#BC ITS LIKE we switched 3 times during art class but it was. not obvious. but they Know

[sanitizarium]

if you have interacted with me in the past 4 months sorry btw. the constant state of dissociation does have me in a grip and i cannot think thoughts

[stonerz4sokka]

the gaang (& co.) on zoom

aang: ALWAYS mixes up his class times and it isn’t until sokka helps build his schedule and set reminders on aang's phone that he actually shows up to the right class at the right time, always excited to be there but is constantly getting distracted by the littlest things (doesn’t help that his window is behind his computer), isn’t afraid to tell the teacher when the hw assigned is too much (the whole class thanks him for that), types jokes in the class chat, wears his appa print pajamas to class everyday, motivates people to stay optimistic during these ‘troubling times’ (and it works)

katara: wears sweatpants and a crewneck everyday but NEVER forgets to do her hair, talks shit about the ugly white girls in their class (some are sokka’s exes) with zuko, wants to do pranks with toph but is too scared of getting caught (though she eventually does a few),  takes the lead in breakout rooms bc she can’t stand the awkward silence although if aang is there they’ll both be very distracting, will literally laugh on camera every time she hears a stupid comment, gives emotional speeches to help motivate her classmates which are well-intentioned but come off as a little preachy :/ people still try though bc they weirdly don’t want to disappoint her, refuses to let a man interrupt her so she will continue talking even if their voices are overlapping for a good 20 secs 

sokka: has an insane amount of reminders, alarms and organizational tools on his phone and computer so he doesn’t forget to go to class, he tries so hard to focus but ends up doing something that’s completely unrelated yet still educational, wears his same dumbass science pun t-shirts to class but he has his hair down more which makes the white girls in his class go crazy, starts all his sentences with ‘i think’ or ‘maybe we should’, tried to be clever once by setting a video on loop for his zoom background so the teacher didnt know he went to the bathroom but forgot to mute himself so the entire class heard him pee :(( his teachers enjoy him more in a zoom setting bc he's less of a distraction but they hate how he never stays on topics and asks questions they dont have the answer to, whenever katara sees him getting increasingly neurotic she’ll send him links to cool small businesses and they’ll ignore their classes n go online shopping together 

zuko: always looks tired and grumpy even when he’s well rested, his camera is at 256p even when he has the newest macbook (azula messed w his computer & he still hasn't realized), extremely paranoid around accidentally unmuting himself so he just never talks, cannot figure out zoom and never screen shares for projects bc it takes him 15 mins every. time. is weird in breakout rooms because he's bad at social situations but he's trying!!! he could try harder tho :/ is able to empathize well with his fellow classmates n tries to lift their spirits (it rarely works but the effort feels nice), the teacher once saw him scream and punch his desk during the desmos activity and sent iroh an email about local therapists who specialize in anger management, spends his breaks between classes crying 

toph: she will pick her nose, eat food, clip her toenails, do anything gross on camera to get back at her history teacher who told her she needs to be more ladylike, is actually cool in breakout rooms she seems like she would be super distracting but she would complain about the shitty teachers n provide insightful thoughts for the discussion/assignment at hand, does her zoom classes in her backyard so she could play with bugs, gives very helpful advice for maintaining ones sanity during online learning

suki: is always wrapped up in her blankets to the point where u can barely see her face, eats on camera & doesn't realize that no one wants to see that shit, she laughs at all the teachers' bad jokes bc she genuinely thinks they're funny, refuses to let sokka outperform in zoom learning so she does actually pay attention although it doesn't look like it, is really chill in breakout rooms n pretends she doesn't really care but will edit the work after class so it fits her expectations, she once farted in the middle of when she was talking and just pretended like she it didn't happen, actually is fine with online learning and likes the flexibility and doesn’t get why sokka is spiraling all the time :// 

azula: oh god, she wears entire outfits with khakis and polos and SHOES!!! for her zoom meetings!!! she. wears. shoes. her hair is always perfect, tries WAY too hard and everyone knows when she wants to speak in class bc she literally starts vibrating on camera, one time someone won a debate against her in class and she turned off her camera for a good 3 minutes, when she turned it back on her eyes were watery and her entire face was red, doesn't understand how people are underperforming over zoom, has the second highest gpa in the school (after sokka) and managed to convince herself he is actively trying to ruin her life but he's just........ sitting there. constantly messes with zuko's google calendar so he's late for class, can clearly see the art of war by sun tzu on her bookshelf in the background

