#it's actually really hard to learn systematically

[italiantea]

my international school background is doing me no favors here my biology teacher was indian my geography teacher was scottish my business teacher was from turkey i have no idea how to pronounce things anymore. why are you asking me how to say cot. who the fuck uses a cot

[nostalgebraist]

Honestly I'm pretty tired of supporting nostalgebraist-autoresponder. Going to wind down the project some time before the end of this year.

Posting this mainly to get the idea out there, I guess.

This project has taken an immense amount of effort from me over the years, and still does, even when it's just in maintenance mode.

Today some mysterious system update (or something) made the model no longer fit on the GPU I normally use for it, despite all the same code and settings on my end.

This exact kind of thing happened once before this year, and I eventually figured it out, but I haven't figured this one out yet. This problem consumed several hours of what was meant to be a relaxing Sunday. Based on past experience, getting to the bottom of the issue would take many more hours.

My options in the short term are to

A. spend (even) more money per unit time, by renting a more powerful GPU to do the same damn thing I know the less powerful one can do (it was doing it this morning!), or

B. silently reduce the context window length by a large amount (and thus the "smartness" of the output, to some degree) to allow the model to fit on the old GPU.

Things like this happen all the time, behind the scenes.

I don't want to be doing this for another year, much less several years. I don't want to be doing it at all.

----

In 2019 and 2020, it was fun to make a GPT-2 autoresponder bot.

[EDIT: I've seen several people misread the previous line and infer that nostalgebraist-autoresponder is still using GPT-2. She isn't, and hasn't been for a long time. Her latest model is a finetuned LLaMA-13B.]

Hardly anyone else was doing anything like it. I wasn't the most qualified person in the world to do it, and I didn't do the best possible job, but who cares? I learned a lot, and the really competent tech bros of 2019 were off doing something else.

And it was fun to watch the bot "pretend to be me" while interacting (mostly) with my actual group of tumblr mutuals.

In 2023, everyone and their grandmother is making some kind of "gen AI" app. They are helped along by a dizzying array of tools, cranked out by hyper-competent tech bros with apparently infinite reserves of free time.

There are so many of these tools and demos. Every week it seems like there are a hundred more; it feels like every day I wake up and am expected to be familiar with a hundred more vaguely nostalgebraist-autoresponder-shaped things.

And every one of them is vastly better-engineered than my own hacky efforts. They build on each other, and reap the accelerating returns.

I've tended to do everything first, ahead of the curve, in my own way. This is what I like doing. Going out into unexplored wilderness, not really knowing what I'm doing, without any maps.

Later, hundreds of others with go to the same place. They'll make maps, and share them. They'll go there again and again, learning to make the expeditions systematically. They'll make an optimized industrial process of it. Meanwhile, I'll be locked in to my own cottage-industry mode of production.

Being the first to do something means you end up eventually being the worst.

----

I had a GPT chatbot in 2019, before GPT-3 existed. I don't think Huggingface Transformers existed, either. I used the primitive tools that were available at the time, and built on them in my own way. These days, it is almost trivial to do the things I did, much better, with standardized tools.

I had a denoising diffusion image generator in 2021, before DALLE-2 or Stable Diffusion or Huggingface Diffusers. I used the primitive tools that were available at the time, and built on them in my own way. These days, it is almost trivial to do the things I did, much better, with standardized tools.

Earlier this year, I was (probably) one the first people to finetune LLaMA. I manually strapped LoRA and 8-bit quantization onto the original codebase, figuring out everything the hard way. It was fun.

Just a few months later, and your grandmother is probably running LLaMA on her toaster as we speak. My homegrown methods look hopelessly antiquated. I think everyone's doing 4-bit quantization now?

(Are they? I can't keep track anymore -- the hyper-competent tech bros are too damn fast. A few months from now the thing will be probably be quantized to -1 bits, somehow. It'll be running in your phone's browser. And it'll be using RLHF, except no, it'll be using some successor to RLHF that everyone's hyping up at the time...)

"You have a GPT chatbot?" someone will ask me. "I assume you're using AutoLangGPTLayerPrompt?"

No, no, I'm not. I'm trying to debug obscure CUDA issues on a Sunday so my bot can carry on talking to a thousand strangers, every one of whom is asking it something like "PENIS PENIS PENIS."

Only I am capable of unplugging the blockage and giving the "PENIS PENIS PENIS" askers the responses they crave. ("Which is ... what, exactly?", one might justly wonder.) No one else would fully understand the nature of the bug. It is special to my own bizarre, antiquated, homegrown system.

I must have one of the longest-running GPT chatbots in existence, by now. Possibly the longest-running one?

I like doing new things. I like hacking through uncharted wilderness. The world of GPT chatbots has long since ceased to provide this kind of value to me.

I want to cede this ground to the LLaMA techbros and the prompt engineers. It is not my wilderness anymore.

I miss wilderness. Maybe I will find a new patch of it, in some new place, that no one cares about yet.

----

Even in 2023, there isn't really anything else out there quite like Frank. But there could be.

If you want to develop some sort of Frank-like thing, there has never been a better time than now. Everyone and their grandmother is doing it.

"But -- but how, exactly?"

Don't ask me. I don't know. This isn't my area anymore.

There has never been a better time to make a GPT chatbot -- for everyone except me, that is.

Ask the techbros, the prompt engineers, the grandmas running OpenChatGPT on their ironing boards. They are doing what I did, faster and easier and better, in their sleep. Ask them.

[olderthannetfic]

Now I'm wondering how countries like Japan and China teach literacy.

Since kanji / hanzi don't really have that much in the way of phonetic elements, they kinda have to teach them by memorization and I don't think they have many reading comprehension problems over there.

(Although both countries do have supplementary phonetic writing systems in the form of bopomofo and pinyin for China, and the kanas for Japan)

--

FAVORITE SOAPBOX TOPIC UNLOCKED!

RELEASE THE KRAKEN!

It's a little closer to teaching vocabulary than spelling, but the same kinds of principles apply: You teach the building blocks, like the traditional radicals, which aren't so different from teaching Latin and Greek roots in an English class for English speakers.

And, as a matter of fact, lots of those radicals do predict pronunciation, just not in every single case. They can also be clues to meaning, but again, not absolutely consistently. Many characters have a sound-cueing radical on one side and a meaning-cueing radical on the other. It's just that only some are still useful in the modern day, while others are more like the English word 'plumbing' where knowledge of Roman lead pipes explains why this word comes from the one for lead, but the root probably wouldn't help a kid learn the word in the first place.

One similarity to teaching phonics would be teaching students to tell very complicated and similar characters apart: you want to help a student spot all the little building blocks of the character and then spot the ones that are different, not just glance at the whole character and get a general overall vibe. If you do a whole look-based approach, too many characters are too easy to mistake for one another.

Remembering a bajillion Chinese characters is hard if you're trying to memorize them in a year and not all of elementary school, but I think people who don't read them underestimate how many component parts there are and how approachable they can be if you start by learning fundamentals, not just memorizing a few individual characters as though they have no relation to anything else.

They're actually pretty systematic, just in the way that English spelling is with its overlapping systems and historical artifacts, not in the way that highly regular Spanish spelling is.

