#sometimes to my own detriment

[hella1975]

there's a very specific kind of vibe that comes with living with your friends in final year that it just does not have in first year or even second year. like as a fresher it's usually the first time any of you have lived away from home let alone with SO MANY people your age and it's terrifying and exciting and randomised to boot so it's generally carnage for a whole year in the best and worst ways, and then second year you pick who you're living with and it feels like for the first time you're doing this adult thing PROPERLY. you have a place of your own now. these are the people you've chosen to live with. studying gets serious etc. but it's still fresh. it's still new. you still don't know how to navigate it. but final year? final year is when you actually get it right. you know how to manage your time better. you know what works for you and what doesn't. studying is the main focus and you've been out in the world for three years now and it's not loud and boisterous like it was in first year and you're not exciteable and awkward like you were in second year. you're comfortable. every single one of my flatmates has their own friend group and we mainly keep to our own social circles, but we'll still meet each other back at the house after a night out and sit in the kitchen or my room to do the debrief. sometimes i'll go days not seeing either of them despite sharing a house but every now and then someone will softly call up the stairs that 'the heating's on!' or one of us will sneeze and the other two will yell 'bless you!' through the walls. the lack of interaction isn't interpreted as dislike in ways it would have been even last year, because we're all just old enough to be past that now and settled enough in our friendship not to worry about it. idk. uni is very loud and unsettling a lot of the time so it's been really sweet to see how almost boringly comfortable final year is.

[nexus-nebulae]

i want to remove my new shrimp's pringle bc i wanna whack people with the Plush Tube but it's sewn on so I'd have to use my seam ripper

it won't make holes and he will still have the pringle only he can share now

[iztea]

Everyday you're being more and more admirable beside the fact that you're a very good artist, your way of thinking is very mature and collected❤️ anyways I hope I don't sound like I'm glazing you I just want to give you praise casually because I believe you deserve it😌🤞

oh hahha thank you yoru, that's very nice of you to say :")) <3 yeahh i can feel my frontal lobe developing with each passing day

[m1dnightbarbie]

sometimes i see people on this site talking about books and im just like “yeah this is why you’re not an author”

[zero-a]

people will go all "just be yourself and love yourself! :)" and then go "if you don't act the way i want, you gotta reprogram your entire way of thinking then reach into the very core of who you are and what makes you you, discard it, and replace it with this better, friendlier, more empathetic version that's coincidentally far more convenient for me to deal with than any other possible compromise we can make that you can do for me but doesn't stretch your mind to nothing but thin bands of what you'd consider 'You' :))))))"

[livvyofthelake]

i’m such a girl who stopped wearing their retainer and is very unlikely to ever start again. like why would i put that thing back on. to feel excruciating pain and then have straighter teeth for a day before having to put it back on overnight. every night. forever. my teeth are not that bad sorry to my parents who apparently wasted their money on braces. well you got rid of the front tooth gap nobody liked so no one can take that away from you i guess. that’s it tho

[the-smallest-lizard-in-eorzea]

I guess I should start putting things out there about my wol and actually talk about them since it's been a bit difficult to draw things.

So this is my Warrior of Light OC, Lux Lumiux. He's a Raen Au'ra man standing at an astounding 4 feet tall. Not only is he short by auri men standards, but even his own mother is some few inches taller than he is. He's got dark skin and light colored hair that I've made blonde, but I've considered recently to possibly recolor it to a light teal type color. Regardless, though by the end of shb for plot reasons, his hair goes completely white, and his horns and scales are also irreversibly altered.

Although Lux's most noticeable trait is his lack of height, he's also selectively mute. He almost never speaks not even if someone's really close with him, and at best the most, you'll hear from him is laughter or a guttural growl. Although he's a white mage and considering how usually there's an incantation used for spellcasting to work in ffxiv, I've taken to altering it that he doesn't so much utter incantations but hum them as though they were a song. Well, at least that's when he's healing, the few offensive spells, while some he can similar hum they're more of a hiss or cry than anything, resembling a melody. While he may not talk verbally, he does on occasion use sign language if he actually has a message to get across but that's not often as Lux is a rather passive person and doesn't really ever have much to say anyhow. Yet at the same time, he's also rather expressive, so it's relatively easy to read how he's feeling based on his expression and body language alone sometimes that and he can always easily answer a yes or no question with a simple nod or shake of his head.

