vexnever

[vexnever]

Journey into the Mystical Grove 🌙✨

Hey everyone!

Today, I decided to skip my usual studies and embark on an adventure into the depths of Neverwinter Wood. With my faithful familiar—a loyal dog—by my side, we set out to explore the unknown.

As we ventured deeper, we noticed a mystical light shimmering through the trees. Guided by curiosity and my companion's instincts, we followed it and discovered an ancient stone archway adorned with glowing runes resembling constellations and lunar phases.

I took a moment to sketch these intriguing runes into my spellbook for future study. Feeling a deep connection, I offered a prayer to Selune, the Moon Goddess, seeking her guidance. The archway's glow intensified, and with a mix of excitement and reverence, we stepped through.

On the other side, we found ourselves in a tranquil grove bathed in perpetual moonlight. 🌌 Seven stone pillars encircled a serene reflecting pool, each pillar engraved with symbols of the moon's phases. The atmosphere was peaceful, filled with subtle magical energy and the soft whispers of a distant melody.

Now, standing in this celestial haven, I'm contemplating my next move:

Should I gaze into the reflecting pool for visions or messages?

Examine the stone pillars to uncover their secrets?

Attempt to commune with Selune for wisdom?

Or explore the grove further for hidden discoveries?

This unexpected journey has been incredible so far, and I can't wait to see where it leads next! Stay tuned for more updates on this mystical exploration. 🌙🐾

[vexnever]

Alexander Never Wizard Application

I am human. Despite my noble birth, I do not place myself above other folk. We all have the same blood. I am a free thinker. Inquiry and curiosity are the pillars of progress. I sold my soul for knowledge, killing neighborhood cats because I wanted to practice spare the dying. I hope I do great deeds and win my soul back. I am easily distracted by the promise of information. Gust was my second spell. I learned it from my parents.

As a level 3 wizard,

I have about 6 constitution. I rely on my intelligence and wisdom also gets me out of sticky situations.

I learned arcana and medicine from my mother. My father taught me simple weapons but I have no training in armor. I chose necromancy as my school.

As a necromancer, I reap the life from creatures I kill, gaining twice the hitpoints equal to the spell level, or three times if the spell is a necromancy spell like poison spray.

I know 3 cantrips and a level 1 spell: spare the dying, gust, find familiar, and poison spray.

I cast spare the dying by evoking arana from my spellbook on a dying creature. The creature becomes stable, stopping bleeding and making short-term repairs to the body. Creatures are in no shape to fight, however. Again by evoking arcana from my spellbook, I transmute the air, either pushing things away or making harmless sensory breezes. I cast poison spray by evoking a toxic spray from the spellbook. I cast find familiar by binding a spirit to a conjured animal and connecting telepathically to the spirit animal for combat. I can only summon one and the conjuration is disbanded if the familiar dies.

I can cast other spells as rituals. It takes a day per spell level to prepare and I can hold spells for one day.

I had religious grandparents so in tough times, I pray to Selune, the goddess of the moon. Her sigil is a pair of eyes surrounded by seven stars.

I typically keep around 10GP on me. I prefer comfort.

I do not belong to any organizations. I carry ink, ink pen, a book, a lamp, oil, paper, and a tinderbox.

[vexnever]

Wild Flowers Worth Knowing

The first was a lover. Shea did her duties, gathered, cleaned, and tended just enough. She made spare time to make abravah for her sisters, sharpened fishing poles for her mothers. 

She asked her father if she could journey towards the sun one day. She promised sweet meats and new fruit.

“Take Brej with you,” he said. “Show him love”. 

Brej was the youngest. He helped every way that he could. He gathered more than his sisters, cleaned more than his sisters, and tended to the gardens more than his sisters. He made no spare time, tired from all of his hard work. His mothers looked on him with worry.

Shea and Brej traveled for two days toward the sun. Brej gathered many fruits along the say. Shea carried none, until he had had enough. He began to scream

But she did not scream back. Shea explained, “I’m not going back”. And Brej screamed some more. 

“The world is too wide. The sky is too large. Don’t fill it with anymore rage. Go home and keep going.” This she had told him, then wiped away his tears, wrapped her arms around his body, and hummed The Song of the Wild Flower. 

[vexnever]

When I’m perfect, I’ll do the following daily:

I’ll wake up at 6:00am. 

I’ll stretch, do some cardio or go for a run. 

I’ll eat breakfast and read the newspaper(s). 

