#total wellness center

[thepersonperson]

Sukuna is Peak Gap Moe. I’ll never be over this. This bastard talks tough, eats people, and kills like a woodchipper and yet…he is a poetic little sap. Getting mad over an improper haikus, the misidentification of flowers…and confessing his feelings to Gojo Satoru under several layers of wordplay no one except those well-versed in ancient Japanese would catch.

I've been over this in greater detail in Sukuna's Negative Rizz, but @tangsakura added more context in the replies to that post, making Sukuna's use of 凡夫 (bonpu) for Gojo even gayer.

In summary, 凡夫 (bonpu) can be translated as painfully ordinary or unenlightened. But in the individual kanji readings, 凡 is mediocre and 夫 is husband. You could read this as Sukuna calling Gojo his mediocre husband. And that's just the modern readings! The ancient readings...

So you can read this line from Sukuna as the following:

“You were born in an era without me and hailed as 'The Strongest'

1) And yet you turned out to be…painfully ordinary.”

2) And yet you turned out to be…unenlightened.”

3) And yet you turned out to be…a mediocre husband/wife/spouse.”

4) And yet you turned out to be…the ordinary one who could stand by my side.”

Sukuna seems to be saying these things all at once. (It’s no different than the Megumi Activities wordplay he uses with Enchain. Alt. link if the Twitter dies.) Gojo apparently makes him feel very conflicted. He’s boring, he can do better, he shouldn’t even call himself the Honored One, he’s his equal, they’re married. The irony here is that no one except Sukuna can understand this.

[berryblu-arts]

hehe, messed up and over the top harumi design <3

edit: shoutout to this post for the idea!

and this video for the motivation!! <- amazing ninjago edit!!! go watch itt!!!

[bredforloyalty]

okay what i meant when i said that even the copious amounts of blood didn't satiate me in particular is that the dead wife/nemesis thing was never something i was eager to see explored, just because i think it's something a lot of male characters get? to go through? the ooh i'm so tortured someone took something from me and now i can't help but turn into a monster while i'm on this quest for revenge and being smothered by grief ough i might kill them even or others in gruesome ways and then realize i'm still just as empty

because, i think men often feel the role they must take on as a man or as a father (especially the latter) is a burden, a huge one, where they aren't allowed to sit back or let go or forgive to their own and everyone else's detriment.. and i understand why there is demand for the same type of stories or story elements or arcs, and why they work, and this same overall theme can be present in a story where it's dealt with in an interesting way or where there's love and care involved in the writing process and the characters don't feel like "man pain machine #48" and "generic sensitive character who will cradle mr. man pain's bloody face in their hands (when we want to end this arc and show how good and lovable he actually is)"....

idk i'm just saying it's not even a specific problem i have with male characters that avenge their families or seem like they're defined by anger or by a traumatic event, i do think it can be written lazily and that we've seen it so many times it's a bit worn-out now, but i wouldn't be quick to generalize. it's just that, since we've seen this before (and that's partly why they poked a bit of fun at themselves when in rickmurai jack, rick's dead wife backstory was revealed).. to me it's one of the least interesting aspects of rick? and yet it's clearly important to the writers and they felt they had to tackle this part of his character, really emphasize his unfinished business, or treat it like something that must have a conclusion

for me though, rick's brand of fucked up and evil wasn't compelling because something deeply fucked up happened to him and there's a lot to deal with there and that's cool, it was more compelling to me (iirc) Before knowing much about his past. tbh. i recognized him already, he felt real, his worst side was familiar because a man doesn't need a whole event to become controlling and cruel when dealing with his family... social norms and umm systems sort of already operate within the framework of the patriarchy, i think it's built into our collective ideas of society, concepts of gender and family and the rules those come with.. i liked that about rick, that why he was an asshole wasn't detailed, there was no easy explanation for the way that he was, he just was. and every time they chose to drive home that rick's defined by losing his original family to his own alternate self and that he was still chasing this one guy, it was like, well i thought there were so many other components as well to why he turned out to be who he is. i liked it more when it was mundane, because that's what i see around me, that abuse is rather mundane. and i'm much more interested in the harm he's directly inflicted on his current family and how his past might affect his current life, what might haunt him. so i guess i never wanted prime to be taken care of, each week i find myself thinking that i just want it to be rick and morty and their messed up little relationship up close and personal again

[boycritter]

i got like 12 hours of sleep that was so baller

[imagionary]

Doodles of 3/4 of my cog manager ocs that I did in the car! Just silly ideas for possible cheats of theirs

[purpldawne]

listened to defragmentation for the first time in like,, a month and now it WILL NOT leave my head

[aldermos]

You do commissions?

Hiii

To be real honest,, not anymore. I've monetized my art a couple times now, and each time without fail, I got into real bad art blocks.

So now I'm mostly going into this like, basically providing free content 💀 i welcome requests more than anything,

With requests, I want to reiterate that I'm heavily selective on what I choose to draw and I'm not budging when it comes to it. I'm pretty strict with accepting them; so if i end up not doing a request, please don't take it the wrong way. This is not to say that I hate requests// i've just had a couple bad experiences w/ them.

