#oh my god I haven't changed at all

[partywithponies]

Fanfic writers reblog this and say in the tags which fandom you first read fic for, and which h you first wrote for.

[muppetjackrackham]

PJO Fancast (6/?) → Iñaki Godoy as Leo Valdez

Leo looked like a Latino Santa's elf, with curly black hair, pointy ears, a cheerful, babyish face, and a mischievous smile that told you right away this guy should not be trusted around matches or sharp objects. His long, nimble fingers wouldn't stop moving—drumming on the seat, sweeping his hair behind his ears, fiddling with the buttons of his army fatigue jacket. Either the kid was naturally hyper or he was hopped up on enough sugar and caffeine to give a heart attack to a water buffalo. "Anyway," Leo said, "I hope you've got your worksheet, 'cause I used mine for spit wads days ago. Why are you looking at me like that? Somebody draw on my face again?"

[bittersweetresilience]

can you be baited into talking about the good aesthetics of jingrenheng? the themes? please and thank you and have a nice day?

................okay... just for you anon...

they have complimentary color palettes! jing yuan has a lot of light associations, blade dark associations, and dan heng's teals are gradient or in between

they all have a symbolic plant of sorts, which sounds funny, but it looks pretty. the gingko and the spider lilies and the maple leaves. those are also red orange and yellow which mix well together. and imbibitor lunae has a lotus thing going on but he and dan heng mostly look visually similar

they have sun moon star symbolism. jing yuan is the sun, blade or should i say yingxing (应星) is the star, and dan heng or should i say imbibitor lunae (饮月君) is the moon. you could also argue that jing yuan (景元) is the world that the celestial bodies orbit in... the center of gravity, but also easy to overlook as an unchanging part of the surroundings...

dan heng is also wearing something associated with both of them. yes, The Relic™. BUT his coat also reads the same poem from which jing yuan took the name of starfall reverie

and lastly they are just three beautiful men okay it's impossible for them not to look aesthetic together

THE THEMES ✨

a guy running from his past, a guy chasing it down and driven perpetually by it, and a guy who can do nothing but hold onto it. it's like a soap drama of perfect proportions

someone who represents the right path, someone who represents the wrong path, and someone who represents the neutral path or trailblazes their own path

they were entangled in their previous lives and they remain entangled now, by their own will or otherwise. it can't get any better than this themewise.

renjing

i was going to say something about what each individual ship in the trio brings to the trio but i got distracted. what was i talking about again

okay, renheng has this 'thin line between love and hate going on' (因爱生恨) and it's about the extremes of passion to me. the hunter and the hunted. it's about the things from the past that should be shed but cannot be. then hengjing has the 'reconnecting through lives and through the mire of identity'. it's about forging a future uncolored by the mist of the past while also acknowledging that that past was there and meant something. then renjing has everything renjing has. renjing has

sorry i can't be objective about them renjing has everything because they are my babies

ANYWAY the point is when you put them together you net the ability to explore all of these different relationship dynamics at the same time plus trio dynamics like the mediation, the competition, each of them feeling left out in their own way, varying levels of memory, varying levels of history... a feast for the feasters

i also think jingrenheng successfully resolves all three of their issues in the sense that it's a relatively stable way for each of them to be able to recognize but also make peace with their past, and not let it impede their future. if jingrenheng actually experienced enough character development to get together and not kill each other, that would mean they have fixed things. a win for everybody.

[unpretty]

Question re: the new membership tiers; is it still the case where you get more actual money after the processing fees out of an annual premium membership or is monthly now actually paying out more?

larger payments result in less of the total getting lost to fees, but the monthly payments do technically make me more money

[schnaf]

22 days until hyeongjun's 22nd birthday

day 11 - Freakin’ Bad⚡️

[eldritchamy]

A question for Uneiverse (to give you an excuse to talk about it, only if you wanna. Since I also just really hearing about it). What's a detail about it that you really enjoy but haven't gotten a chance to use anywhere story related or otherwise just don't get to play with much (silly or serious)

This ask has been sitting in my inbox for over 5 months.

It's time.

And so, we begin with a question of my own.

What IS time?

We're off the map now. Come with me. Take my hand as we walk through the valley of the shadow of time. We're going to uncharted waters, and I'm going to put the fear of god into you. I'm going to make you ask yourself (and me) Amy, how the fuck does you brain WORK like that?

Let me tell you about time and fate, and about what it means to "predict" the future.

And you will begin to understand the scale of what lives within me, eternally gnawing at the inside of my skull, begging for release.

