#//or so i am thinking so far

[verflares]

just how long is forever? // not long enough, with you

pssst. check this out on inprnt :]

[hinamie]

surprise it's yuri!!!in 2024

[floccinaucinihilipilificationa]

[soosoosoup]

snowzone

[poorly-drawn-mdzs]

Lan Wangji Goes To Lotus Pier AU: Part 5: Flip Slip.

(Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 4.5)

[welcometogrouchland]

♫ I do what I want/Crying in the bleachers and I said it was fun/I don't need anything from anyone ♫

(ID in Alt) you guys ever think about your own posts and get upset?? Anyway Damian Wayne I love you I'm so sorry your life is like that

[journey-to-the-attic]

uh oh

[victarin]

i fucking love people here you guys see this dinnerplate-faced daycare animatronic and go "what if they were detectives" and you make all this amazing astounding art and writing and concepts and designs like yeah . sure . im going to be normal abt this and im not going to think about the incredible levels of creativity involved im not gointg to think about how much i love seeing beginner artists using the dca as a way to learn new skills in art and character design Im not going to think about how much joy is in all those AUs and how much artists and writers put aspects of whatever they enjoy in those stupid ass clowns to make these incredible inspired stories and artworks absolutely Brimming with love for what they created &how much i love seeing people in the community huddling around those AUs and hyping them up and making More Art from those yeah im normal. whatever

[starstruckodysseys]

junior year is for the burnt out gifted kids. for the kids who tried so hard and got nothing in return. for the kids who worked and worked and worked with no end in sight. no reward. you succeed at things thought impossible and yet you end up in the same place as everyone else. you’re not really advanced. you’re not really a savior. you’re just a kid.

you’re just a kid, and you’re so, so tired.

[yesokayiknow]

barbara and ian's exit is an unashamedly joyful one. they laugh about the missing years! they have a pigeon chasing montage! they whisper goodbye at the sky and then run off giggling! and then as vicki laughs at their joy, too happy to let the loss of her few friends sink in, one just turns his head and very gently says that he will miss them. he will miss them.

[wolvesandvisions]

to anyone who draws and experiences wrist pain like I do i. I figured out the blindspot to solving the pain. maybe this is obvious but whatever. im honestly I'm frustrated at myself for not knowing sooner bcs I was an athlete for so long. but what always confused and frustrated me was that no matter how much i stretched the pain wasnt going away

people always linked n shared resources to stretches and it'd give me temporary relief but not deal with the issue especially not any longer than the time it took me to stretch.

u do have to stretch. but u ALSO HAVE TO WORK OUT YOUR ARMS.

the reason we are hurting so much is because that muscle is doing a lot of repetitive and strenuous motion but the whole length of your arms and wrists aren't strong enough to withstand that much work.

u cant just stretch. buy a set of light-ish weights and just pick a set of wrist and arm workouts u like. do them often. stretch and do those work outs. i really dont even think it matters which you do I do a combination of this and this

just pick ones u like that are good for you, working out can be fun and not miserable i promise. do it. save ur wrists. my life has changed, i still feel pain but ive been able to work and not be ready to cry the next day from daring to try

[sysig]

How far did you get? (Patreon)

[floccinaucinihilipilificationa]

[woffles-4-waffles]

On the menu tonight:

[poorly-drawn-mdzs]

Teehee! (Spritesheets your Wangxian)

[essektheylyss]

One thing that I feel is really interesting and often forgotten about Essek is that fundamentally, his characterization has been from the start based upon his desperation for external perspectives and connection, which, along with much of his narrative and mechanical positioning, means that he actually has an extraordinary and almost (but not actually, as I'll show) counterintuitive capacity for both growth and trust.

(Buckle in. This is a long one.)

In particular, I would argue, knowing now that many places where the plot touches Ludinus have long been marked for connecting back into the current plot, that he was quite possibly built as a prime candidate for radicalization by the Ruby Vanguard. He felt isolated from his culture, he was desperate for other connection, and he was certainly of the type to believe he was too smart to be drawn into such a thing, given his initial belief that he could control the situation and the fallout. If things had gone any other way, he easily could've been on the other side by now.

As such, he has been hallmarked by being fairly open to suggestion, perhaps for this reason, but the thing about that kind of trait is that it is both how people are radicalized and deradicalized. This is certainly true of Essek, who experienced genuine kindness and quite frankly strangeness from the Nein and was able to move from the isolation the Assembly had engendered to meaningful and genuine connection, largely propelled by his own internal reflection. By the time Nein are aware of his crimes, he's already begun to express regret to an extent and, furthermore, doubt in the Assembly, including explicitly drawing a line against Ludinus, even in a position where he was on his own and probably quite vulnerable.