Having taken a lot of Japanese classes, I will say that Japanese as a foreign language textbooks often do a piss poor job of this and totally do teach kanji in a sight words-y way... But my Mandarin class started with important foundational concepts that served me well in Japanese later even if I bombed out of Chinese class at the time.

Can you tell how irritated I am by all the foreign language learners who think characters are sooooo hard when, really, it's just their crappy textbook? Haha.

They're moderately hard in the way that learning a full adult spectrum of vocabulary is hard, but people do that for foreign languages all the time. The countries that use characters do tend to make sets that are smaller for certain kinds of applications, same as we have things like simple English wikipedia, but a literate adult will always know lots more, whether it's from their career in engineering or their predilection for historical romance novels.

Uh... anyway, the answer is "Bit by bit in elementary school, just like in any other country".

[eldritchamy]

I'm actually having a hard time finding HDG fics that DON'T leave me absolutely frothing at the cerebellum to read them again immediately after finishing them.

One of my favorite things about HDG fics so far is how every single one I've read has had such an incredibly different VIBE to it? I think the reason I got so hooked on it so fast is that the SETTING ITSELF, taken as a premise, is very INTERESTING and hits on a lot of really fun kinks, and has just this huge depth of lore and worldbuilding....

and all of that stuff is the SETUP, rather than the PAYOFF.

By which I mean the shared universe takes a really fun and hot concept and then allows for ALL KINDS of completely different stories to be told BASED ON that setup.

And since the setup FUCKIN. WORKS. for me, I get to just keep exploring all these totally unique TAKES on it in terms of plot and even GENRE, which is such a cool thing for a shared universe erotic fiction bdsm scifi setting to have made possible.

And it's SO COOL how DIFFERENT most of these stories have been from what you would expect from the setting.

You would think the setting would just be an excuse to write really kinky porn (and don't get me wrong, if the kinks are right for you MAN do they hit like a truck), but so many of the ones I've read so far have dealt with, AND BEEN INCREDIBLE SINCERE COMPLEX NUANCED PORTRAYALS OF, themes like trauma recovery, and facing the unknown, and facing your fears, and self discovery, and how important it is to have meaningful connections as you heal and recover from a broken world built on oppressive systems, and learning that a beautiful post scarcity world is possible and that we DESERVE it, and learning how to be CARED FOR instead of feeling abandoned by a world and a culture that have utterly and systematically failed us.

I'm so glad I found HDG stuff.

[gece-misin-nesin]

I hope it’s ok if I rant a little about MHA because your post about Endeavor walking free reminded me of how detrimental some of the messages MHA can be. (I’ll try not to write much, feel free to delete this tho!)

It is so frustrating how the story doesn’t linger enough on the weight killing people that have yet to commit a crime, people that are a threat to the status quo, holds.

Sometimes I legit feel insane because people will be saying things like, “He could be a threat, so of course they should kill him.” And then talk about Deku and class 1A “changing the world for the better,” when the series doesn’t care to unpack its systematic issues past individual issues + the series essentially maintained the system that failed so many—resorting to reforms and expanding programs doesn’t actually solve the problem imo.

And it’s so hard nowadays to even try to have a conversation that entails criticism of the story, when so many fans fall for the condescending righteousness the story feeds as a response just because it came from heroes. Even though the story itself presents reasons why we shouldn’t blindly trust heroes (Endeavor literally right there) 🤦

Like, the story presents characters being oppressed and the ultimate response to their plight is constantly, “Just be a better victim.” The whole situation with Touya and Endeavor + what Deku says to Touya, is absolutely insane to me.

It made me sick to see people saying, “This is what Touya always wanted.” This is what people are taking away from the story, when many people who grew up being abused and didn’t fit the “perfect victim” criteria will tell you how fucked up that ending was.

Anyway, sorry for ranting. It’s so hard to find people who understands criticism in the MHA fandom 😭 The story has a lot of good points and potential, Hori just couldn’t handle it properly.

I am ALWAYS happy to listen to bnha rants!! I devour the bnha critical tag like a wild beast lmaoo

As for your thoughts, 100% agree. I feel like a big part of the problem is that the story spends so much time setting up systematic issues and then just..drops them? Acts like they don't exist? And instead it redirects all blame and reason to indovidual problems, like Endeavor for example. Touya became a villain because of Endeavor..but the conditions under which he became a villain could have been massively prevented if the ranking system didn't exist and if so much value hadn't been placed on it. Or if the wealth and privilege that being a hero had brought to Endeavor hadn't let people turn a blind eye to his bullshit. Because are you really telling NO ONE had even an inclination that something was wrong in that household? Really?

This also applies to Tomura. In the beginning The Walk where he spent some amount of time on the streets without anyone helping him seemed very important to his backstory. He didn't become a villain just because his father was a pos, he becane a villain because the state of heroism led to a society that glorified heroes to such an extent that people didn't help a bloody kid on the street because a 'hero would'. But instead most of his memories Deku interferes w are about the Shimura household instead of the very important bystander syndrome. And THEN to top it all off, we learn the stupid 'AFO orchestrated Tomura's whole life' thing. I cannot find the right words to express just how much I loathe that.

Anyway, Touya and Tenko are just two examples. Overall, the story chooses to resolve individual problems (and how well even those are resolved is certainly debatable) and frame them as the leading causes of villainy when its mostly systemic issues that cause it and then act like there were no systemic issues in the first place. I mean, literally no one has a problem with the HPSC casually having private assassins to commit extrajudicial murder, so. Guess Nagant should have just been "optimistic" and waited for someone to, idk, topple the literal government.

[lakesbian]

can i have more briantaylor thoughts <3 i like them

i love that one of their first interactions is brian explaining his hyperfixation in beating your ass to taylor while absolutely stoked that she's invested in learning how to properly break every bone in someone's body, unlike all these OTHER lazy unprofessional jerks he works with, and then later she successfully takes a pointer from him on how to strangle someone and he calls her fucking. Good Girl. about it. while completely oblivious to the fact that he likes her. what the hell is wrong with him. down so bad he's in the earth's core. AND HE THINKS SHE COULD BE LIKE A SISTER TO HIM. BECAUSE THAT IS THE ONLY FRAME OF REFERENCE HE HAS FOR "GIRL I ACTUALLY CARE ABOUT/LIKE." it's kind of hard to adequately summarize how funny they are. even my Top Hit posts about it don't capture everything. his mental monologue about realizing he likes her involves talking about how she could never be a trophy wife because she's weird and looks like a bug. he's 100% mad that she's more competent him, because he's a misogynist, but he also gets so [said politely] agitated from watching her defeat people with the systematically brutal force of a million well-organized bugs that he probably needs to be given sedatives about it. he thinks it's cute and charming that she cleans her naked ass body off with a Swarm of Bugs after they fuck. you know he's had spiders on his dick and you know the worst part is that he didnt really mind and in fact kind of misses the girl who put them there. its just like. It's so indescribably fantastic that his character is defined by desperately LARPing being normal & positing himself to be the team's straight guy straight guy who exasperatedly puts up with all these loose cannons, and he is Pathologically Attracted to this girl who looks like an anthropomorphized daddy long legs and cant go 3 seconds without murdering a police director. absolutely life-ruinous taylor hebert event. i have to confess i need to perform more actual analysis about them as i reread but theyre just like. conceptually speaking. so funny.

