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cannibalbuffe · 2 months

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hi! I've honestly been craving some qpr headcanons with Alastor as someone who's also aroace! The concept piques my curiosity so much considering most of the stuff with him is purely romantic (no offense to those writers, I just wanna see more qpr stuff! :])

Of course! But do forgive me, annon, I got so carried away with this 😅. I just really like Alastor a lot.

I ended up writing some backstory to your relationship first, but I highlighted the start of the proper qpr headcanons if you feel like skipping that.

Obligatory I'm sorry if this is ooc, I'm still getting used to writing about these characters. This is also all based on my own perception of him.

(Also, I am aware that qprs are very different from one another and there is no single mold for a qpr, I'm just going off of what I think it would be like with Alastor.)

Uhh, I also finished this at 1 AM, so forgive any mistakes. And I'm pretty sure I changed the verb conjugations(? Is this how you say that in English?) from present to past at some point. Sorry. Enough with the A/Ns now. Hope you enjoy!

Alastor queerplatonic relationship headcanons

(gender neutral reader, Alastor x reader)

‼️Trigger-warning‼️: mentions of cannibalism (not graphic), a single mention of tongue-kissing and making out (spoiler: he doesn't want either of those things in this work.) Usage of the word queer, but not as a slur. Alastor is a grandpa and you have to explain LGBTQ+ stuff to him, but he gets it.

› At first, before you were close, it's likely that he didn't see you as an equal.

› Truly, in his eyes, it seems not really is his equal. He is the most powerful overlord in hell and he knows it.

› Unless you are someone he holds in high regard (and this is mostly based on vibes, barely anything to do with power, as we can see by how he is with Lucifer of all people) before your first meeting, like Zestial, you won't be on equal footing at first.

› You only really start getting close when his perception of you shifts.

› You respect his boundaries, you are interesting, you and him share quite a few interests (or not really, but you're at least interested in hearing about his), and you're, surprisingly, pretty wise and mature.

› And caring. I personally believe he would be drawn to that in a way that he may not even understand fully- or realize it at all.

› Still, the point is. He respects you, and you respect him.

› (And not in the way some others do, where they're only "respectful" out of fear. You would act like this regardless of his power.)

› This, by the way, is important. You don't treat him like a superior, but as an equal.

› You'd think someone like him would love to be treated like a superior, and it's true. He very much does.

› But he has to admit to himself that it does feel nice whenever someone isn't shaking in their boots and can hold really good conversations with him while still not being pushy, annoying or just generally disrespectful.

› Anyways.

› Ever since you became friends (which took long), one could say, you just kept becoming closer and closer.

› You were the first one to be vulnerable with him, of course. It happened on accident, but you trusted him enough for that.

› You were also the first one to share any more intimate information with him. Something you wouldn't tell just anyone.

› Between this, your conversations, and maybe even helping each other around (honestly, he probably helps you more than you do him, but you always offer it and always in a sweet way, never condescending, and he appreciates that.)

› He eventually felt more comfortable sharing personal things with you too.

› (He may have distanced himself a bit when he realized this, but it was short-lived. You can't be without each other for so long, and you were pretty upset at his suddenly withdrawal. You may not have mentioned it to him, but he could tell, and as much as he hated to admit it, it hurt him to see you sad because of him.)

› This marks the beginning of the path toward your queerplatonic relationship.

› I mean, you didn't initially label it as such, but it definitely started there.

› Surprisingly, I feel like the first one to ever do any sort of affectionate gesture towards the other was him.

› You knew he didn't like to be touched, so you didn't.

› But! He just started getting more and more comfortable with touching you. At first it was hands on your shoulders, or putting his arm over them.

› I can even see a head pat or two, which he probably passed off as some sort of joke the first few times, but, if you liked them so much, just became a thing he does to you.

› And then one day you, completely absent-mindedly, intertwined your arm with his while walking around.

› When you noticed you had done it and he hadn't said anything, you questioned him about it.

› "Alastor, I'm sorry I didn't ask... is this alright?"

› "This?... Oh, you mean the arms? Ah, dear, don't worry, if it weren't I would have simply told you so!"

› From them on you only got more and more physically affectionate with each other. At first you would usually be the one to start it, but eventually you were both shockingly equal in doing so.

› (You still would always ask if you could touch him beforehand, but after a while he just gave you a free-pass.)

› Not a lot in public, though. Mostly just hand holding, or intertwining arms (if in public, that is.)

› Alastor also was so protective of you. You were the person he treasured most, after all.

› Well, demon.

› Even if you told him you were going to be okay, he would watch out nonetheless. He couldn't afford to lose you, not when he's never trusted and cared for a person this much.

› You two also cuddle a lot. You were the first one to ask, as usual, but now both of you feel weird sleeping alone.

› Alastor loves being the big spoon, if you're doing that.

› But he is also quite fond of occasionally being the little spoon, although he wouldn't be caught dead admitting it.

› A hobby you two do together is cooking. Cooking with Alastor is fun... especially if you're okay with cannibalism.

› But if you don't like that, he won't insist, of course.

› He's pretty good at cooking, though! If you're also good at it, then great. If not, he'll tease you about it (in a friendly way), but still teach you.

› On teasing, he teases you quite a bit, but never in a mean way. If you don't mind, of course.

› You also may tease him occasionally, but he doesn't appreciate you teasing him in public.

› The two of you also have a good amount of inside jokes that probably confuse the hell out of the others.

› Kissing... well. I don't really see Alastor as the type who would enjoy kissing on the lips too much.

› Tongue is out of question for him, as well as any sort of making out, but otherwise... if you like it, he can do that for you.

› He might actually like a peck or two. An acquired taste for him. Don't overdo it, though.

› Of course, him being from the 1930s and not very familiar with anything LGBTQ+ related, he would, at first, be somewhat confused by the request.

› You would probably have to explain to him that nothing is inherently romantic, especially not if you don't want it to be.

› "A kiss on the lips? Well... we aren't courting, Y/n."

› "We can put our own meanings to things, though. Would you like this kiss to be romantic?"

› "Definitely not!"

› "Well, me neither. So it's not!"

› "... That is very sound logic! I can't believe I've never thought of this myself."

› Kisses on the rest of the face are something else, though. He does enjoy it whenever you kiss him on the cheek. He himself might occasionally kiss you on the forehead.

› But overall I don't think he's big on kissing.

› If you want to really solidify that you're in a queerplatonic relationship you'd also have to explain what that means to him, sorry.

› Again, he's old and not up to date with things.

› Thankfully he understands things easily.

› "I see... I suppose we do have quite the queer relationship, don't we? And it is certainly platonic. I don't see why not!"

› Going back to vulnerability. It will never feel fully natural for him to just be vulnerable with you — or anyone else, for the matter.

› (In case you couldn't tell, he's using the word queer as meaning odd (and doing a little pun. You know. Because it's a. Queerplatonic relationship. Queer. Hehehehe), as it defies the norm of what a platonic relationship usually looks like, despite being one.)

› But you know him well enough at this point to recognize whenever there's something going on with him.

› And if you show concern and give him enough time he will share whatever it is with you.

› If it's not anything too big he might even reach out to you first.

› He can also read you like a book and gives surprisingly good advice, and is also pretty good at comforting you.

› You are the only person allowed at his studio while he's live on the radio. You usually read as he speaks in the background, his voice is very relaxing. He enjoys having you around.

› He's also particularly gentlemanly to you, more than to the others. When you're with him you never have to open a single door yourself, for one. If it's raining, he'll hold the umbrella for the two of you. When walking together on the sidewalk, he's always on the side closest to the street instead of you.

› You two often go out for dinner. If you also fancy some cannibalism, he will definitely show you his favorite restaurants around. If not he will just pick the best non-cannibal places (but you know those are not his favorites, haha.)

› He just cares about you a lot, even if it took him long to admit (it may have seemed fast-paced during this, but Alastor is someone who really takes long to get close to.)

› And you care about him lot too!

› (And you're probably never going to be in a life-threatening situation again, at least not at the hands of most demons. Who would ever want trouble with Alastor?)

#alastor x reader #platonic alastor x reader #queerplatonic alastor x reader #hazbin hotel x reader #headcanons #buffet tag

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frenchgremlim1808 · 2 months

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Why Midori is such a breath of fresh air or how to actually write a Villain.

So the awaited essay, the winner of the FrenchGremlin polls of laziness finally has come! It took some time but it’s finally over. If your choice didn’t get chosen that’s okay! I’ll repost a new poll with old and newer options. Please reblog this one i put a lot of time in it, it's like, five pages long over a silly goose. Also sorry for the grammar i sucks and i'm not native. So let’s begin:

(also here is the link to the video format)

So first let’s make things clear, What IS a villain?

“A villain is a character whose evil actions or motives are important to the plot.” That is why I do want to make a difference between a villain and an antagonist, an antagonist is a character who are a plot devices that creates obstruction to the protagonist. That means that a villain is forced to be an antagonist while an antagonist is not forced to be a villain. For example shin is an antagonist but not a villain, he is driven by selfish desires which are themselves fueled by fear anger and loss, he is the protagonist of his own story and is a sympathetic character despite it all, and Midori is just a bitch. Midori falls under multiple stereotypes of villains. Such as “the mastermind”, “evil incarnate” (lmao),”related to the protagonist” etc. Midori is evil, there is no denying in this, he is purely evil, and he doesn’t have a sad weepy backstory, he doesn’t feel empathy towards other, he is a despicable piece of shit who ruined so many lives. I won’t list everything but here is a list of his crimes, murder, assault, domestic abuse, grooming, verbal abuse, and torture, crimes against humanity lmao, stalking, violent crimes, and participation in a cult. And his worst crime is being a pussy bitch of course. So now that we have put the bases up let’s really begin.

Hollywood has a hate boner against villains and I hate them for that.

