9ofspades:

Out of curiosity, if these were book titles, which would you be more inclined to read?  

A Home of Aquamarine and Sun

A Store of Bloodstone and Sweltering Humidity

A Store of Bloodstone and Sweltering Humidity

(Based on the YA joke-prompt from twitter)

Crystal Results Day was always intense.

It wasn’t like your chosen gem would actually dictate the rest of your life. No one was restricted to just one stone. Even if you got something lame, like Pyrite, you still had your lesser affinities, other stones you could use as substitutes. And then there were the universals. But the professors made Results Day into such a huge deal that fifteen-year-olds weren’t about to question it.

“…so I’m sure to get Ruby,” Jax was telling everyone. “I even fudged all my answers on the personality quizzes.”

“Those?” scoffed someone from a different class. “Nobody even reads those; they’re just a way to let you pretend to have any control over what stone you get.”

Jax gasped, then whirled on me.

“Is that true, Jaspin?!”

People were always asking me to confirm things they heard about the gemstone matching process. My dad had worked as one of the people who tested aspiring mages, watching the magic they performed and how they used it, drawing a sample of magic from their casting, and reading teacher reports on personality traits. At the end, he’d send all the data he gathered and a handful of suggested gemstones to the relevant lapidary, who would then run simulations using the magic samples to see which stone best fit the user.

He’d done that up until they’d killed that job and kicked him off.

Our school’s Head Lapidary had teamed up with the Chair of Geology and the Chair of Precisely Bound Magery to come up with an algorithm that would do all of that work for them. They’d enchanted a machine to run the algorithm and spit out a piece of paper with the appropriate gemstone written on it – choosing one at random of two or more seemed good – and automated the job that had kept a couple dozen people in business.

My dad had been demoted back to guidance counselor for the mages. He’d been one of the lucky ones – the rest had been let go.

But back to the present.

“Kinda,” I told Jax. His face fell.

“I mean, they do look at the personality quiz if it looks like you have multiple affinities. Or if they feel like they need more information, I think? It’s sort of optional, though.”

“Oh,” he said, disappointed.

“Hey, don’t worry,” I tried to reassure him. “If anyone can handle getting Ruby, it’s you.”

That wasn’t entirely true.

Ruby was a temperamental gemstone. You needed to be even-keeled, with intense self-control, to channel your magic through it. Let go of your discipline for a second and it would overwhelm you. It was a passionate gem, prone to turning saints into hot-blooded warlords and singing a siren’s song of power and glory and courage and rage.

Not that it was bad or anything. Gems couldn’t be good or bad; they just pushed you one way or another, and sometimes that was for the better. Other times, it was for the worse.

Jax would have been pushed for the worst. He was already way too impulsive, in magic and in life. No one in their right mind would give him Ruby. Though maybe a machine would be fooled.

I checked the time crystal on my wrist. It was Obsidian, a truth stone. Not that it mattered. Time crystals were made in advance by gemcutters who weren’t mages, but could shape magic inside a stone, and distribute the stones to whoever wanted one. Which was everyone. It was the height of fashion to wear a few gemstones around, visible but not gaudy. Take cufflinks – everyone was wearing gemstones on their sleeves. Even the lower-classes were wearing Pyrite crystals loosely tied to their shirtsleeves.

“Time check?” whispered Cathy. Her hands were twisting in her lap.

She had reason to be nervous. As magical ability went, she didn’t have much of it. Not that she wasn’t smart about using it. But if magic was water, there was only so much you could do with a thimbleful.

“0815,” I told her. “Forty-five more minutes.”

The other students fidgeted in their seats…

(Tbc)

Nine gothic misfortunes

listing-to-port:

1. You have an enormous black dog which must be walked for four hours daily or it puts its excess energy to use in lighting witch-fires in awkward places. One day you were feeling a little ill, so you asked the unreliable narrator to walk the dog instead. The unreliable narrator faithfully walked the dog for four hours. It is a complete mystery as to why everything is on fire.

2. You hid under the grand staircase to escape that thing that was knocking at your window in the height of the storm. Now there is a ‘delivery failed’ notice on the mat. You are going to have to pick up your artisan cheeses from the local depot twenty miles away.

3. The malign spirit possessing you has lapsed on its ghastly rent, and as a consequence you have been re-possessed by a bailiff. It is somewhat alarming to be in the possession of a supernatural bailiff. Your body spends more time in the high court of the dead that you would like.