[greyspirehollow]

Vesuvia weekly ; The courtiers' Guilty Pleasures !

Pairing : The courtiers x reader Fandom : The Arcana visual novel Warnings : none. Pure fluff.

Volta :

I like to believe she loves dancing, like ballet, and the opera ; she loves the pretty dresses and the music,, and will secretly try and get some costumes custom tailored for herself, which she'll keep preciously in her closet and put on when she's alone, to admire herself in the mirror and imagine being on stage, amidst the crowd of pretty dancing people and musicians.

I'm pretty sure she would love to be able to fight. Being short comes with a lot of disadvantages,, I'm pretty sure she would like placing a few punches or kicks just right in people sometimes. Maybe she's already asked Vulgora to train her in the past, too.

Loves going to Portia's cottage. Loves Pepi. The flowers. The leaves. It's all so pretty ! And Portia's so nice !

She'll get all flustered and stutter if you ever ask about those secret hobbies of hers, but she'd want to share too, and even get a little frustrated by her conflicting emotions.

Vulgora :

I think they like being calmer and softer when no one's around, and to be treated calmly and with kindness (I'm sure they like being hugged, but you will never for the life of them see them admit it).

They like to play chess with the Countess, even if they loose systematically.

I have a feeling they'd love to go hunting too, with or without a falcon/dogs, or someone else's company.

I think behind their very loud and impulsive facade, they're a rather secretive person, not used to open up about things other than the plainly obvious, and so their little hobbies would be hard to discover unless you look into them a little, or generally get interested in them.

Valdemar :

I think they can play the violin, and some forgotten old instruments. They like how they have to make their finders dance over the instruments to make music.

They're a pretty manual person I think, and can craft little things here and there when they're bored ; pretty sure they tried embroidery even. Very steady hands (heh.)

and fashion. No one can convince me otherwise ; they have a sense of fashion and just don't exploit it. They don't dress often, if ever, or openly comment on people's outfits. but they COULD. IF ONLY THEY DID ARGH-

Secretive person as well. But you'd have no way of discovering any of that if they didn't want you to.

Vlastomil :

Always loved the sound a harp makes. He'd kill to learn how to play it, but he's never dared to take that initiative. It's just such a beautiful instrument, so calming, and it looks really nice to have it lean against you...

I think he'd also enjoy taking walks in the forest, and go lay down in some fresh and humid dirt, listening to the little river nearby, the chirp of birds, the leaves in the wind, the rays of sunlight peeking through...

We know how much he loves his worms, but what if he liked other things as well? what about isopods? tiny lil things.

You may surprise him indulging once or twice, but he'll always stammer a half-made-up excuse and shift the topic of the conversation quickly

Valerius :

Cat person. Loves cats. Wants cats just so he can sit in a big chair and have one on his lap and pet it menacingly while he sips his wine. Will not admit it.

LOVES velvet. Would wear velvet every day of his life if he could ; but he feels it's maybe a little too much in certain scenarios, so avoids it. He does have a cape in the back of his closet, which he wears sometimes when the halls of the Palace are desert.

Actually like to let his hair down ; thinks it gives him a mysterious charm (which yeah, if he styled it a little better), and one time you caught him mindlessly twirling his fingers into his strands.

He's not necessarily secretive, it's just he's learned court etiquette a lot, and so has taken the habit of hiding and bottling his personality down. That part at least.

[starlingsyscourses]

Transcending comment section character limits. @indigochromatic

I think the fantasy/iatrogenic/sociocognitive model of DID is baaaasically the tulpamancy model but said in a mean way. Compare:

These stupid people imagine they have other people in their heads/imagine they are those other people. This is basically just their overactive imagination, like roleplaying.

These cool people construct new people out of imagination/learn to inhabit new identities. This is so like roleplaying that it sometimes happens by accident to people who roleplay too hard.

Those are basically the same thing. One is just saying it in a mean way and one is saying it in a respectful way. I think people in tulpa circles even claim that tulpas are "made of imagination" and this just doesn't make them unreal.

My understanding of why, according to tulpamancers, this doesn't make tulpas unreal is that:

Identity isn't about being physical. A corpse isn't the person that used to live there, right?

Identity isn't about memory, either

Identity is about your choices, your values, your habits, your personality, your body language, your hobbies, your friendships

Tulpas have their own choices, values, etc., so therefore tulpas are not their hosts.

But tulpas do sometimes switch in and use bodies, and (apparently) an fMRI study showed that something was really happening when tulpas do things, and in general they behave consistently (at least as consistently as other people) over time instead of just saying whatever would be most convenient for their host.

But this is basically all applicable to other systems: it's why some people in DID systems hold that they're separate people from their headmates. And this is... basically an argument that's not accepted by experts, in general. For the most part experts seem to hold to a definition of identity that is physical--to a greater degree than the general population, I think. (For instance, it's been described as a notable level of thought disorder to imagine that multiple people could coexist in one body--I think the person who described it this way is R. Loewenstein but I might remember wrong--even though the belief that there could be multiple people present in the same body at the same time or one after the other is a very common religious belief. Psychiatry hasn't impressed me with its ability to live up to its own standards with respect to religious pluralism.)

So: the way the fantasy/sociocognitive model differs from what tulpamancers say about their own experiences is just this specific point about philosophy of identity, which is a way that the fantasy/sociocognitive model doesn't disagree with the trauma model, and it's a way the trauma model is sometimes unsatisfying to people who otherwise believe in it and are aware of trauma in their body's past and find mental health care helpful. And I'd go farther and say this isn't even part of the models. it's part of how the people using them define the words "real person."

So I do think arguments saying that the trauma model makes more sense than the fantasy/sociocognitive model are basically all applicable to tulpa systems. I know less about what people who believe in non-tulpa endogenic systems believe causes their systems. (Not exactly for lack of trying. It seems like people say "we've always been this way" a lot, but that's entirely compatible with the TOSD and also not an answer in the first place. It's like asking what causes cystic fibrosis and being told "I was born with it." Sure. That's probably true but it's not much of an explanation, is it?)

And I think it's probably important that, even though tulpamancers have a highly systematic guide to becoming multiple, what actually happens is that a lot of people try it and get no results at all, while other people show up in their communities saying "I think I had a tulpa all along, ever since I was a child, and just never knew there was a word for it!" Like there's some reason why people are multiple that isn't contained in their guide. Maybe it's fantasy-proneness. Maybe it's the mysterious non-answer that leads some endogenics to be born that way. It's just... neither of those seems like a good answer.

[meichenxi]

Hanzi update (+accidental trauma talk)

tw illness, trauma, vomiting, weight loss, recovery. I didn't plan to write about this but because of what happened in the last year I can't really write about how I studied Chinese without talking about it. so. but it's mainly about hanzi lol

I've been learning how to write traditional characters with the vague idea that I'd go and study in Taiwan, and also that if I want to write Classical Chinese or Japanese they're far more useful - but the program I want to go to Taiwan for requires HSK7, which I DO not think I can achieve and have the results of before March. Who knows! Perhaps within me lies untold brilliance and dedication!!

