#because we can't afford to move

[violet-phoenix-nebula]

Fuck this godforsaken polar vortex. And it's only December.

January is gonna be a bitch.

[lorephobic]

idk how to even like. put this pain into words and i would normally vent about this shit on twitter, but the person its about follows me on there so like. anybody have skills for coping with the crushing realization that the person u love most in this world and have built ur life around sees ur current situation together as a temporary hurdle that's preventing them from their truest and happiest self which. is separate from u entirely? anyone know how to deal with this?

[katya-goncharov]

sometimes I will just suddenly wake up at 6am, randomly feeling mad about brexit

[naamahdarling]

Send me asks, my brain is garbage tonight.

[baishouqijia]

i am desperately trying to be more active but i'm experiencing mental burnout. just want to say thank you for the interactions even when i'm only checking in here now and again - i'll respond when i'm feeling better! <3

[zemnarihah]

my best friend has been very distant w me lately and i asked today if she wanted to hang out and she said she probably couldn't bc it's her brothers birthday but she would let me know if she could and i have her location and i just looked and she's at her boyfriends house rn....

[mantisgodsdomain]

Asks for the Random Character Asks

Marigold: 12, 13, 15

(for this ask game)

12. Crack headcanon

The reason she has so many flowers in her mane is because she fucked up with a transmutation early on and rooted them in there and her mentor Didn't Help At All so now they're just stuck in there as a permanent part of her body.

15. Worst thing they've ever done

As previously mentioned, "worst thing they've ever done" is ridiculously hard to define and extremely subjective at best. For Marigold specifically, it's even harder to define than most. She... doesn't do really things directly, after all.

She's a catalyst, and though she acts to make the situation immediately worse, she generally has little interference beyond that. She's an observer, not a direct actor, she's an alchemist, not a poison-brewer - part of what makes her so difficult to pin down and immune to consequence is that unless it's to gather test subjects for raw field data, she's almost certainly just... not acting directly. There's a medium. An in-between. A client, somewhere along the line, asking for her charms.

Though the "what they would think of when asked the question" question might work under normal circumstances, Marigold is an exception to the rule - as previously mentioned, she would not personally consider any of her actions to be immoral. She's done things that weren't amazing, of course, but it's not like she'd consider herself a bad person - just someone with professional pride. You wouldn't expect her to offer a subpar product to a customer, would you?

Beyond that, there's the issue of pinning down a single individual case. Marigold isn't a... "one and done" kind of villain, she gains the sort of status she has from low-profile but consistent evils. She doesn't do anything obvious, she doesn't do anything that can be pinned on her - people disappear, and monsters turn up after, and if they're especially valuable or they survive the period it takes for the transmutation to settle in their bones, she'll trap them somewhere to harvest for more transmutation-fuelling parts later.

That, of course, could be considered a "worst" - but it's still not one single thing you can point to. It's dozens and dozens of things, spread out over years of activity, people who mysteriously vanish off the streets and never turn up again. There is no single monolith of evil that can be pointed to, because Marigold isn't the kind of evil that does big gestures like that. Just... a slow, steady flow of charms into hands that do harm with them, combined with a slow, steady flow of people who leave their homes and don't come back.

...if we had to choose it would probably be something along the lines of experimenting on prisoners provided via negotiations with criminal factions and then bargaining with the factions those prisoners were taken from to sell them back already transmuted into monstrous forms and entirely incapable of resuming their previous lives. She got paid by both sides for it, both for developing specified new strains of transmutative on the prisoners and for returning them to their original faction. The client didn't specify what to do with them after they'd served their purpose, after all.

13. Dumbest thing they’ve ever done

Well! This one's very nearly a Story.

