#you are a good friend

[bubblegumbhaalspawn]

15. Bhaal handcrafted Durge. Do they enjoy and worship their appearance, or did they have a rebellious phase, trying their best to change their Lord Father's grand design?

OH THANK YOU FOR THIS ONE! I've put a lot of thought into this actually. (Hence that one fic I wrote, Wrapping Paper.) Answer under cut!

As a very young child still in the care of her adoptive parents, Ayana was very much the girly type who enjoyed playing dress-up and having her mother put ribbons in her hair. She'd been referred to as "strikingly beautiful" by one cheek-pinching old lady, who was particularly taken with her sweet features and enormous blue eyes.

After the murder of her parents and discovering the nature of her existence, she shut that part of her brain off for awhile. She was under the impression that physical beauty didn't serve much of a purpose in Bhaal's design--it just wasn't that important. She'd put her hair in pigtails out of habit, but she wore plain dresses on the street and her cultist robes without giving it much thought.

As she got older, she realized that her face and body were good enough tools to lure in victims, but she attributed it more to her innocent face and natural charisma. She looked harmless and trustworthy, and that made sacrifices easy. Most of her attention to her looks went towards disguises, if anything.

(LOOK AT HER. LOOK AT THAT FACE.)

It was after meeting Gortash that her rebellious phase began. He'd look at her face in the same way a lot of her victims did. Initially, she thought it simply made him easy prey, but the closer they became, the more she found she enjoyed it. After asking countless obnoxious questions about why Gortash dressed the way he did and what purpose it served, she experienced a sudden spark of renewed interest in making herself pretty and wearing things that were visually pleasing.

The amount of excuses she had to come up with in order to practice with makeup bordered on absurd, but she and Orin started to have a good bit of fun with it in the first few years. She actually got a fair bit of inspiration from Orin's artistry with murders, and they'd take turns painting designs on each other in the blood of their victims.

Now she mostly just wonders why Bhaal would make his daughter so adorable. The fact that he chose blue for her horns and eyes also confuses her greatly.

#thank you so much for this #i loved writing all of it #you are a good friend #ayana the dark urge #ask game #tiefling durge

[xandertheundead]

"The best meals are a little dangerous." - @tinyarmedtrex when I told the group chat I made traditional carbonara and was worried I gave everyone salmonella

#You are a good friend #I'll remember this if I die vomiting or whatever salmonella does to you #Love you dearly you wise beautiful space goddess

[roosterbox]

Ah! I almost forgot something very important about today!

It’s @turtletotem ‘s birthday!

Send them some love!

❤️❤️❤️

#birthdays #sometimes I do actually check my calendar #I’ve tried to remember to put in my friends’ birthdays #i have a few in there #lol #if nothing else #just to show I’m thinking of them #on their cake day #love to you turtle #you are a good friend #❤️

[drumlincountry]

I was at a Palestinian solidarity gig last night & the one Palestinian artist who was going to perform had COVID so the organisers asked around to see if there were any Palestinians who'd like to say a few words instead.

A local guy who was born & raised in Gaza offered to speak. He started with "I'm an engineer. i'm not a poet or a politician. I don't... do public speaking… I had no idea what to say when I came up here. So i'm just going to tell you about the street I grew up on."

And then he did! He went down the street building by building. He told us about the ice cream shop on the corner, the grocery shop, the charity that supports people with intellectual disabilities. He told us about the people who he knew growing up, the families who still live in the different houses. He told us about the university buildings and about his friends who quit being accountants to start a band together. All on that street.

All of which is gone now, by the way. Bombed to dust.

#Gaza #Palestine #I talked to him a bit afterwards but god what do you say!! #he said he found the gig helpful anyway. Supportive. So that's good. #I'm gonna see if I can find his friends band and share some of their songs #Me Fein

[theoldaeroplane]

worried that thing you put in your art or writing or game or music is too self-indulgent, too self-referential, too niche for anyone but yourself? fear not! you can do whatever you want forever. and you should.

#writing #art #music #games #things i have to remind myself of daily #anyway ive found those things you're worried about sharing are often the most powerful things you CAN share #i hope you write #<- i would like to replace that tag with something that is less conversational #it makes reblogs awkward #anyway good morning. i have so many things to do today but instead i am crafting a memorial to my partner's best friend in my fanfiction.

