I Had A Talk With The Guys At Work About The Sheer Amount Of Superhero Media Available Right Now, And

Elf pet guy?

is that what your parents told you when you woke up and your pet elf was gone

I want to see an episode of a show maybe superheroes maybe magic or something where there’s a two part episode where on of the characters acts insane the the next they just screaming in joy and it revealed they’ve been stuck in a time loop and went insane And this should be a major status quo change with this character needing rehab and the person responsible which means this would probably work best with the time looper being previously introduced. I don’t know the point of these episodes, maybe show how secretly evil this world is or something I just think this would be cool to see the effects of a time loop or a less graphic episode where one character does all the time loop stud of knowing what your going to say and do and using the other characters to break free

Here’s a story about changelings: 

Mary was a beautiful baby, sweet and affectionate, but by the time she’s three she’s turned difficult and strange, with fey moods and a stubborn mouth that screams and bites but never says mama. But her mother’s well-used to hard work with little thanks, and when the village gossips wag their tongues she just shrugs, and pulls her difficult child away from their precious, perfect blossoms, before the bites draw blood. Mary’s mother doesn’t drown her in a bucket of saltwater, and she doesn’t take up the silver knife the wife of the village priest leaves out for her one Sunday brunch. 

She gives her daughter yarn, instead, and instead of a rowan stake through her inhuman heart she gives her a child’s first loom, oak and ash. She lets her vicious, uncooperative fairy daughter entertain herself with games of her own devising, in as much peace and comfort as either of them can manage.

Mary grows up strangely, as a strange child would, learning everything in all the wrong order, and biting a great deal more than she should. But she also learns to weave, and takes to it with a grand passion. Soon enough she knows more than her mother–which isn’t all that much–and is striking out into unknown territory, turning out odd new knots and weaves, patterns as complex as spiderwebs and spellrings. 

“Aren’t you clever,” her mother says, of her work, and leaves her to her wool and flax and whatnot. Mary’s not biting anymore, and she smiles more than she frowns, and that’s about as much, her mother figures, as anyone should hope for from their child. 

Mary still cries sometimes, when the other girls reject her for her strange graces, her odd slow way of talking, her restless reaching fluttering hands that have learned to spin but never to settle. The other girls call her freak, witchblood, hobgoblin.

“I don’t remember girls being quite so stupid when I was that age,” her mother says, brushing Mary’s hair smooth and steady like they’ve both learned to enjoy, smooth as a skein of silk. “Time was, you knew not to insult anyone you might need to flatter later. ‘Specially when you don’t know if they’re going to grow wings or horns or whatnot. Serve ‘em all right if you ever figure out curses.”

“I want to go back,” Mary says. “I want to go home, to where I came from, where there’s people like me. If I’m a fairy’s child I should be in fairyland, and no one would call me a freak.”

“Aye, well, I’d miss you though,” her mother says. “And I expect there’s stupid folk everywhere, even in fairyland. Cruel folk, too. You just have to make the best of things where you are, being my child instead.”

Mary learns to read well enough, in between the weaving, especially when her mother tracks down the traveling booktraders and comes home with slim, precious manuals on dyes and stains and mordants, on pigments and patterns, diagrams too arcane for her own eyes but which make her daughter’s eyes shine.

“We need an herb garden,” her daughter says, hands busy, flipping from page to page, pulling on her hair, twisting in her skirt, itching for a project. “Yarrow, and madder, and woad and weld…”

“Well, start digging,” her mother says. “Won’t do you a harm to get out of the house now’n then.”

Mary doesn’t like dirt but she’s learned determination well enough from her mother. She digs and digs, and plants what she’s given, and the first year doesn’t turn out so well but the second’s better, and by the third a cauldron’s always simmering something over the fire, and Mary’s taking in orders from girls five years older or more, turning out vivid bolts and spools and skeins of red and gold and blue, restless fingers dancing like they’ve summoned down the rainbow. Her mother figures she probably has.

“Just as well you never got the hang of curses,” she says, admiring her bright new skirts. “I like this sort of trick a lot better.”

Mary smiles, rocking back and forth on her heels, fingers already fluttering to find the next project.