If I asked you to conceptualize time, what would you say? Is it the neat and rigid tick-tick-ticking of regular intervals on the clock? Is is the fluid, indivisible space between?

Is is all just an illusion conceived by the animal brain to account for the changing shape of the universe as one dimension passes through another, which our three-dimensional eyes are too flat to see all at once, and our souls have concocted for us a comforting lie, that we may pretend to know the universe in its whole, by knowing it piece by infinitesimal, grinding piece, seeing the pan-dimensional amalgam of existence as an endless, continuous sequence of cross-sections in a number of dimensions our meat-circuitry can pretend to process?

Time is shadows.

Imagine, if you will, a sphere.

You hold it up against the light. Suspend it in the air, perhaps, for simplicity's sake. And the sphere casts a shadow.

Is the shadow still a sphere?

Far more importantly, is it even a circle?

At even the tiniest fraction of an angle, the sphere casts a shadow that no longer perfectly represents a cross section of the sphere. It has ceased to perfectly capture the nature of the object that cast the shadow, even accounting for the wrong number of dimensions. It's skewed. You can never unskew it. The distortion is irreversible.

And the floor isn't flat.

The sphere casts a shadow at an angle at a surface that ranges in distance and direction from the object casting the shadow. Is the shadow still an oval? Has it become a shape you can't name?

But the shadow isn't cast upon a floor, even an uneven one.

What shape is the shadow of a sphere cast at an angle upon a field of grass blowing in the wind? By now there's no pretending you know the answer. And even if you could snapshot a single instant of a single shape, the very next instant that shape would change in the breeze as the grass shifts.

The world is not a field of grass upon the ground. The world is endless variation of leaves upon trees, forests upon mountains, birds in the sky, hunting for the bugs that crawl on the branches of the trees. Massive floating pools of water churning in the low atmosphere as humans decide whether that one looks like a mouse or a sheep. So many humans walking, their clothes flowing behind them as they talk, eat, buy goods, shed tiny particles of skin and hair into the wind, their breath adding chaos to that same wind and a hundred miles away a leaf turns slightly more to the left than if that human had said nothing.

What is the shadow of a sphere cast upon that world? Twisted by its unfathomable complexity of shapes and movement?

And now, to make things worse, imagine if that shadow were a tangible thing that you could pick up. That could cast its own shadow not on the floor but up against the wall.

And all of that is if the shadow is cast by a perfect sphere.

Imagine you are a being that can see the shape of time. Could you look at the echo of a shadow of a shadow of a reflection in a fun house mirror, and recreate what it once was?

Could you look at a crooked set of lines upon the wall and know the meaning of cause and consequence? Could you predict what consequences of which actions would lead to favorable outcomes when realization dawns on you that

𝖙𝖍𝖊 𝖘𝖕𝖍𝖊𝖗𝖊 𝖍𝖆𝖘 𝖙𝖊𝖊𝖙𝖍, 𝖆𝖓𝖉 𝖎𝖙 𝖎𝖘 𝖘𝖔. 𝖛𝖊𝖗𝖞. 𝖍𝖚𝖓𝖌𝖗𝖞.

Time is an ocean of possibility. Each possibility has consequences. Each consequence a sea of new possibilities. How can you hope to understand the shadow of a shadow of a shadow, and not only know what's coming, but how to stop it?

Nothing is fated. But I said something important that bears repeating. Time is an OCEAN. We'll come back to that.

Time MOVES, at least the way we perceive it. I don't like the phrase "everything happens for a reason." I prefer something of my own creation: for every effect, a cause. To achieve a desired effect - a desired outcome - you must change the circumstances of cause that lead to that effect. But there are limits to your influence.

The time to change the course of a river is when the river is still small. The longer that river runs its course, the deeper it shapes and erodes the ground around it. The larger and faster a river the harder it is to redirect it. It will go where it's going, and there's nothing you can do about it. There is an element of momentum that must be accounted for. An element of inevitability.

The path of one person's life, one set of choices available to them in one specific context, may feel perhaps like the current of a river, when you look back on it. But if different changes were made during its formation, it could have taken a completely different path. Ended in a completely different place. And influenced the formation of completely different paths in the future as a result.

But I'll say it again, and you'll know its significance now: time is an OCEAN. It is not a river, but an IMMENSE network of currents with no clearly defined borders, flowing with or against or around each other in an unimaginably complex churning of possibility and consequence and cause and effect. A shift in one current may brush up against another. The second current may shift with it, or crash violently into it, or ignore it entirely.

