#every time this post comes around

[mimimar]

finally completed my comic based on the song ivy by taylor swift!✿ please zoom in to read the text and see the details~

✿.✿.✿

you can get the digital zine pdf here! it includes extras like character profiles, costume design, more art of willow and ivy, zine-exclusive sketches and an illustrated guide to the symbolism of all the flowers in this comic.

you can also get prints of individual pages here!

✿.✿.✿

[cheerioskid]

more hermits i enjoy watching but don't draw that often

[hedgehog-moss]

Bird update: Unfortunately I’ve had to say goodbye to my rooster. I quite liked him but if you’ll remember, he was here on probation and after a few weeks of good behaviour he started pestering my hen a lot. She started looking a bit unhappy (huddling under the outdoor table instead of trotting about), then she stopped laying and I thought perhaps she was moulting and it could explain her moodiness and missing feathers, but the pattern of missing feathers seemed to point to the rooster as a culprit. Then he hurt her wing, allegedly (I have no proof so I’m protecting myself from a libel claim.)

On nice days Dru likes to sit and soak up the sun, stretching her wings one at a time, and on a couple of occasions I saw her stretch only her left wing, never opening her right one. I poked her wing gently and she didn’t bite my hand off which was a good sign, but then I picked her up and placed her on a chair, expecting her to jump off straight away like “I never asked you to put me here, mind your own business”—and indeed she jumped but she only flapped her left wing to slow her fall.

I called the vet to ask if it meant the other wing was broken and what I could do, and she was pretty reassuring, saying if the wing was held closed in the right position it would heal on its own—if it were dangling on the other hand I would need to find a little toddler’s t-shirt for my hen to wear, to keep her wing against her body. The vet also said what vets always say—“as long as the animal is eating normally it’s probably going to be fine!” (and that’s the case)

But I couldn’t keep the rooster any longer—even if he weren’t the one who hurt Dru (innocent until proven guilty) it wouldn’t help the healing process if he kept trying to mount her, so I put him in a box and took him back to his natal farm. They weren’t terribly happy to see him again, but well. I wanted to give him a chance but the circumstances (with only one hen) weren’t auspicious and I sort of expected this experiment to fail. Best of luck, rooster...

A couple of days after his departure, Dru lay an egg again for the first time since mid-February, so I think the message was pretty clear!

Also, that’s a tall bale of hay (from a chicken’s perspective) so I’m not sure how she managed to climb on top of it without boosting herself with her wings. Did she fake a wing injury to get the rooster ousted? Pampe would fake a wing injury without hesitation but chickens strike me as honest. I mean they're unrepentant food thieves but they’re upfront about it.

Final bird update: on Friday I managed to get a new hen! I hope having a new coopmate won’t put Dru in a bad mood again and cause another egg strike. The new hen is very young and still looks like a gangly teenager, and she seems quite vivacious and curious, here she is determinedly strolling into her new home:

One notable fact about her is that she doesn’t speak chicken. She doesn’t kot kot like an adult hen, and she doesn’t make the incoherent gurgling sound that baby hens make, either. It’s more like a dissonant quack. I’m not sure what to attribute it to—maybe she was raised near ducks and picked up a foreign language? I might have to call her Daisy if she keeps this up. I tried to record her but she’s pretty scared of me for the time being so she’s all shy and quiet when I’m nearby...

Dru isn’t amused by any of this. New hen tries to follow her and chat with her and gets snubbed a lot. Well, I did hear Dru cluck amicably the first evening when I brought the new hen in the coop, but she didn’t get an answer, there’s a real language barrier here. I hope the new hen learns French soon because right now Dru just keeps running away from her! 

Poor Dru, she lost her good friend and then had to deal with a dude who woke her up every day at dawn crowing as loudly as possible, and now a new roommate who speaks duck. It’s only been two days though; I’m sure they’ll get along eventually!

[luck-of-the-drawings]

OOH YEAH BABY! PARTY TIME BABY! MUSIC! DRINKS! SOCIAL PRESSURE & A PSYCHEDELIC BREAK DOWN! WELCOME TO VAMPIRE SOCIETY MOTHERFUCKER! ARE YOU SCARED? DO YOU UNDERSTAND YET? ITS OKAY IF NOT. FIRE DISSOLVED IT! ITS ALL GONE NOW. HAVE FUN!

[yaboisnelf]

i hate them i hate them i hate them i hate them i hope they explode

johnny cage and kenshi sketches from mk1

[captainofthetidesbreath]

not to be like this but all of the posts (and there are many across multiple platforms) right now going "I mean obviously I'm not mad or whining or anything but it sucks that there's all these three week breaks, how am I going to survive, this is awful, I cannot believe this is happening to me" like, it does in fact come off as entitled no matter how many qualifiers are put onto it

and the a smaller subset of THAT going "CLEARLY C3 isn't a priority for the studio" or "they're obviously trying to kill C3" or even posting stuff that comes off as "um, don't they know that if they keep doing this I won't shop here watch anymore", like, come on

as a tangent, genuinely, I feel like a lot of people have trouble admitting that they don't actually like C3 so they get existentially worried about them losing interest over a slightly longer break because it'll force them to acknowledge that they aren't actually interested, but it's fine not to be interested!