She finally grows up tall and fair, if a bit stooped and squinty, and time and age seem to calm her unhappy mouth about as well as it does for human children. Word gets around she never lies or breaks a bargain, and if the first seems odd for a fairy’s child then the second one seems fit enough. The undyed stacks of taken orders grow taller, the dyed lots of filled orders grow brighter, the loom in the corner for Mary’s own creations grows stranger and more complex. Mary’s hands callus just like her mother’s, become as strong and tough and smooth as the oak and ash of her needles and frames, though they never fall still.

“Do you ever wonder what your real daughter would be like?” the priest’s wife asks, once.

Mary’s mother snorts. “She wouldn’t be worth a damn at weaving,” she says. “Lord knows I never was. No, I’ll keep what I’ve been given and thank the givers kindly. It was a fair enough trade for me. Good day, ma’am.”

Mary brings her mother sweet chamomile tea, that night, and a warm shawl in all the colors of a garden, and a hairbrush. In the morning, the priest’s son comes round, with payment for his mother’s pretty new dress and a shy smile just for Mary. He thinks her hair is nice, and her hands are even nicer, vibrant in their strength and skill and endless motion.  

They all live happily ever after.

*

Here’s another story: 

Keep reading

i actually do kinda like delivering groceries on the side because it gives me such a unique cross-section of the community. i never know whose groceries im shopping for until i finish the delivery and see them/their home and it's like it adds more detail to the picture of who they are. the baby supplies going to the apartment that i know for a fact is one bedroom (they'll be moving soon - i bet they're apartment hunting, i hope they find a place). the new cat litter box, bowl, and kitten food going to the house covered in "i <3 my dog" paraphernalia (a kitten definitely showed up on the porch recently and made itself at home). the fairly healthy boring grocery order that includes an incongruous tub of candy-filled ice cream going to the home of an elderly woman with toddler toys in the yard (it's clearly for her grandkids, whom she sees often).

shopping for someone else's groceries is a fairly intimate thing. i've bought condoms and pregnancy tests, allergy medicine and nyquil, baby benadryl and teething gel, a huge pile of veggies paired with an equally huge pile of junk food, tampons and shampoo and closet organizers and ant traps and deodorizing shoe inserts and a million other little things that tell a million different stories in their endless combinations. one time someone had me buy one single green bean. i messaged them to confirm that's actually what they wanted, and they said yes - neither of them liked green beans very much, but they had a baby they were introducing to solid foods, and they wanted to let him try one to see if he liked them. another time i had someone request 50 fresh roma tomatoes - not for a restaurant, but for a person in an apartment. the kitchen behind them smelled like basil and garlic when they opened the door. another time i brought groceries to three elderly blind women who share a house. that was one of the few times i have ever broken my rule and gone inside a place i've delivered to, because they asked if i could place the grocery bags in a specific location in the kitchen for them to work on unloading and there was no way i was going to refuse helping.

i gripe about the poor tippers, but people can also be incredibly kind. one time i took shelter from a sudden vicious hailstorm inside an older lady's home in a trailer park, while i was in the middle of delivering her groceries. we both huddled just inside the door, watching in shock as golf-ball-sized hail swept through for about five minutes and then disappeared. she handed me an extra $10 bill on my way out the door.

when covid was at its deadliest, people would leave extra (often lysol-scented) cash tips and thank-you notes for me taped to the door or partially under the mat. i especially loved the clearly kid-drawn thank you notes with marker renderings of blobby people in masks, or trees, or rainbows. in summer of 2020 i delivered to a nice older couple who lived outside of town in the hills, and they insisted i take a huge double handful of extra disposable gloves and masks to wear while shopping - those were hard to find in stores at the time, but they wanted me to have some of their supply and wouldn't take no for an answer.

anyway. all this to say people are mostly good, or at least trying to be, despite my complaints.

