#its time to converge

[clerichs-xi]

its biannual time of talking to my parents about being transgender again. sigh.

[dawnssummers]

— i never liked that ending either. more love streaming out the wrong way, and i don't want to be the kind that says the wrong way.

buffy the vampire slayer, 5.07 fool for love + 5.18 intervention + 5.22 the gift / richard siken, litany in which certain things are crossed out

[silverskye13]

Etho stumbled onto the beach, tired, sore, hungry, and one moment of weakness away from calling Tango and begging for mercy. Sure, the whole exile thing had been his idea. Sure, it had all gone downhill at approximately the same intervals he thought it would. And sure, he'd feel really, really stupid for making Tango help him dig himself into this hole only to whine to be dug out again, but who could blame him? Life in exile was hard.

Everything that could possibly go wrong had gone wrong, he couldn't get a moment of peace with all the half-panicked villagers milling around, and his gear was half busted. There were raids too. Death after death to vexes and evokers lost in the caverns. Dragging himself through mud and water and gravel just to trudge back up to the villager bell and have no clue where the final raiders were. Ravagers pitching him off the cliff at every other turn...

Etho sighed dramatically and sprawled out in the sand, letting himself sink body and soul into self pity and misery. His communicator was a brick in his pocket, taunting him with its presence. It stuck to his thigh with the uncomfortable, matted grasp of wet fabric. He was well and truly soaked after his last climb through the caverns, and his clothes clung to him like a second skin, salted with sweat and blotted with blood from cuts and scrapes. A crossbow bolt, broken at the shaft, pinned his belt against his chainmail. The tip of the bolt pricked him uncomfortably, worrying the bruise that had formed around its impact; though it was rendered nonlethal by the stubborn mail he was wearing, it still hurt. Laying in the sand like he was, he was just adding more grit to the mix, more minor inconveniences to add straws of weight to the almost-broken back of his resistance. More to scrub and clean and dwell on later, while he contemplated giving up.

The sky above was cloudless and brimming with stars.

Etho watched the tiny points of light flicker, and mapped the planets that didn't. His single player world was up there somewhere. So were all the other Hermitcrafts he'd been to - and those he hadn't. It was weird knowing he could chart his presence in the universe with points of light. There had been a long time, before so many worlds formed and fought into being, that he had charted his existence by thoughts and impulses and idle curiosity. Ethoslab - void first, player afterthought. He couldn't really pinpoint the moment he chose physicality, he only knew that he had, and had yet to un-choose it.

There was so much more of him. He was so much bigger than this little peninsula of shoreline. So much bigger than pesky ravagers, peskier villagers. He could give up and just recede back up there into the stars, bid farewell to Season 9. He'd started late anyway. Imposed a barrier he had too much trouble crossing. No one would blame him if he simply unspooled himself into the aether and rested for a while. For a season. Maybe two. The hermits were understanding like that. It was one of the things that made them mortal - the ability to empathize and understand.

Not that Etho couldn't do either of those things. It just took effort, like climbing uphill through a water stream. Like running from waves of vex summoned by a hidden evoker. He thought maybe his exile would help with that: the effort to pretend to be mortal. The effort to understand things the way they did, relate the way they did. To enjoy their company the way they enjoyed his.

No one would blame him if he decided he was too tired. They couldn't. It wasn't in their nature.

Etho blinked up at his stars, his universe, the pieces of him he'd left behind places where he tried his hardest to be player first, void second. He should make a decision. He should reach into his pocket and call Tango. Or he should drag himself to his feet and soldier on.

Or he could just sleep on the beach here. Sure he'd wake up cold and sandy, but hey, the sound of the waves was nice. It was a steady rhythm, the water muttering incomprehensible secrets to the sand and shells. He timed his breathing with the rolling surf, watched the sky, and tried to live in a single moment. His skin itched where it touched the sand. His scalp crawled where the water in his hair dried. He closed his eyes and sighed, bearing his discomforts as best he could.