Small side note: he's also got impeccably neat handwriting that's really easy to read.

Lux is originally from Othard, and some years before ARR was brought to Aldenard by his father, but due to several bad things that seemingly happened all at once he was cast out into the seas and by the grace of hydealyn surfaced off the shores of Gridania bordering Ul'dah. He wound up taking residence in Gridania until eventually enlisting in the adventurers guild after a few confusing dreams that seemed to take place in the endless liminal blue of the aetherial sea. Little did he know what all those dreams would lead to.

Dreams are also an odd quirk of Lux's that came with his connection to hydealyn. While sleeping, he can connect to others' dreams and subsequently invite them into his. For a while, though, he mainly only ever saw the memories or dreams/nightmares of others, but as time went on, he unintentionally began pulling others into his nightmares. Although this ability is fairly limited as often, it's hard to remember dreams and nightmares once you've woken up and because of the lack of worldly logic it's hard to really know who's dreams he's witnessing, especially since he's bound to the logic of one's dreams too so anything bad or good that happens in the dream he cannot change or alter. Similarly so the same holds true to those that get pulled into his dreams.

[transmogrified-in-the-void]

I've been going through a very interesting, and important gender and gender presentation journey over the past four months, which culminated into a comment that has been bothering me for a while.

Since about mid-September, I've been slowly gaining a lot of self-confidence for various reasons, and I've also been looking at the parts of myself that I've hidden underground inside my mind for a long while. Including my own feelings about my own femininity.

For those who have known me for a while, you'll know I've always been more masculine leaning in presentation and gender. As it turns out, I sort of pendulum swing across the entire spectrum.

Me and the friend who's been by my side this entire journey (who, funnily enough, is the only allocishet friend I have), had this inside joke with each other that if I showed up to a meeting with the gang in a skirt they wouldn't know what to do. And so we eventually got me a skirt.

I can't begin to describe the amount of pure bliss I felt when I saw myself in it. I'd only felt that feeling once before, when my dad put one of his old ties on me for a fun little game we were playing in 2020. The only difference was that when that happened, I was still in denial about who I was. When I looked in the mirror, it was something I couldn't even begin to grasp onto. When I looked into the mirror just barely two weeks ago, I finally saw me.

And so we ended up making a whole "scene girl" outfit for me. This was revealed in almost its entirety a few days later, and we were right. They really didn't know what to do with me. With the exception of my mom and one of my oldest friends (who both said I looked cute, and I did! I felt cute!), the actual group I hang around with didn't know how to react to it. One of my friends just ignored the whole thing like it was normal (hurtful, but it's whatever), another kept asking when it happened and trying to wrap his head around the change (funny), and one eventually ended up saying something that's been bothering me.

Initially, they were really surprised I had legs because he forgot that I did. But later, when we were talking about a character that me and the aforementioned friend had made for a sitcom (a transman who dresses femininely for the most part), he turned to me and said "so like you, a transmasc drag queen".

While yes, that fits that character fairly well, it didn't sit right when about me. Because no, as it turns out, I'm not a transmasc drag queen. I'm not really . . . anything. When I dress more masculine, it's queer because it borders on tomboy/butch and transmasc (which, I know those terms can coexist, but I'm using it as a scale of masculinity because I can't explain it any other way), and when I dress femininely it's also queer because I'm someone who inherently goes towards androgyny/masculinity as my comfort expression.