[mumblesplash]

i know it’s like years old at this point but i love that one collab mumbo and grian did with tommyinnit bc it’s like the single most concentrated example i’ve seen of mumbo’s Chaos Nullification Powers

you get to see a bit of it on hermitcraft, mostly via his interactions with grian, but until seeing that collab it didn’t really hit me just how completely mumbo can no-sell other people’s attempts to control a situation. tommyinnit is possibly the single shoutiest, most chaotic minecraft youtuber out there, and in most videos i’ve seen he pretty much overwhelms everyone else and sets the tone for interactions because of this. but mumbo just. doesn’t let him. no matter how much tommy escalates in intensity, mumbo reacts with *exactly* the same energy he always does. grian largely comes across in the whole video as annoyed and reluctant to engage with the whole thing, but mumbo’s not even affected. he just rolls with anything he finds funny and basically ignores anything he disapproves of, only seeming more and more unflappable the harder anyone tries to get a rise out of him.

AND imo, this is the key to my favorite interpretation of him as a character

see, when the people around him are being more reasonable/calm, i think mumbo often comes across as anxious and a bit easily overwhelmed. the thing is, his nervous wet cat vibes do not scale. he has one setting. his responses to the last life ‘ah-ha!’ jokes and to hermitcraft 8 starting to crumble to pieces under a falling moon are almost identical.

mumbo jumbo is inexorably and eternally Just Some Guy, but that gets stranger and stranger the weirder his surroundings become. the giggly incredulousness that makes him an easy target for goofy puns looks Very different when it’s also his reaction to the impending end of the world.

#anyway yeah i have this whole idea in my head about mumbo’s friendship with grian from a characterization standpoint #bc i agree with the somewhat? common consensus that being friends with mumbo has made grian softer and friendlier over time #but i don’t think it was in a ‘reflecting back the kindness he’s being shown’ way #i think it’s because the more harsh and chaotic you try to be towards mumbo the more you feel ineffectual and out of control #and grian can’t handle it so he slowly becomes nicer until he feels like they’re on equal footing again #like don’t get me wrong i think they genuinely are good friends #and i don’t think this is necessarily something mumbo is doing on purpose #but i think the power dynamic going on under the surface is much more bizarre and weighted in mumbo’s favor than it seems at first glance #mumbling

[floccinaucinihilipilificationa]

#good omens #´hello friends!! how are you!! #I hope you're doing well! ( ´ ▽ ` ) #I have a big cough but otherwise I am good! It's nothign bad I am just very slimey #usually I am not a cough person I am not sure where this is coming from #most of the time I just get a stuffy nose #has my nose gotten stronger #but there are good news too I have already found a VERY good chestnut to put into my pocket this autumn!! its very small! (❁´▽`❁) #it's been a very warm autumn in Germany so far so it has not really felt like fall yet #but yesterday it was all rainy and stormy and I had two new books and it was the best day possible to have a slimey cough (: #and now I feel SO much autumn I am close to buying a set of window colors #I do not know what I would to with the window colors I just have this strong urge in me to buy a window color set #the last time I did a window color was at the birtday of a class mate I think she turned 9 and I made a deer #but for some reason we did this craft 5 minutes before we all had to leave so we had to carry our window color deer home wet #unfortunatly for the deer and me I fell down the stairs of her house and smeared the deer all over me and i screamed the entire drive home #which wasn't very long but it probably felt very long for the mother who had a screaming child covered in window color deer inside her car

[whisperwillyou]

I still haven’t watched the last two episodes lol

Have a Noceda siblings sketch that I never finished

Luz really cartwheeled into the boiling isle and swiped the brother Belos has spent the last 400 years fine tuning and I have nothing but respect for her. 😌

#toh #the owl house #Luz Noceda #Hunter Noceda #hunter the golden guard #the most simblings ever #emperor belos #philip wittebane #caleb whittebane #Philip: I made a better version of an old friend- #Luz: you fucked up a perfectly good brother is what you did. Look at him! He’s got anxiety and ptsd! #fox talks

[inkskinned]

at some point it's just like. do they even fucking like the thing they're asking AI to make? "oh we'll just use AI for all the scripts" "we'll just use AI for art" "no worries AI can write this book" "oh, AI could easily design this"

like... it's so clear they've never stood in the middle of an art museum and felt like crying, looking at a piece that somehow cuts into your marrow even though the artist and you are separated by space and time. they've never looked at a poem - once, twice, three times - just because the words feel like a fired gun, something too-close, clanging behind your eyes. they've never gotten to the end of the movie and had to arrive, blinking, back into their body, laughing a little because they were holding their breath without realizing.

"oh AI can mimic style" "AI can mimic emotion" "AI can mimic you and your job is almost gone, kid."