I’ll shower and put on clean clothes. 

I’ll brush my teeth, shave, and whatever. 

I’ll make my bed, and clean my room, and wash the dishes, and whatever. 

Work, watch tv, whatever. Nothing matters. 

Moral of the story is sooner or later, your work has to go out to the world. If you want to make money for something, you have to market it as something that someone else wants. You can’t buy your own stuff or live off of your own doing. Doing so would be pretty boring I guess, a farmer making food for himself. Sooner or later, he has to give it all away, or it dies. He’ll have a family or maybe a group of animals who depend on him to eat. They’ll become dependent on his produce. 

I guess that’s where I’m trying to grow up. People make all of these TV shows and books because there are people who aren’t working to make this stuff on their own. There’s a market for it. If I was a farmer, I don’t think I would sell stories. I would just sell food like everyone else. So yeah, maybe I should be a truck driver or an electrician, or a manager of a grocery store, or an analyst in the Army. Maybe I should just live the simpler life because that’s sort of what I’m made for. I like taking in the things that are made for me. I eat processed and packaged foods, not the things I’ve grown with my own hands. I don’t know the value of money or how to make it as a writer.

Whatever I do, I’m going to have to do well at it, which includes working hard to make something from scratch, based on the tools that I’ve accumulated this far. If I’m writing, I could start by adding my two cents to the conversation. I’m wary though because of breaking out the conversation of this or that is good or bad. There is a lot of critique online where that’s all they have to say, but it doesn’t really add to the conversation. Maybe it does. I’d have to analyst the critics and say if they are good or bad myself. Good thing I have an English degree then. That’s not what I want to talk about though, I think. I’d really like to look at stories, maybe also characters and the lessons they tell. I want to learn about the meaning of life. I want to know if there really is any point to it all. 

The therapists keep asking why I haven’t just ended it already. I think it’s because I want to know. There are some things I still want to know. I want to know what it will be like after I’m dead, but there’s time to find out. That option is still in my back pocket if I’ve exhausted everything else. I can’t kill myself because I may be wrong about the afterlife, but if I can’t remember anything that happened before I was born, then how would I comprehend something that happens after?

It’s nice when I can wipe my mind, when things slow down so much that all that’s left are the sounds that are around me. It makes laying here feel truly peaceful. The glow of my light is the sun, the hum of my AC is the breeze. Then you find yourself finally falling asleep. 

[vexnever]

Music scorches my body from inside out. Maybe it started with fruit juice too early to sunrise and a combination of bad choices which started yesterday at 9pm. My throat holds back cigarette ash, which I smoked throughout the night despite a brewing storm storm. Blood pools around my face and chest, ready to burst out of the pores of my nose. Regret is a useless word, one that one of us have, but it rests on the tip of my tongue. At least someone is getting some sleep.

[vexnever]

Need another century to get inspired

[vexnever]

I am not shy. I’m here, aren’t I? You wanted me to go away but here I am. You imagine me with a French accent, like that actress from the youtube video. She was cold, yet brilliant, and her coldness made her like everyone else. Maybe that’s exactly what she wanted. Maybe that’s whom you are making me out to be. I’ll be gone by the morning. I’m almost gone now. 

[vexnever]

After a night’s sleep and rereading the idea, I kind of understand what the assignment is getting at. I got angry because Woolf was deliberately using language and a style that implicitly gets at the point, deliberately using the womanly speech she characterizes to prove a point. Maybe she does this by accident and doesn’t acknowledge that she’s done so, but it’s obvious that it’s there. If she doesn’t realize, maybe I should be a little upset, but I don’t know yet. I still don’t really want to reread it. 

The book organizes an introduction before the passage where two things stick out to me. First it mentions Woolf’s stream of consciousness. A talked about this and it was pretty evident throughout her chapters. You could feel when her character took a pause to stop writing. You could feel when she came back and the thoughts were affected by things in her surrounding. The second thing was something that should have gone in the ideas portion. It says to “Weigh the value of her statement ‘Lies will flow from my lips, but there may perhaps be some truth mixed up with them; it is for you to seek out this truth’ (p. 21)”. I think this is my first clue as to the answers I’m looking for. She’s intentionally being allusive in her writing, which, without having reread yet, makes me think she’s unsure. But it could genuinely mean that she wants you to piece it together. I think it’s a nice thing to do. It’s a lot different than what we see in the news and TV now. People are so sure of themselves that there is no stream of consciousness. Everything comes easily in this information age. People don’t have to look for the facts because they are presented full faced. She presents her stream of consciousness as a way to show what she does know, her thoughts and experiences, and ties it with what she knows. I don’t know if there’s anything like it, other than a person telling you every detail of what’s on their mind. Total honesty. The truth, the facts are imbedded in., and we get a sense of her credibility. She’s not lying because she has been giving everything up until this point. An open book. 

