We did it, gang! We finished it! The last chapter is posted :)

Preview under the cut

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He chuckled and it was a weak, dry bounce in his throat. “Not Mary.”

“Not Mary, indeed,” she smiled at him, and the image of Aunt Mary pushing Donk’s chair through the gravel came to her mind. “She really does have the family’s best interest at heart, doesn’t she?”

He chuckled, again, in a way. A dry choke of what should have been a laugh. “She’s the champion of us all.”  The air in his thin chest vibrated with his long exhale. “The heroine of the story.” 

“Yes.” Sybbie grinned; again she stroked his fingers. “The heroine of Downton.” 

But Donk shook his head against his pillows. “No, not that.”

“Oh yes,” Sybbie passed her thumb against his hand. “That was Granny.”

“I was wrong.” She watched him close his eyes and move his lips, quietly, before looking back at her again. His mouth sounded dry as he spoke, dry but very solemn. “The times I’ve thought Downton needed saving. My life’s work: saving Downton. Protecting Downton. Only now that I’m at the end of it all can I see what it’s really been.” 

She didn’t like this. But she’d listen. She swallowed down the feeling that had risen up high in her throat at Barrow’s cottage. She swallowed down the feeling that had lodged itself tightly at reading through Granny’s letters. She swallowed it all down, and she breathed around it. “And what’s that?”

“Downton saved me.” He nodded, slowly, and his lips trembled into a smile. “Only I was far too self-important to understand that. Hubris.” 

“But—” Sybbie adjusted herself in her chair. “You did save it, too. By marrying. And Uncle Matthew. And now with Georgie—

“—yes, the house.”

“What?”

“We worked to keep the house. The Abbey. Oh, but Cora always knew, I think. And… in her gentle way, she tried to tell me so many times.”

Sybbie blinked. “Knew what?”

Donk exhaled a long, but shallow breath. And then Sybbie watched him smile. “Downton is more than just this house.” He turned his hand beneath Sybbie’s, and his soft fingers squeezed her own. “It’s given me far more than I have ever done for it.”

While browsing Vogue magazine, Sébastien Mitton found a photograph of Ruby Aldridge from the Céline Fall 2011 fashion show. He said, “Boom! We have the direction!” Her beauty and her unsettling gaze drove the first concept art for Emily.

procrastination is starting to have its consequences finally

Forever should've talked with Richas and tried to understand his side in the beginning ofc but some of you are distorting a lot of things

He was super worried with Richas and cares deeply about his son. It's not because he did a mistake that he is a terrible father, calm down

camera day :D

i want to defend blue team's strat bc i feel like people are (validly) annoyed by how hard to counter it was (i really think tubbo would have claimed them even if etoiles and roier hadn't glitched bc he was so well positioned [tho we'll never know weep 😭]) but if you're annoyed, congrats! that's how blue team's felt the past 2 days lol while ~technically~ they could counter by defending spawn like etoiles and roier tried to they a) don't have that many players online at that time naturally (etoiles and tubbo having to be on a 4-5am is not healthy even if possible) and b) it's VERY easy—even without doing tubbo's log strat—to have one person run in spawn and claim them all in <2 secs in the last 10 minutes and have the countdown make it impossible to counterclaim. like REALLY easy. and if they've already claimed the contracts, there is literally nothing they can do but watch the other team win which is VERY frustrating. so it's purposefully irritating/dirty strategy that protests the late login being so op. i'm pretty sure tubbo complained on day 2 that the game rewards waiting until the last 15 minutes to claim rewards unless they balanced it better. blue then lost to the same balancing issue two days in a row. and only tomorrow, on day 5 is it getting fixed. that's the slowest any balancing issue has been implemented so far!! (the % changes daily to fit the gameplay, they gave more detail on the points breakdown the day after blue asked, they added the spawn safe zone today WHILE bad was spawnkilling) blue team simply took the late login strat to its logical extreme, and i think that it really highlights why the game is changing to avoid this outcome!! but blue suffered for like 3 days from this unfairness so i, personally, think it's well-deserved for them to use it to their advantage on the last day it's possible!!

steve harrington, living his best life.

