i didn’t “finish” the qiao story but nano saw me add 20k words and an extra side storyline so I’m pretty proud of myself.

main problem now is that I’m kind of stuck as to where to end the first book/if I want to do the whole publishing rigamarole again or if I want to keep posting it online.

Given that I’m at 72k words, the ideal ending would be at the current generation leaving the narrative, with the sword being handed off from the eagle family to the snake’s daughter.

BUT, the generation after the snake’s daughter sees the sword truly lost and feels like a more definite ending ending with a lot of old characters getting their denouements, but it’s like, a full character lifetime’s worth of story left to write

lastly I have no clue how to sell this story. “it’s about building a good home for children and losing it, and then one of the children avenging its loss” is kind of the basics but also the revenge plot is barely the focus? it’s more about the people left to the wayside, but that kind of narrative depends on strength of characters and idk how pitchable that is

I was really in the mood to do some masquerade fanart, but I didn’t feel like coming up with anything original, so here’s some of my favorite (...slightly paraphrased) bits from the first part. I don’t know where it’s going, but it’s pretty fun so far!

also one that isn’t canon except in my heart:

(disclaimer that this is a Joke)

(he is a horrible little rat man, but to be fair, so is everyone else)

(if you don’t like horrible little rat men why are you even playing this game)

IMAGINE. working at ur stupid uhhh job or whatever. pulling into your drive way and ready to work on some crazy project in your garage. opening the door to the most unfamiliar silence. did your wife and kid leave for something? could you imagine knocking on your kids door, hardly getting an answer, and opening it to find the splattered remains of your wife across his room your child is scared! hes hardly consolable, in a state of shock and terror. you are too, but youre the adult here. you need to take charge. you need to protect him. you need to do something. you need to do something.

Despite everything. Despite AFO trying to create the perfect spawn in Tomura. Despite having every moment of his life controlled from the day he was born. Despite experiencing tragedy after tragedy to create a creature so full of hate it would stamp out the sun, there is still a seed of love, of goodness, of rebellion in Tenko Shimura.

AFO could try take everything from Tenko. But he could never take his heart.

Weird AU idea: Crossover AU between Minecraft and Welcome Home. Those bitches gotta kill some dragon to get back home IDK. I can see many shenanigans with this concept

Mainly made this up because I had a dream the Warden from Minecraft and Julie Joyful met (Julie was not enthralled for obvious reasons) (tbh it was more a nightmare DX)

bold of you to assume their Goofy Asses could get anything done, let alone kill the ender dragon

it's really interesting to see how lucy idolizes john compared to his actual actions in arc 13, and also compared to the unhealthy direction lucy's own character is taking.

john felt a sense of duty and obligation towards his bound companions, so he made a deal to free them in exchange for taking the carmine seat. he could have chosen peace, happiness, and backing away from an eternal, senseless war, but his duty to his friends was more important than any of that--and even more important than lucy.

i'm not sure lucy has accepted that john made a bad choice there. she's gotten to the point where she feels like eternally fighting is an obligation she *has* to do, where it's bad if you don't fight, even at the cost of your own happiness. she blames the entire universe and literally anyone else for john's death except for john himself, completely removing his own agency.

and i think a lot of lucy's current complexes, her inability to put down the knife, her insistence that destroying herself for a greater cause is good and right, is because she doesn't want to accept that john might have not made the best decision after all. continuing the cycle of violence isn't how it's done, especially because at the end of it, you'll be so twisted by that violence that you won't be capable of making positive change.

I've spent the latest days reading the Iliad over and over. I have many copies (different translations and an Ancient Greek-Spanish one). I literally highlighted with blue and post-its every single scene where Agamemnon appears, talks, or is named. :3 also bonus for Agamemnon and Cassandra stickers, and bookmark:

I assure you I can counterargument any unfair criticism you have against him >:( I'm writing an essay about him, all his flaws, and all his good sides 💕🦁

AND INARIUS

OH GOD INARIUS YOU POOR SUMMER CHILD. YOU SWEET DUMB CHILD. YOU ARROGANT IDIOT. I AM TEARING HIM LIMB BY LIMB. SHACKING HIM LIKE A RAGGED DOLL

The man Viktor Orbán wants to destroy - and whom he might fear the most

This is Pastor Gábor Iványi, the head of the Hungarian Evangelical Fellowship, a small, free-thinking Methodist congregation.

