i am forever and irrevocably changed. i will never forget this. i will never forget.

I am chomping at the bit to finally be let in on the missing pieces of Day’s characterization. What is the deal with the animosity between him and Night? What was he truly like before he began losing his sight and got to know Mhok? Which pieces of his core personality are we still not privy to and are going to come rearing their heads as his health worsens and tensions with his family rise? I need to know!

40 minutes left of work. i've written 2785 words of fics so far today, cna i crack the 3k mark in 40 mins? hopefully!! i'm on the fuckin ball man this is the most inspiration i've had in a while, i have six things queued up i am so far ahead of my little schedule i make plus my commissions and trades are coming out nicely

kinda embarrassing how all it takes is seeing my special guy to give my mood a full 180

Me when we don't speak anymore by bears in trees

hmmmm i need to email my therapist for an appointment i think

the thing abt growing up chubby and awkward and a know it all and busy and never dating especially in high school is that like. now I’m 23 and I’ve never dated and I’ve never been kissed. and I have no idea how to do any of those things or what flirting or anything looks or feels like now as an adult bc I wasn’t the subject of those interests/affections alongside my peers as teenagers and now I feel utterly clueless and helpless and like. blah blah blah I know that people that really care about me won’t care abt my lack of experience with romantic or physical relationships blah blah blah but at the same time. how do you even get to the level of someone caring abt you to the point where my inexperience isn’t weird or cringy without. dating? how does any of it work?? I feel like I’m still fifteen and oblivious and clueless and helpless in so many ways except now all my peers are full adults and there’s this huge gap of unknowns and experiences and knowledge I don’t have/haven’t had between us that’s becoming more insurmountable every year. aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa. yk?

also ngl one of the worst parts of having the air of melancholy is that no one wants to be around u if ur sad all the time. so i just have to quarantine the vibes. can someone just sit and be sad with me?

Y’all I made a character for an episode at the beginning of the season who I had a lot of like; plans for? She was gonna be this dark brooding figure who referred dramatically the time before she lost her wife…….. but it turned out her wife left her bc she kinda sucked. And her companions were The Guy Her Wife Left Her For; really a lovely man. and that guys nephew. And, in the end it was a really funny episode and a really fun game! But the character ended up feeling kinda one- note!

In this tale; she was a hardened dwarven warrior whose love of her blade, crafted for her by her one, won out over her love for her one and lost her, in the end.

But like, what I really love about ftlcast, the podcast I’m on, is that now I’m picking her up again, a little further along in her story, at a very different point in her life, around a new group of characters.

And also in a completely new genre. So now she’s a Space Missonary hot gruff butch with a Huge Cyber Axe with a big green hard light blade, and a sad mysterious backstory. She gets to be that hero archetype a little bit with the added benefit of the fact that the audience knows it’s a cheap veneer already bc they saw her at her most pathetically angry.

Anyways the format of our podcast is cool and unique and lets us tell cool stories like that sometimes. Bc of our fun genre hopping thing! And while I’ve only really gotten intentional about character arcs in recent seasons, it’s structurally present across all our previous seasons bc that’s built into the format of the show.

I'm trying to figure out how to talk about critical role announcing a live show, because it's the kind of news that's like, how do you talk about that? How do you even begin to begin?

At minimum a few people will almost certainly die as a direct result of critical role doing a live show for 12,000 people during a pandemic. But that's only the best case scenario; it could be many more. How do you even string words together about that?

I know there's a lot of pandemic denial out there but there's also a lot of people who genuinely don't know the pandemic is still going on, now that it's no longer getting press. If you genuinely didn't know that the pandemic isn't over, over a quarter million people in the U.S. and tens of thousands of people in the U.K. currently have covid

[Edit - I made this post on July 16, and now it's October 8 and I'm linking to this in my follow up post, so I just want to add a note to avoid any chance of date confusion by noting that the above numbers were for mid-July, and as of October 8 in the US with the new covid surge it's over twice that number now]

And it's easier for the "it's a mild illness now" misinfo to gain traction when the death rate absolutely is lower than it was in April 2020 or whatever other date forms people's personal traumatic high-water mark, but that does not mean thousands of people aren't losing their loved ones every week, and thousands more aren't suffering long covid, heart damage, neurological damage

I'm whiteknuckling to scientific integrity to write "will almost certainly die as a direct result of critical role doing a live show for 12,000 people during a pandemic" instead of "will die," because I can't see the future and October hasn't happened yet. But barring an unhinged Act of God-level change in covid rates, the live show is guaranteed to get people sick. Statistically, that means deaths - at least a few deaths, potentially many more. Which gets me back to like. How do you even find the words for that?