But yes do feel free to send requests through asks, please just be wary of the above 🙏

and to be absolutely concrete: i'm not taking requests that contain/align with nsfw, proship, terfs, racism, zionism, fetish, etc. 🚫

[everchanging-cryptid]

I went to Rainforest Cafe for the first time today

I would like very much to live there

[booksbwaybadflower]

If you're gonna take time off of school just make sure you still graduate in a spring semester. Even if that means taking more time off than you wanted to or needed to.

[lightsiided]

truly the one thing she never grows out of is having an emotional reaction to things like

rey has such a temper and we see her get overwhelmed and react without thinking so many times. and once she can take a minute to take a breath and collect herself she does the right thing and it all works out but sometimes she can't get there

and for as much as she matures i think that's one thing she'll never be able to shake. her instincts are always to react physically because so much of the formative years of her life made that a necessity so she's always going to be the person who swings first

[dulcewrites]

I’m writing this…. Thing lmao, and I hope I’m not horribly mischaracterizing Helaena. Idk I find her difficult to characterize at times.

Also trying to describe her dragon dreams… bc they it is barely touched on nor explained for her.

Edit: oouuu the way I really want to write hotd Alicent and Helaena related stuff bc I do feel like I could bring some new dynamics to their characters. But it’s come to the point where I just prefer writing them in a modern setting bc I feel like I can get them out of their situation 😭😭 I don’t want them to suffer

[cherry-shipping]

o i think i realized why i was suddenly embarrassed talking about me and sans. while getting used to talking abt my ships publicly i decided itd be easier to talk about him in a half joking post dating kinda way (i.e. “hes my boyfriend and i love him”). but that means that my favorite part in our relationship to think about (pre dating stuff) is still embarrassing as hell

[moteldogs]

every time I visit home I think I know what it’s gonna feel like. and I never do

[imwritesometimes]

trying to come to terms with the fact that the wip maybe is just actually better off an idea I keep inside my own brain and eventually forget about rather than something that actually gets written even if it's never shared

[cascadiiing]

Sometimes I forget leafpool is dead and then I remember and my day is ruined

[phantomrose96]

If anyone wants to know why every tech company in the world right now is clamoring for AI like drowned rats scrabbling to board a ship, I decided to make a post to explain what's happening.

(Disclaimer to start: I'm a software engineer who's been employed full time since 2018. I am not a historian nor an overconfident Youtube essayist, so this post is my working knowledge of what I see around me and the logical bridges between pieces.)

Okay anyway. The explanation starts further back than what's going on now. I'm gonna start with the year 2000. The Dot Com Bubble just spectacularly burst. The model of "we get the users first, we learn how to profit off them later" went out in a no-money-having bang (remember this, it will be relevant later). A lot of money was lost. A lot of people ended up out of a job. A lot of startup companies went under. Investors left with a sour taste in their mouth and, in general, investment in the internet stayed pretty cooled for that decade. This was, in my opinion, very good for the internet as it was an era not suffocating under the grip of mega-corporation oligarchs and was, instead, filled with Club Penguin and I Can Haz Cheezburger websites.

Then around the 2010-2012 years, a few things happened. Interest rates got low, and then lower. Facebook got huge. The iPhone took off. And suddenly there was a huge new potential market of internet users and phone-havers, and the cheap money was available to start backing new tech startup companies trying to hop on this opportunity. Companies like Uber, Netflix, and Amazon either started in this time, or hit their ramp-up in these years by shifting focus to the internet and apps.

Now, every start-up tech company dreaming of being the next big thing has one thing in common: they need to start off by getting themselves massively in debt. Because before you can turn a profit you need to first spend money on employees and spend money on equipment and spend money on data centers and spend money on advertising and spend money on scale and and and

But also, everyone wants to be on the ship for The Next Big Thing that takes off to the moon.

So there is a mutual interest between new tech companies, and venture capitalists who are willing to invest $$$ into said new tech companies. Because if the venture capitalists can identify a prize pig and get in early, that money could come back to them 100-fold or 1,000-fold. In fact it hardly matters if they invest in 10 or 20 total bust projects along the way to find that unicorn.

But also, becoming profitable takes time. And that might mean being in debt for a long long time before that rocket ship takes off to make everyone onboard a gazzilionaire.

But luckily, for tech startup bros and venture capitalists, being in debt in the 2010's was cheap, and it only got cheaper between 2010 and 2020. If people could secure loans for ~3% or 4% annual interest, well then a $100,000 loan only really costs $3,000 of interest a year to keep afloat. And if inflation is higher than that or at least similar, you're still beating the system.

So from 2010 through early 2022, times were good for tech companies. Startups could take off with massive growth, showing massive potential for something, and venture capitalists would throw infinite money at them in the hopes of pegging just one winner who will take off. And supporting the struggling investments or the long-haulers remained pretty cheap to keep funding.

