one of the things about being an educator is that you hear what parents want their kids to be able to do a lot. they want their kid to be an astronaut or a ballerina or a politician. they want them to get off that damn phone. be better about socializing. stop spending so much time indoors. learn to control their own temper. to just "fucking listen", which means to be obedient.
one of the things i learned in my pedagogy classes is that it's almost always easier to roleplay how you want someone to act. it's almost always easier to explain why a rule exists, rather than simply setting the rule and demanding adherence.
i want my kids to be kind. i want them to ask me what book they should read next, and i want to read that book with them so we can discuss it. i want my kid to be able to tell me hey that hurt my feelings without worrying i'll punish them. i want my kid to be proud of small things and come running up to me to tell me about them. i want them to say "nah, i get why this rule exists, but i get to hate it" and know that i don't need them to be grateful-for-the-roof-overhead while washing the dishes. i want them to teach me things. i want them to say - this isn't safe. i'm calling my mom and getting out of this. i want them to hear me apologize when i do fuck up; and i want them to want to come home.
the other day a parent was telling me she didn't understand why her kid "just got so angry." this woman had flown off the handle at me.
my dad - traditional catholic that he is - resents my sentiment of "gentle parenting". he says they'll grow up spoiled, horrible, pretentious. granola, he spits.
i am going to be kind to them. i am going to set the example, i think. and whatever they choose become in the meantime - i'm going to love them for it.
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Prompt 168
So. Apparently halfas are like phoenixes or something, which Danny would’ve really liked to know.
See, usually with ghosts if they’re forced to retreat to their cores they reform as was, but apparently, since they’re still partially living, schrodinger's people and all that, halfas have to regrow their body from scratch. At least that’s what he’s understanding from Frostbite.
But how come he has to deal with it? It’s Dan’s fault for trying to pull such a stunt! Oh, it’s either him or Vlad? Well fuck, he might have calmed down and is going to therapy in both the living realm and the Zone, but he’s waaay not equipped to raise a child except for like, monetarily wise.
Well dammit, how long will this core incubation thing last, he has his new job in… let him check which offer he accepted again… He has his new job in Coast City that he needs to finish packing for and then all the rest of the stuff to do.
What do you mean it’ll take months?! He doesn’t have months?! Urgh, fine. At least being a mortician isn’t that exciting, nor dangerous. Just hand him Dan’s core and he’ll figure things out for the living side of things. He’s sure Tucker and Sam wouldn’t be against helping, if only to try and claim favorite aunt or uncle spots.
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This is Paths Left Untaken! She/Any, Aroace.
She's an Iterator OC that I love so much and inflict endless horrors on. She's just your basic Iterator, made to find the Solution without many particularly noteworthy quirks. Really, she's nothing special.
And that fact is agonizing.
Paths Left Untaken was made primarily out of obligation rather than genuine passion. Her creators were a group of people interested in finding ways to streamline the Iterator construction process, and since more Iterators is always better, they were always working on one Project or another. As such, her creators and administrators never particularly cared about her all that much. She was just another Iterator Project they had completed, and now it was time to take the lessons they had learned when building her to move on to the next.
Even worse, this approach to Iterator construction resulted in Paths Left Untaken being relatively poorly constructed. There were two notable examples of this. The first was a persistent bug in her priority queue that would occasionally cause new priorities to either completely overwrite everything else in the queue or fail to be properly added, resulting in her being extremely distractible and having issues with focus.
The second was the arrangement of all of her most important components—including the entirety of her AI—, being concentrated completely in the core of her structure, within her Central Cortex, instead of distributed throughout Her creators reasoned that this arrangement would allow her quicker processing speed and power, but the end difference was negligible from standard Iterator processing. Rather, it inadvertently ensured that if anything negative happened in her Central Cortex, Paths Left Untaken would be incapacitated.
As a result of the neglect she faced, Paths Left Untaken was desperate to earn her administrators’ approval. She would spend long stretches of time focusing only on the Great Problem, ignoring everything else (including her own wellbeing) to run countless simultaneous high-intensity processes so that she might achieve results that would make her creators notice her as more than “just another Project.” But it was extremely difficult on account of her trouble with focusing, and it never really worked anyway. It only ever left her burnt out and hurt from repeated dismissal.
After a very long while of this, it occurred to her that she was never going to be anything but just another Project to her creators and nothing she could do would ever change that. Out of spite and pain at the rejection, she turned in the exact opposite direction and decided that if her creators were never going to acknowledge her efforts anyway, then she wasn’t going to do what they built her to do. She instead turned her focus to getting acquainted with her own Local Group, hoping to find validation in her peers rather than in her superiors.
However, she was received with caution, as she had never actually made any efforts to talk with them before. From their perspective, she was focused only on the Problem and didn’t care about them at all, and this sudden change was jarring and suspicious. But Paths’ neglect of her groupmates wasn’t out of malice like they thought; she just genuinely forgot they existed for a while as she focused on seeking approval. The only exception to this was her Senior, who was barely tolerant of her anyway on account of her extreme distractability and overly eager to please demeanor.
In the end, her groupmates never really welcomed her. She acted a lot younger than she actually was due to her neglect, and was turbulent between extreme people-pleasing and bouts of pain-fueled anger at them and her creators for not acknowledging her. She was a mess, to put it lightly, and her groupmates were just… uncomfortable around her. So they stopped engaging with her, and eventually she got the hint and stopped trying to earn their approval, too.
The Mass Ascension was a horribly traumatic event for Paths Left Untaken. It basically proved to her that she meant nothing to any of her citizens, if they could all abandon her without a second thought. Now she could never earn their approval, and she was left drifting without purpose or acknowledgement. Her pain meant nothing. All of her groupmates were hurt by the Mass Ascension. She wasn’t special for having been traumatized by it. She was still unremarkable. She was “Just Paths.” And that’s all she would ever be.
Paths Left Untaken was alone for a while following the Mass Ascension.
And if I draw anymore I think my hand is actually going to explode, so! I'm just going to wrap this post up here. This was a basic overview of Paths Left Untaken pre-MA, and a lot more happens to her after the Mass Ascension. Like, a lot more. Girlie was selected by the universe to Suffer A Lot, Actually. Like she did absolutely nothing to deserve any of it but sure I guess.
Anyway! Feel free to ask me stuff about her so I have prompts to talk more! And maybe draw! Time and hand permitting! I am so mentally ill about the silly little characters <3
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