... how do i explain to you - you can make AI that does a perfect job of imitating me. you could disseminate it through the entire world and make so much money, using my works and my ideas and my everything.

and i'd still keep writing.

i don't know there's a word for it. in high school, we become aware that the way we feel about our artform is a cliche - it's like breathing. over and over, artists all feel the same thing. "i write because i need to" and "my music is how i speak" and "i make art because it's either that or i stop existing." it is such a common experience, the violence and immediacy we mean behind it is like breathing to me - comes out like a useless understatement. it's a cliche because we all feel it, not because the experience isn't actually persistent. so many of us have this ... fluttering urgency behind our ribs.

i'm not doing it for the money. for a star on the ground in some city i've never visited. i am doing it because when i was seven i started taking notebooks with me on walks. i am doing it because in second grade i wrote a poem and stood up in front of my whole class to read it out while i shook with nerves. i am doing it because i spent high school scribbling all my feelings down. i am doing it for the 16 year old me and the 18 year old me and the today-me, how we can never put the pen down. you can take me down to a subatomic layer, eviscerate me - and never find the source of it; it is of me. when i was 19 i named this blog inkskinned because i was dramatic and lonely and it felt like the only thing that was actually permanently-true about me was that this is what is inside of me, that the words come up over everything, coat everything, bloom their little twilight arias into every nook and corner and alley

"we're gonna replace you". that is okay. you think that i am writing to fill a space. that someone said JOB OPENING: Writer Needed, and i wrote to answer. you think one raindrop replaces another, and i think they're both just falling. you think art has a place, that is simply arrives on walls when it is needed, that is only ever on demand, perfect, easily requested. you see "audience spending" and "marketability" and "multi-line merch opportunity"

and i see a kid drowning. i am writing to make her a boat. i am writing because what used to be a river raft has long become a fully-rigged ship. i am writing because you can fucking rip this out of my cold dead clammy hands and i will still come back as a ghost and i will still be penning poems about it.

it isn't even love. the word we use the most i think is "passion". devotion, obsession, necessity. my favorite little fact about the magic of artists - "abracadabra" means i create as i speak. we make because it sluices out of us. because we look down and our hands are somehow already busy. because it was the first thing we knew and it is our backbone and heartbreak and everything. because we have given up well-paying jobs and a "real life" and the approval of our parents. we create because - the cliche again. it's like breathing. we create because we must.

you create because you're greedy.

#every time someones like ''AI will replace u" im like. u will have to fucking KILL ME #there is no replacement here bc i am not filling a position. i am just writing #and the writing is what i need to be doing #writeblr #this probably doesn't make sense bc its sooo frustrating i rarely speak it the way i want to #edited for the typo wrote it and then was late to a meeting lol #i love u people who mention my typos genuinely bc i don't always catch them!!!! :) it is doing me a genuine favor!!! #my friend says i should tell you ''thank you beta editors'' but i don't know what that means #i made her promise it isn't a wolf fanfiction thing. so if it IS a wolf thing she is DEAD to me (just kidding i love her) #hey PS PS PS ??? if ur reading this thinking what it's saying is ''i am financially capable of losing this'' ur reading it wrong #i write for free. i always have. i have worked 5-7 jobs at once to make ends meet. #i did not grow up with access or money. i did not grow up with connections or like some kind of excuse #i grew up and worked my fucking ASS OFF. and i STILL!!! wrote!!! on the side!!! because i didn't know how not to!!! #i do not write for money!!!! i write because i fuckken NEED TO #i could be in the fucking desert i could be in the fuckken tundra i could be in total darkness #and i would still be writing pretentious angsty poetry about it #im not in any way saying it's a good thing. i'm not in any way implying that they're NOT tryna kill us #i'm saying. you could take away our jobs and we could go hungry and we could suffer #and from that suffering (if i know us) we'd still fuckin make art. #i would LOVE to be able to make money doing this! i never have been able to. but i don't NEED to. i will find a way to make my life work #even if it means being miserable #but i will not give up this thing. for the whole world.

[aristoteliancomplacency]

Beans.

My partner and I have a running joke with a friend. Every time he goes on holiday we increase the quantity of beans in his flat.

The first time we bought ~30 cans of kidney beans and hid them around the house like some Easter egg hunt thing but with beans.

The Second time we bought ~6kg dried white beans and hid those in various places. Nearly every receptacle that could safely hold beans became the home of beans. My personal favourite was emptying an oat milk carton, very carefully washing and drying it, filling it with beans and then just putting it back among several other cartons.

He went on holiday again a couple of weeks ago. Obviously there is an expectation of bean-based shenanigans. And obviously we have to beat our previous efforts.

