at the end of the world, victory

realized i never shared my rot series from beginner's ceramics 🍊 obviously pretty wonky + some cracking and weird glaze stuff, but i really loved every step of the process <3 hoping i get to do it again sometime

I've always had chronic fatigue. I remember being twelve, and an adult mentioned how I couldn't possibly know how tired they felt because adulthood brought levels of exhaustion I couldn't imagine. I thought about that for days in fear, because I couldn't remember the last time I didn't feel tired.

Eventually I came to terms with the fact that I was just tired, and I couldn't do as many things as everyone else. People called me lazy, and I knew that wasn't true, but there's only so many times you can say "I'm tired" before people think it's an excuse. I don't blame them. When a teenager does 20 hours of extracurriculars every week and only says "I'm too tired" when you ask them to do the dishes, it's natural to think it's an excuse. At some point, I started to think the same thing.

It didn't matter that I could barely sit up. It was probably all in my head, and if I really wanted to, I could do it.

When I learned the name for it, chronic fatigue, I thought wow, people that have that must be miserable, because I am always tired and I cannot imagine what it would feel like if it were worse.

Spoiler alert, if you've been tired for a decade, it's probably chronic fatigue.

Once I figured that out though, I thought of my energy as the same as everyone else's, just smaller in quantity. And that might be true for some people, but I've figured out recently that it absolutely isn't true for me.

I used to be like wow I have so much energy today I can do this whole list for sure! And then I'd do the dishes and have to lay down for 2 hours. Then I'd think I must gave misjudged that, I didn't have as much energy as I thought.

But the thing is - I did have enough energy for more tasks, I just didn't go about them properly.

With chronic fatigue, your maximum energy is obviously much smaller than the average person's. Doing the dishes for you might use up the same percentage of energy that it takes to do all the daily chores for someone else.

If someone without chronic fatigue was to do all the daily chores, they would take breaks. Because otherwise, they're sprinting a marathon for no reason and it would take way more energy than necessary. We have to do the same.

Put the cups in the dishwasher, take a break. Put the bowls in, take a break. So on and so forth. This may mean taking breaks every 2-5 minutes but afterwards, you get to not feel like you've run a marathon while carrying 4 people on your back.

Today, I had a moderate amount of energy. Under my old system of go till you drop, I probably could have done most of the dishes and wiped off the counter and then been dead to the world for the rest of the day.

Under the new system, I scooped litter boxes, cleaned out the fridge, took the trash out, cleaned the stove, and wiped off the counter and did all the dishes. And after all that, I still had it in me to make a simple dinner, unload the dishwasher, and tidy the kitchen.

It was complete and utter insanity. Just because I sat down whenever I felt myself getting more tired than I already was.

All this to say, take fucking breaks. It's time to unlearn the ceaseless productivity bullshit that capitalism has shoved down our throats. Its actively counterproductive. Just sit down. Drink some water. Rest your body when it needs to rest.

There will still be days where there is nothing to do but rest, and days where half a load of dishes is absolutely the most I can do. But this method has really helped me minimize those, which is so incredibly relieving.

hole in the sky

Every time I see a duck I think to myself that I want to pick up that duck. There is a sort of quality of the duck that makes it feel like the act of picking up the duck would somehow be analogous to those strange videos where people use knives to cleanly cut through multilayered cakes. There would be a sort of accumulative act even without taking permanent possession of the duck. It would rather be more like pulling the lever on some ancient machine which makes a counter increase by one. The duck is the lever. I hope my meaning is clear to you all?

laios’ shirt fighting for it’s life

let me tell you driving from Ohio to Washington in a SmartCar with everything I owned was funny enough on its own but once I got west of the Rockies, every. single. time. I stopped ar a gas station, random dads would just spawn beside my car. like there was some sort of dad portal following me. and they’d see my ohio plates and go, “did you DRIVE through the mountains in that?” and every. single. time. I’d go, “well, they didn’t airlift me!”

it killed. it absolutely cleared ever time. never failed to make the dads laugh. they were obsessed. i said it the same every time. it was like I was in a groundhog day timeloop on interstate 70 westbound gas stations. and you know what? I was happy.

