@storyseekers event 15: character that i relate to

— anyway, you don’t have to work it out, like, immediately. i didn’t just wake up one day like- oh look, guess i’m gay now!

universities and colleges will be like "we have one the best libraries containing the largest collection of resources in the world" and then assign you readings that look like they were photocopied next to the chernobyl elephant's foot

universities and colleges will be like "if you study with us you can access almost any academic text in the world for free" and then the texts in question look like this

getting into the shower: evil evil evil

being in the shower: there is no past and there is no future, there is just the here and now, i am alone but i am not lonely, i am calm and one with the universe, existence is sublime

getting out of the shower: evil evil evil (wet version)

gender identity:

older brother in a teen movie who has caution tape and a hazardous waste symbol on his door

at th club and dj won’t stop playing morse code beats

when me and Jean-Michel make it out of the trench with dry socks and no infections

just judging interest here - is anyone interested in bringing home any lil critters like these friends?

they're all needlefelted! the two pride wyrms (bottom row) have posable bodies, and the second wyrm has posable arms as well!

just checking to see if theres any interest before i properly price and list them! 😊💗

please reblog to spread them as far as possible!

Gonna start a post with blank memes. Please add any you have on hand and reblog to spread them.

very good content

Here’s a few I’ve accumulated over the years

Ah, some gold!

Omfg, a goldmine

@estheticallypleased

This is a blessing look at all of these templates

Thank you Maude…

The real writer experience is standing in the shower and coming up with the most authentic dialogue with perfect phrasing and raw emotion in your head, then stepping out and drying your hair, putting on some clean pajamas and opening a word document to write down all your perfect ideas only to realize everything has evaporated. 

I FEEL CALLED OUT

Never lose a perfect shower line again.*

*Remember to erase promptly if you share a bathroom with anyone.

I’ve used these to outline term papers. nothing like a bath to get your brain to finally kick into gear and figure out your damn thesis

WHAT

Also these handy little guys if you prefer a notepad:

Are you kidding, shower crayons are the BEST when you share a bathroom with other people. When I was in college, we had them and we would use them to carry on philosophical debates, finish song lyrics, get life/writing advice, etc. It was so much fun and I miss it. 

Oh my GOD no one told me these existed

Also

God fucking bless the people who made these

Going back into the shower (you don’t need to turn it on) can be enough to retrieve the memory

Our brains refresh every time we go through a doorway. It packs away the data from the room we left so it can load up the floor plan of the room we’re going into. If you go back to the room where you had the thought your brain will often unpack the memory when it’s loading up the floor plan

are you telling me i can’t remember info bc my brain is rendering???

People honestly didn’t go “mad” from seeing cosmic horror things in Lovecraft very often. That’s a modern thing, and honestly feels like modified “gorgon”

Usually its stress, paranoia or ptsd from near death experience.

The true terror was not really in seeing something horrifying and alien, but understanding the implications, or not being able to fit it into an existing mental framework.

Playing this up could actually create an interesting setup in a narrative, come to think of it. Someone seems fine after dealing with cosmic horrors, so everyone assumes they were fine. Cue some days later, when everything’s settled and they’re able to process what happened, they find that they begin to have a breakdown as it all begins to fall together.

As a simple thought experiment, imagine what encountering something completely recognizable but otherwise impossible would do.

Lets say you walked into the next room, and standing on a piece of furniture was a little man, literally 18 inches tall, at most, in green clothing, clambering and climbing about. I don’t mean like what you’d imagine from a special effect or a cartoon, but a real tiny thing that looked, moved, and acted like an impossibly miniature humanlike creature, the hair wouldn’t be shrunk by proportion, there’d be fewer folicles overall, but more densely packed. You can see the faint veins under the skin, the hairs, the pores, you can smell it, it leaves scuffs, it makes sounds appropriate for its size… and when it sees you, it just looks at you, tilts its head, smiles mischieviously, and darts under the couch, vanishing. The only thing you find is a gold coin, which is real, solid, and rare, having not seen circulation in centuries.

You’ve had, in this scenario, an encounter with a leprechaun. It’s a relatively understandable phenomenon. There’s plenty of tolklore to prepare you for it, the creature is rationally built, has antatomy that makes sense, is similar to yourself enough to be very familiar. It wasn’t even hostile. 

Is your life ever going to be the same? 

In addition to questioning whether you actually saw what you saw, you now have to wonder why you were visited. Wil it come back? If it does can it hurt you? If it can, can you stop it? Where did it come from? Has it always just been there, out of sight? Is it here right now?

And those are just surface level questions. Now, fundamentally, the rules of reality have to be reassessed. If such a thing can exist, what does that say about our understanding of biology and evolution? Moreover, there are suddenly theological implications here, none of which are likely to be cleanly or comfortingly answered in their entirety. 

You’ve just witnessed sone of the single most important encounters in human history, and anyone who hears you talk about it is going to think you’ve lost your mind. The terror and sense of lonliness from that is going to be sould crushing.

Now, replace the leprechaun with something that looks like a deep dream animation brought to life and appears to be both impossible to adequately destroy and possessed of absolute malevolence. Getting attacked by a normal everyday animal can be traumatizing, surviving an encounter with a bloodsucking octopus tree that screams in an alien language from mutiple slathering maws is certrainly beyond the ken of 1930s psychiatric medicine. 