He didn't fall asleep. He was lulled to the edge of it, maybe. His breath evened out. His thoughts spun towards nonexistence. His body was weighted with the feeling of sinking through the ground, through his subconscious into comfortable oblivion. Then, with every rush of the waves, wakefulness returned for him like a stray dog - meandering and lazy, but brutally persistent.

He was dragged awake alongside the presence of... something. He couldn't place it at first, so hazy in his exhaustion that he measured it as his own wakefulness at first. As he sat up in the sand though, he found whatever it was out there was distinct from himself. It was a great unspooling of something, a system of thought and presence in the water. The horizon was alight with it, a pale pseudo-sunrise that pulsed like heat rays off the surface of the water. Its consciousness brushed his, extended as he had been, and he felt the edges of something vast, fathomless, deep and drowning. It was cold in that crushing way the depth of the ocean is cold, a sunless dark smothered by water and distance, alight only by the predatory longing to feed. It was sharp-toothed, patient as a mountain in the breath before an avalanche, and when it brushed by him, it grinned.

The waves arced higher, roared, raced and crashed. White sea foam curled up the beach towards him, electrified by the thought and will that compelled it. Brightly colored fish, tinged silver-grey by the night, darted from them, roiling the water in great pulses and ripples. Entire schools of them fled the water, leaping into the sky as though driven by some great predator, backlit by that yellow phosphorescence in the deep that Etho recognized as eyes. Dozens of gazes trained in his direction, their lights spilling together. The sea boiled. The thing was nearing the shore. As it approached, it made itself familiar. Dark depths of frigid presence condensed and warmed themselves. Bright eyes winked out one after another until only two remained, unsettlingly bright, but human in their proportion. The crashing waves soothed, returning to a gentle rolling against the shore, and with each beat forward, they pulled this thing, now a him, towards dry land. 

xB crawled out of the water with all the clumsy effort and strength of the first amphibians sniffing for shore in the times before history. His clothes were soaked. His hair was streaked with sand and kelp. His hands were planted firmly in his pockets. If not for all the sea water, and the hint of scales and gills like lace around his throat, he could have just strolled out of a building in the shopping district.

"Hullo," xB said anticlimactically, grinning with teeth that looked as though they couldn't decide how human they should be. They were situated in simple, straight rows, but the gums were too pale, and the white bone too sharp. 

"Hey xB," Etho squinted his eyes, the closest to a smile he had to get with the mask on. It saved him the effort of trying to figure out how to arrange his face for human interaction. "Out fishing?"

xB chuckled, tilting his head to the side to let some trapped water out of his ear. It was just a few more indistinguishable drops to add to the damp ring of sand around his feet. "Maybe. You out star gazing?"

"I'm in exile."

"Ah. I see. So that’s why you’re so far out here,” xB shook his head, scattering water and sand from his hair. If the action was meant to dry him at all, it didn’t help. He sat down beside Etho, and the smell of salt and fish misted off of him in waves. “Should I leave?”

“I feel like you’re not going to,” Etho chuckled, laying back in the sand. He crossed his arms behind his head and gazed up at the sky, re-charting points of light he’d already mapped a thousand times in his head. “What brings you all the way out here?”

“I needed a vacation,” xB sighed and stretched, and bones that hadn’t existed a few minutes ago popped and cracked along his spine. “I love all those guys dearly, really I do, but they’re all so…” He trailed off, trying to find the right words. Finally he settled on, “... human.”

Etho nodded.

“They move too fast, and they work too big,” xB explained, as though he had to. “There’s so much emotionality going on there. I needed to just be…” he gestured vaguely to the ocean, conveying some other indescribable thing he was having trouble putting into words, “... you know. For a little while.”

“I get it,” Etho hummed, blinking skyward. He and xB were a lot alike, all things considered. The deep ocean and its half-life sentience, and the void and its time-damned knowingness, felt similar from time to time. To sensitive hands, both ice and liquid nitrogen felt cold. There were generous differences between the two things, but cold wasn’t one of them. “Well, don’t stop on my account.”