But she does mention that lies will flow from her lips, but I think that is to say that one person’s truth is a lie to someone else. There is no way to be completely factual, but she asks the reader to look into it and find truth in it for yourself. Those were the only notes that I jotted down in the introduction. It’s taking me a long time to convince myself to go and reread. 2 days I’ve spent on this so far and I’d rather talk about nonsense than read this passage again. I’ll reread it now, and explain the other things I’ve jotted down along the way. 

witticisms —n. a witty remark, duh. 

inextricably —adv. in a way that is impossible to disentangle or separate

I underlined “unsolved problems” in the sentence “women and fiction remain, so far as I am concerned, unsolved problems”. I’m confused a little, because she opens the writing in a way that suggests she is doing it for the purpose of defining the phrase “women and fiction”. But why? Whose’s asking her to do this? Maybe no one. Maybe it is the writer over her shoulder. Maybe she does this because she is as bored as I am. But she does explain that it can’t be done. My first thought is who cares, but that’s beside the point. Maybe I’m getting tired of this altogether. She explains that she has a few options when given this task. She could allude to women whom write and some other things, but ultimately choosing one path would do the others a disservice and whoever she’s writing this for would simply take her definition, her witticisms and stick them on a shelf, like a dictionary, unthought provoking and dim. So she’s going to explain. 

I can see where she isn’t telling the truth. She could simply say, I don’t know, and if anything I’ve found that I like Virginia Woolf for it. She won’t admit it to herself. She has to go through the motions, digging through her stream of consciousness to find the answer to a question she may never have the answer to. I think that’s what she means when she says that she will lie, because lies are just truths that haven’t been proven wrong yet. In the moment that we say something, we believe what we say, if at least for a moment. It’ll become a lie if it is, but everything starts out as a truth. Big Little Lies has me rolling. What a good show. I think it’s over, but I really fucking hope not. I don’t know what I was saying or if it was coherent. 

Unsolved problems. She can’t answer the question because there are unsolved problems associated with it. I don’t know either V. dawg. Maybe I’m missing the point. Maybe I’m not supposed to go back and write for every note that I jotted down in the book. If I am, I’m definitely going to take less notes in the future. This is tiring and I don’t like that I have to split my focus between something I should do (reading) and something I want to do but can’t because I have nothing to say (writing). Maybe I should reread the entirety of it again, but if I do, when is there time to revisit my notes? When is there time to explain quotes that I liked? A teacher would be nice, but I don’t think anyone has the answers to these questions. I don’t like being the computer that’s working to figure it out. I don’t know what kind of computer I want to be. 

[vexnever]

Prompt: Woolf’s essay challenges readers because her style is deliberately relaxed, almost as though she is luxuriating in the fact of her own financial and spatial independence. Woolf frequently expects us to figure out for ourselves the full implications of what she is saying. Another way to put this is to say her meanings are often implicit rather than explicit. Apparent digressions often turn out to be related to her central theme, but we have to work out how they are related by paying close attention to meanings implicit in these digressions. As you reread A Room of One’s Own, pay close attention to Woolf’s use of digressions, noting the places where she tells us things explicitly and places where you are not sure what, exactly, she is doing or saying. Underline places where Woolf uses words that connect digressions to her main theme. Why does she so often make her argument indirectly, by implication?

The idea of rereading this things. I don’t want to do it. It’s interesting because I really wanted to read it in the first place. I don’t know where that urge came from. Maybe it goes so far back as the first time I read a book, that excitement that I was learning and growing from there. I can’t imagine an excitement from rereading. The suffering and confusion I had when I first read it will probably still be there. I have things I could say about the “Ideas for Rereading” that I can have separate from my initial reading. I don’t know what the right word is to describe it. It’s like retracing steps, walking backwards down an upward hill.