Recently Hollywood decided that pure evil bad guys is actually a bad thing, so now they decided to do stupid side story with them, to give them ”””depth””” since I guess how could we like those villains since they are bad. A great example of this is the Disney remakes which I loathe so much oh god I hate them. So first they did a maleficient it was okay honestly, then they did a freaking cruella movie where her mom gets killed by Dalmatians, that’s not a joke, in the peter and wendy movie that nobody saw they decided to have made the captain hook be a lost boy who was abandoned by the lost boys and peter, oh also they decided that PETER CUT HIS HANDS OFF AND LEFT HIM TO DIE BECAUSE HOOK WANTED TO SEE HIS FAMILY. They are going to do a freaking mufasa movie, in no time I can’t wait to have a Ursula movie where it’s discovered that ariel killed all of her family in cold blood or something’s. So you might say what’s the problem? I mean isn’t that supposed to make the story more interesting. No, no it doesn’t, because first they take all of the character personality traits and throw them in the bin, second they are supposed to be the vilain in a musical animated movies, I am not against complex villain, I love them, but by doing this, the original character doesn’t exist anymore. Just create original content with new interesting characters instead of doing stuff like this. Also it’s kind of funny than in all of those interpretation they take all the fun and sucks it out, what do I mean by fun, the gayness, Disney vilain are fun because they are camp, they are fabulous extravagant extra in all the ways possible, and that’s the reason we liked them. Not every character needs something super deep, like “my family was burned down at the stake and my dog was eaten by my ex”, sometimes we just like bad fun people, they are the story, and Hollywood hating them so bad just bothers me a lot. Also now the new thing is to not have a villain at all which can works in some narrative but not all of them, it gets boring after a while. In the past people were angry that villains are bland, but now I kind of miss it. While I will critique villains who have no purpose outside of being evil that’s dumb, like for example Voldemort is bland like white bread because his only motivation is being evil, but evil people do exist compared to what some Hollywood writers think, they should know. So that’s why I will put a difference between evil villains and villains whose only purpose is being evil; we loved Disney villains but they still had motivations, goals, reasons that to them a least were worth everything. World domination isn’t enough, why do you want world domination, what is the true reason deep in your heart, is it an inferiority complex, is it a savior complex fuelled by xenophobic beliefs.

That is how to write a pure evil villain, evil people exist all over the world, but I have never seen one who doesn’t have they own reasons to be so bad, it doesn’t excuse their actions nor really explains them. We do not want justifications we want explanations. If you are justifying evil behavior then do it, but don’t claim that it is a pure evil character. A pure evil character can be fun, can be interesting, he can be deep, it’s all about balancing all of their traits to truly make them greats. Which is why midori succeeds while current villains fail. Current stupid remake/spin off try to justify the behavior because they feel like this is what the audience wants, but it’s not what we need. So I will defend to the grave evil villains.

Creating an evil villain doesn’t make them boring guys.

Why the heck does big budget movies have either the blandest protagonist or the blandest villains sometimes both, like I said evil people do exist but comically evil character only works in satire not in a serious multiple millions of dollar movie. Example that boring ass avatar movie, the one with blue people, none of the characters are interesting the villain is one note. The lords of the rings also suffers from that, but I don’t care because the protagonist are so awesome that sauron being personality less doesn’t matter. Also sauron is more of a force of nature villains so it’s not the same. The recent kingsman movie has a bland one note villain, there is nothing entertaining, funny, about him he’s just evil, borrrrring. Every Disney remakes depiction of the characters are boring. I just feel bored out of my mind. Atla one of my favorite shows of all time has a main villain that’s kinda one note, Ozai, but he is actually intimidating guy, azula is the superior character, but I wouldn’t consider her a villain she is an antagonist though. I honestly don’t get why Hollywood thinks that just creating a character with no personality and whose only goals is to be evil is good.

So back to midori for a second, here is my question, when midori was on screen did you ever feel bored? Never right! Because despite midori being an evil character he has an actual personality, he’s fun, you want to punch him in the balls. Because midori has other personality traits than evil, midori is petty, childish, extremely intelligent, controlling, a natural manipulator, he is a trickster, he doesn’t seem to get some social norms, he is narcissistic, easily angry, and fears death etc See how I counted a lot of traits, traits that in other character would works, midori has positive traits, and I think that is the best thing nankidai could have ever done, midori has traits that a regular person could have. Which is why if I put midori in any settings his character would work.

Example, instead of a death game the cast is under the sea to discover the insane wildlife and supernatural stuff happening, what would midori do in this situation? Well he would very passionate about finding all of what’s happening, he’ll do anything to find out, even sometime sacrificing others, not only will he try to find what’s happening, but he is also going to try to find a way to make this discovery favour him in the end. Or let’s imagine it’s a vampire situation, where a vampire attacks the city, midori would try to stop it, not because he cares, but to experiment on them to get their biology and finds the real secret of immortality since he fears death.

Here is my second advice, after creating your character try to imagine them in another completely different situation, like normal life, or a fantasy world, ask yourself the question what would they do in that environment? If you can find a real complete explanation of their actions then yes your character has multiples dimensions if not try thinking about it again. Some example of questions I do want to point out are some like “if my character had all the power in the world what would they do first or”, “if my character had only a day left to live what would they do”

Why is Current media incapable of creating good threats like bruhhhh.

Okay so first of all let’s talk about stakes in a story, let’s say you are watching a slasher movie, slowly the cast gets slimmed down and people die in horrible ways, that should set stakes right ? Well if the villain is an absolute buffoon who makes the stupidest actions and decisions in the world, you wouldn’t feel intimidated at all because despite what the filmmaker might try to say the plot armor will NEVER make a character intimidating. It’s just like a detective character who just seems to know everything without a thought, well you won’t really fear the character failing. Worse is the the final girl, who is for some reason always escaping the slasher guy by pure luck every time, she is shown as incompetent but still she survives, which make the villain seem completely incapable so now you feel nothing.

To avoid this filmmaker often use techniques such has unpredictability, I mean good I mean good ones, for example instead of immediately seeing whose going to survive because the black guys always dies first and the virgin white woman is the last survivor, change the status quo, make us think that this character is obviously safe while they actually aren’t at all. Or actually make them menacing by SHOWING to the audience how horrible dangerous they can be. Which is why SHOW DON’T TELL is so important, telling us how dangerous someone can be only to see them get beaten to death at the end of the movie makes us feel nothing.

Midori felt like a impossible person to beat, he is smart, had twenty plans in advance, even in situation where the cast felt like they might have a chance he was always armed, just like the gun he promised to use or the rocket punch. When they felt like they were finally advancing, he put obstacle in their ways, such as the collar game or the moment he put the collar on explode mode for ranmaru. The entire point in the murder game was to make time pass, it took a long time for the cast top realize that this whole time they were losing precious time not realizing that the dummies were the real problem. The characters that made you feel the most hopeless were the dummies, if you won by killing midori they would die, but if you lost you might lose people you love (keiji or gin). It felt hopeless because they were no solutions in the end. That creates tension so that creates stakes. If we were told how dangerous unpredictable sou was then it wouldn’t hit the same, we are shown that he is that terrible. There is a scene ingame where bbg shin ai tells us that midori tortured and like to destroy people. That’s exposition so TELL, but do you why it works, because we are SHOWN before his behavior. Midori felt unbeatable, so the fact that we were shown his weakness such has his petty behavior, hatred of minors, and fear of death, for the first time it feels like there is a chance that we might survive this. And still after he isn’t shown has an incompetent buffoon, he is one, but the narrative doesn’t show us that he is.

What is also consider is good to make the audience feel actual stakes is to first really develop well the main characters, how can we feel worry for a character if we don’t know them, the audience need to feels emotional connection to the main cast to actually care. You can use things such has moments where there is nothing special happening just character talking getting to know them. Make us feel why we need to care about them possibly losing, instead of being indifferent. Or I don’t know maybe make an entire spin off game where we get to have the cast talk to each other and seeing dynamics between character that died early to get them a chance to shine and make their death even more tragic, or even make mini episodes of characters who only got a single chapter to show off their characteristic, to get us to know them better? But that’s just a silly idea of course, wink, and wink.

My favorite thing about Midori is that he is actually pathetic, like really pathetic, but weirdly realistic?

Midori is the most pathetic character in the cast, yes more than shin, shin is leagues less pathetic. No I’m not saying that midori is not intimidating or scary, I would piss myself if I saw him. He’s a scary guy. But if you look at him more closely you can see that he is a baby brat in a big boy suit.

So let’s start by something clear, Sou Hiyori clearly displays antisocial behavior, or in common terms he is a psychopath/sociopath, this illness is very badly seen in medias, I am not saying that people who lacks empathy like him are inherently bad, he is, a lot of people with antisocial behavior actually suffers a lot and have a difficult life. Sou real issues is not his antisocial behavior, it’s his narcissism and god complex. Sou feels the need to HAVE CONTROL over others, he like the feeling of being in power, he sees the rest of the world has beneath him, toys for his pleasure. He says that he “really like humans” because despite it all he seems to put himself in a different categories than regular people, they are beneath him. When he loses control his calm and cool behavior disappears and we see his true face, a grown man who has throws a tantrum like a baby. One of the best representation of this is midori views on the cast:

Midori hates kanna, like no jokes he has beef with her, a fourteen years old, actually he has beef with a lot of people in the cast. Midori views emotional people has weak, people who are loving optimistic as beneath him and useless. He preferred when sara was cruel and horrible, that’s what he loved about her, he liked seeing her scary emotionless side. But Kanna, kanna is everything he hates. A crybaby who not only puts the group in harmony, is a source of hope in general, is the reason he near got to have closure with shin (killing him), he views kanna as “not fun shin”. We have many proofs for this, if you type the word kanna kizuchi he says this: “Poor Kanna'd weep! I think a more worthless name would be better for someone like me” He mocks her, but also himself (I’lll come back on this later), he calls her worthless. Also in the electric charge minigame, when he can choose who to shocks he chooses two people in particular, kanna who he hates and hinako who ruined his fun by giving the cast a chance in saving ranmaru. But he does also says mean spirited stuff to other people, qtaro and gin. He also says some sarcastic comments about nao and joe, saying that it’s such a shame that they died so young. But you might say why kanna especially? Because he is a petty baby who is jealous of kanna, Yes jealous, of kanna, a fourteen years old. Because he feels like she stole his hubby wubby shin away from him…. God I hate him. And you know what that make him a pathetic idiot, after the scene where kanna beats his ass, he’s all mad and like “uhh I’m going to pout I wanted you to cry like a lot, now I’m gonna cry”. An that’s actually god, because it humanize him, he wants need thoughts, he isn’t one note, and that’s the most important!

Sou is a villain but before that he is a character, a fully developed character, and THAT’S WHAT MAKE HIM GREAT, Sou works because he works realistically, I mean if you forget the robot part, it’s easy to imagine a narcissist man child who needs to feel in power towards other, so his main prey are young vulnerable people.Which leads me to my next point:

Sou is a failure like really, and we aren’t sad for him.

