what other people think, and it's okay to be weird, and just sort of accepted that at face value and never looked back. So it didn't really bother me if I wasn't friends with the cool, pretty, popular kids in class because I absolutely believed that if someone didn't like you then their opinion shouldn't matter to you.

I do remember having little tolerance for people I thought were not being genuine, I remember being at summer camp rolling my eyes at other kids there who were "acting" like they were so cool and weird and different, but knowing that they couldn't tolerate anyone there that was "too far" outside the norm, and the idea that you could only go "so far" in "weirdness" before getting bullied or ostracized only further cemented my ideas on the matter.

I think this has served me well into adulthood. I'm still into a lot of the same hobbies, some in a broad sense (anime) other's in a more specific one (I was digging around a small neighborhood comic shop and found a discounted copy of the first comic my friend ever gave to me to read and immediately had to buy it because the laser focused joy was so strong). It helped me weather skepticism from my family, coworkers, etc and to find "my people". I can't say I have always been (or am even now) a flawless judge of character, but at the very least I have a good idea if another person and I are going to "click" from early on- and I think it saves a lot of time.

This doesn't mean that I spend most of my time judging other people, mind you- it just means that for most of my life, I've been able to take a look at a situation and see what parts (and parties) really matter and move on.

[shihalyfie]

Hello! During the Kaiser arc we get to see several instances of the original chosen digimon in their adult stages while alone in the digital world, protecting zones. I wonder if it was supposed to be a mechanic that as long as they didn't lose enough energy they could maintain their adult forms indefinitely, or maybe that since their partners were closer to adulthood they too could maintain the form longer, or maybe even evolve by themselves...? What are your thoughts on it?

This is a good question, and I don't really have a good answer for it! I used to just pass it off as an oversight, but nowadays I'm not sure because that would have to be such a huge oversight it would be unusual, as it violates what seems to be a core evolutionary tenet. (Although I suppose it's possible that the relevant scenes were supposed to have their partners in play, and then something got cut for time?) Bar any more useful explanation, I'd say that what you just said doesn't seem unreasonable.

[rosykims]

hiiiiiiiiiii sorry it took me literally 3 months to do this but here she is !!! my tav, vierynrae drisune — viera to her closest friends and vierie to her doomed-by-the-narrative boyfriends. disclaimer please immediately disregard her hair bc i still havent found a hairstyle OR fit i like for her, but since she would realistically change her look every 6 to 10 hours im happy just waving some selections of note @ u all <3

truly unfathomable lore dump under the cut (tw for physical assault and miscarriage)

she/her

209 years young <3

astarion romance with a generous sprinkle of dream visitor sexual tension for reasons i'll get into (tldr the emperor takes the form of her dead fiance bc they both know its the only form that could ever hope to get through to her 😍)

"seldarine" drow! formerly a lolth sworn menzoberranzan girly, now a well established and famed diabolist of neverwinter (we'll get into it lol).

nowadays shes lolth's no. 1 hater but — having regrettably served her pretty contentedly for 100+ years — she feels too alienated from the seldarine pantheon to truly consider herself a follower. she does toss a prayer eilistraees' way for good karma's sake every now and then, though !

fiend pact (of the chain) warlock ! outside of the power her patron offers her, she's relatively useless in a fight (ie no multiclassing for her lol). the majority of her skills are in leadership, social maneuvering and underhanded political subterfuge. forging her pact was a very deliberate and very necessary move from her perspective to like. add some bite to her bark going forward.

im saying that her level one feat (if the mod ever drops lol <3) is magic initiate: bard and while she isn't canonically a multiclass, she could very easily become one if her pact fell through.

