#not because that's some arbitrary number I'm trying to keep under

[moghedien]

I swear I only see any discourse about "anti vs pro shipping" or whatever the fuck when its specifically people complaining about how supposedly prevalent that discourse is on here.

like I cannot emphasize this enough, you control your dashboard. learn how to curate it and unfollow people and block people for being annoying. like you aren't obligated to be mutuals with people who reblog things that annoy you. you aren't obligated not to block people just because they're kinda annoying. literally stop making yourself miserable for no reason and just start weeding people its better that way

#I have literally been on here for 10 year #I have almost 7.5k followers #and I've literally never followed more than 200 people #not because that's some arbitrary number I'm trying to keep under #it really just takes a fucking lot for me to follow someone ' #like I literally don't follow people who I generally like because they reblog things from someone I don't like ' #and I would rather not follow them than see that person on my dash #like avoid things that make you upset its not that hard

[hotforharrison]

I've been exclusively posting new Harrison content and nothing about me personally for quite some time now, but I just kind of wanted to... talk to the void, I guess. It's been rough lately.

The end of December leading up to the shit show that was my birthday on New Year's Eve, and now into 2024, has not shown me any kindness.

Seeing my husband happily in love with his girlfriend while our marriage spirals around the drain into divorce has been really difficult, one of the hardest things I've gone through in my life.

He says that he wants to work things out and have both of us, which is what I want as well, but his actions speak differently most of the time.

She lives nearby and gets surprise cookies and hugs when she's feeling sad. On multiple occasions, I've gotten left alone in my room in tears.

They talk on the phone more in a single day than he and I did in the entire two weeks I was visiting my family out of state for my high school reunion.

I want so much to be in love and happy again, which I haven't been in quite some time. I'm not sure that it's going to happen with him as much as I want it to. I usually feel like we're on a sinking boat, and I'm trying to use a cup to throw out water to try desperately to keep it afloat, even though it's ultimately futile.

As per the marriage counselor's suggestion, we're being more intentional about our time together, like we're dating again.

Although I'm unable to leave the house right now for anything that isn't absolutely essential (I'll get to that in a minute), we've been having movie nights every Wednesday with phones put away and paying attention to the movie and each other.

We haven't done anything "special" together as a couple in what's honestly been years, and we're going to go to either Kemah Boardwalk or Galveston hopefully the week of April 15, depending on whether it's safe for me to walk that much at that point.

I'm not holding my breath that it's going to ultimately help us reconnect enough to improve things, but I'm hoping it's a step in the right direction of getting there.

We've been polyamorous since 2015, but I haven't dated or been looking for someone to date since 2016, or even just hook up with for that matter. My husband has had a number of girlfriends and partners over the years, which I'm completely fine with.

It's been a sort of mono-poly relationship for the past almost 8 years, but entirely by my own choosing. He didn't influence that at all and actually encouraged me to date again if it's what I wanted to do.

And I am going to go down that rabbit hole hopefully later this year, which is very nerve-wracking.

I know it's absolutely not a requirement for dating, and shallow people who would only date someone who is under a certain weight aren't great partners, but I want to lose a lot of weight before I start looking again. It will help me feel better about myself, and self-confidence is an attractive quality.

Right now, I honestly don't even want to be undressed in front of my husband who I started dating in 2007, so him seeing me undressed is nothing new. I view myself as "fat and disgusting," even though I've known women who weigh as much or more than I do right now who were very attractive and had no trouble dating.

My husband said I carry the weight very well and don't need to be down to some arbitrary number that I come up with to date again, which I wanted to be under 200. He asked how much I weighed when we started dating. I weighed around 260 then, and I understood his point.

I started actively trying to lose weight on September 22 of last year, because there's no reason to wait until some specific date like a New Year's resolution. September 22 was as good a day as any.

I was about 12 lbs shy of my highest weight ever, which was 352.8 lbs, at 340.6. As of January 16, I'd lost over 30 lbs since the end of September and weighed in at 307.1. I'm 5'9, so a tall girly, and my tentative goal is 175. It's subject to change based on my desired goal clothing size, which is a 10. (I don't want to stop shopping at Torrid, and they go down to a 10 at the lowest.)

Anyway, I broke my right leg and severely sprained my left ankle when I fell in a parking lot the day before Thanksgiving in 2022, which halted my weight loss efforts in 2022 and led to me regaining most of the weight I'd lost then.

The amount of damage I did to myself from just falling in a parking lot was pretty impressive. Ironically, I did not break the glass bottles of hard cider I was carrying, only myself.

The broken leg healed perfectly over the course of a few months or so, but because I still had to use the other leg as my main weight bearing side, it didn't get to properly heal like it should have. My sprained ankle's ligaments were very loose. The ankle kept collapsing over the course of 2023, through a round of physical therapy, and I just kept spraining my ankle over and over again whenever I tried to do more demanding things like working out. Being more active is very important to weight loss and health, so it was really frustrating.

Eventually, after trying to work out one too many times and foolishly not allowing the injury enough time to "heal," (and I use the term "heal" loosely because it never actually did and just became increasingly damaged) I ended up in putting myself into an immobilizing boot full time because of the collapsing extending itself into normal walking.

The first round of physical therapy made no difference, and I did a consultation with a different physical therapy place to see what they said. After going over my situation and having an assessment of my ankle with the physical therapist, I asked if he were in my shoes what he would choose to do. He said that if it were him, he'd do the surgery and follow it up with physical therapy to regain strength and balance.

So I had the surgery to fix it once and for all on January 19. (I was hoping to have the surgery ASAP, but couldn't do it in December like I originally hoped. My insurance was changing in January.)

The injury was apparently worse than the doctor initially thought it was, and I haven't been able to put any weight at all on it since then. I had been very much hoping to be able to put some weight on it again at my 3 week follow up, but no dice. I've been stuck exclusively on a knee scooter cart and crutches for over 5 weeks now. It's been such a struggle, in so many ways.

I've left the house literally 3 times since I got home after the surgery. Two follow up appointments with the foot and ankle doctor, and an interesting session of marriage counseling while I was drugged out of my mind on prescription painkillers. I honestly don't remember much of it, or that week in general. I was very happy to transition to ibuprofen and acetaminophen after the first week post-op.

I haven't been able to weigh myself since my last weigh in before the surgery on January 16, which is taking a very, very heavy toll on me and my mental health.

I've been having recurring nightmares about getting back on the scale and weighing more than I ever have in my life -- like 70+ lbs more than I did when I last weighed myself in January. I know rationally that I've actually lost weight and am very likely under 300 lbs now, but there's still this deep, nauseating fear that I'm wrong and weigh more than I ever did.

My husband assures me that he can tell that I've lost weight, but it doesn't feel real to me with my skewed perception -- like my brain tells me that the clothes that fit differently were obviously messed up while they were being washed and just ended up stretched out somehow.

I took measurements of my body when I started losing weight in September, and as of a week or so ago, I've lost 7" in my bust and hips and 5" in my waist. My brain tries to convince me that I just measured myself wrong in September, like I could somehow measure myself wrong with over 7" of difference with the exact same tape measure.

It makes no logical sense.

I have another follow up appointment with the foot and ankle doctor on Monday morning and get to find out if I can put weight on my left leg again after some x-rays to check my healing progress. (That makes me nervous because I still have some prominent bruises on one of my thighs that I had on January 20. They've gone from purple to brown, but they're still very obvious. It's supposed to take 2 weeks for bruises to go away. Not 5+.)

I really don't know that I can handle having to wait even longer to weigh myself again and start the process of getting back to walking and eventually working out.

I want so desperately to be able to make progress toward my goals instead of just miserably stagnating here.

I want to lose the weight. I want to be healthier. I want to feel better about myself. I want to have the chance to finally figure out things with my husband, even if the conclusion we ultimately come to isn't what I'm hoping for. I want to find a nice guy to date. I just want to move forward, actually live my life.

Thank you for coming to my TED talk, I guess?

[vergess]

FWD: genuine question because I'm trying to resolve a perceived inconsistency: I believe you when you say losing >10% of your body weight rounds to impossible because usually you say true, researched things. I'm trying to square this with that I personally know multiple people who've done so, and I usually try not to assume my life is statistically exceptional so I'm kind of at a loss. (1/2)

FWD, cont: Hypotheses I've currently got include: actually I've met far more people than I estimate, making the denominator of this percentage higher than I realize, and: maybe some of the people I know might not count by the studies' definitions because they've only been lighter a couple years? You are good at stats and know about this if you have ideas I'd love to hear them. (2/2)

Right, yes! excellent point! I should have mentioned this in the body of that post, and will edit it in if I can find it.

So, first off: until someone has kept the weight off for 3 years it doesn't generally "count." As the number of years increases, the amount of re--gain usually does as well, with many people exceeding their starting weight. However, you'll usually "know" if you're one of the infinitesimally small percentage by year 3.

It's ALSO worth noting that these studies are based on moderate diet and exercise, without medication.

Using starvation dieting, extreme exercise, dehydration, steroids, and other such techniques you may be able to keep the weight off somewhat longer, at the cost of doing massive harm to your Everything (brain, organs, muscles, bones, all of it).

This has been common but widely ignored scientific consensus for decades, BTW.

We're going on 30 years of knowing this at the research level. That's since I was a kid.

And yet, right now, I know people being denied surgery for being overweight. Not even by a huge amount, like BMI 30 (the first step in Obese from Overweight). People are required to catastrophically damage their already sick bodies for the chance to receive massively shocking surgeries in the hopes of not dying, and then doctors "wonder" why fat people die younger.

But they don't wonder, really. They've known for decades. They just ignore it. They pretend at ignorance for the sake of their bigotry. Insurance companies, too, are allowed to basically kill people for being fat.

It's a constant goddamned near-death-experience.

All over the LIE that weight loss is meaningfully possible.

