#like totally off

[dreamlandcreations]

Burnout recovery (?)

It took me a while to figure out why I was so down all the time. But I didn't take the "good news" that well tbh. Because:

"It takes an average time of three months to a year to recover from burnout. "

And I was like. NOPE. FUCK. THAT!

Well, the first few days after that were even worse because I kept pressuring myself to do something, anything other than lying in bed and staring at the ceiling. But even something as so no energy "task" as listening to music was making me... idk how else to say it other than itchy...

Anyway, eventually I just gave up, let it consume me and slept away like 2 days... AND GUESS WHAT? I felt a tiny bit better.

So I'd say the first step is just LET IT ALL FUCKING GO! Turn the nagging in your head off and stop caring about anything else than getting a good rest!

My work drove me insane for the last 3 years or so and tbh it took over my life far, far sooner than that. It wasn't healthy. Letting that go took like 2-3 weeks ( I had "help" from other tortured colleagues 🫶 talking helps!) and a lots of Youtube shorts about "this is business not personal". Yay to scrolling paralysis.

Yeah, and about that. I realised that with the burnout I really burned all the bridges that kept my autistic/adhd traits in check. I mean, I used to have a good balance, now I'm off the scale with both in the worst way.

I think the second step is just trying to stay in that kind of relaxed, "don't care" space while figuring out the reasons why I felt so terrible. Again, Youtube shorts about autism/adhd and work mentality really helped. It was like talking to someone without actually getting myself together enough to open up about this to a "real person" (it never would have happened, you know).

And this is the part from where this might not help anyone who doesn't have adhd (and autism?) but realising that I've become a shell of adhd behaviour was actually a big step. Especially with the adhd/autism traits comparison vids bc I just understood how I was functioning when I was doing all that stuff at once.

The next step(s) I took was trying to take care of myself. Eat, sleep, wash, clean up to feel better in my skin and in my environment. I made it a challenge (chasing dopamine seems to be the only way adhd brain can do stuff). Like I'll put on this song ( I wasn't really listening to it still) and do .... until it's done. It did not help at first. Just getting into a task without thought doesn't work for me. I needed to take a minute and visualise that I'm going to do this and this and this and I'll be done in 3 minutes. I prepared for the task mentally, I hyped myself up then I did it. And it worked. Then I got too much into it and overworked myself 😅

However cliché it sounds, the key is finding balance.

Now I can listen to music, I've read 14 books this year so far and reading 5 others now, and I'm planning my year and thinking about what I want to do in life.

I still have bad moments/days and that's okay. I am still not okay but I'm getting there.

I figured, I need to occupy (not overwhelm!!!) my senses to stop my mind from wandering (and torturing me) so now when I have to do something like dishes, I just put on an audiobook and try to let everything else go.

I still can't watch movies/shows. Which sucks bc I feel like I need visual stimulation too sometimes so idk what's up with that but it's a no for now.

Writing is still a NO! (that's a screaming no in my head). But I started to write down ideas again (something I didn't really do for months)

What I know would improve my health and most likely my mental state is regular exercise, but I'm not there yet. I still regularly skip/forget to eat more than once a day so that's a priority.

It's also difficult to leave the house tbh. The outside world is overwhelming and I don't go out if I don't have to (which is like once a week now).

What I do know is that if you want to do something DO NOT SIT DOWN! You'll never get it done. There's no "in a minute" or tomorrow. If you want it done, do it now.

I'm working on building a structure/routine in my daily schedule that gives me a guide so I wouldn't waste my days but doesn't limit or outright strangle me with too many limitations by being to crowded.

[inkskinned]

at some point it's just like. do they even fucking like the thing they're asking AI to make? "oh we'll just use AI for all the scripts" "we'll just use AI for art" "no worries AI can write this book" "oh, AI could easily design this"

like... it's so clear they've never stood in the middle of an art museum and felt like crying, looking at a piece that somehow cuts into your marrow even though the artist and you are separated by space and time. they've never looked at a poem - once, twice, three times - just because the words feel like a fired gun, something too-close, clanging behind your eyes. they've never gotten to the end of the movie and had to arrive, blinking, back into their body, laughing a little because they were holding their breath without realizing.

"oh AI can mimic style" "AI can mimic emotion" "AI can mimic you and your job is almost gone, kid."

