#let me write that down for reference

[twinklingwatermellon]

Went to an anniversary dinner today and the husband told us that when he was interested in his wife/trying to court her, he decided to get her attention by sending her a potato in the mail.

No box, no wrapping, no nothing, just her address (and a note) written on the potato in Sharpie and three postage stamps stuck on.

When it arrived at her house the whole family was congregated around the potato wondering what it could possibly mean, afraid it might be a bomb 🤡

[ki1ldeer]

Doodling to keep me from gnawing at the bars of my enclosure

[wisterianightmare]

So, Infold clearly has my number because some of these men are so perfectly tailored to me that I often wonder if they’re streaming the inside of my brain to the creative team, but lately Sylus has really been taking the cake (haha, birthday pun I know I’m lame).

I’m still a pretty new player so to avoid spoiling myself I’m not going to list the specific “versions” of the character that we’ve been treated to, but the whole “gothic, dark, crime lord romance -turned - devoted and worshipful green flag loverboy in disguise” is really making me feel some sort of way. And then I had a devastating thought.

Infold please give us:

“Dark Academia Professor Sylus”

[sorrowful-hyacinth]

Random Early Morning Thoughts

I know I’m neglecting my own stories and OC’ s, apologies! Technically I’m also not, I have a friend that I actually started to do RP’s with, which is huge actually!! Never in my life. So technically I work with my OC’s everyday, just in private. Buuuuttt…

I really want to do fan art of other peoples characters too. I’m like a little gremlin who reads others stories and gets royally obsessed with their characters. So perhaps someone could recommend me a story that they want to see one of the characters drawn from. Even if it’s from your own story, or a story that already has a million fan arts, I just want to see everyone’s cool characters 🙈

It might also give me a new whump series to read, I haven’t explored one in a while. It doesn’t have to be a whump series either!

- 🪻

[dovahkiin-official]

i'm going a little crazy here. so, i've been thinking about the kier eagan painting that resembles caspar david friedrich's "wanderer atop a mountain." you know. "Kier Invites You to Drink of His Water."

(courtesy of reddit user ex_dem)

i've also been thinking about the recurring water motif. so i took a closer look at this painting and really thought about it. Kier is standing atop a mountain. it's supposed to invoke this:

but he's looking out at the Great Lakes. and the Great Lakes have been mentioned a few times now. first by Alexa. and then the employee whistling "The Wreck of Edmund Fitzgerald." i think it's a safe bet that the Great Lakes are significant to the narrative of Severance. and then i got thinking. maybe the painting can tell us the location? is there a mountain south of the Great Lakes? turns out... not really, no. there is no mountain tall enough or close enough for this view. this painting is completely fictionalized. Kier never climbed a mountain and appreciated the sublime nature of the Great Lakes. but still, it's "His Water." obviously, it's symbolic then. so then i came up with a theory. maybe Kier Eagan discovered something in the Great Lakes. we know Lumon started as a company that made salves. maybe Kier discovered something in the Great Lakes and made the salves from it. maybe whatever was in the Great Lakes has a greater significance than we could know. The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald goes, "The lake, it is said, never gives up her dead." i have a feeling that whatever they dredged up from the Great Lakes should probably be put back.

[crossbackpoke-check]

the deweys photos are from this video: https://youtu.be/5xTwJho44ao?si=bPw8MZZ327lCogVZ aren’t they just everything

kissing you and the minnesota wild official media team (with consent) full on the mouth, THANK YOU THIS VIDEO IS EVERYTHING 🥰🥰 i have seen pieces of it before i think (connor petting a shark 🥹) but the entire video start to finish is such a delight, 10/10 would recommend

[sskk-manifesto]

--

[fridayiminlovemp3]

that weird ass fucking lifetime christmas movie that’s thinly veiled fan fiction about taylor swift and travis kelce makes me so uncomfortable like that is FREAK behaviour, making that a real movie is FREAK BEHAVIOUR. i can’t even watch the trailer for it it just freaks me out

[cuteniarose]

So back in December when I was writing Suiren's birthday fic I set Haya's birthday as March 1st so I'd have some kind of deadline for finishing the first chapter of the fic about her (that I started in 2023 and didn't get past 800 words 😬), otherwise it would never get done

March 1st is Saturday. I never once opened the damn document.