Finally, some personal notes:

Fat people tend to self isolate due to anti-fat bigotry, meaning that we're less "meetable" than skinny people, so sampling bias is inevitable when using your own life as a gauge.

Most people's lives have like... 3 Weird Statistical Anomalies because true, natural randomness clusters for arbitrary large periods, and the human brain evolved to be exceptionally good at identifying patterns, which makes clustering very noticeable.

You're like.... for sure underestimating how many people you've met, because like... unless you live in the smallest imaginable town (under 500 population), you've just met so many people that your brain discards them entirely. After all, how many other kids did you go to school with, and how long ago was that.

#Asks #Answered asks #arionwind

[masterofcarrots]

God Save the King

My...uhhh....really questionable first attempt at fanfic. I'll post it to AO3 once they finally set up an account for me.

Adult themes because I'm in my 30s writing about mass murderers who canonically went on like an orgy-spree back at the beginning of time.

~~ Story below if you actually like reading stories in tumblr format~~

Boredom. Monotony. An endless, unceasing march of day to night and back to day just so it could start all over again. That was life for his kind.

How many times had Gandharva sat in a bath like he was now? Trying not to think, just exist, feel the cool comfort of the liquid around him as if it was an extension of himself. Besides Varuna, he had the best claim on that being true.

His arms dropped from the sides of the oversized tub carved from black basalt and filled with fresh snowmelt. Kalibloom's temples, perched atop the world as they were, suited his tastes in temperature.

A few of the girls serving the temple had offered to help run back and forth and keep the fires lit for him so he didn't have to bathe in the cold. He'd patiently explained, five times over to each, that a half a degree above freezing felt pleasantly balmy to him.

Wet wisps of hair the color of a glacier waved along the water now that they weren't spilled out over his arms. His appearance – the most full-grown adult one of his repertoire – was probably part of it. The girls had been told to watch out for the murdering bastard nastika king trapped there by the gods; looking as he did now – a little taller, a little better-muscled, a lot less bright blue-skinned – he wasn't unaware that he didn't fit the image.

It had used to be his preferred form of himself. After Shakuntala had been born and then grown upset because she'd overheard the gossip that there was something different about her, that she couldn't have come from the parents she did, he'd lied to her and told her they'd meant her hair color.

It hadn't been terribly long, in his perspective of time, that she'd understood they hadn't meant her appearance but her weakness compared to the older siblings she hadn't met. The lie had gone away. His green hair to match hers had remained.

Gandharva's eyes turned again from inside his head to the world around him. He debated whether he should count how many hairs he had on his head.

Every hundred million years or so, to pass the time, he did it. The answer never changed.

He could count the number of times he'd sat in the bath trying to figure out ways to make another hour disappear. His memory was good; it didn't degrade with time. It would waste some of the minutes that existed between now and an end that never seemed to come.

At least in the sura realm there wasn't a sun or moon that forced you to think about the arbitrary boundaries they all set on an indivisible concept.

Existential ennui was worse for him than most – the vast majority of his interminable days had been spent ranked among the strongest of a strong race, terrifying even for a nastika, and those few who topped him in pure strength couldn't compete with his regenerative speed. Maybe Ananta could have killed him, if the other king had been cruel, like Gandharva once had been.

The boredom, the wanting to put an end to his own infinite existence, that had long been a bigger threat to him than anything else.

He sank his right hand further under the water and formed a small whirlpool, letting it tickle his palm before drawing it upwards, above the edge of the tub, circling his hand around and making the water funnel dance along the surface, entertaining himself for all of five seconds before the dull tedium of life crept back in.

Pathetic.

He'd take boredom over what else liked to creep in these days, something far more pathetic than his failure to occupy himself, memories of how he'd chosen to have his fun years past, wondering if he shouldn't have taken a page from Ravana's book and spent all that restless energy fucking instead of fighting, because in the end – or really, the limitless middle between beginning and end – there wasn't much else capable of remaining interesting no matter how many times you'd been there and done that.

They didn't fundamentally require food or sleep. There was only so much to talk about. It mostly came down to how others were faring in the fucking and fighting departments, being a species like they were, with no need for philosophical curiosity like humans had.

Scientific advancements didn't improve their lives; they could explore the universe on a whim; they had seen how it had all begun, all the bits and pieces of history; pondering the truths of the world was useless when you knew so much about how the whole of creation worked that all there was left to learn were things you'd accepted you'd never get an answer to, because if the Primeval Gods had wanted them to know, they'd have told.

Lust, bloodlust, they alone kept the spirit alive unless you went for love and found yourself a third thing on the list of experiences that didn't grow boring over millennia and started with F – family.

The almost-forbidden F, for obvious reasons. Loving two people had ruined him this much. Letting himself care for any of those long-gone children from back at the beginning would have destroyed him more completely than the void he'd been told awaited him as an afterlife.

He was fine with that. He'd had enough life. The last thing he wanted was a fucking afterlife. The creatures humans called gods held it over his species as a threat, forever blind to the fact it was a mercy.

Cowards. They were more pathetic even than he was.

Love, family, there were reasons, and good ones, those experiences should be denied to him and the other nastikas at the depth that humans felt them. Most, maybe all of their children, so much weaker than them, would die first. Lovers, even strong ones, could die too, he knew that best of all, and when they didn't, while love itself might not grow boring, the lover could.

Humans only had to keep their promises to each other a few decades and frequently failed at that. There was no point in pretending it wasn't possible for nastikas to fall out of love given enough time, and if they all knew it, why invest themselves in something so totally when they knew one day, maybe long into the future, but one day, they might be the left-behind and not the leaver and it would feel like a knife twisted into their side starting from the end of the relationship and not ending until death or the end of time, whichever came first.

Gandharva had chosen fighting way back when, pinned his hopes on it to keep him alive and kicking, strange as that sounded, as it directly invoked the possibility of death. That was what had made it fun.

The prospect of getting the type of beating he'd done everything in his substantial power to deserve had invigorated him more than he cared to admit, because what he'd never wanted to admit was that he might deserve it. A little bit.

Maybe that's why he was so fascinated by that one human whose life he'd saved just so she could repay him by ignoring him most of the time. When he'd crossed the line from pathetic to extra-pathetic. Him, one of the few remaining original nastika kings, ignored by a woman who owed him her life, and he hadn't even threatened to kill her for it.

Probably, it was because within an hour of meeting her, she'd had a sword pointed at his throat before he'd seen her move. It wouldn't have hurt him all so badly, he knew.

But just for a second, in the time that it had taken for him to register the factual inability of her to truly harm him, that flicker of mortality that kept him alive had shivered through him.

He was helpless against it – against her. He had far more reasons to want to die than stay alive; he had to hold on to what he could if he didn't want Menaka's sacrifice to go in vain.

Apparently, suicide had been deemed so likely all the servants in this temple he was confined to while the world and its gods sorted things out must have been instructed to keep sharp objects away from him.

As if he'd be so determined that he'd manage to do it using a regular old knife. He wasn't that fucking pathetic, thank you very much.

He'd chosen bloodlust all the way up until the closest thing the universe had known to a literal, actual siren had convinced him to try love. Not that he hadn't had any impure thoughts about Menaka, their relationship hadn't been one of contented celibacy, but lust had been a product of love, not the other way around.

Asura, he thought, had combined all three – fucking, fighting, and fucked up family – in a far more pathetic way than he ever had, if that time Gandharva had interrupted him and Ravana in the middle of things was any indication.

He shook his head to clear it, water droplets flying off the ends of ice-blue hair and onto the dark stone around him. Any more gross memories of Asura and Ravana and he really was going to end it all.

At least his relationship with his – the priestess, he wasn't a god and didn't want to be – wasn't as bad as Chandra's with his. She'd summoned him back, for reasons Gandharva couldn't name, since as far as he could tell the woman despised her god with every ounce of her being.

Chandra was pathetic too. Running around at the beck and call of some human that didn't respect him and was basically cheating on him with a more powerful god, a real God. Laila – he thought that was her name – was kind of scary, for a human.

Agni's perpetual pathetic-ness went without saying. Of all of them, he had the worst relationship with a priestess right now.

The problem with Teo wasn't that she hated him. It was that she was still working out how she felt about him, and that might come down to feeling absolutely nothing.

He'd rather her hate him. At least that meant he was as fixed in her mind as she'd managed to become in his.

Chandra's woman had hated him for two measly decades. Agni's woman had the accumulated hatred of two thousand lifetimes, or however many it had been.

Those two women knew the gods for what they were – cheats and liars pretending to be helpful. The gods were just as perpetually bored as the nastikas and just as harmful to humans. Instead of harming them directly they mostly stuck to messing around in their lives other ways, then drove the humans crazy for entertainment.

It was hilarious, absolutely hilarious to someone like him, who'd met all the so-called gods and knew their habits, that the ones the humans liked the least – Yama, for example – were the most honest, and the ones that humans loved – Indra being the poster child – enjoyed making their worshippers dance around like puppets in a personal show.

Pathetic. All of them.

Gandharva sank down further into the water, not sure why he was keeping his chin above it except for the fact that it seemed to scare the humans who couldn't help seeing him as close to human when he stayed underwater too long.

He wondered if Agni and Chandra used their elements in private the same way he did, when he needed to believe in something, even if it was a ghost.

Another flick of his wrist and the water level around him lowered, half of it now taking shape in front of him, an afterimage of his late wife that at his command leaned down to kiss him.

Just on the forehead. That was how pathetic he was.

His hearing was better than human, so he heard the footsteps coming before the knock at the door.

He'd send whatever servant it was away after yelling out that yes, he was still alive, he just liked sitting in water and didn't get all wrinkly like they did.

A knock never came. The doorknob began to turn.

It had to be Teo. She was the only person besides the gods that had the gall to invade his privacy without warning, and it was boots he'd heard in the hallway, not bare feet.

He'd let her catch him in a way he'd never in several billion years allow anyone else to, his watery Menaka still poised affectionately above him.