I imagine the contestants on Naked and Afraid, how they have to climb a mountain to get to their extraction point, starving and thirsty. It’s like how they get to the top and no one is ever like, “wow” let’s do that again, right now, before I have time to think or do anything else. A lot of people even have an okay time out in the wild, but still no one is itching to immediately go back. I’m not itching in the same way. They don’t talk about in the introduction how this would feel. They do say that it will be easier the second time around. I’ll probably read it faster and pick up things I didn’t the first time because of my daydreaming or lack of interest. Still, that excitement is gone. I’d much rather move on to the next story, but still, the challenge or “ideas” at the end of each passage are there to test my skills so to speak. So I want to do it. That’s why I haven’t said fuck it already and moved on. I want to do this. I’m just afraid. 

I started off by writing. I was going to follow the book’s suggestion of splitting the page into two and annotating away from the book after annotating inside the book’s margins or underlining. My hand cramped up pretty early on and I didn’t know the best way to organize my large handwriting on such a small page. 

I started off by breaking down the first sentence in the “idea”. I didn’t agree that it was a challenge because her style is “deliberately relaxed”. I thought that it was because the writing was so challenging to me. I don’t know. Now that I’m going back and trying to remember what I wrote and where my head was at is already difficult. I was angry. I know that for sure, because the book’s authors and not Woolf had already made a few assumptions about me. They were right in the end, but I still didn’t like it. I already find it weird that I have to look over my notes and defend my position between Woolf, the textbook’s authors, and my old self. I wrote, “I already disagree with this. Maybe if they used a word other than because. I don’t agree that it is relaxed. I actually think it was very pressuring, because I went looking for something challenging” and I guess I forgot to mention that I found it. This work was very challenging for me. I go on to say, “Aside from watching TV or reading fiction, this was the opposite of ‘relaxed’. 

It probably challenged readers not because of the style— I don’t— unless style is something like her academic prose, but even then, academic writing isn’t really relaxed. I get that there were times where she was speaking in a relaxed manner like her stream of consciousness” which is where I realized I may have been wrong. I saw that since she was writing about her day to day activities, the book authors say that it was relaxed. It’s academic. She spoke with a great vocabulary and her ideas seemed fleshed out, but this is probably only the case because she is well read and writes often. I’m sure if I were at her caliber or the caliber of the authors of the book, I may feel the same way. I go on to write in my notes, “Maybe that’s what it means because I was not relaxed. She was relaxed, but it made me tense— challenged me to find the point of her drawn out writing”. I still agree with my old self there. The relaxed style she used I guess made it seem like she could go on forever without ever answering the question. It made me mad while I first read it because I guess I wanted something clear and concise and instead got drawn out and challenging. This is what I asked for though, when I set out for something to do today. 

I got to the next sentence in my notes and had to cut it short because my hand was cramping. Typing is already proving better since I’ve gotten to the next page without breaking a sweat really. I will say that getting to the end of the page makes my work feel “relaxed” to use their word. I know my ideas are unedited so while at first getting to the end of the page was an accomplishment, now it seems that getting to the end of the page is only a good thing when you are at the end of your ideas, when you have said everything you needed to say about a topic and can move on to the next paper. I wonder how many pages this would produce if I were writing it down. 

The next sentence, coupled with my burning wrist are what make me mad, but I don’t have the quotes to back it up. That, I’m sure is the point of second reading, to find the points and work with them based on the source material. What made me mad is, as I put it, “I agree. This is her only using one side of her brain— the womanly brain that she talks about when referring to a man’s decisive writing”. Now, she doesn’t say that she uses both womanly and manly writing, but the fact that she blatantly throws it out that a man is not using both without acknowledging that she is doing the same, as a way of shaming him for not being right in his writings, made me mad. I can’t help it if I’m doing the same, but without proper instruction, why bring it up in the first place. I’m sure I’ll have to look up the answer to that when I read it again. Also, I’d like to note that I’m starting to want to reread it more and more. The more I write, the more I want to flesh out details that I’ve missed and questions that I have for the passage that I hope to answer. Side note, I also think I like typing better because it uses both hands as apposed to one from writing on paper. 

So in summary, I’d like to map out clearly, what the fuck she’s talking about, what it means for the ideas she introduced in the beginning of the work, and find out why it made me so mad in the first place. What gaps does she have in her writing? What gaps is she detailing in men and women? Is she doing the same shit she detailed? Does she say how to fix the problem? Am I a misogynist? Probably can’t answer them all, but I’ll try. Oh! and then I have to answer the actual questions from the Ideas. This is troubling because this is the first one and I’ve already written a page and a half of nonsense.