she's canonically a noble background, though she could easily be mistaken for a sage. truthfully all of her interest in the arcane stem from political ambition, noble is the correct answer (and a background she tries to keep under wraps)

lawful evil alignment, bordering very close - and eventually transitioning - to lawful neutral. evil is a sort of unfortunate necessity from her pov right up until the start of bg3, but her character is more aligned to the Lawful part as opposed to the Evil part. she follows a strict code of professionalism, unscrupulous loyalty, and also sometimes "just business, sorry kid" :/ but outside of those circumstances she's as charming/kind/reasonable as they come lol

ok. whew. heres the full unabridged off the walls loredump. prioritizing her menzoberranzan history over her diabolist career bc otherwise i'd need a whole third month for this lol.

viera drisune (later taking the elven adult name vierynrae) was the 13th of 21 total children borne to mistress viciiva drisune, matriarch of the 17th house of menzoberranzan

only vierynrae herself and 2 other sisters actually survived to see viera's elven 'adulthood'. one sister was xaeszara drisune- the firstborn and heiress. xaeszara saw herself as an aspiring proxy of lolth, forsaking politics as she became utterly consumed with fanaticism and religious fervor. she perceived acts of heresy against her goddess in the everyday routines and familiar faces of her kin, and often took to culling her siblings and cousins in sporadic ritual offerings to the spider queen :)

arac'nene drisune, the 16th child and vierynrae's younger sister, also survived - specifically because she was just as deranged as the eldest. she didn't possess xaeszara's zealotry, but still relished in lolth's simpler tenets of chaos and slaughter. the two essentially allied together to pick off the other siblings and minor family members, arac'nene acting as xaeszara's attack dog against any she deemed undevoted to lolth. which was all of them, naturally.

vierynrae only survived because she clued in to the alliance early, and knew the only way to survive was to win the favor of their matriarch and mother, viciiva, by making herself an invaluable asset in all matters of house affairs. and she did! what she lacked in combat prowess she made up for in charisma and intelligence, and quickly earned the trust (and protection) of viciiva after overseeing several successful raids/assassinations of rival houses and improving their overall position in drow hierarchy. the other two siblings couldn't touch her without dooming their house's winning streak or worse, earning the mother matriarch's wrath.

for almost 70 years viera enjoyed the relative safety of her mother's protection, while being groomed by her into a natural leader. vierynrae's actions helped house drisune ascend the ranks of nobility until they were eventually named 10th of the great houses.

in all those years she dutifully followed the tenets of lolth, the only faith she'd ever known, until one day while skulking about in the caverns just outside of the city, she met kiryn'kel nathril , a handsome, bewilderingly sweet man whom she would soon come to learn was not only a seldarine surface drow, but also ironically a cleric of eilistraee, who would regularly venture deep into the underdark to save its denizens from the tyranny of lolth.

against all odds (and in spite of several dozen death threats and attempts viera would make against his life) they fell in love, and began an affair in secret that would last for over 15 years. during this time kiryn taught her about the surface; about sunlight and freckles and kindness and what an honest, earnest hug felt like. he was patient, and successfully de-radicalized her, soon even convincing her to begin aiding him in his efforts to undermine lolth and free any who might stand a better chance on the surface

try as he might, though, he was never quite able to convince her to leave menzoberranzan and marry him up in his home in neverwinter. she had too many ambitions in her own city and still held on to the drow superiority she'd been indoctrinated in to. what's more, she still held a stubborn, optimistic hope that she could miraculously change her home from the inside (while conveniently consolidating all her power and authority over the other houses, too, of course)

this didn't happen, obviously. vierynrae's family's suspicions were growing due to the subtle change in her attitude over the years, all culminating with her abruptly learning that she was pregnant with kiryn's child. she knew her child was a son, and that her house already held the two total male heirs allowed (ie: the two surviving men xaeszara hadn't murdered), and so she finally accepted kiryn's proposal and began to make bittersweet plans to flee the only home she'd ever known.

the plans were short lived, and the pair were inevitably caught by house drisune mere hours before they had agreed to leave. to avoid the shame - and consequences - of the truth getting out amongst the other houses, the matriarch viciiva allowed vierynrae to live, but only after cutting off her ring finger, confiscating its band, and forcing her to watch as kiryn'kel was publically and sadistically executed.