That sort of weakness was charming to humans in a certain kind of way he needed to charm her to have her believe that in spite of all the blood on his hands, he didn't totally lack emotional range and couldn't be written off as a mindless murderer.

When he and Teo had been drunk one night seven years ago during his time playing pretend – he didn't really get drunk unless he wanted to, and usually when the offer was extended he wanted to, intoxication being supremely helpful in denying the agony of forever - they'd discussed enough on the subject of Gandharva's ambiguous-on-time-markers previous relationship that the depth of the empty place in him wasn't news to her. He knew not to expect jealousy over that, only sympathy.

He was glad of it. He didn't feel prickles of envy either over the past, couldn't, because his species simply wasn't built that way. They'd all have murdered each other over it early on if they'd had a tendency for hating the ones before themselves on the list of romantic entanglements.

The reason he'd stopped laughing at her stories of former lovers hadn't been because they existed – if they were going there, while it may have been so long ago it would be nigh-inconceivable to her understanding of years, he had hundreds of lovers and thousands of children to disclose. He'd quieted because of something else she'd said.

She'd been lost, after the Upheaval. Had looked for, and found, forgetfulness in a way common to all species created by the Primeval Gods, which did have to make one wonder about them, a little bit.

And she'd joked, that had been the sad part, in the first instance that she'd hinted she liked him for reasons beyond pity she'd joked that he treated her too much like she was made of glass.

She was made of glass, to him. Jostling her in a way Menaka would have found playful would snap her in half.

She hadn't been so fragile, to all the others. It had been convenient, oh so convenient, that she was tough for a human, didn't need patience and care, like she didn't deserve to be treated tenderly and –

And there he went, getting pathetic again.

Even he, violent as he'd been at the time, had enjoyed the counterpoint of gentleness in other moments. As evidenced by the fact he was still holding Menaka's form above him. For much longer than he'd planned.

He'd pretended like he hadn't heard Teo come in, like he'd been too caught up in being morose over his past he was unaware of anything else but regret and longing.

He'd expected her to say something by now, even if it was that he was indecently exposed due to the bathwater having other occupations for the time being.

Adding to his laundry list of pathetic actions, which now included doing laundry when he'd lived in that Half village for a few years, he was the first to break and express curiosity. His head turned towards the door to see why she hadn't so much as gasped in pleasant shock.

The eyes that met his were shocked alright. Definitely not pleasantly. No attempt was being made to hide the disappointment, or, dare he say, disgust.

Right, then. He was never going to live this down.

When he said never, he really meant it. The memories of nastikas didn't fade with time. He and Makara would be remembering this and pretending it hadn't happened literally until they died. Which at this rate, Gandharva assumed they both were hoping was imminent.

How many times had he told Makara not to sneak up on him just because his stupid Darkness attribute made him so damned good at cloaking his presence?

Before it was too late, he needed to make the evidence disappear.

Gandharva dropped the water back over him and mentally prepared what order he was going to tell his most embarrassing stories about Asura and Ravana that he'd kept untold and in reserve. Those were sure to override and replace Makara's disgust at catching him making a fake wife to kiss him.

Makara groaned weakly, purple-tinted lips twisting in displeasure. His fingers pinched at the bridge of his nose for a moment as if he had the universe's worst headache.

"Well, that leads into what I was going to say anyway, I guess," he muttered, eyes still closed.

"How did you get here?" Gandharva asked.

Makara shrugged. "There's been random portals opening for some time now. I finally got lucky and came through."

"No, like…" Gandharva gestured at the room around him. "Here here."

"The priestess let me through."

Not again, his mind groaned, hating that Teo remained so unsuspicious she'd been convinced by another of his kind that they were a Half in need. He was really going to have to talk to her about this spontaneous adoption habit.

"Teo?"

Makara shrugged again. "If that's what Agni's woman is going by these days."

All the mental power given over to plotting how to erase Makara's memory quickly changed to plotting an escape. If it left Makara mentally traumatized and at risk of spreading gossip over how pathetic his king had become, so be it.

Brilith hated Gandharva, Brilith knew who Makara was, and Brilith would not allow him into Gandharva's presence unless he was there in the role of torture device.

The bathroom had a door, which Makara was presently standing in front of. There was a window that had a sheer drop down to the city nine thousand meters below them.

He'd survive the fall. And then promptly end up locked back in the jail cell he'd managed to sweet-talk his way out of.

Ignorant – or maybe not – of Gandharva's distress, Makara sighed again and began speaking.

"The Tarakas are dying off for now, it looks like," Makara said. "Our territory is safe again. And habitable by weaker ones because of that stupid ocean you almost killed yourself making."

"The Tarakas are dying off thanks to me, you know," Gandharva bragged to his unfriendliest friend, who often seemed to forget which of them was in charge. "You're welcome."

"All praise the great Gandharva," Makara said, intoned so flatly it was worse than obvious sarcasm. "You've reminded everyone you aren't as useless as you've seemed the past five hundred years. The nastikas respect you again. Some more than that. And seeing as it's time, I won't go telling everyone what I just saw."

"Time for what?"

Makara and Chandra should really get into a contest of who could stare at whom with the best I hate that I have to put up with you and am a centimeter away from ripping out your intestines face. They even kind of looked alike.

"Don't tell me you can't feel it."

"Ah," Gandharva said, looking at his fingernails with faked nonchalance, still not sure what Makara was after but completely sure he didn't want to know. "So you're jealous that I still miss Menaka that much, but don't even miss you enough to come back home now that we can go."

He saw Makara's hair move out of the corner of his eye, the other man cocking his head and finally breaking his dead-on-all-but-a-technicality-looking expression.

"Do you really not feel it? Have you spent so much time sucking at being the king it changed your biology?"

The inspection of his fingernails began again, in earnest this time. Truthfully, with Taraka gone, his transcendentals back, the penalty he should have paid for taking sura form a few years ago forgotten except for in whatever had made him cry when he'd killed that monster and suddenly felt like he'd lost something he hadn't known was there, he was no longer king in name only.

It was why Agni and Chandra had given him free roam within the temple grounds. They knew they couldn't hold him there against his will if he really wanted to fight it. And Agni, at least, knew how pathetic he was, and that he wasn't going to fight it, that a larger part of him than he planned to acknowledge wanted to stay there in the human realm; his pending "judgement" from the gods was no more than a bad excuse.

He'd be perfectly happy if they killed him, anyway. They probably knew that. And Agni knew how Menaka had felt, that you could only make up for the past by being alive. So as long as they didn't expect he was going to grossly misbehave again, his eternal life sentence would continue.

"Aghh," Makara groaned, interrupting his thoughts as they went down dark paths again. The other man's look of contempt was back. "Fine. If I have to explain it to you like you're some innocent, I can."

Makara approached closer and loomed over his rightful king, arms crossed. They'd activated lecture mode.

"Our clan's population is well below what it needs to be to fend for ourselves in the long term. Strong parents make strong children. You are the strongest male and the strong females are willing to give you the time of day again. Do I need to re-educate you on how one makes children or do you still remember?"

Oh. That. Makara was wondering if he could feel that – the re-emergence of the we need more of us instinct in nastikas that had led to the explosive population-building in the beginning.

That he'd been feeling for years. It hadn't changed just because children would have a chance at survival now. He'd been ignoring it long enough he'd almost forgotten it wasn't supposed to be a fact of life.

"Anyway, here's the list of who all's still around," Makara said, pulling a sheet of paper out of his robe. "I'm willing to hear you out if there's anyone you particularly hate the idea of sharing children with."

"All of them," Gandharva said breezily, not looking at the page. There was one name he knew was missing on the list, and that was all that mattered. He smiled up at his second-in-command. "You can do it instead."

Gandharva materialized his clothing just in time for Makara to use his robe to haul him out of the water and throw him against the wall.

He'd known that was going to happen. He didn't really mind if the temple servants saw him undressed after they ran over to see what the noise was about, but humans were generally less physically-inclined than suras, and were liable to get extremely strange ideas about what it meant that Makara appeared to be wrestling him while one of them was nude.

Out of many of the funny things he'd learned in his stay on this planet, "naked wrestling" being a term parents used to avoid explaining to their children just what they were up to in bed had to be one of his favorites.

He was pretty sure Maruna had learned the euphemism as well. The first thing Gandharva was going to do after he made a very necessary apology to that kid was to suggest that if he wanted to, Maruna could take out his anger with some one-on-one, nothing in the way fighting and then watch as he created an entirely new trauma in the chicken's mind wondering if he meant it the sura way or the human way. Gandharva might even offer to do it in his weaker and thus more fair-for-fighting female form to make his intentions that much more ambiguous.

"Look, you childish dumbass," Makara began in his perennially disrespectful way. "This is about the survival of our race. You need to go to bed with them, not wake up cuddling with them. I think we'd all prefer you not. Stay pining for Menaka for all I care, but unless you tell me you're physically incapable of-,"

"What if I am?" he cut in. He couldn't care less if Makara thought him that lacking in ability. Most days, he wished it were true. It would make life easier.

"Then change into a female and make yourself useful," his quickly-becoming-not-a-friend snapped back. "Whatever works for you."

By now, the servants had come running. A spell had repaired the wall back to its uncrushed-by-a-man-far-less-delicate-than-his-fine-bone-structure-hinted state.

Seeking an easy out from this conversation, Gandharva escorted Makara to go reflect on their many misdoings at the Lake of Reflection. Mostly so that Gandharva could push his annoying companion off the bridge the next time he said something stupid.

Makara didn't need to know that part.

"I'm going to assume you were joking about really not being able to," Makara said, breaking the silence. "I don't think it works like that for us, no matter how pathetic we get."

Yeah. He was going to push Makara off the bridge. Just because Gandharva was pathetic didn't mean Makara should be allowed to tell him so.

Yeah. Makara had forgotten why he wasn't king. It was time to-

Ahh. And there was Agni's woman, preventing his assassination plan and chiding them for causing trouble.