I've been diving through covid reporting all afternoon for the actual current numbers, because policies declaring the pandemic "over" and ending testing have made reporting so deeply inadequate and crappy, and misinformation is a plague (metaphorical) that I don't want to contribute to. And well, yeah. The most conservative estimates are a quarter of a million people currently sick with covid in the U.S. and 60k people in the U.K. (if you want to know why I'm confident those numbers are 'reliable' in the sense of coming from confirmed sources and not pulling numbers out of thin air or overestimating cases, but also are significant underestimates, please ask me I will make a post about covid stats and hospitalizations and wastewater testing in a heartbeat)

But playing with stats is not giving me words for the, this

How do you deal with looking at a piece of fiction you loved and knowing that the making of the next piece is going to cause injury and death to real alive human beings in such a direct way?

It's easy to fixate on the people who will read this post in the most bad-faith way possible, but I know that with the lack of press there are a lot of people who literally do not know the pandemic is still happening. If this convinces a few people not to travel to the live show, or to use as many layers of protection (n95, tests, quarantining before and after) as possible, then it's worth it

(And if you are one of the people who didn't know that covid rates are still this high, I'm sorry you're finding out from an emo post about a dnd live show)

so recently a child had gone missing and it ended up being a case of manslaughter with bad cover up and people are calling it a collective trauma (it is not) and comparing it to last year’s massacres (two of them, consecutively, also not a collective trauma) and it’s so disgusting how people are victimizing themselves and shifting the narrative around how if affected them personally and i’m not even going to touch upon the conspiracy theories and sensationalist approach to the entire ordeal

So, in lieu of the awesome and by that I mean shitty tumblr news I’m probably not going to be posting on here very much in the future. I’ll still try to update my current comic project, but… beyond that is uncertain.

You can find me on instagram at what_the_wonder for more art, or you can follow my main blog @whatthewonder . It’s much more casual over there. I’m also on discord if you would like to say hello :) send an ask or dm w/ ur discord handle and I can shoot a lil message ur way. I’m on Twitter too with the same handles, but I haven’t really been on it at all recently. I’ve been kind of drifting away from social media to focus on irl stuff.

I’ve been on a Puzzle Agent bender recently and gotta find new places to shout abt this game

Ok. Peace and love

really just absolutely not doing ok just now i am so sorry for my sort of fluctuating ability to socialise i will get back to messages and things eventually sorry

the longer I exist online the more I feel like a lot of people think politics are like. awareness fairs. about awareness.

listen. ik the holidays are about more than gifts. but when you've had about 2-3 christmas mornings in a row where one or both of your adult siblings has big feelings over what they were/weren't given, it's hard to not feel the pressure.

So baby shouting notwithstanding, it's been a minute since we got a squeaks update, how you holding up chief?

oh for sure, especially since the last update was "oops i am literally dying" and i am decisively, not dead.

july/august was absolute rock bottom in that regard. the fears and concerns i shared here about the situation were very much real, but in what was finally a change for the better, in sept/up till now things have been steadily improving. im still sick as hell and i have a number of serious issues persisting, but it's certainly up from the "haha discussing hospice care" levels where it was this summer.

outside of that I joined a new lab and got started much more actively on research and its been very enriching. INCREDIBLY exhausting especially considering the above context but its been nice to find something in grad school that feels like a better fit.

mental health has been ok, ive been trying (with limited success) to limit my exposure to social media sites that I know are upsetting, and I'd like to do more art again in the forms of plushies/sculpting/illustration while still trying to find a good balance with cosplay. ie back to normal everyday issues which let me tell yall feels like a downright blessing