[mearchy]

How come people whose DNI lists I’m on will interact with me. You’re going to file a restraining order and then walk into my house, unawares? Reblog my post with an addition but I cannot boost it because you rail furiously about how you want blogs like mine nowhere near you? Must I go to the trouble of reading your DNI and respectfully not engaging, and you will not even read my bio to see that I am one of the ones you prefer to suicidebait on anon before you decide to write a soliloquy in my tags?

[fleouriarts]

feeling bad about my art lately. will probably not post for a while. but i wanted to at least dump some stuff here before i retreat into my hidey hole

[taegularities]

regarding: colour me in – HMMMMM okay pls talk to me about this 🎨🤍

[lanternlightss]

genuinely believe nameless bard would still try to pick up venti. just because he’s no longer wisp size does not mean he loses wisp privileges!!!

anyways, please imagine venti talking to someone, and bard comes up behind him to pick him up bridal style—even swinging them around a little! imagine bard carrying venti fireman style as they run away from a diluc chasing them. imagine bard grabbing venti and holding him up simba style, and venti does that cat thing where they just. go long. the possibilities…...

[presidentbungus]

in a similar vein to my last post i very much think demo’d be so good with kids. i don’t know if he’d be a good dad necessarily with all that emotional baggage and undoubtedly enough generational trauma to permanently ruin a toddler within seconds but he’d be a great uncle, godfather, weird neighbor, etc.

consider with me here. uncle tavish with the eyepatch and the peg-leg. he looks scary but he tells great stories about wizards and wars and explosions and he leaves in all the gory bits. he’ll show you how to make a pretty good firework out of the cleaning stuff your mum’s got lying around the house as long as you won’t tell on him. he’ll help you pull pranks on your adult relatives and he’ll take the blame for them. he’ll let you sip on his beer and scrumpy if you swear up and down you’re grown-up enough and when you hiss and stick your tongue out at the alcohol he’ll tell you that means you’re probably more mature than him. he doesn’t seem that rich but he’ll buy you a dirtbike or a pony or a whole set of expensive action figures for your birthday and he won’t even act like it’s a big deal. there’s something so simply enjoyable to him about kids (kids that aren’t his), so kicking with wonder and fierce excitement about the world, and he does whatever he can to give them what he never got—the push to run around and discover and do what they want, and to spit and curse and play-swordfight in the backyard and everything else all the adults in his life never really let him do. really, under it all, at the end of the day he’s got the big dumb heart of an absolute bloody sap and he knows it, and it’s almost relieving to know he’s still got it after all these years. you know? it works out

[rosewheresheshouldntbe]

> Rose: Confess to Kanaya!

Rose: I love you.

Kanaya: Y Yo Ati, Rose.

> Rose: Get swallowed by something that looks like Venom.

> Rose: Get sent to super hell!

> Kanaya: Have something very gay and homophobic happen to you.

Kanaya: ...

What an absolute diversity loss. You find yourself thinking "love loses!"

[roseofcards90]

.

[anxiously-sidequesting]

Sometimes I have actually insightful and interesting things to say about w101 and other times I say useless things like I want to carry around Wizard101 NPCS under my arms like exhausted and surrendered cats while I swing them around and slap their backs and shoulders like I'm proudly showing them off to strangers

[stop-breaking-my-heart-dragonage]

This week on "CJ needs to gush about DAO": Morrigan's dark ritual.

I adore Origins because depending on how serious you take roleplay, every decision you make is a thread that leads back to your origin, and in this case of the ritual, who you choose to romance can have a major impact on how you handle this choice.

For context, my canon run is with a female Tabris who romances Alistair and keeps him as a Grey Warden, and is close friends with Morrigan. It's more in character for my Tabris to reject Morrigan's ritual and not even bring it up to Alistair, which would result in her leaving him behind while she makes the ultimate sacrifice in killing the archdemon... however, agreeing to convince Alistair to do the ritual with Morrigan is the only choice in the entire game where I break roleplay because I'm selfish and weak and I want Tabris to live.

I have a lot of strong feelings about the ritual, like it hurts me. It makes me want to chew on furniture. I can talk about it until I can talk no more. I so badly want to be strong enough to remain in character and reject the ritual.

Let me explain: Tabris survives an origin that deals with sexual assault. She gets kidnapped on her wedding day, she watches the other kidnapped women and her husband get murdered, and then is too late to save Shianni from being assaulted... and Tabris carries that trauma with her throughout the entire game.

If the way to save her life is to ask the two most important people she cares about; one being her lover and the other being her best friend; who she knows hate each other, to have dubiously consensual sex in order to make a baby to absorb the old god soul... she's saying no. The last thing Tabris would ever do is put someone into a sexual situation where consent is at all dubious after what she saw happen to Shianni and nearly happened to herself. She'd rather die than force that upon Alistair and Morrigan.

That's what I mean when I say origin affects everything; I know some will side eye that with "Really? Your warden would rather die than let Alistair sleep with another woman? It's one time, and Alistair agrees to it, so no one needs to die?"