"Did he tell you he's in love with a human woman?" she asked, pretending like Gandharva wasn't there and only looking at Makara. "You must be embarrassed for your entire clan."

"She's lying," Gandharva replied reflexively, mirroring Brilith by ignoring her and turning only to the other man. "She's mad I've killed her a couple times. You were probably there for a few, Makara."

"I wish I were lying," that maddening woman muttered. "If only for Teo's sake. It makes you wonder about yourself, that such despicable creatures see something loveable in you."

Gandharva wouldn't repeat that to Agni. Unless the god really pissed him off. Brilith would calm down eventually. Probably. In another lifetime. Maybe.

She took her leave. Makara tilted his head back, took a deep and completely performative breath, then looked at him again.

"I'm going to pretend I didn't hear that," Makara hissed. "Like I said, I don't care who you're in love with. This isn't about that, and if I start telling people how far gone you are, all the eligible prospects will lose respect for you again."

Fuck. He should have just leaned into Brilith's accusation.

"I let a Half from our clan slap me," he confessed, suddenly eager to let out something so shameful it would make Makara give up on him as a total nutcase. "More than once, actually. I sat in front of her on my knees and let her have at me until someone else stopped her."

Teo, dammit to the deepest hell, had a friend who'd had some very personal feelings to work out towards her ancestral king and the emotional resonance he'd made her a part of more than once. His pride had written off allowing the thrashing to take place as a trust-building exercise.

"You…" Finally, Makara was lost for words. "You what? Can they even do that? There isn't some kind of instinct that prevents them from trying to hurt you?"

"I think she's related to you, now that I think about it," Gandharva reflected, not entirely sure if he was lying. "It must be where she gets her shitty personality from. Her name's Clari. You should check in on her and see if you can figure out which one of your children messed up your bloodline before we talk about having more."

"Gandharva!" Makara yelled, exasperated now. "Come home. Get yourself busy. It will even be fun if you let it."

"You're always mad about how stupid I became over Shakuntala," he laughed, shaky, her name still sensitive so soon after the last vestige of her had disappeared at his own hands. "You really think it's a good idea for me to have more children?"

"Oi," Makara griped. "I think you misheard me. We need you for making children. There's no way in hell we're letting you raise any of them. So don't worry about that part. You don't even need to learn their names. Come back and play house with your woman here until we need you again."

"I can't go back to being like that," he confessed. "And even if I could, I'm not allowed to leave, and none of our clan's females are here. We can fight about this another time, if I survive that long. And if not, you'll be the king then and the honor of the job goes to you."

He gave Makara a wink. An absolutely salacious one.

"Fine," the other man said. "Fine. Be that way. You're going to regret it, though."

"I won't," Gandharva sighed. "Most anyone that needs my protection is gone by now, Makara. The nastikas can survive fine on their own. They don't need me to lead them; they don't need me to help make a new clan for them just so we can go fight and get everyone's children killed anyway."

He wondered, watching Makara's retreating back being lost to the fog of the wintry atmosphere, if that was the last Gandharva would ever see of his oldest friend. More of him hoped so than hoped not, if this was going to be the theme of their conversations until Gandharva caved.

Menaka would be happy. Not because he was remaining true to her – she'd much rather him move on, he was sure – but because he was remaining true to what she'd want, because he'd chosen not to indulge himself in the momentary pleasure of creating for the later pleasure of wreaking destruction.

He didn't know what his true self was anymore, and the lake certainly wasn't going to show it to him. All he could see was someone indistinguishable from human because of the red obscuring the fact his skin was colored like ice and his hair changed from near-white at the roots through pale blues and into hints of lilac by the ends, the deformity in his right pupil made invisible.

Whoever that creature was, he was a little bit less pathetic-looking than he had been yesterday.

For the first time since he'd been woken up by Ms. Kupatergent in the forest, he tried sleeping. He wished he could dream, like humans did, live in a fantasy world of his own imagining for a few precious hours.

Because he didn't need to sleep, nothing natural occurred to make him wake up, either. It was Teo that did it, coming into his room to announce to him that it was time to take his watch back up over the endless march of days.

Except she didn't. This day would be a little more interesting than most. After hearing of his penitent beating at the hands of Clari, one of her relatives had arrived in Kalibloom to enact a similar form of vengeance.

Gandharva shocked himself, and Teo, by agreeing to do whatever this Mari woman wanted to make up for the "endless piles of unimaginable fucking bullshit" Gandharva had forced her to go through whenever he was feeling out-of-sorts. Teo had bashfully repeated the phrase Mari had said to her when she'd made the request to be granted an audience.

Gandharva shocked himself, and every witness to the event, Agni and Chandra most definitely at the top of the list, by appearing in front of them within a few minutes of meeting Mari, knees on the ground, head bent to touch the floor, arms stretched out before him in a full display of debasement, praying for all he was worth to be saved.

He apologized. From the bottom of his heart he confessed every sin he could remember, apologized, begged for forgiveness and mercy. When he dared to raise his eyes off the floor for a moment, he thought even Brilith was considering his plea.

"Come on, Gandharva," Agni said, choking on his laughter. "You did say you'd do whatever she wanted to make up for it. And if this is what she wants, I mean…if I weren't a married man…"

Agni shut himself up fast with an apology to his hoping-for-a-divine-divorce wife.

Pathetic idiots, the both of them, Gandharva and Agni, maybe they really were starcrossed soulmates, fated to say very, very stupid things without thinking that it would come back and bite them in the ass later.

Regardless, the not-totally-enlightened god couldn't prevent his eyes from doing a last sweep over the naked and unashamed woman standing to the side of Gandharva with her arms crossed in exasperation.

To the world of gods and nastikas, as far as his clan went, it was Urvasi who'd won for being the most desirable of the women. Even among all the clans, she'd ranked in the top three, and long debates had formed over whether it was her or Shuri or Airavata that deserved the number one spot.

The truth was known to exactly two people before today. Gandharva, and the definitively-not-a-man standing next to him. It wasn't really a competition at all, unless that competition was for a distant second place.

"Agni," Chandra muttered, eyes as transfixed on the floor as Gandharva's. "Are you trying to get yourself killed?"

The larger man crossed his arms over the bare chest that Gandharva was doing his best to stare at and convince himself that actually, men were more to his taste, now that he thought about it.

"I didn't say anything when Brilith stared at Sagara being naked," he pouted. "There's no reason to make a big deal out of it. I mean, who wouldn't stare at this one? There'd have to be something defective about you."

Okay. There was a time and a place to wonder what the hell that was about and why the murder-priestess and naked murder-snake were put together in the same sentence, but right now, Gandharva had more important matters to concentrate on, like the fact that his body wasn't allowing him to revert to the child form he'd used for a few years nor to a female one because…well, because. There was only one reason that happened. Biological impulse really wanted to make him aware he was an adult male right now.

"I didn't mean Brilith. She'd probably you rather run away with Miss…Mari, and never come back. But do you not…?" Chandra sighed, uncrossed his arms and recrossed them the opposite way. "Never mind. I shouldn't expect any better from you."

What was preventing Agni from recognizing a nastika in human form and mistaking her for the world's most attractive Half like Teo had – Gandharva was a little hurt, just a little, that Teo had put him alone in a room with a woman like that and hadn't even come to check up on him to make sure the physical relationship remained a one-sided expression of violence like "Mari" must have promised her – was that said nastika had cloaking abilities to fool a god and hide their transcendental value. Any god but the source of the Darkness attribute to begin with, who for once might be on Gandharva's side, and clearly understood the depths of the problem they were faced with.

Ever the idiot, Agni continued digging his soon-to-be grave.

"She kind of reminds me of you, Chandra," Agni laughed. "If you were part sura, a woman, and way hotter. You love yourself enough I bet you're tempted."

It wasn't that he was wrong. Gandharva could see the way Chandra's gaze was fighting not to look and then got caught when he did, the same way his own eyes had stayed studiously concentrated on the floor or the fire god because when they weren't what they saw was…

Perfect.

Brahma or Visnu had wanted to play around with them all. Maybe Kali. Perfection from head to toe, the only thing that looked more perfect to him than Shakuntala.

Long hair the deep purple of pre-dawn, a deep, rich blanket of soft, saturated velvet. Skin the palest flush of translucent lilac and seemingly covered in fresh dew. Eyes ruby red, lips as full and colorful as ripe plums and shaped like a bow Vayu dreamt about being able to recreate, and that was just her face, her flat, uncaring, I challenge you, I dare you to make me part my lips and flutter my eyes closed and arc my unimpressed eyebrows up face-

Yeah, yeah, he was pathetic, Gandharva knew that, once he used every ounce of willpower he had to turn his imagination off. But he wasn't that pathetic. That was as far as the bad thoughts were going to get.

Way back when, so far back it was in those memories he'd chosen to forget with time, Makara had felt it his duty to offer to take the form he didn't prefer for the sake of making as powerful of a rakshasa as their clan could.

One glance, and Gandharva had forbidden him from turning female ever again, out of a deep and abiding fear of the consequences.

It was the type of beauty you couldn't distract yourself from, the type that inspired endless jealousy, the type that would make all the clan turn male to fight over and none of them would get a damn thing done besides killing each other or, quite literally, getting Makara done. If they were lucky.

It was a secret between the two of them, why there was such a power gap between king and second in command. Menaka was stronger as a male but had preferred female; Makara was the rare nastika stronger as a woman even without counting sex appeal but preferred being male, leaving Gandharva with both his backups in their weaker states by default.

And that had been a good thing for him, on many counts.

Makara would have lived as a woman if Gandharva had asked. Not out of love – Makara didn't know the meaning of the word, for sure – simply out of duty.

It was why Makara followed him to this day, because he'd known from the beginning Gandharva could be a good king and put clan above clam – no, that was a bad joke, he was going to kill himself for sure now – anyway, he had the wherewithal to put his people's wellbeing before his own, when it came down to it.

