waiting for sunrise

every friend group has a corpse in it. if you think yours doesn't, YOU'RE the corpse.

Grace

The cast: *in a bad German accent* CALEB VILL COUNTERSPELL THE COUNTERSPELL

Best friends

person w adhd experiencing symptoms of adhd: why the fuck can’t I do this thing . I wish there was some explanation for this

UNMUTE!!

POV u are delicious

"Asexual people are often assumed to “lack” attraction. But in reality, many report rich and varied forms of attraction that don’t map neatly onto sexual desire.

So instead of asking “how does attraction work?,” we asked:

What do people actually mean when they say they feel attracted to someone?" "Drawing on both qualitative and quantitative data, we identified and validates seven different forms of attraction:

These aren’t just theoretical distinctions. Statistically, they show up as separate but related dimensions—meaning people really do experience attraction in multiple, distinguishable ways." "Our findings demonstrate that both asexual and non-asexual experience multifaceted forms of attraction.

Put differently, the seven forms of attraction our study identifies are not “ace-specific” categories—they’re general features of human attraction. But starting from an asexual lens helped us see those features more clearly."

"If you only measure sexual attraction, you miss a huge part of how people relate to each other. And that’s true whether you’re working with asexual people or not."

Here's a link to the full published paper!

the face of a man who just realised he got into a car with the most insane person alive

I feel like one of the conversational skill failures it’s really easy to fall into is assigning the other person an opinion, rather than asking what their opinion is. This kind of inherently puts them on the back foot, which is uncomfortable, so people don’t like it.

Starting a conversation by informing the other person that you KNOW their feelings, and you are acting based on the feelings you assume they have, without giving them a chance to tell you what feelings they ACTUALLY have… No one likes this!

You may have learned it from your parents doing it to you, in which case I can only imagine you didn’t like it either, but you still internalized it as an acceptable mode of communication because we are always internalizing stuff from our parents even though we don’t like it. It’s kind of a quintessential passive-aggressive parent move: “well, you never want to help me, you don’t appreciate everything I do for you” etc. It puts the addressee in the position of defending themselves and their actual feelings instead of inviting them to SHARE those feelings.

People generally find it easier and more pleasant to converse with you if you go into it with an attitude of curiosity rather than what is essentially a power-play. Assigning your interlocutor an opinion based on your assumptions about their internal experience expresses an unconscious sense that you believe you are and should remain in control of the conversation. But friendly conversations aren’t really supposed to be about control.

something it took me so. fucking. many. years. to learn. is that being terrified of someone else having the upperhand in an interaction was causing me to preemptively "defensively" try to take the upper hand before the other person could. the reasons for this are sympathetic and I think it is a really common thing to do. but omg my interactions with people have gotten so much less unpleasant since I started trying to internalize that no one needs to have the upper hand in an interaction

i was letting my past experiences of being treated poorly in this specific way influence my own behavior such that *I* was the one bringing the idea of "someone having the upper hand" to the interaction to begin with!!! it was miserable.

And then he lost the idgaf war because she said “the pretty lights you made changed my life Master Olly 🥺

redraw of everyone's favorite 'dad & the cat he didn't want' panel

i am not immune to mental images of the brushbug being a cute cat bug creature

As an adult I think me and all my friends should all have matching schedules and work like 20 hours a week and also everyone lives within 15 minutes of each other why is that so much to ask

these tags by @vaguely-concerned cracked me up so I had to sketch it as baby Orufrey

Man, Beldaruit gives me suuuuch brainworms. What is that man THINKING in any given moment? I was rereading chapters of the manga to prepare myself to write chapter 7 of Silver Children , and Bel's whole description of Qifrey and Olruggio's childhood adventures is so fascinating to me.

Chapter 36

Insane. Insane description of his young apprentice/adopted son. "His hatred ran dark, and his fixation deep." Does he really see baby Qifrey like this?

Esp when from Qifrey's pov, these adventures are such joyous things. "I greeted every morning with excitement, for with the rise of the sun, came another adventure with you."

In chapter 91, we get a glimpse of Beldaruit's opinion of Qifrey and Olly's adventures from a more neutral perspective.

"Those darned rascals...at least they have each other!"

He's supportive of this friendship. And he sounds like an exasperated parent, not someone who thinks Qifrey is hateful and obsessed. The image of the two boys is also very telling: happy kids who just love being together. Something positive, not two dark avengers stealing into the night.

Now look at this bit from chapter 38.

Again, we see baby Qifrey, alone in the dark, followed by the beautiful atelier, and Beldaruit's monologue, which again, reads very parental. A concerned parent who realises he can't do anything more to intervene. The tone is of a man who sounds rather defeated.

"I pray he knows better than to tear it down with his own hands...and lose that which he has finally managed to find."

Okay, so Bel, you acknowledge that Qifrey was looking for a place of comfort and solace? So then why would you describe these adventures to Coco as awful, vengeful quests? Is that truly what you believe, or were you feeding her stories so you could manipulate her into leaving Qifrey? What IS your game here?

Am I reading too much into this??? Maybe. But I haven't met anyone who disagrees that Beldaruit has some kind of plan or involvement in whatever's been going on. He's smart and powerful, and we know basically nothing about him.

He genuinely cares for Qifrey. I see this time and time again. Even this internal monologue in 38 is a big tell. That's love. If he didn't care, it wouldn't matter to him whether Qifrey found solace and comfort. He describes Olruggio and their friendship in warm, glowing terms. "Those darned rascals" and "one dear friendship". So he is HAPPY that Qifrey and Olly found each other.

But I'm starting to wonder if he actually believes Qifrey was a vengeful angry kid, or if that's just something he's fluffing up for Coco. He does have a flair for the dramatic, doesn't he?

I do believe that Beldaruit genuinely thinks some part of Qifrey is obsessed with revenge, and he is right in thinking this—obviously. We know Qifrey hates the Brimhats.

Chapter 37:

He admits that he was wrong. Qifrey has become selfless. His role as a teacher has become very important to him. "I've been grappling with the wrong fear."

I think...my conclusion, for the sake of my fanfic, is that Beldaruit didn't know WHAT to make of Qifrey and Olly's adventures. Were they childish flights of fancy? Yeah, maybe. But Beldaruit is aware of Qifrey's dark side, and has wondered, ever since childhood, if these childish flights of fancy have a darker motive. And when Qifrey tells him about Coco, about her mother, about how she's a lead, it confirms to him everything he's feared. Qifrey never gave up the quest.

I basically think Beldaruit, rather than being certain/confident, has actually been unsure about Qifrey's motives for a very, very long time. Because he fundamentally doesn't understand Qifrey. He loves him but for many complex reasons, Qifrey has shielded Beldaruit from his darkness (likely because Beldaruit always sounds so judgy about it). Over time these small cracks of doubt grew into vast chasms, until their relationship became so strained that Beldaruit feels compelled to poach Coco from Qifrey to protect her from him.

AAH. They FASCINATE ME. THEY FASCINATE ME, I TELL YOU!

friend who went to bed is a type of dead wife