This is Viktor Orbán, the increasingly far-right prime minister of Hungary, who's basically managed to steal an entire country in the heart of the European Union - also the great friend and student of many authoritarian or far-right leaders: Erdogan, Xi, Trump and, of course, Putin.

One of the most gripping stories in the fall of democratic Hungary under Orbán in the last 13 years is the duel between these two men. Iványi is the elderly, jovial pastor of a small methodist church. Always on the side of the downtrodden - the Roma, the homeless, the poor, the refugee. He is the living conscience of the country. His congregation may be relatively small, but it operates a network of schools, kindergartens, homeless shelters, senior homes etc around the country, caring for some 20 000 people. (Their activities are completely non-denominational and neutral - they don't require anyone in their schools etc. to pray with them and the clientele has absolutely no money to give to the church.)

Strangely enough, the two men hey started out together - in the late 80's Iványi was the "pastor of the opposition," and as such, the one to christen the first two children of the young, rebellious liberal opposition leader, Viktor Orbán.

In the late 90s Orban went for the more prosperous field of increasingly right-wing populism, generating a fanatical following and polarizing the country, Iványi stayed where he was needed - with the homeless, the Roma, the increasing number of impoverished people - often raising his voice in their protection (eg from the marching neo-nazi paramilitary groups).

Come 2010: Orban wins the elections with 2/3 majority, giving him free reign over the country. He declares that he will cement his government "for the next 20 years", and changes the constitution (which he never said he was planning to). The increasingly undemocratic measures (one of Orbán's first, symbolic acts is to remove the word "republic" from the country's official name) are met with several opposition demonstrations in the first years - and Iványi is a frequent speaker.

One of the many large-scale changes is a new church law - purportedly to get rid of the "many business churches" operating in the country - in reality to cement in a few servilient churches to push propaganda in exchange of the (extremely) generous support of the state.

The law declares that only a small number of churches - named in the law - may remain recognised churches, everything else must become a "religious association" - and not receive the extra subsidies churches were previously entitled to when they operate educational or social welfare institutions - basically killing their budgets. They can also no longer receive the yearly 1% tax donation Hungarians may freely bestow on their church of choice. Iványi is semi-formally told that he should not even dream of getting the status - it is not a right, but a favour granted by the government, and Orbán has vowed to destroy him.

Iványi's church fights the new bill, winning all cases in court, before the Constitutional Court and the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg. The government laughs in their face - they never get back their church status and the lost subsidies (after the decision of the Constitutional Court Orbán cynically changes the constitution to "correct" the situation). The goal is to simply and slowly let them bleed out - it would cause too much of an uproar to shut the church and its institutions down. Public support is high, but after a while everyone becomes numb - there's only so much the average citizen can keep being enraged about.

The plan almost backfired - in 2023 the church is still standing, Iványi and his staff of more than 1000 people are still there caring for the increasing number of people kicked to the curb by Orbán's kleptocratic regime, so the government has stepped up its game - the Tax Authority has started to pull large amounts of money (hundreds of thousand dollars) from the church's bank account "for their unpaid bills", even though the state rightfully and legally owes the church several millions. They got to the point where some months they cannot pay the staff's salary.

So far the Evangelical Fellowship has managed to stay operational and show that there is another way to live in this divided country, another way to turn towards our fellow men - without fear and hate, to show that a church must not spew nationalist propaganda in exchange of the state's favour, to show that you must not bend your backbone to live in this country. To be the living conscience of the country.

It may not last, though. The attacks have intensified in the last months, Iványi himself is getting older and his health and constitution has suffered from the decade of persecution. This is how he and Orbán look like after 13 years of this regime.

What Iványi and his church needs is help, support (monetary and other) and visibility on the international stage. You can find them here

TL;DR: There's a community in Hungary that is deeply committed to freedom, liberalism, equality and humany dignity, that the autoritarian, alt-right despot (Putin's and Xi's lackey) Orbán wants to destroy - and they are almost at the end of their tether. Help them by donating or just spreading the word.