Let me be clear in saying this isn't a "Morrigan slept with my man" issue. Sure, that part's awkward and it sucks, but that's not even breaking water tension, let alone diving into the deep waters to the core of the issue.

For my Tabris, this is about betrayal, consent, and accepting fate.

The person offering Tabris this deal is someone she thought of as a trusted friend who has actually been lying to her the entire time. It doesn't matter what Morrigan's intentions are now or if she genuinely wants to save the wardens. She knew from the beginning why Flemeth sent her with them, she admits as much. She knew a warden would need to make the ultimate sacrifice and then leveraged that to get what she wants. Morrigan waited until the night before, when Alistair and the warden learn one of them has to die to defeat the archdemon, and took advantage of the high running emotions and possibly the fear of dying to make the warden agree to her ritual.

At least, that's how my Tabris interprets this confrontation. She feels betrayed by someone she came to love like a sister and went out of her way to help Morrigan with her mother upon learning what's in Flemeth's grimoire. And then that someone tells her no one needs to die, she just needs to convince Alistair to sleep with her... which is a huge fucking problem.

The Alistair and Tabris romance is slow; it took a long time for either of them to be comfortable with being emotionally vulnerable and trusting each other with basic intimacy, let alone sex. Tabris is mortified at the idea of putting Alistair in this situation. Not only would it feel like a betrayal on her part to ask that of him, but she knows the last thing Alistair ever wants to do is father a bastard who then goes on to grow up without him. How could she possibly ask him to do that?

Then you consider that ritual or no, there isn't a guarantee that they'll survive anyway. Say they do the ritual and Tabris dies anyway; she made Alistair sleep with Morrigan in order to save her and then she died anyway. Or if Alistair dies then Tabris gets to live with the fact that the last person Alistair was with was a woman he hates because she asked that of him… and either way, Morrigan gets to walk away with what she wanted.

Tabris led the group, and she's accepted that if Riordan dies [which he does] then she'll be the one to make the sacrifice, even if it means breaking both hers and Alistair's heart.... except she doesn't because I'm a coward who doesn't want to lose her because my worldstate isn't good without her in it but I also refuse to lose Alistair so I just pretend it plays out differently in my head it's fine-

But... that's how I play Tabris and view the situation. My friend @pi-creates and I have discussed the dark ritual at length. While I play a Tabris who romances Alistair, Pi plays a Mahariel who romances Morrigan, so we have vastly different interpretations of the ritual itself and Morrigan's intentions.

Which yeah, it makes total sense that someone who romanced Morrigan with a different origin, and has the option to do the ritual with her rather than asking someone else to do it, wouldn't see this the way I do.

To quote Pi: "Playing as a male warden in the Morrigan romance makes the whole situation feel different, and maybe it’s because she’s presenting it differently due to the emotional connection, but it feels more like she’s opening up about her initial instructions (that she had been given by Flemeth) and offering a solution to avoid the possibility of death. And for my Mahariel, the constant threat of sudden death has haunted him from the start – he caught the blight and was ripped away from his clan (something he did not want to do in the slightest), got forced into a Grey Warden ritual that could kill him, was forced into a battle that could kill him, going on this whole quest that he never wanted but has now become responsible for regardless of his thoughts on the matter… the dark ritual may be one of the few moments where he is presented with an option to decide if he wants to walk into certain death, or take actions of his own volition to stop it.

"The idea of the ritual still feels like a dodgy thing to do since the ultimate outcome is unknown at that point, he’s taking Morrigan at her word that it will save the warden and that this child would be unharmed, just with an old god soul that she isn’t exactly clear on why she wants that and is determined to runaway immediately after the battle to secure it properly. It could be interpreted that it’s purely a preservation thing, but I’m biased to wanting Morrigan's intentions to not be power based.

"But also, taking part in the ritual isn’t as outlandish for my warden since he and Morrigan have already been involved in an intimate relationship. It’s the future of the ritual that is scarier – the idea of this old-god baby, and the idea of Morrigan insisting that she’s leaving afterwards when Mahariel and her have a loving relationship. He’s hurting, but he doesn’t want to die, he doesn’t want Alistair to die, he doesn’t want Morrigan to leave, he definitely doesn’t want pregnant Morrigan to leave on her own… it’s complicated, but for completely different reasons."

And I find that fascinating. I want to know how other players approach this part of DAO, what origins they play, and who they romanced. Seriously, this is an invitation to anyone reading to share their thoughts.

What about a warden who doesn't even have Alistair in their party because they made Loghain a warden? Is there anyone out there who has Loghain do the ritual with Morrigan and why? What about male wardens who don't romance her? Do you choose to do it with her anyway, or do you ask Alistair or Loghain to do it? Do you tell Morrigan to fuck off with the ritual? Why? Who makes the ultimate sacrifice in that case? And what about Morrigan herself? How do you interpret her intentions/motivations? I want to know.

I'm telling you, this is a discussion that gets me excited, as most discussions about DAO do.

[tangledinink]

are you guys ready for a monday in which i do not publish any new fic for the first time in almost six months.