#twitter imports

[angrennufuin]

Beach behavior post

Reminded of this idea by Jules, but the initial twitter thread is from June 2021:

How do your characters feel about the beach? What do they wear? What do they do when they're there? Do they get sunburned or tanned or actually wear enough sunscreen like some kind of monster? Gimme the beach takes!

Sûl has an enormous sunhat and spends most of her time under a giant beach umbrella wearing impractical Haute Couture swimsuits with filmy coverups and ogling beachgoers. She still gets horribly sunburnt and has to spend the following day lying in a dark room and wincing at sudden movement.

Lin has already made friends with the nearest beach volleyball team, tried unsuccessfully to surf, swum out inadvisably far and got slightly mesmerized by the pull of the ocean's vastness, caught a sheepshead fish and screamed but cooked it anyway. She's having a GREAT time. (Linmir tans shockingly dark and her hair bleaches shockingly white. She wears luridly patterned bikini tops with men's swim trunks and open Hawaiian shirts.)

Nee has gone full tidepool science and is collecting samples and shells and stuff. She wears watersocks or flippers, one of those giant goggle masks that go over the nose, and an incongruously frilly one-piece; she keeps excitedly pointing out interesting organisms she spots while swimming. She tans! But she wears a LOT of sunscreen, because she once read an article about skin cancer and has been paranoid since. She keeps wrestling her drow friend, Lylah, into putting more sunscreen on.

New kids coming in separate addition! Ah, 2021, having only 3 characters... What a time.

[wordsbetweenthelines]

[ tweet from @NightValeRadio says “We hold these truths to be self evident, even though, historically and in practice, none of them have seemed to be.”]

[kensatou]

meanwhile notes put up by the guy hired by my dad to help with foreign guests at his little ryokan in rural japan (“my english is not perfect,” said the guy earnestly. “but i think i can always get the meaning across.” “great,” said my dad. “that’s all that matters.”):

[angrennufuin]

Niosiki “Nee” Cranta The Halls of Screaming Stone Titanomachy Campaign (written in early 2020)

The Acorn Path academy prides itself on the gruelling nature of its entrance exam, but what you chiefly remember is the time just after its completion: the hour you spent waiting for news of acceptance or rejection. Prior to today, prior to right now, that hour was the longest one in your life.  Now, as then, the seconds drag past. Your stomach feels as if it is stuffed with boiling lead; a horrible itching restlessness crawls along your skin. You can feel every molecule of blood and sweat and cave dirt on your body and all of them are… Wriggling.

Now, as then, you pace in long circuits. Only this time, you’re pacing an underground passage instead of the deep-carpeted university hallway. That’s fine. The clatter of your hobnailed boots on the stone is more satisfying, anyway.

“Nee,” says someone, from somewhere; you don’t know where, because you’re extremely not interested in looking anybody in the eye right now.

“I’m fine,” you say, brusque, with a lot of dignity, and sit down on the ground. Sketch the outline of Prestidgitation in the air with your fingers; it’s a cantrip you’ve done a million times, and it’s actually almost relaxing. The invisible force that whisks everything unclean off of your skin and clothes. The almost-heat, almost-cold, almost-pressure of the sensation, all of those and also none of them. It steadies you, so you cast it again. Uselessly.

You didn’t take a single hit in this fight, so you don’t have any need to patch yourself up. You used maybe two spells, and flipping through your spellbook to prepare more takes precisely forty-seven seconds. Leaves three thousand, five hundred fifty-three before the rest of the party is ready to move on, and you feel every single one of those seconds like a weight on your ankles. 

Pacing bothers the people around you, apparently. People who got to the fight sooner, and, therefore, did get injured, and, therefore, need more rest. So you won’t pace. You cast Prestidigitation again. Still feel unclean, afterward.

This hour is stretching far, far longer than the other one, the Acorn Path one. You think about possible time-dilation or -compression spells (that’s, what, Dunamancy?) to occupy your brain, which otherwise will start churning about the fight itself. You refuse to think about that. Your brain is your most powerful weapon and you are not going to-- oh dammit, you’ve thought about it.

This hour is stretching, yes, far longer than seems possible or believable, but it’s nothing. Nothing, compared to the agonizing seconds of waiting to see if Tanith’s desperate spell would take. 

You’re thinking about it now, so any protection not thinking about it could have afforded is gone. That makes it okay to look across the cave, to let your eyes pass over Oz (sitting with one leg pulled up, leaning back against the wall, face pale and drawn, hands unsteady) and Lylah (squatting next to him, talking low and seriously). Nothing immediately happens, which makes it okay to take a deep breath. From this angle, the new scar on Oz’s face is glaring. Obvious, with its corpse-white hue, with the way it drags one eyelid down, with that eye’s iris gone pale green and milky. It’s not a clean scar, somehow. It makes your fingers itch to shape healing spells, even though you don’t know any. You have tried exactly one healing spell, back in university, which sucked and was boring. But still.