For every effect, a cause. But for every CAUSE, many POSSIBLE effects.

So time becomes a series of choices beyond number. Each choice leading to fathomless changes in the flow. As the earth turns, some currents flow inevitably in certain directions. If not here, then somewhere else. SOME CHANGES ARE INESCAPABLE.

The universe must be dynamic. If nothing changed, the universe would not need to exist at all. Change is the point. Variance is the point. Choice is the point. The universe exists to know itself, and it knows itself through change.

There is an endless sea of currents flowing in various ways with, beside, against, around each other. Some directions of flow are strongly influenced by the shape of the seafloor and the rotation of the earth. There are changes in the world that are virtually guaranteed to exist, whether because the nature of the universe has made them inevitable, or because changes long past have created the currents that are now too old and too deep to change.

Picture a river again. What happens when you throw a stick into it? The stick is swept up in the current and carried along the river.

Throw in more sticks. Same thing, right? You can make small changes without affecting the overall outcome. Within one large shadow of a sphere, the details of a hundred blades of grass whose shadows are lost within the larger shape.

Anchor a large stick to the riverbed so it can't get swept away. Now, it's just one stick. The water will flow around it. There are small ripples. Tiny changes in the river, micro-currents that will affect a localized area. But on the whole? The river still flows. You changed something. But you didn't change the course of the river.

Add stick after stick after stick until the river is obstructed completely, and the current is forced to change shape.

Which stick built the dam?

Which straw should the camel's back blame?

Back to the ocean. Can you dam the sea? Can you build that dam one stick at a time, by throwing sticks into separate currents, hoping the currents bring them where they need to be in time?

There are patterns borne out from the endless flow of possibility as the ocean of time churns. With all those ancient currents running together, what difference does the wake of a boat make on the shape of the waves? How many breaches from how many whales would it take to turn a current south instead of north?

What if you could make a bigger change? What if an avalanche altered the shape of the seafloor, so the rotation of the earth forces new waters to resist the old currents? So the inevitability of the dynamic universe drags forth a new set of possibilities?

There are a LOT of currents. They've been turning for a long, long time, ebbing and flowing with a billion tides and ten thousand quintillion waves. Choices can make new currents. BIG choices, with a lot of consequences, may even change existing ones.

But the ocean still has a geography to it. There are places where water is forced through the gaps between landmasses, or forced into the shallows, or freed to dive into the black beyond a continental shelf. There are places where, no matter how many changes you make, many currents are still guaranteed to meet.

There are fixed points in time.

What if one of those points is a whirlpool, threatening to swallow everything drawn into the place those currents meet?

What about a whirlpool on the scale of worlds and gods?

How do you keep from drowning?

How do you give yourself the best chance, not of AVOIDING the whirlpool of inevitability, but of entering it at the farthest possible edge, where the right momentum, the right decisions made in the moment you are caught in its gravity, may carry you through to the other side, so you still remain when time marches on?

Is it better to see things coming at all? Or is the ability to see time, to speak a language of the universe that no one else can speak, one of the greatest cosmic horrors you can imagine?

Imagine the burden of time on those who can see it.

Imagine the WEIGHT of being able to see those currents. Of knowing which threads of fate to pull. Of knowing which ripples to make, which waves to break, which currents to shift. Of knowing.

Imagine the complexity of figuring out WHICH changes to make. And the great leviathan of guilt left on your shoulders when the decisions you made - even in pursuit of the best possible outcome - bring harm to the ones you love most, the ones you're most desperate to protect.

Even if you're right.

Even if you played 17-dimensional chess with the wizard-addled corpse of god and knew, with certainty, that if a single problem you had a hand in creating had been resolved more neatly by even minutes, the sticks would not have fallen into place within the dam, and the entirety of creation could have been swallowed piece by piece by the horror you were trying to stop.

Imagine the horror. Imagine the responsibility. Imagine the unending, agonizing pain of the burden of Knowing.

Because what time is, most of all, is a nightmare.

And there's no waking up.

