#we'll see how long it stays that way...

[papermonkeyism]

It's the Intense Wanderlust time of the year!

I am inspired! I want to wander forest paths and draw and tell stories and and and

I might have some regrets tomorrow about the amount of walking I've done today, but in my defense the weather was pretty and consequences are for losers.

[vaguely-concerned]

sophia seeing cailan's body hanging there when they go back to ostagar, and suddenly all she can see even through the rot and the ruin is just how much he looked like alistair...... :'(

a mental image that totally will not haunt her through alistair's many years on the throne as rebellions and assassination attemps come and go. doesn't send her unhinged and unwise even a little

[spaghett-onaplate]

depression is really weird actually wdym i spent 2.5 years of my life in bed

[fictionadventurer]

I thought that it was stupid that Brandon Sanderson had the narrator of Tress of the Emerald Sea call all the unnamed sailors "Dougs" when he could have just called them, you know, sailors. But then I started using the term. Turns out having a word for "yes, we know that realistically all these individuals have unique identities and personalities, but they're not the focus of this story so we're going to treat them as faceless background characters" is surprisingly useful.

[flufflecat]

New project: start

[eosofspades]

in these trying times, please keep in mind that people who claimed cayde was coming back all along can enjoy their vindication and people who claimed his story was over and he was not going to come back in beyond light/witch queen/haunted/lightfall were ALSO right and we don't have to have another fandom war a la season of the haunted please let the main tags remain functional

[noamuth]

Mental Handshake

Characters infected with an Illithid parasite can recognize each other as infected once they step within a certain distance (probably about 5 feet, considering they seem to trigger once within conversational range), unless a character passes a Wisdom check (up to player's discretion).

This comes in the form of a mental link between the parasites, and often flashes of emotions or memories. Some flashes one might get upon meeting Dalamus are as follows:

For all his hostility/pride, underneath it you sense pain. Fear. Loneliness. And a veritable ocean of distrust. This world is not his--it is too open, too bright, too hot, too soft. He aches to return home, to the dark.

You see the inside of the Nautiloid through the eyes of the drow as he attempts to escape his pod. He does not call out for help. Too proud. Too fearful. Once free, he moves stealthily through the ship, following other escapees. But he does not join them, does not help in their battles or their escape. Untrusting. He follows, ducking behind corners and into hallways to hide his presence, allowing them to clear the path for him.

You see a sprawling underground city. Cold, dark buildings rise from the cavern floor, their architecture as sharp and dangerous as their inhabitants. Eerie, magic-fueled purple flames light windows and braziers across the city, illuminating countless spider motifs. Menzoberranzan. The City of Spiders, (bonus context, if knowledgable enough: where Priestesses of Lolth rule with iron fists and fickle whims, and where murder is just a business strategy employed by the poor and noble alike).

You are a dark-haired drow noble kneeling before his Matron at the gates of an underground city. Your face is hot with pain and tears and blood, and the taste of iron fills your mouth as you beg to stay in her service. Regret squeezes your heart and the breath from your lungs. Your stomach roils with dread. You hope your words can convince the Matron, but she mercilessly stamps out that hope with a single word in Drowic: "Z'haan."

Multiple choices given and varying detail allowed to give other players the ability to decide how much information their character will glean.

Individual character's knowledge affects how useful this information is to them, of course.

[waywardsalt]

easily my favorite boss in elden ring so far

[orcelito]

I'm in the woods again

[dreamersscape]

Does it feel like life is permanently set to extreme hard mode and I still feel super crappy greater than 90% of the time? Yup. But! Emboldened by our relative success with last year's tomatoes, we have given it another go and have added a little pepper plant friend for them. :)

(It may look like the peppers aren't doing as well as the tomatoes, but it cannot be overstated just how bananas this plant's growth chart has been; it's determined to escape the confines of its basket-cage; it has to be constantly rotated so it doesn't completely lose the battle with gravity; I only took this picture the other day and it already looks SO outdated. Can't stop, WON'T STOP.)

[derinthescarletpescatarian]

wait, Derin how did your leaving make the hospital shut down?

I used to work as a live-in nanny for a pediatrician.

Now, the thing about hospitals in my country is that they are massively understaffed and massively underfunded. This is especially true outside the major cities. The staff are worked to the bone and receive little to no help in things like finding accommodation or childcare, making working in rural areas a very uninviting prospect; staff come out here, get lumped with the work of three people (because there's nobody else to do it), burn out under the workload and leave, meaning that those remaining have even more work because that person is gone. It's unsustainable and the medical staff are doing their best to sustain it, because people die if they don't, so to the higher-ups it looks like everything's getting done and therefore everything is fine.