Sou failed everything he worked on, he failed to get the paper from alice, he failed whith shin since he had to leave earlier than he thought he would leave, because of his mistake he lost his position in the death game, then he failed to kill gin or keiji, and then he died like an idiot losing his cool and acting like a toddler. And he knows it that why he is a bit self-hating (he should be). And yet none of us feel any sympathy towards him, why? Because sou is one of the most despicable guy in existence. He is a disgusting pervert, sadistic asshole, and abusive narcissistic cunt who thinks he is better than everyone. From the bottom of my heart I hate him sooooo much he is literally the character I hate the most in existence. He abused shin, ruined keiji’s life, traumatized the entire cast, literally assaulted sara like he physically assaulted her. He mocked nao and joe and kugie life as useless. He is an obsessive jerk AND I HATE HIM. And you know what…… It’s good. Like I actually feel a lot of emotions when I think about him, he fuels me with anger and disgust, and if your characters can make me feel that much rage then you did it, you created an actual perfect character. Hiyori is such a shit person that I think about him a lot, writers shouldn’t be scared to make a character such hittable assholes, example bojack horseman in bojack horseman is the vilest man on earth and I love it, because I genuinely hate him. Just like I genuinely love kanna, like really I really love her, I in the same time despise midori so bad. We hate him because he is horrible to good people that WE KNOW AND CARE ABOUT, not random npcs. There is a lot of… disgusting implications in his story with shin that I will not talk about it makes me really uncomfortable right now. SO HERE IS A VERY TACKY TRANSITION TO TALK ABOUT WHY I HATE JUNKO FROM DANGANRONPA.

Junko is boring, that’s it, she is boring, not funny not interesting, she is a fetish, she is the biggest Mary sue on earth, she is a gross character made to make fun of people with disabilities and queer people. Her only traits is being crazy, that’s it. I wouldn’t call midori that crazy actually, he’s methodical calculated, and precise. Crazyness is a term for people who aren’t in control of their actions and delusional about reality, sou is not crazy, he knows what he is doing, he is in full control, while characters like shin should actually be consider crazy, like shin is actually crazy but sou isn’t.

Conclusion:

Sou is a breath of fresh air, because nankidai had the balls to write an actually interesting deep and threatening character AND make him a villain. He didn’t fall into the trap of making him have a sad backstory or good motives, sou is just selfish, that’s all he is. He make him a fun entertaining guy who you absolutely hates, he made him threatening and at the same time a complete doofus. He made him humane and pathetic.

But the thing that make me love nankidai the most is this

The fact that he actually killed him that takes courage as a writer to just end a character THAT WAY, which is why midori will never come back alive he is forever dead. And that take a lot of talents as a writer to just take one of the most important characters and just get him drilled to death in the anus, like dammn nankidai you are a savage. That fact alone makes him one of the best characters in game, I hate him as a person, but has a character he is a masterpiece.

Though Kanna could solo him

this was posted as a video on my blog this is mainly so people who don't want to stay there reading a 24 minute video of my stuttering can have a bit of quiet

#yttd #your turn to die #kimi ga shine #shin tsukimi #kanna kizuchi #sou hiyori #midori yttd #cna you tell i have no life #i spend a part of my short existence writing about fucking midori #yttd analysis #frenchgremlim polls of laziness

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copperbadge · 4 months

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Every so often I get an Anon ask where I'm not entirely comfortable responding in public with no cut or warnings ahead of the text -- it's not that anything inappropriate is being said, it's just sometimes the subject matter's a little rough. This is one of those, so I decided to copy and paste it and put it behind a cut; warnings for discussion of abuse and fraught familial situations.

You've spoken about having ADHD before, and i was wondering if you have any links to websites with resources for adults with ADHD that are more than the very generic "stay organised!", "eat healthily!", "avoid distractions!" things? like, something that explains ADHD and WHY getting organised is good, maybe? or how ADHD may intersect with anxiety? my mother finally went to a doctor and got (as i expected) an ADHD diagnosis, but the doctor told her medication wouldn't give her much at this point, which is fine, but she's just kept going as usual for her, which is not.

she has ignored everything i've told her before (like, to think ahead and prioritise, to make plans, to make lists, that she has to be systematic about it, to stay calm because if she has a plan everything should be done on time) but she ignores me. she just starts doing whatever, whenever, and then getting annoyed/anxious that "nothing" is done, and then she starts yelling at me.

i just want her to realise she MUST at least attempt to be organised, and that it's not just for work stuff, it's for everything, including every day stuff like chores. (also, i'd like to stop being yelled at. like, some of my first memories are of getting yelled at. it's been years and years of regular bouts of screaming. now i know it's her and not me, and i'd. like it to stop)

i apologize for the huge ask/rant, but yeah, do you know of any resources that explain the importance of being organised? i think if i show her something 'official' maybe she'll start doing it. or do you have any personal tips for talking to her about it? or a book about someone's experience with ADHD? anything. anything at all.

So there is...much to unpack here, as the kids say, both in terms of what you are asking directly and what you are not asking but what I'm going to address anyway. I don't have any great resources for what you're looking for, because neurodiversity comes in a lot of shapes and sizes even within a single diagnosis, and as you likely know I'm a big proponent of doing-what-works, and that's something a person has to figure out for themselves. A lot of people seem to find ADDitude very relatable and they are informative, but that's probably the best general resource out there to go deeper than surface, and a good place for her to start reading if she wants to.

But the real problem, Anon, is that she's never going to listen to you.

That seems like a real bold statement, but it is also extremely likely to be true. Most people who get a diagnosis start to work on themselves and learn more about their unique neurology; it's clear she's not going to do that, and you can't make her. I'm sure some of it is that she's been told her entire life, by people with much more power over her than you, to do those things: be organized, make lists, have a plan. They are the hardest things for people with ADHD to do, and she can't simply whip herself through them, and so she learned long ago to ignore anyone saying anything about it. Medication could help with that a lot, actually, so your mother's doctor really fucked you both by telling her it wouldn't do anything for her; whether she's taken that as permission to ignore the problem or whether she just believed him, he did a really shitty thing in doing that.

Your mother is neurologically incapable of forcing herself to do many things that neurotypical people find easy. There are workarounds, yes; some of us do extremely well if we decide that EVERYTHING has to be planned, and behave accordingly. Some of us find stopgaps. But that has to be a decision she makes, to find workarounds for herself. It's not something you can offer her with helpful websites or books, because she is also likely very deep in shame about it, to judge from her other behaviors. That's not your fault, which means it's also not your job to fix it.

And here's the other problem: you are in an abusive home situation where your mother is taking out her frustration with her mental illness by hurting you.

And that really really sucks and I'm really, really sorry. But the screaming-at-you, which absolutely should not be happening, is a result of decades of frustration at the world that won't accommodate her, combined with an inability to regulate her emotions. Unless she is medicated or learns better regulation or at least picks a different target, it's not going to stop. That's not your fault either. Some of it isn't even her fault. (Some of it is; mental illness is not our choice but it is our responsibility, and she is not behaving as either an adult or a parent should in abusing you because she can't find somewhere else to put all her emotions.)

Presumably you are either too young to leave or can't afford to, but the best possible thing you can do for yourself is get out as soon as you can, sever yourself from her financially, and then decide what level of interaction you want with her going forward. Honestly, may be the best thing for her as well, to realize that if she doesn't make a change, she will lose access to her child.

I realize that is almost certainly not immediately possible, however. Do not leave if you are going to a less safe situation, either. Be smart and strategic -- make your plans and prepare as much as possible ahead of time.

"So in the meantime, Sam, what the fuck am I supposed to do?"

Bearing in mind that we are going to assume you cannot help your mother, as she either doesn't want help or is in denial or both, the best thing you can do if you can't get out is to shore yourself up: remind yourself as regularly as possible that none of this is your fault, and do your best to protect yourself both emotionally and physically. IE, if she's not organized enough to buy groceries or cook, do what you can to make sure you are regularly fed -- do not concern yourself with whether she eats. That's her responsibility, she's a grownup. If you are likely to be yelled at for this -- well, she was always going to yell at you about something; it might as well be as a result of you caring for yourself first. As much as you can, spend time away from her if possible.

Given her past behavior, especially if you are an only child or oldest sibling, you may already be de-facto head of household; this may be simply a process of assuming actively that she can't fulfill that role, and doing what you can to care for yourself and any siblings. If you have other family who understand the situation, I strongly suggest tapping them for help. As much as you can, reach out to adults in your life you trust, and get their help in caring for yourself and your family without needing to depend on her for support.

I don't wish to stigmatize mental illness or addiction but living with someone in denial about the impact of their mental health on those around them is exactly like living with an addict: the best strategy is to expect nothing from them, remind yourself often that you are not to blame for this situation, look out for yourself first and foremost, and get out once you can. I'm really sorry it has to be that way, because it shouldn't be. But I'm concerned with you, not with her, and if you want to build a better life for yourself, it's going to have to be one that doesn't depend on you being able to change someone else.

I'm afraid I don't have a lot of books for you about that, either. I wish you all the luck -- you shouldn't need it, but unfortunately sometimes we still do.

#sam has adhd #mental health #abuse #toxic family

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bulbabutt · 1 year

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if i can be corny for a second i wanna talk about the greatest strengths of the 2003 tmnt series and why it speaks to me (esp as a queer person)

so i might have alluded to this before, but let me say it outright: each show is definitely a product of its time, and the ideals of whatever generation its from. whether talking about the humour, the story, the dialogue etc, its always important to remember that these shows will always come off in a way due to the generation theyre from. and thats not a bad thing! it just means its important to think about them from that perspective.

2003 is a show of my generation growing up, and a thing about that era that maybe some people younger than me wont understand is there is so much more language commonly available to describe yourself now than there was then. you can take this in any context; mental health, sexuality, gender identity, or even just the ability to describe your relationships with more (idk if this will be the right word) therapist language.

in 03 we have a family unit of splinter and his sons, each with their own strengths and weaknesses. we have a splinter who hasnt opened up to his sons about the trauma hes experienced, but not in a way of shutting them out, simply because it isnt their responsibility to know as they are teenagers. he tells them of the mutagen that created them, but not of his past with his master yoshi, who he calls father when by himself, but never around his sons which is just an interesting concept to think about.