If you look at it logically, laying out all the facts, what happened shouldn’t be shocking. It really shouldn’t. Yesterday, you took a horrible gelatinous cave-thing to the face and upper body, and passed out twice within the span of an hour. Leif routinely gets skewered by assorted weaponry, and also hasn’t had an audible heartbeat in weeks. Lylah and Oz and, yes, Tanith and Symon and Arrie, too, have gotten knocked out plenty of times. Sometimes more messily than this. No one in this party is invulnerable, you know that. Obviously.

But it’s never been this bad before. Never anything that wasn’t fixable by dumping a healing potion down someone’s throat and hoping for the best; never anything that put you out of sorts like this. Leif and Lylah and, awfully, Oz -- you’ve been traveling with them going on five months now. You’re used to them being around. You kind of like them being around. And when you saw Tanith’s face as she leaned over Oz’s body -- when you thought, for an eternal, nasty moment, that he was gone for good--

Your thoughts stop right there. They refuse to congeal. It feels like someone is moving heavy furniture on your chest.

Pushing harder on that line of thought doesn’t even do any good. It just kicks your stupid heartrate into overdrive and shallows out your breathing, and that horrible, crushing weight on your chest gets worse. Your thoughts wheel away from Oz lying still, Lylah screaming, Leif’s intent stare, but the only replacement is Rill’s wrinkled face. Her lips, turned down at the corner. Her saying How did you get to be such a disappointment, Nee. Your skin itches again; if you got up. If you paced, back and forth, fast, vicious, maybe you’d feel better. But Oz is tired and Lylah might be crying; you cannot disturb them. Instead, you twirl your new wand in your fingers. Put it away. Cast Prestidigitation again, even though you can’t have possibly gotten dirty.

A sudden memory, that time at Acorn Path again: you’d folded a spare paper from your exam booklet into a shitty little fan to pass the time. You’re way better at paper-folding now; when you dig out a spare parchment from your pack, your hands are practised and sure on the creases.

Rabbit-ear fold. Outside-reverse. Pleat. Making the edges perfectly even, the folds crisp and straight, quiets your mind and soothes the weird itchy-jumpiness. It speeds time back up, too; it’s almost time to pack up when you look down and realize the finished shape of the thing you’ve made.

Your chest almost gets crushed again, but you take a deep breath through it. Stand up. Stalk across the cave, angry, now, all of a sudden.

You drop the tiny paper wolf in Oz’s lap just as he finishes talking to Lylah. Skitter your eyes away from his befuddled look. “Don’t do that again,” you say over your shoulder, already turning to go. You add, as an afterthought, “Asshole.”

Some of the pressure in your chest eases, just a little bit.

[politijohn]

Source

[wordsbetweenthelines]

[tweet from @broken says “Hi, sorry it took me five days to get back to your text. I myself am understaffed at the moment.”]

[wearenotjustnumbers2]

[pink-cloud-99]

[oooocleo]

ok surely this is allowed... im tripping over all these hands im drawing lately

patreon

[wordsbetweenthelines]

[tweet from @jonnysun says “high difficulty level escape room concept: u are laying in bed and u have one hour to get out of bed”]

[sapphic-design-is-my-passion]

[artsekey]

Thinking about the time I lost a game of Overwatch and I was so mad about it that I genuinely considered getting into shit with the other team in chat and then realized that it was a colossal waste of my living breathing Human Time and uninstalled Overwatch instead because it was only making me angry.

And then thought about the OTHER time when I was on TikTok and realized I was Not Enjoying Myself and was, in fact, seeing so many sad videos and fake influencer ads that I felt Truly Despondent and then just…Deleted it.

Imo I want my social media /general media experience to be a pleasant break from real world and I get to decide what I get to cull to make that a reality for myself. I highly reccomended it! Life has improved considerably!

[wordsbetweenthelines]

[tweet from @phineas says “Barbie derives her signature pinkness from red-hued carotenoids in the brine shrimp that comprise the majority of her diet”]

[taffywabbit]

reminding myself there are no truly "bad days", because every single day, someone somewhere in the world has taken a photo of an extremely tiny animal and shown it to someone else, and that's very good actually

[batfamhastwitter]

Part 38! If my family found my ao3 account I think that I would actually pass away I'm not even joking

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[annalrk-art]

maryland miku at the bus stop what will she do