"but What Is Time?"

okay this was actually useful. thank you :)

One thing that has made me a much more well-adjusted person is a clip I once saw of Hank Green saying that anyone can be in amazing shape as long as being in amazing shape is one of their top three priorities.

(This is obviously a generalization that isn't true for everyone. But it is true for most people and I'm proceeding from there.)

This "top three priorities" framing has genuinely reduced my tendency toward jealousy and self-comparison a lot. Now when I feel envious of someone’s spotless, aesthetic home, I think to myself, “Having a spotless, aesthetic home is probably one of their top three priorities. It’s definitely not one of mine, so I shouldn’t expect my home to look like that.”

Or when I see an influencer with a body that takes a ton of work to maintain: “Maintaining that body is obviously one of her top three priorities, because it’s her livelihood. My livelihood is my brain, so I’m never going to prioritize my body like that.”

It also helps me to identify areas that I actually DO want to prioritize more. I realized in recent years that my envy for my friends who prioritized writing more than I did was NOT going away, so I started to prioritize writing more. (Not top three, but higher priority than it has been in the past.)

so my twitter feed pointed out something...interesting

As Damian’s 16th birthday approaches, Tim gets more and more anxious. He spends more and more time with Damian, until they’re almost attached at the hip. Offers, with a tone of suppressed desperation that does not suffice to make Damian agree, to take Damian out of the country for his birthday. Starts to stand firmly in between Bruce and Damian every time they’re in the same room, twitching every time Bruce moves toward them.

Damian’s 16th birthday passes without incident, if you don’t count Tim hovering at his shoulder the entire time, armed, checking every present before letting Damian take it.

Tim is staring at the clock as it hits midnight, and his body goes almost limp, the constantly-held tension of weeks dropping. Then his face fills with confusion. Then goes blank. He leaves, with the party still in swing, and Damian feels the absence at his side immediately, the spot just behind him that he’s grown used to having a protective presence in finally empty.

No one sees Tim for weeks.

so that's what that was

Be wary. I have strewn various traps around this post

"is that timothet chalamet??"

but like in the tone of that hatsune miku meme.

(it keeps happening, help.)

Ain't my circus but I would know my monkeys anywhere.

as much as i love angst i do also adore familial league of assassins shit, and since i keep seeing them on my tiktok fyp i cant stop thinking about those videos of idiot teenagers in military training being. teenagers. and thinking of jason and damian. just those two having weird little gimmicks and traditions that confuse the absolute fuck out of the rest of the family from their time at the league.

damian will refer to grapes as ‘assassination implements’ because of that time jason tried to throw one at him, missed, hit ra’s in the back of the head, and to avoid getting in trouble gaslit him into believing it must have been some kind of dart that hit him from a coup attempt. ra’s went into lockdown and had the entire base searched and jason’s been lying about it for a year, nodding along whenever ra’s brings up the ‘irritating failure that escaped capture’.

nanda parbat had a specific bar that a lot of the assassins would go to when off-duty for a break, but damian wasn’t allowed because talia said he was too young so jason and a couple other loa workers dressed him up in fake facial hair and convinced the bartender he was just a really short old guy to get him in, and since then whenever they talk about something damian’s done that he wasn’t supposed to do they say it was ‘old man brutus’ that did it. bruce has no idea who the fuck brutus is or why two of his sons find his existence so amusing.

whenever the assassins were fucking around on loa grounds they would have a specific low-down gravely tone of voice that when any of them saw talia or ra’s approach, they would use to warn the rest of the group by saying ‘al ghul’ in that tone to indicate everyone had to straighten up and act like they were training. damian can copy that tone perfectly, and will use that voice when saying non-sensical words like ‘ooby-dooby’ and ‘birch tree’ because the tone makes jason instinctively straight up and whirl around like a soldier hearing the word ‘sergeant’. it works every fucking time.

one of damian’s tutors and jason’s mission colleague hated coconut milk with a fucking passion and would rant about it every time it was brought up in conversation. a lot of the guys would take bets on how long she could go talking about it and then purposely brought it up to set her off as a game. every time anyone around the loa base was seen with coconut milk somebody would respond ‘what would eden say if she saw you with that?’. tim dick and bruce do not know who eden is or why they hate coconut milk and at this point they’re too scared to ask.

all im saying is the loa becomes much funnier if we consider it just to be a very strict assassin boarding school that jason attended and damian grew up in.

You can tell a lot about the health of a civilization by their warning signs. Places with a lot of dumb folks will have very broad, very dumb warnings in public. "No feeding the birds." "Stop swimming in this drainage pond." That kind of thing.

Advanced civilizations have very precise signs. They've covered the bases of their regular, run-of-the-mill idiots, and now they're working hard to cover that other end of the bell curve: the talented idiot. When I was in Germany last time, there was a big warning sign that consisted of a 76-letter-long word that means "stop bothering this particular goose, Sven." I don't know who Sven was, but the goose looked pretty calm. It worked.

Now, I have a secret to tell you. You can just make your own signs. There's no law against it, except perhaps "littering," and the municipal sign factory doesn't have very good security. If you show up there past close and put in the door code that you shoulder-surfed off one of the employees returning from lunch a week prior, you have all night to fuck around with their sign-printing machine, making the most official-looking placards you can think of.

Is this wrong? I don't think so. It's a public space, and being able to put up an aluminum sign that says wacky crank shit is your right. For instance, just last week, I banned pickup trucks from parking by the playground. The cops figured out something was going on, because they didn't get any calls for toddlers getting backed over for a couple of days and sent a patrol truck to investigate. Took my sign right down.

What I discovered after that is that nobody keeps records of what signs are supposed to be there. Why would anyone put up a sign for no reason? They cost money, after all. The city is now suing the shit out of that officer for stealing the "no trucks" sign, thanks to an anonymous tipster who called in the theft. Guy wearing a reflective vest came by and put like four more of them up after the lawsuit made the news, just out of spite. I'm not entirely sure if he's actually a city worker; we ran into each other at 3am at the sign factory and just grunted. He was working on some really crazy signs about not feeding a particular swan. Probably German.

(crawls on all fours with blood drenched on me) I have to do arts and crafts