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alyjojo · 8 months

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Advice to Work on Yourself 🤷🏽‍♀️ in October 2023: Capricorn

Ace of Swords rev - 8 Cups - 2 Swords

Regarding: 10 Pentacles rev

This is a career reading, you dream of leaving the job you’ve been at, because things feel unstable and the people around you aren’t very cooperative. Especially a boss. They’re probably friendly to your face but also snide, competitive, like snakes in the grass…rattlesnake could be a side nod to that feeling, validating you. You dream of disappearing without a word, finding something else, more suited for you, and not even telling these people to fk off, just letting them perish in this dumpster fire 🔥 they’ve probably created by being incompetent.

You don’t want to fight, compete, have to stand up for yourself, it’s like this situation is just bs and you shouldn’t have to deal with it. I’m getting this whole ordeal is karmic, where it’s going to lead you (or push you to go) or what you’ll learn from it is exactly what’s supposed to happen. In the thick of it though, it’s very frustrating, and you’re being validated about that. The advice is your desire needs to meet practical action, in order to avoid a Tower, or a complete destruction of a current foundation. Meaning if you have house/car payments, kids, rent, whatever, protect those, and plan your moves, don’t just impulsively decide “I’m done” and bail like you probably fantasize about. I don’t think I even need to tell a Cap that fr, it’s not like you. You do seem to be supported in leaving something behind, transforming yourself and your career in new ways, shedding old skins and moving away from things that are unstable in your life. Could be a home, a job, a relationship, a parent figure. Career is the main story, but apply it however.

But do the responsible thing. That’s what you do. And listen to your intuition, because Pink Cat on The Fool shows you not doing that, and that’s what can cause additional karmic consequences. Do things for the right reason - they’re unstable. Move towards *better*, not just new, to get out of there. Step by logical step. You don’t want to go from one bind to another one, getting serious about taking charge of your life & career are Justice, it’s the right thing and you’re right on how you feel about it, or probably the people around you. It’s also possible this is showing you needing to speak with HR, if that’s available to you, or The Emperor can be another boss on a higher level that needs to hear about what’s going on, to take this literally. If one is a fool, move up the chain, until someone hears you.

Animal Oracle: Rattlesnake 🐍

“The experiences that you’re presently going through are an initiation into fulfilling your purpose as a healer.”

The foundation for compassion is an awareness that suffering is a natural part of life, whether through the empathetic appreciation of another being’s pain or the experiences of having suffered oneself. And which beings haven’t at times felt the pain and sorrow that is an aspect of living? The deeper you go into the soul of another, the more you can feel what they feel, yet paradoxically maintain a certain distance or objectivity. A true Healer must heal from the heart, no matter what technological, logistical, physical, or shamanic tools they use. The experiences that you’re going through now or have just completed are all a preparation for you to open your heart to the suffering around you and do your part in alleviating it. You’ll find that you’re increasingly being asked to offer your time and energy to help heal others - including not only people, but also animals, plant beings, and the Earth. Some of this healing power will also go to mend the rifts that exist between ethnicities & cultures.

You’ll notice more and more how often your hands will spontaneously feel energized, experiencing it as heat or a tingling sensation. This is the Power of Spirit working through you. Allow it to guide you in whatever the focus of your healing is, whether simply placing a hand on the shoulder of a friend, or more extensively and directly involving yourself in another being’s health.

Artist Oracle: GEORGIA O’KEEFFE

- Nature can keep a secret.

- Keep Freud guessing.

- You can’t run away from yourself, but running away from others can be quite productive.

Advice:

- Broaden Your Cultural Horizons

- Protect Your Loved Ones and Your Assets

Charms:

Dress 👗 on Wheel of Fortune can be hobbies, other people, this can show a player mentality with Knight of Wands following, or with the Cultural Horizons card, a hobby or some sort of niche/artistic interest could hold the key to the path you decide to go down next. Could be foreign, travel, something very different than what you’re used to. Ballet, fashion, costumes, acting, theater, dancing in general could be involved, doesn’t have to be. New passions lead new places. Separately, there could be issues with a dress code, or hobbies, maybe too casual an air relating to work. If related to Halloween, people may dress up/down in ways that are just…cringe, to you. I get you’re surrounded by clowns at work 🤡 Or you feel that way at least.

Pink Cat rev 🐈 on The Fool show you not listening to your inner voice when you make spontaneous exciting decisions, and it needs to be more of a heart & mind combined decision, than a rushing into things without a clue sort of energy. Strange energy for you. That could be a lesson learned. If something inside is saying NO, or whatever it’s saying, listen to that. It’s your Spirit trying to guide you. Take leaps of faith, but do it consciously, well aware of what you’re doing and what you need, listening to what your soul is saying it needs that you’re not getting. Follow that, not just some new thing, because it’s new.

Butterfly 🦋 on 8 Cups shows transformation in your life, shedding of the skin, old lovers, old habits, old ways of being, maybe patterns of communication with the following cards. Communication may be an issue for you. You could also leave without saying a word, or have. It’s something on your mind, but you aren’t clear enough about where that leads. If a party or something makes you uncomfortable, you could just bail, and others could be pissed at you for not explaining or defending yourself. Discomfort is clear, if you’re in the midst of a major transformation and still stuck in an old pattern somehow, or that’s what you’re being led, to shed. Poetry 🥳

Helm 🛳️ on Broaden Your Cultural Horizons is the same as Wheel of Fortune, but one that you direct more than Spirit. They just help. This is the most advice of all of the advice, expanding your horizons, doing things you consider different. Ethnically, culturally, possibly literally moving locations, or something just *different* to you. Moving in this direction is the right path, and what comes next comes in after you start moving, or get where you’re going, there’s an “after that” too.

#Capricorn #capricorn tarot reading #advice to work on yourself #advice #October 2023 #tarot #tarotblr

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a-small-batch-of-dragons · 3 years

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Warm

Prompts: Um hi, I love your writing. Would you by any chance want to write a hurt/comfort piece where Janus returns from a meeting with the Light Sides and has a breakdown bc the Light Sides still don’t completely accept him after everything (not in an unsymp way, more in a suspicious-but-not-wanting-or-realizing-that-they-hurt-him-way) and Remus comforts him? Thank you lots (should you choose to write it :D) - anon

If your still up for prompts can you do remus helping to comfort janus after a busy day like he does stuff only dark sides would know that will help janus relax - whitehorsewolf

Thank you for the asks, babes!

Read on Ao3

Warnings: sympathetic dark bois

Pairings: can be dukeceit if you want, doesn’t have to be

Word Count: 1998

They’re not mean. They’re just cold.

Patton doesn’t insist that he’s evil and that they should never listen to him, that bar none, lying is wrong, and Thomas is a bad person for even thinking about it. Logan doesn’t throw barb after barb at him, pretending he doesn’t understand sarcasm and using it as an excuse to put down his intelligence. Virgil doesn’t make his life hell every time he dares open his mouth. Roman doesn’t loudly cut him off or glare at him or make fun of everything he says.

Patton is quiet, asking politely if Janus wouldn’t mind explaining a little more. Logan is clipped, smooth, dispassionate. Virgil never makes eye contact with him but backs him up, every single time. Roman apologizes when he misunderstands and offers solutions for Janus to consider.

They are considerate, they are careful, and Janus hates it.

They’re walking on eggshells now, not just with him, but with each other. They speak so carefully that every single word becomes a lie, a lie of omission. Janus’s mouth almost starts to bleed with how bitter it tastes.

They try. They do their best. And he does have to give them credit because they are trying. They’re trying so hard that it’s killing them. It’s killing him.

So much is going unsaid so they don’t accidentally hurt anyone else that they’re tearing themselves asunder.

Is this…what he wanted?

He certainly didn’t want it to be this cold.

Janus reaches his door with a groan, opening it and slipping inside. His fingers slide uselessly off the clasps at the front, unable to wrap around anything for long enough to undo the clasp, move the material, even work through the fabric of his gloves. The material saps the warmth from him the longer he can’t get it off, creating a strange warmth paradox where it’s the only thing that kept him standing in that frigid, frigid living room but now it’s wicking away every last speck of his own heat.

He hisses, his mouth still bone dry from the lies. He manages to get himself over to the heat lamp and bat clumsily at the base, searching desperately for the button to press and make all this cold, cold, cold go away. He misses.

He grits his teeth and tries again.

He summons up every last bit of willpower he has and tries again.

Finally, he hits the button and almost faints with relief. The warmth is there, it’s right there, he just has to…just has to get to it…it’s so close…it’s right there…

Snakes…snakes don’t do well in the…in the cold…it’s cold…it’s so cold…

It’s…so…cold…

…so…

…cold.

Janus falls to the floor, his hand outstretched for the warmth of the heat lamp.

Something bangs on his door.

Bang. Bang. Bang.

“Janny!”

Janus can’t summon up anything to move.

“Janny, open up, or I’m coming in.”

He…can’t…move…too…cold…

“Janny? Janny, you’re not supposed to be the one that’s scary down here.”

…cold…

The hinges almost fly off his door as Remus kicks it in. If he weren’t as he currently is, he’d be pissed. As of right now, he’s just…there…lying on the ground…out of the warmth.

“Jeez, Janny, you’d think that you…were…Jan?”

Remus’s voice turns from manic glee to concern in less than an instant. Before Janus can blink—snakes don’t have eyelids—Remus is there, next to him, crouched on the floor.

“What’re you doing over here, Jan,” Remus mutters, “and why are you colder than a polar bear’s butthole?”

“Re…mus…”

“Yeah, Jan, it’s me, let’s…alright, let’s get you into the heat, yeah?” Remus grunts and gets his arms under Janus.

Janus almost groans with how warm Remus feels, even through the thick cloak. Once the heat’s gone it’s gone, replaced quickly by the blazing light of the lamp. Unconsciously, Janus lets his head flop to the side, the scales starting to gleam in the amber glow.

“Alright, that’s better, now let’s just—alright, here we go—why am I the one uncomfortable right now, is this what it’s like for all of you? It’s awful…”

If Janus had speech right now, he’d be asking Remus what he was talking about. Instead, all he can do is hiss clumsily as Remus starts to peel the layers off of him. Why is Remus doing this? Is something wrong with him?

Oh, right, he’s cold.

A high-pitched whine splits the air. He doesn’t like it. He would rather it stopped, thank you very much. It hurts. Did they leave some electronics on or something? Can this stop now?

Now Remus is making a shushing noise, what—

—oh. Is it…

“Shh, shh, Jan-Jan, it’s okay, hey, uh-uh, Snakey, you look at me now, yeah?”

Warm. Warm hand on his face. He tries to blink—does he have eyelids now?—and Remus’s face swims into view.

He’s worried. Remus never looks worried. It softens as soon as Janus can focus on him.

“Hey, Snakey,” Remus murmurs, “you just stay here, yeah? Be a little snake puddle?”

The whine keeps going. If anything it gets higher.

“Shh, shh, shh,” Remus hushes, “if you do too much of that you’ll spread the cold back around you, you gotta be quiet for a little, yeah? I’m gonna get the rest of these off you, but you don’t have to worry.”

…he’s the one making that noise. Well, that’s embarrassing. He’s sure if he could he’d be blushing right now. But cold-blooded and all that…

“There you go, Snakey,” comes Remus’s soft voice as those warm hands go back to work, “just stay right here and bask in your heat lamp. I’m gonna help.”

Janus lets his eyes close as more things start to jostle him lightly. He feels the thick layers being pulled away, exposing more and more scales to the bright light. It’s warm. It’s warm. He sags to the ground and his hands begin to twitch.

A chuckle comes from somewhere above him.

“Jan-Jan,” Remus murmurs, much closer, “I’m gonna get your soft stuff to put on and your scale brush, yeah?”

Janus just hums.

“When you got speech back you’re gonna tell me what happened,” comes the soft mutter before Remus is gone, leaving Janus there in the warmth.

Is he…mad? No, not really. The others haven’t done anything wrong, per se, they’re trying their best and it’s…it’s not easy. None of this is easy. As a matter of fact, they’re doing quite well, all things considered. He’s not exactly blameless here, is he?

Is he sad? That they don’t like him? Yes, a little, but that’s…that’s also not really what’s going on.

He’s just tired.

And very, very cold.

“Hey,” Remus murmurs, having crouched back down, “hey, Snakey, you here with me?”

“Mm…”

“Good. Here,” he says, raising a metal straw to Janus’s mouth, “you gotta drink something. You’re not looking so good.”

Janus opens his mouth and immediately winces when he feels something creak. Remus curses softly and summons something else.

“Alright, Snakey, I’m gonna sit you up a little. Hey, hey,” he soothes when Janus whines again in protest, “you’re not going anywhere, but you gotta rinse your mouth out. Trust me.”

Janus lets Remus—he doesn’t have much of a say in this, he’s still far too cold, but he trusts Remus—sit him up and lean him against something, tilted so his mouth is over a bowl.

“Here,” Remus says, holding up another cup, “it’s just warm water. Try and rinse your mouth out a bit, huh?”

Janus does, obediently taking a small mouthful and spitting into the bowl. Well, he more just…opens his mouth and lets it fall. There’s blood. And it’s going everywhere because he can’t aim like this.

“Hey, uh-uh,” Remus murmurs when he mumbles an apology, “you do know who you’re talking to, right Snakey?”

“’S messy.”

“If you think these little things are messy then I haven’t been working in the common area enough. Shh, shh,” Remus chuckles when Janus immediately protests, “I’m kidding. Mostly.”

Janus just keeps washing his mouth until it runs clear and it’s not as bitter anymore. Remus sets the bowl aside and raises the first straw to his mouth again.

“It’s just warm water and honey, it’s not gonna do anything to you. I promise.”

“…sure?”

“I’m sure, Snakey,” Remus hums, holding Janus firmly with his warm, warm arms, “I wouldn’t pull anything when you’re like this.”

He wouldn’t, Janus knows, he’s just…very tired.

“There you go…” Remus gentles him back to the ground when he’s had his fill, picking up the dry brush and rubbing it carefully over one of his shoulders. “When was the last time you brushed your scales, Snakey?”

“…mm.”

“Oh, Jan-Jan…” Remus shakes his head and strokes the brush down his arm, patiently working across the scales. “There…that’s better.”

The brush’s stiff bristles slide neatly between the scales and clean out even the most stubborn of detritus. Remus works patiently around the rest of his non-scaled skin. The bristles are too rough when they’re not on the scales. It’s quiet, just the soft buzz of the lamp and the scrape, scrape, scrape of the brush. It’s warm.

“Snakey,” Remus murmurs after a while, “do you think you can roll over for me?”

“…must I?”

“You can talk again,” he chuckles, along with a gentle poke to his belly, “that’s good. And unless you don’t want me to get the other side, you gotta roll over.”

“…help.”

“I gotcha.” Remus gently works his hands under Janus’s side and lifts, carefully letting him rest on his stomach. “There…you can breathe okay, yeah?”

“Mm.”

“Good.” The brush returns, working slowly over and over the scales. “You wanna tell me what happened?”

“Nothing.”

Another gentle poke to his side. “Don’t lie to me, Snakey,” Remus chides, “you don’t let yourself get like this just because.”

“The others are just…just…mm.”

“I know, but still.”

Janus sighs. He tells Remus how the others were cold. Not unkind, just cold. Remus hums, switching the brush to his other hand.

“It’s gonna take them time, Jan-Jan.”

“I’m not angry.”

“But it’s still nice to hear, yeah?”

“…mm.”

Remus finishes with the brush and carefully sets it aside, rolling Janus back so he can look at his face. The warmth is starting to seep into his bones, sinking him further and further into the floor. Remus chuckles.

“You gonna fall asleep there, Snakey?”

“’S warm.”

“I know, that’s the point. You can sleep, that’s okay. Want me to stay?”

Janus reaches out blindly for Remus’s sleeve. Remus lets him pull him down into the shady spot outside the heat lamp, pulling Janus a little closer. He’s not as warm as the heat lamp.

“If you wanna go ahead and fall asleep there, you do that. I’m not gonna go anywhere.”

It’s quiet. It’s warm.

“You’re doing great, Jan,” Remus whispers, “this shit is fucking hard on everybody. It’s gonna be okay.”

A warm hand settles on his belly, rubbing gentle circles.