If Percy Jackson rated the Greek Gods:

Zeus: 4/10 has tried to kill me several times but did make Thalia and my bro Jason

Hera: -10/10 erased my memories and hates my girlfriend

Poseidon: 100/10 that’s my pabby

Demeter: 7/10 seems pretty chill, wanted me to eat cereal so she cares about my nutritional well-being I guess

Ares: 0/10 tried to fight me when I was 12 very aggressive

Athena: 6/10 can be helpful but also very scary when you date her daughter

Apollo: 5/10 very self-absorbed but has calmed down since he got acne

Artemis: 7/10 very cool but tried to take away Annabeth

Hephaestus: 8/10 helped us out but also sent us into an active volcano so mixed feelings

Aphrodite: 6/10 said she was going to make sure my love life was interesting and oh boy did she deliver. I do like Piper though so she gets points for that

Hermes: 9/10 awesome, hasn’t even tried to kill me once, sent me to Paris on a date, has dope snakes

Dionysus: 2/10 can get a better score when he learns my name

To be fair considering there were presumably a couple hundred Jedi running around killing most of them is great. Plus the rest of them being forced into hiding and incredibly disorganized is also really good.

And finally a good number of escapees are either elders who are gonna die soon anyways or padawans who have little training and are unskilled

Anyway Order 66 wasn’t that effective huh

We’re lead to believe in the original trilogy that Obi-Wan and Yoda were like, the only two to make it out. But then you watch the shows, read books and comics, play Fallen Order, and you’re like. Now hang on just a minute. Because Ahsoka Tano and Kanan Jarrus make it, Cal Kestis and Cere Junda make it, Grogu survived as a BABY, all of the inquisitors technically, now Gungi, and according to wookieepedia my beloved

Master Kirak Infil'a

Master Coleman Kcaj

Master Obi-Wan Kenobi

Master Taron Malicos

Master Jocasta Nu

Master Oppo Rancisis

Master Luminara Unduli

Master Uvell

Master Quinlan Vos (presumed)

Master Yoda

Knight/Jedi Temple Guard the Grand Inquisitor

Knight Cere Junda

Padawan Ferren Barr

Padawan Caleb Dume

Padawan Gungi

Padawan Cal Kestis

Padawan Trilla Suduri

Unidentified Rodian Jedi youngling

Former Master Eeth Koth

Former Padawan Naq Med

Former Padawan Ahsoka Tano

Zubain Ankonori

Selrahc Eluos

Fifth Brother

Grogu

Khandra

Ka-Moon Kholi

Mususiel

Masana Tide

Nari

Nuhj

Seventh Sister

Kira Vantala (According to legend)

So that’s 33 confirmed individuals and god only knows how many else ???????

All I’m saying is Order 66 was not that effective

One of the biggest obstacles to moving forward with Tiny Frog Wizards is that I just couldn't get Paths of Power and Power Dice to pull their weight. They represented a soft violation of the game's basic mechanical conceit that casting spells and only casting spells has dice-rolling attached to it, and in playtesting they didn't prove to be terribly effective at encouraging specific flavours of foolishness – they were just a lot of mental overhead for not a lot of benefit.

The pages previewed above represent a first pass at reworking them into something a little more on point. Instead of big goofy statements about your tiny frog wizard's ethos of magic that hook into a metagame resource economy, you get a generic pool of material components, optionally supplemented with magic items that mess with the dice economy at the time of casting, and you don't need to do anything special if you decide you don't want to use them at all.

As always, comments, criticisms, and/or bizarre rants are welcome!

(Please disregard the fact the page numbering skips from 11 to 13 – page 12 is reserved for the other twelve example Functions I haven't come up with yet. In the meantime, if you want to give it a spin, just use a d4 rather than a d6 for the first digit of the Function roll.)

Relistening to wolf 359 is weird because there’s so much foreshadowing

[image ID: Text reading Texas State Aquarium staff stated that the animals have been getting a little restless. One of the employees had an idea to let some of the land animals spend time with some of the sea animals, and it has worked out brilliantly.

Putting the sloths near the dolphins was the biggest surprise of all. The dolphins are absolutely delighted with the sloths, and the sloths, normally very quiet animals, have been squeaking replies back to the dolphins for hours at a time. Who would have guessed these two species would be such a great match?

There is a photo of two dolphins in a large pool, their heads peeking out above the water to look at a brown sloth, who is hanging on a branch. End ID]