Here's the funny part, though. Of the four people I hang around, three are queer in some way. The only one, the only one, who saw that I'm fine with fluidity in pronouns, jokes about my gender, and just sort of knew from the beginning that I was suppressing my femininity (which he told me after the Skirt Moment, so that was a fun night), was allocishet. I could get into all the weird shit that has gone on with me and the group, but the least queer person in the group understood, almost immediately, that I, the most verbally and visually queer of the group, enjoy funny little gender jokes. Hell, a few days after meeting I was doing something in my friend's kitchen and he said "oh sorry I was raised in a republican household, if there's someone in the kitchen I assume it's a woman".

So I guess what I'm saying, right now, is that I'm not any particular gender identity, I'm not trans anything, I don't really enjoy the fit of genderqueer even, I just. Am. And I wish that people irl would be willing to have fun with that more, rather than being so fucking afraid that I'm going to have a breakdown and kill someone for misgendering me.

[heybaetae]

.

[alltimefail-sims]

This is Beckett's song. This is the song that encapsulates his entire being from childhood to adulthood (where the story will take off). I literally don't have the words to tell you all how very Beckett-coded this song is without being spoilery but...god... all I'm going to say is that it actually makes my heart hurt and my eyes sting to think about how much he would relate to this song.

[julesnichols]

People with major depression saying they wish they got manic episodes so they'd feel better oh my god shut up shut up SHUT UPPPP!!!!!!!

[questioning-pisces]

the way i relate to every member of the gangsey. i don’t think that’s happened before, where i saw myself if every character in a book??? like i am them. they are me.

[haarute]

i'm sorry but as someone who is always trying to understand most things and most people, the reaction a lot of folks have of immediately dismissing something or jumping to an outrage without having a second to try to reflect on a situation or process empathy is something that i will never relate to and i consider to be a bad mentality to have if left unchecked actually

[brave-symphonia]

I don’t usually make whole posts to talk about a misconception I have during a liveblog, but I feel the need to say this, no matter how embarrasing I find it.

Every so often, I just don’t make connections while I’m liveblogging, and some of them are things that you’d think would be really fucking obvious, and I discovered one of these shortly after posting my episode 33 liveblog of Utena.

That being, until a mutual referred to Utena as 14 and Akio as an adult, my brain apparently did not realize that those are the ages they have.

Like, I think I didn’t make the connection that Utena is in middle school, so she would be 14, maybe because of the artstyle, I think I assumed she was like 16 or 17, maybe? Or maybe I just didn’t think of her age and thought teenager.

And Akio, he is getting married to someone, which should’ve been a clue to me. And he’s acting chairman of the school, which also should’ve been a clue to me. But it never connected to me that Akio is an actual adult.

Maybe it’s because of him being Anthy’s brother, and I usually hear brother and think the character is a similar age. Maybe it’s because most of the characters are students. Most likely I just didn’t think about it.

This feels like a very glaring thing to miss.

It really does make that entire scene in episode 33 so much worse and more horrifying, since it’s not just the villain manipulating Utena into a position where she sleeps with him, but an adult manipulating a 14-year-old girl into a position where she sleeps with him.

Originally the one post I made of that scene said something about how Utena slept with Akio, but when I realized this I changed it, even though I don’t normally do that with my posts, because the line just felt wrong to me. Because she didn’t sleep with him, he raped her.

This is all to say that there are definitely many scenes that make me really uncomfortable in episode 34, because Akio is just getting close and familiar with Utena and it just feels really creepy.

Which may be the intent, and if so, it’s definitely doing its job.

[ryutarotakedown]

hate hate hate that iris of hazakura temple is always painted as 1) incredibly perfect and sweet and kind, 2) some sort of devil, or 3) invisible by fandom. have you seen the way she procrastinates.

[f1-stuff]

hi mal ❤️

I adore the new chapter of MeMa!

It’s not long but the feeling it left me with was literally “contented sigh”

They’re almost there! So close to saying the words!

They’ve grown so much I’m so proud ❤️

I did want to throw something at Rupert (affectionately)

As always, I adore your writing and you.

Please take care and don’t overwork yourself.

Sending all the love ❤️

- C

Thank you, C ❤️☺️

I needed to get that chapter up before the race this weekend haha so it’s a bit rushed but glad you liked it!