but this wasn't enough for xaeszara, who noticed during the execution that viera's hand hovered a little too long - a little too protectively - over her stomach. in her grief, vierynrae barely noticed her two siblings' whispers, nor when her mother was invited into its fray. the gravity of her situation only dawned on her when her mother bid her halt during the long walk back home, and asked her one grim question: "is it a male?"

her silence was the answer, and viciiva nodded, permitting xaeszara to push vierynrae down a flight of stairs carved into the stone. arac'nene was waiting at the bottom, laughing, to kick her nearly to death - more than enough to guarantee the child would never be born.

minutes blurred into hours, and vierynrae -grieving, raging, but mostly numb - knew her days in house drisune were numbered. she never went home, instead limping her way out of the city gates and on towards the secluded place she had first met kiryn all those years ago.

from there, she began bargaining, first to the gods - who would not answer a lolth-sworn - and then to the anyone in the nine hells who would listen. she screamed at the cavern walls that she was willing to bargain, and after three days, the fiend who would soon become her patron emerged from the dark. she offered up his soul to him right there in exchange for the power to raze the city of menzoberranzan and everyone in it, but the devil only laughed. "do you truly think your little soul is of equal value to that of the city of spiders?" he asked. "how many souls call menzoberranzan home, i wonder? thirty thousand - fifty? not to mention the wrath of lolth this tantrum of yours will inevitably bring about . . . why, that price alone is worth as many souls as you have hair on your head."

and with that, the terms of a pact began to form. a drop of infernal power for every act of service - and for every soul sent to the styx - tallied by the silver hair on her scalp. each deed's value would be measured in strands, turning black as the underdark itself to mark the progress of such an insurmountable price. once every hair had turned, she would know at last that the pact was complete, and she would be powerful enough to return to the underdark and attempt a final stand. until then, she would serve her patron in any and all things.

her first kill was her mother, matriarch viciiva. her patron was true to his word; as 17 strands of silver hair turn blacked, she felt an equivalent surge of power - just enough to make the weeks long trek out of the underdark and up into the sunlit lands, alone.

i hit the block text character limit oh god 🤪

and so her new life began. she navigated a hostile surface world with only her patron's whispers to guide her, eventually settling in neverwinter, in spite of a population vastly hostile to her kind. over the years, her uncanny ability to sniff out a desperate soul - and then cordially offer then aid - made her a recogniseable and accepted figure in the city, eventually putting her in the position to make a legitimate business out of it.

business flourished, and as her renown grew, so did her power, forever measured by her rapidly darkening hair. by the start of baldur's gate 3 she is formiddable — a diabolist and the right hand of her patron, feared and respected, secretly amassing every resource, ally and advantage she has at her disposal through low whispers and coded letters. all of it to pay the price of marching — one day, perhaps centuries from now — on menzoberranzan, and having the power to take it.

[navree]

What do you think about people calling Alicent a r eligió zealot? Personally, I find myself quote uncomfortable when people describe her as such and I don't really see it anyway? I think zealot is too extreme to be thrown around so freely

Hey anon, I actually touched on this in the second half of this response, so I won't go into too much detail, but long story short I agree. Zealotry, especially of the religious kind, is a very specific thing, with a specific definition and specific parameters that Alicent just does not fit. She's maybe a bit fanatical, but not extremely so, and a better description would be "devout", and she is not uncompromising about it at all, which is a core tenet of religious zealotry. Alicent is religious, yes, and clearly subsumes herself into that religion deeply as she moves more into adulthood, but that doesn't make her a zealot.