...well, I wouldn't rely on it. (I am also busy with a job, a partner, studying an A-level course to begin tutoring it in September, and writing the second draft of my novel.)

And even if I ended up going to Taiwan with my absolutely fantastic HSK7, there's no way I could handwrite all of those words within a year. If I learn 10 characters a day, that's like 3650 characters in a year, but realistically that will never happen - and you still have to actually remember them.

I also know from my last experience where I learnt a stupid amount of characters very quickly (about 800 in two weeks) that I can technically do it, I have a very large swollen brain, but then the brain, being very large and very swollen, promptly burns out. And leaves me to not do any Chinese again for like two months. So basically - completely pointless, because after those two months of rest I had forgotten most of them anyway. I will not be doing that again.

This time around I have been slowly, very slowly, learning things on Skritter. I have about 400 characters so far. I'm not doing words but doing characters, which is a bit slower, but I figure it'll be more useful in the long run. After I have the first 1000, I'm planning to then systematically go through the HSK and TOCFL lists and check I know how to put characters together and which 'jing' is used in 'yijing' etc.

This approach is only really going to work because I know a lot of vocabulary and can read a lot of stuff already - otherwise I wouldn't recommend to anybody without that backbone of vocabulary to just learn random isolated characters, unless you're masochistic or much harder-core than I am.

As I have said in a lot of posts before, I had a very difficult experience in China last August and have basically taken an entire year off studying because in all honesty I just couldn't bring myself to face the language again. Every time I tried I had this crazy grief and nightmares and stress response. What I went through was so stressful that during those two months in China that I lost seven kilograms, as I couldn't eat much without vomiting it back up due to stress and fear, didn't sleep, and ended up having to leave for Thailand pretty severely malnutritioned - which then made me susceptible to illnesses there and I spent the next two months after with awful health, vomiting and weak and generally sick. Luckily I was with friends and I gained the weight again and my period and digestive system sorted itself out.

And I never expected that a language itself could carry trauma? Like. Nobody died, it wasn't like that, I wasn't abused or assaulted or anything but still...for just under a year, every time I spoke or heard or read Chinese I couldn't help thinking of those two months. Even now it's still hard. I'm finding my way back to it but, to be honest, I didn't expect how hard it would be. I thought I could just - move past it, because I'd already had so many great experiences in China and Taiwan and with Chinese, that they would cancel each other out or at least be aided by the huge amounts of love that the language has shown me. Alas, it was not the case.

Anyway. All of that to say - I have only managed to do about 400 characters in a year, because I essentially gave up studying completely.

Now I've just finished reviewing and re-remembering those 400 characters on Skritter, so I'm ready to start again! I don't know what's changed, I guess just time - I feel more positive, I feel curious and interested about the language again. I don't know. I'm not going to question it too deeply. But for these past two weeks, I've been having a lot of fun :)

I'll update everyone on my progress as I go! Next post - 500.

[luaspersona]

hey y’all, how have you been?

i know it’s been a while, and i know i promised a fic that was supposed to be posted earlier this month and that it’s been some time since i dropped a review. but a lot of stuff happened and i realized that i needed some time off. during that time, i reflected a lot and considered not returning, maybe only posting the seoul town road story and going offline for good. eventually tho, i understood how much i missed reading and how much i couldn’t really stop coming up with ideas and outlining some stories — i like this and for the most part, it makes me really happy.

but i wanted to talk a bit about the stuff that made me second-thought coming back. i wanted to be open about stuff that’s depressing and demotivating in this community, especially because i’ll change a lot of things about how i interact here.

this will be a long text, but it’s really important if you follow me. i wanna make it clear tho, before anything, that i’m speaking for myself here, and myself only.

⇢ the first thing i wanna say is that i’ll be generally less active. i used to think that in order to become a popular blog or whatever i had to be chronically online, posting all the time and all. after giving it some thought, i can't really tell if that's true or not, but the thing is: i don’t have the mental health for it. so i won't push myself. but also, if you write something and want me to read it, please send it to me! shamelessly and guiltlessly promote your work! i probably won’t see it on the feed, but i’m always open for recommendations, i just don't have the time to look for it anymore.

⇢ i’ll also go through my followers and block anyone who doesn’t have their age displayed or looks like a bot. no questions asked. this isn’t a blog for minors, and i wanna protect myself. understand how tumblr works if y’all wanna be here.

⇢ i will finish and post seoul town road soon. please be patient. 

⇢ lately, i’ve seen a lot of wonderful writers deactivate due to lack of interaction and support. i understand we’re here working, writing and sharing for free because we *chose to*, but it's hard to speak to the void. so please, don’t let this become a place where authors are talking to themselves while feeling unsafe due to plagiarism or hate. i understand the reasons why someone might be a silent reader, but... just don't make the authors you like feel alone, y'all (i can write some tips and general guides for reviewing and interacting with writing blogs if y’all are interested).

⇢ ok, so… i thought a lot about whether or not to talk about it. it was already super messy, even if i wasn’t online at the time and didn’t see it happening (i'm sorry if this is just repetition, and i bet y'all are sick of it). but ultimately, the main reason why i hesitated to come back was because of what happened to M, so i kinda need to vent about that.

M was one of the oldest blogs here, always open to chat and interact and doing god's work for our horny and sentimental souls (shape of your body is actually one of my favorite stories ever and made me realize a bunch of stuff about myself to the point where i quoted some of it to my therapist at the time), and y’all came for them in such a nasty, violent way, misgendering and attacking a person that, upon first being called out for writing something insensitive, was immediately open to discussion and hearing what y’all had to say (regardless if it really was insensitive or not, the discussion was more than welcomed by them).

what shocks me the most, is that y’all are supposedly from a fandom of a bunch of dudes who once wrote problematic stuff, but educated themselves after accepting criticism and changed. if y’all understand that our oppressions are systematic, y’all have to understand that everyone has stuff to learn and stuff to let go. i say that as a black woman, who once used to perpetrate racist shit because that was how i was raised and taught. i say that as a bi woman, who once used to perpetrate biphobic and queerphobic rhetoric because that was how i was raised and taught. i say that as a human being, who once used (and probably still do to some capacity) to perpetrate prejudice and problematic behavior because that was how i was raised and taught.

this is not to say we should forgive and forget whenever someone says stuff that’s wrong or suspicious, but sometimes people really don’t understand that what they’ve said is offensive or from a place of unfamiliarity (not sure if that's a real word), and if we gave the boys the benefit of the doubt and still supported them (and are now being rewarded with their care and attention) why can’t we do the same for ourselves? not to mention how transphobic most of y’all were, all while calling someone out for doing something you deemed problematic, like ??? fuck y’all tbh. seeing how they were treated, and learning about the tea blog made me physically sick. someone who has always been such a light in this community being dragged from one (debatable) mistake — which they acknowledged and apologized for — made me depressed af.

it all made this look like stan twitter, where every interaction feels like an attempt to expose someone and draw hate towards them. this makes me feel unsafe as hell. and i don’t know… this whole environment is not as it used to be. there were a bunch of nice projects i wanted to share, i was working on jade’s profile for a nice little thing i wanted to do to support the writing community, i was working on monthly recs, but… idk. i’m not saying i won’t do them, just saying it might take longer for me to feel comfortable here again.