(i do not intent this next sentence as ragging on the two shows after this when i say it, simply from a character standpoint) this is the splinter who completely doesnt make his problems his sons problems, but he also is very willing to tell them the truth when he knows they're ready. this is is the most idyllic version of splitner out of all of them, even when comparing to his mirage counterpart (who hes the most based on) due to that splinter raising them to be ninja specifically to make them fight shredder. this one is just their father who loves them and wants to keep them safe the best way he can, and he was never a human in the first place to even know how to be that. so this whole family dynamic starts with him, and the way he raised his sons reflects his parenting.

so, the setting and year this show is made is 2003. something very relatable here is how there isnt a lot of language for the personality quirks of the turtles. there's so much evidence here for mikey having adhd, his brothers will say things like "why doesnt mikey have to help?" and the answer is "well, he'd be bored. and whats worse, mikey not helping or mikey being bored?" its this beautiful moment of, "hey, we know its not fair, but thats how mikey is, and its better for everyone if we just respect that thats how he is" mikey cant keep his hands off stuff, they know this they dont yell at him for behaving that way, they just stop him. this coding feels the most specific, but like i said. its 2003. we dont have the words to describe what this is yet, and if we do its not common knowledge.

another example is in the classic episode where raphael meets casey jones. raphael is sparring with mikey, and he lashes out and nearly kills mikey. everyone reacts to this by getting him to stop, and no one is more upset than raphael himself. they all tell him to go get some air, which he does. theres no moment of any of them screaming at him for losing his temper, its very clear that they all know he's going to do that himself. and he does go get some air. they all know thats what he needs. he goes and meets casey jones, another hot head, and raph has to help coach this hot head on his anger. when he comes back at the end of the episode after having let out that aggression, he apologizes and no one is upset with him. there's a very clear understanding among his family that he cannot help it, but the best thing they can do is give him his space when he needs it. watching this from a 2023 perspective (20 years later) im sure we could analyze this as a few things going on with raph, my mind comes to autism but at the end of the day it doesnt matter why he behaves like this, the point is that he does and the best thing his family does is just...help him. which they do. and they never hold it against him.

when leo is going through his ptsd arc hes at his closest to raph as a character, the show draws a lot of parallels (like having him go let out some aggression with casey) and we get to see the dynamic in reverse. in "i, monster" (the rat king episode) leo is losing it, taking on rat king alone and not wanting to let up. raphael is actively holding his brothers back when they say "we shouldnt leave him to fight alone", raphael says "if leo gets in trouble i'm the first one in there, but right now it looks like leo's got more than one monster to work out of his system" raph doesn't exactly know what leos going through, but he recognizes it. he knows he needs to fight alone, so raph lets him. its only when the building collapses and leo is no longer in a safe position that he says "leo lets go", which leo wordlessly agrees with and actually listens.

this is what i think is the best part of these guys, the unconditional understanding they have for the way they are. we still have our "raphs a big hot head" "mikeys annoying" jokes, but they feel like genuine good natured sibling ribbing because they know each other on that level.

and to go back to the fact that this show is set in 2003, there's something so specific about the way mikey constantly makes references to liking women's clothing, to being fine with feminine language, and to being open about being the pretty turtle who "has that effect on minds of men" speaks to me as a queer person. this could easily be intended as homophobic jokes and probably is, because again.... its the mid 2000s, thats very much what media was like, thats what the jokes were. especially with the girly screams mikey does being one of the first jokes of this nature.

but theres something that happens in season 4, where an alien is attacking mikey, and donnie rushes in and says "hey, thats my sibling" that sticks out. and it happens again in fast forward. when talking to the dark turtles leo says "you and your brothers" "me and my siblings"

because of the way this family unit just understands each other without ever having a conversation about things, it feels like its not a joke. theres some kind of affirmation happening here. even if it seems like i could be reading into it too much, its specific! and it keeps happening!

and by the end of the show, when mikey says he wants to be maid of honour, even if that line in the media itself was intended to be a joke, no one in their family treats it like one. of course mikey is the maid of honour, he asked to be one! the only real offence taken is when april says bride's maid, to which he is offended because hes so much more important than that!

so from a story standpoint, this show doesnt have the intricate complexities and butting heads of latter iterations, there isnt much relationship growth to be had (in fact once we get to around season 5 the flanderization of the characters kind of begins and it loses some of the more complexities) but thats because its just not the focus of the story! the story is more about what they go through together, and thats fine! thats what our shows kind of were at the time. not saying there isnt any relationship growth, but its very much not the focus because these turtles? they already understand each other in a healthy way.

so to me, these guys are kind of the most wholesome family unit

#tmnt #tmnt 03 #tmnt 2k3 #tmnt 2003 #2003 tmnt #can you tell im in my late 20s #lmao #this is why i did the silly st thing #cuz its relatable #thoughts

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joyflameball · 7 months

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Making my own post abt this actually, since there is a more popular version running around that has shitty advice and I sure as hell ain't gonna manage to hijack that

Switching to Firefox: What do?

Now a lot of us are neurodivergent and have FAR too many tabs for our own good, and I can understand if you're nervous about switching because of that, since that's a LOT of tabs and you don't wanna lose them. Trust me, I relate to that immensely. I have FAR too many tabs open for my own good.

So what you should do in that case is save your tabs. I personally saved my tabs in a private Discord server, since that let me open the tabs again easily, and make categories for each type of tab, but you can use something like Notepad to save them as well. So, you copy-paste all your tabs over to wherever you're saving them (and additionally, copy-pasting all of them will allow you to see tabs you don't need and delete them, since they're no longer buried).

Once you're into Firefox and signed in, head to Settings. You should see in the general tab the button that says "Import Browser Data." You'll see a dropdown arrow that will let you pick whatever browser you wanna import your data from.

That easy! From there, pull up ALL your tabs and you're good to go!

Simplified explanation:

Save all your previous tabs, maybe in Notepad (I personally used a private Discord server, for the reasons I explained).

Once in Firefox, head to Settings and import your Chrome data.

Pull up your tabs that you saved, and you're in!

Settings

So, you're in the general tab with your data from Chrome imported. Now, keep going through the Settings, because there's a LOT more you can do, and Firefox's settings are fairly simple to navigate. I can't give you any advice for the general tab, that's all for you to handle.

Head to Home, and this is where you'll need to start changing some stuff. I recommend disabling "Recommended By Pocket" for the safest experience, not just because it's better for privacy, but also because the Pocket stuff is annoying. Also disable "Snippets" at the bottom.

Head to Search. From here, you'll be able to disable Google as the default browser, which is good for everyone. You CAN use DuckDuckGo, which allegedly is safest, but I'm personally suspicious of that (look up "duckduckgo safety issues"). However, it is 100% safer than Google, so if you just wanna use that, go ahead.

If you wanna use a different search engine from what is shown, it's gonna be a bit more complicated to set up. In the Search tab of settings, set it so there's a search bar in the toolbar.

Go to the address of whatever new search engine you wanna use (I'm personally using ecosia.org, as it helps w the environment by planting trees, AND it's got a really good privacy policy). Let's use as example: youtube.com .

You'll see a magnifying glass with a plus sign in the smaller search bar. When you click it, you'll be shown a dropdown that says "This time, search with: [all the search engines]." Click the YouTube icon that has a plus sign next to it (again, YouTube as example).

I'm explaining this somewhat confusingly- Mozilla's website has a much better explanation.

Head back to the Firefox settings, and set your default search engine to the new site. Bam.

(Additionally: to disable ever searching with Google, scroll down to Search Shortcuts, and remove the check mark next to Google.)

Simplified explanation:

Set it so there's two search bars.

Go to the address of whatever search engine you wanna use.

Click the magnifying glass, then the icon of the new search engine.

Head back to the Search settings, and switch to the new engine.

Privacy and Security

THIS is what you're here for. Firefox has LOADS of settings to make you more secure. My personal recommendations are:

Set enhanced tracking protections to Strict, or if you wanna customize it yourself, Custom. This will allow you to block cryptominers, trackers, cookies, and fingerprinters.

Set it to clear history when Firefox is closed.

Set it so that the search bar will not show you suggestions from sponsors, and don't allow Mozilla to process your search queries.

Under Permissions > Location, set it to block all requests to access your location. You can do the same for whatever other permissions you'd like, but especially block Location.

Block Firefox from making personalized extension recommendations, at the very least. If you don't want Firefox to use telemetry data, set it so Firefox won't send technical and interaction data to Mozilla.

Block dangerous downloads, obviously, and set it to HTTPS-Only Mode on all windows.

Enable secure DNS stuff using Max Protection. I'm personally using NextDNS (recommended by r/piracy).

Again, I'm not the arbiter of information here. You do whatever you want with your privacy and security settings. These are just my personal recommendations.

Extensions

A point of contention in the original post was how many fucking addons the OP had that essentially did the same thing, like several different adblockers when just one is enough. This is risky not just because it'll slow your browser down to hell and back, but also because it'll make you MORE traceable.

However, this doesn't mean you should go around with zero extensions. Especially since In Today's Day And Age, you WILL get ambushed with ads wherever you go. So at the very least you'll need an adblocker. However, there are extra extensions you can use to help clean up, for example, YouTube Search.

Here's my personal list of extensions, with ones that I feel you will DEFINITELY need marked in pink. I made sure these aren't redundant, or don't cover settings that Firefox already has.

I could be wrong in places, so if anyone wants to push back on this, I encourage it.

Ublock Origin: GET THIS ONE. Everyone and their mother loves this bad boy. Great adblocker that works REALLY well to clean up the web and make things less... awful. It lets you block specific website elements (so if Tumblr's pulling shit you can block it), and in settings it has a WHOLE lot of privacy/safety settings you can turn on which I won't go over, since this is a post about Firefox. The point is: GET UBLOCK. Everyone loves it, it's great, it's reliable, 10/10.

SponsorBlock: This is a GREAT addon that completely skips sponsored sections in YouTube videos. It feels kinda seamless sometimes. It also lets you skip a lot of extra unnecessary stuff as well.

Youtube Search Fixer: Unclogs YouTube's search so you won't get playlists, shorts, unrelated search results, all that fun stuff, so you can just find what you're looking for.

Youtube Shorts Block: Automatically turns YouTube Shorts into standard YouTube videos so you can get away from the fucking TikTokkification of the Internet.

Return Youtube Dislike: Remember how YouTube inexplicably removed the ability to see dislikes? This addon reverts that. You can see dislikes again.

Shinigami Eyes: Marks anti-trans sites with red, and trans-friendly sites with green (with the ability to change those colors, in case of colorblindness). It works with Tumblr blogs, Youtube, Twitter, a fuck load of sites. Great for knowing FOR SURE if a post is an anti-trans dogwhistle, and for going through gender critical blogs and blocking them on masse. It's INCREDIBLY reliable at catching transphobic sites, and finding trans-friendly ones.

Auto Tab Discard: We're all neurodivergent here and have way too many tabs, and that slows down our fucking computers. Auto Tab Discard basically puts those tabs into sleep mode- not deleting them, but making them go offline for a bit so they aren't taking up as much running time. It also lets you mark specific sites to NOT get put into sleep mode, if you need them up for whatever reason.

XKit Rewritten: Look. We're on Tumblr. We know this site's bullshit and how it's impossible to use. XKit helps fix a LOT of the bullshit on this site and adds on helpful stuff. Seriously, get XKit, they're the ones carrying this whole fucking site.

Again- I could be wrong. And I think the only one you 100% DEFINITELY NEED is uBlock. The others are just for convenience, or in the case of Shinigami Eyes, safety. You don't need to install any of these extensions except uBlock. It's just my personal recommendations.