mai: yawns on camera whenever azula talks just to piss her off, doesn't talk often because her teachers & peers underestimate her but she's smart and when she does talk it's always something rlly insightful, one time her and ty lee were paired with jet for a project where he spent the whole time 'explaining' the topics at hand while they did the entire project on another tab and pretended to pay attention to him, tom tom will sometimes join her during class bc he misses her n she acts like she hates it but she does love spending time with him, is actually secretly extremely anxious about maintaining her grades during online learning but only sokka and ty lee can tell, her and sokka gossip through heavily layered inside jokes that only the two of them understand

ty lee: built a completely new daily schedule and organizational system the minute she learned they were switching to zoom, is always ready for class 20 mins before it starts but joins the zoom 2 minutes after class started so no one thinks she’s an overachiever, a great student but she waits too long to speak in class so she barely joins in on the discussions, is seemingly the regular ty lee but every so often she’ll pretend to go to the bathroom & turn off her camera to recollect herself bc she’s always on edge :/, would have the best gpa in the school but doesn’t want to seem intimidating so she purposefully scores lower on certain assignments so she has a 3.75 gpa, 

jet: he tries to subtly vape during class by turning off camera his camera but its really obvious bc when he comes back he’s coughing and waving the smoke out the air, only participates in breakout rooms when the teacher comes in and immediately turns off his camera when they leave, staged a kidnapping during one of his lectures as an elaborate prank but no one cared noticed, someone else recorded the prank and posted it on tiktok where it blew up & all the comments were insulting him, he didn’t care though because ‘there’s no such thing as bad clout’

chan & ruon-jian: has not gone to a single one of their zoom classes sober (honestly barely attend), still tried throwing houseparties even when the cases were at their peak, tried to one-up jet's kidnapping prank by calling SWAT on themselves but ended up getting arrested because they forgot to hide their stash (they sell counterfeit juul pods), worst part was that their prank only got 250 views on yt :(

[hayesit]

matt’s 2019 year in review

here it is! and it’s late because i had other/better things to do (and procrastinating), was recovering from hangovers (also procrastinating), and recovering from being sick (procrastinating).

i’ve been doing these year in review posts since 2016, so here is my fourth installment. every year i look back through my google calendar, my camera roll, and my bullet journal as a gratitude exercise and to chart my own development as an adult. 

here is my spotify wrapped 2019!

the beginning of this year was off to a good start: i met two friends that i know through the internet! i met my friend riley when she visited boston (i met her through a mutual friend and through overwatch league twitter) and my friend jimmy that i’ve known for…. 6 or 7 years (?!) through tumblr and designed the logo for me and alex’s late podcast, hardly tea, may she rest in peace. 

i moved dorm rooms in between the fall and spring semester, and once again i was not happy with where i lived. i lived with 4 rando’s that i was placed with and the 5 of us barely even talked with each other. my direct roommate i saw for only two weeks, and for the nights he slept over in the bed (that he was paying room and board for) and had the worst snoring humanly possible that not even earplugs could kill (video below). i hardly slept while he was there and roamed the halls of riverview suites like a ghost due to the anxiety i felt about my lack of sleep (we love a vicious circle)! he disappeared after those two weeks without notice and i lived in fear of him returning for the rest of the semester (which he didn’t), but returned to my normal sleep schedule. 

that semester was my first semester of full-time grad school. i got a poor grade on an assignment that had a note from the professor that said she knew i could do better and it hit me how much different grad school is from undergrad and how much more effort and dedication it requires. after crying in my professor’s office, my work ethic has improved since then, but it’s not anywhere near where i’d like it to be (more on that later). 

now to more positive things for the spring semester: i met some friends that semester both ~on and offline~ that made the semester far more bearable AND i did however truly pop off in every last one of my powerpoint presentations for class. i looooove making powerpoints and just fuckin telling jokes about my research topic and have ppl tell me that they are looking forward to my presentation & that i should teach college classes :)!

me and 4 friends had a social group in which we’d drink and play board games and forget about the board game and drunkenly talk shit called cabam after all our first initials! i always looked forward to that and dug the group chemistry a lot.