⇢ i know i'm no one. i'm a little blog from the corner of our community, and i barely have enough followers for all of this to mean anything. but this is still my blog, and it's still a place that was supposed to feel good. and i want to have some control over it, even if no one cares necessarily.

anyway. i’m depressed, and i’m saying stuff i might regret, but. yeah. that’s it ig. i'll return slowly and i missed y'all, especially on discord, and i'm sorry for vanishing. i'll also be rb this for the next days to make sure that i reaches everyone i want it to reach.

[gold-rhine]

hello. i come for ask game. xinyan & anemo or, if you do not care for hard mode of character rarely talked about kaeya & dendro

anemo needs to have their life uprooted, either their core believes shattered or to lose something fundamental that makes them question their sense of self, to be the leaf on the wind, but learn to go with it instead of being thrown around. this is why death of loved one is a very popular anemo motive, as its an easy way to yank the ground from under character's feet. for a righteous, self-confident character like xinyan, that loss also needs to challenge their preconceptions. basically i think it needs to be heizou situation where he cast categorical judgment on his friend and then at his death was forced to re-evaluate his own view of justice. heizou would be pyro or electro if that friend didn't happen btw, depending on other circumstances.

for xinyan it could be idk, she had a conservative uncle who was against her rock and roll shit (and we know her family was not thrilled), she thought he's a jerk and fought him all the time, but then got into trouble with law by idk vandalizing public property with graffiti or smth, and it somehow tied her to even bigger crime that she didn't do, and instead of blaming her or chastising her like she thought he would, he uncle took the blame and went to prison himself to protect her. like he could just die protecting her from smth, but i'm trying to reduce anemo-related deaths asdghj

kaeya would work very well as dendro, he has a lot of corresponding tendencies - drive to collect and process new information, to systematize it and then use it to achieve his goals. his urge to get info from ppl and to put them in hard situations to see how they'll react mirrors alhaitham's ethos of collecting information through biased perspectives to understand these perspectives and challenge them against one another, alhaitham is just much more blunt. the main problem is that kaeya needs to not hate himself and not see this drive for learning things about ppl as inherently evil thing that makes him a manipulator. which is uuuuh, hard to do in his situation lol. idk, if his dad really didn't have an agenda for him and left him in sumeru with candace without any loaded statements about last hope of the khaenriah, so kaeya didn't feel like a spy and time bomb.

dendro kaeya i think would be either in akademiya, inventing psychology and tools to analyze ppl, or be an edgy writer who uses social experiments on ppl to get "true" plots for his books. maybe both actually lol

[wilcze-kudly]

I've seen your AU posts about Bolin as the Avatar, but here is another interesting thought experiment for you: what if Suyin was the Avatar?

[Disclaimer: Not making up a new timeline, so let's roll with some AU where the current Suyin we know is simply discovered as the Avatar at a really late age.] So, some of what often defines an Avatar are these common prerequisites: the world tour, learning the elements, spirituality, and approach/practicality. I'll give my thoughts on how I feel Suyin would fare and/or adapt in these categories, but everything said here is really just for fun discussion and is always up for your and everyone's own interpretation. World Tour: Suyin already has one foot in on this side of things as she's already been noted on traveling some parts of the world, seems relatively well-traveled, and has met a variety of people in her travels.

As the Avatar, I don't believe this aspect would be very hard for her. However, I could see her wrestling with the difficulty of hardly ever having the opportunity to enjoy any private time in her home for the sake of ushering peace and stability in the world. It's possible she could have someone act as an interim matriarch over Zaofu or possibly even step down permanently. Oh, who are we kidding? We all know she's a certified workaholic and will collapse trying to do them both at once. Learning the Elements: I also believe this should come easier to her as well. Her fighting style, for starters, is already very reminiscent of airbender movements in how nimble and mindful of her surroundings she is than most other earthbenders. Or, as Aang would say, "being quick or clever"

However, she thinks like a waterbender; how she redirects metal and earth thrown at her and redirect them to her opponent is a sight to behold. The one element I could see having an issue with as the Avatar is fire as it requires a mind of inner peace and tranquility (and she has definitely had some lingering issues in her past). She is also reasonably emotional (under the right circumstances) and impulsive which can cause lapses in her judgment or behavior. Lightning is a possibility as a skill, I suppose, but I definitely see her redirecting it more than generating it much. Oh, and traveling to find masters? Screw that. Nope, they're all getting an extended deluxe stay at Zaofu until she's mastered all the elements. Non-negotiable.

Spirituality: This is the shortest one as we don't know much of what Suyin thinks of spirits, the spirit world, or even how spiritual she actually is. She comes off as a bit materialistic, though, so that might affect how she interacts in those kinds of such matters but it's all very vague, to say the least.

Approach & Practicality: I think this aspect is the most interesting because I think it really hinges on how charitable one wants to be to Suyin's character. For all I've mentioned, she could very well be a Szeto-type of Avatar that mainly prioritizes the progression and safety of only Zaofu and any surrounding territories under their banner. There's enough precedent for that mentality given her response to the Earth Kingdom situation in Book 4. On the flip side, I could also see her acting with a sort of dual persona. One, that operates as sort of a "mother hen" kind of figure that over-compensates for the world's needs, albeit in her own fussy and systematic way with the best of maternal intentions. The other persona is more discreet and handles problems behind the scenes. Given that she had someone like Aiwei in her ranks and wasn't afraid to assassinate Kuvira in the dead of night, this is another possibility of how she would operate as the Avatar. Honestly, I envision her as a slightly more domineering Yangchen, with occasional flashes of Kyoshi if things REALLY hit the fan. But, hey, who is gonna piss off the cool mom, right? ....Right?

Oh my god I love this idea! I think a show following an older, more established Avatar would be very interesting.

One can actually put forth a theory that Suyin's travels have already kinda lead her through all three elements to some extent.

She spent time sailing on a pirate's ship, surrounded by water. That's waterbending down.

The circus she performed in looks incredibly similar to the one Ty Lee had performed in. This can also be backed up that Suyin also has a painted lady doll, a dragon mask, and some other thing (perhaps a flute? Or a pin?) With a dragon motif. So that's firebending also down.

Her connection to Airbending is a little bit less pronounced, but she did spend a lot of time in a sandbender commune. Now, while sandbenders are earthbenders, their bending methods are incredibly similar to airbending, to the point where they can propel their sandgliders with it. The commune could also be similar to Air Nomads and their communal lifestyles.

I can see her connecting very strongly with the healing aspects of waterbending. She seems to have a bit of medicinal knowledge, or at least enough of an instinct to get most of the metal out of Korra's bloodstream. We really don't talk about that enough man that was cool as fuck.

I could sort of see Suyin making Zaofu a bit of her home and "base of operations" like Aang seemed to fo with Air Temple Island. Also the idea that instead of a traditional Team Avatar, she has her gaggle of feral ninja children is really funny to me.

The more I think about Suyin as an Avatar, the more wonderful symbolism I can see there.