“I’m stopping on my account,” xB chuckled, even though there wasn’t much to laugh at. “I don’t wanna get lost in it, yanno? Ya’ll wouldn’t see me for the rest of the season.”

Etho nodded wordlessly. 

“Unless,” xB said slowly, smirking down at him with bright eyes, “that was a really subtle way of telling me to shove off.”

Etho feigned hurt, placing a hand over his chest and raising his eyebrows, “xB! I would never--”

“Oh I see right through you, spaceman,” xB laughed. “Putting the hermit in hermitcraft out here. I see how it is.”

xB didn’t move to stand, but then again, that was the nature of the ocean. The surf didn’t leave the cliff because it wanted some alone time. It dug in and chipped away, until it had all the bones of the earth powdered to sand. So xB didn’t leave, and Etho didn’t try to make him. The void was more of a watcher than an actor anyway, and he could outlast xB’s patience. That wasn’t a sea-void metaphor, that was just them.

“I’m guessing you’re out here for the same reasons I am, then?” xB pressed on, heedless of Etho’s silence. “It takes some adjustment, but the exile’s a little extreme. I prefer full immersion myself.”

“I thought about not joining,” Etho hummed, finding a planet to fix his eyes on. It was a vaguely reddish light in the sky. “I’m joining late as it is.”

“Better late than never?” xB remarked, testing the waters with him, trying to figure out what he needed to hear. Or maybe he was just trying to make conversation. It was an odd little language barrier between them - two strange consciousnesses, one of void one of sea, conversing through the only experience they shared, pretending to be human. It was a language neither of them were the best at, but they tried regardless. 

“It's hard, xB," Etho told him, like he needed the reminder. "My body is awkward, I hate pain, and you're right, they're all so much all the time. I'm nothing. So much of me is just distant points of light and quiet moments."

"You're an airhead," xB concluded for him inelegantly. 

Etho chuckled, "Only sometimes."

"Fill it with redstone then. You're good at that."

"Redstone burns," Etho told him. "I'm not ready to burn yet. I can barely do noise."

"Aren't stars loud?" xB asked him. "I feel like giant burning balls of gas are probably loud."

"Is the bottom of the ocean loud?"

xB tilted his head thoughtfully, like the question had never really occurred to him. "Define loud?"

"Human loud. Like noise."

"The bottom of the ocean probably just sounds like your eardrums bursting, then."

"The void is quiet until you touch something."

xB wrinkled his nose, "But you're always touching something."

"There's not enough something in the void to touch."

"Should be full of water."

"Water is rare."

xB hissed unpleasantly, a disgusted sound that he wasn't quite human enough to make normal. It sounded too much like the charge before a guardian strike. "Water is life."

"Life is rare, and we'd make some mortal philosophers cringe."

The two of them chuckled, because they were talking nonsense - two immortal things pretending they knew mortal concepts like life and rarity. It was funny; pleasantly distracting. It was a distraction that only lasted until they were silent. 

Etho looked up at the sky and sighed. “I don’t know what I’m going to do, xB.”

The sound of the ocean filled the silence between them, calm and steady without xB stirring it up. Etho could imagine it was xB’s heartbeat, constant and droning, an unstoppable rhythm. Etho didn’t have a heartbeat. The vibrations of the universe were random and distant, and many of them weren’t even his to claim. They were worlds and broadcasts, and advanced communicators sending data and coding across lightyears of distance. 

Etho allowed himself a moment to think, really, he was quite lonely. Even sitting beside someone he should have every reason to relate to. And if he had trouble even seeing bits of himself in xB, well, there really wasn’t much hope for him this season, was there? It was a gloomy thought, but it wasn’t a new one. Yes… maybe rest was his best option after all. Like starting a new day, just a few years from now. What was time, really, to someone made of timelessness? The hermits would understand.