4. You came to this graveyard on the cliff over the sea at the dead of night with the intent of digging up the grave of your long-lost love, which you believe to contain the silver dagger that alone can settle her unquiet ghost. It is a stressful situation. You were never very good at numbers when stressed. You believe you may have taken twenty rather than thirty paces from the old yew tree and may in consequence have dug up a badger.

5. A dread raven has settled over your door, from which it hourly proclaims your doom. You made a plan to get rid of the raven. The raven network appears to have got hold of this plan, because another smaller raven turned up to perch on the shoulder of the first and proclaim its doom. Now a third, even smaller one has turned up. You have recursive ravens. There is probably a lot of doom about to come down.

6. Lacking a cellar, you have walled up your rival beneath your floorboards. Unfortunately your rival is a mouse and seems to be enjoying it down there. Will the cheese board will never be safe?

7. Now that they the have closed the refinery across the bay, the mist no longer descends over the high moor at night and as a consequence gruesome deeds cannot be done unnoticed. You have a huge to-do list of gruesome deeds. The local undertaker has started to call you up regarding supply chain issues.

8. You have been staring into this abyss for some considerable time. It is not gazing back. In point of fact it is ignoring you completely. It looks like you will be going home alone tonight.

9. Your grandmother has refused to pass down the ancestral curse, instead bequeathing it to the local cats’ home.

Tropes that Need to Die #15:

The male lead/love interest of this show is kind of a scumbag, sure. He’s kind of mean to the female lead/love interest sometimes, he doesn’t treat her nearly as well as he should, he gets mad at her a lot, sometimes for no reason… but he’s cute, and he has his good moments, and he’s not a COMPLETE ASSHOLE like all those OTHER men you see in this show, so if the audience looks around, he’s really the only halfway decent guy with a name on the entire show that’s her age. Isn’t this romantic? Don’t you ship it? OTP 5ever!

Concept

Forget the seven deadly sins – the Seven Virtues are here to pick a Chosen One and get him to save the world from an ancient evil and untold destruction. Unfortunately, they want different Chosen Ones, and they can’t agree on a hero in time. So now they’re stuck trying to save the world themselves.

The problem? Enemies have Lord of the Rings-style monster armies that attack through Brute-force, not any kind of anthropomorphication of sins; and the Virtues only have power in the forms of (a) being able to demonstrate almost superhuman levels of the virtue they represent, and (b) giving any ordinary human who’s still uninvolved in the conflict the same level of that virtue. (They would have been able to give virtues to an extraordinary human, but unfortunately whatever time window they had for doing that ran out.) (Now, “ordinary” doesn’t just mean unpowered – it also means you can’t be too far from average in any direction! Being too good at chess or a famous singer disqualifies you, but so does being more lazy than literally everyone else, or being able to lick your elbow.) How do the Virtues end up coordinating an effort against the forces of evil?

For reference, here is a list of the Virtues:

Virtue Charity

Virtue Chastity

Virtue Humility

Virtue Kindness

Virtue Temprance

Virtue Diligence

Virtue Patience

For further character prompting, try having two virtues be male and two be nonbinary.

the-place-where:

likesdinos:

jackmymeat420:

corginator:

jackmymeat420:

drop whatever you’re doing right now and climb a tree

its pitch black outside, and freezing cold. I think ill climb a tree tomorrow

you climb that fuckin tree right now

I’ve literally never seen this post on my dash when it is not after dark and cold as balls. I’m beginning to think this is a conspiracy to get us eaten by some nocturnal tree demon.

everybody put in the tags at what time you saw this

moderncommunication:

sometimesyouhavetobebrave:

mememic-bry:

mememic-bry:

mememic-bry:

executive dysfunction is telling yourself for two and a half hours that you need to shower bc you smell like your workplace and you absolutely Cannot do Anything Else until you shower, doing Any Other Thing before showering is illegal!!! but you still haven’t for some reason??? you’ve just been sitting on your bed in a towel scrolling tumblr for 2+ hours thinking “I need to shower right now immediately” and growing increasingly frustrated that you are still not clean and you haven’t eaten or done your laundry either

ok actually no I’m reblogging this because a) I am clean now (and I smell amazing, thank you), and b) I had a heckin Realize and I wanted to share it with y’all in the hopes it’ll help someone else with a brain like mine.