TLDR

Get Firefox. Save all your tabs from Chrome, sync your data, do all that jazz.

Set your default search engine to anything but Google. You can do DuckDuckGo, or if you're suspicious of DDG like I am, use something like Ecosia (and you can add that as a default browser with the instructions I laid out).

USE FIREFOX'S GREAT SECURITY SETTINGS. You don't need a million extensions to do stuff Firefox already CAN do.

The only extension you 100% need is uBlock Origin, but here's my list of ones I personally recommend to help clean up the web and have a better experience.

Get off of Chrome. Google is currently on trial, brought there by the fucking DOJ, for being an illegal monopoly. The trial started about a week ago, and will last for about three months. Depending on how this goes, this could shake up Google's whole monopoly, and change the future of the entire internet.

Firefox is better in every way than Chrome. Firefox will actually try to protect you and lets you opt out of unnecessary data collection. Firefox is not based on Chromium. Firefox is open source, and its code has been scrutinized and deemed as safe. It's not perfect, no corporation is- and Mozilla is ultimately that, a corporation. But god, it's leaps and bounds ahead of Chrome. Switch to Firefox.

#cassie rambles #switch to firefox #firefox #google #google chrome #mozilla firefox #web browsers #browsers #chrome #browser #fuck google #internet privacy #internet safety #digital privacy #internet security

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the-thursday · 2 months

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Hello everyone, this post was long overdue, and finally, prompted by our beloved Howls also leaving, it's time for me to rip off the bandaid as well.

I would also like to announce a sort of departure from Ranger's apprentice fandom.

I do not know how many from RA fandom era from few years back are still here but I assume mostly newer blogs keep up with this account.

Take a lil history walk with me, if you will. I joined this fandom around 2017-18. I was very active around here, posting all kinds of stuff, fics, takes, incorrect quotes, art and whatnot. I made many friends with whom I had a great time and I am happy and honoured that I am friends with some of them till this day. Fandom became the second home to me as things hadn't been exactly easy irl and maybe I fixated on it too much, but gods know I loved this place so much. And I wish for everyone to experience this happiness and just as I made friends who became a significant part of my life, I wish that for you as well. Being surrounded by amazing and wonderful people and sharing similar interests is one of the most pure joyous feelings in this world.

As 2020-2021 rolled around, some of you know that things in my life picked up a harsh pace and I started to drift away. In 2021 I left the fandom because of that and unpleasant things with one of the people here. It was one of the most gut wrenching decisions I had made.

In 2022, I started gradually getting worse, but also had the courage to come back at the end of the year. I felt happy and welcomed and I am so grateful to everyone who made it happen, who supported me and gave me another breath. My mental health kept getting worse but I wasn't alone and that has been everything to me.

Now it's about a little more than a year since I've been back and again, I've met wonderful amazing people who I am happy and honoured to call friends. I don't regret coming back and I am happy I did, however I think it's time for me to go again. And below, I hope to explain why.

Like I said, I've been getting worse. Last autumn and this winter have been very difficult for me and I had to rethink some priorities, as life is going on the time left for me to invest in fandoms is getting thinner and thinner. Unfortunately, among them, isn't keeping up with this fandom. With my next words I hope not to insult anyone. The truth is, I don't find enjoyment in the fandom and content itself anymore, or more like, as much as I used to. I don't exactly vibe with posts for roughly the past half a year and I don't mean this in negative way, I just think it's for me to move on. All of the new people that I've seen have wonderful content and while I don't exactly vibe like I used to, I can see that you're having fun and that's important! People come and go and I do wish all the newcomers and seniors who are still here to have a great time, but I don't think I have energy, capacity and vibes to be part of it anymore. As you know, my blog has been very much inactive for a long time, aside from dumping my dumb sketches or reblogging something here and there. And rather than letting it rot, I'd like to cleanly move on. Anyhow, on self deprecating note, since really it's not like I've been someone prominent I don't think this is a loss to the fandom and this makes it easier for me.

So to summarise, my leaving is about personal things, my life moving and the fact I don't have the mental capacity or motivation to actively keep up.

So what does this mean? I won't be posting RA related stuff on this blog anymore. This blog will turn into a neutral main blog and I'll create one side blog for art that I hope to continue to make and maybe one blog dedicated to the work of Brandon Sanderson.

However, it doesn't mean that I am not up to goof around about RA anymore, however this will be done in DMs. If I sometimes get to draw and post RA related art, it shall be posted on my new art blog with RA tag. However, I don't think there's a high probability of public RA art from me anymore, because 1) need to move on and 2) I have a very strong and maybe confrontational opinion about art in this fandom that has given me a bad taste and discouraged me from enjoying making it and posting it. I won't go into details because I don't want to sour this post for myself and for y'all with it.

I want to thank this fandom for everything it has been for me and for everyone and I wish y'all some happy fandoming!

Yours only,

The Ranger Thursday 11

#rangers apprentice #final goodbye

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dailygtwscar · 10 months

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[248 - ARTIST SUPPORT 🧡]

It's Disability Pride Month!

If you're a disabled artist of any kind, please promote yourselves in my submissions!! I'll queue up everything till the end of the month. (I don't know how artists supports work here or if they're even a thing at all but !!!!!!!!!)

(rules are: no nsfw, no AI-generated images, no NFTs, tag your tweet with the proper warnings)

Also, here's some stuff I'd like to get off my chest (long text post ahead).

First of all, I wanna i want to mention something about how I draw Scar. I know I haven't been the best at drawing him with mobility aids. I'm still trying to get better at it. Scar himself has seen some of my posts & has never really said anything about how I draw him, but I personally don't think that's a valid excuse for me to only occasionally draw him with mobility aids. I apologize, and I will try my best to draw him with mobility aids more often now.

Another thing I wanna talk about is the reason I couldn't make a disability pride post earlier than I intended (which is honestly just me venting but it'll give a bit of context on my sporadic posting schedule). I was really anxious about it because of the internalized ableism / impostor syndrome I've been dealing with for the past year or so. I have an anxiety disorder and I am also neurodivergent. Somehow, it didn't feel right calling myself disabled even though it has made it almost impossible for me to get through highschool, have dropped out of college because of how severe my anxiety got, how rsd has kicked my butt since I was little, how it's so hard for me to read social cues and make friends, how my terrible memory has caused me forget the most simple & important things (and it has gotten me in trouble so many times), how most of the people in my life were ableist towards me, etc, and just overall how made it difficult for me to be a "normal" human in society. All because I've convinced myself that "it's not that bad" (spoiler alert, it is).

Even now, I still feel iffy calling myself disabled despite being diagnosed for nearly three years now. I felt like I didn't have the right to talk about anything related to disability because mine isn't physical. At the end of the day, I'm still disabled. I know it's not a bad thing. It's just very difficult. So please be patient with me, with both art and me in general. I'm really trying my hardest here.

#long post #goodtimeswithscar fanart #GoodTimesWithScar

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abelle25125 · 2 years

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a comprehensive list of all things sus about Adrian Graye

ok so i have been slightly obsessed with the illusion coven head since his introduction in hunting palisman, but now that we’ve had an episode with him as an actual character there are some things about him that feel super suspicious and i’m going to try my best to explain them here

1:Despite being the head of the illusion coven, We never actually see him cast any illusions.

When we’re first introduced to him when he tries to trick the school into joining coven he mentions that the illusion of him was cast by a different coven scout

“Tom, that Adrian illusion was lacking a certain, hmm? You get me?”

and given his need to yell for the illusion to end rather than just stopping it himself, we can assume that he wasn’t in control of the illusion in that scene.

We can probably apply this logic to his later scene with the fake willow and Belos - as we’ve seen in the past that illusions need a constant focus when cast by a witch, and he seemed a bit too concentrated on bullying his actors and kicking hunter in the back of the head to be casting anything.

Him snapping his fingers and the Belos illusion vanishing could either be read as him dispelling the illusion or calling of the two Guards behind it, but given the lack of evidence towards the spell belonging to him, im choosing to believe the latter.

this leads us onto the next few points:

2: He casts spells without drawing a circle and

3: the only two times he draws a spell circle, he does so while holding/using his magical amplifier

in his first scene after Gus calls out the fake Adrian, we see him hand off his coffee cup and then in a poof of smoke - appears next to and grabs Gus. you cant touch illusions, so neither of those were fake, which means that, without drawing a spell circle he’s teleported across the room.

We only see him draw a spell circle twice in the entire episode, the first time he literally uses the magical amplifier to draw it, and the second time he’s holding it.

now these first three points could just be explained by saying “oh he’s the coven head he’s super powerful at illusions he probably doesn't need to concentrate or draw circles or whatever” but then even ignoring all that there’s -

4: this man is waaay to focused on the looking glass ruins

Graye was sent to Hexside by Belos to brand the children, but the moment the illusion stuff kicks off and he sees the looking glass ruins he abandons that plan to hunt down gus and figure out where the graveyard is. His reasoning is that the galderstones would be good gifts for belos, but are they worth abandoning his mission for?

the reasoning could just be that he’s figured that the branding mission was a bust and hes in the panic of ‘i need to please my boss so he doesn’t kill me for failing so bad’ and wants to make it up for him, but then why does he seem to be happier when he sees that the galderstones are intangible

either way - this is not the face of a super confident person who has everything under control

The looking glass ruins have come up a few times now in relation to the EC, and based on how good TOH is at setting up plot lines - it feels like they’re building it up to be more important than it seems.

then of course theres the one that a bunch of people are talking about

4: He got his ass handed to him by Gus’ memory bubble

that shit fully incapacitated him, like he was still knocked out , fully catatonic later on, like - not even hunter got knocked down by this and he’s gone through some shit - and Graye’s comments about bad memories feel way to prominent to just be a passing comment.

Theres been a fun trend of all the coven heads being ironic in some way , a bard with stage fright, a plant head who loves killing ect; so having an illusionist who’s been lying about something to get where he is today could be really fun

so whats up with this guy? lets figure it out- yeah he’s a basilisk

- similar fangs, tail and :3 face

- similar hair styles

- same blue teleportation magic

- including the inspector from the first day we’ve only seen 4 of the 5 basilisks

- Basilisk number 4 even has the same hair squiggle as Graye

theres kinda just a weird amount of evidence supporting this theory, it’s probably not true, and if it is, probably wont have a lot of plot relevance, but i cant help but think theres something else going on with this guy. He’s the only coven head who’s showed up by himself in an episode so far, and there’s just a lot of details and potentially foreshadowing stuff happening around him.

this ended up being way longer than i planned so kudos on reading all the way through

#THIS WAS SO MUCH LONGER THAN I PLANNED OH NO #hi im slightly obsessed with this guy #literally the moment my arm healed i started drawing him (and then i injured my arm again but dont worry about that)#and then i stopped mid drawing to make this whoops #adrian graye #adrian graye vernworth #the owl house #toh spoilers #the owl house spoilers #toh theory #basilisk theory #man i dont really make original posts that much this felt weird #long post

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attonposting · 1 year

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Okay, so Carth keeps coming up lately, both by people who love him and people who don't, and I thought I'd throw my two cents into the ring.