... how do i explain to you - you can make AI that does a perfect job of imitating me. you could disseminate it through the entire world and make so much money, using my works and my ideas and my everything.

and i'd still keep writing.

i don't know there's a word for it. in high school, we become aware that the way we feel about our artform is a cliche - it's like breathing. over and over, artists all feel the same thing. "i write because i need to" and "my music is how i speak" and "i make art because it's either that or i stop existing." it is such a common experience, the violence and immediacy we mean behind it is like breathing to me - comes out like a useless understatement. it's a cliche because we all feel it, not because the experience isn't actually persistent. so many of us have this ... fluttering urgency behind our ribs.

i'm not doing it for the money. for a star on the ground in some city i've never visited. i am doing it because when i was seven i started taking notebooks with me on walks. i am doing it because in second grade i wrote a poem and stood up in front of my whole class to read it out while i shook with nerves. i am doing it because i spent high school scribbling all my feelings down. i am doing it for the 16 year old me and the 18 year old me and the today-me, how we can never put the pen down. you can take me down to a subatomic layer, eviscerate me - and never find the source of it; it is of me. when i was 19 i named this blog inkskinned because i was dramatic and lonely and it felt like the only thing that was actually permanently-true about me was that this is what is inside of me, that the words come up over everything, coat everything, bloom their little twilight arias into every nook and corner and alley

"we're gonna replace you". that is okay. you think that i am writing to fill a space. that someone said JOB OPENING: Writer Needed, and i wrote to answer. you think one raindrop replaces another, and i think they're both just falling. you think art has a place, that is simply arrives on walls when it is needed, that is only ever on demand, perfect, easily requested. you see "audience spending" and "marketability" and "multi-line merch opportunity"

and i see a kid drowning. i am writing to make her a boat. i am writing because what used to be a river raft has long become a fully-rigged ship. i am writing because you can fucking rip this out of my cold dead clammy hands and i will still come back as a ghost and i will still be penning poems about it.

it isn't even love. the word we use the most i think is "passion". devotion, obsession, necessity. my favorite little fact about the magic of artists - "abracadabra" means i create as i speak. we make because it sluices out of us. because we look down and our hands are somehow already busy. because it was the first thing we knew and it is our backbone and heartbreak and everything. because we have given up well-paying jobs and a "real life" and the approval of our parents. we create because - the cliche again. it's like breathing. we create because we must.

you create because you're greedy.

[bigfatbreak]

Birds of a Feather previous / next

[ionomycin]

Forest Guardians

[lilybug-02]

Patience and responsibility....that's a promise....right?

Part 27 First || Previous || Next...

--Full Series--

An exorcism? In my family-friendly Deltarune? It's more likely than you may think. The backgrounds here were very interesting! Much more complex than how I usually do them (especially that computer).

Player POV:

Feral energy.

[starrysharks]

artificial intelligence ghost

[diedoverahat]

he’s so silly i want to suck his dick so hard his stomach caves in like a juice box.

[laddercat]

doodles cause i'm crazy

[waterghostype]

crusty kid

[soranker]

vash life drawings hosted by zeet studio sketch!!!🤞🤞🤞

[seagull-scribbles]

[sugarcoatednightshade]

thinking about how Humans Are Space Orcs stories always talk about how indestructible humans are, our endurance, our ability to withstand common poisons, etc. and thats all well and good, its really fun to read, but it gets repetitive after a while because we aren't all like that.

And that got me thinking about why this trope is so common in the first place, and the conclusion I came to is actually kind of obvious if you think about it. Not everyone is allowed to go into space. This is true now, with the number of physical restrictions placed on astronauts (including height limits), but I imagine it's just as strict in some imaginary future where humans are first coming into contact with alien species. Because in that case there will definitely be military personnel alongside any possible diplomatic parties.

And I imagine that all interactions aliens have ever had up until this point have been with trained personnel. Even basic military troops conform to this standard, to some degree. So aliens meet us and they're shocked and horrified to discover that we have no obvious weaknesses, we're all either crazy smart or crazy strong (still always a little crazy, academia and war will do that to you), and not only that but we like, literally all the same height so there's no way to tell any of us apart.

And Humans Are Death Worlders stories spread throughout the galaxy. Years or decades or centuries of interspecies suspicion and hostilities preventing any alien from setting foot/claw/limb/appendage/etc. on Earth until slowly more beings are allowed to come through. And not just diplomats who keep to government buildings, but tourists. Exchange students. Temporary visitors granted permission to go wherever they please, so they go out in search of 'real terran culture' and what do they find?