“You ever stop and think how cool it is,” xB spoke slowly, gazing up at the sky, picking his words with the same care that astronomers identified planets, “that we live in a universe where, in its two darkest, most desperate places, there are stars?”

Etho sat up slowly, peering out at the ocean. He could see the stars in the sky reflected in smears of light on the water. He got the distinct feeling, though, that they weren’t what xB was talking about. "You mean starfish?"

xB nodded, smirking, like he was aware it was a bit ridiculous. "The deepest oceans I've ever swam, there have always been starfish. Like deep, deep down, where the water's so heavy it sits on your chest like it hates you. They crawl around down there, tenacious little guys. Almost as tenacious as stars making themselves in nebulas, and burning up and making worlds, and burning those up too."

Etho smiled, "Are you giving me a pep-talk, xB?"

"Oh definitely not. It's only a pep-talk if I walk enigmatically into the ocean afterwards," xB stood and stretched, loose sand falling from his clothes and dusting the top of Etho's head. "I'll see you in a few days then, when your exile is over?"

He asked it like it was a real question. Like he didn't already know the answer. Etho shrugged, "Maybe."

xB graced him with one more chuckle, followed by a lazy salute, "Good luck, Etho."

xB walked into the water, shedding his humanity with every step. It seemed less like he disappeared into the water and more like he diffused into it, a collection of thoughts and ideas that colored the surface like spilled oil before melting into the tide and vanishing. Etho watched the place he vanished, watched the breaking of dawn start to lighten the sky on the farthest horizon. One star, then two, then three disappeared into the sunlight. Etho sighed, stood, stretched out his back and felt every pop and ache in his spine as he did so.

"Tenacious as the stars, huh?" Etho asked the ocean in front of him.

He got back to work. 

[fvaleraye]

*lies on the floor*

you know we really love when the dragonfable devs are trying new things and having fun with boss mechanics, but it really feels bad when we run into a main story boss that essentially counters every strategy we know by heart and feels impossible unless we leave and farm for all the best ice resistance items in the game at our level.

[alitherandom]

Never before in my life have a character's life choices made me want to scream so much

[yj-98]

rotating comics and rdr in my head at terminal velocity :)

[sn4pozu]

ACTUALLY GUFFAWED I JUST CHECKED THE WEDDIE TAGS AND I STARTED HOWLING

[itspileofgoodthings]

i think (to speak sanely and in a practical manner for a minute rather than a self-pitying one) that it’s hard to both a) feel all you’re feeling, b) keep going and be a professional and also a daughter and a sister and a friend to all the people in your life. and you do have to do both! the way out is through, it’s time, it’s good not to melt down in the wrong time and context, in places where it wouldn’t be helpful and would just be a weight for everyone else. but the melting down still needs to happen. the tears still need to be cried and the feelings felt. and it’s just. the balance of that is part of what is so hard to strike. 

[bengallemon]

Persona 3 x Chainsaw Man au because I'm on the verge of getting into csm

Ask me for any semblance of detail please it'll force me to get up and do things

Anyway. Thanatos and Pochita.

[oatbugs]

anyway my fields of study are sooooooo . gorgeous . literally so beautiful absolutely losing my mind each day

[spamalie]

i think the main issue with that ruby mermaid movie is that they tried to half-ass shrek. you can’t just half-ass shrek

[strawberrycircuits]

Since you know lore of loz (and you actually explain it in a way that makes sense to me), could you explain to me where Botw/totk fit in the story. Cause I've been told that the first 8bit loz game is supposed to be the very last in the series, but my brain refuses to think that botw could come before that.

ok so good news: 8bit loz is, at least according to nintendo, NOT the last game in the series-- its not even the last game in a branch of the timeline.

im going to do my best to be as concise and understandable as possible, but im going to be talking about the timeline which is anything but. so. here goes!