during this semester i grew a   “ beard “, otherwise known as i chose not to shave just to  “ see what would happen “ (praythatitfilledin). sorry about that!

the overwatch league was something that i had to look forward to watch every week and i had my experience enhanced through sideshow and avast’s unofficial companion streams, which guaranteed lots of laughs. i have bought tickets to two boston home games in 2020 which i am very excited about! analysts have predicted boston to be in 20th place this year (there are 20 teams) but i’m still excited for the 2020 season anyway!!

i can’t have a year-in-review of 2019 without mentioning game of thrones. due to the show’s final season being undeniably weak, i enjoyed the camaraderie with the other people that watched thrones during those six weeks. i haven’t thought about the show or its universe for quite a while, unfortunately. i truly was quite into the world of westeros, but the weakness of the end of the story cheapened the journey of each of the characters, in a way. such a shame.

while i got my diploma in december 2018, i walked across the stage of umass lowell’s tsongas arena with my bachelor of arts in psychology (and minor in theatre arts). it wasn’t as emotional or triumphant of an experience and just felt weird, considering i had already gotten my diploma and was going to remain in the clutches of rowdy the riverhawk as i am staying for my masters degree in applied behavior analysis/autism studies. i brought a ceramic monkey to graduation. it didn’t have any symbolism, but i just wanted to see if they’d stop me (which they didn’t)

 this summer was better than most summers of mine go, i hung out with alex nearly every weekend, got my very first iphone, and got a data plan. the combination of these three things got me back into playing pokemon go, an unexpectedly fun pastime! went on lots of walks!

my favorite day of summer was going to a lake with alex and our friend gianna, who i grew closer to after meeting her during macbeth last year. fond 2019 memories with gianna include: doing simulation patients with her, watching movies with her and alex, and the halloween party. what a great gd person and a great gd friend! big fan and eternally rooting for her. 

fire emblem: three houses came out on the switch in august and is, without a doubt, my game of the year. there’s truly so much to love about the game: the world, the characters, new changes made to the series, things that were gone but returned, interesting micromanaging, and best of all, how huge my brain feels when playing it. 

i got a 6-week summer job as a paraprofessional at an extended-school-year program for children with developmental disabilities at a preschool in haverhill which taught me a lot of lessons, such as: i hate cleaning shit off of children.

then i had feelings that didn’t make much sense for about a month! whoops!

my full-time job i currently have is working at my old high school as a behavior specialist. i provide consultation and work on programs to lead to more appropriate behavior in students, primarily ones with developmental disabilities. so far it’s been fairly rewarding, some days are more challenging than others, some days are a lot of sitting in meetings, and some days are a lot of running around. some days there is not much to do at all, which has its obvious upsides and downsides. working at the high school isn’t something that i want to do forever, but it’s a good place to start with. i’m definitely learning a lot and there are a lot of benefits to working here. sometimes i can work on my grad school work (which is all online until the 2020 summer semester) which is definitely huge. and my commute is either a 15 minute walk or 3 minutes if my mom drives me! 

a ~complex~ thing about working in my hometown is that it makes the most financial sense to live at home because it’s so close to work. this is my first time living at home full-time since high school and i’m not enjoying that part too much. most weekends i visit alex in lowell, but being stuck at home with no car (going to retake the license test in the spring when the ice melts!) and having to go to bed so early definitely hurts. sure, i have what is likely the lowest amount of expenses i’ll ever have in my life (no car-related payments, no rent, no groceries), but i feel landlocked. i feel like a teenager with minimal freedom, which is in part because my mom doesn’t quite understand yet that i’m a 22 year-old that should have a lot more freedom than i do now. the most i really do on weekdays after work gets out (2:30p) is go to savers with my mom if it’s tuesday (senior citizen day), maybe go for a walk if it’s nice out (which for most of the school year, it isn’t), or be on the computer watching bon appetit videos and playing overwatch, fire emblem, or pokemon, eat a bland dinner at 6, go to bed at around 9:30. sad! truly not a situation that i want to be trapped in that much that much longer!

i think the best and most important part of this year was becoming closer with alex. as i mentioned before, we see each other most weekends, to our great benefit. our living situations have flip-flopped, with me living at home and alex living in an apartment near campus, which in both similar and different ways have taken their respective tolls on us. having each other while going through changes and stagnations in our lives has been immeasurably important. thank you alex for providing a place to be myself other than my own head. thank you for being my best friend. 

