Thinking about how Gillion would compare Chip to the sun.

Thinking about how he’d look at Chip and realise that he was a child of Aster the same way Gillion was of Lunadeyis.

Thinking about how he’d see the freckles across Chip’s cheeks and body, and be convinced, surely at first, that they were his own set of stars. How he’d have it explained that it were marks from rays of sunlight, and realise quickly that it was a gift from the goddess herself. How he’d compare it to his own markings, the blue and orange stripes over his own flesh.

Thinking about how Gillion is so connected to the water, and how he’s helped Chip slowly embraced his fire. The way they reflect and balance each-other, so much like the sun and moon. Gillion would notice too, Chip might try to ignore the thought.

Thinking about the poetry Gillion might’ve read, the sun and the moon’s tragic romance. Maybe he’d see connections between them, relate a little, find a strange sense of power in proving them wrong, in holding Chip and Jay close besides their differences. Maybe he’d worry that destiny would tear them apart too.

Thinking about how Gillion would talk to the moon, to Lunadeyis, recalling stories and telling her about his companions. There’d never be any reply, but he figured it would be lonely where she was, watching from the sky. He hoped it might bring her some comfort, he hoped she was watching.

That’s all I got for now, thinking about my little guys (squeezes them in my hands)

BtB Throwback… Stirring the old feels as I plod along with chapter 9 of HHU…these Hyūgas….💔

Despite having written close to 25k words this month, I have been SLACKING on making any type of "Six Sentence Sunday" or "WIP Wednesday" Posts. Partially because my NaNoWriMo Project is a secret gift. Partially because I have been cursed by an eldritch deity and never know peace.

Anyway. To each and every one of you who continues to tag me - you're gems. Sweethearts. Sparkles of Light on my bad days. I love and appreciate each of you, even if I do it silently from my little corner of the world.

Setting the emotions aside now.

Here are as many sentences as I feel like sharing from my project. Because I've been quiet lately and ya'll deserve more than just six measly sentences for not abandoning me. (And if you're from the CO Fandom, know that I'm coming back to all my SnowBaz WIPs as soon as I finish this beast)

An Excerpt from Chapter XI

As I finish Erwin’s request, I level my gaze back on him. Finding his eyes with my own, there’s a look, an intensity, in them that leaves my mouth dry. There’s a question flying in the blue of his irises, a curiosity that I want to sate.  What does he want from me?  Swallowing, I lean forwards in my seat. Propping my elbows on the table, even though Erwin told me that proper nobles keep their elbows off the tops of tables and desks. “How much of this is true?”  Erwin’s eyes flash at my question, and he leans in himself. Bringing our heads close enough together that I can smell the tea and cream from breakfast on his breath. “What do you think?”   “I think I’m not being told everything,” anything, “and that’s on purpose.”  Apparently, that was the right thing to say as Erwin grins at me. And again, I’m struck with how much he reminds me of that boy who’s name I can’t recall. Brilliant white teeth and pink lips that soften his angular face. The sight stirs something reminiscent in my gut. I’m half tempted to ask Erwin if he feels it too, if I remind him of someone from his own childhood. But before I can gather the courage to potentially make a fool of myself if I’m wrong, Erwin is asking more questions of me.  “And why would they do that? Why not tell you, tell everyone the truth?”  “The same reason anyone avoids the truth, because they have something to hide.” It’s an easy answer. One of the first lessons that Kenny taught me. Everyone has something to hide, and if you can find that truth in an individual you can best them every time.  “Exactly,” Erwin agrees with me as he pushes the books we’ve been studying away from us. “So what could the royals and nobles be hiding from us?”  At that, I’m stumped and shrug my shoulders. Erwin deflates with me, almost like he was expecting me to actually have the answer to that question.  He does think I’m a noble, maybe the idiot thinks I have some secrets.   It wouldn’t shock me to discover that he wants to use me for something. He’s clearly working against the nobility in some regard, and I’m sure having a noble on his side could be beneficial. But if he thinks I’m going to be some grand advantage, he’s surely mistaken. I’m nothing more than a good fighter and decent thief.  “I think we’ve covered enough for today,” Erwin redirects the conversation suddenly. Moving to restack the books and parchment we’ve been using all afternoon.