“You rest now,” comes the murmur, growing longer and lower as it slowly becomes the only thing Janus can hear, “rest, Snakey…you’re warm now.”

Warm…

“You’re gonna be okay.”

…warm…

“Everything’s gonna be okay.”

General Taglist: @frxgprince @potereregina @reddstardust @gattonero17 @iamhereforthegayshit @thefingergunsgirl @awkwardandanxiousfander @creative-lampd-liberties @djpurple3 @winterswrandomness @sanders-sides-uncorrect-quotes @iminyourfandom @bullet-tothefeels @full-of-roman-angst-trash @ask-elsalvador @ramdomthingsfrommymind @demoniccheese83 @pattonsandershugs @el-does-photography @princeanxious @firefinch-ember @fandomssaremysoul @im-an-anxious-wreck @crazy-multifandomfangirl @punk-academian-witch @enby-ralsei @unicornssunflowersandstuff @wildhorsewolf @thetruthaboutthesun @stubbornness-and-spite @princedarkandstormv @your-local-fookin-deadmeme @angels-and-dreams @averykedavra @a-ghostlight-for-roman @private-snippers @treasurechestininterweb @cricketanne @aularei @queerly-fluid-fan @compactdiscdraws @cecil-but-gayer @i-am-overly-complicated @annytheseal @alias290 @tranquil-space-ninja @arxticandy @mychemically-imbalanced-romance @whyiask @theaceofcrows @emilythezeldafan @frida0043 @ieatspinalcords

If you want to be added/taken off the taglist let me know! Also some URLs aren’t automatically linking which leads me to believe I may have them wrong! If this happens also let me know!

#dragonbabbles #fic #sanders sides #deceit sanders #janus sanders #remus sanders #sympathetic deceit #sympathetic remus

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justanotherpersonsuniverse · 3 years

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Hey, @ether-solrac here. So I was thinking about how the ladybug and black cat miraculous combined are supposed to grant a wish while whenever other miraculous combine you're kind of just able to use both powers. So I figured I'd come up with some powers that could come from two miraculous users combining their powers or one user activating two miraculous at once.

*Bee + Rabbit = Freeze Frame:

- for 60 seconds time itself is completely frozen except for the user(s).

* Fox + Rabbit = Echos of the ancestors

- an illusionary imprint is created of a past miraculous holder of choice. They aren't solid so they can't help fight but they do retain all the knowledge from when they were a holder. This can be a way to get info on a villain that came back or for general advice and training.

*Ladybug + turtle = Biome

-The power of life is infused in an area and the resulting magic turns the area into any kind of environment/biome desired.

Bee + Fox = Astral Purge

- the user is converted into a mental Astral form and allowed to invade a mind with one of a few goals in mind. This can either be extracting a secret, placing an idea inception style, or in extreme cases reawakening a fear to mentally paralyze.

*Rabbit + Snake = Perfect Paradox

- Rather than repeating the same loop until you get the desired result, the user can choose multiple timelines/outcomes and converge those two or three realities into a single reality where they got to achieve everything. (from the outside this would just look like multiple copies of the same person running around but they're somehow hard to concentrate on until the timelines become one again)

*Dragon + Mouse = Split Charge

- The dragons elements are split between copies that are allowed to fully utilize the one element each.

*Cat + Bee = Weakpoint

-Rather than complete destruction, this power essentially forces a weak point onto the opponent like a glowing red dot on a video game boss. This is meant to be a way to seriously damage something that's otherwise invulnerable without disintegrating them.

*Turtle + Fox = Hardlight

-while they won't last as long, all illusions created during this time are hard light and can be felt.

*Ladybug + Fox = Independant shadow

- Can create a single illusion that can act on its own as long as the user has given it some kind of base to go off of.

*Cat + Fox = Fear itself

- an illusion that is seen differently by everyone that looks at it. No matter what you'll always see you're deepest fear.

*Cat + Turtle = Wrecking ball

- the shelter becomes a ball and the then converts the destruction power into just a massive amount of force at once.

*Ladybug + Rabbit = Alternate Support

- instead of a lucky charm, a person or object is temporarily summoned from an alternate timeline to help. For example if another of the same miraculous is needed for a plan then another user from AU. (ex. If this were done in the Panthera AU and they needed a second cat then Chat Noir might be summoned.)

Those are all I can think of for now. As usual if people want more I might make another post with more combos.

————

FUSION IS JUST A WEAK- I’m kidding, I love this dude

#marinette dupain cheng #adrien agreste #chloe bourgeois #alix kubdel #nino lahiffe #alya cesaire #luka couffaine #kagami tsurugi #ether-solrac #submission

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incarnateirony · 4 years

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Where would the serpent have come from? Was it created? Did it create the souls and put them in the bodies Chuck created? If the snake is a separate entity that has something to do with souls ending up in the physical shape Chuck designed it does sound like a bad guy, but I get the sense that wasn't your angle.

Here’s the fun thing: I don’t know if SPN will ever answer that within the text.

However, considering the density of jungian and alchemical text, we can pull from other texts out there and answer this! Sort of.

I’ve said before, alchemy as it stands has a lot of denominations, origins and groups. Sometimes completely unrelated cultures performed very similar practices, although their imagery may lightly vary based on their region or until they intermingled. So there’s not going to be any *one* answer to this, as much as a fuckton of philosophers semi-politely debating this across a few thousand years.

The most streamlined form I could give a generalized audience: the snake simply Is.

Think of it like this: Chuck talked about the beauty and glory in creation that was greater than his pride or his ego that was just there, waiting to be born, like Chuck and Amara just were. As he spoke to her and prodded knowing she had seen and felt it, he looked to Dean (humanity) -- which is a statement unto itself with man/the soul. However, we’re gonna peel back a few layers and inspect that.

I’ve spoken often of things like the Prima Materia: The First Material. It’s this non-thing that is the first thing while being a paradox, that exists in a nonspacetime that never and always exists and will forever-never be. It is there before there is time, space, light, darkness, or anything else. It is Nothing. It is... the Empty.

However, like the big bang, there’s this infinitely dense mass of SOMETHING that made the EVERYTHING. It somehow existed when nothing else did.

At some point, Chuck and Amara cropped up in this Nothing Space, but by the sheer fact that they existed, it was no longer Nothing. Not anymore. That Infinitely Dense Point went “wuh-huh? (Why) Do I exist?” Think of Amara less as Light and Dark, and more as Being and Unbeing. After all, Amara told us Chuck’s Light was a Lie, and many MANY points of text have pointed us to human souls being the true light (even in side episodes like The Thing with the blood magic conjoined to Grace as Life). Life is, after all, an existence within Chuck’s Sandbox, he who creates by Grace. The human immortal life is something else, from an eternal light. And just like the plot of S6/early 7, he who has the most souls is God.

This may seem like a LONG aside to the snake but really important in addressing the placement of the snake.

Think of it like the Matrix: Man, long ago, created Machines, but at some point Machines made The Big Machine and the Program, in which humans live to be kept beneath the surface as Power Cells. The Machine ceases function without the human Cell. As would Chuck’s boxes.

The Shadow is spoken of, between Jung and Alchemy, in many forms: The First Adam, the Primordial Man, the Inky Man, etc. Sometimes alchemy addresses this thing and the demiurge as Nous 1 (Shadow) and Nous 2 (demiurge,Chuck, YHVH).

Nous 2, the demiurge, made the created world as a state of being, spoken into reality by the Word and formed by Grace. The demiurge, in some forms, even created the physical bodies that *became* humans, but the serpent was the catalyst.

Now, this is where it varies. See, some gnostic branches talk about the serpent as being Lucifer, and Lucifer was the super true savior. I do not believe this is what Supernatural is doing. Sometimes it’s the son of Lucifer, which we have a tip of the hat to with Jack. But most ultimately, and what I see being answered by our text, is that it’s basically a reflection of the subconscious collective that IS the Shadow but waking and conscious in the world. Think of the Shadow as the subconscious, the sleeper, the dreamer, seeking desperately some meaning for why it exists and variably wishing it didn’t; It is the forefather. But, in peering into the creation made by the Being of its self-question, it seeks answer WITHIN what has been dreamt.

See, by this track, there was never *really* an apple or a quince or whatever the hell. It was a proverbial thing or a manifestation. The Serpent offered knowing the difference between good and evil; and evil doesn’t really exist, it’s just the Absence of Good. And, in the weird little automatons making the “mistake” to eat the fruit, they acquired souls. God made man “in his image” and gave /the breath of life/ -- Grace, within the Supernatural universe structure -- but he did not necessarily impart *souls.* That came from the serpent, who made Eve eat the fruit, and what is Eve, and where is Eve now in SPN?

According to Chuck, evil and a monster. According to Death, one of the most dangerous creatures in existence. According to general lore, the mother of monsters, who’s children then become the Leviathans. No, this isn’t in timeline construct, if you realize the Garden is where man is born, which means they come from a place outside of Earth. Before earth, even. Before Amara was even sealed away, possibly. Which would explain why the corpse of a Leviathan was used to seal Amara away, per what Michael gave DeanCas in 15.08-09.

Gadreel was the sentry that allowed Lucifer into the Garden. While it doesn’t seem that he acquired a soul, perhaps because he never had one or never made the right choices, the encounter with whatever was in the garden caused a change. This is, admittedly, a mild but fascinating retcon on the hand of Dabb, as one could have assumed the serpent was previously Lucifer -- and again I point to some more christianized denominations saying that. Weird ones, given, but still very christian leaning. But now in this new angle, if you release your christian coding, Lucifer encountered a creature that may have asked who he was or was meant to be and understood the importance of human souls to the equation before building his own program within the machine to take as many as he could so that he, too, could become god in his own way.

The serpent simply Is. If you look into Jung and others, you’ll find talk of the unconscious serpent. It is a manifestation of humanity’s placement in the world and issues we need to address. The Serpent has many places in alchemy; it is he who whispers the truth, he who climbs the tree YHVH would have crucified him on and yes, even the crucified one himself -- the crucified serpent is an emblem you can find readily with a quick search. It is a reflection of man’s potential and his path.

Who are you? Who are you meant to be?

#supernatural #spn #meta #my meta #pagan life #amaah #jung #alchemy notes #cosmogenesis #shadow #soul #mind #demiurge #chuck #the garden #prima materia #souls

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unironicduncanstan · 3 years

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the “Tangodeltaindia” blog explained,

aka my brain has cringe spots on it and needs to be inspected by the FDA

hi my names randi/uni and i created a total drama island themed ARG two months ago on a whim that almost no one interacted with bc i started off way too niche and difficult, so i kinda just went increasingly off the rails because i knew most likely no one was monitoring my posts and i could just make a real cursed hidden tomb that could one day be discovered by someone in a goonies esque unveiling. but then i got lice and now im sad and uncomfortable so i’m just gonna explain the entire damn thing in one shot. its absolutely batshit and theres a reason no one uncovered it ok here we go;;;

first of all the name. its so stupid but. ‘tango delta india’ = ‘tdi’ in the NATO phonetic alphabet. it just felt like a funny place to start that implies its gonna be a puzzle blog idk,

moving on to the actual content tho; some of the earlier posts mean p much nothing and were just an attempt to draw people in, such as the mr coconut ‘like if you agree’ or the ‘let him inside hes cold’ posts.

then theres the cipher (x). it was posted shortly after the height of the ‘using total drama reference pictures to make an alphabet’ meme. in case anybody didnt see that; for a while it was a joke in the fandom to take the transparent references of total drama characters, and line them up, using them like hieroglyphics to make translatable pictures. its supposed to correspond to the alphabet, based on the first letter of their first name. an example could be, alejandro = a, bridgette = b, and so on. there was no solidly set alphabet amongst the fandom though, it was self explanatory most of the time so i made my own solid personal cipher key for that blog to make the whole thing easier.

NOW ONTO THE FIRST PUZZLE POST,,,, (x). theres a scene, a string of text, the cipher key, and a link to a decoder. the way to decode it all is to plug the characters on screen into the tangodeltaindia cipher key, and then plug That translation into the decoder website, and then finally paste in the text under the photo.

the website linked is to a Caesar cipher decoder. the Caesar cipher is just a code where the alphabet is assigned to numbers (a=1, z=26), and to encode something with it you can move this pattern however you want as long as you keep the regular sequence of alphabet and numbers. so you could scootch over One letter, and “abc” would now say “bcd”. so on and so forth.

looking at the scene + my own total drama reference cipher, alejandro = A, and the beaver = 1, which gives A1. so you could now follow the link to the website, press ‘decode’, and paste in the text under the picture. the ‘shift’ in the middle is automatically set to ‘7′, or as it shows, a -> h, meaning ‘a’ has been moved over by 7 letters. so if you set the shift to just 1 over, or A1, now you can translate the text. it reads;

“lets start simple. after all, a trail of breadcrumbs begins with a loaf. whats the harm in another long winded fandom meme. another inside joke. and arent you curious whats truly lurking inside?”

edgy! simple! kinda just a test to see if people would do it or not. which they didnt so of course i tried to make it weirder-

puzzle 2; (x) using the exact same translation rules as above. we have alejandro and the snake, which with the tangodeltaindia cipher key means A6. going to the website, putting it in ‘decode’ mode, pasting in your text, and setting the shift to ‘6′ gives you this translation.

“in his eyes are an island. nothing but a dream, born out of going to bed angry. sink or swim.”

this was just hinting around at where the story was gonna go so it’ll make more sense later. something else to note; if you zoom all the way in and look into alejandros eye (’in his eyes’), you’ll see the word ‘Thera’. ~thats a surprise tool that will help us later~

so after this one, there are two non-puzzle posts that are also just hints (i was just tryna see if i could get people hyped), the first is a close up picture of chris with red eyes that simply says “those arent his eyes”, and then a post that says “his real names not chris :)”, they’re again referencing his eyes, and this time further implying theres something fake or wrong about them, or with chris as a person. again, it’ll be explained better later on.

moving on to puzzle 3 (x), another test to see if anyones keeping up (which also failed josdfjsdfkjs), using the same translation rules, dj = a dash or minus, and the snail = 5, “-5″, shift the letter ‘A’ BACK five instead of forward, and you get the simple translation of; “getting harder now.”

puzzle 4 and 5; at this point, there are two images posted within hours of each other that i’ll explain together as they line up. (x) (x)

These are some of the only ones that can be translated from just the tangodeltaindia key directly. They end up a string of numbers, which are latitude and longitude coordinates. The first post, labelled “the lie”, translates into “45.57394802102744, -81.46817207492494″. googling that will take you to maps and show you to a place called Lonely Island in Canada.

The second one, “the truth”, translates into “36.404663113177534, 25.39605673375295″, taking you to Santorini, Greece.

This is where the hints got really out there bc i realized nobody was following along but i still wanted to paint a picture. so this is the set up;;; the idea that the ‘island’ (camp wawanakwa) existing somewhere in canada, is a lie. the ‘true’ location being santorini isnt meant to be taken at face value though. the mythology behind santorini is that a man impregnated a goddess and to escape the wrath of her father (triton), she formed the island (santorini) by having her lover throw clay into the sea, and then she gave birth to her son, Theras, on this island, giving the island it’s Other nickname, Thera.

this is again just a vague implication that the island might not be real at all, or that it was formed through cosmic means.

the next two posts are more non-puzzle hints, the first showing the definition of the word ‘fresh’ (new), and the second being images of total drama backgrounds with no characters and the text reading “they were always empty.” more, admittedly very outlandish implications that the island is some kind of illusion, but again mostly just another try to drag people into the blog.

puzzle 6. (x) this one introduces a new concept to the regular translation rules, some of the characters are laying down. its kinda supposed to imply they’re “dead” and that you need to take their corresponding letters out of the alphabet given on the Caesar cipher page, below the shift. The upright characters translate to “-9″, so you shift ‘A’ back 9 letters. Then remove the letters; “TH-E-R-A-S”, and with those letters taken out, you can finally translate the text.