The Earth Kingdom is still probably suffering massively after the damage done to it by the Fire Nation. And who better to herald it's rebirth than the metalbender Avatar daughter of a renowned war hero.

Suyin is all about progress and people growing. And I can certainly see her wanting to spread that to others. As the Avatar, doing so wouldn't be seen as her subjugating others (which was one of her main reasons to not help during the whole earth empire thing) but by acting as a Spiritual Guide to others.

So yeah this is an amazing concept. Honestly i need to gather my thoughts on it but I may revisit this concept.

[i-need-some-advice-on]

I have a sweet friend whom I love very much. But as the years go by I'm becoming less and less sure that our morals and politics align. I'm scared of losing them but I'm also worried about the resentment that I'm slowly developing for them. Does anyone know how to deal with this kind of thing?

For context, my friend is studying to become a psychologist. In the past, I used to have the same opinions about therapy that most people in the majority demographic do - that "Therapy is good and psychiatry is a good and altruistic field, and if a bad therapist hurts someone then it's just that individual practitioner being a bad apple."

But I have a PD diagnosis, I've had previous (bad, as you can imagine) experiences with therapy. And I mean EXTREMELY bad, it threatened my safety in an abusive household and I was also in risk of forced institutionalisation once (That one was related to depression a lot more than any PD just to be clear.)

And as I educate myself more and talk to other people who were in similar situations, i get more and more anti-psych with time. It's not really a Few Bad Apples situation if the therapist(s) who hurt us were technically doing their exact job description and were actually adhering to their regulations. I have developed a huge mistrust for psychologists and therapists and like 50% of it is a knee-jerk personal trauma reaction and the other 50% is genuinely getting more socially conscious and knowing that I'd be treated even worse in a whiter country (which my friend is.)

They also tell me things about their actual psychology classes and every fact I learn unsettles me more. Their classes, teachers and entry level career paths are ALARMINGLY blasé, unprofessional and unethical than what you'd expect from such a serious profession.

My friend is a good person btw I am fully sure they're trying so hard to stay ethical and genuine even when their classes/grades literally inventivize them not to be. I know they're that one person in class who goes all in to make an original presentation while everyone who copied off the internet gets an A. But I just feel sad about how far this can really go, it's like seeing someone genuinely try to be a good cop.

I have known this person for a few years and I see them as a LIFELONG friend, I want to hang out with them when we're old and boring. But I just don't know if I will ever be okay with their education and future career, sometimes I'm actively scared of what their psychiatry books must have told them about people like me. Again, my friend has repeatedly reassured me that they're one of the good ones that don't hate or discrimate against certain disorders but I still believe it's a systematic issue. I'm scared of watching them turn into something else but at the same time I don't want to lose them. I also don't think I have any right to tell them what to do with their own life.

All my opinions about psychology here were purely to give you an exact idea of what I'm talking about! I don't want to start any discourse about the anti psych movement on this blog because that's not its purpose (thanks for this space btw op <3) I just didn't want people to assume that my friend was a right winger or something, and that's the only thing it sounds like if I leave it in vague terms. What do I do? Has anyone ever been in this kind of situations with a friend's beliefs and what did you do about it?

.

[someidiotwithalaptop]

Alright: What the FUCK happened to Summer???

Because something sure did, and every new thing we hear about her gets more disturbing, and it haunts me.

So, I'll start with stuff that's fairly certain and like, small leaps of logic before I go full tinfoil hat conspiracy theorist. We have very little actual info about Summer, nearly all of it from different characters talking about her.

From Yang we get the basic facts from her family's perspective: Summer was a Huntress who went out on a mission and never came back. We also get the characterization of, "Super-Mom: Baker of cookies and slayer of giant monsters."

From Qrow, we learn that 1. She was a brat, which like, honestly STRQ was probably just "oops! all brats" 2. He thinks she would have pressed on if she knew the truth, which, uh, she almost definitely did. "We don't have to kill you to stop you," is not the sort of thing you say to Salem if you don't know she's immortal, that's all I'm saying. 3. Whatever her final mission was, she didn't tell him or Tai or Ozpin. I'm inclined to believe Ozpin when he says he genuinely doesn't know what happened to Summer, since his biggest secret is already out—plus he's been genuinely repentent about the mess his lying caused in Volume 6 and is taking steps to do better in the future. It would feel really weird thematically if he knew and was keeping yet another giant bomb of a secret. So Summer went on her final mission alone, or at the very least, she didn't tell any of Ozpin's inner circle where she was going.

We'll get to speculating about why not later, but I think this point is probably going to be important in Ruby's character arc—whatever Summer's ultimate fate, she got there because she tried to save the world alone, and we've seen Ruby do something similar. Like she's not running off after Salem by herself, but she's definitely trying to shoulder the burden of leading and inspiring everyone to keep going all on her own, without asking for help as that responsibility has been slowly yet systematically destroying her mental health. I mean ffs she's been literally carrying her team on her shoulders for two episodes now.

HOWEVER: Oz, Tai, and Qrow don't know anything about what happened to Summer, but it's possible that Raven might. When Ruby tries to reach out to her and convince her to work together, because they'll have a better chance than if they try to do it alone, Raven says, "You sound just like your mother," in truly the most bitter, disdainful-ass tone I have ever heard. And then she opens a portal for Cinder to throw a fireball at her. Whether this is about a more generalized friction that maybe contributed to Raven leaving, or a specific moment when Summer tried to get her on board with whatever she was doing on that final mission, is kind of uncertain. Or it could be both!

(And it might also be she married my ex bitterness but, admitting my biases here, I hate that fucking trope with a fiery passion and I think it's more interesting if her anger at Summer is actually about Summer.)

Regardless, if Summer did ask her for help, then based on how Raven reacted to Ruby I don't think she got it lmao

And then. Oh, and then. We get Salem!

"Your mother said those words to me. She was wrong too."

"Her again?"

So like. Salem definitely met her. Had a whole-ass conversation with her, even.

And that fucking smile??? Salem did some shit to Summer. It's just a question of what, exactly?

Right. Okay. So after they kill the Hound and realize WHOOPS that was a person and he looks an awful lot like Ruby! and everyone reunites, Ruby says this:

"When I saw its eyes, I knew. Salem used to kill people with Silver Eyes, like Maria. But she’s always wanted me alive. Why would that change unless, when she met Mom, she learned she could do something new?"

Timeline-wise, this seems accurate! But I'd like to also insert TR into the equation. It's a little hard to tell given the uhh, body horror of it all, but he definitely looks younger than Qrow (which is maybe not saying a lot given that Raven looks at least ten years younger than Qrow and she's his twin lmao) and, more to the point, like he's probably younger than Summer.

Like, yeah, hard to tell, but I don't think this man is past forty. And even if he is, it doesn't seem like Salem's had him for very long, seeing as she never sent him after Ruby or the relics in previous volumes. So he's probably an example of what Salem's been doing to SEWs after Summer.

Also, Salem calls him an experiment, and says that so far she's pleased with the results. Meaning Summer isn't exactly a Hound, though I wouldn't say that puts grimmification off the table. Just that it's not in the exact same way he is. And it's worth pointing out that the way TR has been grimmified, it's left him completely without agency and unable to disobey Salem. Even after Ruby blasts the Grimm off his head, he's still left repeating "Take The Girl" over and over without any sign of whoever he used to be coming back to the surface. It's possible that is what Salem is referring to when she calls him a successful experiment.