Consider the Tags below as both a Hello, but also How are you all doing?

@aristocratic-otter @aroace-genderfluid-sheep @artsyunderstudy @bazzybelle @bookish-bogwitch @buffy @captain-aralias @confused-bi-queer @cutestkilla @ebbpettier @erzbethluna @facewithoutheart @fatalfangirl @foolofabookwyrm-activated @gekkoinapeartree @hushed-chorus @ic3-que3n @ivelovedhimthroughworse @ileadacharmedlife @ionlydrinkhotwater @j-nipper-95 @johnwgrey @krisrix @larkral @martsonmars @letraspal @moodandmist @mostlymaudlin @onepintobean @palimpsessed @prettylightsbigcity @raenestee @shrekgogurt @skeedelvee @stardustasincocaine @stitchyqueer @tea-brigade @theimpossibledemon @thewholelemon @wellbelesbian @whogaveyoupermission @you-remind-me-of-the-babe

new weaves of time chapter out in a few!

when u go to write a mentally ill person in ur story you are presented two options. the first option is to write your mental illness realistically as you actually experience it with all the ups and downs and people who are like you will resonate with it and feel seen. except every person who reads instagram infographics on mental health that uses the phrase narcicisst for anyone who does anything that crosses them and unironically call themself a dark empath will call you scary and tell you that youre demonizing mentally ill people

the second option is to lie and write inspiration porn for those people to get hard to

DEVASTATING the lyric you've been mishearing is better than the real one

the fact that shakespeare was a playwright is sometimes so funny to me. just the concept of the "greatest writer of the English language" being a random 450-year-old entertainer, a 16th cent pop cultural sensation (thanks in large part to puns & dirty jokes & verbiage & a long-running appeal to commoners). and his work was made to be watched not read, but in the classroom teachers just hand us his scripts and say "that's literature"

just...imagine it's 2450 A.D. and English Lit students are regularly going into 100k debt writing postdoc theses on The Simpsons screenplays. the original animation hasn't even been preserved, it's literally just scripts and the occasional SDH subtitles.txt. they've been republished more times than the Bible

at some point it's just like. do they even fucking like the thing they're asking AI to make? "oh we'll just use AI for all the scripts" "we'll just use AI for art" "no worries AI can write this book" "oh, AI could easily design this"

like... it's so clear they've never stood in the middle of an art museum and felt like crying, looking at a piece that somehow cuts into your marrow even though the artist and you are separated by space and time. they've never looked at a poem - once, twice, three times - just because the words feel like a fired gun, something too-close, clanging behind your eyes. they've never gotten to the end of the movie and had to arrive, blinking, back into their body, laughing a little because they were holding their breath without realizing.

"oh AI can mimic style" "AI can mimic emotion" "AI can mimic you and your job is almost gone, kid."

... how do i explain to you - you can make AI that does a perfect job of imitating me. you could disseminate it through the entire world and make so much money, using my works and my ideas and my everything.

and i'd still keep writing.

i don't know there's a word for it. in high school, we become aware that the way we feel about our artform is a cliche - it's like breathing. over and over, artists all feel the same thing. "i write because i need to" and "my music is how i speak" and "i make art because it's either that or i stop existing." it is such a common experience, the violence and immediacy we mean behind it is like breathing to me - comes out like a useless understatement. it's a cliche because we all feel it, not because the experience isn't actually persistent. so many of us have this ... fluttering urgency behind our ribs.

i'm not doing it for the money. for a star on the ground in some city i've never visited. i am doing it because when i was seven i started taking notebooks with me on walks. i am doing it because in second grade i wrote a poem and stood up in front of my whole class to read it out while i shook with nerves. i am doing it because i spent high school scribbling all my feelings down. i am doing it for the 16 year old me and the 18 year old me and the today-me, how we can never put the pen down. you can take me down to a subatomic layer, eviscerate me - and never find the source of it; it is of me. when i was 19 i named this blog inkskinned because i was dramatic and lonely and it felt like the only thing that was actually permanently-true about me was that this is what is inside of me, that the words come up over everything, coat everything, bloom their little twilight arias into every nook and corner and alley