“he creates life solely to destroy it. to crush it in his hands. he births chaos so that he may have something to control. the power has given him madness. the isolation, arrogance. don't try to stop him, he's already chosen to be unstoppable. his mind is a perfectly crafted prison, one we will all soon be living in.”

this is where the story gets more on the nose. it’s talking about chris, and about him being an unstoppable cosmic force, a diety who can create worlds within his own mind, and he does so maliciously just for power. hes created the campers through mental energy just to torment them. it also hints that his plan is to expand the world of total drama island and engulf the whole universe.

puzzle 7. (x) same as the last puzzle. beaver and moose translate to ‘1-0′ or ten. the characters lying down to remove from the caesar cipher alphabet are “T-U-L-P-A”. this doesnt have anything to do with the modern way some ppl interact with tulpas but just the actual idea of creating thoughtforms, or willing your thoughts into real life creations, referencing how chris has created the entire island and everyone on it solely through his mind. with those letters removed and the shift set forward 10, you get this:

“his psychic power is unfathomable. the reality he bore was just a passing thought. an idea that became so dangerous. he predates the idea of a mind, the minds own ability to recognize itself, his synapses are paradoxically ancient. the island exists only within himself, to torment the souls hes created, and damned from the start. will they ever be free?”

it states that chris is more than a man or even just a diety, hes an all powerful god already, yet he craves more power. the final line, “will they ever be free” is in reference to the campers, which segways into the next arc;;; freeing the campers from chris’ psychic island imprisonment.

puzzle 8. (x) to solve this one you have to translate the top image with the tangodeltaindia cipher key, and add it to the text given, which creates a link. this leads to a PDF, a page from a book written by terence mckenna. he’s a famous ethnobotanist known best for his studies on DMT, the strongest hallucinogenic drug in the world, its also known as the spirit molecule. many people on this drug (without any prior knowledge of this phenomenon) will recount meeting strange fractal beings that can create things in the universe just by speaking them into existence, theyve come to be known as ‘machine elves’, a term coined by mckenna. ill show the most important excerpt from the page;

this is less about the psychedelic drug part and more about the words and ideas, like “punching a hole through a dimension so it pours through” and “if god didnt exist man would invent him”. its more worldbuilding towards chris’ power and cosmic abilities

then come 2 more clues. a picture of chris holding his own body captioned ‘ego death’, and the meaning behind the name ‘chris mcclean’. the latter is another “please look over here” post, but the first is another minor reference to the previous puzzles answer involving DMT and terence mckenna. ‘ego death’ is a term again used with strong psychedelic drugs, its the sensation that your spirit as you know it is literally Dying, and you are instead connected to and a part of everything around you. another reference to chris’ power and how he may look like a man but his body and spirit are connected to the world hes built in unfathomable ways. at this point im cementing the idea that chris mclean is not a mortal man and cannot be fought with mortal weapons

puzzle 9. (x) this one was an attempt to make easier to solve puzzles, and comes with a visual of chris looming over the island. the text is in wingdings, which can be translated through multiple websites found through google. it says;

“s︎o︎o︎n︎ h︎e︎ w︎i︎l︎l︎ s︎l︎e︎e︎p.︎ h︎e︎ w︎i︎l︎l︎ d︎r︎e︎a︎m︎ a︎ n︎e︎w︎ h︎e︎l︎l︎,︎ a︎n︎d︎ t︎h︎a︎t︎ w︎i︎l︎l︎ b︎e︎ o︎u︎r︎ o︎n︎l︎y︎ c︎h︎a︎n︎c︎e︎,︎ t︎o︎ s︎a︎v︎e︎ h︎i︎s︎ c︎r︎e︎a︎t︎i︎o︎n︎s︎,︎ a︎n︎d︎ f︎r︎e︎e︎ t︎h︎o︎s︎e︎ w︎h︎o︎ w︎e︎r︎e︎ n︎e︎v︎e︎r︎ d︎e︎s︎i︎g︎n︎e︎d︎ t︎o︎ b︎e︎ f︎r︎e︎e︎.︎ t︎h︎i︎s︎ m︎a︎y︎ c︎o︎m︎e︎ a︎t︎ a︎ c︎o︎s︎t︎.︎ t︎h︎e︎ n︎i︎g︎h︎t︎m︎a︎r︎e︎ m︎u︎s︎t︎ e︎n︎d︎,︎ t︎h︎e︎ o︎u︎r︎o︎b︎o︎r︎o︎s︎ o︎f︎ h︎i︎s︎ s︎y︎n︎c︎o︎pe︎ m︎u︎s︎t︎ c︎l︎o︎s︎e︎,︎ b︎u︎t︎ i︎t︎ m︎a︎y︎ t︎u︎r︎n︎ o︎u︎r︎ e︎f︎f︎o︎r︎t︎s︎ o︎f︎ s︎a︎l︎v︎a︎t︎i︎o︎n︎ t︎o︎ d︎u︎s︎t︎.︎ o︎u︎r︎ f︎i︎g︎h︎t︎ m︎i︎g︎h︎t︎ e︎n︎d︎ i︎n︎ s︎a︎c︎r︎i︎f︎i︎c︎e︎,︎ r︎e︎n︎d︎e︎r︎i︎n︎g︎ h︎i︎s︎ l︎a︎s︎t︎ i︎n︎v︎e︎n︎t︎i︎o︎n︎ b︎u︎t︎ a︎ c︎e︎a︎s︎e︎l︎e︎s︎s︎ v︎o︎i︎d︎.︎ w︎e︎ m︎a︎y︎ s︎e︎e︎ h︎o︎r︎r︎o︎r︎s︎ t︎h︎a︎t︎ c︎a︎u︎s︎e︎ t︎h︎e︎ s︎t︎a︎r︎s︎ t︎o︎ s︎h︎u︎d︎d︎e︎r︎,︎ b︎u︎t︎ w︎e︎ m︎u︎s︎t︎ t︎a︎ke︎ t︎h︎i︎s︎ c︎h︎a︎n︎c︎e︎.︎ w︎e︎ h︎a︎v︎e︎ n︎o︎t︎h︎i︎n︎g︎ t︎o︎ l︎o︎s︎e︎,︎ a︎n︎d︎ a︎ w︎o︎r︎l︎d︎ o︎f︎ n︎o︎t︎h︎i︎n︎g︎n︎e︎s︎s︎ t︎o︎ e︎n︎d︎.︎ m︎a︎y︎ t︎h︎e︎ s︎e︎a︎ s︎w︎a︎l︎l︎o︎w︎ u︎p h︎i︎s︎ i︎s︎l︎a︎n︎d︎ o︎f︎ l︎i︎e︎s︎.︎ g︎o︎d︎ pr︎o︎t︎e︎c︎t︎ y︎o︎u︎.︎”

this is essentially saying that the island, the campers, werent all just created from his mind, but from his dreams. this confirms that he Sleeps, and claims hes going to sleep again soon, and during that time period theres a chance to kill him before he can dream up another world (or season) to control and torment. its also saying that theres a chance killing him will destroy the island and campers, but that its the only choice we would have to end the cycle. hey guys i am so bored and over the years i have been on every stimulant and anti depressant doctors are legally allowed to prescribe and its still just not quite there yet huh

puzzle 10. (x) the video, the title translates to “the island of his eye”. its just meant to encapsulate everything ive already been hinting around at but with real footage and some audios taken from the show, and again, it was me tryna make some lore that was easy to digest and also terrifying to an audience with no other context. the final images are the only new clues, if you pause fast enough you can barely make out the characters that (paired with the tangodeltaindia cipher key) would say “set them free”, and you can also see an aerial view of what is actually called “the eye of argentina”. it is a real island that rotates atop a swamp, it is geometrically perfect and no one really knows for sure why it rotates the way it does or how it was formed. this clue is simply related back to the idea that the island of wawanakwa’s location is not in canada, and that it does not function like a normal island.

puzzle 11. (x) what td blog is complete without a uquiz? anyways, it doesnt matter how you answer the quiz, theres only one possible result. the title is a link to a mega file, which is protected with a decryption key. the image attached to the result, when deciphered, is the randomly generated key to the unlock the file. the image you see from the file is this; (TW for mentions of self harm and eye trauma)

in case this is too hard to read ill transcribe what it says;

“How to escape the dream - accept that there is no dream to escape, and no you to escape it. - believe in it anyways. - sleep on your back. - cover your eyes. - hide a nail under the pillow. - wait for the ringing. - when you first see him, dont call his name. dont speak. - keep your eyes shut. - on the second night, ask where the camp is. he wont respond verbally. - on the third night, you’ll see his eyes. - on the fourth night, you’ll enter them. - you can’t turn back after the fifth night. - don’t try to hide your fears. he knows them before you arrive. - don’t shut your eyes for too long when it becomes too much. you risk losing them. - find chris mclean. - don’t stop till the nail is through the socket. - repeat on the other side. - repeat on yourself. - congratulations. they are free”

this is, believe it or not, an idea that comes from my very own sleep paralysis experiences. ive dealt with it a lot, so why not make a weird ritual thing for an arg based off it ig. so whenever i’d fall asleep on my back, i’d eventually hear this ringing in my ears (or it’d happen upon waking up), and then the sleep paralysis would begin. i only ‘saw’ stuff a couple times but the fear for me was really more about the overwhelming sensation of pure dread that always came along with it even when i was aware what was happening, and i Always got this feeling too that if i opened my eyes in that moment, something was gonna stab them.

so moving on to how that applies to the arg, the first few lines are about how, obviously, the island is not real, even in the lore being given its a figment of chris’ imagination, but you have to enter it anyways, and the only way to do that is to believe its real. then it tells you how to ‘enter’ that world, (btw i didn’t expect anyone to actually follow these instructions if found, but even if they did, the whole ‘sleep paralysis being caused by sleeping on your back’ thing usually only happens if you’re predisposed to having it and only happens to Some people who have it, so the intent was like. never to bring that upon anybody. but if you are prone to sleep paralysis plz do not attempt even as a joke or anything thx)

the parts about hallucinating chris then are as follows, “ask about the camp / he wont respond verbally” , meaning he will show you through a dream instead, one that might look a lot like the video from before. “on the third night you will see his eyes”, meaning you will see the island but not be able to interact with it, or basically, how we see total drama on tv right now. “on the fourth night you’ll enter (his eyes)” references the island existing ‘within his eyes’, meaning you will enter the actual island. the next night chris will sleep and you will be able to enter the island again and find him. the idea with the nail is that, if you destroy his eyes you destroy the ‘island’ within them. wrapping back around to sleep paralysis, the idea of stabbing yourself with the nail afterwards is because sometimes, the only thing you can move during sleep paralysis is your fingertips and toes, and wiggling those can help bring you out of the paralysis. so at first how i used to wake myself up, but it didnt usually work fast enough so oftentimes id just pinch the shit out of my fingers and use pain to make my muscles start up faster.

the next post is a link to a countdown. again, i knew nobody was rly following at this point, but i wanted a little more build up before just dropping the ending. it was set up to end 5 days after the last post, aka the one that mentioned a 5 night dream ritual.

puzzle 12. (x) going all the way back to the normal multi step translation puzzles. the coloring of the cipher is a bit different, and its missing chris, but its meant to be used the same as it was before, these changes are only for dramatic effect. and chris is gone because well. we mentally offed him in the inception dream land last time. so anyways the snake = 6, shift A to 6, take out the letters “R-I-C-K” of the characters laying in their graves, and you get this translation;

“its almost time. we must now crack open our minds like a crowbar to a sealed chest. like an egg to a pan. to find our way into camp wawanakwa our ego cannot remain intact, and to traverse it we must stay strong. to escape it, we must glue the pieces back together. now we sleep. dream. end the nightmare.”

this is a final message before ‘entering the island’ to kill chris and free the campers from the island. it acts like a pep talk.

the next post is just the countdown ending.

puzzle 13 (the finale). (x)

this post sends you to a new blog entirely, called @awakenfromthenightmare. there is only one post on it. the post has another link to a mega file, and the link is attached onto a string of text. follow the link by clicking, then copy the text and paste it in as the decryption key. now you have another image to translate with the tangodeltaindia cipher;

when translated, the text is another link to a youtube video.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQw4w9WgXcQ

so there you have it, that video is the ending to the entire arg. it didnt really end the way i wanted at first, i got burnt out from no engagement about halfway through which isnt anybody elses fault, but i still felt this was a well crafted and fitting finale. thank you all for reading.

#tw self harm ment./ //#tw eye trauma / //#tw unreality// //#tw drug ment/ //#long post/ //#like a mile long just look at the tws its a rabbit hol e

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janus-stanus · 4 years

Text

It Seemed the Better Way

Rating: Teen and Up | Category: General, Angst, Character Study

Characters: Virgil and Janus, + a Remus cameo (and maybe someone else?)

Setting: Half when Virgil and Janus were around 10 years old; half in early July 2017, right before the Season 1 finale

Summary:

Years and years ago, Virgil came to Janus with a problem. They both swore themselves to secrecy. In doing so, Janus discovered his purpose. Now, as Virgil looks back on that decision, Janus comes to him with some questions. This time, they don’t see eye to eye. Virgil has to pick a side. He chooses neither.

Content warnings:

Imaginably standard for fics about Virgil choosing to duck out, but we get into his self-hatred and wanting to disappear

Homophobia (the characters don't literally experience it but the description of it is fairly intense)

Spider-related body horror, not much more extreme than Patton turning into Lilypadton though

And temporary possession

AO3 Link (13k words, one chapter + a short epilogue)

Because the fic is so long and mostly one part, I won’t be straight up posting it here to tumblr. Fortunately, you don’t need an AO3 account to read it. I will put the first ~1,700 words below the cut as a preview (plus the taglist). Since this is my first complete Sanders Sides fic, reblogs, kudos, and comments would be greatly appreciated! Hope you enjoy!

[props to @books-are-cool for beta reading the fic for me!]

Virgil had to steel himself before entering Janus’s room. It always unsettled him how empty yet cheery it was. The daffodil yellow walls and carpet, plus the faint scent of lemon air freshener, made him queasy, and there was nothing else to add any character or additional color. The one object that wasn’t a yellow-tinted carry-over from Thomas’s bedroom was the cushioned yellow chair Janus was currently lounging in. He seemed to have dozed off in it, still in his black pants, bright yellow polo shirt, and sparkly dark purple waistcoat. The sight made Virgil feel somewhat underdressed in his lilac pajamas.

The door shut behind him, and Janus’s eyes fluttered open. When he saw the intruder, dragging behind him a thin black blanket patterned with skulls, he let out a beleaguered yawn.

“Yes, Virgil?”

He approached cautiously, rubbing his fingers against his safety blanket to calm his nerves. He did his best to block the clips of the evening broadcast from his mind for the moment. Instead, he forced eye contact with Janus, and, in a hushed tone, spat out the words that had plagued him for the past hour:

“Is Thomas gay?”

“…What? You mean, does he like guys? No, obviously,” Janus retorted as he rubbed his eyes. However, when he lowered his hands and saw the sincere concern in Virgil’s face, he paused.

“Are you sure?”

Present-day: Early July 2017

It’s a quarter past midnight, and Virgil finds himself in a paradox. His body has dissolved into jello and cries out to sink into bed, yet it turns to stone whenever he even thinks of leaving his post. His face sags like melting wax, but his eyes remain wide open, staring with laser intensity into the formless darkness of his room.

Usually, it’s easy for him to pin down the origin of his fatigued insomnia; some issue he blew out of proportion during the day, or a potential problem lurking on the horizon. Not this time. It was a good day. Just like yesterday, and the day before, and every other day in the past week. It’s standard for Thomas, and presumably the other three, but for Virgil specifically? It’s the first time in Thomas’s adult life that he’s experienced this level of calm. He could get used to it - if it didn’t come with the itching need to do something about it, to tear back the curtain and drag out the monsters lying in wait, to make himself useful. In combination, he’s left with a light, murky haze of apathy filling in the gaps where his emotions should be, creating the sensation of him slowly rising into the air. He needs to feel something. He wants to feel bad.

So he slides off the desk into the leather chair, closes out of the Evanescence playlist on his laptop, and pulls up the video that has rooted itself in the back corner of his mind. While it was uploading, it was the typical brand of anxiety that made it monopolize his attention. As Joan and Thomas had said, coming out was something you’ll never be done doing; however, this video was as close to a final statement of intent as anything would be. There was no turning back from here, no more lying hiding. And, even this many years on, he was still terrified of the fallout.