[nursingwriter]

  Psychoanalytic Therapy in Family Systems   Introduction &nbspPsychoanalytic therapy, derived from Sigmund Freud's theories, has developed over the last one hundred years to now function as one of the most primitive frameworks in psychotherapy. It provides directions to understanding the more profound and less controlled aspects of human personality, early childhood trauma, and interpersonal conflicts. When practicing family systemic therapy, psychoanalytic concepts help understand the processes occurring within a person and a family. The current paper presents an overview of psychoanalytic therapy as a theoretical orientation. It explores its fundamental postulates, conceptualizing individual, couple, and family processes, principal interventions, and engagement points with gender, culture, and other diverse parameters. Last, I provide personal impressions regarding the theory and intended application of the theory in clinical work. Basic Tenets of Psychoanalytic Therapy &nbspSeveral principles underpin psychoanalytic therapy as follows. The first principle holds that the patient's unconscious mind contains, in part, the resources that will bring about change. This principle has primarily shaped the approach taken by psychoanalytic therapists in their treatment of patients. Psychoanalytic therapy is based on several principles as follows: The first principle fundamentally believes that, at least in part, the patient's unconscious has what is required for change. Psychoanalytic therapy emphasizes the first one, preconscious motivation, where most people's actions are thought to result from preconscious desires, fears, and conflicts. These are the processes that are automatical and have their origins in childhood, and they play important roles in how a person perceives, feels, and acts during adulthood (Henkel et al., 2022). The second is the principles regarding defense mechanisms. Psychological defense mechanisms are those processes that run unconsciously in a personality to save it from anxiety and/or feelings of emotional pain. Kernberg, (2016). explained that repression, denial, and projection are ways of handling internal conflicts. These are not necessarily pathological defenses, but they may cause relational problems if put into play excessively. Third, role-determined personality is based on early and late childhood notions. The psychosexual conflicts in childhood, if not resolved, produce psychological disturbance in later years (Kernberg 2016). This framework shows that these early experiences should be incorporated into the therapy. Last but not least, manifestations of transference and countertransference are between the psychoanalytic therapist and client. Countertransference is a process where clients transfer the feelings they harbored toward important figures in their past. In contrast, countertransference refers to the feelings that the therapist develops about the client, wherein feelings are reacted to tell something about the therapist or give a way into the client's unconscious material (Tarzian et al., 2023). Understanding Individual, Couple, and Family Dynamics &nbspPsychoanalytic therapy sees family relationships as internal working models and regressions between them. Such conflicts usually arise in individuals' early childhood family environment. For example, the failure to have dependency needs met during childhood contributes to the problem of attachment in adulthood. These internal contents define people's behavior within the couple or the family as a system. Evaluating couple dynamics involves defining the process due to each partner's subconscious projection of the other. In conflicts, many couples continue the cycle of arguments, resembling issues with persons from childhood or adolescence, due to the selection of couples at a subconscious level. This dynamic is often discussed using object relations theory, a perspective of psychoanalysis that primarily emphasizes the role of early relationships with primary caretakers in constructing later relational styles. In family therapy, systems and values such as family of origin and multigenerational transmission are paramount. Berman, (2023). incorporated psychoanalytic concepts into family systems theory, noting that previous unresolved issues are inherited. Therefore, the socio-psycho-genetic investigation of a family unveils the search for resolutions to present family conflicts. Core Therapy Techniques   &nbspSeveral fundamental methods are used in psychoanalytic therapy to increase the patient's awareness of the unconscious material in analysis and in producing insight. One of the significant approaches is an association, where clients are allowed to say anything they want. It is used to assist the clients in accessing aspects of the material that may reside in the client's subconscious mind and yet impact their overall behavior. The therapist attentively focuses on the material, looking for clues about a patient's psychic structure, which reflects unconscious conflicts. The second technique is dream analysis. Another conception of dreams relates to the one that regards them as reflections of the subconscious want, fear, or aggression. Cognitive therapists assist patients in understanding the meaning that