So the way Salem has dealt with people with silver eyes has gone:

Maria (kill her) > Summer (?!?!) > TR (an... experiment) > Ruby (bring her to me alive)

Adding TR into the mix, it seems unlikely that the "something new" Salem learned she could do from Summer Rose would actually have been, y'know, a Hound. Plus from a narrative perspective, I don't think we're going to have Ruby literally saying exactly what happened to Summer into the camera only for her to turn up, Hound-ified just as expected, a couple volumes later. So, some possibilities:

Ruby is actually exactly correct about what happened to Summer, but she's not going to show up later so there's no reason not to just tell us. Personally I doubt it's this, given the way the mystery has been unfolding over eight volumes and counting. It'd be kind of weird to just tell us instead of showing us, or indeed having the Hound literally be Summer. Also, if Summer is a Hound too then why is TR an experiment?

Summer was Grimmified but didn't survive the process, so she gave Salem the idea but she's not actually a Hound. This also seems a bit odd to me given that would mean she's basically just dead like we assumed, but with extra steps. Like it's upsetting but it doesn't represent the kind of dramatic upheaval to the sisters' worldviews that it feels like this is building towards. It doesn't explain how fucking smug Salem is about the whole thing.

Summer was Grimmified, but didn't actually lose any agency. This would explain why Salem is still experimenting, and why she's so pleased with TR—he's even more singleminded in carrying out her goals than Tyrian is. It also fits with the way the Grimmification worked on Salem. Even after she jumped into the goop, she was still very much herself—it's possible it influenced her, but she was definitely capable of showing love and affection to both Ozma and her daughters. She just, uhh,,, was also willing to try and murder them. But it's unclear to me how much of that was Evil Goo and how much was just that there's no way a human being spends any significant length of time as the Last Woman Alive without some unpleasant side effects. We're social creatures and we do not generally do well when completely deprived of company.

Summer wasn't Grimmified at all, the whole Hound thing is a red herring.

In either 3 or 4, regardless of how much body horror happened, Ruby is wrong about what happened to Summer. And in order to not undercut that moment of utter despair at what probably happened to Summer... I feel like what actually did happen has to be. like. worse.

AND IT'S A TAD DIFFICULT TO GET WORSE THAN THE HOUND.

So. Time to put our tinfoil hats on: what if we add an element of horrible betrayal?

Yes this is a Summer-joined-Salem conspiracy post.

But hear me out okay! Circling back a bit, why wouldn't Summer tell any of the inner circle where she was going? If she talked to anyone, it was Raven, who had already noped the fuck out by the time Summer went on her final mission. Now, if it was just Tai and Qrow I'd say she might've kept it from them for the same reason everyone always keeps that secret—she didn't want them to lose hope. But... Ozpin already knows. There'd be no reason not to tell him what she was doing, unless she knew he'd try to stop her.

Now: my goal here is to make all this make sense, without altering the first foundational piece of characterization we get for Summer. Namely, "Super-Mom: Baker of cookies and slayer of giant monsters." I'm not saying Summer learned the truth and went, welp, if you can't beat 'em join 'em. Because both Summer and Raven tend to act as foils to Ruby and Yang, and "gave up immediately" doesn't feel like an interesting foil to Ruby's perserverence. But, if you find out that there's an existential threat to the entire world, and she can't be killed...

Isn't it worth trying to negotiate?

Especially if, say, you were absolutely desperate to end this war in your lifetime. Because Summer knows that if it's really impossible, if Salem can't be stopped, then Ruby will get dragged in whether she likes it or not. All because of a trait that Summer passed down to her.

Salem's been killing people with silver eyes, probably for millenia. It's easily possible that Summer had her own visit from someone like Tock, or noticed the same thing Maria's father did, that there's a suspicious lack of people with silver eyes considering how useful they are against the Grimm. As long as Salem is a threat, Ruby is going to be in that same danger. Forever.

So she has to do something, right? If there's even the tiniest chance she can end this now, before Ruby will ever have to suffer for it, before she gets pulled into an impossible war and Yang comes charging in after her, because of course she's going to try to help her sister... isn't that a chance worth taking?

This is why I think Raven knows some shit, by the by—when she's telling Yang about Salem, she actually kind of indirectly drops the same bomb that went off in Volume 6, it's just that she didn't do it in the same explicit terms that Jinn did. "She can't be stopped, she can't be reasoned with, and she will not rest until Humanity crumbles at her feet."

"Can't be stopped" is Raven's translation of can't be killed, since "We don't have to kill you to stop you" seems to be a flavor of terrifying exclusive to Ruby and apparently Summer. But "can't be reasoned with" implies that somebody tried. And like, let's be honest. Do we really think Raven was the one who decided to give diplomacy a go?

Not to mention this line, which I'm like 90% sure is referring to Summer:

"Or... you can go back to Qrow and join Ozpin's impossible war against Salem, and meet the same fate as so many others."

It really seems like Raven knows something she's not telling us. Like, if that is a reference to Summer's fate, does that mean Raven knows what it is, or is she just speculating like everyone else? Does she have a portal to Summer, and is that giving her information the others don't have? All that, combined with the fact that she's also way more bitter about Summer than everyone else, seems signficant.

Anyways. Let's say Summer decides to have a chat with Salem.

She can't tell Ozpin. He'd try to stop her, because he'd see it as a suicide mission. Qrow or Tai both might tell him, or agree with him and get in her way, so she keeps it from them too. Maybe she goes off completely by herself—or maybe she goes to Raven, because she's the only one who might be able to help who Summer knows won't breathe a word of it to Ozpin. Either way, Raven doesn't help her. She's not getting anywhere near Salem.

And then... well. Salem got here by manipulating people, by swaying them to her cause. Summer asks her what she actually wants out of all this. Isn't there some way they could resolve this without this endless war, all this endless death?

Important to note, I don't think we've heard Salem's motivation in her own words. At least, not since the Lost Fable, when she wanted to rule with Ozpin as the new gods of Remnant. I think it's safe to say at least a few things have changed since then. Closest I can think of is what she says to Cinder in Volume 8, "In pursuit of a new world, no cost is too great." Which is ominous, but also quite vague, and says nothing about what she plans to do with the relics.

Instead, we get a whole lot of people guessing. Ozpin thinks she wants to die. Tyrian thinks she wants to destroy the world. Hazel and Mercury think she wants to remake it, with no Huntsman Academies, with them as the new top dogs.

There's a pattern here—Salem never actually says what she wants, and other people have a habit of projecting their own motives onto her actions. Ozpin wants to die, Hazel wants to destroy the Huntsmen Academies, Mercury wants to be the one with the power so he's not getting hurt, and Tyrian's just in it for the chaos.

And it's not like Salem hasn't done stuff like that on purpose. By the time she started growing her army against the gods and telling people they would all steal immortality like she did, she'd already tried to kill herself. She didn't want immortality. She just let people think she did, because it was more convenient for her.