However, now that it’s immortalized on the web and thousands of unknowable eyes and ears have consumed it, with comments still rolling in by the dozens, the uneasy feeling wracking his body is of a different nature. Because they love the video, of course they do. The online community that has formed around Thomas never ceases to amaze him. Just a year or two ago he’d have laughed at the idea that he’d choose to scroll through the comments on one of Thomas’s posts, but here he is, once again proving his visions of the future wrong. It’s the most he’s smiled in years (though the competition for that honor has been more heated recently than it was for a long, long time).

He scrolls past multiple “I’m here, I’m queer” jokes, compliments for everyone who took part, proud declarations of identity, and allies sharing their support. Those all warm his heart, but the ones which make him pause are the uplifting coming out stories: people who opened up to friends and found they have more in common than they knew; people who gathered the courage to have the talk with their parents (not in the foolhardy way he had, god no, he has yet to watch through the video without skipping that part); people who found acceptance in their communities, even religious ones, even at school. And more than that, people, total strangers from every corner of the globe, who claim Thomas as an inspiration for them living their truths.

It’s those comments that trigger the uneasy feeling. That, and whenever the word “repression” resounds in his headphones like a high-pitched whistle.

Virgil lives in the negative. He deals not just in apprehension and fear, but in embarrassment, regret, and guilt; and he exaggerates each instance by his nature. But this whirlpool in his gut is the result of more than just one bad memory, one isolated failure. It was a chain of choices that formed the armor which has since fused to his bones; actions taken and opportunities passed over, things said and unsaid, truths suffocated and lies that gained a life of their own,

“You called?”

Virgil slams the laptop shut almost hard enough to shatter the screen. He flicks the desk lamp on, then swivels his chair to face the intruder, shaking his head a few times to part his bangs.

“...Janus.” Not the bad feeling he was looking for.

“You remembered,” he grins, an artificial glimmer in his eyes. He takes a second to adjust his capelet and ensure that the golden clasps on his shirt are perfectly in place. “Forgive me for the lack of professionalism, I had to take care of, a thing.”

From the way he says ‘thing’, Virgil knows exactly who he’s talking about. Some things never change. “You couldn’t have knocked first?”

“I thought we were beyond that point in our relationship,” Janus pouts, putting his hand to his chest. “You’re not going to kick me out, are you?”

“Depends,” Virgil responds, without missing a beat, as he pulls his headphones off his ears and tosses them onto the desk. “Why are you here?”

“To talk.”

“About what?”

“...I was hoping you would take the lead on that front,” Janus says, “You’ve always been so good at that. But if it’s up to me, I suppose I could provide a starting point.” He makes a show of glancing around the dimly lit room, recoiling slightly at the inexplicable smell of lavender and expired Halloween candy, before he locks his gaze on the anxious side with the most neutral smile he can muster. “What are your feelings on last month’s ‘Having Pride’ video?”

Virgil huffs as his body tenses. He wants to say ‘fine’, but then he remembers who he’s talking to. “In all honesty? They’re mixed.”

“Really?” Janus gasps, with all the subtlety of a piano plummeting from a third-story window. “I’m, quite frankly, astounded to hear that from you. Why?”

Virgil rolls his eyes. “Look,” he hisses, “I don’t know what you’re hoping to get out of this, but we are not going there.” He flips up his hood and spins the chair a full 180 degrees. “Good to see you, now get out. Maybe try again another time.”

For a moment, the room goes quiet, music to Virgil’s ears. Then Janus fires back, with words like daggers:

“If you say so. It’s all water under the bridge now. Just, don’t sit there and make yourself out to be the victim.” When he gets no reaction, he gives a final thrust: “I did it for you, remember?”

Virgil’s hands clamp down on the armrests. He tries not to say anything, to just let him have the satisfaction of having the last word and leave. But the last statement out of his mouth devolves into outright mockery as it echoes in his ears, begging to be challenged.

In the blink of an eye, he rises and sharply turns to face his opponent. “You keep on saying that,” he growls, leaning in with his arms crossed atop the back of the chair, “But you and I both know it stopped being true a long time ago - if it ever was true.”

Janus’s eyes narrow. He briefly flashes his fangs, but he bites his tongue. Instead, he plants one hand on the chair, as if throwing down a dueling glove, then shoves it toward the other wall. Virgil catches his balance just before he’s sent tumbling forward, his hood sliding back down.

“Apologies, let’s try that again,” the scaly side smirks. “You were saying?”

Virgil takes a moment to refocus his frustration. “How mature of you,” he mumbles (not that he should have expected better from him). Then he jerks his head up so he can drill his eyes into the snake’s as he continues. “I won’t pretend I wasn’t in on it to start, because believe it or not I’m better than that. Thing is, I realized later that it was a terrible idea, that it would only make things worse in the long run, for all of us. So I asked you to give it up. Did you listen? Of course not. And you never said why you couldn’t, you just-”

“Because you knew,” Janus cuts in, his voice sparking with indignation, everything else about him suddenly stone cold. “You knew exactly why.”

All Virgil can do is stare blankly back at him. While he waits for further clarification, he idly notices the dark smudges fading in under the other side’s eyes.

Janus cocks his head in turn, scanning every inch of Virgil’s clueless face. He opens and closes his mouth a few times. When he fails to find the words, his arm begins moving with a will of its own.

Virgil notices the trembling hand in his peripheral vision right before it lands on his shoulder. He takes an abrupt step back, and from the depths of his subconscious something roars, “Don’t you dare t-”

And it clicks.

END OF PREVIEW

If you want to read the rest, here’s the AO3 link again!

TAGLIST: (massive thanks to @the-taglist-repository!)

@smileyzs @robinwritesshitposts @thatgaydemigodnerd @arya-skywalker @itsabsurd-and-terrifying @potatsanderssides @legendsgates @demoniccheese83 @rainbowbowtie @kieraelieson @star-crossed-shipper @a-fandom-trashdump @just-your-typical-trans-guy @idont-freaking-know @katelynn-a-fan @dwbh888 @royal-stormcloud @ananonsplace @ollyollyoxinfree @brain-deadx0 @the-grounded-raven @grouptalekindnesssoul @the-hoely-bleach @anvil527up @fanficloverinthesun

#thomas sanders #sanders sides #it seemed the better way #virgil sanders #janus sanders #raven writes

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onceaponamidnightdreary · 4 years

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Writing prompt: As many of you know, animals with their eyes on the side of their head are considered ‘prey species’ and vice versa. Write why dragons were designated as a ‘prey species’.

As many of you know, we no longer have dragons.

When they existed, if they existed, they were both the creatures of dreams and nightmares. Long, coiling bodies, glinting scales stronger than steel or iron, horns and claws and teeth sharper than a knight's sword. Great jets of fire and flame, stronger than a blazing forge. Wings more mighty than the sails of the Royal Navy and that could carry them to the ends of the earth if they wanted. The beauty and greatness and majesty of these creatures were both revered and feared. Not many dragons existed long ago, if many at all. These dragons were hunted by and sought by all the kingdoms, many a noble knight giving their life to slay the so called beasts, for no other reason then honour and human stupidity and wealth, because a dragon's hoard could had enough wealth to bring kingdoms to their knees. They liked to surround themselves with gold and silver and precious gems, glinting in all the colours of the rainbow. Not, because they were vain, like the royal advisors thought, but because their eggs would only hatch in the presence of these beautiful stones and metals.

A dragon only lays one egg in a lifetime so it is the most precious thing in the world to them and they would give their life to defend it. Many a knight has found a dragon egg while cleaning out its hoard when the dragon is dead and simply discarded it as just a large round stone, because it looked unremarkable compared to the riches coming his way. And that is how they were driven to extinction.

But long before the knights, and the kingdoms, and all of civilization, dragons thrived all around the world. They were plentiful in their numbers and varieties and were safe from all of the other creatures on the earth.

All but one.

They were hunted and chased and eaten by only one other creature and it was the only one they feared.

They didn’t have languages in the mortal tongue back then, but if they did, they would be called the Racintor. Meaning ‘Dragon Slayer’ in the language of the Doasen Kingdoms.

The racintors were created for no other purpose than to hunt dragons and the dragons were only created to avoid the racintor, such was the paradox of their existence.

The racintor were huge serpents like creatures, almost hideous in their beauty. Long coiling bodies and sharp shining scales, snouts pointed and gleaming, with large, gaping maws, teeth like those of several thousand long swords. Long, jutting and jagged spike-like spines ran along their body, one of the only things that could get through a dragon's armoured skin.

They were the only thing the dragons feared, and they spent all their time in their caves and in the sky, where the racintors could not find them. They feared they would be discovered by them in their nests and gilded caves and they would be caught off guard, sleeping perhaps. And the rancitor would slither in coiling their long snake-like body around them, tighter and tighter, the sharp spines breaking flesh and into bones and sinew, until there was not a breath left in their body. The rancitor would then swallow the egg, the one most precious thing in the world to a dragon, open their great grisly gleaming maw and swallow the egg whole. They thrived on the pain of

the dragons, drank it in like a fine aged wine.

Thankfully, these days, there are no longer any rancitor.

But, sadly, there are no longer any dragons either, of which we will always mourn.

Because they were too beautiful and heavenly for this earth, and we didn’t deserve them, so they left.

Maybe if you look at the stars, one day you’ll see them, with their great flaming breath and their majestic wigs, streaking across the night sky.

#writing prompt #dragons

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giftfromthesleepprincess · 5 years

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Chapter 6-The Eternal Sorceress; Scene 5

Gift from the Princess Who Brought Sleep, pages 226-243

It had begun to rain.

It had been raining like this when she came here around two months ago too. Although the rain was more intense today than back then, with no sign of letting up.

If the sky had been clear, they might have been able to see the splendid full moon.

But there was no time to pay mind to that. They had to find Margarita as fast as they could.

“I hope she’s here…”

Elluka and Gumilia descended from the carriage, and looked up at the red building before their eyes.

If they should fail, there wasn’t anything they could do about it this time. For now they could do nothing but pray that their reasoning was on the mark.

There wasn’t a spare moment to go over Calgaround with a fine-tooth comb. The red clothing—relying on just that commonality, Elluka and Gumillia were standing before the mansion of Calgaround’s mayor, Julia Abelard.

“You should head back to the entrance of town for now,” Elluka said to the coachman, looking upon him with worry. “We—Yes, if over two hours go by and we haven’t come back, get out of town immediately.”

“I wish you well in your battle…although I don’t really understand what’s going on still.”

“You don’t need to. You should stay quiet on having brought us here too.”

“In any case…good luck.”

“Thank you.”

After watching the carriage leave, Elluka and Gumillia opened the door to the mansion.

It wasn’t locked.

“—Welcome, come right in.”

Julia Abelard was there to greet them. She didn’t look surprised. It seemed she had anticipated for a while that the two of them would be coming there.

“We don’t have time. Answer me honestly.” Elluka gazed directly at Julia’s face. “Miss Margarita Blankenheim. Is she in this house?”

“...Yes. Margarita’s on the second floor. She’s there to work on her last task.”

“—I thought so. You’re the sorceress who was conning everyone with that name...‘Elluka Clockworker’. If I’d known that at the beginning, I could have finished this without taking such a detour.”

“Life is a procession of detours, Miss Hanne Lorre...Or rather—Miss Elluka Clockworker.” Julia grinned broadly.

“--! ...You knew. You knew that I was the real Elluka.”

“Oh yes, of course. That’s why I directed you to go to Toragay.”

“...And that librarian was your accomplice as well, wasn’t he?”

“I wanted to see if you could figure out Margarita’s true identity. ...You’ve let me down, Miss Elluka. I thought you’d be able to arrive at the truth much faster than this.”

Julia let out a disappointed sigh. Seeing that, Elluka shot back, irritated, “You’re just being a sore loser. Even I noticed there was something fishy about Margarita. But I didn’t have proof. Without any clear evidence that she was someone who had contracted with a ‘Vessel of Deadly Sin’, I couldn’t just make a move on her at random.”

“‘Contractor’? Margarita?”

“Isn’t that the case? She’s been putting the people of her town to sleep using the power of the demon in the vess—”

“Haaah...What a letdown. You...don’t know anything at all,” Julia sighed again.

“And just what is it you’re saying I don’t know!?”

“All of it, all of it. I didn’t do anything to lead you astray but you’ve been completely fooled anyway. …She had told me to let you into Pere Noel, but I won’t. There’s no way you have the required skill.”

“…So Pere Noel is wrapped up in this after all.”

“Yes…Yes. I am the leader of ‘Pere Noel’, ‘First, Santa Claus’. The late Kaspar was ‘Second, Dealer’. Margarita…I suppose I’d call her, ‘Third, Sleep Princess’. …Would you be satisfied with that answer?”

“Why was Kaspar killed? Was there some internal struggle in the organization?”

“Margarita did that on her own…But, well. He was breaking the organization’s rules, and tried to hog all the profits for the black market for himself. I certainly couldn’t let that slide. So I gave Margarita ‘gift’. She’d asked for it.”

“That…red liquid.”

The item that Julia had left in the inn. But judging from her tone, that wasn’t something that she’d forgotten by accident.

“Oh, so you properly noticed that, did you? I’m so glad you found my hint. That was the third ‘gift’, which I made—but that was just a dud, one that didn’t serve any purpose on its own. Margarita skillfully improved upon it, and with that made the fourth ‘gift’.”

“She killed Kaspar and Marx with that, right?”

“She only killed Kaspar with the fourth ‘gift’. For Marx she made the fifth ‘gift’. Although it seems that didn’t do the job as well. Her refinement of it actually weakened its effects, paradoxically.”

That was likely why Marx didn’t immediately die, then.

“Through that failure, Margarita pushed on and created the sixth ‘gift’. It’s a most marvelous thing. There’s no need to have the victim drink it. The contagion spreads through the air, and then one by one guides people to a sleep-like death--she’s magnificently created a pandemic that exceeds even the ‘Gula Disease’!”

The Gula Disease—that was a miraculous pathogen that once spread throughout Evillious, and drove many people to their deaths. It was an illness deemed incurable until recently when Puerick Rogzé invented a cure for it.

“…I’ll eradicate such a thing immediately.”

“You think so? Is that even something you can do? In the end you couldn’t even do anything about the Gula Disease—the illness released by the ‘Vessel of Gluttony’--right? You couldn’t protect Arth or Anne from it.”

"--Don't you dare speak their names."

Right then even Gumillia beside her could hear Elluka grinding her teeth. Arth and Anne…They were her old friends, who she’d been unable to save. It was a memory that left a deep shadow on her heart even now.

As though to ridicule Elluka’s irritation, Julia continued to speak.

"You've realized it now, haven't you? The sixth ‘gift’ won’t go away even if you kill Margarita. Just like the Gula Disease, it will remain as an infectious illness—and continue to kill people.”

"…Grr."

"And that's not all. Margarita is currently trying to create a seventh 'gift'. And by dawn, when she has it complete--What will happen then? Maybe it will destroy humanity, hahaha.”

"--I won't let her finish it."

Elluka prepared to unleash a spell.

--But Gumillia spoke up before she could.

"…Is 'Fifth, Pierrot', here?" she asked, looking calm.

"Ah…Yes, that's right, Gumillia. You were pursuing him, weren't you? –But unfortunately, 'Fifth, Pierrot' has already returned home. But if you're looking for the girl he was taking with him, she's in the basement. Feel free to let her go once you’ve defeated me.”

“I thought so a while back, but you have been, very talkative.”

“Heheh, it’s fine. This is the time of question-and-answer that I’ve been eagerly waiting for. Not to mention, you—"

"'You won't be able, to tell anyone. Because you'll, die here!'--That's what you mean, to say?"

“…Correct.”

After saying so, Julia also made the same gesture as Elluka.

But what rose up from her two hands was not wind.

It was the same color as her clothing. A crimson fire.

“Gumillia, step aside.”

Elluka pushed Gumillia out of the way and released a tornado from her hand.

The tornado grew in intensity, heading straight for Julia as it encompassed the wood on the floor and the furniture around them.

Gazing at the sight, Julia sent her own flames towards the tornado without making any sign of alarm.

If they were normal flames they would probably have been snuffed out by the tornado in an instant.

But the flames that Julia unleashed changed shape as though they had a will of their own, taking on the form of a large serpent. The fire snake wrapped around the tornado as though to capture it, and it was completely negated.

“…!”