A fun fact about charms: they're not always perfectly consistent, especially if you're making new ones. That's why you test them before applying them to paying customers. That's why you take a constant flow of people unlikely to be missed for experiments. That's why you do experiments in the first place. If something goes wrong, then you need to know what to fix it, and if an unexpected variable throws the experiment-

Well. It could go very, very wrong, or very, very right. But you never turn your back on the experiment. You never assume you know what will happen next until it's good and tested, you never assume things will work out until you're 100% sure, you never assume that nothing can possible go wrong - Marigold knows this, of course, and she acts accordingly. Lab safety is a priority, not an afterthought. When the things you're working with might kill you if it breaks containment, you never leave things up to chance. It's simple safety precautions. Nothing ever up to chance. Nothing ever allowed to fail. And if anything were to fail - well, you being on-hand gives the best possible chance of getting things back under control.

And then, of course, someone comes calling at the door. You're too early into the experiment to excuse watching it as a delay, of course, and you know they know you're home - you mentioned you'd be home just the other day, after all. Reputation is valuable, and the monitoring built into the cage will work just as well, won't it? It might need a few more trials, but you can't really afford to be rude, and you especially can't afford them coming to find you - these parts of your lab are blocked off to guests for a reason, and you can't simply disappear a guest to your house.

Surely, it won't do any harm to leave it for just a few minutes. Surely, it'll mean nothing to leave the transmutation to finish unattended. You return back downstairs not more than five minutes after you left, ready to finish what you started.

The cage is open.

[desperatepleasures]

trying not to think about it but also i need to figure out what im gonna do with my hermit crabs and it's not like. urgent but at some point im gonna have to figure out how to change out their substrate and also there's a solid chance i'll have to rehome them someday :(

[burr-ell]

This is hopefully the last thing I'll say about the moonlitboar situation: can we all take a moment to appreciate just how comedically absurd this is?

Like, imagine being this terminally online. Imagine being genuinely, righteously outraged because someone said that an otherwise-heroic video game character was made more interesting to them because we found out that he helped perpetuate the annexation of part of a country. Not that someone said he was a good person for doing this, mind. Just that it made him interesting. Interesting because flaws and terrible choices make a character interesting.

And not only that, but then this same person had the temerity to suggest that a character we know almost nothing about actually had a pretty good life in the place where she was created and then grew up, a claim we cannot truly dispute or confirm because again, we know almost nothing about her.

These two opinions were worth harassing someone off their platform. These two opinions were "actions" that deserved "consequences", based on logic (i.e. "well my headcanon says—") that would get you laughed out of any high school English class worth spit.

There's nothing even slightly suspicious about saying these things, assuming you're not completely off your gourd. There are no dogwhistles. There's no use of racist or misogynistic or imperialistic rhetoric to promote a conqueror as a good person or suggest that oppression of women is a good thing. It's literally just a person having opinions about video game characters. These are some of the most utterly milquetoast things a person could possibly say about these two topics, and they were found worthy of a harassment campaign.

Y'all. Your parents and I are begging you to go outside. Get a job. Contribute to society in any meaningful way, if for no other reason than that it might open your eyes to things in this life that actually matter. Because "someone had an opinion on a video game and I thought it was stinky poopoo and they're WRONG :(" simply is not a problem that real people have that is worth treating a human being this way, and it takes a truly staggering amount of privilege to believe that it is.

[knightoile]

i don't want to work. at all. does this make me a bad person? it doesn't matter what my job is. i've been a librarian for more than a year now and it's great but i feel like life is meant to be so much more than this. if everyone is feeling like this too but we're not doing anything about it... then what are we even doing? are we gonna spend the next 40+ years working ourselves to death or until we're so tired we can't even enjoy what remains of our days on earth? why does nobody care?? why are we so complacent about it????

[the-innefable-idiot]

i blame capitalism for people complaining about kinnporsche not having a plot

no i won't elaborate

[muiromem]

Current emotion on this not-so-fine evening:

[brittlebutch]

my new notetaking system is too new for anything like this yet, but in my head i live in a future where i have an actual file cabinet i can store old notes in, organized in file folders by topic, and it's a wonder <3

[nessacousland]

Year 7 of being in a long distance relationship: I might get to see my boyfriend again in as soon as four months!!! For a week. 🙃

[dumbdiscodragon]

News: "there might be a housing crash coming"

Millennials/Gen Z: *rubs hands together greedily*

[squid--inc]

.....