The only reason Makara wasn't beating Agni to a pulp for making lewd suggestions about him – her – was that there was a more important mission at stake. The haha, too bad, I can't leave here and there's no suitable women around so what can you do? mission.

Maybe, maybe Gandharva could deal with Makara on her own, had they been ruling over a clan with a healthy and stable population and neither had the nagging impulse at the back of their minds to help it get to that state.

As things stood – pun not intended – trying to fight Makara on his own while she wasn't wearing clothes was going to start with sura-type naked wrestling and very quickly end in the human way that neither of them actually wanted it to but Makara was convinced it needed to for some stupid, bullshit political reasons.

So right now? Right now all Gandharva could do was beg for help from beings that could close their eyes and go find enlightenment again and leave all thoughts of love and lust and pleasure at the top until Makara was bodily removed from the human realm.

"Umm…." Teo's voice cut in. She must have heard the news there was some fresh absurdity happening in her temple due to Gandharva and had come to check. "What's…. ahhh….Mari? Why are you…naked?"

When Agni laughed, it shook the room with force. Nobody had ever accused him of being a quiet god.

When Agni held in his laughter, the way he was doing now, he sent the energy out around him instead. The previously cool stone beneath them all warmed and cooled in the same tempo as heaving breaths.

"He, well, Teo, you know, it's no secret to any of us that if you and Gandharva were just a regular man and woman you'd be, you know…"

Gandharva didn't raise his head enough to observe whatever obscenely lurid motion Agni was probably making with his hands, because then he'd be overcome with the urge to make sure nobody but Yama got bothered by Agni's inane ramblings for the next few centuries, which would involve a perilous amount of time looking at things other than the safety of the floor.

"And if you think about it, I mean, we know the Halfs get affected by emotional resonance, and, umm, I think Clari's cousin here might be, you know, sharing the…the mood, now that she's so close to him."

He couldn't see Teo's face, but he could imagine it. The blank stare of processing information that separated them further from each other, wondering if it was possible to have the remotest bit in common with a creature like Gandharva, someone who, based on Agni's one hundred percent incorrect theory, had the innate power to make all lower life forms of vaguely similar nature irresistibly attracted to him until he locked himself up in the place all the gods agreed Agni belonged.

Horny Jail. That was what Marut had called it. She wasn't one of the more delicately-inclined creatures inhabiting the realm of the gods, in Gandharva's opinion.

"First off, she isn't my cousin, I've never seen her before," he heard Clari chime in, just as rude toward the gods in tone as she was towards her sura superiors. "And it can't be what you said. If I see any vulnerable body parts on that one on the floor there, all I'd feel is the urge to bite, and not in good way."

The reflexive, recoiling cringe he made at the mental image was the best antidote Gandharva had found so far to combat other, far more unspeakable mental images.

He felt something move next to him, another body coming close, warm, no…hot. Very hot. The temperature way.

"Why are you down here too?" Gandharva whispered, glancing to the side enough to see Agni bent over in a very similar position to himself.

"Brilith was looking inspired by what Clari said," Agni whispered back. "It feels safer down here."

"You're probably right," he replied, nodding a bit to himself.

When he'd imagined that one day there was a possibility he and Agni might support each other side by side in a fight, this…well, this definitely hadn't been how he was thinking. Actually, Chandra would probably be with them too if Laila were in the room.

"Makara," Chandra coughed out. "Put on some damned clothes. It's one thing to disrespect the temple of gods like me and Agni. This is a Primeval one we're talking about."

"Kali never seemed big on clothes herself," Makara spoke, voice beautiful as the rest of her, refreshing as spring rain with the gentle comfort behind it of waves breaking on a distant shore. "I think she'd approve."

Chandra couldn't argue with that. Neither could Agni, or Gandharva. First and foremost, Kali would approve of how much generalized chaos Makara's refusal to materialize clothing was causing.

It took a second for the other shoe to drop on Agni. When it did, there was mistaking it. His laugh was uncontainable, the type that Gandharva would bet had people on the other side of the world wondering why the fires were flickering in their hearths, the source of all flames having trouble inhaling the oxygen that made them burn. The god had to roll over onto his back where he laid on the floor and hug his stomach.

"M-Makara? What the – why are you…"

Agni's voice drifted away for a moment. "Right. I think I get it. We're all familiar with this situation."

"Good," Makara said, which she wouldn't be saying if she knew Agni better, and knew that whatever situation Agni was talking about, he'd made another entirely off-base assumption about what was going on. "Then all you need to do is ignore Gandharva's pathetic attempts to weasel out of helping with rebuilding our clan. I'm not here to make trouble for the rest of you."

"You know," Agni sighed, the measure of his misery obvious in the dimmed light of the fire warming the room. "There's times I think Ananta let himself get done in just to finally get a break from Sagara chasing after him."

While a highly plausible theory, in Gandharva's opinion, he failed to see how that observation had any connection at all to the impending doom of crossing lines with Makara they'd long ago sworn sickened them to think about.

"I mean, Makara, take it from me," Agni went on, getting back on his feet and approaching where she stood. "I know what it's like to feel like you might have to wait forever to find happiness with the only person you want it with. But I don't think using an excuse like repopulating is going to make things turn out the way you want."

There it was. Agni's newest entirely off-base assumption: Makara's black heart – it was black, Gandharva had seen it – was filled with a different type of love than subject for king.

If that were true, Gandharva would gladly see himself out of this world like Ananta had.

Deep purple lined in black rustled on the floor to his right. Makara was himself again. Gandharva's forehead removed itself from the floor to the sound of an otherworldly snarl from his friend's throat.

He scanned the room just in time for him to see a look mirrored across all the human faces that weren't Brilith's, a remembrance that no matter how almost-human the two nastika looked and how immaturely human they were presently behaving, they were very, very far from it.

"Agni," Makara said, voice laced with the threat of a thousand tortures, hands that were well-used to killing powerful things lacing themselves into red robes. "If you ever say something like that out loud again, I will find a way to kill you, and every time you make it out of hell, I'll hunt you down and send you right back. Gandharva will probably help."

He made a quick nod of confirmation to Makara's assertion.

"You were the one trying to drag him off to bed so badly," Agni complained, dumb as always, or maybe just playing it. Gandharva could never tell. He couldn't discount that the man had known how poorly Makara would take his words and had indeed done it on purpose, either to help Gandharva, or to help save the world from bad parenting. "What else did you expect me to think?"

"That some of us understand the concept of personal sacrifice," Makara spat. "We need to increase our population, we need this idiot's help, and he said he'd do it except for some flimsy excuse about being trapped here without any good women around."

"Liar," Gandharva cut in, finally able to get up on his feet and fight back. He saw Teo's hand twitch for her sword and wondered if it was him or Makara she wanted to stab first. "I said I wasn't going to, and you wouldn't shut up about it, so I said it wasn't worth fighting about right now anyway due to the small inconvenience of the rest of our clan being stuck in a separate dimension from me."

The fight started there. Re-started there. However you wanted to call it.

It didn't end there. It didn't end for a long time, not by human standards, anyway. For non-humans it wasn't so abnormal to argue for days straight when you wanted to. It wasn't like they had to eat or sleep in between and when things got personal, well…there was a lot of old history to rehash.

By the time the light outside had fallen low and Agni had lit all the candles at once and all the humans in the room had learned a plethora of strange details about the biology and practices of a sometimes-similar, sometimes-alien race and any secrets Gandharva or Makara had been hoping to keep from others had been announced to the world, the argument had gone approximately nowhere.

Not until Agni's woman interrupted, laughing so hard all of a sudden he and Makara both stopped to stare at her while she was overcome with uncharacteristically girlish giggles.

"Sorry," she recovered, waving her hand at her face like she was too hot. She got close to him, very close, put her hand out and touched his cheek almost affectionately. Gandharva saw the opposite of affection glaring back at him in Agni's eyes. "If I didn't know you two as I do, I think most of this would be too big a shock to me to feel anything else."

She nodded towards the other humans, Teo, for one, looking confused over how and why the relatively-young priestess thought she knew two nastika so well, because it was one of those things that couldn't be said, not in front of people who didn't know, not unless you had permission.

"And if I were them," she said, jerking her chin at the two gods still standing next to each other. "I suppose all this inane drama would be old news, and not so funny to hear for the fifth time. But for me…"

She drifted off, and Gandharva really wished she'd stop touching his face, because he didn't think Agni was planning on staying still much longer.

"It's the first time since I remembered that something's given me such a long break from what's in my own mind." She gave his cheek a final pat. "I didn't realize how much I'd love hearing embarrassing stories about you told in front of the last person you'd want hearing them. So I'll help you out a bit."

Gandharva didn't suspect Brilith of lying, exactly. He also didn't suspect she liked him enough after the past few hours to really want to help. She'd give him help, of a sort, that he probably wouldn't want, help in the same way the goddess of the temple they were standing in would define the term.

"Makara," she said. "Either you can go peacefully, or I'll make you go."

Makara didn't do much, just treated Brilith to the same I can't believe I have to deal with this idiot stare he usually gave Gandharva and turned to address her god.

"Agni," he said. "Your feral pet is very arrogant. You need to remind her that giving you the power you need to kill me will probably kill her first."

"Agni won't need to fight for me," Brilith cut in.

"Don't tell me you're so arrogant you think you can do it on your own?"

She shook her head.

"That red bird that used to follow Gandharva around came back to find me after a long…" she drifted off again, smiled to herself. "After a long time away. He's trapped here too. He stays not far out of the city. Garudas have good eyesight. He'll see it if I send a signal."

She tapped her staff on the ground for emphasis, fire threatening to shoot out and off into the sky to summon Maruna, which would be a weirder turn of events than Gandharva kneeling down in front of gods and praying earlier in the day, he was pretty sure.