Elluka certainly hadn’t seen that coming. If Julia was indeed the same “Red Cat Sorceress” from before, then she had fought her in the past. At the time Elluka had both been taken by surprise and under attack by her underlings, and so she’d been effectively defeated.

So this time she had created a tornado with her full magical power right from the start.

Frankly, she had intended to settle this with one blow.

“Hmph…A spell that controls wind—Or perhaps it would be more accurate to say, a spell that turns nature into your own power by manipulating it. You could display that strength to the fullest in a forest or above an ocean. However…Seems it doesn’t work so well inside a house like this,” Julia analyzed Elluka’s magic with an air of calm. Next she turned to Gumillia. “The former spirit here has the same sort of power, yes?”

Gumillia made no reply. But Elluka knew. As a former forest spirit, Gumillia was much more dependent on their surrounding environment than Elluka. She may have been at her strongest if they were battling in a forest, but in a town like this her power dropped dramatically.

In that case—

Elluka suddenly started to sing.

A beautiful melody flowed from her lips.

A “spell song”—That was the strongest among all of the magical techniques that Elluka used, her so-called special technique.

By putting magical energy in a song, she was able to draw out the effect of her spells several times over. As it simultaneously increased their burden on the body it wasn’t something to be used lightly, but this wasn’t such a situation where that caution would apply.

Normally, the magical energy that the song carried would gradually well up inside her body.

However—

…That’s odd. My magic isn’t overflowing in the least.

With this she was just some weirdo singing in front of an enemy.

Elluka stopped singing.

Julia grinned widely watching her.

“Heheheh—If you’re a sorceress yourself, naturally you must know. Using high-grade magic requires some degree of preparation. This is my house, so you two have had no opportunity at all to do anything of the sort. But…That’s not so for me. I’ll say it again, this is my house!”

As Julia cried out, writing stood out against the walls of the mansion. They were carved symbols that gave off black light, closely packed against the red walls.

“Let me say up front that you can’t use ‘spell songs’. They’re sealed by these carvings. In here, no matter how much you sing it won’t grant you any power! –So, with these odds I might win even if it’s two against one, hahahahaha.”

So then, knowing what methods Elluka and Gumillia had on them, she had beaten them to the punch.

“Come then…Be burned to cinders.”

Julia once more shot fire from her hands. The flames were several times bigger than the ones before, and reached even to the ceiling.

Although there was no sign of the ceiling burning from those flames.

“Relax. These fires won’t burn down the mansion. I can’t afford to let Margarita get charred to a crisp. These are flames that only burn people. …In other words, these are flames that will only kill you two!”

This was bad. There was no way to ward off those flames inside like this.

They could run outside—no, Julia wouldn’t let that slide. The entrance must have been sealed with magic the moment Elluka and Gumillia walked in the door.

She had no option but to summon up a wind once more. But…Would she be able to overcome such enormous flames? What should she do, unable to use spell songs and only left with magical techniques that had declined from what they used to be--

Her foe was not kind enough to wait for Elluka to think things over.

Before she knew it, Julia’s flames were advancing before her eyes.

…Ah, I’m in deep trouble—I might die here.

Elluka might have had an immortal body (albeit that had come into doubt lately), but that certainly didn’t mean she was invincible. It would hurt her to be cut by a sword, and naturally if she got burned up by fire it would be farewell to this world.

How half-baked of the “Sin”. I wish that I could have been made invincible while it was making me immortal. If so then I could have been as reckless as I wanted, and might have looked for the “Vessels of Deadly Sin” faster—Oh enough. There’s no point in me making such unsightly excuses right before I die.

There was no time for her to struggle by raising a wind. The flames had already reached the tip of Elluka’s nose.

Elluka steadied her resolve and closed her eyes.

--The fire didn’t burn Elluka’s clothing or skin.

Literally, it had all been washed clean. There was a large hole in the wall, and the rain pouring in from it was gathering up into a turbid stream and extinguishing Julia’s fire.

“Ho…My flames can’t be put out by regular rain. Have you changed this rain into magical water? Impressive, Elluka,” Julia praised.

But that was wrong. Elluka wasn’t the one who used the rain.

Then that left one answer. The other sorceress present there—

“Gumillia!”

She had done it.

“Elluka…you’re too panicked.”

“I-I am not!”

“Yes, you are--Hey, woman." Gumillia waved her left hand, and the turbid stream returned back to rain. While doing so, she pointed her right hand at Julia and began to speak to her. "Where, have you left your red cat plushy?"

"…"

Julia didn't reply. The smile had vanished from her face.

That was true. If she was "Red Cat Sorceress", then her true body would be the plushy. Her human bodies were simply being manipulated by it. So the “Red Cat Sorceress” always either had the plushy riding her shoulders or at least somewhere nearby.

But she couldn’t see it anywhere in the mansion.

In other words, that meant--

"You…are not the 'Red Cat Sorceress'!" Elluka cried, also pointing at Julia.

Gumillia made a dissatisfied expression. “I had, wanted, to say that…”

Without a word, Julia glared at Elluka, and then turned that glare to Gumillia.

"…Hmph."

And then she made her third sigh that day.

“It seems of the ‘Eternal Sorceresses’, the apprentice is the superior one. …Yes. Congratulations. I am not the 'Red Cat Sorceress', and while I'm at it I'm not 'First, Santa Claus' either. … You could go as far as to say that I'm not even 'Julia Abelard'."

She pinched the edges of her skirt and lifted them in a quick curtsey,

“Let me introduce myself again. I am the most loyal apprentice of ‘First, Santa Claus’…the one you call the ‘Red Cat Sorceress’—I am called ‘Fourth, Shadow’. The ‘Four’ is simply because I like that number; in actuality I am the most senior member below my lady, heheheheheheh.”

“’Fourth, Shadow’—In other words, you’re her body double?” Elluka asked.

"Yes, that’s so.”

“Then the fake ‘Elluka’ who got close with Margarita—”

“Oh yes, that was not a lie. You weren’t mistaken on that. Though of course, that was something that I’d done under my lady’s orders.”

Come to think of it—Rita at the Charity Institute had said that the “messenger of the gods” who’d arrived when Margarita was born was a different woman from the fake Elluka.

She’d been right. The “messenger of the gods” was the genuine “Red Cat Sorceress”, and the fake Elluka who showed up in Toragay after that was the “Fourth, Shadow” standing before them…That must be it.

“Ah, that’s right. I’ll tell you everything, before you ask me—I am also the one who burned down Lioness twelve years ago. –My, how nostalgic. Now that I think about it, that was my first job. Though, I’d done it by own judgment. My lady has such an attachment to you. I got so burned up with jealousy. But in the end, I wasn’t able to kill you, my whole reason for doing it. …Little Shadow was but a novice back then you see, teehee♪”

“I see…I’m glad to hear that…In that case then I can kill you without hesitation.”

“My my, such bold talk, Miss Elluka. Alright, then if it’s like that how about I send you once more the fire spell that my lady taught m—”

“No need.”

The one to butt in between them was Gumillia. She had drawn her fireworks gun, and pointed the muzzle at Shadow.

“If you, are the ‘Red Cat Sorceress’ apprentice, then your opponent, can be me, an apprentice as well.”

“…Getting awfully cocky, aren’t we, Miss Ex-spirit? All you’re going to do is dodge my flames aga—"

Whether it was “Shhpah!”, “Crack!”, or “Ka-boom!”—at any rate, a bright flash shot from Gumillia’s gun along with a loud explosion.

--But Shadow nimbly dodged it.

“What an interesting thing you have there. Is that a gun with magic in it? I see, so then you’re able to use a degree of magical power without relying on the enviro—"

Another explosive noise rung out, and another flash headed for Shadow.

But she once again dodged it.

“You’re slow. Too slow. Something like that’s not going to work on m—”

“Then, what about this?”

Gumillia took out a knife from her pocket, and rapidly inscribed a symbol onto it.

She quickly brought up the gun again, and fired off a third time.

The flash that came out was much faster than before.

“—Oop.”

Shadow just barely managed to dodge with a bit of panic. The flash only grazed her skirt.

“An acceleration symbol, hm? How marvelous. But unfortunately, I’m still just a bit too fast for—”

“‘Clockwork Secret Art’.”

The moment those words came to Gumillia’s mouth, the rain coming in from the hole in the wall suddenly stopped all at once.

Not just that. The dusk outside brightened, and the scenery at once changed to the middle of the day.

“Wh…what is—”

A bizarre change began to occur in Shadow too. The movements of her body had changed to something quite openly sluggish.

“Wh…at…is…th…is…”

Gumillia leisurely walked up to Shadow.

“Ho…w…are…yo…u…so…fa…st…?”

From Shadow’s perspective, Gumillia’s movements probably looked like they’d gotten extremely rapid.

But they weren’t. In truth—the flow of time around Shadow had simply gotten slower.

The Clockwork Secret Art—ordinarily it was a spell that required elaborate preparation, and a source of great magical power to accompany it.

And yet Gumillia…had used it without any preparation or without even recitation of any spell words.

Gumillia put her gun’s muzzle on Shadow’s temple and immediately pulled the trigger.

“Ough!”

Shadow gave out a miserable scream, fell back, and then was blown away.

Even after she collided with the ground, Shadow didn’t lose consciousness. She staggered around on her feet. Apparently the effects of the Clockwork technique itself had cut out.

“Looks as though, right now, this is my limit, after all,” Gumillia muttered regretfully.

If the Clockwork Secret Art had been completely unleashed to its full effect, Shadow’s movements wouldn’t have just slowed, but time would have completely come to a full standstill. The span of time that it was in effect would have been much longer, too.

Gumillia might have declared herself to be at her limit in that sense, but even so it was more than enough. It was beyond what the average sorcerer would be able to even put into operation alone.

“Alright. One more try. Clockwork—”

“N…Hold on a moment! Stop,” Shadow anxiously screamed, running outside from the hole in the wall.

The outside of the mansion had once more turned to nighttime, and the rain had started pouring again.

“…You won’t escape,” Gumillia murmured. Immediately after, something snagged on Shadow’s body.

“Wh…!?”

It was the stems of Greeonio Plateau Roses. They had been growing in the garden, and had rapidly expanded, binding Shadow’s arms and legs. Not just one, but several had all attacked her at once.

“I c-can’t move—”

“And now…return to the earth.”

The Greeonio Plateau Roses’ vigor didn’t stop at arresting Shadow. The pointed stems pierced into her skin, and burrowed into her insides. The number of stems wrapped around her grew and grew, until finally Shadow’s body had been completely obscured by them.

Elluka could do nothing but gaze during the whole fight. She merely watched over these actions that far surpassed what she pictured of her favored pupil in complete admiration.

The Greeonio Plateau Roses stopped growing. The captured Shadow said nothing.

Eventually the countless stems fused together and changed to one large stem, and finally a massive flower bloomed from it.

And so, the battle came to an abrupt end—

And Fourth, Shadow literally became an enormous Flower of the Plateau.

<<prev------directory------next>>

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slyviaplathismybestie · 6 years

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Irony In Othello

When looking at ya boi Will Shakespeare’s Othello you have to look at irony and how it is used throughout the play, specifically dramatic irony. Well, first you’ll need to look at the different types of irony and what irony actually is. Now, you might find yourself thinking “op, I know what irony is. I use it all the time”, but could you tell me exactly what it is? Probably not.

According to the dictionary definition, and yes I googled it. Irony is the expression of one’s meaning by using language that typically signifies the opposite, and this is used normally for a humorous emphatic effect. Think of irony in sitcoms or such.

Irony originated as a literary technique in Greek tragedies, in which the full significance of a character’s words or actions is clear to the audience although unknown to those within the play.

The different types of irony in Othello are:

Verbal Irony - The use of words to mean something different than what you appear to mean e.g. Iago 24/7

Situational Irony - The difference between what is expected to happen and what actually happens.

Dramatic Irony - When the audience is more aware of what is happening than the characters.

Most examples of these involve Iago King of the Snakes. Throughout the whole play he acts like he’s got Iago’s back, but in reality he’s plotting his downfall. What a fucking snake! And he makes his intentions very clear at the start of the play when talking to Roderigo.

Were I the Moor I would not be Iago. In following him I follow but myself; Heaven is my judge, not I for love and duty, But seeming so for my peculiar end. For when my outward action doth demonstrate The native act and figure of my heart In compliment extern, ’tis not long after But I will wear my heart upon my sleeve For daws to peck at. I am not what I am. (I.i.57–65)

Iago openly says that he doesn’t follow Othello out of respect or love, but because he wants to exploit him to gain more power and status for himself, and also get revenge for Othello supposedly fucking his wife. This speech also shows off Iago’s cryptic and elliptical manner of speaking. Phrases such as “Were I the Moor I would not be Iago” and “I am not what I am” hide as much as, if not more than, they reveal. Iago is continually playing a game of deception, even with Roderigo and the audience. The paradox or riddle that the speech creates is symbolic of Iago’s power throughout the play.

#aqa english #english literature #english lit a level #othello #shakespeare #irony #drama #aqa #iago #roderigo #shakespeare othello #aqa english lit

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ayma-nidiot · 3 years

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“Don’t Speak Their Names”- Shrimpshipping fic Chapter 31

This chapter can be found here on AO3.

Chapter 31 - The T.V.

~29 December 2005~

In an extremely rare moment of peace, Rex decided to take a stroll through downtown Domino City with all his… friends, for lack of a better word. If anything, he felt bad that everyone was doing so many nice things for him, and he had no appropriate way to return the favour. The weather during their stroll was as nice as it was shortly before regionals. After all I’ve done to everyone since then… am I really deserving?

It was Espa, of all people, who snapped him out of his thoughts. “FREAKING OW! ”

“Espa?” Mako turned around to see his boyfriend trying to bend over to pick up a maternity shirt that fell out of his handbag. “See, this is why I told you not to bite more than you can chew. Because you’re not-”

“Yeah, I know, I’m not a shark. Or a shifter like you.”

Mako smiled as he gently stroked Espa’s baby bump. “Maybe one of our babies might be. Wouldn’t that be cool?”

“So, that’s why I’ve been in pain all the time. Ugh.” Espa groaned, then looked to Rex.

“What, have the twins been giving you trouble?”

“Yeah… They’re growing so fast. Not helped, of course, by how they always want spicy food. If they don’t get it, they’re kicking me like crazy…” Espa rubbed his temples. “I haven’t been getting much sleep. I don’t know how you do it, Rex.”

“Heh, what an odd way to bond. Well, just think of how happy you’ll be when you finally get to look into their eyes. And believe me, it hasn’t been much easier for me, either.” Rex’s smile quickly faded. “At least you have the father of your babies at your side.”

The party, now feeling like they were done for the day, decided to make one last stop before going home. Rex’s beloved park was badly damaged from the monster attacks, and even with landscapers working hard to restore it, he knew it would take forever to regrow the roses that were once there.

“This is the park where we had the baby shower…” Rex couldn’t bear to look at the brambles all over the park benches.

“Come on, Papa, chin up!” Amber hugged her mother from the front. “The Earthbound Gods are almost all gone, and after they are, you and Daddy can duel your hearts out here!”

“And me?” Joey pointed to himself.

“Yes, Joey, and you.”

“But what about you , Amber?” Rex asked.

“I… I don’t know…” Amber trembled. “After the Earthbound Gods are all vanquished, I will have served my purpose. So I’ll probably return to my own time.”

“You know what, fuck that noise.” Rex wrapped an arm around his daughter. “You’re one of us now, and nothing’s going to change that.”

“And I know better than anyone that time paradoxes really aren’t a thing when my cousin is involved.” Mokuba laughed.

“Too bad he couldn’t use those mysterious powers of his in Battle City.” Espa chuckled.

“Ah, shaddup,” Rex scoffed. “You weren’t even there in our ancient Egyptian time travel.”

“Papa… Okay, I think I’ll stay after all and attend my own birth, if only to make sure that Daddy isn’t late.”

“I hope he’s there at all… Ggh!” As Rex chanced upon the central tower of Domino City and the T.V. on it, another contraction hit him - so he called Dr. Balls for advice. “Doc, I’m having more regular and painful contractions now. And I’m feeling them everywhere, not just in my belly anymore. I know I should have told you this yesterday, but... this all started yesterday.”