My friend (and boss) worked one week on, one week off, swapping out with another pediatrician. This was necessary because it would not be physically possible for one person to handle the workload for longer periods of time. The one single pediatrician had to hold up the entire pediatrics ward, which was not only the only public hospital pediatrics ward in our town, but also the one that served all the towns around us for a few hours' drive in all directions. I regularly saw her go to work sick, aching, tired, or with a debilitating 'I can barely make words or see' level migraine, because if she took a day off, twenty children didn't get healthcare that day, and some of these kids' appointments were scheduled weeks in advance. She'd work long hours in the day and then be called in a couple of times overnight for an hour or two at a time (she was on-call at night too, because somebody had to be), and then go in the next day. Sometimes she would be forced to take a day off because she physically could not stay awake for longer than a few minutes at a time, meaning she couldn't drive to work.

Cue my niece's second birthday coming up in Melbourne. I'd been working for her for about 3 years, and she (and the hospital) had plenty of advance warning that I (and therefore she) needed one (1) Friday off. That's fine, we'll find someone to work that Friday, the hospital said. Right up until the last week where they're like "oh, we can't find a replacement; you can come in, can't you?"

No, she tells them; I don't have anyone to watch my kid that day.

Oh, surely you can hire a babysitter for this one day, they say. Think of the children! We really really need you to work that day. I know we said it'd be fine but we need you now, there's no one else to do it.

There are no other babysitters, she told them. Unless you can find one?

That's not our responsibility, they said.

But I'm not changing my plans, she's got plans by now as well, the hospital knew about this one day weeks in advance, and with absolutely no reserve staff they're forced to reschedule all pediatrics appointments for that Friday. Not a huge deal, it happens on the 'physically too overworked to get out of bed' days too. I go to Melbourne, she goes back to her home in Adelaide for her recovery week, all should be on track.

My niece gives me Covid.

This was way back in the first wave of the pandemic, and there were no Covid vaccines yet. The rules were isolate, mask up, hope. I had Covid in the house, and it would've been madness for my friend and her toddler to come back into the Covid house instead of staying in Adelaide. There was absolutely no way that a pediatrician could live with someone in quarantine due to Covid and go to work in the hospital with sick children every day. And no support existed for finding another babysitter, or temporary accommodation, so the hospital was down a pediatrician.

The other pediatrician wasn't available to do a three-week stint. They were also trapped in Adelaide on their well-earned week off.

Meaning that the only major pediatrics ward within a several-hour radius had no pediatricians. They had to shut down and send all urgent cases to Adelaide for the week. To the complete absence of surprise of any of the doctors or nurses; of course this would happen, this was bound to happen, it presumably keeps happening. But probably to the surprise of the higher-ups. After all, the hospital was doing fine, right? Of course all the staff were complaining of overwork and a lack of resources in every meeting, but they could always be fobbed off with the promise of more help sometime in the future; the work was mostly getting done, so the issue couldn't be too urgent.

It's not like some nanny who doesn't even work for the hospital could go out of town for a weekend for the first time in three years, and get the only public pediatrics ward in the area shut down for a week.

[atomskdluffy]

Today was pretty much Sunday part 2 for me, mostly because I did laundry I didn't have time for yesterday, but also because I pretty much did nothing (on purpose). Or so I thought, but I actually started a few things I had been meaning to do for a bit, so it doesn't feel as much like nothing as it could have. Either way, I need to figure out what I'm doing tomorrow. Either I'm going for a walk or playing VR games all day, we'll see what happens!

[phagodyke]

venting sorry... don't want to just delete it bc it helps to get it out just ignore this post pls 👍

haven't slept much at all and feeling so sick andstressed and in pain bc my period is due and so tired its making me dizzy but i cant sleep more or ill just feel more sick and I want a hug and to cry so hard into someones shoulder but no one cares or will even come near me it makes me feel diseased they think things about me that aren't true bc I struggle so much to communicate and thry all make assumptions insteqd and no one wants to give me space to talk to them about it so I cant undo that now and its all my fault and I'm so. exhausted :-(

[neverendingford]

.

[skeletalheartattack]

hi, i've been readin dragon ball for the first time these past few weeks and just finished the part where they're on planet namek. I Understand What You See In Him.

he's fucking something right??? ohhh straight up, you should see (and hear) him in the anime as well if you think you have the full picture. i've been absolutely obsessed forever

[makemycitybreak]

I should lose weight again