I've seen pieces from this extra comic before, but never read the full thing until today. And holy shit does it hammer home just how much the story is about class.

Multiple times, when food comes up in this comic, it’s also in context of money:

I've seen this last panel on the right brought up before in context of like, dungeon meshi's relationship with fat and eating, but in the full context of the comic it really hits how much adventuring directly consumes bodies for money.

As much as this has been part of the story the whole time, showcased as early chapters 19 and 20...

It never fully hit me before how often adventuring comes down to having no other way to make money but to throw yourself into death repeatedly. To be used, whether it’s by individual selfish people (like the resurrection group that is happy to try and get Kabru's group to kill each other to get extra gold from them in chapter 32), or by the greater cog of the Dungeon Economy in general.

Which, to be clear, is all too often how things work in the real world, too. So many jobs burn through the health and lives of workers. Dungeon Meshi just makes it literal in a new way: by making the healing and resurrection, a core part to the adventuring loop, directly use fat, muscle, and energy from the body being healed.

Imagine Amazon, but if you got injured at work, they could literally burn up some of your body to get you back to working sooner. And that was seen as an advantage of the job.

And then you have Laios, thinking about eating monsters:

Not just because he likes monsters a lot. But because it would help. He says something similar in the actual manga too, during the chapter discussing his dream with the Winged Lion

Laios wants to be able to make a home for Falin. He wants to give her a place where she never has to eat alone. And when he gets a party, he wants to give them a way to eat well. And when he runs a country, well…

He wants to ensure that everyone has enough to eat.

Food is political. Food ties into class, and money. What is deemed "proper" to eat, what is a luxury, what is crass… so much of it comes down to money.

Being judged for eating what's available, when what is “proper” isn't affordable, is already a thing that happens. People forced into work that consumes their energy is already a thing that happens.

Dungeon Meshi has a lot of fantastical elements, but boy is its examination of food and class very real.

it really underscores how intelligent, resourceful, and conscientious laios is in the context of a manga that's thought this deeply about where the calories come from and where they go, because laois is BIG. he and fallin are clearly hardy northern peasant stock, inclined to be tall and broadly built, but laios is undeniably fit and healthy, he has a lot of muscle, he has fat over that muscle. considering that healing takes fat, and fat takes food, and food takes money, it suddenly makes brutal sense that his armor is a sound investment even though--or especially because--his sister is a healer. he's the party tank, but to actually function as a tank he needs to go as far as he can with as little damage landed as possible. and it works! he's getting it to work! considering the economic and metabolic pressures in play, even though they're just breaking even, it's impressive as hell that they ARE breaking even.

and it's really cool to consider how this isn't the kind of story where the protagonist gets a big, strong, heroic body for free, or from a miracle, or some cheery montage: laois got his body like that through very, very prudent budgeting.

"I've been waiting for ages for somebody to unmask them."

This moment tends to elicit negative reactions in a first read through, and I've got some opinions about why where Kabru is coming from here actually makes a lot of logical sense. So I thought I'd elaborate on that.

I think people hear this and go, "He thinks they must be hiding something because they gave money to someone? What a cynic." Or "he dislikes them because they did charity?? What's wrong with this guy!". And obviously, a lot, a lot is wrong with him. But I think this makes more sense than it seems at first glance! What people evaluating this judgement miss is why Kabru is paying attention to Laios and co to begin with.

Shimunia on Etsy

i love you, Two Catfish as Street Musicians in the Kashina district, ca 1855 of an unidentified artist, you go so hard

I am developing a gay hookup app with roguelike and deckbuilding elements

oh ok. the dwarves in dungeon meshi live in a steampunk world. good to know. But i love the juxtaposition between elves using magic birds to communicate while the dwarves have straight up telephones

and the gnomes are hopelessly dependent on the orb

I want to meet the person who was given the job of designing the communications standard which allows real-time three way calling between a telephone, a crystal ball, and an oracular parrot.

Hunger

"you will look for themes and motifs in media that isn't worth the effort" i will look for themes and motifs in the dirt. on the ground.