You hear constantly about "Such and such app has 10-bazillion users gained over the last 10 years and has never once been profitable", yet the thing keeps chugging along because the investors backing it aren't stressed about the immediate future, and are still banking on that "eventually" when it learns how to really monetize its users and turn that profit.

The pandemic in 2020 took a magnifying-glass-in-the-sun effect to this, as EVERYTHING was forcibly turned online which pumped a ton of money and workers into tech investment. Simultaneously, money got really REALLY cheap, bottoming out with historic lows for interest rates.

Then the tide changed with the massive inflation that struck late 2021. Because this all-gas no-brakes state of things was also contributing to off-the-rails inflation (along with your standard-fare greedflation and price gouging, given the extremely convenient excuses of pandemic hardships and supply chain issues). The federal reserve whipped out interest rate hikes to try to curb this huge inflation, which is like a fire extinguisher dousing and suffocating your really-cool, actively-on-fire party where everyone else is burning but you're in the pool. And then they did this more, and then more. And the financial climate followed suit. And suddenly money was not cheap anymore, and new loans became expensive, because loans that used to compound at 2% a year are now compounding at 7 or 8% which, in the language of compounding, is a HUGE difference. A $100,000 loan at a 2% interest rate, if not repaid a single cent in 10 years, accrues to $121,899. A $100,000 loan at an 8% interest rate, if not repaid a single cent in 10 years, more than doubles to $215,892.

Now it is scary and risky to throw money at "could eventually be profitable" tech companies. Now investors are watching companies burn through their current funding and, when the companies come back asking for more, investors are tightening their coin purses instead. The bill is coming due. The free money is drying up and companies are under compounding pressure to produce a profit for their waiting investors who are now done waiting.

You get enshittification. You get quality going down and price going up. You get "now that you're a captive audience here, we're forcing ads or we're forcing subscriptions on you." Don't get me wrong, the plan was ALWAYS to monetize the users. It's just that it's come earlier than expected, with way more feet-to-the-fire than these companies were expecting. ESPECIALLY with Wall Street as the other factor in funding (public) companies, where Wall Street exhibits roughly the same temperament as a baby screaming crying upset that it's soiled its own diaper (maybe that's too mean a comparison to babies), and now companies are being put through the wringer for anything LESS than infinite growth that Wall Street demands of them.

Internal to the tech industry, you get MASSIVE wide-spread layoffs. You get an industry that used to be easy to land multiple job offers shriveling up and leaving recent graduates in a desperately awful situation where no company is hiring and the market is flooded with laid-off workers trying to get back on their feet.

Because those coin-purse-clutching investors DO love virtue-signaling efforts from companies that say "See! We're not being frivolous with your money! We only spend on the essentials." And this is true even for MASSIVE, PROFITABLE companies, because those companies' value is based on the Rich Person Feeling Graph (their stock) rather than the literal profit money. A company making a genuine gazillion dollars a year still tears through layoffs and freezes hiring and removes the free batteries from the printer room (totally not speaking from experience, surely) because the investors LOVE when you cut costs and take away employee perks. The "beer on tap, ping pong table in the common area" era of tech is drying up. And we're still unionless.

Never mind that last part.

And then in early 2023, AI (more specifically, Chat-GPT which is OpenAI's Large Language Model creation) tears its way into the tech scene with a meteor's amount of momentum. Here's Microsoft's prize pig, which it invested heavily in and is galivanting around the pig-show with, to the desperate jealousy and rapture of every other tech company and investor wishing it had that pig. And for the first time since the interest rate hikes, investors have dollar signs in their eyes, both venture capital and Wall Street alike. They're willing to restart the hose of money (even with the new risk) because this feels big enough for them to take the risk.

Now all these companies, who were in varying stages of sweating as their bill came due, or wringing their hands as their stock prices tanked, see a single glorious gold-plated rocket up out of here, the likes of which haven't been seen since the free money days. It's their ticket to buy time, and buy investors, and say "see THIS is what will wring money forth, finally, we promise, just let us show you."

To be clear, AI is NOT profitable yet. It's a money-sink. Perhaps a money-black-hole. But everyone in the space is so wowed by it that there is a wide-spread and powerful conviction that it will become profitable and earn its keep. (Let's be real, half of that profit "potential" is the promise of automating away jobs of pesky employees who peskily cost money.) It's a tech-space industrial revolution that will automate away skilled jobs, and getting in on the ground floor is the absolute best thing you can do to get your pie slice's worth.

It's the thing that will win investors back. It's the thing that will get the investment money coming in again (or, get it second-hand if the company can be the PROVIDER of something needed for AI, which other companies with venture-back will pay handsomely for). It's the thing companies are terrified of missing out on, lest it leave them utterly irrelevant in a future where not having AI-integration is like not having a mobile phone app for your company or not having a website.

So I guess to reiterate on my earlier point:

Drowned rats. Swimming to the one ship in sight.