Our friend has (had) a mosaic on his wall of the famous Marilyn Monroe Pop-Art by Andy Warhol. He made the mosaic himself. Over the last couple of weeks we have spent hours and hours assembling a frame, drawing up a pattern and gridding out a 70 x 70 frame and gluing an untold amount of beans to it. I have spent over 21 hours gluing beans to a frames.

For the last couple of days I ended up going to bed at 5:00 am because I lost track of time whilst experimenting with which types of glue works best with different beans (I now have *opinions* on this, y’all). The day of our friend’s return we spent the morning and afternoon grouting the piece and wiping it down and wiping it down again and wiping it down again because grout is just like that. In the evening we went to install the mosaic, just a few hours before his return. Here’s a comparison between the original and our clearly superior replication, and the new piece installed in its rightful place.

#marilyn monroe bohnsaik #sometimes you gotta make things out of beans #obviously we would not do things things if we thought our friend wouldn’t be amused by it #we’re already planning the next one #gonna have to be good to outdo this one

[andthebeanstalk]

Today my therapist introduced me to a concept surrounding disability that she called "hLep".

Which is when you - in this case, you are a disabled person - ask someone for help ("I can't drink almond milk so can you get me some whole milk?", or "Please call Donna and ask her to pick up the car for me."), and they say yes, and then they do something that is not what you asked for but is what they think you should have asked for ("I know you said you wanted whole, but I got you skim milk because it's better for you!", "I didn't want to ruin Donna's day by asking her that, so I spent your money on an expensive towing service!") And then if you get annoyed at them for ignoring what you actually asked for - and often it has already happened repeatedly - they get angry because they "were just helping you! You should be grateful!!"

And my therapist pointed out that this is not "help", it's "hLep".

Sure, it looks like help; it kind of sounds like help too; and if it was adjusted just a little bit, it could be help. But it's not help. It's hLep.

At its best, it is patronizing and makes a person feel unvalued and un-listened-to. Always, it reinforces the false idea that disabled people can't be trusted with our own care. And at its worst, it results in disabled people losing our freedom and control over our lives, and also being unable to actually access what we need to survive.

So please, when a disabled person asks you for help on something, don't be a hLeper, be a helper! In other words: they know better than you what they need, and the best way you can honor the trust they've put in you is to believe that!

Also, I want to be very clear that the "getting angry at a disabled person's attempts to point out harmful behavior" part of this makes the whole thing WAY worse. Like it'd be one thing if my roommate bought me some passive-aggressive skim milk, but then they heard what I had to say, and they apologized and did better in the future - our relationship could bounce back from that. But it is very much another thing to have a crying shouting match with someone who is furious at you for saying something they did was ableist. Like, Christ, Jessica, remind me to never ask for your support ever again! You make me feel like if I asked you to call 911, you'd order a pizza because you know I'll feel better once I eat something!!

Edit: crediting my therapist by name with her permission - this term was coined by Nahime Aguirre Mtanous!

Edit again: I made an optional follow-up to this post after seeing the responses. Might help somebody. CW for me frankly talking about how dangerous hLep really is.

#hlep #original #mental health #my sympathies and empathies to anyone who has to rely on this kind of hlep to get what they need. #the people in my life who most need to see this post are my family but even if they did I sincerely doubt they would internalize it #i've tried to break thru to them so many times it makes my head hurt. so i am focusing on boundaries and on finding other forms of support #and this thing i learned today helps me validate those boundaries. the example with the milk was from my therapist. #the example with the towing company was a real thing that happened with my parents a few months ago while I was age 28. 28! #a full adult age! it is so infantilizing as a disabled adult to seek assistance and support from ableist parents. #they were real mad i was mad tho. and the spoons i spent trying to explain it were only the latest in a long line of #huge family-related spoon expenditures. distance and the ability to enforce boundaries helps. haven't talked to sisters for literally the #longest period of my whole life. people really believe that if they love you and try to help you they can do no wrong. #and those people are NOT great allies to the chronically sick folks in their lives. #you can adore someone and still fuck up and hurt them so bad. will your pride refuse to accept what you've done and lash out instead? #or will you have courage and be kind? will you learn and grow? all of us have prejudices and practices we are not yet aware of. #no one is pure. but will you be kind? will you be a good friend? will you grow? i hope i grow. i hope i always make the choice to grow. #i hope with every year i age i get better and better at making people feel the opposite of how my family's ableism has made me feel #i will see them seen and hear them heard and smile at their smiles. make them feel smart and held and strong. #just like i do now but even better! i am always learning better ways to be kind so i don't see why i would stop