The idea that seeing a monster immediately impacts your sanity is derived more from the Call of Cthulhu roleplaying game as it is from Lovecraft’s writing itself. It’s a good enough game mechanic for representing trauma in a game where the characters are assumed to be semi disposable and adventures take place over a short period of time, but it does a disservice to the genre to make it a universal assumption. It makes it more like a power that the creature has to make people go crazy than, as the above examples emphasize, the mounting isolation and unease of realizing that the world does not work how everyone else thinks it does.

To give examples from Lovecraft’s writing, seeing Cthulhu statuettes doesn’t make people crazy: the realization of a global conspiracy, telepathic dream control is real, and that Cthulhu can only be delayed, not ever really killed, is what makes the narrator crazy. And most of that craziness is the well founded belief that the conspiracy will kill him now that he knows as much as he does. The Old Ones from At the Mountains of Madness are thought to be novel biological specimens. The first scientist to see the mi-go thinks at first that they’re a hoax. Nobody becomes a gibbering wreck immediately on seeing Wilbur Whatley’s true form, even though it is both impossibly hideous and recognizable as human.

“the mounting isolation and unease of realizing that the world does not work how everyone else thinks it does…. Seeing Cthulhu statuettes doesn’t make people crazy: the realization of a global conspiracy, and that Cthulhu can only be delayed, not ever really killed, is what makes the narrator crazy.”

as someone living in a world that feels like it’s increasingly spiraling out of control, this is terrifying actually 

wet dog

this author reserves the right to change absolutely everything about their project despite already sharing things online

I honestly believe the whole “adults require less sleep” thing is honest to god probably a myth created by capitalism

It is.

i honestly believe that sleep deprivation is the biggest ignored/neglected root cause of health dangers that prematurely kill adults

ask me sometime about the role of sleep in the leptin ghrelin cycle and how its interruption destabilizes weight homeostasis

or about the new research showing that heart disease is not caused by fat, like we thought for years, but by inflammation in the circulatory system whose root cause is unknown but one of the prime suspects is, you guessed it, sleep deprivation

but nobody wants to hear that lack of sleep is killing people. employers don’t want to hear it. and god knows that having sold their waking hours to capitalism to survive workers don’t want to lose the only time they have left to them to live their lives, mostly stolen from sleep

i mean even i don’t want to do anything about it and i love  sleep, i just love overwatch more

this this this this this

our society places almost zero value on sleep

on enough sleep

on uninterrupted sleep

on regular, predictable, cycling sleep

all the evidence we have suggests sleep is really, really, really important to the processes of the human body, including both mental and physical health, and yet when was the last time you heard somebody suggest that people had a *right* to sufficient, regular sleep?

Reminder that 

- Humans are not meant to sleep for extended periods of uninterrupted sleep. 

By this I don’t mean “humans shouldn’t have 8+ hours of sleep a night”; I mean that we are supposed to sleep for four to five hours (ish), then get up and do something relaxing like reading for a half hour to an hour, then get another bout of four to five hours. This is what our bodies were designed for. 

Sleeping the whole night through was a fad started with the advent of the lightbulb. Sleeping the whole night through is so recent (and artificial) that First Sleep and Second Sleep are mentioned in Dickens’ novels.

- Lack of sleep for even a single night severely compromises your immune system.

If you’re planning on getting little sleep or pulling an all-nighter, make sure to eat lots of fruit and veggies/take vitamins that day. Or even better, get yourself some bee propolis. It’s a natural remedy used for thousands of years in Latin America and is insanely good for boosting up compromised immune systems (if you get the drop kind, put 3 to 4 drops in a spoonful of honey and mix well with a 2nd spoon to mask the strong taste). It has no side effects and is all but impossible to overdose on.

- According to several government bodies around the world, chronic lack of sleep is literally tied for 1st place as the worst kind of torture (the other is solitary isolation)

- Expecting a teen to get up for 8:30 classes is the equivalent of expecting an adult to be at work at 4 am.

After babies, teens are the age group that needs the most amount of sleep. Puberty is exhausting, and the body needs time to recharge. Ideally, a teen should be getting between 10 to 12 hours of sleep at the bare minimum. Most teens are lucky if they manage to get 8. And that’s a gigantic problem; not only does lack of sleep affect mood (which is extra significant when your hormones are already riding a rollercoaster to begin with), but also has massive effects on growth, which is kinda what the whole puberty thing is supposed to be about.

- According to research “starting work before 10 a.m. is tantamount to torture and is making staff sick and stressed”

- Humans were not designed to have the same sleep cycle across the species. Much the opposite in fact.

Night owls and morning people are an actual thing. Because we’re pack creatures, Nature came up with a clever way for our ancestors to always have someone on the lookout for predators and threats: make people naturally alert at varying times so that there’s always someone alert to keep watch. 

Forcing night owls to follow morning people’s sleep cycle means night owls live with what researchers have referred to as “permanent jetlag”.

@hypno-sandwich Sharing for no particular reason.

@always-midnight-somewhere

*AHEM*

everyone stop what you’re doing and look at this baby pelican

his power grows

please… he’s getting too strong…

please… stop… i beg of you…

i cant even imagine the temptation of living near a hotspot for paranormal investigators. i would be out there EVERY NIGHT fucking with them. that aint a ghost that made you pee yourself its me, the lich of the woods. gonna lay little traps for ya. gonna shake your tent while you’re sleeping. gonna make spooky noises. walk around in the dark with a cloak and a deer skull mask. hack ur little radios and say fucked up scary stuff. it would occupy all my time and thats why i cant live near one of these places. it would be almost too much fun 

you might be thinking that i sound like a scooby doo villain but im not doing this for capitalistic reasons its just fucking hilarious. just for fun. just for the sheer chaos.