"we're gonna replace you". that is okay. you think that i am writing to fill a space. that someone said JOB OPENING: Writer Needed, and i wrote to answer. you think one raindrop replaces another, and i think they're both just falling. you think art has a place, that is simply arrives on walls when it is needed, that is only ever on demand, perfect, easily requested. you see "audience spending" and "marketability" and "multi-line merch opportunity"

and i see a kid drowning. i am writing to make her a boat. i am writing because what used to be a river raft has long become a fully-rigged ship. i am writing because you can fucking rip this out of my cold dead clammy hands and i will still come back as a ghost and i will still be penning poems about it.

it isn't even love. the word we use the most i think is "passion". devotion, obsession, necessity. my favorite little fact about the magic of artists - "abracadabra" means i create as i speak. we make because it sluices out of us. because we look down and our hands are somehow already busy. because it was the first thing we knew and it is our backbone and heartbreak and everything. because we have given up well-paying jobs and a "real life" and the approval of our parents. we create because - the cliche again. it's like breathing. we create because we must.

you create because you're greedy.

A reminder to all my lovely fellow writers: progress is progress, even when it isn't. Writing four thousand words in a session is progress. Writing a hundred words in a session is progress. Removing an entire scene because it doesn't flow well is progress. Rethinking your plan for the plot in order to get unstuck is progress. Development looks different for every writer and every story.

Season 1 Rarijack is really funny

Several weeks ago, my retirement-age mother requested that I play Baldur’s Gate 3 for her because she has trouble with controllers/keyboards and wanted “to see what all the fuss is about with that cute wizard boy.” For context, my mother and I have done this sort of thing in the past with certain RPGs (dragon age, mass effect, etc.), but it’s been a few years since she’s personally requested a game like this. Basically, I control her Tav but let her make all the choices so she can determine how the story plays out without worrying about mechanics. She treats it like a choose-your-own-adventure book.

Anyway, here is a list of some of the things my mother has said and/or chosen to do throughout the course of BG3 in no particular order:

She is (obviously) romancing Gale. She is quite smitten with him and his passion for books and learning; she also thinks he’s polite and qualifies as “relationship material.” She also REALLY likes the things he’s said about his cat so far (my mom is a cat lady), so I know she’s gonna flip shit when we meet Tara in Act III.

She’s playing a normal druid Tav with a generally good alignment. Her favorite spell is Spike Growth because she thinks it’s hilarious whenever enemies walk into the AOE and die. I usually end up having to cast it at least once per battle per her request. Sometimes twice.

Contrary to her alignment, my mother tasks me with robbing every single chest, crate, barrel, and burlap sack we come across; this also includes people and their pockets. The party is always at max carrying capacity. ALWAYS. She doesn’t like selling things because “what if I need them.” The camp stash is in literal shambles. There is no hope of organizing it. She’s got like fifty seven sets of rags and a billion pieces of random silverware.

She MUST talk to every animal and corpse in the game. I think five hours of her total playtime so far (47ish) has been spent speaking to animals as many times as humanly possible. Like, I was thorough in my own playthroughs, but this is on a whole other level.

She did NOT get Volo’s lobotomy, but she did let Auntie Ethel take her eye in hopes of a cure for the tadpole. I did not understand the logic then. I still do not understand it now.

She is far more interested in fashion than equipment stats. Do you have any idea how much gold I’ve had to spend on dyes just to make things match? SO much. Same vibe as that “please someone help me balance my finances my family is starving” tweet but instead of candles it’s thirty thousand fucking bottles of black and furnace red dye.

We broke the prisoners out of Moonrise, but they got on the boat too early and bugged the fight by leaving Astarion and Karlach behind. Wulbren Bongle somehow got stuck in combat mode even after engaging the cutscene on the docks below Last Light; he he kept trying to run ALL THE WAY BACK TO MOONRISE nine fucking meters at a time while I frantically tried to finish the fight with the Warden, otherwise Wulbren would have run straight into the shadow curse. (I would’ve let him go; fuck Wulbren Bongle, all my homies hate Wulbren Bongle. But my mom didn’t know that, and she wanted to keep him safe. So.)

She had me reload a save like eighteen times to save the giant eagles on top of Rosymorn Monastery. Wouldn’t even let me do non-lethal damage just to get past things. I think getting that warhammer for the dawnmaster puzzle took us like an hour and a half alone. (Yes, I know you can use any warhammer, but SHE didn’t.)