“Then you need to get your butt over here right now, because you’re experiencing true labour. Your mucus plug came out a while ago, so it’s only a matter of time before your water breaks too.”

“Yes, Doc… I’ll be there in a minute.” Rex hung up.

“I’ll push you on the wheelchair to the delivery room, if you want,” Joey offered.

“And I’ll hold your hand throughout the birth if Weevil isn’t there,” Mokuba chimed in.

“We might as well all be there,” spoke Atem. “You’ll need all the support you can get.”

“...” Rex said nothing, and merely looked at the giant T.V. that displayed the news.

“I thought you said that the park was your final pit stop for the day? You sure don’t have a sense of urgency for someone who’s about to give birth,” Espa noted. “What’s wrong?”

“This T.V…. It’s where Weeves and I watched the finals of that K.C. Grand Tournament we almost crashed.”

“I still think you guys should have won that duel,” Kaiba remarked. “Zigfried just got a super lucky starting hand.”

“We’ve been through so much together ever since I fell for him after regionals…” Rex subconsciously started crying; he hugged his baby bump with one arm and stroked it with the other. “And yet… he’s not going to be present for his daughter’s birth, all because of the Earthbound Gods.”

“Papa, I-” Before Amber could say her piece, she saw a familiar face out of nowhere. “Daddy!”

“Weeves?” Rex turned around. Sure enough, Weevil stood only a few meters away, staring longingly at the same T.V. He ran up to him and starting kissing and hugging him immediately. “I knew you’d come back to me! Baby, I missed you so much.”

“...” Weevil remained silent for a spell before he hugged Rex back.

“You…” Rex’s tears turned to tears of joy. “You really are back…”

“No he isn’t!” spoke a demonic voice from above, whose source was invisible.

“A-Arrrrrgh!” Weevil knelt to the ground in pain. “My… My head…”

“Weeves!” Rex began to panic.

“Show yourself at once!” Atem demanded. “Or else you will know the power of ancient Egyptian magic!”

“Now now, Uru…” Watda appeared behind Weevil in the form of a crimson devil, with several snakes in place of legs. “Have you forgotten what your real goal is?"

“'Real goal...?'" Rex's fleeting good mood faded. "Weeves, explain yourself!"

"And why should I have to?" Weevil's voice hardly sounded like his own now. "Actually, scratch that. I'll explain myself... through battle!"

"You... You can't be serious?!" Rex wanted to collapse to his knees right then and there. "Grr! Watda, get out of my boyfriend's head if you know what's good for you!"

“You cannot unwrite what is already written!” Watda cackled as red-and-purple shadows emitted from Weevil’s heart.

“Weeves!” The temperate weather gradually began to foul up, to the point where even Rex noticed. But that didn’t make him want to go to the hospital room any faster, his quickening contractions be damned.

“...Yes, my love.” Weevil’s clothes slowly peeled off, thanks to the flames that Watda created. “Your wish is my command. Say the word, and I will kill anyone who gets in our way.”

“Weeves?” Rex’s heart broke seeing his beloved get intimate with someone else. “You can’t mean that!”

“Oh, I think he does.” Watda caressed Weevil’s face. “Once I am through with you, I will bear Uru’s children. Then, this world will belong to the Earthbound Gods!”

“Weeves…” Rex patted his baby bump. “Does the love we share mean nothing to you now?”

“Whatever are you talking about? Ha!” Weevil cackled.

“Weeves…” Rex stepped back as his contractions gradually got worse.

“Papa!” Amber angrily turned to Watda. “Stop filling my mom’s head with shit!”

“Uru! It’s time!” Watda’s snakes delved deeper into Weevil’s body. “Receive untold powers!”

“Yes!” Weevil’s laugh became more sinister as his form began to change.

“Arise! Earthbound God Sanpedro!” So were Watda’s last words before he completely fused with Weevil. He was now not only half-shifted, but he also had red eyes, four dragon’s wings, and a maroon chain whip.

“Ha…” Weevil felt no need to say anything yet, hoping that the power coursing through him and his intimidating presence would speak for themselves.

“That’s…” Amber shook. “That’s the creature… that killed everyone…”

“Oh… my… gods…” Atem looked up in slight fear; even though it was midday, Weevil’s new transformation enshrouded Domino City in dark clouds.

“Instead of gawking at him, why don’t we do something about it, pharaoh?” Kaiba shifted.

“You said it, Kaiba!” Joey summoned Red-Eyes Black Dragon and mounted it. “So bug boy has wings now. How hard could he be to defeat?”

“You really think so?” Anita and Weenus, as Aslla Piscu and Cusillu, showed themselves.

“I killed your buddy the whale like it was nothing!” Kaiba scoffed. “And you’ll soon learn that messing with Seto Kaiba will be your first - and last - mistake.”

“I’m right behind you, Kaiba.” Dip revealed herself.

“Ccarayhua… You’ll fucking pay, traitor! Hyaaaaa!” Anita thrust her beak at Dip, who counterattacked with her lizard tail.

“You go ahead and kill the damned rabbit’s other allies…” Weevil ordered. “Leave the damned rabbit and his daughter to me. ”

Amber had to think fast as Weevil approached, with his chain whip at the ready. “I never thought I’d have to do it again…”

“Amber?” Rex was about to mount Red-Eyes Slash Dragon.

“But if transforming into Rabidragon is the only way to bring Daddy back to his senses, so be it.” Amber lowered to the ground, hovering only slightly about it, as pink flames erupted from the ground. The flames changed her body into that of a dragon with rabbit ears, cottonball-like fur, and red spikes all over her body and tail.

“Beautiful…” Rex admired his daughter’s true form.

“Papa, get on,” Amber insisted. “We have a better chance of fighting the monster from the air.”

“Oh?” Weevil raised an eyebrow as Rex and Amber flew up to his level. “I’m a monster now? Whatever happened to ‘Daddy?’”

“You’re not my Daddy!” Amber glowered at Weevil. “You’re a disgusting monster that has driven Daddy mad!”

“Hah! Well, good luck trying to kill me without also killing your Daddy!”

Just then, Rex could hear a voice call from below, “Rex!”

“Mom?” Rex looked to see Ptera, Spinos, Camellia, and Adelaide running to him,

“Get down from that butt-ugly dragon… rabbit… thing this instant, mister!” Ptera demanded. “You should be in the delivery room!”

“Harsh, Grandma… By the way, I’m Amber. Or Rabidragon, whatever you want to call me.”

“Oh my… S-Sorry.”

“And who is that? ” Camellia squinted at her son. “Weevil?”

“Ah, yes…” Weevil didn’t bother to descend, as Watda’s henchmen surrounded Rex’s family. “If it isn’t the Earthbound God Uru’s mother herself. You’ve served your purpose, as have the rest of you lot.” Weevil nodded, giving his monsters the go-ahead to attack.

“Oh, no you don’t! Go, Jurrac Tyrannus!” Spinos summoned his ace monster that barely protected Ptera in time.

“Spinos… Heh! I’m not some damsel in distress you need to save! Watch this! ” Ptera summoned Dark Driceratops and Black Ptera in attack mode.

The Dark Driceratops fell an enemy close to Anita. “You lot are strong, for nonshifters.”

“And it’s too bad you’ll never get a taste of their power!” Kaiba blocked Anita from proceeding further. “But you’ll get a taste of the queen of Egypt.”

“And its awesome crown prince!” Heka did a funky dance before generating a ball of light from his hands.

“Heka, for gods’ sake, we’re in a battle!” Kaiba chided. “Be thankful to Ra that you haven’t gotten your head chopped off yet!”

“But I haven’t, Papa! Look what I can do!” Heka released a storm of light balls at several enemies around Weenus - and even one at Weenus himself.

“Ggh…” Weenus winced as the light ball took off a good chunk of his monkey tail. “I can’t believe I let this nimrod injure me!”

“Looks can be deceiving!” Heka stuck his tongue out.

“Aww, you’re so amazing, my love!” Amber squealed.

“How dare you flirt on the battlefield instead of fighting me! ” Weevil charged, nicking Amber’s shoulder with the chain whip and nearly knocking Rex off.

“Aaaaaah!” Amber cried.

“Babe!” Heka violently pushed aside the enemies that swarmed him, killing most of them. “Get out of the fucking way!”

“Like hell I will!” Weenus slapped Heka with what little tail he had left.

“You… son of a bitch…” Heka held the gash in his arm, but still charged forward. “Nobody comes between my girlfriend and I, ya hear me?”

“Huh?”

Heka began to sing, “Ireruruy iraruy…”

“What? Heka, you idiot!” Atem exclaimed as his Millennium Puzzle glowed. “Your body can’t handle the Pharaoh’s Incantation! You’re not mature enough-”

“Irakah urugem iomo atakatu, ijusanim uatust…”

“You…” Weenus could hardly remain in monkey form.

“You die!” Heka’s arm became enveloped in a blue, sword-like beam of light. “Now!”

“Gah…” Weenus reverted forms mid-air and fell to his death.

“You’ll pay!” Anita tried to slash Heka with her wings, that was until Kaiba took the hit instead.

“Leave my son alone, cur!” With his teeth, Kaiba seized Anita by the wings and kicked her hard enough to rip them off one by one.

“Hmm?” Weevil looked to the two Earthbound Gods who had just died. “Tch! Useless bastards. But no matter… Rex, I will kill you on this day, just like I did in Amber’s future. Do you remember, oh dear daughter of mine?”

“No…” Amber’s body started to blink like a car light. “No, leave me alone!”

“Amber…” Rex stroked Amber’s ears. “I’m here, and we’ll free Weevil from this evil. Together.”

“Hahaha! Come try me, rabbit stew!” Weevil unleashed the chain whip upon a weakened Amber.

“Weevil! Ugh!” Rex’s Tyrant Dragon barely managed to get a hold of the chain whip. “Please! You’re better than this! Even under that disgusting disguise, I know my bug duelist is still there. I know that the man whom I’ve literally been to hell in back with many times is still there.”

Weevil’s attack faltered for a spell. “D-Do you honestly think that you can sweet talk your way to defeating the most powerful Earthbound God of all? What a joke! I’m not weak-minded like Ccarayhua! And I’ll prove it to you right now!”

“If…” Rex closed his eyes in resignation as his last strong monster fell to Weevil’s chain whip. “If that’s how you really think, then-”

“Aaaaaaaaargh!”

Rex opened his eyes again to see that Kaiba had taken the hit for him, and took a rapid nosedive in human form. “Kaiba! Gods, no!”

“Big Brother!” Mokuba led the “Dweeb Patrol” to where Kaiba had fallen.

“Hahahahaha!” Even though he was several thousand feet in the air, and Kaiba’s intervention knocked him back a bit, Weevil found it prudent to spit upon Kaiba’s body. “So much for the ‘God-Shattering Star,’ huh? That's what he gets for ruining my childhood! Fuck you, Seto Kaiba! I curse your name! I despise you!”

“Our God-Shattering Star…” Phuckdis couldn’t transform, as his flight feathers had been cut during the battle. “He has fallen!”

“P-Papa…” Heka was still fatigued from his battle with Weenus, as well as using the Incantation. He couldn’t even crawl to Kaiba, and passed out before he could try.

“Heka… My love, not again…”

“And to think, your cousin died for nothing, because you’re going to die anyway!” After brushing himself off, Weevil started his attacks anew, which Amber struggled to block.

“Amber…” Rex let his Duel Disk fall from the sky. “This is hopeless… If the Blue-Eyes Shining Dragon can’t defeat Weeves, then what am I supposed to do?”

#yugioh #ygo #shrimpshipping #mpreg #fanfiction #symbioshipping

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itsyastarboi · 6 years

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one (1) single idea

MGS 3 is a VR sim played by Raiden before MGS 2

evidence:

1. Raiden’s code name was “Snake” before MGS 2

2. Colonel Campbell is the one who tells us that “Snake! You Can't Do That! The future will be changed! You’ll create a Time Paradox!”

#change my mind #mgs #metal gear solid #metal gear solid 3 #metal gear solid 2

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sometipsygnostalgic · 7 years

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Hiveswap Review (Spoiler)

We’ve been waiting an awfully long time for the Homestuck Adventure Game. First kickstarted in 2012, it’s gone through a troubled development cycle between 3 studios and.... yeah, you get the drift. Even in its final form, Hiveswap has gone through numerous unexplained delays (most infamously the last minute January Launch Month delay), and the development team for it had been very tight-hush until the end of August when a final release date of September 14th was announced.

Now that Hiveswap is out, we’re able to see for ourselves what the development team has been working on. Does it hold up to expectations? Does it make up for the hard delays and extremely concerning lack of communication?

Those are answers you can only decide for yourselves. What I will say, however, is this: Hiveswap is a charming and visually stunning introduction to the Homestuck world, that combines only the best of Homestuck’s humor with a new calmer, more curious and coherent setting.

It’s a shame, then, that the content of Act 1 isn’t a little bit longer. However, the gimmick of combining any item with each other and getting a new description will draw out the length for any lore completionists.

Before I start gushing about my feelings on Hiveswap, I’d like to point out something that REALLY soured the game for me: The cutscenes have a processing power so high that most laptops - including my own - aren’t able to handle them. I don’t understand this, because a 2.20ghz processor can handle the game like a breeze. I’ve had no trouble running Hiveswap. But as soon as a cutscene plays, it ends up taking a processing power that would burn a computer which can play Overwatch. What’s going on here? Why are cutscenes like this? Is it something to do with the Unity engine? Surely another user has figured out how to compress scenes without losing their quality!

So, I had to watch the game be played in its entirety by @neproxrezi, only returning to my own game to test out as many combinations as possible.

To make this easier for myself, I’m going to split off Hiveswap into a few categories:

Story and Characters - Hiveswap Act 1 is extreeeemely short, like 27 minutes long if you do an ameteur speedrun. On the surface, not a lot happens, but it serves as a compelling introduction to the Hiveswap world. You start off as Joey Claire, a young dancer of multiple schools with a hatred for pogs, Bubsy, and her entire life circumstances. Joey works with her brother to hide from a bunch of monsters that have invaded their home. Shenanigans ensue, mostly pigeon-related, and using Jude’s cryptic advice Joey figures out how to retrieve the attic key. Once in the attic she uses a precious heirloom key, which looks suspiciously Cherub-like, to open a SNAKE PORTAL..... Joey is transported to the world of Alternia where she meets a self-loathing rustblood of the bottom rung of society called Xefros, and explores the house of his controlling and paranoid Revolutionary moirail Dammek. Then Joey gives Xefros some words of encouragement and saves him with the help of Dammek’s lusus, then they ride into the distance while dodgy heiress Trizza Tethis takes a selfie over the burning neighbourhood. It’s all pretty basic, but a natural stopping point and setup for act 2 that makes me devastated I can’t go and play it immediately.

When you dive deeper into the game, usually by clicking on everything you see and combining as many items as possible, you can learn a lot more about these 4 characters. Joey in particular gives the audience plenty to think about once you start messing around with her; combining the green Cherub key with items will often leave her reminiscing about her absent mother, and clicking on Jake’s items strewn all over the place will show how she resents his constant absence fom her and Jude’s lives. There’s plenty of information about Rose’s mom, too, who’s their drunken babysitter and.... even now, not the best stand-in for proper parenting. I’ll talk about these two more later but it makes me curious about their circumstances in Homestuck. Meanwhile Joey and her brother Jude aren’t as close as they could be. Joey’s alarmed by how cryptic and secretive Jude is, wrapped up in his conspiracy capers, and she has great difficulty undertstanding him or having a normal conversation. This is highlighted when she assumes he wouldn’t have any care for his mother’s heirlooms if they didn’t have anything to do with aliens, and when she unlocks the Cherub portal despite his warnings because he never told her of its dangers. Joey does think about this distance between her and Jude, especially when locked on the new world.

Xefros, meanwhile... everything you click while in Alternia - whether as Joey or as Xefros - will usually have information about Dammek. Xefros is clearly used to being messed with by Dammek’s "tests” and revolutionary spiel , which seem to be a more extreme and warped version of Jude’s conspiracy capers. Inspection of his house will paint a picture of Dammek as having a very cluttered mind, hyperfocused on his goal without seeing any of the world around him or understanding the needs of his puppydog moirail Xefros. Now, Xefros himself is extremely passive and will do whatever other people tell him, which is kinda Tavros-like but more extreme. He doesn’t have any care for what happens to himself so long as he’s impressed those around him, and it’s not until Joey tells him how cruddy this is that he gets slightly relaxed and more optimistic. It’s ironic to see how Dammek and the Alternian revolutionaries end up falling into the same heirarchy that they strongly oppose. It shows the Revolution might be a joke, one of many others the Highbloods have quashed before.