now i come to the thing that i’m most excited about for 2020. not 2 suck my own horn but i have cobbled together a fuckin dream team of five friends (me, alex, chris, kelly, and molly). the two times we have all gotten together it has been so satisfying in such a wonderful and otherworldly way that i am filled to the brim of happiness being around them. the craziest thing is that i met chris and kelly through twitter! TWITTER. and they’re real-ass people and my real-ass friends! i haven’t been so pleased with something in my life like this for so long and it feels so good to have adult friends that i have chosen rather than friends by circumstance. it’s truly a crime that we can’t see each other more often, but we already have a day picked out for the next time we all do something together. feeling emotional writing this paragraph bc i love me gd friends so much!

there is a lot of uncertainty about this new year for me. i sure as fuck don’t want to live at home more than i have to but don’t know where to go, my practicum class starts for me this summer which means i’ll most likely have to change jobs (fine by me, but will be exhausting), i recently began my search for therapists and hope to find one soon to help me ~unpack things~, my thesis begins in the fall semester and i don’t know what to do for it, and i’m not 100% dead-set on working in special education. it’s been hard transitioning from living on campus and going to school full-time to the life i have now. 

[rogertaylcr]

its alright if its long! i asked bc i was curious, id love a long answer

OKAY HERE IS THE SUPER LONG ANSWER, it’s self indulgent and, dare I say, Boring as shit -- but it’s the full answer to how/when/why I started drumming -- it is also 1.5k words long so it’s under a read more

so I started like drumming in a serious way i would say like a year and a halfish ago which isn’t a super long time I know but theres a tediously long story behind it which you asked for so don’t blame me for how long this is cause dude i know it’s long

The why of it is actually pretty short though. So my house is a music house, my mom plays a bunch of instruments and sings and my dad listens to a bunch of music so theres a lot of musical passion (even when theres no talent necessarily). As a kid, like 3-4 like EARLY memory, I remember listening to bohemian rhapsody and hearing the drums specifically, which idk if this is universal but for a lot of songs for awhile i just didn’t hear the drums as like part of the song really, and with bohemian rhapsody they were just so clear, like i could hear the heartbeat of the song. (this was the first song I felt that with but definitely not the only one, baba oreilly was another one that i made me realise the life of the song comes from the drums) When I was .... like 6-7, a beatles doc came on MTV and I saw Ringo drumming during the early beatles years and he was standing and stomping the hi hat and bass and there was just so much movement and power behind it and so much more fun in my opinion than the other instruments and i was like “i wanna be the one giving songs their heartbeats”. The more i got into a bunch of other, new and old, bands the more i was like This Has To Be Me. I had always been a fidegty person who was drumming to shit anyway but like the idea that that could translate into like something palatable and musical and entertaining and LOUD was News™ to me and I wanted to do that, but at the time I only knew a bit of piano and like a single chord on guitar and, like a lot of people’s parents, my parents saw creative fields as really unstable/unrealistic so I was like “well obvious it would be nice to be a loud drummer but I’m going to be a business person” (this is how cynical i was as a child).

the WHEN of it is a longer story, like it isn’t actually cause the actual answer is that i’ve been seriously drumming for about 1.5 years but theres like more to it imo

When i was in the third grade, instruments were compulsory at school so we all had to choose and buy one to learn on as well as basic piano lessons. I wanted to play the drums as “my instrument” at that time BUT my school didn’t have the budget or the space really to accommodate that (i would've had to buy my own kit and haul it to and from the school which didn’t make sense for me to do for someone who hadn’t ever touched drums) AND they didn’t have a teacher that could really teach drums, our percussion section was just a xylophone and some cymbals it was a school of like 2000 kids so :/

So I learned clarinet and then when i was 10, in the fifth grade, my older sister’s friend stopped playing saxophone and got permission to bring her drums in. We only had an orchestra so our teacher had to write her music for/with her which was cool but anyway. She left her drums at school and i knew her and so while i was supposed to be in the practice room playing clarinet i was trying semi-fruitlessly to drum. I knew i wanted to drum by any means necessary but like I was 10 and since i had no guidance (and no proper sticks i was using xylophone mallets) I didn’t think I was “good” at it and when we moved away I took that as a sign that it wasn’t meant to be.