People complain that Carth is sexist, a lot. And I get where that's coming from, I've got the same issues with his romance as anyone else. I love the bones of Carth's character and remember him very fondly – he's tied for my favorite character from KotOR I, even! But the writing is... flawed, to say the least, and in a way that goes past just 'poorly aged.' I don't think his lines themselves ever go worse than awkward, but there's some more fundamentally unhealthy stuff written into his relationship that I suspect wasn't intentional.

What I find interesting, and what a meme just very succinctly pointed out, is that many of the same people who have beef with Carth are cool with Atton. Who is definitely the more sexist of the two, both incidentally and deliberately. And it's a really interesting differentiation between the two pilots/f!PC love interests/earlygame buddies, because I think their palatability comes entirely down to how the games portray that sexism. So this is my attempt to figure out why one thing works and the other kinda doesn't.

Carth Onasi is introduced as a stand-up guy. He stays behind as long as he possibly can to save other survivors on the Endar Spire; he believes in the Republic wholeheartedly, he serves to protect and approves when you do the same, and other characters sing his accolades. He's supposed to be wholesome, but with PTSD-related trust issues that cause friction between him and you.

Atton Rand is the opposite of that. You find him in a jail cell, he's untrustworthy and a cad, at any given moment he's either abrasive or lying through his teeth, he complains when you help people, and when you get to the bottom of his trust issues, you find out he's a worse guy than you ever could have imagined.

It's much too oversimplified to say that Carth is supposed to be a good person and Atton is not, that's not where the problem comes from, but it will become relevant later.

When Carth starts flirting with you... okay. The biggest, most obvious problem is that the game wants you to be into it. Carth flirts and continues to flirt after you can tell him to stop. Sure, whatever; that's not egregious. You can respond to Carth's flirting positively or negatively, and that's great... but when you do respond negatively, the game loves to pull you into these playful insult exchanges where your PC shouts and pouts while Carth taunts you. There's where the issues start. Even when the player is trying to shut him down, they get dragged along for the ride anyway, and the narrative decides that this is also romantic. Thus KotOR I only has a shallow understanding that it's presenting a situation a woman may want nothing to do with. It's kind of impressive that you can actually call Carth sexist in-game, and yet it doesn't feel like the game actually understands that he is in fact being sexist.

Actually, no. Maybe I'm reading too deep into this, maybe this is why I'm so forgiving to Carth as a character, but I don't think the problem is Carth, I think the problem is that the game is being sexist in this particular spot. I was more annoyed by my own return dialogue options than anything Carth said to me - especially the ones where I was being mean. It felt like f!Revan was being pigeonholed hard into the writer's idea of 'women', that it was not an especially flattering or nuanced view, and there wasn't anything that I actually wanted to say. Definitely the writer did not understand my perspective as a player – but that's not a problem unique to K1 and it's one even the sequel is super guilty of at times, so I'll move on for now.

When Atton makes skeevy remarks, you always have at least one dialogue option to call him out for it, and you cannot ever react positively to what he says. Either you smack him down or you ignore him. This is extremely important. Yes, you could argue that it's not as accommodating to how different players might react... but what this establishes is that the game is self-aware. It does not think what Atton is doing is in any way attractive, or that it should be interpreted positively. Instead it acknowledges what a lady's probable reaction to his unwanted advances would be and encourages the player to express it, and the way that's written isn't a playful back-and-forth, it's the Exile snapping at him and Atton backtracking. Atton's being a piece of shit, but instead of stirring up chemistry, the narrative goes out of its way to mete out karma – hence everyone else on the ship mocking him, or the comically topical details like him being an unwashed loser who smells terrible and scratches his junk in public. Whether you like Atton or not, the game wants you to know that it thinks he sucks, and you are never left feeling like there is an unsettled score.

On the contrary, this lack of self-awareness is what makes Carth's romance in K1 hard to swallow if you didn't start out receptive to it. When you can react negatively to Carth's comments, it doesn't feel like you can do so in an intelligent way. The tone is very “Ugh, MEN, amirite” rather than “I don't like the turn this conversation has taken and would like to just be your colleague again” or just “Stop.” - which is probably what you wanted to say if you were just platonically enjoying or less-amicably bickering with your dorito-jacket companion when the gorgeouses started coming out of left field.

Worse, when you actually can shut Carth's romance down, it involves being a dick to him and stomping hard on his personal issues. Like I'd understand if a player was angry with him at this point, because again, you've been forced into a romance arc even when you were telling the game no as much as it would let you - but there's a huge difference between wanting to tell a guy to back off and wanting to shit on his dead wife or his Sith kid or his blown-up planet. I dunno, I'm not that vindictive! I think there's only a couple of options at the very end of his romance tree where you can turn him down... not even amicably, it's still rude, just without being a Grade-A asshole, and by that point, you have been through a lot of flirting you presumably didn't want to be involved with. Generally, the game won't let you break things off with him without being a dick, even if you never agreed to board that train in the first place. Now loop back to the way that K1 unfailingly portrays Carth as a great guy, whose flaws have nothing to do with his upstanding sense of morality, and there's where the dissonance comes from. Not only does the game push you into his romance after you said no, it makes you the bad guy for trying to get out of what he initiated.

But there's another issue in the timing of the Carth relationship. He starts his flirting while he's expressing intense distrust and standoffishness with your PC. With Carth's nonstop skepticism about your trustworthiness, and constantly bringing up his issues with you... at least during Taris and Dantooine, it comes off more like his attraction to you is superficial and not as a result of him growing to like you, something that's pushed by how it's always focused on shallow hooks like your appearance or your 'cute' attitude. It's very awkward. I do not think this was the writer's intent. I think Carth's supposed to be captivated by what he's seen you do, and that's just going in recursive loops in his paranoid little brain and making things harder for him. By the end of the romance, it's extremely clear that Carth's into you for you. But it's clumsily handled at the start.

Contrast this with Atton, who starts off aggressively sexist towards a female Exile, fifty times more offensive than anything Carth ever does. Literally the first line he gets is leering at the PC's forced state of undress, mocking her vulnerability, and he continues in that vein for much of Peragus. He creeps on your nudity at least four times off the top of my head, he ogles you, he complains about women, he tries to hit on you, he even contemplates the possibility of Sexy Kreia (which is a level of dickery I can scarcely comprehend.)

But that tapers off and disappears around the time he starts showing actual romantic interest in your PC, like when Kreia threatens him and it's revealed how much your opinion matters to him, or when he asks Bao-Dur for advice. And a female PC never sees it again. This creates the opposite impression – that Atton's attraction is a result of your time together. Sure, he's still a pig, but it follows that he wasn't making serious passes at you on Peragus because his behavior now that he is actually interested in you has changed. And it implies that in an actual relationship, that would not be how he'd view or treat you, which I think is crucial for how willing people are to ship Atton with their Exiles.

Now, this is all a product of how K2 did not actually answer that question and let you romance Atton, because with Carth, it's the opposite and you see exactly how he behaves once he gets into a serious relationship. It involves spanking. Things could be very different if K2 actually had fleshed out romances. It's hard to say, because both the PC and the crew were very thoughtfully written (I will take a bold step here and say that K2's characters were on the whole written much better than K1's), but on the other hand, Atton is still the worst and I'm pretty sure the game would want to remind you of that if you agreed to play tonsil hockey with him. And it may have crashed into the same pitfall that Carth's did; if the game railroaded your interactions with Atton up to some point, it'd leave a bad taste in anyone's mouth who wasn't already signed up for the ship.

With the way things are, Atton not only gets a free pass to be interpreted as generously as his fans want and easily ignored by those who weren't keen on him, he even gets an interest boost from this because people will always want what they can't have.

Anyway. With a male PC, you'll continue to see Atton make sexist remarks towards other female characters and can even have a wingman chat with him that is entirely him projecting his issues all over women. He doesn't make these comments with a female PC, suggesting that he's on his best behavior... but that he'd still totally be a leering asshole if he wasn't trying to impress you. With a male PC and Carth, his sexism is nonexistent, again probably because he was never intended to be sexist and it's a product of clumsy/oblivious writing.

There's an additional layer with Atton and the question of how much anything he does is an act, but that doesn't exonerate him from any of the crap he says. I could write a separate essay on Atton and his relationship with women, but the guy is very much a womanizer who's terrified of the idea of intimacy and has a lot of shitty opinions that stem from his defensive need to believe that nothing emotional is ever real or relevant to him. He might've been casing the Exile on Peragus, but his chauvinism is genuine.

But I digress. The tl,dr; is that Atton acts less sucky the more he crushes on you and Carth acts more. Combo that with how their respective games make Atton pay for being creepy but give the strong impression they want you to go along with Carth's nonsense, and it's a little less mystifying why Carth gets so little benefit of the doubt while the King of Trash enjoys fandom sexyman status. His romance is almost predicated on the fact that he's a scumbag, where Carth's is very confused to whether the awkward parts should exist or not.

There's a bit more that kinda hurts Carth. The flirting... well, from what I remember it just got “wow, okay then” later on, and I found it way more silly than offensive in any way, but him repeatedly bringing up how you remind him of his dead wife doesn't help the relationship much and suggests that Carth may be projecting someone else over you. I can live with that, drama's tasty and it doesn't prevent a real connection from burgeoning. You can make the exact same argument for Atton anyway, and I think his is way worse. My major issue is at the end of the game. Mr. Trust Issues does not react well to the events on the Leviathan, when it turns out he was right to have kept an eye on the PC all along. It's great payoff! And I absolutely adore his discussion after that, when he admits his struggles to reconcile you and Revan, how he tried but he can't hate you, how helping you gave him something real when revenge only left him hollow. Seriously, for all the shade it gets, there's some really great stuff in his romance too - you just have to stick it out long enough to see it. But then, on Rakata Prime, Carth seems to reconcile his crisis of faith and finally, wholeheartedly decide to love you in a way that falls flat on its face. He confirms you're a good person because you're not Revan anymore, like Revan is some purely evil part of you you've now cast off, when... that really seems more like denial than anything else, and not the foundation for anything healthy.

Seriously, I wish they'd handled that with more nuance. It would have counted for so much in my books.