Some sources: 1 2 3 4

like ok. not to double post but i am going to try very very hard to be hopeful. the future is not fixed. this was a fucking horrible outcome and the consequences are and will be continue to be absolutely dire. but it is not permanent. things can change. this will radicalize people who will then use that energy to try to make things better. this will make people realize that we need each other and we are nothing without community and mutual aid and it will create networks of care and deepen the networks that already exist. the justices will die or retire and new justices will take their place and they may be just as bad or even worse but they also might be better. maybe we won’t even have justices. maybe this will be the breaking point where we decide (or really reach critical mass of people deciding) we aren’t going to live like this anymore and we look at what other countries are doing and how they fought to get there and we fight even harder in that same direction. these other cases are in even more jeopardy now but maybe they wont be overturned. abortions will still happen and maybe people will pursue careers and volunteer opportjnities to make sure that even in light of this they will happen safely. the future is not fixed. this is the middle of the story, not the end of it and not the beginning of it. idk

i need something to take apart and put back together 20 times Right Now

hm

like

like, i like a good colony sim as much as the next guy, i mean i loved what they had in cult of the lamb and the system theyve got in ac 3 looks like it would be reeeeally fun like genuinely!!

but um

wasnt. ratonhnhaké:ton’s entire motivation. from day 1. to push back the ppl settling on his people’s lands and force them to leave or at the very least not expand? i mean thats literally his entire motivation to leave his village and listen to juno. why is he suddenly recruiting people to turn a house in the forest into a small town. what the fuck

I didn’t realise this until adulthood but handmade birthday piñatas are the apex of parental devotion. I spent the week cooking for my ravenous teenage cousins and felt a bit crestfallen at times that I was spending so long making something that was going to disappear within minutes—but with piñatas it’s so much worse, they exist to be savagely maimed. Year after year my father asked his kids what shape they wanted this year’s piñatas to be and he spent weeks painstakingly making them in the basement after work, only to watch a bunch of oversugared bat-wielding kids gleefully destroy them in less than 10 minutes. 

I mentioned this to him and he said he remembered researching tarantula anatomy for the giant spider piñata I asked for when I was 4, trying to make the fangs the right shape and to cut the crepe paper into very thin ribbons so the thing would look appropriately fuzzy, and I was like “and I don’t even remember it because I was four!! spending so long building a beautiful object only so your kids will have fun destroying it, knowing they won’t even remember it, is such a selfless endeavour” and he said “my other motivation was that you said you wanted the spider to look real & scary so the kids at your birthday party would be terrified of it and you’d get to scoop up all the candy and I wanted to support your slyness & ambition”

Grabs you by the shoulders HUMMINGBIRD SALAMANDER BY JEFF VANDERMEER AND Y/N BY ESTHER YI ARE REALLY JUST THE SAME TYPE OF STORY IN DIFFERENT FONTS. THE RECKLESS AND RELENTLESS PURSUIT OF AN IDEAL, OF AN IDEA, OF A FRAGMENT OR A FIGMENT OF A PERSON WHO YOU SO EARNESTLY BELIEVE YOU KNOW. EVEN AS IT DESTROYS YOU. EVEN AS IT TEARS YOUR LIFE APART. AN ALMOST RELIGIOUS ZEAL FOR AN IDOL. THE SUDDEN DISAPPEARANCE OF THAT IDOL LEAVING MANY BROKEN OR OTHERWISE CHANGED IRREVERSIBLY. AN IMAGINATION OF AN IDYLLIC REALITY. UNRELIABILITY OF THOUGHT, OF MEMORY. A WOMAN REALIZING SHE NEVER LOVED THOSE WHO WERE CLOSE TO HER AS SOON AS SHE STARTS TO LOVE A CONCEPT. LOVING THE IDEA OF LOVING AN IDEA. DO YOU UNDERSTAND

Thinking about how everyone is so dramatic about yakuza 3 being the most dogshit gameplay wise when it was some of the most fun ive had playing a yakuza game and encountered 0 of the issues people were having