She’s started keeping an irl notebook to keep track of her quests between play sessions. She writes down ideas and strategies when she thinks of them during the week, then brings them to her next game session at my house. I think she wrote about three pages on possible approaches to the goblin fortress alone.

She insists that I pet Scratch and the owlbear cub before every single long rest, no exceptions. Sometimes I have to do it multiple times until she is absolutely sure that the animals know exactly how much she loves and cherishes them. She has also commissioned a crocheted owlbear plush from a friend of hers and is very excited.

I’m sure there’s a bunch of stuff I’m forgetting, but those are some fun things I thought of. She’s enjoying the game and is telling all of her retired friends to get it and play it for themselves. She asked me “what is Discord” yesterday and I think my life flashed before my eyes.

anyway shout out to my mom for being neat

Part 2 — Part 3 — Part 4 — Part 5

Hello I love your bg3 content and your Dorian is so lovely! Can we get like an alternative reality with Dorian and Ascended Astarion? What would your headcannon be for them? 🙇

something like this, probably

24/05/2022

What progress at home has biden enacted? What policies of his show that he is making progress that prove he is actually different than trump?

I like to pretend I have faith in humanity, so I'll answer as if you're asking this in good faith.

Biden's DEA has lifted restrictions on telehealth prescriptions to make appointments and assistance more accessible.

He put a funding package into place to help unhoused people get access to mental and physical healthcare, as well as short-term and long-term housing.

He has attempted and is still attempting to get student debt relief through - this was blocked by Republican judges appointed by Trump, but he's still working on it.

Infrastructure repair - his administration has budgeted funds to actually fix some severely-damaged and frequently-traveled bridges.

Trying to expand access to healthcare to include undocumented immigrants who came to the USA as children (Dreamers) under the Affordable Care Act. Support for Navigator programs and outreach has also been increased.

He has vetoed Republican-led bills that were attempting to overturn environmental protections - one that would have forbidden investment fund managers to consider climate change in their portfolios (I have two degrees in accounting and this is actually huge), and another that would have overturned restrictions on agricultural runoff into our waterways.

He and his administration worked for ages to get rail workers paid sick days.

This is just some of what he's been doing. Meanwhile, Trump and other Republicans want to criminalize the lives of LGBT people like you and me. They want to eliminate no-fault divorce and force births that will kill parents or devastate them financially. They have stated flat out that they want to install a military dictatorship in the USA. They attempted to put that in motion on January 6th, 2021. They failed once. They will do better next time.

One party wants to house the homeless and expand social safety nets, while the other one wants to criminalize homelessness. One of them wants a future in which I might be able to vote to change how much of a war machine my country is, while the other one wants to eliminate my ability to vote entirely. Those are not the same. Those literally are opposites.

At the end of the day, all you and I can do is choose to do the least amount of harm possible. You and I cannot choose to do no harm. This is the USA, we sell war, you and I cannot choose to do no harm. I wish we could, my god do I wish we could, but that is not an option. So we grieve for the harm we couldn't eliminate and work to minimize the harm that is done. Despite all the crap they support, Democrats are the minimum amount of harm right now. Acting like they aren't is exactly what brought us to an election where our options are a future where we are either wading in blood or drowning in it.

Not voting for Biden will not help Palestine. Not voting for Biden will guarantee a Republican president who will make the situation in Palestine WORSE. AND it'll hurt a lot of other places as well, both at home and abroad, because Republicans are about business and the USA is in the business of war! And I would very much like that to change someday! I would very much like to someday be able to choose to do no harm! And I know what I have to do to try for that future, so what are YOU going to do? There is no standing off to the side in this. If you aren't helping pull, you're the dead weight we're pulling. Are you going to dig your feet into the mud and blood and drown us there? Or are you going to get the fuck off your ass, grit your teeth, and help us pull free?

i need swifties to shut the fuck up about 'oh so kendrick's disses can be analyzed for hidden meanings but we can't do the same for taylor songs' yeah bc that's not isolated to kendrick. subliminals and entendres abound in rap. taylor swift songs are as deep as a puddle while youre wearing flip flops and your feet still arent wet