[piplupod]

so there's a trans woman who goes to the centre and everyone calls her by her birthname which she is like... fine with but only because she has no choice but to be fine about it. anyways I've known her for a while through a trans group before the centre so I asked her today if she'd rather I call her by her birthname or her chosen name and she said she prefers her chosen name but I can call her by her birthname if I want and oh my god I was about to cry for her bc god I really feel that whole situation fjdkdl, I just told her "no I WANT to call you by the name you prefer, that's why I'm asking, I want to make sure it's safe for you if I call you [preferred name]" and she seemed so grateful and I'm just :') eeurrgghh i hate how we have to be grateful with crumbs !!!

its just absolutely wild to me that she's presenting femininely and wears skirts and dresses and everything and uses her preferred name when she writes her name down on stuff and yet everyone at the centre calls her by her birthname and he/him pronouns. like. how are people so fucking rude and oblivious ??? she's even worn a she/her pronoun pin to the centre like.... people are so fucking stupid about trans people I stg.

idk I'm just hoping to make her feel a bit more comfortable and maybe if I start calling her by the right name and pronouns then everyone else will too eventually because I know she doesnt feel safe correcting people. I'm not going to make a big thing of it obviously bc I don't want to put her in danger but I will be using the correct name and pronouns now that I've double-checked with her about it, and if I start feeling like it's making things worse for her then I'll check in with her again at that point. I've honestly been stumbling trying to use he/him for her when I mention her to other ppl because she is just... she/her in my brain. it's what I know she wants to use so it feel fucking awful to use anything else !!!

[izzy-b-hands]

You ever have a day where you feel like you're doing everything wrong, even when you're like. just doing things you normally do. And are alone, so like the only person i could in theory upset/piss off/etc right now is me myself, and Yet the feeling persists

Yeaaaaah. That's today's vibe for me apparently lmao

[vibinginthedreamlands]

Nooooo, Nate, don't keep reading. Don't listen to John. I love John, but I also have genre awareness and know he's, in the long run, going be evil. Don't you see Nate, John served the role of the trustworthy outsider, the man unaware and blissfully unaffected by the curses and horrors. He gave stability and represented common sense in a way that was confident and comforting, while also being, due to his true role, underhandedly degrading. "Nate, that couldn't happen." "Nate, do you need to seek help?" "Nate, when's the last time you got out of the house?"

Which normally could all be reassurances or healthy check ins, but coming from someone who has Eldritch knowledge about the fact that those things *do* happen, that Nate has a history with his mental health and the underlying fear that John is feeding with the implications that he is losing his mind, and the fact that he *can't* leave his house makes all of John's words gaslighting. He's saying, 'see it's not so hard. Just be normal. Is it even real? I'm not affected, why are you?' and leaving Nate to doubt *himself* instead of ever scrutinizing John's whole role.

Which has now switched by the way. No longer is he the trustworthy outsider. Because Jim is gone.

Jim served the part of the the only other man who knew what was happening. Jim was the one other player who could look Nate in the eyes and not just say yes something is happening, but also yes something is happening and it got me too. It used her against me too. It played me, and it tricked me, and it manipulated me, and I don't know what's happening either. And while Jim and Nate never got along (good to estrange the two people who might actually be able to help each other out through the use of shared experiences), Jim was still proof that what was happening was real and it was bad. If he'd stayed maybe they could have learned to coexist. Maybe they could have helped each other. Maybe Jim's approach to the situation, doing the bare minimum of what he had to to get what he wanted and hightailing it as far away as possible could have rubbed off on Nate. Which would be bad. Because "Steve" wants Nate to keep reading. John is now saying to keep reading. *Nate* is convincing himself to keep reading. So it's fortuitous (or menacing) that Jim is gone now and won't be filling his head with schemes of freedom.

Now John can fill his role (and Steve's). The Cohort. John knows about the horrors now. He can be the confidant, the believer, the partner while still being collected and confident and comforting in the face of it. This only adds to his already held position of the only reliable source of information. His dedication to Nate's cause in the face of actually 'comprehending' the monsters will motivate Nate to push on, to pay back his effort by continuing to read. Which we all know can only lead to good things/s

[green-mountain-goose]

why're things so fucked upppppp~

[bunn-iiii]

so many things happening in my life in the next couple months and it feels like my life is turning around compared to how I felt this time last year which was complete and utter dread and burn out in every sense of the word

[angorwhosebabyisthis]

today on my When All You Have is a D10 project: Rolling a 6 with a D100.

-

1-16: Option 1

17-32: Option 2

33-48: Option 3

49-64: Option 4

65-80: Option 5

81-96: Option 6

97-100: Reroll

-

if you get that last one you can reroll the ones column, tens column, or both, up to you. tune in next time for so fucking help me i WILL find an efficient way to substitute dice for a deck of playing cards

[greyias]

My scene skeleton/expanded outlines for this fic are starting to get a bit out of hand.