"In this dimension, you wouldn't stand a chance against a fifth stage rakshasa," she finished, glibly, almost sweetly.

Yeah, so, Brilith currently hated all the non-humans in the room with her. They couldn't forget that. After seeing how entertaining it was to watch Makara and Gandharva torment each other all day, she wanted to make sure Agni didn't miss out on the fun. That was his conclusion.

Based on the fire god's face, the implication that his love-of-many-lifetimes had some kind of secretive, special relationship with Maruna was working very well.

While Agni may have been the target, truthfully, Gandharva didn't think anyone in the room, most of whom had various levels of grudges against the not-so-little kid, had escaped without taking some degree of mental damage from the revelation.

Chandra, surely, had his time in the spotlight coming. He was smart enough to know it, if the way he was eyeing the nearest window was any indication.

Gandharva closed his eyes, trying his best to figure out if Brilith was just lying in order to be hurtful or if there was a chance she was telling the truth in some form.

If she was…if she was, it was about time he had a not-father to not-son talk with Mr. Chickenhead about how killing Brilith in a couple previous lives when Agni hadn't seen and Gandharva hadn't known was one thing, but stealing her right out from under his nose was like, so stupid of an idea it must have created an extra dimension because none of the others could handle that level of unfathomable idiocy.

From what Gandharva had…gently encouraged out…he was going to put it that way, yeah, from what he'd gently encouraged out of Maruna, the boy had been stuck on that one bad egg in his clan.

Samphati didn't have any real similarities to Brilith beyond being women who were frequently angry, and suras tended to be incredibly picky about type in a certain kind of way.

Unless – well, unless it was the attitude, he supposed. That would put another piece of the puzzle neatly into place. Neatly, but unpleasantly. Namely, the question of why Maruna had been so willing to follow Sagara's directions.

Samphati, Brilith, Sagara, there was kind of a clear pattern, if you thought about it, something like, overpowered women with grudges against the world and a questionable grasp on sanity.

Poor Maruna. It felt like he belonged there with them, in Gandharva's Exclusive Extra Pathetic Club.

Gandharva groaned and rubbed at his temples, trying to block out the not-entirely-figurative meltdown Agni was having over in the corner.

First off, he was going to assume he shouldn't sneak up on Maruna and Sagara together under the assumption they were plotting. They'd probably be doing something else, and Gandharva could live without a perfectly-preserved-into-perpetuity memory of witnessing that abomination stuck in his head.

Worse, now that he knew Brilith had, for some reason, seen Sagara undressed, he had to wonder if there was a connection between that, and what they were doing with Maruna, maybe separately, maybe together, after all this time Gandharva had thought he'd heard it all, but no, no, there were things out there that could shock him yet.

Second, he really hated Sagara. He didn't know how Maruna could possibly do this to him, knowing Gandharva wanted to kill her most times he thought about her. Mostly, he was held back out of a shred of empathy for the sole female member of his extra pathetic club.

On the bright side, this meant there wasn't a single thought about Shakuntala that her father wouldn't approve of floating around in that bird's brain. He was willing to call it a wash.

------------

Maruna's ear twitched. His actual ear, not the appendages he'd lost when he'd grown that most people had thought were his ears.

His head picked up from where it was resting, on top of a blonde one, which itself was resting against his shoulder.

People would still be suspicious of Samphati being out of control. Until things calmed down some and could get properly explained, it was best for both of them to lie low and not attract attention from the wide variety of individuals who might want them dead.

And since they were stuck up on a mountaintop together, most days feeling like there was no future and the ones that didn't feeling like the future was theirs to decide with their elders as good as gone, Akasha's my daughters are reserved for nastikas rule had been conveniently forgotten.

Even after she recovered, Samphati was probably a little too crazy for anyone who hadn't seen her back when she was happy. After what he'd been through himself, the same was probably true in reverse.

So for now, they had each other, and a lonely mountainside outside of Kalibloom, where Ran had told Maruna was probably best to wait because with Gandharva, you never really knew.

Ran must have sent a letter to the temples to say not to murder him on sight, please, because after only a billion years of wearing him down, humanity had domesticated a sura. His original human, somehow, was a priestess sharing this time with him, the one he'd almost killed in Atera.

She'd gotten her memories back. She'd come to find him. Thank…he didn't think his species was supposed to thank the gods, but in this case, it felt appropriate to thank a specific one, she had not come to tell him that she was still creepily stalking him with unrequited love through the ages, but just to say hello, ask a few questions, and tell him they could be friends, maybe, when she sorted through her feelings – not those feelings, morality-feelings – about distant past-present Maruna and temporally-past-two-decades Maruna.

He was fine with that. He was kind of doing the same.

She'd told him she was glad he'd learned to smile, and sad he'd lost his not-ears, which she'd considered his most expressive feature. She'd agreed with Ran he should stay outside Kalibloom.

"What is it?" Samphati finally asked.

They didn't talk a whole lot, because neither of them felt the need to fill in each and every moment of silence with chatting. Amazingly, after living this fucking long, he was pretty sure he'd run out of things he felt needed to be said about his life in about a tenth of the time that Ran had before he'd accidentally lived for way longer than humans were supposed to. And that was if Maruna was feeling particularly talkative.

True to himself, he didn't say anything back, only shook his head.

Maruna had a sixth sense. To be technical, he had a seventh sense. Sixth sense was for detecting cloaking, which he had, so the extra, idiosyncratic sense he'd added along the way, something like a unique transcendental, was his seventh sense.

He couldn't see Gandharva from where he was. He knew he was in the city, was as sure as he could be that he was in the one temple unless he'd wiggled his way out of captivity, so somewhere in there, in that temple, Gandharva was doing something – specifically, thinking about something that might ruin Maruna's life. He could feel it.

Gandharva was there, Agni was with him, their fusion transcendental was to combine their idiocy exponentially and not additively, and of all the places to be idiots, they had to be doing it in the temple dedicated to Chaos.

Honestly? Maruna was beginning to think he should have just stayed in that one fucking cave and never come back out.

#kubera #kubera webtoon #one last god kubera #many crack ships #most of them falsely imagined #maruna's OT3 #please come discuss this series with me I'm begging you #I'll write literally anything #as long as it's crack

[erstwhilesparrow]

what's double life, sparrow? it almost sounds like a dnd podcast title jsdfgkjh

reyni, i would like to preface this by saying that i'm genuinely delighted and flattered by your consistent efforts to reach out / discuss shared interests, and that i hope my responses reasonably convey how much i like seeing you in my inbox. i appreciate you! :]

that said. i regret to inform you double life is not a dnd podcast; it is a minecraft roleplay series on youtube. double life is the third season of what i think we're calling the life series, where a bunch of creators scheme, collect resources, and fight to the death on a very small map. the goal is to hold on to your limited number of lives longer than everyone else, and the prize is [???]. (the prize is you have fun fucking around with your friends, and a lot of people on the internet get very sad about your roleplay character.) i have seen double life be described by turns as a telenovela, a sitcom, and a minecraft gay marriage simulator. i really really like it, and in particular i'm a huge fan of the way they do soulmates, but i will put that under a cut for reasons of [talking a lot about something that is not really directly answering the question]. i'm (not very) sorry that i keep reblogging fanart that makes silly youtube videos look all edgy and serious :P

hi there, welcome to the space underneath the readmore! the thing about double life is its shiny new conceit, the thing that makes it different from previous seasons of the life series, is (:sparkles:) soulmates! each player is "soulbound" to one other player, and what this means mechanically is that when one of them takes damage, the other person takes that same amount of damage. what this means narratively, on the other hand, has widely varied depending on the creator / soulbound pair.

i've tried describing this set-up to multiple people without mentioning the minecraft component and the thing that particular exercise has thrown into sharp focus is that "person who feels your physical pain (and only your physical pain)" is. not necessarily a very conventional definition of soulmate. and the thing i keep ending up at is that i kind of adore that fact? it gets dressed up in language and behaviour we typically use when dealing with romantic relationships (some characters refer to their soulbound partners as their "crazy exes", others find their partner and immediately start flirting with them, i mean even just the fact that they call this being soulmates) but it is so important to me that the soulbond is fundamentally a game mechanic.

it's completely arbitrary who gets paired with who, and i know that none of the creators went into this game with the goal of picking apart the whole way people often think about romance, but the fact of its randomness combined with the ways the players talk about the bond is so deeply appealing to me for a soulmate story because i think it opens up avenues and / or spaces for discussing aspects of romantic relationships i am personally very interested in exploring?

i've thought for a long time about soulmate stories, because i'm invested in Doing Weird Shit to romance tropes (see: that summer i wrote what is to date my longest published fic about hanahaki But Make It Weirder) and this is sure one of them! i know there are other people -- on tumblr even! -- who are interested in this too, but i've never been totally satisfied with the stories i've seen?

like, obviously, just playing the trope straight throws me off because it constantly feels... too easy? like it shouldn't have worked out that neatly? it typically assumes a certain amount of... natural importance to romance that i don't agree with? but the ones that try to complicate the trope have also never quite clicked for me. the closest i've gotten to being able to say why is... i think they are often "what if soulmates existing sucked for this one specific person because [this person isn't their soulmate's soulmate / this person is in love with someone who isn't their soulmate / this person doesn't seem to have a soulmate at all / this person is aro which comes with its own set of potential complications]?" and there's. it feels like a personal problem? one that that specific person has to [repress / ignore / cope with / solve]? and that, on top of being wildly depressing, just. doesn't ring true or feel interesting to me?

because sometimes [gestures broadly at the whole thing of dating / relationships / falling in love] is good for people! it works out for them, and they genuinely are getting things they need / want out of it even though it's not perfect! i care about stories that can play around with that! i don't care about stories where this works out fairy-tale-happy-ending perfect, but i do care about what it takes to get to this being Good For You, what those types of people might fail to consider when they assess other people's relationships, the very subtle ways things can go wrong in a relationship because parties involved have been told their whole lives that this thing they're doing is Good and Correct and The Only Way, what it looks like to feel that pressure toward a romantic relationships and attempt to conform to those expectations, and so on. there are so many different ways to be hurt here! and that sort of thing just. doesn't fit into either of the models of soulmate stories i've described above?

but double life! double life has So Much of that! it's so delicious! there's such a range in the way that the players approach the bond, and it's so so fun and useful as a springboard for thinking about and illustrating -- in the [greatly exaggerated for funsies but nevertheless reflective of real parts of our society] way of sci-fi / fantasy fiction -- so many of the ways people approach romance, outside of the binary of [Perfect And Good] and [Just The Shittiest Ever]. and, again, i cannot imagine any of the creators set out to On Purpose say any of the stuff i've described here -- it was improv and playing around and friends trying out new stories to tell. but they give themselves over to an arbitrary system for defining their relations to each other, and some struggle to fit themselves to it and others don't, and we as the audience can see just how arbitrary it is but we and they find meaning regardless, and none of them think to say, "hey, what if we just gave up on every single piece of this system entirely?" and in the end it all falls apart anyway, because separate from being a soulmate story it was also a death game and it was never not going to be a tragedy. i care So Much about it. despite this being the season where the rules of the game themselves seemed to intertwine themselves with the concept of love, it was also the season where the power of love failed, where everything unravelled not despite but because of it.