happy pride my loves 🏳️‍🌈

words pale to express how much I hate macron at this point

so I just got diagnosed with adhd

It's not a surprise. I've been pretty much certain of this for like, ten years or so (only growing more certain when immediate family members were diagnosed), but it's... pretty vindicating to have a professional be like, 'yeah you've really, actually been struggling for reasons fairly out of your control.' I guess I'm posting about this here as a sort of sorry excuse for my progressively-worsening difficulty with drawing (in terms of frequency + how long it takes me to get through commissions). When I've said I have motivation issues, I don't mean that I've lost my passion for art or my desire to be drawing; it's more like I'm running at full speed into an invisible brick wall I could never find a way around - which, in and of itself is demotivating, but that's not really my point here. My point is that I'm really really hoping this is just some busted dopamine trickery and maybe, somewhere down the line, I'll find a medication that works for me and maybe I'll actually be able to draw more than like, three times a year? If I'm lucky. I have so many ideas I've wanted to draw so badly for so many years (I have a whole list! I write down every idea! It's pages long!), and I've been suffocating and I just desperately, desperately want this to work. Pray for me lmao

so... thank you all for all your patience and support despite it all

americans, your candy is perplexing, but it compels me. i had caramel cold brew M&Ms and they slapped hard

side note. im just upset now about how it feels like my work is no longer belonging to me. I dont get to choose what it is put into. it is now a comodity for whoever believes that they have a right to my work.

When I work in an art-based industry, what I produce will not be my own. It will be owned by another company who hired me. I could spend hours on it and pour my life force into what I create, but it could be held by the company and not released or released and removed from my ownership.

Now tumblr is the same. now every website is the same. You never have control of what you post forever. You never get to choose what happens to your online work. But now I know that what I post will go directly into the content meatgrinder that is AI technology. I will not get to choose this. I will not get to own my work any more. Even if I opt out, even if thousands of users opt out, not everybody will. Not everybody will know. Not everybody will want to. Not everybody will be bothered.

Theres a difference between individuals reposting my work onto pinterest and an entire blog being fed into AI. Theres a difference between a single human feeding artwork that isnt theirs into AI and an automatic process in which my data, my artwork, my life is being fed into AI. I will never own my own work again unless I keep it directly next to me and never share it.

Im debating pulling all of my work from this website.

Chapter Eighteen of Things Given to Tomorrow

Excerpt:

“No.” Marigold’s quiet voice gathered up the authority it had been lacking moments ago, and Sybbie brought her gaze to her. “I suppose we can’t ignore that this is likely the beginning of the end.” Sybbie wanted to cry just looking at Marigold as she spoke. The soft way she stroked Shirley’s round shoulder, the softer way she tipped her curly head. “With Granny gone, it felt terrible of course. But for us to lose Donk, too?”

“Do we really have him now?” Sybbie didn’t meet the gaze of her younger cousins when she spoke, but she could feel their attention train on her all the same. “Daddy said that when the heart is ready, the body will follow. And I think his heart has been ready for a very long time.” She swallowed. “Perhaps when we were all around, when we were living here or in London and popping in and out, maybe he felt Granny was still here with him? Through us. The children. But we’re all gone. We’re all grown, and our family is –” She stopped and sighed. “I know we love each other, and we’ll always be family, but … we’re people who share more of the past than we will of tomorrow.” She chanced a glance up now and saw, plainly, that her cousins knew she was right. 

“Alright.” Caroline was the one to eventually break the strange quiet. “Let’s agree? We will do anything in our power, no matter where we live, to support those people sitting in there with Donk now. I mean it. Especially George, especially because he’ll be Lord Grantham sooner than I think he would like.” She offered everyone a rueful grin. “What is it that my mum likes to say? ‘We Crawleys stick together.’”

Can't sleep. Scrolling Tumblr. Hit a Minsc gifset. Got through reading the first image caption and then the Tumblr app scrolled away incredibly rapidly for no obvious reason.

Tumblr really said "you've almost recruited him, you don't get to spoil yourself now". XD

Tuvok's father in law, Sokarn-He.

I was stressed but now i'm more chill and really sleepy...

woe. kiryu be upon ye