their dream makes in operationally significant ways as a way of helping them locate unexpressed feelings and comprehend their intrapsychic realities (Kernberg, 2016). Interpretation is the hub or core of psychoanalytic therapy. Cognitive model Therapists analyze clients' actions, perceptions, and feelings and explain the signs clients have observed regarding how early experience influences present behavior. Often, these interpretations are built around transference, occurring when clients shift their attitudes to the influential individuals in their lives to the therapist (Kernberg, 2016). Last but not least, working through means going back and over the 'forgotten,' 'repressed' material time and again during the process of therapy. This process of moving through varying stages of their process means that clients can learn to create better patterns to combat their internal conflicts. Intersection with Gender, Socioeconomic Status, Race, Ethnicity, Sexual Orientation, Religion, and Culture &nbspPsychoanalytic theory propounded in Europe in the early 19th century has been criticized for its failure to consider cultural differences. Highly criticized and developed from Western, male, and upper-middle-class norms, most older psychoanalytical models failed to accommodate clients from other cultures. However, as has been mentioned before, modern psychoanalysis is more tolerant. Today's psychoanalytic therapists consider gender and sexual orientation, race, ethnicity, and cultural background. For example, feminist psychoanalysts have questioned Freud's gender prejudice when dealing with the female psychosexual stage of development and the Oedipus complex (Henkel et al., 2022). Today, therapists always consider cultural aspects such as race, class, and sexual orientation as structures of unconscious processes and relating. Further, psychoanalysis has been considered unreliable for low-class societies because of its lengthy and expensive system of treatment. However, approaches such as STDT have made the psychoanalytical model more available to a broader spectrum of clients. As for religion and spirituality, CT was most accustomed to viewing religious manifestations as a neurotic phenomenon characteristic of the primitive mind. However, in current practice, practitioners appreciate the role of spirit and more often include the client's religious or spiritual system where necessary (Berman, 2023). Personal Reactions and Clinical Application &nbspPsychoanalytic therapy is one of the most interesting but, at the same time, quite complicated; it pays great attention to content beyond the level of consciousness, which can help me better understand the psychology of clients. The concept that a child's early experiences affect their adult relationships is supported by my experience working in a clinical capacity. Nevertheless, I also view deficiencies within the historical psychoanalytic model in downplaying cultural diversity and its lengthened process. In my current practice, I would apply psychoanalytic ideas in a more culturally friendly and clinical manner. For example, employing brief psychodynamic therapy can help clients integrate psychoanalytic processes more quickly than could be accomplished with traditional long-term therapy methods. In the clinical setting, I see myself applying free association and transference analysis to help my clients understand their behavior patterns, especially when treating families. The knowledge gained from a family of origin construct on how unresolved strife affects present relationships can be a valuable asset to families, as the need to interrupt the unhealthy cycle and embrace new healthy ones is met. Conclusion Psychoanalytic therapy clarifies the psyche, patterns of behavior, and interpersonal relationships. Despite criticism, the system is not very diverse and accessible in a way that is easy to apply, but modern versions make it more portable and suitable for therapeutic practice. In family therapy, several concepts from psychoanalysis give clinicians tools for understanding the transfer of pathological processes from generation to generation, as well as helping clients overcome unresolved issues from their childhood and gain more adaptive patterns of interaction. As I continue my clinical practice, I eagerly await to apply this gain to practice with people, couples, and families.             References Berman, J. (2023). Psychoanalysis: An Interdisciplinary Retrospective. State &nbspUniversity of New York Press. https://doi.org/10.2307/jj.18253204 Henkel, M., Huber, D., Ratzek, M., Benecke, C., & Klug, G. (2022). Can we differentiate between psychoanalytic and psychodynamic psychotherapy? – &nbspAn empirical investigation of therapists’ self-reports. Zeitschrift Für &nbspPsychosomatische Medizin Und Psychotherapie, 68(4), 362–377. &nbsp https://www.jstor.org/stable/27191176 Kernberg O. F. (2016). The four basic components of psychoanalytic technique and derived psychoanalytic psychotherapies. World psychiatry: official journal of the World Psychiatric Association (WPA), 15(3), 287–288. &nbsphttps://doi.org/10.1002/wps.20368 Tarzian, M., Ndrio, M., & Fakoya, A. O. (2023). An Introduction and Brief Overview of Psychoanalysis. Cureus, 15(9), e45171.   Read the full article

