I Know I'm Not The First To Uno-Reverse The Whole Humans-summoning-demons Thing, But What Kind Of Mundane

The Hawt Spring

This tiny little inn is built around a magical hot spring. The spring has one simple magical property: as long as one is physically bathing in the spring, or a pool conected to it and filled with its water, they seem more than naturally physically attractive. To everyone.

The caretakers no longer allow mirrors at the Hawt Spring, and have a firm limit on how long they allow people to stay. Because otherwise, one can poison one's body image, or lose the ability to find beauty in ordinary people.

If you get on their good side, the caretakers might tell you about all the newlywed couples who would honeymoon at the Hawt Spring before there were rules, and come away ready for divorce, after getting too used to how each other looked while bathing in the Hawt Spring. They would begin to see each other's real bodies as "ugly."

Nowadays, newlyweds are banned from the Hawt Spring, by official decree.

New RWD just dropped, so

ATTENTION

If you see this you are OBLIGATED to reblog w/ the song currently stuck in your head :)

I wonder if, after Azeroth's Second War, some of the humans running the internment camps for the orcs were frustrated by how placid the orcs had suddenly become... if, perhaps, their lack of aggression or hostility deprived them of their justification for keeping sapient beings in prison camps, and subjecting them to enslavement and abuse.

Whatever else you want to say about Jill Bearup, she called Kylo Ren a "murderous pouty-faced space numpty," so she can't be all bad.

It's hard to study contemporary American cryptids, because they don't have unique names. Instead of fanciful names like "Jersey Devil" or "Sasquatch," most new cryptids don't have distinct names, people just use common words like "woman" or "criminal," even when they're referring to imaginary, non-human beings with supernatural powers.

"Stolas isn't wrong for choosing his own happiness for once after years of abuse and depression"

and

"Octavia isn't wrong for feeling betrayed by her father and fearing she's been only an obligation to him"

are two concepts that can and should coexist.

Also, my two cents, it's amazing what happens when I go and do a little light manual labor. Raking leaves, washing dishes, weeding the garden... and suddenly the ideas and solutions start moving again.

Hey, sorry if you’ve been asked this before, but I have ADHD and I’ve been following your comic for years and just now have started to write my own comic (partially because you really inspired me). But I’m really struggling with staying on the project even when it’s boring and getting myself to work on it in the first place. Do you have any tips on how to keep your brain invested or just to make yourself do the work at all?

I have excellent news, I literally just figured out something really important about this.

So when you're an ADHD kiddo or otherwise have difficulty staying on task in a structured environment where Task is the Priority, the main way people try to MAKE you stay on task is by removing your access to anything that is not The Task. No phone, no TV, no doodling, no going outside, etc. In practice, this just makes us miserable because it takes the boredom that's always simmering around a 2 or 3 and cranks it all the way up to 11. In the same way that you would have difficulty staying on task if you were in physical pain, this crushing existential monotony makes it very difficult to work. The work might get done simply because you have no other options, but it will not be done quickly or well, and it will take a while to recover from how much it hurt.

What I realized earlier this week is I caught myself doing this to myself. I had 42 pages of background colors to do, and I thought to myself "this sounds really tedious, but I suppose I have nothing better I can do." And I realized what I'd just thought, and got very alarmed.

Because back when I was an ADHD kiddo imprisoned by school scheduling and a million little factors that keep children immobile and restrained, I couldn't stop thinking about how big and exciting the world was, and how much I wanted to be anywhere but here. When I was feeling really crushed in I'd pick a random spot on the maps on my wall and just imagine being there instead of my bedroom. This was the impetus behind almost all of my creative energy. I've said it before - anything is a prison if you can't leave, and being in a prison makes it easy to imagine how amazing things could be outside of it. Aurora's initial worldbuilding was forged in the crucible of fifth grade misery. My enthusiasm for art and my creative drive are inextricable from my sense of wonder and yearning for excitement in the real world. Not escapism, but appreciation. Wonders unimaginable are out there, and I gain just as much joy seeking them out as I do conjuring them up in my head and sharing them with all of you.

So now that I'm a grown-up with actual freedom in every way I've been able to get, the idea that I was staying on task by making myself believe the world was small and not worth seeing was extremely alarming. It could keep me on task for an afternoon, but at the cost of slowly extinguishing the thing that made me want to make art in the first place - the hunger to experience and draw inspiration from all the myriad complexities in the world.

So what I've been doing is I've been purposefully and intentionally taking excursions whenever I catch myself thinking "I could take a break but it wouldn't be worth it, it's the same outdoors as always, I'll be uncomfy and unproductive and tired." Because that is never true. Every time I've put down the stylus and gone out, I've been renewed in one way or another, and when I come back to comfort fully recharged I get a lot of shit done. Because it is easier to work on anything if you remember why you wanted to make it in the first place, and it is self-defeating misery to just lock yourself in with it and tell yourself you're a bad person if you can't get it done.

I honestly don't know how widely applicable this is. I have worse wanderlust than anyone I know, so for me this has always been modeled as imprisonment vs freedom. I've also been extremely lucky to find myself in a profession that lets me set my own pace on literally everything I do. But I genuinely believe that when it comes to making art with ADHD, you need to give yourself freedom to move laterally, not just in the direction of obvious forward progress. We don't think linearly in any other part of our lives - art is no different.

My local library has thrown away its reference section. "That stuff is all online, now."

They have thrown away most of their archive. What remains is buried in the basement under junk, and all record of its contents is lost. They have no interest in doing anything with it.

For job hunting tips, we direct you to the three biggest job hunting websites.

Homework help and tutoring comes from a local NGO, when they can afford it, although they do use our building.

We do finally have crafts, though! We turned the quiet room and the young adult reading area into a luxurious crafting station.

Legal aid isn't available. We can refer you to a local lawyer, or that local NGO. But you can look up documents online, and print them for free!

I tried to provide compassionate human connection when I worked there, but that's one of the reasons I was let go. Apparently that's something patrons are supposed to provide each other.

And we still have books! We have more and more books about fewer and fewer things, and soon we will have more fiction than ever, we just have to get rid of all the useless nonfiction that's not about hobbies, home renovation, cooking, or poetry. Nobody ever reads those books, they're just taking up space we could use for James Patterson novels!

Truly, there's no better time to visit your local library.

Nerf that Ring of Flight by making it the ring itself that flies, while wearing it, you can move the ring through the air in any direction at will. How the character manages to keep the ring on their finger, and their finger on their hand, is the player's problem.