Actual, written first drafts of the first two chapters:

Me pre-writing the next three chapters:

[ivy-saurs]

the ios uplift alarm tone gives me war flashbacks. do not be fooled by its name.

[doctorbrown]

DOCTOBER '23 ⸺ 「 5 / 31 * ALARM CLOCK 」

November 7, 1955

01:23

Emmett didn't have the heart to wake the boy when he finally passed out, face-down on his living room couch and still fully clothed, shoes and all. He was only gone about twenty minutes—twenty-two, to be precise, according to the small collection of clocks hanging on the wall—to make up one of the unused and neglected guest rooms. He had more space than he knew what to do with, and the kid very well couldn't be sleeping on the couch for an entire week while he was temporarily displaced in this time due to the actions of his future self.

How could I have been so reckless as to send a kid through time alone?

So he left him there, hovering awkwardly over the boy for a moment before finally fetching a spare blanket from the closet and draping it over the exhausted time-traveller.

Marty's small collection of future gadgets were still on the chair where he left them, and it took all of Emmett's willpower not to start examining the strange items in greater detail, from the portable television studio to the device that looked like an odd transistor radio. You'll find out in time, he mentally chides himself, but the kid is still asleep and his curiosity is a powerful thing, so the next thing he knows, the radio is in his hands, much lighter than he imagined it would be.

He takes it with him into the kitchen, where he's set up multiple papers to begin his plans to modify the time machine. Normally, he would retreat to the garage to work on his project, as the environment there was far more conducive to the creative process, but he had reservations about leaving Marty alone in the house; what if the kid woke up, panicked, thinking this was all some horrible nightmare?

With so little time and the kid's very existence on the line, he sets to work, leaving the miniature radio on the table, which was now popped open, where a strange thin film canister labelled Van Halen, whatever that was, rested inside.

08:37

When he goes to check up on Marty again, a few hours later, the only difference between then and now was the position Marty was in on the couch and how tangled up in the blanket he had gotten himself. He looked just as sound asleep as he did when he first knocked out, and Emmett chuckles to himself—when was the last time he slept? He had serious doubts the kid would be awake any time before noon. Copernicus trots over, tail wagging, eager to check on their new houseguest.

❝Copernicus!❞ Emmett whispers as he puts his front paws on the couch, ❝Leave Marty be! He's had a hell of a day; let him sleep in unbothered. You can say hello when he wakes up.❞

Copernicus looks back between his master and his new friend, as if weighing out the amount of trouble he would get in for disobeying. Marty is new, exciting, and friendly, but—

❝Come on, boy! Let's get a start on breakfast.❞

Emmett sets the coffeepot on the stove with enough for two—does Marty drink coffee?—and fetches Copernicus' food bowl from the floor, yawning into the sleeve of his robe. This was not his first all-nighter and, if the existence of the time vehicle is anything to go off of, it will not be his last, either. He still has no real understanding of how the machine works beyond knowing that it does, and even if it will save him what will likely be years of struggle—thirty years, if he is to believe Marty's departure date is the very first test of the machine—he can't allow himself to break established history by obtaining future knowledge.

He sighs as the smell of coffee permeates the kitchen and promptly fills Copernicus' bowl with his favourite dry food.

Before he can set the bowl back down, a shout and the sound of something heavy hitting the floor causes Emmett to jump, sending dry kibble flying across the kitchen. He drops the bowl on the ground and hurries over to find Marty no longer on the couch, but on the floor, hair askew and wide-eyed and still hopelessly tangled in the blanket.

Copernicus is sitting on Marty's chest, tail wagging, and Emmett's eyes go wide.

❝H-Hey Doc. Copernicus kinda—❞

❝Copernicus!❞ Emmett chides, crossing the length of the room to pick up the dog and set him down on the floor. ❝What did I say about letting Marty sleep?❞

❝It's fine, Doc, really, I just wasn't expecting him to start licking my face, that's all.❞

Emmett kneels down as Marty starts to struggle against the blanket, brows furrowed as if to ask, may I? Marty nods, and he works on extricating the boy from his fabric prison. ❝Nonsense; you were exhausted, you need to sleep. I might have tried to wake you up when breakfast was finished, but that wasn't going to be for some time.❞

[hazmatazz]

like go fucking cunt your boyfriends shouldn't feel like they're walking on eggshells everytime you're around. no wonder neither of us wanted to kiss you because we were so disinterested because you made us feel fucking awful!!! oh my god