When we got to america I joined school bands (as in orchestra/concert band) as a clarinet player once again, I still wanted to be drumming and i was in a public school by then so i had access to like “school drums” but I was so far behind the not-self-taught drummers in the actual band that I just like decided I had to focus on what I was already good at which was my art and dove into the upper level art program which like GOOD cause that made life worth living but it also meant the only time I could drum was when I was at this one friends house or had access to the band hall and like I just couldn’t keep the improvements i’d made, like i’d perfect a song and then have zero access for a couple weeks (except to like stand alone snares but :/ ) and i’d have to start over essentially and it was SUPER discouraging and it made me feel like I wasn’t making any progress

In the meantime I was trying to get my musical fix by learning guitar/piano and piano came back to me pretty quickly (its gone again now) but guitar like.....you can’t hit it lmao, piano i could slam the keys how i wanted to and get that really great loud resonating sound and i could stand to play and get more movement out of it but guitar is tedious in a way that other instruments aren’t imo, like the sound is loud but the movement is very precise and i never had the patience for that

when I got to college I really had to focus on my art especially the first two years, I literally lived in the studio (im not exaggerating, the students in my major and I had a janitorial bathroom set aside for showering) so pretty much all of my hobbies got tossed aside those two years it was grueling, fun but also hell

Junior year came and i had like 30% of my time back and i was like considering switching majors. I knew i didn’t want to do animation but also you can’t just switch into music at a university, you have to be pretty accomplished already and percussion at my school is HUGE like i would’ve had to be roger himself to have a chance of switching in. On top of that the degree isn’t super useful so I now have my Bachelors of Science. But by junior year i KNEW i didn’t wanna do that, I knew i wanted/i want to drum so I.... licherally................went to the library and printed like 50 pieces of paper each with three flyers on them and cut them up and put them up ALL over campus essentially begging for access to a drum kit. I could only afford like a couple hours on this one guys kit every few weeks for one semester (and then the following semester i did a semester away, they had drums at the school there but i only got access like a total of 5 times) so when i came back to america I did the exact same thing, I put up flyers in the music building and eventually i found a girl who let me use her drums for free all year, she gave me access like last august? I think? and just now has packed them away in the last month or so, and i would literally go into this tiny stuffy unairconditioned room (that had an automatic light timer so i’d be in the dark halfway through a song ahsdkhajkda and a couple times the heat got to me and i had to go outside and sit in my car w/ the AC before coming back in ahdjkahdjkasdjka) and drum for about 6-8 hours MWF and maybe like 3-4 hours T/TR which i know isn’t as much as some people but like I had school work still so I couldn’t do too much more. (it worked out great cuase i only took 7 hours my last two semesters so it was like something i could do while all my friends were in class and they weren’t open on weekends so my social life didn’t get fucked up) and like i know i haven’t been drumming drumming that long comparatively to like normal people who start at age -2 and are born with a snare in their laps but you spend that much time each week doing something and you’ll get good you just like… have to and I like where I’m at right now, I think I’ll always have super severe imposter syndrome abt my skill level b/c of how long it took me to get here and being an overcritical perfectionist doesnt help but yeah

i really dont think its a coincidence that my coming out (to myself) coincided with when I said “fuck it im gonna play drums come hell or high water” but SUPER LONG AND OVERLY DETAILED story short, I heard roger drum and said “if i dont do that ill die” and then when i finally had the resources i drummed myself into multiple heat strokes and i recently saw roger live so the universe rewarded me for all that shit

[ryouverua]