Similarly, when the Nein reach the Vurmas Outpost some weeks later, he has moved from regret for the position he's ended up carrying a heavy remorse. This makes sense! He's fairly introspective, seems used to spending a lot of time in his own head, and was left with plenty to mull over. It's not some kind of retcon for him to have progressed well past where the Nein left him; it just means he's an active participant in the world who has done his own work in the meantime.

This is another interesting aspect to him. I've talked about this a bit before but I cannot find the post so I'll recap here: antagonists in D&D have significantly more agency than allied NPCs. Antagonists are active forces, against which the party is meant to struggle; allies are meant to support the PCs, which means they tend to be more passive in both their actions and their character growth. Essek was both built as an antagonist, in a position that gives him significant agency, and also was then given significant opportunity to grow specifically to act as a narrative mirror for Caleb's arc. Even when he becomes a more traditional D&D ally, he still retains much of that, though he occupies a supporting role.

I believe that this is especially true because of the nature of Caleb's arc, which I've already written on; the tl;dr of this post is that Caleb is both convinced that he is permanently ruined and also desperate to prove that change is possible. Essek is that proof, because he is simply the character in a position to do so. But this also means that his propensity for introspection and openness is accentuated! He has to do the legwork on his own, for the most part, because that's where he is in the meantime.

But he still ends the campaign necessarily constricted; he is under significant scrutiny, he's at risk from the Assembly, and he goes on the run fairly soon after the story ends. He spends most of the final arc anxious and paranoid, which is valid given the crushing reality of his situation. It would be very easy to extrapolate that seven years into this reality, he would be insular, closed off, and suspicious of strangers, even in spite of the lessons he's learned from the Nein and their long term exposure.

So seeing his openness and lightness now is surprising, but at the same time, given this combination of factors in his position in the narrative over time and his defining traits, it's not by any means unreasonable.

But one thing that I found so delightful is how much trust he exhibits, which is obviously a wild thing to say about Essek in particular, given much of what he learns is both earning and offering trust, which was something he says explicitly in 2x124 that he's never really experienced: "I've never really been trusted and so I did not trust." It makes up much of the progression of his relationship with Caleb, and the trust that he is offered by the Nein in walking off the ship is the impetus he needs to grow.

But I think it's easy to talk about trust when it comes to people who have proven themselves to you or to whom you've ingratiated yourself, and that's really the most we can say about Essek by the time he leaves the Blooming Grove. There is this sense in a lot of discussion of trust (not solely in this fandom) that it is only related to either naivete or love, but there's far more to it. Trust at its best is deliberate—cultivating an openness to the world at large is a great way to combat cynicism and beget connection instead. It allows a person to maintain curiosity and be open to experience, but it can be incredibly difficult to hold onto.

It is clear that the Essek we meet now is a very pointedly and intentionally trusting individual. He trusts Caleb and by extension Caleb's trust in Keyleth, as he shows up and picks up a group of strangers from a foreign military encampment and walks in without issue. He trusts the Hells to follow his lead moving through Zadash and to exhibit enough discretion so as to avoid bringing suspicion upon all of them. He trusts that Astrid will respond well to his entrance, but he also trusts himself and the Hells enough to execute a back-up plan in the case that she doesn't. In the end, he even trusts them enough to give them his name and identity.

He doesn't scan as someone who has spent half a dozen years living like a prey animal, afraid of any shadow he runs across in an alley, withdrawn into himself and an insular family, which would've been an easy route for him to take. He scans as someone who has learned the kind of trust borne of learned confidence and a trained eye for good will and kindness, which are crucial weapons one would need for staving off cynicism in his circumstances—as if he has survived thanks more to connection and kindness than paranoia and isolation. (If we want to be saccharine about it, he scans quite poignantly as a member of the Mighty Nein.)

So it is easy to imagine this trust and openness as a natural progression of his initial search for perspectives external to his own cultural knowledge. Though he makes those first connections with the Assembly to try to vindicate his personal hypotheses, he finds in them exposure to the deepest corruption among Exandrian mortals, which could've—and did, for a time—turned him further down that same dark path.

But it's also this same openness to exposure from the wider world that allows the Nein to influence him for the better, and in spite of the challenges he's certainly faced simply surviving over the past seven years, he seems to have held onto this openness enough to move through the world with self-assurance and a willingness to extend the kinds of trust and good will that he has been shown.

(I would be remiss not to mention that I was reminded about my thoughts on this by this lovely post from sky-scribbles and their use in the tags of 'light' to describe Essek's demeanor this episode, which is really such an apt word for it.)