All of that said. I know I just went after the man like a vending machine with a stuck bottle of chocolate milk, but I think the sexist vibes in Carth's romance are worst at the start and that he does not deserve the sheer amount of flack he gets. I've seen far worse offenders in the world of video game romances, and this might drive some controversy in and of itself, but I vastly prefer Carth x f!Revan to Bastila x m!Revan. There's a whole 'nother pile of issues in K1's other official ship (f in chat for Juhani), and I think those are much harder to deal with than the ones here. If anything frustrates me with Carth's romance, it's how unnecessary all of the bullshit is. I really want to get into it! The concept is perfectly fine! I love the character! There's good stuff in there! And when I replay KotOR, it's not that difficult to close my eyes to the bleh parts and enjoy the rest, especially once the first couple of conversations are past. Again, all Carth needed was a more conscientious writer at the wheel.

I'd be really interested in hearing other people's takes, both on how they interacted with either of those romances or where their interpretations differed from mine. I only have my own perspective and that of a few people I've talked to over the years, and I'm given to understand this is something of a fandom hot topic!

#carth onasi #atton rand #kotor #kotor 2 #kotor ii #basically a dissertation on how framing makes all the difference #i'm sorry carth #i love you a lot but your writing is so bad #kotor remake pls fix

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art · 1 year

Photo

Creator Spotlight: @textless

Hi! My name is Amadee, and I am a librarian who lives in Arizona. I also love taking photos in my spare time.

Check out our interview with Amadee below!

What got you started in photography?

Both of my parents were very interested in photography. I’d always loved looking at their work, and in high school, I got a 35mm camera as a gift, so I could start taking photos myself. Back then (in the actual 80s), HS students in the Minneapolis area could take classes at area colleges for dual credit. I started taking photo classes at the University of Minnesota and had access to a darkroom and nearly unlimited film and processing supplies without realizing just how amazing that was. I took many photos of friends, acquaintances, and strangers, and I loved looking at work by Nan Goldin and Bill Owens. After college, without access to a darkroom, I stopped taking pictures almost entirely.

How has technology changed the way you approach your work?

Bluntly, technology allowed me to start taking photos again. The first digital cameras I tried in the early 2000s were terrible: slow, clunky, and with next to no storage capacity. Even so, they seemed like the first step in an interesting direction. By 2008 or so, I had a point-and-shoot digital camera and rediscovered what I loved about photography… except that I no longer wanted to take pictures of people. Soon I started taking photos of tiny things, especially insects, and my little camera wasn’t up to the task. I got a DSLR with a macro lens in 2010 and haven’t stopped taking photos since.

I know many photographers who are nostalgic for film, whether or not they were around in the analog era. More power to anyone who wants to spend the time and money, but I don’t miss film even a little. For the kind of photography I enjoy, which is almost entirely documentary, the ability to take an unlimited number of photos, and see what did or didn’t work right away, makes all the difference.

You've also written books in the past—what was the most challenging, yet rewarding part of the process?

I was a children’s librarian for many years and just love books. So, when I started writing, I hoped to create books that would connect with kids and spark their imagination. Cortez the Gnome was a book I would have liked to see as a kid, and the art project elements were fun and frustrating. Gentle Hands filled what felt like a gap in my storytimes and gave me a chance to work with a publisher I like very much. Alas, my biggest challenge is that I haven’t had an idea in years! I write occasional blog posts for Free Spirit on topics related to serving youth, but working with kids was the spark for new ideas, and these days my work is mostly admin. I enjoy it more than I would have guessed years ago, but as a wellspring of inspiration, it is not.

How do you create healthy boundaries in balancing your day job and personal aspirations?

Work comes first every time. That might sound like a drag, but I truly like my job and think library service is critically important. In some of the tiny communities we serve, the library is the only gathering place open to everyone, and the only place to access fast internet, enrichment activities for kids, books, movies, and all kinds of other good stuff. I love taking photos, but I would hate to make a job of it.

What is the hardest part of your process?

The process itself is just fun, and I’d stop if it weren’t. I used to stress about editing and posting photos soon after taking them because I wanted to create a sort of nature journal in real-ish time. That wasn’t sustainable, partly because the subjects that interest me are so seasonal. I might take 2,000 photos in August (peak macro season here), but only 100 in February. Now I just try to indicate when photos were taken and know that I’m the only person who particularly cares about that. For years I posted six new photos each day. Now I generally post two and skip days or longer whenever it suits me.

Right now, the biggest challenges are external. First, my vision is less and less sharp. It’s nothing severe, just a function of age, but it makes me think I’d better develop an interest in non-tiny subjects at some point. Second, some small but annoying health problems have kept me from getting out much over the last year. I used to take a hike or long walk at least once or twice a week, and more in peak bug season. Since last September, I’ve taken two longish walks and mostly stuck to the yard. On the plus side, it’s an excellent yard with an ever-growing assortment of interesting plants and insects.

While this is frustrating in some ways, it’s also a distillation of something I have always liked. Even when I was hiking all the time, I enjoyed going back to the same places, again and again, getting to know them in detail and watching the seasons roll through. Staying so close to home this year has been an extreme version of that, and some aspects of that have been very satisfying.

I should also say, for the record, that I am not technical at all. I’m not interested in new gear as long for its own sake, and I don’t like messing with camera settings or anything fiddly. My favorite piece of photo advice ever was “f/8 and be there,” which I took to mean finding a basic setup you like and focusing on the subject at hand. I like finding strange or beautiful things that other people might not notice and trying to make them interesting to a wider audience. (Wider than just me, that is.)

What is something you would love to photograph but haven't had the chance to yet? Why?

This is oddly specific, but I desperately want to find an Arizona Unicorn Mantis (Pseudovates arizonae; check out the photos here). Several have been spotted within two miles of my house, but I have never found one yet. They are otherworldly and just fascinating. Insect goals!

Are there similarities or differences in your workflow when it comes to photography and writing?

Mostly difference in that photography is relaxing, and writing is nearly impossible, at least right now.

Who on Tumblr inspires you and why?

There are several excellent photographers who live in my corner of Arizona, and I love their work because it shows different aspects of a place I care about. Also, their photos are just gorgeous.

@fatchance is practically a neighbor and an all-around lovely person. He takes beautiful pictures of birds and desert flora, and unlike me, he takes the time to learn about and share good information about his subjects.

@thelostcanyon is another south-eastern AZ photographer I admire, and he is also a very good painter.

@inlandwest is actually my partner. We’ve lived all over the west together, and I like that his wide-open-spaces aesthetic is so different from my focus on the little things.

A little farther afield, I love @macroramblings, and Celeste, of @celestialmacros, @celestialphotography, and @occasionallybirds, for their beautiful macro work. @mostlythemarsh is another long-time favorite. He’s not a macro photographer, for the most part, but I like seeing familiar places through the seasons, and I like the stark difference between his environment (east coast/Canada) and my own.

Thanks for such wonderful answers, Amadee. Check out her beautiful photography work over at her Tumblr, @textless!

#creator spotlight #photographers on tumblr #writers on tumblr #macro photography #textless #insects #bugblr

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tokyo-tower-symbolism · 1 month

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I've been meaning to get into the re:live game story for a while now, but I don't know how necessary the event stories are in comparison to the main and school stories...

do you have a recommended reading order for main story and events if the timeline makes them interspersed?

Uhh, there was this one good google doc that had a bunch of stuff like what stories were important for each character, but I cannot find that right now so I'll do my best from memory but honestly I might miss a couple things so my bad.

Edit: thank you @pallastronomy for finding the doc in question, i really wanted to read that again too

To read it you can go to the wikia, read it on karth.top, or look up the parts on Youtube. That last one might be the best since you'll get the full visual novel experience.

So first off I would suggest reading the first part of the story, so Main Story chapters 1-6. Well, suggest is a strong word. I think those chapters kinda suck, but I guess they're necessary for the premise and to introduce the characters? But then again they abandon the original premise half way in favor of the performance festival so whatever. And if you want a better introduction to the characters you should read the School Stories (ignoring SJH) and also maybe watch Shoujo Cante All Starlight. So really I don't suggest you read those chapters but

I think at this point you are can read the event stories from "Hello to Halloween" to "Surprise! Rehearsal Friends!"

And you don't need to read them all, but they're fun! I couldn't really tell you which ones are super important to the plot, sorry about that. Honestly my personal opinion at this point is to just pick a couple characters you like to follow and read their stories. You can see who participates in each one on the Revue Starlight wikia

Plus, character card bond stories! Each event has a couple gacha cards they're trying to sell, and sometimes they're not super related to the story, but sometimes they are. If someone references something that happened off screen, it either happened in an earlier event or in the bond card, but I'd still only read the bond cards once you're done reading the event is over since otherwise they can be spoilers. Just think of those as prequels instead of preludes.

Then at this point you can read Main Story Chapters 7-11. And I really do think you should read these since they are juicy. There's a new plot and we really get to dive deep into the ReLive characters and see their individual pasts and why they now stand on stage. It's great.

Now for the Event Stories, feel free to read any story from "Starry Diamond Tragic Orion" up until "Royal Retainer"

Although now I gotta bring up some caveats. Anything with Seiran is not going to matter to the main plot of ReLive, and if you're curious about them, then that gets into Stage Play Territory which is much easier to follow but not in ReLive.

And honestly same with the Seisho only stories. They're fun, don't get me wrong, but they kinda don't affect the developments of the cast at all.

Starry Diamond is a live show that had some Revues, so some of the relive events are just rehashings of those. Except Venus & Cupid Story, which is a sequel to Zeus no Chuusai from the Starry Diamond Live, and that revue is actually super important to the Yumeoji Sisters's story but it is not in ReLive.

And once you've had your fill of those stories, you can start reading Main Story Chapters 12-18, Arcana Arcadia. And this one is really good. Iirc, the main revue starlight writer came in for these parts. There's some info that directly leads into the movie. And it's honestly great.

But the issue is that there are intermission bond stories that need to be read in the middle of the chapters. If you are reading it online that can be kind of pain, but in the game I think it's in the right order? I could not say for sure since I don't actually play it. Anyways, here's the vague order according to the wikia, but I'm not 100% on this

Chapter 12: 1-2

Chapter 13: Tower, Hermit, Empress, 1-3, High Priestess, 4-5, Magician, 6-9, Hanged Man, Strength, 10-15

Chapter 14: Wheel of Fortune, Chariot, 1-2, Lovers, 3-14, Faith, Hierophant, 15

Chapter 15: 1-2, Devil, Sun, Justice, 3-15

Chapter 16: Death, Charity, 1-15

Chapter 17: Temperance, 1, Fool, 2-4, World, Judgement, 5-15

Chapter 18: Hope, 1-9, Emperor, 10-14, 15/Moon

So yeah, after this you have basically free reign to read the remaining event stories. The next big ongoing plot seems to be about Siegfeld Junior High, but that one also isn't really connected to the previous stories at all.