[jaydove-writes]

I'm bored

Ask me questions about my OCs and tell me about yours.

Here are some Starbourne traits that every Starbourne character has.

Force: Passion, Desire, Joy, Hope, Trust, Clarity, or Love. These determine personality traits and non-elemental magical abilities.

Element: Light, Water, Air, Earth, Fire, or Shadow. These determine what kinds of magic the character can use or protect themselves from. Also can be coupled with Forces for personality types. (Yes that means there are 42 personality types as opposed to the MBTI's 16)

Age: Pretty self explanatory, but one thing I should mention is that adulthood starts at 17 instead of 18.

Tenets: Things the character strongly believes in. (Like pacifism, prayer, chastity, or something similar)

Homeworld: The planet they were born on. The Starbourne equivalent to Earth is Terra Nova. (Literally New Earth) Other planets include Feria, Stellaria, Luderia, Draconia, and you can also make up your own.

Entitlements: What your characters believe they deserve (whether they actually deserve these things is irrelevant)

Relationships: Who they have bonds with, be they romantic, platonic, familial, or strictly professional

Yes I made an acrostic, I love those things.

[riwaq]

Understanding the Role of Parents in Islam

Parenting is an essential responsibility in Islam, with profound implications for the well-being of both children and the community. In Islam, parents are not just caretakers, but also role models and guides for their children. The duties of parents towards their child in Islam go beyond the basic needs of food and shelter. They are deeply connected to the child's emotional, moral, and spiritual development.

Duties of Parents Towards Their Child in Islam

First and foremost, Islam stresses the importance of love and affection in the parent-child relationship. Children should feel secure, loved, and valued within their family. The Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him) set an example of gentle care and kindness towards children. He frequently showed compassion, giving them attention, and showing empathy for their feelings.

Another vital responsibility of parents is ensuring the well-being of their children by providing proper education. Both religious and worldly knowledge are highly encouraged in Islam. Parents should guide their children in learning not only how to read and write but also to understand their faith. Teaching them the basic tenets of Islam, such as prayer, fasting, and charity, forms the foundation of a strong relationship with Allah (SWT).

Furthermore, Islam places a significant emphasis on providing children with good manners and ethical values. Parents are tasked with instilling respect, kindness, and honesty in their children. This can be done through their own behavior, as children often learn by observing their parents. Parents should act as living examples of integrity and fairness, and they should teach their children to treat others with the same kindness and respect.

Parents are also responsible for the physical and emotional needs of their children. They should ensure that their children are well-fed, clothed, and housed. Emotional care is just as important; providing a stable and nurturing environment helps the child feel safe and valued. In times of distress or difficulty, parents must be there to comfort and guide their children, offering wisdom and support when necessary.

Additionally, financial responsibility is crucial. Parents must provide for their children’s material needs, but they should also teach them the value of money and the importance of being generous. The Prophet Muhammad (PBUH) taught that it is the responsibility of the father to provide for his family, and mothers have a crucial role in nurturing and guiding their children.

One of the most important duties of parents is to make supplications (du'a) for their children. Islam encourages parents to pray for their children's success, health, and well-being. The role of parents extends beyond the physical realm into the spiritual one, as they ask Allah to guide their children, protect them from harm, and bless them with good character.

As children grow, the relationship between parents and children evolves. When children reach adulthood, the parental role shifts from providing direct care to offering guidance and advice. Islam reminds parents that their responsibility continues, even as children become independent, and that they should always offer support when needed.

In conclusion, the duties of parents towards their child in Islam are vast and encompass many aspects of a child’s life. Parents are tasked with not only providing for their children's physical needs but also nurturing their emotional and spiritual well-being. Islam encourages love, patience, guidance, and constant prayer for the success and happiness of children. Through these efforts, parents can contribute to raising children who will be a source of benefit to themselves, their families, and the larger society.