Humans with innate heart defects that prevent them from drinking caffeine. Humans with chronic pain and chronic fatigue who lack the boundless endurance humans are supposedly famous for. Humans too tall or too short or too fat to be allowed into space. Humans who are so scared of the world they need to take pills just to function. Humans with IBS who can't stand spicy foods, capsaicin really is poison to them. Lactose intolerance and celiac disease, my god all the autoimmune disorders out there, humans who struggle to function because their own bodies fight them. Humans who bruise easily and take too long to heal. Humans who sustained one too many concussions and now struggle to talk and read and write. Humans who've had strokes. Humans who were born unable to talk or hear or speak, and humans who through some accident lost that ability later.

Aliens visit Earth, and do you know what they find? Humanity, in all its wholeness.

[nerdpoe]

Instead of going to Ra's to find proof in the land of the living, Tim decides to go to the Realm of the Dead to search for proof of Bruce's time entrapment alongside the Ghosts of Kon and Bart. Also he kidnaps Cassie.

It's foolproof; he gets to be with his friends (whether they want to or not, but the cult thing is weird Cassie frfr this is for ur own good damn), he can interrogate the ghosts from the timeframes he suspects Bruce was in, and also confirm that Bruce isn't in the Afterlife at all.

Kidnapping Cassie actually wasn't that hard, he'd just asked if she wanted to see Kon and Bart one last time. Then he'd explained that he could do it without dying.

He found a website from a pair of professionals who built a portal to the "Ghost Zone", or really Afterlife, in their basement.

Breaking into their house and using the thing is no problem at all.

He finds Kon and Bart, and after a tearful reunion, he and Cassie partner up with them for one final adventure.

Unfortunately, he decides to do this after Dick gave Robin to Damian (Dick genuinely didn't see any other way to stop Damian from going back to the League okay? man was stressed out and making snap decisions with no consideration of the consequences), and also after he'd been up for 48 hours.

The note he left perhaps left a lot to be desired.

'If you won't believe me that he's alive, then I'll prove it by searching for him in the Afterlife.'

Things get a little more complicated when Bart and Kon's Ghosts disappear from the Afterlife, indicating that they've been revived.

But also leaving Cassie and Tim without guides in the realm of floating green doors.

So in short;

Dick thinks Tim killed himself.

Cassie's mom thinks she's still with the cult, and that the cult has killed her daughter, because now there's no communication at all.

Damian read Tim's note as literal, as Tim intended, and keeps trying to explain that to Dick, who thinks Damian is in denial.

Cassie and Tim are stuck in the Ghost Zone without a map or guides, still gather evidence of Bruce and also how to get back.

Kon and Bart came back to life, but with the distinct feeling that they need to find Cassie and Tim before it's too late, whatever that means.

Due to the time distortion, Bruce gets back before Tim does, and is informed by Dick that Tim is dead.

[lobotomyladylives]

Actresses being tortured on the set by male directors is a massive historical and present day scourge of the film and TV industries and it's really SO common when you look into it. like from Kubrick terrorizing Shelley Duvall (and only her) on the set of the shining to Tarantino strangling Diane Kruger until she passed out to Hitchcock replacing fake birds with real birds after Tippi Hedren rejected his advances (in order to scare and physically injure her as a punishment for not fucking him) to James Cameron almost literally drowning Kate Winslet to an actress on GOT being waterboarded ten hrs straight to get like a minute of footage to Brando improvising an unscripted rape scene on the last tango in Paris set with the directors permission that ended up traumatizing Maria Schneider (in fact quite a lot of the gratuitous, graphic rape scenes in film were included for the sadistic pleasure of the male directors at the expense of the actresses).

The list goes on and on and I could seriously talk for ages about how revolting it is that these men still have active careers bc the industry just tolerates it. No piece of art is worth inflicting this disgusting and unnecessary abuse on actresses (and it's ALWAYS the actresses isn't it, never the actors. Hmmm wonder why). We call these men auteurs and geniuses but they're really just pathetic abusive sacks of shit. I want to impale every male director who behaves like this and I want their rotting corpses displayed as a part of the universal studios tour.

[itsnotacostume]

we as a fandom do not talk about this scene enough. what the fuck is this. why did he feel the need to install this? so he could stare at his boybestfriend all day without having to get up?

[starstruckodysseys]

junior year is for the burnt out gifted kids. for the kids who tried so hard and got nothing in return. for the kids who worked and worked and worked with no end in sight. no reward. you succeed at things thought impossible and yet you end up in the same place as everyone else. you’re not really advanced. you’re not really a savior. you’re just a kid.

you’re just a kid, and you’re so, so tired.