Also some cards have connecting bond stories even without events, such as the Frontier Rangers, Orpheus, Camelot, Snow White, and Yin-Yang.

But for real, I think the best way to get into the story is to read the main story and then see what characters you like. Then you can read along all their bond stories and events that they star in, and maybe you'll find other characters that stand out. If you are missing any information, usually characters will reference whatever they are talking about, so you won't be completely lost.

So yeah, I hope you have fun with the relive story! It touches on a lot of the themes from the show and honestly I just really liked seeing the characters again. And also Arcana Arcadia is great, just so great.

#asks #revue starlight

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rockybloo · 2 months

Text

A LONG while ago I had made a post considering making a Patreon or something of that sort for my stuff and how I was pondering things about it.

And I had gotten an inbox response (that I didn't post for very obvious reasons y'all will read later on under the cut) requesting I only post NSFW artwork on it as said person said they didn't care about 18+ artwork and went on to explain how everyone's money is tight right now and that they really didn't want to miss out on story and OC stuff.

And I feel like enough time has passed that I can form a proper response. Because I do understand money being tight but...there's just levels to this that made me feel some very offput by this response to me simply thinking about making a Patreon.

The first thing I want to state is that, if I did make some subscriber content, I definitely wouldn't hide lore heavy stuff behing paywalls. It would have been bonus extra content people could def live without or at the very least something they could see weeks or months earlier than people not subscribed to it (which is something many artists I follow do).

The second thing, is that I understand many do not like NSFW work. I totally get it. HOWEVER, I love drawing intimate things, so much so that I already have alt accounts where I post my more adult content for other adults to see for free because I treat it the same as my sfw art. It's just stuff I wanna draw for fun. And it wouldn't be fair suddenly cutting off those people over on my alt and telling them to pay to see my OC's tiddies from now on.

I also very much am not a fan of having people tell me to my face that they don't care about NSFW content in relation to my OCs and stories. Please keep that to yourself or at least in your friend group Discord servers. Telling me to my face is just a major vibe killer.👎🏾

Third, and by far the most important thing I want to say, is that "YES" money is very tight for everyone right now. Believe me, I know.

However, it's super important that people understand creators are also part of the group when y'all say "money is tight". Like I said, society is hella unstable and everyone is struggling. Artists, especially the ones brave enough to be doing freelancing for a living, are also tight on money.

It's why so many have subscription services for their work. Nearly every creator with a story or characters I follow have a subscription of some sort that people can pick as an option to support them.

When I was considering making a Patreon, I definitely was not expecting everyone following me to hop on board. In the past, I have had people ask if I had one. So me potentially making one would have been meant for those people who were interested in it. It would have been a more "out of the way" option of showing support.

That being said, many artists are share their work for free. Many do so because they love sharing their creations with others. While I don't believe the person who sent in the inbox ask had meant to come off as entitled, I do think people have to check themselves when it comes to their responses to artists in general wanting to make a little money off their own creations.

I have seen so many times where an artist starts to do something to earn money, whether it be merch, adopts, or commissions, and people will complain because there's a price tag for something they got used to getting for free.

Just like someone who enjoys looking at art has the freedom to decide if they want to give said artist money or not, an artist definitely has the right to decide "I want to make some money from my art".

"Art is a luxury" is very much a two way street. You don't have to pay, but an artist doesn't have to make all their work free.

#important rocky post #rocky rambles

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copperbadge · 6 months

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Hello, Mr. Badge, I seem to remember that you once posted about your processes and systems for staying organized in life with Excel spreadsheets etc. I’ve been struggling a lot with depression and executive dysfunction issues and don’t want it to impact my work.

Do you use the same processes at work? I get overwhelmed with the amount of documentation we have and the exceptions to the rules in our processes.

I'm so sorry you're struggling! It's really rough, and the more complicated the task feels, the more fraught it seems, the harder it is to even get a start. I feel that hard.

As for organizing work like my home life....well, it's sort of the same. I don't make a strong distinction between life and work simply because a lot of what needs organizing in my life IS my work, so it's tough to talk about them separately.

For example, I use Google Tasks to build a to-do list each day, but that to-do list starts with "stuff I'll do before work" then "shower" then all my work stuff, then "evening" and then all the stuff to do after work, ending with "7pm chores" (because I have a lot of stuff to do right around 7pm, which I need to post about elsewhere). Then the stuff I've pushed off to next day is below that, and that just bumps up the next morning. What's important isn't really how I keep the list, but that I keep it in a way that is constantly accessible, and I've trained myself to 1. put everything on it, even stuff like "grocery shop" and 2. check it whenever I feel lost. I don't find google calendars very helpful, however, so while work makes me use one for meetings, everything else goes on a calendar I made in Google Sheets that I'm just super used to by now.

It sounds like you're having a fairly specific issue, which may not even be related to your mental health (though assuredly the mental health issues aren't helping). If you have a lot of confusing documentation and exceptions in the stuff you do at work, that can be legit stressful even for someone who isn't dealing with other stuff, so I just want you to know that this may not only be a You Problem. My problem is usually the opposite, in that I'm often the first person doing something, or the only person who's done it in a while, so there's no documentation at all. But when I do have documentation I often will simply rewrite it.

After all, just because you have a handbook doesn't mean you have to use it. You can copy it over into another document and make yourself a step-by-step guide and/or a checklist. Like, I do our holiday cards every year, and my "HOLIDAY CARDS" document says "Here's the first thing you do, here's the second, do this before going past that, check this before asking for that". Literally at one point the document says "Stop. Before you go any further, do this step. Even if you don't understand why, do this step" because in the past I've disregarded that instruction ("Why on earth would I do it this way?") and lived to regret it.

Making the guide really, really sucks. Often it will take me four or five passes at a project before my guide is comprehensive (this is my fifth year doing the holiday card project and the document still has some steps missing at the end). But once you have it, it's invaluable, and often in the past I've found other people want my guides because they're fairly clear and precise about what needs doing when. For example, you might say, "Open the file and move column B to in front of column A. NOTE: THERE IS ONE EXCEPTION, THIS IS THE EXCEPTION." Or "Once you've saved the file, save a second copy to your backup folder so you can go back to it if you delete something you shouldn't. Stop and check: is this file from before or after October? If after, remember, you have to also rename it." If you find that there's a mistake you make frequently, figure out what would stop you from making it and add that in.

(We had a guy at work whose last name was VERY long and Italian, and so when I was working phones he got a special entry in the directory document I made -- the first line was all his directory info and the second line was just the phonetic pronunciation of his last name. He found out, which I had never intended him to do, and lost his shit laughing. "No wonder you're the only one who gets it right!")

So my recommendation to you is to create your own handbook, your own templates, and your own way of doing things and just slip that back into the system you have at work. Draw a diagram by hand if you need a flow chart. My approach to all my organizational issues has always been "What would make me do this correctly / prevent me from doing that thing wrong / remind me what to do / make it easier for me to start".

I think of this nowadays as the "Take the cupboard doors off" school of organizing, because to really make full use of my kitchen in a way that I liked, I had to take some of the cupboard doors off. It looks messier and kind of cheap, but it's actually a much more organized system now, and who's in my kitchen other than me?

#sam has adhd #adhd #organizing

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hueningsloverr · 4 months

Text

౨ৎ txt as musicals !

pairing: ot5 txt x musicals summary: god. idek where to begin. txt as musicals. word count : 0.6k im actually so sorry i even wrote this wow what was i thinking. if you dont know these songs LISTEN TO THEM.

yeonjun : heathers / mean girls there is also a tiny dash of moulin rouge in him

it boy energy is so reflected throughout BOTH

i’m sorry

definitely a candy store guy

he 100% cracks corny jokes like in stupid w/ love

but the amazing theatricality???

the vocals????

SO yeonjun

and ikik abt the soobin meangirl meme but like

lets be real

jjunie just has that energy

and not in a bad way

like in a 'yeonjun told me to dye my hair purple so i did!' way

and when i say heathers i don't mean the negatives

like that musical is fucked up

i mean the level of iconic-ness (?)

sassy man apocalypse fr

"i like looking hot buying stuff they cannot :3" - yeonjun (definitely)

soobin : six

...

i'm actually so sorry for this one!

he competes with himself, that much is obvious

soobin seems like the type to really question if he deserves something - if his suffering was enough

he's the type to compare past suffering to current

like 'well i suffered back then and i turned out fine, i'm not any more important for suffering now' type of stuff

he's the leader, its his job to be the strongest

and he lets himself have some fun

(i mean his first [?] scandal was him showing his middle toe.)

or he could be super serious like the great leader we all know he is

or he's just a total mess, but yet still so strong ??

hes admirable

he's in the history books fr

beomgyu : hamilton

the perfect balance of chaos and serious

i mean he's literally "lock up your daughters and horses!"

while also being "mom i'm so sorry for forgetting what you taught me"

beomgyu was written by lin manuel miranda argue with a wall

its also just so interesting, like gyu

like you could study both hamilton and gyu

a fan favourite

you can't go wrong with hamilton

and you can't go wrong with guy

hamilton has its… fans

and gyu has his bamtoris

both would doxx you if you speak ill of their favs

the gateway into the community

like gyu was the first member i found out about

and hamilton was the first musical i liked

you dip your toes in, and next thing you know you just spent $25 for some merch

taehyun : hadestown

it’s so sad

yet serene and passionate like tyun

i mean, just look at him

those eyes - that smile!!

boba eyes :3

also, he so was a greek mythology kid

probably bought every percy jackson book / related piece of media when it came out

he knows everything

theres just something so tyun about it all

hadestown is a musical you might not know about

but the second you do you're like "wow wtf i was missing out on literally everything good in this world"

and that's literally tyun too

like if you somehow don't know about vocal king taehyun

the moment you find him obsession forms

or at least in my case

my little tyun🤧

i could see him staring in the mirror going "who are you? who do you think you are"

hueningkai : be more chill (bmc)

you can not tell me this boy didn't have some sort of issue making friends

the photos of him sitting alone at lunch (?) pre-debut???

hes so jeremy heere

because he's really just a sweetie

but no one notices him besides his very close friends

definitely would almost accidentally take over the state of new jersey

type of boy to go all the way if he likes a person

im talking joining the same clubs as them

and even joining the friend group they're in

all of it

we all know he used to think so poorly of himself and talk down on himself

like he had those voices in his head

has his michael in the bathroom moments

thinks he's a loner, a loser, a freak

you know the usual high school insults

but he's able to grow confident, with some help

i luv hueningkai ;3

and i luv be more chill

authors note : i lied this is not based off of making the bed. my bad. whoops. maybe next time!

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