#this is excessively over dramatic as I'm actually losing it right now lol

[bob-com69]

Ok what the fuck was today's dungeon meshi episode!?

We get hit with Senshi's is he a cannibal or not arc which was a roller costar in of itself with playing the guessing game of is he or is he not then the great wave of relief when it's revealed he isn't a cannibal

But then they had to hit us with this guy

...

WHY IN THE BLOODY HELL DID STUDIO TRIGGER PUT FUCKING ELF SENSHI IN THE SAME EPISODE AS THE BLOODY CANNIBALISM ARC!?

MY HEART HAS FUCKING RISEN TO HEAVEN AND THEN PLUMMETED STRAIGHT TO HELL 20X OVER FROM ONE EPISODE PURLEY FROM SHOCK! WHY SUCH A DRASTIC CHANGE OF TONE!? I'M DYING!!!

[ddpej]

Dai, cousin! I'm so sorry I missed messaging you last night~ I got distracted by a book >.

…about the series, especially the NME versions. I’m glad that is something the fandom has embraced wholeheartedly. So, other than reading excellent books, have you any other hobbies? Any sports or crafts or anything like that? I’m quite enjoying getting to know you! You really express yourself so beautifully in writing~ I hope I can learn to express myself so well~

No worries!  I had just assumed circumstances conspired against us one way or another.  (I do not consider myself to have been wrong. I have a long history of inadvertently losing time to books!)

I have no idea why that’s the default!  I mean, I can kind of understand the volume, excitement usually involves excess energy or adrenaline or whatever, and if it slips out unexpectedly as sound it’s probably going to have some force behind it.  I’ve been known to let loose a “HA!” before myself (mostly as in “take THAT!”, because I do love to prove people wrong when they doubt me).  But I don’t know why most people seem to go high-pitched?  Or, for that matter, why they drag the whole thing out for so long?  My excitement is not at all a long, loud, shrill thing – but that doesn’t seem to be normal in the slightest.  (Flailing is fine.  Flailing is often adorable and pretty much always quiet in and of itself, and I absolutely understand excitement expressed as motion.)

Anywho.  Hobbies!  I am somewhat infamous in local meatspace as a puzzler, for starters.  I love the paperboard texture of puzzle pieces in your hand, and the rustle as you paw through the box looking for prime suspects (or the smoothness and the satisfying *click* of the plastic pieces snapping together, if you have that kind of puzzle, or the hushed whisper of foam-backed ones as they tumble and bounce off each other).  I don’t care so much about having a finished display piece as I do about just. Putting the puzzle together, because I can, so I’ll go back to the same puzzle more than once if I like the feel or the trick of it. ^_^  (I will put together anything but I casually collect puzzles that are unusual or different or catch my eye, such as tiny or 3D in some fashion or double-sided or interestingly shaped or intended to be challenging.)  Sometimes I’ll put a puzzle together upside-down, picture to the table, just to have done it (but you have to have the right kind of puzzle for that, tightly cut and variation in the pieces, or it doesn’t work very well).

I am also reasonably well-versed in cross-stitch!  I learned it in the single digits, dabbled every few years or so, and picked it up again in college.  (When I graduated, I actually gave all of the professors in my major and some of the staff I’d worked with cross-stitched thank-you cards.  It was a frankly absurd undertaking for a condensed-course graduating college kid, and I am somewhat amazed that I finished them all, but I’m still really proud of some of those cards.)  I have gotten out of the habit in recent years due to time constraints, mostly, but I dug out my old stitching-to-do pile last year and have been slowly easing my way back into the rhythm of things.

I don’t participate in sports much any more, but I was pretty active back in my school days?  I played soccer for nearly a decade, I think (AYSO, never actually on a school team for Reasons).  In middle school I tried at least a season each of basketball, volleyball, cross country, track, and parade band (only running and band stuck).  I played tennis and swam in lakes in the summer and also just generally ran around wild.  In high school I did marching band, swimming, and track.  (Track was 9th and 10th grade only; junior year I got knee surgery, which wouldn’t actually have been a problem except that the coach insisted every practice that I be alone in a tiny little windowless room that smelled like old sweat, with the door closed “to avoid disturbance”, and ride a rough old exercise bike thing for two+ hours because actually running out on the track would hamper my recovery. Theoretically.  Never mind that the surgeon had given me a clean bill of health and free reign.  So.  I quit after a few weeks, and never went back.)

As for sports in general, which in retrospect is probably what you were referring to, I have never followed sports as a thing, even with the ones I loved being in.  I just. Don’t have any emotional investment in people I don’t know, maybe?  I dunno.  Basically I don’t mind that sports fans are fans of sports but I don’t really understand it, because there’s absolutely no draw there for me. =P  (Given the basic laws of the universe, I shall now assume that you are a sports fan of some flavor and I have dealt you a grave insult. lol)

Thank you for the compliment, by the way!  I suspect I blushed.  I would like to state for the record that I’m enjoying this as well. ^_^  If it helps any, looking back on my own writing over the years, the trick seems mostly just to be to keep doing it?  My style as it is now crept up on me over the course of years of forum roleplay, and I had no idea how dramatically it had changed until I went back after the fact to reread some of the first posts I’d made.  (I think that boils down to “Keep calm and write on”.  You don’t have to be consciously aiming for an ideal in order to get better.)