So if this agent of Ozpin's comes to her, absolutely desperate for a way to end the fight before it can come for her daughters, well... why not just tell her about the gods? About how Ozpin plans to one day reunite the relics, and submit Remnant to their judgment? About what might happen if he does?

(TBH I don't think Oz will ever do that, not because I think he's decided not to or anything like that, but because I doubt he'll ever see a humanity united enough for it to be worth trying. We're an argumentative bunch.)

But like. To Summer, all of a sudden there's this other, even bigger existential threat. And Salem isn't like Ozpin. She does have a plan! She wants to destroy the relics, so that the gods can never be resummoned, because of course she hates them and so she would never want them to come back!

(Again, not saying this is actually true, my best guess is that she's trying to bring them back so she can fight them again slkdfjlskdj)

And then, if they succeed, not only will the gods not be a threat anymore, Salem won't be a threat either. She'll have gotten what she wants!

"This can all... be... over..."

Summer has to finish this. There has to be a way for her to do this by herself, to save everyone, to put a stop to it all in time to protect her children! (Raven can't be right, it can't just be hopeless!)

From there, all Salem really needs to do is be a bit careful how much she tells her other followers about what she plans to do—which it seems like she has—and eventually find a way to either hide what relics she has or convince Summer that she's trying really hard to destroy them, definitely, pinky promise!

(And, as an aside: if true, it's very possible that the reason Salem's so insistent on keeping Ruby alive isn't that she wants to turn her into another Hound, but rather that was one of Summer's conditions.)

All this, of course, may or may not come with a sprinkle of Grimmification. Because why not add some body horror to the good old-fashioned betrayal horror! Though, if I'm right and not going completely off the wall here, I suspect it's probably more in the vein of Cinder than TR. Namely, like, consensual.

Regardless, it definitely feels like Summer has been idealized to a point that's just sort of... begging for trouble. She's the perfect Huntress. The best of us. The one who would have pressed on. And like, historically putting people on pedestals like that has not gone well in this show (see: Pyrrha). Not to mention the way trying to be the perfect Huntress that Summer was has been affecting Ruby over the years.

Also, definitely totally unrelated to all of the above: I think paragons that turn to evil despite or indeed because of all their wonderful paragon qualities FUCK SEVERELY and I would like to see it.

[apocryphalia]

sorry to reappear here just to be genuine on main but I'm deep in the finals soup right now so naturally I've been having Thoughts

I've been thinking about when I was 25 and finishing my associate's degree and applying to transfer to get my bachelor's. and I knew I wanted to do grad school and I was so anxious about finishing everything as quickly as possible because I was already going to be in my 30s (the horror!) by the time I finished school and would be able to actually "start my career"

but you know what I did instead? fell in love with a new subject. started thinking about other degree programs. took way too many classes my senior year and burned myself out and decided to take a year off after undergrad to decide what I wanted to do. and then COVID happened and I decided to keep waiting and I came out as trans, and I realized actually the thing I wanted to do was still what I wanted when I was 25.

so I applied to law school. and I thought, ok, this is fine. I'll get through the next three years and then I can REALLY start living my life when I'm 34.

but friends. do you know what happened instead? I fell in love with the thing everyone made me expect to hate, that I thought was going to be just a necessary evil I had to suffer through to get out into the world and practice. to finally get started.

I've been looking at phd programs now. I've been systematically harassing all my professors about how to do what they do and I've been reading their scholarship and I've been rotating the erie doctrine in my mind like it's my new fucking blorbo

and when I first realized that oh fuck, maybe I do actually still have some interest in academia? and legal academia, of all things? I thought, well shit, now I'm not going to REALLY get started until I'm in my 40s. and I was MAD. I was mad at myself for every point in the last 31 years where a different choice might have theoretically gotten me here sooner. I was mad at the legal profession and the academy for working the way that it does and I was mad at God and the universe for making me want things and then making them hard.

but look. what have I been doing all this time if not living my life? what am I doing right now if not starting my career?

my point is. my point is I actually love getting older and learning new things about myself, even if sometimes I'm the last one to know them. and I loved the experiences I had in undergrad and I love the experiences I'm having now, and I'm accumulating a whole list of other experiences to have and things to learn that I think I'll love too. and this shit isn't some race for the finish line or a checklist of things to do in the exact right order or at the exact right age. it's just... life. and sometimes it's weird and sometimes it's hard and sometimes things don't go the way you wanted or the way you thought they were going to, and I think that's probably fine actually?

idk. I just wanted to share.

[pure-ablution]

Can you talk more about how you plan your goals and what you want to achieve in the future, the mindset and attitude, and how you stay focused and maintain momentum?

To me, discipline and proper planning are the most important aspects of achieving my goals. I can only maintain momentum whilst I’m up in the air; if I allow myself to droop, even for a little while, it feels impossible to get up again. I have my routines and rituals because I’ve committed to them and they ground me, they keep me focused. I’m not the sort of person who can put something down and pick it back up again easily—I have to stick to it consistently, and I’ve found that that’s the best way to see results anyway.

I plan things carefully, but I don’t let myself get caught up in the planning stage. I knew a boy at school who spent so long creating the most perfect, scientifically proven and effective, beautifully formatted study plans for the run-up to his final exams, and he ended up failing all of them—because he’d spent so long planning that in the end, he didn’t have the time to actually study. I think that a lot of people can accidentally let life fly by without them, and a lot of people think that their lives have to be put on pause whilst they achieve some goal or another: for instance, they say that they can’t go out and start a new social life or learn how to do their makeup until they’ve lost weight. This is silly—you should be staggering your goals and plans so that they work simultaneously with one another, or at the very least, take on a logical pattern.

For example, I sat down at the start of my serious dedication to my appearance, with a printed picture of my face in front of me, and devoted an hour to really scrutinising hard and determining what was really necessary. I judged which surgeries and procedures were needed and what was excessive, and then planned them out to a sensible order. It made no sense to have a rhinoplasty done before getting my orthodontic work, because my teeth could shift my new nose entirely out of joint, so I prioritised having my teeth fixed first of all, and planned to reassess once my lower face had begun to settle into shape. I had my lips blushed six months before I had them filled, so that the colour had time to settle and the filler wouldn’t blanch out my natural lip colour. I bought new skincare products in a staged process, starting with cleansers and prescription treatments and ending with masks and devices, because I didn’t want to overload my skin with too much at once, and I wanted to work in a systematic way.

I give myself a very strict timescale for planning, I use a plain notebook and pen to create charts and checklists, and then I force myself to get the ball rolling before I start to second-guess myself and make amendments. I don’t waste time with fancy computer programmes or journalling techniques that require time to master, I just keep things plain and effective, and I focus on the action over the documentation. Currently, I’m nowhere near the end of my plan and I still have courses to complete and competitions to win, and I want to graduate with honours and offers, to get engaged and married, to have children. In the nearer future, I have my baptism scheduled and the end of my conversion process, I have some places to visit and things to buy, I need to have my braces taken off and start booking consultations for my rhinoplasty, and I’m going to take my intermediate certificates for the languages I’m learning. I’m always working towards the next step and I think it’s important that you’re able to not only identify your goals, but also be able to break down the steps you need to take to reach them, and get started as soon as possible.