so the zelda timeline looks like this, right? its a big mess with multiple branches, and it looks like this because Ocarina of Time is a game dealing with time travel and things got a little fucky in that game.

so the general idea here is; as an adult, link saves a future hyrule and leaves that newly-saved world to be sent back in time to before all of this happened (a world that is eventually flooded, since ganondorf returns and theres no link to save them that time, leading to wind waker). back as a child, link then runs and tells zelda about ganondorfs plans, and he's stopped before the events in the adult timeline can happen and we get the child timeline instead (and he goes off into the woods, sparking the start of majoras mask). if link dies in ocarina of time, ganondorf wins and we get the doomed timeline (leading to a link to the past)

breath of the wild is super fucking weird because its has elements from EVERYTHING ON THIS FUCKING TIMELINE. the rito? the flooding of hyrule (as mentioned in the description for rock salt)? ocarina of time Link being remembered whatsoever? islands referencing characters like Linebeck? those fuckers only exist in the adult timeline. twilight princess being referenced directly in links knighting ceremony? the mirror of twilight appearing in a side quest? arbiters grounds from TP still being in the gerudo desert? thats only in the child timeline, bro! ganon being a horrific entity of hate and darkness rather than a man? the yellow stripe on the hero of the wild gear? the abundance of monsters? doomed timeline, baby!

and the developers take on where botw is isnt exactly consistent, either

so! the consensus on where botw is is that it takes place after everything else on the timeline. that, at some point, the three timelines converged, and a shitload of time has passed since then, and now we've got the Hyrule of BOTW. and its been so much time that, as the art book for BOTW says; "Hyrule’s recurring periods of prosperity and decline have made it impossible to tell which legends are historical fact and which are mere fairy tale.” Hence the inconsistencies and weirdness about when this all takes place.

(also, fun fact that totally doesnt mean anything at all; the noncanonical spinoff game hyrule warriors? the plot for that game, loosely speaking, is that the three timelines are converged, which would explain how BOTW can be from every timeline. oh and its the first game where link wears blue. yeah the same blue he wears in breath of the wild. just a silly, funny thought.)

so.. yeah. the zelda timeline is a confusing mess, but we all kind of agree (based off of what the devs have said) that is at the end of everything that came before and waaaaaaay off in the future from there. so there ya go :]

[volinare]

reading I did earlier today. First one i've done in so fucking long so it was a big one.

[exilley]

Stampede Vash in the Rose Bride dress + Anthy with Vash's gun and glasses. Likewise Stampede Knives in the Akio getup + Akio with the fucked angelic body horror symbolism about autonomy and power dynamics built on patriarchal foundations. This IS something i just cant draw

[sanstropfremir]

yeaah the rise of academies seems like a way to make more money since its illegal to make trainees pay back their debts now. SM institute opened in 2020 and even thought they are offering scholarships and what not it seems less like a cash grab and more like the ballet academy scene. very intense, very competitive and very effective

oh, i meant that more generally about the industries themselves, not so strictly specific to the institutes/academies. academies and conservatories don't generally make high enough profits to warrant being labelled cash grabs (they usually have government/grant funding and charge obscene tuition fees to stay afloat), because training someone in any type of art+performance is never going to be profitable enough for a capitalist. but, when you take the comparison even farther down and compare the kpop industry to something like the current ballet scene, the industry itself is structured around maximizing profits, not about creating career artists. make no mistake, it does of course create career artists and attract people who are dedicated and passionate about making lifelong careers in this field, but currently the basis of the industry is deeply rooted in capitalism and does not prioritize the 'art' of it. tbh no arts ent industry is safe from capitalism now anyways, bc a lot has been restructured in order to just barely survive in the 21st century (rising ticket prices and elitist exclusivity, the art market etc etc), but the kpop industry isn't quite at the place yet where it gets accepted into the canon of 'artmaking for artmaking's sake'

[cinnabeat]

i hate it when people are like "i wonder who iruma is gonna end up with" like is ameri just a brick wall to you guys or?