I know I'm a master of speedrunning at this point but for fuck's sake can I please write like a normal person for once in my life???

[cuttle-creatures]

Oof, exhausted. But let myself start bookmarking potential artfight marks, as a treat 👀

[dataframe]

i love critiquing things. it's extremely fun, especially as it pertains to the author's lack of investment/confidence in their own worldbuilding, which is more often than not what draws me in regardless of the characters. of course, this means writing shen yuan's haterism is like second nature to me. i finally get to publicly launch an in-depth critique alluding to an old jrpg that if posted publicly would result in my execution via its status as a cult classic.

[essektheylyss]

trick or treat :^D

hello! I went looking for the most recent bit I wrote, and I think it's actually kind of fun. feat. my deeply-held headcanon that Essek has some divination training:

“You are not one for divination.”

It was a weak protest, given the fact that Essek had in fact done some study of divination as it pertained to potentiality and dunamantic time. “Caleb Widogast. I will not allow it—him,” he growled, “to remain a shadow over you. You have ended this. Put it aside now.”

[deathemayor]

procreate only letting you have one reference layer for filling/auto selection is actually so medieval. who decided that was a normal thing to have. literally no comparable art program ive used has such an arbitrary limitation

[unknownf]

pragmatic Tav with A!A.

The first month, when Tav saw the number on receipts, they let out a gasp: "what the fuck—" while Astarion was walking by.

"What's wrong, my love?"

"This—we can't keep going like this," Astarion is on his highest alert. Tav waves the receipts in front of his face. "We were living like this???" Astarion let out his breath.

"Ah, that. It is nothing to worry about, my dear consort. We have his every property, including that bank account—"

Tav cut him with a tired sigh.

"Have you ever done accounting before?"

"..Maybe I have, I am not sure. "

"You are going to take an accounting lesson tonight, my prodigal love."

[keets-writing-corner]

Any update on chapter 3?! I’m dying for it!!

hello!

I am also dying writing it

💀💀💀💀

every single week I'm like "MAYBE THIS WEEK, MAYBE THIS WEEK IT'LL FINALLY GET DONE!" and then I add to it but the workload still feels large

let me count real quick last I checked it was over 40k words and it still needs: 17 transitions 10 scenes

I- oh

well the GOOD news is, there are more transitions I need to do than scenes, and odds are a lot of the scenes are either going to be cut, or transformed into exposition cuz there's only so much showing I can pull out of my brain before I just need to grab the reader by the face like "listen I just need you to understand that X happened and it made Y character feel Z. Got it? okay moving on"

I swear, if I end up getting enough words on the word count to beat NaNoWriMo on freaking A SINGLE CHAPTER I'm gonna throw a table. I want to break it up so bad but the way I planned the fic is that each chapter are very specific periods/times growths/arcs that have a clear beginning and end to them and I'd rather they be grouped together without creating a bunch of works

sorry for the long wait, I WILDLY underestimated how much time I'd need to finish writing 3... I knew these chapters were chonky but good GRIEF 3 is already over double the size of chapter 1 and I'm not even finished

chapter 4 is looking so much more alluring to work onnnnn, it's probably going to be a similar length to chapter 1 honestly. which will be a much needed breather

I'll tell you all what, if you want to help me out, a lot of the scenes I've been stuck with are scenes that involve Lilith's potential powers, of which I've come up with a few already (some being voice based obviously) BUT if any of you want to send your lilith superpower headcanons my way that'd be so much fun and helpful. I'd do a little shout out in the notes of the chapter to credit the idea

also, I'm hesitant to release more sneak peeks than I already have cuz this chapter is surprisingly hard to sneak peek without getting into the nitty gritty or things that don't make sense out of context BUT if anyone wants to come send me anons or whatever and chat with me about 3, I might let something slip >:3c who knows

obligatory AO3 link to the fic if someone is stumbling across this for the first time