Oh yeah, youre right about him searching for ppls validation, i think! Like, even negative attention—it really does sorta feel like a child throwing a tantrum. At the same time, in contrast to his childishness—or maybe not, we never really do give kids enough credit—hes very… calculating? I guess. I mean its clear hes laying out pieces to do something, we just dont know what at this point. That aside i feel like… while he is wanting the attention of ppl hating him, even like outside of any plans he has, doesnt exactly negate like? Also feelings like he doesnt have to be “good” bc the ppl around him arent either—with his whole thought process that anyone can lie. Then again maybe theyre supposed to parallel/contrast like… kaito seeking positive attention/validation, and kokichi seeking the negative. Like a child screaming “look at me, look at me!”. So maybe him calling saihara a partner is less him seeing himself on par with others — though it may still be like that, just him seeking that validation as well — and more telling of how he views saihara specifically. I think how unwielding he can be sometimes mighta earned his respect, some. His search for the truth after kaede died leads him to putting his foot down to save everyone more than once during the class trial, which mighta earned some respect esp since the timeline of kokichis infatuation (cough crush cough) coincides with that. Though its unclear what his views ARE exactly on truth vs lies — but hes said he hates liars, hes also said that everyone lies, and that theyre what runs the world. So it seems like he views them kinda like a needed evil? So maybe he saw saiharas searching for the truth in a world full of lies, fools hearty, but also admirable. It could also explain why he got so pissed when he caught him in a lie—lying to him, about him. Also off topic but ive learned that in the art book its stated that saihara was originally supposed to be nb and i feel fucking robbed

As someone who spent a lot of time working with kids via volunteer/summer work in high school, trust me, kids can be very calculating when they want to be - and honestly, their minds move in directions that a lot of adults can’t anymore. The power of ~imagination~ or as Kokichi Ouma would say, lies, perhaps? What is fiction and fantasy other than beautifully decorated lies for people to enjoy and distract from their own lives…

mumble-Beatrice-mumble-KOKICHISHOULDMEETBEATRICE-mumble

Also speaking of Beatrice and Kokichi parallels - if Kokichi has a line about wanting Shuichi to solve him I spontaneously combust, probably.

ahem, anyway -

I’m trying to pin down in my head when Kokichi started focusing on Shuichi specifically and while it’s pretty obvious in Chapter 4, I also got his love hotel pretty early on in my playthrough as well as doing a few of his FTEs so my perspective might be a bit biased. 8′D With that said, he made a pretty big impression on Shuichi during the Bug Meet-n-Greet when he woke up to Kokichi’s shining face but that may have been because Shuichi was the only one who got knocked out. Hm…

Oh, potential idea about Kokichi’s look on lies in regards to Shuichi specifically - I wonder if this is the first time Shuichi has lied not only to him, but about him? As a direct counter to him? I’m probably going to forget some of the lies (and I didn’t get every single one either, despite my best efforts), but to bring some up:

Shuichi lied about hearing someone in the dorms - Chapter 2

Shuichi lied about whether the second death in Chapter 3 was instantaneous or not, and also about K1-b0′s light functions -

All of those were in service of revealing the truth and finding the killer. And I think having both of these here is important because both of those, I think, lined up with Kokichi’s goals in those trials.

But in this trial, where one of Kokichi’s goals is to force Kaito into a corner belief-wise (undermining the new apparent leader of the group), he finds Shuichi starts lining up with Kaito a bit too much as an unintended consequence - sure, he’s trying to reveal the truth and find the killer, but either a) these goals don’t align with Kokichi - he spends a lot of the trial throwing out breadcrumbs to Shuichi to reach a certain conclusion (I’m not sure that conclusion was supposed to be the truth or not, which is something I’m gonna think on later, because it really does seem like Kokichi dropped the culprit’s name out of spite rather than it being his actual plan), but after lying about being in the salon he does expect to be taken at face value or at least be challenged with evidence rather than perjury or b) Shuichi is, whether intentionally or unconsciously, barbing this lie with the implication, “I’m going to lie to corner you, Kokichi, the culprit of this case,” and Kokichi finds this offensive to both the spirit of the trial, but Shuichi’s apparent role as the truth-seeking, unbiased, logical Ultimate Detective. Despite his initial plans, Kokichi has his own moral code for himself and those around him, and seeing Shuichi cross a line that way snaps something in him that makes him lash out. Does that make sense? I could be completely sideways on this but - 8′D

Man, the mystery of Kokichi Ouma is going to be fun to unravel!

Oh and about that last bit - I’m actually not surprised by that tbh. They made him pretty androgynous and the fact that they unapologetically gave him love hotel scenes for all the guys and girls is pretty… telling. I actually wonder if it was a sort of apology for the protag-switch, especially considering Kaede would have been our first main-game girl protagonist - he seems to straddle the line much more than both Naegi and Hajime! But honestly though, I wouldn’t worry too much about that. Fandom exists to rectify all the problems of canon (and sometimes cause some but that’s a different conversation), so if you want to write/draw/etc nb Shuichi, you can totally do that ~