I figured something out about myself a long time ago– it’s only just now occurred to me that I was in fact solving a problem caused by executive dysfunction, and I haven’t been implementing this solution lately because my brain went “that’s a relatively new term to me and therefore a Different problem that requires a Different solution”. thanks a lot, brain.

anyway, long long ago, before I knew these fancy schmancy Official words, the problem, as I phrased it to myself, was such: 

sometimes I get Stuck. I was doing something, or on my way to doing something, and then… I just. got stuck.

“Stuck” looks like refreshing my feed or dashboard repeatedly. or it looks like staring at a spot on the wall. or chewing my fingernails. or picking at a stubborn sticker. all the while, my brain drifts through various unrelated topics I wouldn’t be able to recall if asked. sometimes I can get Stuck for hours before realizing I am Stuck. sometimes I get so Stuck that I go to bed that way (feeling especially bad for being unproductive) and I have to just reset everything by sleeping.

one day I asked myself, “why is this happening? why am I stuck, right now, at this moment in time?” the answer, as it turns out, was pretty simple: I was trying to make a decision, and I got distracted. I haven’t moved forward because I haven’t answered that one question or made up my mind.

let me rephrase this in terms of executive dysfunction: many people have expressed that it feels like knowing you need to do a thing but not feeling “ready” to do it. many with ADHD may also be familiar with the feeling of needing things to be “just so” before you embark on a task- you need your setup to look a certain way, or you need to set a timer, or have the right music playing, etc.

when I get Stuck it’s often because I got lost somewhere in that setting-up process, and my brain took the opportunity to nyoom off into Distraction Town.

getting myself Unstuck is solved, 95% of the time, by tracing my steps back to the original decision I was trying to make- often something small and inane- and then troubleshooting from there. (out loud! verbal processing is totally punk.) 

  • “what was I trying to do?” 
  • “was I trying to decide between two things?” 
  • (the answer’s usually yes.) 
  • “what were they?” 
  • “okay, let’s decide. 
  • “okay, that’s settled. let’s move on.”
  • and then I am free as a bird to nyoom in the direction of The Thing I Wanted To Do All Along, in the amazingly disorganized, scattered, yet rapid-fire way that I do many things.

so!!! in the case of my first post, where I hadn’t showered for 2 hours? turns out I had been trying to decide what music to listen to in the shower. (another hack: my chances of getting Stuck while showering decrease by 75% if I have music playing to help me keep track of time.) I couldn’t immediately make up my mind, got lost in thought, got distracted, and drifted. once I stopped and asked- “why am I stuck?”-  then I remembered- “oh yeah! I wanted to listen to music”-  and then decided- “I want to listen to Daft Punk’s Discovery album”- I was finally heckin able to shower. and also eat, and also throw my clothes in the dryer.

and may I add I only zoned out once, during the slow part of “One More Time.” 😛

I’m not saying this is a foolproof method. sometimes I don’t have a reason for being stuck, and that’s okay! I’m also not saying this is how every adhd brain works. it’s just how my brain works, and I’m sure there’s at least a few who can relate. for those few, I hope this helps!!

a lot of people are reblogging the original post without the update and leaving frustrated comments and that makes me sad! if I can find ways to hack my brain than so can you! executive dysfunction is a real and frustrating challenge, but don’t buy the lie that there’s no way to work with it or around it!!!

!!!!

exceedingly familiar circumstance for me. and great to recognize that hey, you did in fact have a solution, you just didn’t recognize it as such.

hi-def-doritos:

hi-def-doritos:

charming-tothelast:

hi-def-doritos:

manasaysay:

hi-def-doritos:

A while back I heard my friend (male) insult another dude by saying, “You look like the kind of guy who wouldn’t go to Wal-Mart to buy his girlfriend a box of tampons” and I still think about that crowning insult sometimes

My dad once called another guy “someone who thinks loading the dishwasher once in a while makes him less of a man”

I like your dad already

one time my dad’s boss was giving him shit for always leaving work early so he could get home and help my mom with me when i was a newborn and his boss said “i’ve never changed a diaper in my life” really proudly and my dad responded “i’d be ashamed to ever admit i was that worthless of a husband”

oh WOW

This is by far my most popular post.