As for Jude..... I wonder what’s going through that boy’s head? We barely saw him and yet he made a strong impression of his personality.

Gameplay - Hiveswap doesn’t have any “gameplay” in the traditional sense, unless you count the snake game. Instead it has a series of puzzles. They aren’t very difficult, but it’s more the funny dialogue you can read while playing. I’m gonna talk more about the humor in a few seconds, but the way you can combine any item with any other item must have taken soooooo much time from the writers, especially Cohen Edenfield. I wonder if this was always going to be the case in the original game too?

There’s not really any failstates for hiveswap. You can get eaten by monsters if you dick around on your way to the attic after the big fight, but you’ll just respawn where you were before. It’s not a game I’d choose to “play”, exactly. It’s more of a visual novel.

Humor - Oh boy. This is where Hiveswap wanted to nail it so, so bad. And its effort was valient to say the least. Joey’s dancing was some visual feel-good humor, all the 90s gimmicks in her room (especially the not-so-subtle videogame posters) had me clicking on them with every item i could find in the house, xefros in his entirety was a well of dark humor that pushed the game’s atmosphere back to its homestuck roots, and Byers - so true, so brave - he is the best item in the game. The funniest scenes for me were the Pigeon sequence with Jude, and Joey’s acrobatic pirouhettes away from Dammek’s terrifying lusus :P

I do have some criticisms for the humor. While combining everything with everything is a lot of fun, it’s not necessarily... funny. Like I didn’t get a lot of laugh-out-loud moments with the combinations. Often I found jokes were either too long-winded beyond their expiration or the punchline was just very awkward. This is a small criticism considering no other games bother to do this, but considering hiveswap act 1 is just an hour long if you DON’T do this, the game’s padding could have been more entertaining to say the least. counting on this gimmick when the humor isnt the best in the world, it’s a veeery risky move.

Graphics - okay, let’s put this out there: hiveswap without a doubt is one of the most visually stunning indie games out there. It recruited the help of many artists from the fandom itself, like adrienne garcia, angela sham, dammek the tumblr user, rah-bop, shelby cragg... For the most part the game looks great. The drawings on the short panel-based animations look wonky sometimes especially when compared to the beautiful opening animation, but it’s a small criticism.

This has convinced me that the move from 3d to 2d has seriously benefitted Hiveswap. I mean, look at this:

then look at this:

it’s a whole WORLD of difference. I seriously do not think Hiveswap would have made a good impression if it had released in the crappy-looking state the 3D studio had produced it in. The game would have not looked like homestuck, and not been able to pull off any of the animated feats in the final product. Why were they going with that art style in the first place??? It was a waste of time money and effort. I guess that the 2D team was slowly constructed over years of producing homestuck flashes and paradox space content? Many people key to the current team were in high school in 2012.

Music - Led by James Roach, he worked closely with Toby Fox to really nail Hiveswap’s soundtrack. It’s short and loops an awful lot but I never found it boring or annoying to hear. It’s quieter and more subtle than Homestuck’s loud, rambunctious music, but each character has their own theme and leitmotif. The music changes to create a good atmosphere for each room. It’s not the best work from either artist, but it’s very good as a videogame soundtrack.

Dedication to the source material - While Hiveswap has adapted away from Homestuck’s crude humor, I feel it keeps the best and throws away the worst. Hiveswap being E10 rated made some people suspicious because of how sweary and dark Homestuck is, but Hiveswap has already shown its guts and some very effective dark humor. I wonder if Act 2 will have the same rating?

While the atmosphere in Half-Harley Mansion isn’t the most Homestuck in the world, Joey’s introduction is a nice homage to how all homestuck characters are introduced. And.... you can’t ignore the insight it gives into Jake and Roxy. More specifically, Grandpa and Mom.

So, it’s revealed in Hiveswap that Jade’s Grandpa had a wife and two kids before encountering her. What does this say for Jude and Joey’s situation post-hiveswap? Did he lose his two kids, and decide to build a new life in the pacific with Jade? Did he see her as his second chance? It sort of puts a damper on John’s comment that Jade’s ‘pa seemed happy living alone, and Dave’s comment that Jade’s ‘pa was a clearly loving father. As it turned out, ‘pa severely neglected his own kids after the death of his wife, probably because they reminded him of her. But maybe Jake lost his two children and decided not to make the same mistakes with Jade? That’s why he took her to the island with him instead of siccing her on Roxy again, although Roxy had her own hands full. Yeah, talking of B1 Roxy, it’s quite interesting to see how she had changed between Hiveswap and Homestuck. Joey saw Roxy in a very different light to Rose; she saw Roxy as very kid-like and sincere, but extremely negligible due to her drinking. Most notable difference is how Roxy here obviously hates cleaning, but by the time she mothers Rose, she takes perfect care of their house. I wonder if this is another effect of Jude and Joey’s theoretical departure from the mansion? If, like Jake, she saw Rose as a sort of second chance? It’s a shame how that turned out. Yknow, im gonna laugh and cry if it turned out Jude or Joey killed Ana Claire with guns as a baby, like Jade and Jake before them

As for Alternia it was chocablocked with references to Homestuck, from the hierarchy to the Condesce to Doc Scratch to FLARP. Yeah, this is when Hiveswap went from an adventure game to a Homestuck game. I haven’t got much else to say here other than that I’m excited to see how Alternia differs from our impressions of it, and how the infrastructure of the peter pan society works.

and, of course, it had the best possible refrance:

CONCLUSION: Hiveswap has shown its guts to the world, and made a positive impression. I’m disappointed by how short it is, but that’s only because I want more.

Idk what’s going on with all the bugs such as the resolution glitch or the cutscene processing, especially cos Hiveswap went through an extra 9 months of “bug testing”.... wouldnt most people have gotten this bug the first time they launched the game??? wouldnt they have noticed the cutscene fuckery? these glitches have resulted in many people getting refunds. the only reason i didnt do the same is because i want to support this game, and i want to play it again in the future when the bugs are fixed or i have better hardware.

hopefully hiveswap act 2 won’t be followed around by the same issues, same lack of communication, same lengthy development that act 1 has suffered. if it comes swiftly, and if hiveswap act 2 makes as good an impression as act 1, then I feel we’ll have something truly special on our hands.

Story and characters: 4 hats outta 5 - short but sweet

Gameplay: 2.5 hats outta 5 - glitchy and contentless with no fail state, but this isnt necessarily a bad thing Humor : 4 hats outta 5 - sometimes missed the mark but a great chuckle for any player, fan or noob Graphics: 5 hats outta 5 - e c s t a s y Music: 4 hats outta 5 - does the job, does it well Dedication to source material: 4 hats outta 5 - best of the old, best of the new.

FINAL SCORE: 8/10. All it needs is to finish, then it’s already better than Homestuck...

#hiveswap #homestuck #gaming #adventure games #steam

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aquariusfemme-blog · 7 years

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Scorpio and Aquarius - A Powerful Match

If you are a Scorpio or Aquarius, or even a rookie in astrology, you've probably heard some of the rumors about this water sign meets wind sign pairing. A lot of astrologers will go on autopilot and tell you the best compatibility is when you have the same elemental sign, plus you should check out your charts. This is somewhat basic when it comes to astrology. Every combination has its unique offerings for a relationship, some less feasible (more challenging) than others. Scorpio and Aquarius are a powerful match, albeit if the two are not mature enough in who they are, it won't work so beautifully.

Aquarius is exactly what Scorpio wants and has always wanted. Aquarius will always be mysterious to Scorpio, which puts it in a perpetual spiral of being on the hunt. Scorpio is a strongly masculine sign, and loves to go after something it doesn't fully understand, and Aquarius is complicated enough to draw a Scorpio. The water sign unfortunately gets bored easily. Sometimes a pleasant match is too surface level for Scorpio -- this sign desires a great deal of complexity, paradoxes, and affection. Scorpio is like the pipe organ of emotions and thought. Scorpios are extremely powerful signs, but often misunderstood... and so they'll trail to the side and go on their own independent journeys. People don't always know what exactly a Scorpio is, so it'll fade from view without ever being fully realized.

But an Aquarius -- though it doesn't fully come right out admitting it -- fully and easily understands the Scorpio better than any zodiac. A mature Aquarius will know a Scorpio immediately just by the way a Scorpio uses its eyes to cut through titanium. No other sign has this intense of a stare. Scorpio is drawn to people who have 1.) a banging body and 2.) a charming personality. These are gifts the Aquarius often has and employs, with a fair amount of either introversion or introspection (perhaps both). Scorpio can't unravel an Aquarius like it can most signs. It sees that the Aquarius has more pure motives, a different range for ethics, and a massive capacity for love. Scorpio enjoys Aquarius, but it brings up a lot of insecurities for Scorpio. Can the Scorpio possibly win the heart of the person who wants to take care of everybody's hearts? How can the Scorpio, which can be the lowest of creatures -- win such a big heart?

Scorpio feels awkward having to face its insecurities in the light of someone who is so lovely. Aquarius often shirks getting into relationships, sometimes delving into very independent phases and being void of sex. Aquarius gets called out for being both a virgin and having bisexuality, pansexuality, and straight edge sexuality. No one really knows how to label an Aquarius, especially when they are so private. They have a sexuality that is massively deep and insightful, and there are Aquarian types who really are protective and intuitive about their sexual life -- while some Aquarians are extraordinarily exploitative. Aquarius doesn't feel a lot of chemistry with many signs on a sexual level. It may feel chemistry, an amazing exchange of ideas or even compatibility, but having attraction... real, invasive thoughts that distract them -- is difficult to achieve. The Scorpio is one of the few signs that can get inside an Aquarius' mind. They feel a certain chemistry with this sign that is absent in the other 11. Scorpio also finds something in Aquarius that others do not have. These two signs are like magnets and immediately connect well with each other, they want each other, and it's something about how they mix as fixed signs and their emotional palettes. I think the biggest hurdle for these two is that if they meet too soon, they won't have enough knowledge to understand each other. There is a certain amount of life fluency they need in order to bridge the gaps they'll have. Scorpio is known for having a crazy amount of range to their emotions -- they're designated as having three different morphological cycles from the snake, the scorpion, to the phoenix. The other signs arguably have one totem. It's an automatically complicated sign, that other signs just don't have enough power in them to study. It's a sign that can easily go under the radar if you're not paying attention, which is silly because a Scorpio can change their mask, they are malleable, they can learn, and most importantly they can learn you. They have busy minds, often easily getting distracted with too much noise, but they love deeply and loyally once they've found their match. They are deeply searching for the right person. They cut their loses because they believe so heavily in a soulmate. Regardless of whether they flat out say it or not, they are looking for a supernatural connection -- even if they can be grounded, at least in comparison to the Aquarius.

Aquarius can come off aloof to them, but Aquarius is like Jean Gray from the X-Men. She seems to be only present in thought, highly intuitive, quiet, and amazingly charming -- but she is the one who can unleash the Phoenix. She has a powerful amount of emotions locked up inside her heart, and she doesn't let it out easily, because it is like dynamite. Aquarians are powerfully emotional, that's why they are tied to the image of being water bearers. Yes, they can skate above the water all day long with beautiful thoughts, but they are also the water itself. They are spring wells of emotion, with astute emotional control. If there were an Olympics for emotional control, Aquarians would get all the gold medals. They have a relationship with emotion and thought that is difficult for many to read, and therefore Aquarians too are also seen as misfits, odd, and different Their high capacity for both thought and emotion makes them an odd duck that can make them difficult to understand, but they're usually so sweet that people accept them, unlike Scorpio who has a tendency to be brooding, grumpy, and dark. If you're a Harry Potter fan, think of the Slytherins. They get a bad reputation in the books, but in actuality they are great and must take responsibility for that greatness.

Scorpio and Aquarius get along because they are both odd, highly creative, and secretly emotional. They need to take things slow. Taking things slow is seriously the key to making this pair work. It's like a red velvet cake. Make sure to preheat the oven, follow all the steps, and make sure you have all the ingredients before you pop the pan into the oven. Otherwise, you'll end up with a gooey, inedible mess. They can rush things by taking it physical, but they need to create a great deal of space, an entire grid if you will, to build trust and communication. This will take awhile, and for many they'll give up because this takes patience. But this pairing first needs to understand how to talk, which is going to take some time because they are so different and have to learn from each other. It's like a newborn learning how to talk -- think of it that way for this pair. Aquarius can unravel itself slowly to Scorpio, which is what it needs. Aquarius needs private dates, away from the hustle and bustle because all the stimulus can distract it from its date... and Scorpio needs private dates because it needs a person all to itself. Scorpio needs that intimacy. Intimacy is what it really desires -- meaning your personal secrets, the story of you, and the story of where you are headed. You can't force the conversation with these two. They'll need to take their time. This may take two months of seeing each other or two years before really solidly deciding that you are in fact in a relationship.

Trust me when I say this, but Scorpio and Aquarius don't need to worry about who they are physically. Scorpio by its very nature is sexual. It's a sensual sign, with a vivid imagination. This sign likes moving to this direction because sex is a strong glue for discovering another person. Aquarius with its imagination easily makes strides in sex, which it knows and that is why for many they put off. They already in a sense understand it, and so it makes more sense for them to study other things. The two most single signs of the zodiac are Virgo and Aquarius. Scorpio on the other hand -- can be the loner, but it is greatly the mystique, the wellspring, and the initiator of relationships. Aquarius builds its social structure like a never ending ocean with friends across all genders, cultures, and species. Aquarius is a humanitarian and a social network godess; Scorpio is by instinct interpersonal. Scorpio is a sign that is built for making a family. It's one of the few signs to really charm and awaken an Aquarius. A Scorpio has strong staying power; it is loyal to the core, unless you show infidelity. An Aquarius needs someone who wants to stay, but struggles to find someone like that because they find more people just want to date several people, not just at once, but always. An Aquarius needs to feel special, it needs to feel wanted, it needs to ultimately feel like someone is consistent and will stay.

Now an immature Scorpio, will still have an exploratory phase before settling down. Scorpio is somewhat of an ass before giving away the quality it knows it must to have a relationship -- and that's its loyalty. The more a Scorpio shows how loyal it is, the more it will get to the Aquarius and its amazing emotional current. An Aquarius is powerfully objective, mysterious, and very Luna Lovegood -- which intrigues the Scorpio. A Scorpio likes both the calm Luna Lovegood side and the X-Men Phoenix side of an Aquarius. While the Aquarius loves the emotional-romantic side and dutiful side of the Scorpio.

It is never easy for these two to separate because they have ESP for each other. They know the connection when they come across it, and can latch onto each other with great intensity. To separate, especially for the Aquarius, means they'll have to go complete different ways in order to get over the other person. Also, the Aquarius will want all enough separation to prevent getting back with the Scorpio, because deep down they know they love them.

Combo is One of the Most Powerful

On some alchemical level, all relationship combinations are like a spell. You take one fire element and add it with the energy of an earth element and you have an end result. With a Scorpio and Aquarius equation you have a healing configuration. All water signs have some amount of healing and creativity to them. Aquarius is a brilliant thinker, with excessive creativity and intuition. When these two meet, they make for a cleansing, healing panacea -- or a tempest. All combinations have their healing and destructive powers -- this one either way is strong. There are 78 monogamous combinations. Polygamous combinations tend to be weaker because the power is not balanced.

A Scorpio can fixate on an Aquarius and help it to be more powerful. Scorpio is a magician, and often feels that the challenges around him or her are too dry. That many of the things around her are dull to a great extent, until an Aquarius steps into the world because an Aquarius is a visionary. The Scorpio helps makes the vision a reality, while Aquarius takes a dormant volcano (the Scorpio) and makes it a reality. These two can see their full potential in this relationship. They need to understand that they don't communicate like normal couples, nor should they. They're not like normal individuals either. Scorpio needs an Aquarius which will gladly accept its affections. Aquarius needs a Scorpio to chase it... because Aquarius isn't a huge fan of chasing. It's an incredible and beautiful journey if done well, an amazing pairing. But for many, they jump into this stack of cards too early and too quick making for a great deal of frustration. Neither of these signs do well with zodiacs that are too simple for them nor are too controlling. They have to line up with each other naturally and with desire, else the structure will fall before it really had the chance to grow.