#chattering sparrow #thanks for the ask! good opportunity for me to talk about things i've just been rolling around in my brain for the past uh. six months. #i just. wow. double life smp you own my entire heart. #i do not feel as awkward for talking this much as i otherwise might because i suspect this is at least loosely relevant to #some of your interests reyni

[powderedwhiteviolets]

some vents abt recovery that i'm gonna place under the cut, feel free to scroll past

i wish i was one of those girls with a regular appetite. the kind who leave a bite or two on their plate because they're just "so full!". the kind who only eat a few meals a day and never snack. the kind who always make the right food choices and only have a brownie twice a month. the kind who don't think about food until it's time to eat. the kind who doesn't have to actively compensate for bigger meals because they automatically do it by nature. everyone around me keeps urging me to "trust my body" in recovery but how can i trust my body when it feels like it actively wants to make me obese? my body supposedly wants to keep me alive and healthy and yet at the same time it feels like it doesn't know what's good for it. my extreme hunger phase of recovery has passed since i'm able to be satiated by meals and snacks but i still eat so much...i've abandoned my tracking apps but the numbers still tally automatically in my head. i'm hitting close to 3k calories most days. the recommended govt intake for women is 2k. i have an active job and average 15k steps a day in the span of a week but i feel like that barely justifies anything. i try to exercise at the gym even though my history with it is disordered and while i love the rush of serotonin doing it gives me that voice telling me i'm not doing enough and should be pushing myself harder are starting to creep back in.

i'm weight restored, i don't want to keep gaining weight. i know it takes longer than 3 months to learn regular healthy eating patterns after coming from both 2 years of a restrictive eating disorder and whatever the fuck i was doing with food in my late teens, but...i'm still so scared. i know i can't even go back to restricting. i don't want to go back to being sick and miserable and weak and on the verge of fainting multiple times a day. i don't want to go back to self imposed isolation for the sake of arbitrary calorie limits.

it's just so hard.

#why wasn't i one of the lucky ones #i'm overwhelmed. i'm tired. i feel like i'm pushing a massive boulder up the worlds steepest hill #and it never goddamn ends #every day i wake up and i fucking eat (regrettably) #tw ed #personal

[greyeyedmonster-18]

Hey Grey! Would you have any tips on how to keep notes of every character in a long series? I only really have experiences with short stories but I’ve been working on a long piece for a while and I have a TON of random jotted down info about each of the characters, quirks, plot points, quotes, etc but I’m struggling categorizing them/finding them when I need to? It’s all jumbled up on a single draft file. Idk if I made myself clear at all in this question? Also, you’re not obligated to answer, ofc!!

Hi sweetie, nonny.

uhm, first, full disclosure, i am the most disorganized person on the planet (when it comes to everything that isn't career related and then i'm a whole other person). writing included. i ask my teenage son to remember things for me because i simply can't

but HERE are some tips/things i do when i write?:

-i make up an arbitrary chapter count (ten reasons was the easiest because...10. but for others i literally pick a random number and then adjust if needed) and put this at the top of the document (or create a new one). if i write a bit of dialogue that i know comes later, then will drop it in the outline under a later chapter and adjust (ex: for ten reasons, i wrote their kissing scene pretty early on and then dumped it in the outline at chapter 7. as i developed more of the story, i moved it.)

-if you have plot points, plug them into the chapter count! (i believe this is what one calls an outline)

-knowing and loving your characters is so important. this is probably the area i spend the most time in, and I'll literally go into a separate document and just...hang out with them. So if you have a list of character quirks or quotes or anything for a specific character, use a separate document! (I personally use the sticky notes app on my computer and then color code it so brain remembers PINK is for character stuff). Go back to that document when you need it.

-ctrl find in your document is your best friend. use it. (you can always use a tagging system. this isn't creative writing related, but when i write for academia i always use the word insert when i want to come back to something, which is helpful when i'm working on 30 page papers. so i can cntrl find insert and everything i wanted to address later comes up). create a system that works for you!

-I'm sure writers who are far better than i have everything neatly lined up. but i honestly work on one big document (except for character stuff) that isn't even titled and work in tiers, so as you scroll down, there's more and more clarity.

But also, if you want to talk writing/support feel free to DM me and I'm happy to try my best to help! My process is so imperfect and it's messy and even in academia my professors want to toss me across the room because my "system" makes no sense to them (and then i fart out brilliance and they're left stunned and speechless because they saw what was behind the curtain). but i encourage all and anyone in their writing endeavors and will happily provide support in any way possible

xoxoxoxo

#asks #ask me anything #writing support and help

[traumacatholic]

hey, first of all thanks so much for having a blog where you share lots of free sources with people!! :)

idk if you answer questions like this but your pinned mentions trying to help those who want to convert so i thought it'd not be too inappropriate to ask!

i've also been raised in an atheist/agnostic household and i have been in search of a faith that i can feel drawn to & believe in on and off since i was a teen, i'm now in my early twenties. recently, i really feel drawn to christianity with catholicism resonating the most with me.

the problem is though, i wish to believe, I don't feel like this is something i can control. i keep approaching the scripture literally and find myself lacking faith in the existence of God and doubting the idea of one true religion. when i tried to talk to my theistic friends (both Christian and other religions) about this and learn if they had experienced something similar and still managed to believe, their answers made me feel even more inadequate for faith.

since you mention you also come from a formerly atheist background, i wanted to ask if it is something you can relate to and/or offer any advice? i don't want to be "dabbling in" a religion that actually means a lot to other or "be faking it" if it makes sense but also i have no clue why i want to believe, so yeah. sorry this got a bit long, thank you!!

I think it's really understandable to be in a position of having an interest in a faith, and wanting to kind of experience it, and also having a kind of feeling that you're intruding. As much as I love reading about people's journeys with the faith, and how they came to the faith, I do also find a lot of them quite alienating. They don't speak to my experiences, and there's naturally the divide between how I experience and relate to things and how someone else does. But it's important to remember that as much as we might be able to relate or not relate to someone's faith, their path isn't the path that we can follow (for better or for worse).

We're all coming from very different backgrounds, with very different experiences and goals. Any convert (or potential convert) can come to the faith from a myriad of different angles. One kind of shared fear, that at least a fair number (if not all) converts experience is that kind of 'what if I'm just dabbling?' 'What if I'm disrespecting the faith because I don't actually believe in it?' 'What if I'm approaching the faith in the wrong way?'. But it's important to remember that everyone has to start somewhere.

When we grow up, we experiment with different hobbies and with different games and so on. Some of these hobbies we will never return to, and others we might really grow our life around. But we still had to take the risk of engaging with it and finding out if it was for us. And while religion and hobbies are very different things, we still have the same kind of risks. We still have to actually experience it in order to decide if this is something we want to continue pursuing - and this is a decision that we have to keep making. We all stumble, we all end up on very different journeys from where we first started.

Reading about Catholicism is very different from actually experiencing it- and it very much is a living faith that does need to be experienced. Reading a book on the Mass can be intellectually (and even spiritually) stimulating, but it's still not the same as actually going to Mass. If we hold back from experiencing those things until we cross some arbitrary threshold of seriousness in our head, then we're naturally impending our journey to seeing and living the faith. The same goes for things such as prayer, it can be very easy to fall back to 'I should only pray when I actually believe that prayer helps'. But things like prayer are something we have to get comfortable with. It can feel very unnatural the first few times that we do it, and we're restricting ourselves from the free flowing dialogue that can be really helpful in understanding our own thoughts and feelings.

I think a lot of people at some point (and even multiple times) on their faith journey have to tackle with questions of whether they're just faking it. Sometimes faith is dragging yourself up out of bed and going to Mass even though you feel like you're getting nothing out of it. Even though you feel like your prayers aren't going anywhere and it's just bells and incense. It's a conscious decision, that can definitely be eased with feelings of connection to God. But those feelings are never essential. As for knowledge about the faith, the faith is so rich that it is impossible for anyone to perfectly know even most of the faith. We all fall short in our understanding of different concepts, whether we want to admit that or not. Catholicism is not some exam that you have to pass to enter into.

For me, I find Scripture is best experienced in the Mass and in diving into specific topics. Where I might spend some time enriching my understanding of Mercy, and reading books that draw from numerous verses. Of course, reading the Bible is important. But what's also important is context. The context of the Mass, the context of the other books of the Bible, the context of the language that it was originally written in. And these can very much be missing when we just pick up a Bible and try reading through it from cover to cover (or even just picking out Books at random). That's not to say that there isn't benefit to reading the Bible in this way, but you might find it a lot more helpful to engage with the Bible through the readings at Mass or through something like a study guide. The Bible in a Year by Ascension Presents might be a good starting point.