[wildegeist]

Everyone talks about the joys of someone else being super invested in your OCs and while this undoubtedly feels absolutely awesome, I think there's also something to be said about the joy of being invested in someone else's OCs too. There's just vibes you get out of some people's casts of characters that you can't get anywhere else with their own unique flavor from that person, and they're just sitting there in relative obscurity spawned completely out of someone's mind with no media involvement or anything. Special kind of feeling

#ESPECIALLY if you are friends and they share secret obscure lore with you #and fun lil facts no one else knows #plus people get so giddy about it and it feels GOOD to bring that kind of joy to someone #wildemusings #a wilde hit

[quadrantadvisor]

Imagine if the GIW started gunning for Jason without the Batfam ever meeting Phantom. Like, Bruce has to figure out on his own that the guys in white suits with Lazarus guns are 1. a legitimate government agency, and 2. are perfectly within their rights to hunt Jason like an animal, because 3. there's secret government legislation that says that since Jason's body processes ectaplasm, he's classified as non-sapient and has no legal protections.

Bruce calling up Clark like

Bruce: I am currently in the process of breaking into a government facility in order to dismantle their operations.

Clark: Okay? Do you need... help?

Bruce: Yes.

Clark: Sure, I'll be right there.

Bruce: Not that kind of help. Oracle is sending you the files now. I'd like you and Ms. Lane to make these people wish they were never born.

Clark: [speed-reading the documents] Oh yeah, can do. This is truly disgusting. If the public is half as outraged as I am, we'll get this sorted as fast as the courts can manage.

So Clark Kent acts as a whistle-blower, the Justice League publicly condems the Anti-Ecto Acts as inhumane, the GIW is disbanded, and Batman gets pardoned for all of those crimes that he technically did by assaulting federal agents. And after all that gets sorted, some white haired kid pops up in the Watchtower like "haha thanks for that I really didn't want a war between Earth and the Infinite Realms" and the League are like "wait what"

#dp x dc #dpxdc #danny phantom #dc #batman #batfam #and jason and danny become best friends obviously #yes i am implying danny is the ghost king here #i just think that bruce being like 'what do you mean my son is non-sapient and has no legal rights. ill kill you.' is good and fun #my rambles

[clefadrylcorner]

Obsessed with lovers and piners calling the object of their affections their best friend. Like yessss blur the lines between platonic and romantic love. show how important they are to you in a multifaceted way. Cover up your feelings with another kind of love that is just as true. One type of love does not negate the other and but tragedy can rip both out from under you single handedly, and it will hurt so much more that way. Losing a friend and a lover. Gaining both and not needing any labels for what they are. Using labels but having it be so much more than a title. Were they friends before they were lovers? Or were they lovers whose friendship grew inside of their love? Unclear! Who cares!

#any time one side of the pairing pulls out the best friend card I am immediately on the floor #they can be side by side! they can be distinct! it doesn't have to be explained! #they did this in the new nimona movie and i crumpled #call me arospec and biased but holy shit this is my bread and butter #nimona #goldenheart #good omens #ineffable husbands #she ra #catradora #ace attorney #narumitsu #they ARE best friends. they are also lovers. are you listening to me. #should i tag queerplatonic here? that's definitely part of this too #clefadrylcorner talks a lot

[dragondawdles]

the beastie <3

#totk spoilers #<- (? yet another schrödinger's spoiler she shows up during the beginning sequence but uhhh just 2 be safe) #totk #light dragon #the light dragon #totk light dragon #loz #tloz #zelda #id in alt #dragon doodles #(I don't know the TAGS for this fandom grrgrhgrgrhg I'll decide eventually) #hiiiiiii so the uh new zelda game was good. I beat that after 140 hours like a week ago (explode emoji) #and now I'm brainrotting zelda HARD which means I have feelings about like 17 dudes all at once #we'll have to see if that means I'll bombard you with characters!! lately art's been blah but I've got some stuff cooking hopefully #hey I'm happy with this tho!! happy with tha beastie :] #this worm is my best friend

[florbe-triz]

Finally!! let me share with you the Trigun playlist I made! It's called NoMan's Land and you can listen to it HERE It's an evergrowing playlist, hope you enjoy!

#Trigun #trigun maximum #trigun stampede #vash the stampede #my art #and for the cover I had no idea what to do! #so I just did a redraw of the ost cover haha sorry #creativity isn't a very good friend of mine these days #oh but I hope you like the music !! #most of it talks about vash and the rest I leave it to your imagination uwu