Embrace the calm of an Aquarius. The ease it has with life will match well with a Scorpio and its ever changing ways. The Scorpio is the most solid of the water signs, like ice. But it can drift into its liquid and gaseous state simply because it is the master of water, but a Pisces... will always be the light waters, and Cancer will always be the deep, troubled waters.

Scorpio can go anywhere there is emotion, and Aquarius can go anywhere where there is thought. The two together feel more complete, and feel more like they can share their personal stories. They're not exact mirrors, or even in the same states -- but they can explore each other and understand each other quite well. Don't force this kind of relationship -- if it isn't meant to be, then it is not meant to be. But when intellect and emotion try to replicate each other and understand each other, beautiful and crazy things can happen.

Aquarius doesn't always talk. This can be baffling since it is a wind sign. Sometimes the Aquarius just wants things to be quiet and will leave a lot of space and privacy for you to decipher. If an Aquarius spends consistent time with you, this is a major plus. You may find with an Aquarius that you are making all the moves, but remember them accepting your moves is also a move.

They'll slowly turn from gently holding your hand and letting you touch their hair to kissing you as they please, and for long bouts of time. This is a creature that sees far ahead into the future and loves to gather information effectively before making a decision. Don't let your insecurities drive them away, and make your insecurities clear and they'll do what they can to comfort you, because that's their instinct. They want things to work and they want things to be smooth, and they don't want to hurt you. But you are a Scorpio, and you have the power more so to hurt them, so be careful. Scorpios know how to sting, and stinging an Aquarius... will hurt them extensively. They really want to trust you. If you sting an Aquarius, they'll block you out of your life, which is exactly what you don't want. They won't block you as long as you don't sting them.

#Aquarius #scorpio #astrology #love #compatibility #aquarius love #relationship #Zodiac

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mahleur · 4 years

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100 (big) little idea

Depressive Realism: Depressed people have a more accurate view of the world because they’re more realistic about how risky and fragile life is. The opposite of “blissfully unaware.”

Skill Compensation: People who are exceptionally good at one thing tend to be exceptionally poor at another.

Curse of Knowledge: The inability to communicate your ideas because you wrongly assume others have the necessary background to understand what you’re talking about.

Base Rates: The success rate of everyone who’s done what you’re about to try.

Base-Rate Neglect: Assuming the success rate of everyone who’s done what you’re about to try doesn’t apply to you, caused by overestimating the extent to which you do things differently than everyone else.

Compassion Fade: People have more compassion for small groups of victims than larger groups, because the smaller the group the easier it is to identify individual victims.

System Justification Theory: Inefficient systems will be defended and maintained if they serve the needs of people who benefit from them – individual incentives can sustain systemic stupidity.

Three Men Make a Tiger: People will believe anything if enough people tell them it’s true. It comes from a Chinese proverb that if one person tells you there’s a tiger roaming around your neighborhood, you can assume they’re lying. If two people tell you, you begin to wonder. If three say it’s true, you’re convinced there’s a tiger in your neighborhood and you panic.

Buridan’s Ass: A thirsty donkey is placed exactly midway between two pails of water. It dies because it can’t make a rational decision about which one to choose. A form of decision paralysis.

Pareto Principle: The majority of outcomes are driven by a minority of events.

Sturgeon’s Law: “90% of everything is crap.” The obvious inverse of the Pareto Principle, but hard to accept in practice.

Cumulative advantage: Social status snowballs in either direction because people like associating with successful people, so doors are opened for them, and avoid associating with unsuccessful people, for whom doors are closed.

Impostor Syndrome: Fear of being exposed as less talented than people think you are, often because talent is owed to cumulative advantage rather than actual effort or skill.

Anscombe’s Quartet: Four sets of numbers that look identical on paper (mean average, variance, correlation, etc.) but look completely different when graphed. Describes a situation where exact calculations don’t offer a good representation of how the world works.

Ringelmann Effect: Members of a group become lazier as the size of their group increases. Based on the assumption that “someone else is probably taking care of that.”

Semmelweis Reflex: Automatically rejecting evidence that contradicts your tribe’s established norms. Named after a Hungarian doctor who discovered that patients treated by doctors who wash their hands suffer fewer infections, but struggled to convince other doctors that his finding was true.

False-Consensus Effect: Overestimating how widely held your own beliefs are, caused by the difficulty of imagining the experiences of other people.

Boomerang Effect: Trying to persuade someone to do one thing can make them more likely to do the opposite, because the act of persuasion can feel like someone stealing your freedom and doing the opposite makes you feel like you’re taking your freedom back.

Chronological Snobbery: “The assumption that whatever has gone out of date is on that account discredited. You must find why it went out of date. Was it ever refuted (and if so by whom, where, and how conclusively) or did it merely die away as fashions do? If the latter, this tells us nothing about its truth or falsehood. From seeing this, one passes to the realization that our own age is also ‘a period,’ and certainly has, like all periods, its own characteristic illusions.” – C.S. Lewis

Planck’s Principle: “A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.”

McNamara Fallacy: A belief that rational decisions can be made with quantitative measures alone, when in fact the things you can’t measure are often the most consequential. Named after Defense Secretary McNamara, who tried to quantify every aspect of the Vietnam War.

Courtesy Bias: Giving opinions that are likely to offend people the least, rather than what you actually believe.

Berkson’s Paradox: Strong correlations can fall apart when combined with a larger population. Among hospital patients, motorcycle crash victims wearing helmets are more likely to be seriously injured than those not wearing helmets. But that’s because most crash victims saved by helmets did not need to become hospital patients, and those without helmets are more likely to die before becoming a hospital patient.

Group Attribution Error: Incorrectly assuming that the views of a group member reflect those of the whole group.

Baader-Meinhof Phenomenon: Noticing an idea everywhere you look as soon as it’s brought to your attention in a way that makes you overestimate its prevalence.

Ludic Fallacy: Falsely associated simulations with real life. Nassim Taleb: “Organized competitive fighting trains the athlete to focus on the game and, in order not to dissipate his concentration, to ignore the possibility of what is not specifically allowed by the rules, such as kicks to the groin, a surprise knife, et cetera. So those who win the gold medal might be precisely those who will be most vulnerable in real life.”

Normalcy Bias: Underestimating the odds of disaster because it’s comforting to assume things will keep functioning the way they’ve always functioned.

Actor-Observer Asymmetry: We judge others based solely on their actions, but when judging ourselves we have an internal dialogue that justifies our mistakes and bad decisions.

The 90-9-1 Rule: In social media networks, 90% of users just read content, 9% of users contribute a little content, and 1% of users contribute almost all the content. Gives a false impression of what ideas are popular or “average.”

Texas Sharpshooter Fallacy: Goals set retroactively after an activity, like shooting a blank wall and then drawing a bullseye around the holes you left, or picking a benchmark after you’ve invested.

Fredkin’s Paradox: Confronted with two equally good options, you struggle to decide, even though your decision doesn’t matter because both options are equally good. The more equal the options, the harder the decision.

Poisoning the Well: Presenting irrelevant adverse information about someone in a way that makes everything else that person says seem untrustworthy. “Before you hear my opponent’s healthcare plan, let me remind you that he got a DUI in college.”

Golem Effect: Performance declines when supervisors/teachers have low expectations of your abilities.

Appeal to Consequences: Arguing that a hypothesis must be true (or false) because the outcome is something you like (or dislike). The classic example is arguing that climate change isn’t real because combating climate change will hurt the economy.

Plain Folks Fallacy: People of authority acquiring trust by presenting themselves as Average Joe’s, when in fact their authority proves they are different from everyone else.

Behavioral Inevitability: “History never repeats itself; man always does.” – Voltaire

Apophenia: A tendency to perceive correlations between unrelated things, because your mind can only deal with tiny sample sizes and assuming things are correlated creates easy/comforting explanations of how the world works.

Self-Handicapping: Avoiding effort because you don’t want to deal with the emotional pain of that effort failing.

Hanlon’s Razor: “Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity.”

False Uniqueness Effect: Assuming your skills are unique when they’re not. Comes from conflating “I’m good at this” with “Others are bad at this.”

Hard-Easy Effect: Hard tasks promote overconfidence because the rewards are high and fun to dream about; easy tasks promote underconfidence because they’re boring and easy to put off.

Neglect of Probability: Arguing that Nate Silver was wrong when he said Hillary Clinton has a 70% chance of winning, and using Donald Trump’s victory as your proof. Good predictions are based on probabilities, but the assessment of predictions are always binary, right or wrong.

Cobra Effect: Attempting to solve a problem makes that problem worse. Comes from an Indian story about a city infested with snakes offering a bounty for every dead cobra, which caused entrepreneurs to start breeding cobras for slaughter.

Braess’s Paradox: Adding more roads can make traffic worse because new shortcuts become popular and overcrowded.

Non-Ergodic: When group probabilities don’t apply to singular events. If 100 people play Russian Roulette once, the odds of dying might be, say, 10%. But if one person plays Russian Roulette 100 times, the odds are dying are practically 100%.

Pollyanna Principle: It’s easier to remember happy memories than bad ones.

Declinism: Perpetually viewing society as in decline, because you’re afflicted by the Pollyanna Principle and you forget how much things sucked in the past.

Empathy Gap: Underestimating how you’ll behave when you’re “hot” (angry/aroused/rushed), caused by the inability to accurately foresee how your body’s physical response to situations (dopamine, adrenaline, etc.) will influence decision-making.

Abilene Paradox: A group decides to do something that no one in the group wants to do because everyone mistakenly assumes they’re the only ones who object to the idea and they don’t want to rock the boat by speaking up.

Collective Narcissism: Exaggerating the importance and influence of your social group (country, industry, company, department, etc.).

Moral Luck: Praising someone for a good deed they didn’t have full control over. “Avoid calling heroes those who had no other choice.” – Taleb.

Feedback Loops: Falling stock prices scare people, which cause them to sell, which makes prices fall, which scares more people, which causes more people to sell, and so on. Works both ways.

Hawthorne Effect: Being watched/studied changes how people behave, making it difficult to conduct social studies that accurately reflect the real world.

Perfect Solution Fallacy: Comparing reality with an idealized alternative. Prevalent in any field governed by uncertainty.

Weasel Words: Phrases that appear to have meaning but convey nothing tangible. “Growth was solid last quarter,” or “Many people believe.”

Hormesis: Something that hurts you in a high dose can be good for you in small doses. (Weight on your bones, drinking red wine, etc.)

Backfiring Effect: A supercharged version of confirmation bias where being presented with evidence that goes against your beliefs makes you double down on your initial beliefs because you feel you’re being attacked.

Reflexivity: When cause and effect are the same. People think Tesla will sell a lot of cars, so Tesla stock goes up, which lets Tesla raise a bunch of new capital, which helps Tesla sell a lot of cars.

Second Half of the Chessboard: Put one grain of rice on the first chessboard square, two on the next, four on the next, then eight, then sixteen, etc, doubling the amount of rice on each square. When you’ve covered half the chessboard’s squares you’re dealing with an amount of rice that can fit in your lap; in the second half you quickly get to a pile that will consume an entire city. That’s how compounding works: slowly, then ferociously.

Peter Principle: Good workers will continue to be promoted until they end up in a role they’re bad at.

Friendship Paradox: On average, people have fewer friends than their friends have. Occurs because people with an abnormally high number of friends are more likely to be one of your friends. It’s a fundamental part of social network dynamics and makes most people feel less popular than they are.

Hedonic Treadmill: Expectations rise with results, so nothing feels as good as you’d imagine for as long as you’d expect.

Positive Illusions: Excessively rosy views about the decisions you’ve made to maintain self-esteem in a world where everyone makes bad decisions all the time.

Ironic Process Theory: Going out of your way to suppress thoughts makes those thoughts more prominent in your mind.

Clustering Illusions: Falsely assuming that the inevitable bunching of random results in a large sample indicates a trend.

Foundational Species: A single thing that plays an outsized role in supporting an ecosystem, whose loss would pull down many others with it. In nature: kelp, algae, and coral. In business: The Federal Reserve and Amazon.

Bizarreness Effect: Crazy things are easier to remember than common things, providing a distorted sense of “normal.”

Nonlinearity: Outputs aren’t always proportional to inputs, so the world is a barrage of massive wins and horrible losses that surprise people.

Moderating Relationship: The correlation between two variables depends on a third, seemingly unrelated variable. The quality of a marriage may be dependent on a spouse’s work project that’s causing stress.

Denomination Effect: One hundred $1 bills feels like less money than one $100 bill. Also explains stock splits – buying 10 shares for $10 each feels cheaper than one share for $100.

Woozle Effect: “A reliable way to make people believe in falsehoods is frequent repetition, because familiarity is not easily distinguished from truth.” - Daniel Kahneman.

Google Scholar Effect: Scientific research depends on citing other research, and the research that gets cited the most is whatever shows up in the top results of Google Scholar searches, regardless of its contribution to the field.

Inversion: Avoiding problems can be more important than scoring wins.

Gambler’s Ruin: Has many meanings, the most important of which is that playing a negative-probability game persistently enough guarantees going broke.

Principle of Least Effort: When seeking information, effort declines as soon as the minimum acceptable result is reached.

Dunning-Kruger Effect: Knowing the limits of your intelligence requires a certain level of intelligence, so some people are too stupid to know how stupid they are.

Knightian Uncertainty: Risk that can’t be measured; admitting that you don’t know what you don’t know.

Aumann’s Agreement Theorem: If you understand your opponent’s beliefs you cannot agree to disagree. If you agree to disagree it’s because one side doesn’t understand the other side’s view.

Focusing Effect: Overemphasizing factors that seem important but exist as part of a complex system. People from the Midwest assume Californians are happier because the weather is better, but they’re not because Californians also deal with traffic, bad bosses, unhappy marriages, etc, which more than offset the happiness boost from sunny skies.

The Middle Ground Fallacy: Falsely assuming that splitting the difference between two polar opposite views is a healthy compromise. If one person says vaccines cause autism and another person says they don’t, it’s not right to compromise and say vaccines sometimes cause autism.

Rebound Effect: New symptoms, or supercharged old symptoms, emerge when medicine or other protections are withdrawn.

Ostrich Effect: Avoiding negative information that might challenge views that you desperately want to be right.

Founder’s Syndrome: When a CEO is so emotionally invested in a company that they can’t effectively delegate decisions.

In-Group Favoritism: Giving preference to people from your social group regardless of their objective qualifications.

Bounded Rationality: People can’t be fully rational because your brain is a hormone machine, not an Excel spreadsheet.

Luxury Paradox: The more expensive something is the less likely you are to use it, so the relationship between price and utility is an inverted U. Ferraris sit in garages; Hondas get driven.

Meat Paradox: Dogs are family, pigs are food. Some animals classified as food are wrongly perceived to have lower intelligence than those classified as pets. An example of morality depending on utility.

Fluency Heuristic: Ideas that can be explained simply are more likely to be believed than those that are complex, even if the simple-sounding ideas are nonsense. It occurs because ideas that are easy to grasp are hard to distinguish from ideas you’re familiar with.

Historical Wisdom: “The dead outnumber the living 14 to 1, and we ignore the accumulated experience of such a huge majority of mankind at our peril.” – Niall Ferguson

Fact-Check Scarcity Principle: This article is called 100 Little Ideas but there are fewer than 100 ideas. 99% of readers won’t notice because they’re not checking, and most of those who notice won’t say anything. Don’t believe everything you read.

Emotional Contagion: One person’s emotions trigger the same emotions in other people, because evolution has selected for empathizing with those in your social group whose actions you rely on.

Tribal Affiliation: Beliefs can be swayed by identity and a desire to fit in over rational analysis. There is little correlation between climate change denial and scientific literacy. But there is a strong correlation between climate change denial and political affiliation.

Emotional Competence: The ability to recognize others’ emotions and respond to them productively. Harder and rarer than it sounds from https://www.collaborativefund.com/blog/100-little-ideas/

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