I would also recommend looking into RCIA, and resources that are aimed for those entering into RCIA. This is the process that people go through in order to convert to Catholicism either from other religions (or no religion) or from other denominations. I must stress that there is absolutely no requirement that you absolutely must be Baptised and Confirmed at the end of it. When I was going through RCIA most of the people in my group had actually been through it before, and for one reason or another decided to go through the program again rather than going ahead with Confirmation.

My best advice, would be to just start getting involved in the community. Even if you find out further down the road that this isn't for you, you're still going to have benefitted from these experiences. Start going to Mass, start developing a prayer routine, start engaging with theological books. If you can, I'd also encourage you to get involved in any Church groups that you can attend. Making real life friends in the faith can be so beneficial, and these groups can be really helpful in growing in our understanding and putting our faith into practice.

But please also be patient with yourself, and understand that some of this is going to involve steps back, periods of not feeling the feelings we might have expected, periods of awkwardness. You're not dabbling in the faith by trying to grow in understanding of it. And the fact that you're concerned about this shows that you're being respectful about it.

[ghostbustermelanieking]

oddly specific memories i have of listening to tma

in honor of the finale, and because i am a sentimental asshole, i bring you this potentially uninteresting and completely pointless list. i'm gonna miss this show a lot

half my original reasoning for listening to the podcast was to motivate me to walk on the treadmill. this did not work. but i did it the first time, when i was going through the trailers and anglerfish, and i remember the room where my dad keeps the treadmill is really dark and the spooky chanting sort of freaked me out

after the treadmill, i ended up listening to the bulk of the first four episodes on the couch, and halfway through i let my oldest cat, winnie, who always lived outside (i know, i was very against actually keeping her outside) in the house. and she jumped up on the couch with me, which she literally never did. (she was very grumpy and not super affectionate.) i had that cat since i was five, and she passed last june, and i really miss her. quarantine kind of gave us the opportunity to hang out with her a lot, because we were home so much. so i'm glad these memories are kind of intersected in my mind. (below: a pic i have from that day.)

my friend sarah relistened along with me the first time around, which was extraordinarily sweet of her, and also led to some interesting interactions. for example: she forgot when it was revealed that sasha was dead, so she accidentally spoiled that for me when i asked when the others would find sasha (and i spent all of season 2 just like. anxiously vibrating over this fact). she also made this post, when i was still in like early first half of season 1, and my immediate thought was "oh no martin is dead." i hadnt even MET martin at this point

back in early quarantine, my mom had this rule that we had to do something new every day (to keep away the depression... ha ha). anyways, all i wanted to do in my free time was sit around and listen to tma (and also watch this show i was into on netflix), so i came up with some lame excuses, one of which was "i'll give myself a pedicure." this led to the memory i ultimately associate with mag 56 (trevor herbert 2) being me sitting out on our roof balcony thing, giving myself a horrendous pedicure

another time, my family wanted to go play tennis, and they brought me along and brought a hammock for me to lay in. there was this excess material from the hammock, and the sun was in my eyes, so i ended up pulling it up and over me to block the sun and creating this ridiculous hammock cocoon thing. one of the episodes i listened to that day? "tucked in."

before i ever started the show, my friend sarah stayed with me while i was pet sitting. i remember when she got there, she'd just listened to 150 and was telling me how freaky it was (she was still trying to get me into the show), and she was like "of course we're staying on a CUL DE SAC." (that was also the weekend she watched us for the first time and was very upset because i slept through the whole thing, which is scary when you're staying somewhere by yourselves.) anyways, i spent the whole show waiting for the scary cul de sac episode

while i was listening to the show for the first time, my step-dad (an artist) started painting an EYE on the door downstairs near my bathroom. a fucking EYE. he didn't finish it til i had finished the show. but still weird!!

i binged like 12 episodes in one day to finish season 4, which is not impressive at all, but it's still my personal record. i just remember staying up late in my dark bedroom (til like.... 11 i'm lame and i go to bed early), listening to like 158 & 159 & 160 and just being knocked on my ass by how good it all was... i was SUPER spoiled by this point, through my own fault, and i knew exactly what was coming, but actually experiencing it was nuts

the second week i listened live was 167, where the public release was delayed by a couple hours by accident. i spent like 20 minutes refreshing spotify, thinking it was broken, before going on tumblr and seeing what the deal was. (and 167 remains one of my favorites of s5 because i remember just going "thank god it was worth the wait.")

this one car ride where sarah and i made some of our friends listen to the first three episodes of the show. it was the middle of the night and we were just like blasting down i40 listening to anglerfish and do not open etc

the night the what the ghost episode publicly dropped was the night after my graduation, and i was sleeping out on the couch in the living room so my grandfather could sleep in a bed. it was super dark, and i am a jumpy person, and i Remember being mildly disgusted with myself because the corny sound effects were actually freaking me out. (i think i mightve actually seen something weird that night, maybe, but that's another story.)

the weekend my parents moved me into college, we couldn't get the cable in the house we were staying in, and we were all sitting around doing nothing, so i jokingly suggested starting tma with them, and they were like ok grace. my step-dad promptly fell asleep and my mom zoned out -- which is probably good, she doesn't like horror and she's super claustrophobic, so it's probably better we never got to do not open

my brief roommate in college talked about how she was into those youtube channels where people just read scary stories, so of course i was like try tma out. so she listened to the first episode on her own, and we were out one night, and she started mag 02 while i went into an ice cream place. she was into it (she kept being like open it, ya pussy) and wanted to keep listening while we went home, and even back in our room. i had only been in town for a couple weeks, and barely knew my way around, but i also didn't want to turn the gps on and be interrupted every five seconds. so i tried to find our way back on my own. it took the entirety of mag 03, and into mag 04, before i did it. so now i will forever associate across the street with all those wrong turns i took in a dark, semi unfamiliar city, trying to get back to our college without a gps

the day of the early drop for 179 was the day i moved back home from college -- a five hour drive by myself. i ended up listening to it on the final stretch of the trip, when i was super tired and it was dark and i knew it'd probably be a crazy episode. just me full blasting down i40, drinking an energy drink (which i never do) through a hole punched in the top, listening to daisy's death

186 early dropped the day after initial u.s. election day (when we still didn't know anything). my mom had set up a "watch party" in the living room with these giant air mattresses, and we all sort of spent the day crowded around the TV watching the numbers. not much of a memory, but i remember sitting on that air mattress and listening to martin's monologue in the midst of that messy week

i had a virtual therapy appointment on the day of 187's early drop, and my dad was home, so i drove to an empty parking lot to do the session in some privacy. i was trying to listen to the episode before the session started, so i ended up listening to the last half sitting in my car, in the pouring rain, just staring at my radio in shock (187 remains one of my favorite s5 episodes)

my friend sarah had just come home for winter break the day 189 dropped, and we decided to listen together, just like driving around in circles drinking coffee and listening and speculating on whether or not that was really martin

i started my relisten right after thanksgiving and was just kind of blowing through fast as i could through the whole of december. i had to go back to college to empty out my dorm, and i went to the beach after, and i ended up listening to mag 11 while just like walking around in circles in the tide pools. the closer it got to christmas, the more christmassy i wanted to keep things, so i would like. listen in the mornings and turn on one of those Netflix fireplaces and get all cozy

my other friend went with me on a mini bagel road trip in december, and he was still trying to get caught up, so we listened to mag 169, 170, and 171 on the drive home. (by this point, i was accustomed enough to s5 and smiting scenes to automatically reach for the volume controls when jude perry and jared hopworth died.)

when i relistened to mag 47, i was sitting with my cat beezus. i paused the episode to write this big long meta, so i was in a different headspace when i pressed play again. jon immediately yelled for sasha and i immediately jumped, and beezus gave me a searing glare and just got up and left

i relistened to piecemeal while i was cooking, which i thought was kind of funny and also disgusting

after christmas, i got into the habit of bringing my cat georgia into my room in the mornings, and she'd crawl under the covers with me while i listened to tma

one story i've always liked to tell from my first listen is how when i first listened to the meat arm grinder episode, my dad asked me to help him cook hamburgers later that day and explained how hamburgers are ground up (to my disgust). i hit meat grinder in my relisten and um. you'll never fucking guess what i made for lunch that day

so i had all these arbitrary rules for myself when i started tma last april, and i've broken like all of them. i started listening to tma while virtually working -- you just pull it up on your computer and it works. (i got the life scared out of me when one of my coworkers started talking over the podcast, wondering who it was that had walked into jon's office and why he wasn't reacting and why i didn't remember it.) i also started listening a lot while driving, which led to several long meta posts i wrote being typed up in a parking lot somewhere

i spent the entirety of 194 anxious-cuddling georgia. (i tried to do this for 198 and then didn't have any anxiety to cuddle her over.) i fully plan on doing this for 200, where i am sure i will need it again

my favorite place to listen to tma probably ended up being the roof room at my mom's, and unless something goes awry, this is where i will listen to the finale. (with georgia, of course.)

this list is super uninteresting, like i said, but here it is. i'm gonna miss this show a lot. i can't wait to return to it, later in life, and make all new listening memories in the process

#the magnus archives #personal #food mention tw #pet death tw

[deedee-sims]

About what you said to that anon, what level of polys do you usually avoid? I'm always worried about that, playing on a laptop and all. I keep it under 10k, but it's a totally arbitrary number, probably just because I'm used to think in terms of metric system, I guess. Another biggie for me are cars, custom or maxis, because some ts2 maxis itens are still quite high, but I guess there's no way around it with something as detailed as cars.

Hi! I don’t have a limit or anything (as I said, my computer fortunately can handle them), but I think hairs above 20k poly are too much. I have a couple of them, but I’ll try to replace them when I find something similar. I don’t really have any custom cars though!

#Anonymous #replies