[elegyofthemoon]

While reading the relic story for Fleet of the Ageless, I ran into some mention of the "Three Sufferings":

Yet, just like the shifting of the sun and moon, what once prospered was fated to decline and what once brought elation must eventually induce agony. It was not until the arrival of the Three Sufferings, when people were tormented to near extinction, that the Xianzhou people finally came to understand the true nature of this so-called miracle, which was nothing but harrowing calamity. (The Xianzhou Luofu's Celestial Ark)

And I'm not really sure if they mention it elsewhere on the Luofu (I'm very slowly going through everything. Except I keep getting sucked into reading Belobog stuff >_>), but what it did make me think about however is that in Buddhism, there is something called the "three marks of existence", which refers to the three sources of suffering in the world. So I wanted to mostly write this up as a comparison between what's going on in the Luofu vs. Buddhist belief! (And a very big warning: I might be skimming over important details about the religion. I was born into a culture that is very heavily influenced by Buddhism and have grown up with some understanding of it while having to study it on my own, so I'm sure I'll get a lot of details wrong. So if I get anything wrong, you're always welcome to chime in!)

At least in my memory, I remembered that there was a suffering because of attachment to objects, to self, and to others -- all with the concept that all things do not last, so I had to search up these names properly.

anicca (impermanence): This is the core concept in which nothing lasts in this world. The inability to recognize the impermanence of life will then lead to grief -- suffering -- that humans face, as a result. You can actually see this with the Sanctus Medicus's desire for eternal life with Dan Shu who grieved the loss of her friend Yufei via the diaries that you could pick up

It's this idea of attachment to something bound to end some way or another that will inevitably lead to suffering/pain when that loss comes.

dukkha (suffering): The idea behind this mark is that the truth is that life cannot be satisfied. If there isn't suffering, there are moments of joy, but as all things in life, even the joy is brief.

I wouldn't exactly be able to pinpoint how this gets carried out on the Luofu. I would have said something about how the Luofu had once sought out eternal life which then led to the implanting of the Ambrosial Arbor by Yaoshi, but now are unsatisfied by their gift of eternal life to them. I could also say that at least with the longer lives that the Xianzhou natives have, they eventually lose interest in life itself because they've had the chance to sought out anything they could with their many years, which is better described in Yukong's third character story:

and for the final mark of existence: anatta (not self): If suffering comes from attachment, then an attachment to an image of one's self too can lead to a source of suffering. With time, everyone is bound to change and grow, so any attempts in trying to hold onto one specific image could lead to a source of pain.

I think the best way to display this concept is actually through Yaoshi's acts and why the Alliance condemns them and their "abominations" (themselves included :'D). To rid of the suffering that comes with death, Yaoshi hopes to grant the gift of eternal life, but it seems that coming back from the dead doesn't mean returning to one's old self, which I feel can be seen at least with Blade's case with his revival and no longer being Yingxing. These undead are what the Alliance hopes to get rid of. I think it can also be seen through Bailu's story quest with the girl who slowly becomes marastruck who panics the moment the armor and her skin becomes melded into each other, no longer able to retain her former image before meeting and reuniting with her lover, in which case the idea of "self" is an attachment to a physical form rather than something more abstract instead, and that leading to her own suffering in the end.

I'm sure that a lot of Hoyo's writing with weaving in Buddhism with the Luofu lore isn't coincidental (looks at Dan Heng) , and I'm sure that there's bound to be better show of each of these principles, but I think this is what Hoyo might be referring to when they write about the "Three Sufferings" in the relic. Maybe I'll come back to this post later if I find better evidence BUT I thought worth noting at least for now :) ty for reading if you made it this far