Aeschere Knight

me: i don’t envy the sucker who has to work out the solution to this problem. it would take a lot of brainpower for them to work their way out of this mess. haha 

me: 

-had to undergo very painful surgery to get automail

-had to relearn how to write because of his prosthesis (there’s a post going around showing he had to switch hands etc) and his handwriting is likely a lot worse due to that. This means automail isn’t super good for delicate work, unsurprising, considering what it’s made of. 

-experiences phantom limb pain and therefore other associated stuff (this was only really shown in the manga)

-cannot go anywhere too cold without changing his automail or he’ll get really bad frost bite and it will stop working

-cannot go anywhere too hot, period, because the metal attached and under his skin will overheat and he will be badly burned

-Reattachment is painful, but needs to be done frequently if he breaks or outgrows his automail

- it’s HEAVY so much so that the strain has the potential to cause stress on his body, enough that it’s even theorized as possibly stunting his growth.

-it requires regular maintenance or it will break down, as shown when he forgets to do that and it…breaks down

-when it does need to be repaired, it takes time to do that, during which Ed uses regular prosthetics (that usually don’t quite fit him).

-costs a lot of money (not a problem for Ed due to high state alchemist salary/having mechanics as surrogate family, but explicitly noted to being the reason why most people in the fmaverse stick to regular prosthetics along with the painful surgery)

So Ed can’t actually do everything perfectly and experiences a lot of extra hassle, problems and pain people without automail don’t have to deal with!  And any advantages he does have are more suited to fighting than day to day life (being able to incorporate weapons/fake out people who want to blow up his arm). 

Do you know the definition of the word disabled. Have you ever looked up what a disability is.

Glasses.

And yet they are ubiquitous. Glasses are relatively inexpensive, and there are opticals everywhere.

No one pities or tries to suggest that myopic or presbiopic people don’t actually need their glasses. No one says they should “toughen up” or “try yoga” to fix their vision. People with glasses aren’t asked “what happened” to them by strangers on the street.

Needing prescription glasses is the gold standard of how all disabilities should be treated.

If I’m sitting down for a while not doing anything physical (i.e school) my body is like ‘oh you’re not busy? let’s sleep!’ When I go to bed I stay there until my body is done—alarms, fire, flights, and meetings be damned. It takes the average person 15 minutes from eyes closed to the first stages of sleep. You glue wires to my legs and skull and watch me through a window and I am out in 15 seconds. I can peacefully sleep naked in a garbage bag if my gear gets soaked (I might wake in the morning in agony because my muscles have seized from the cold but I remain well-rested on backpacking trips).

As you (the insomniac reading this with faint awe and disbelief) might imagine, there are some upsides and some downsides to my neurological disorder.

One downside is I can’t magically produce more hours in a day by regularly sleeping the common 7 hours, or the arguably more common 6, or the not unheard of 5, or that-guy-from-AP-english-class-who-I suspect-is-going-to-keel-over-clutching-his-JD-anyday-now 4.

The upside is I can’t do that.

The weirdside is my senior year of high school when I started taking anti-sleep medicine and was thus awake sometimes, I realized everyone around me looked bad. We were 17, 18 and these twitchy honors students all had shadowed eyes that teared up as they stumbled over concepts they studied so hard to master. It wasn’t super noticeable at first because it was everyone! It was sad. And scary. They bragged about not getting sleep and they cried about it but in a joking way, you know? Chronic widespread sleep deprivation is deeply disturbing from the outside, once you figure out how to notice it, which is difficult because MOST PEOPLE ARE ALWAYS SLEEP DEPRIVED.

College wasn’t much better.

A side note—I’ve found I need 9, 9 ½ hours of sleep. Like many things involving the human body it varies person to person. There is a range, with 8 as the average for an adult. If you are an adult, you might only need 7 hours! But perhaps put some real time in figuring out if that’s true. I cannot express how unlikely it is that 5 is your ideal. 

If you are between the ages of fourteen and seventeen (U.S high school), you need between 8 and 10 hours sleep with 9 hours being the average. If you are younger, you need even more and also should maybe not be on tumblr.

It’s like eating food. It’s like drinking water. Even if you messed up your time management and it’s 110% your fault that something is due tomorrow and now it’s 11 at night—ASK FOR AN EXTENSION. You. Are. Hurting. Everything is harder and worse because you are chronically sleep deprived.

Here are some random tips to get more sleep because I can’t actually give any  advice. If you think there’s something medical going on here’s some sleep disorders and how to identify the 5 most common. 

I have mild/moderate Narcolepsy and it is insane that our cultural attitude towards sleep is so messed up that it makes my life better. 

First, eyes are small. If someone is more than a few feet away, there’s very little chance they will notice someone else’s eye color. Same is true if it’s dark or if they’re wearing glasses.

Second, people don’t pay that much attention to eye color. Most people don’t think of others (I don’t think) in terms of eye color. I’m not actually sure of the eye color of most of my relatives or friends

Third, this is in no way a useful descriptor unless it plays an important role in the story. Harry Potter’s eye color mattered because of his mother. Hermione’s eye color didn’t.

Height (if it’s noteworthy–most people don’t really notice unless it’s unusual in some way)

Posture/their “walk” (e.g., do they slouch? hunch? scurry? stride? etc.)

Facial expression

Clothes (again, if it’s unusual in some way)

Hairstyle

Hands (gestures and appearance)

How they interact with other people and/or the environment

*loves fireworks

*can’t stand the sound

*has never seen them before

Zakiyah isn’t scared of fireworks but they’re loud and obnoxious and unnecessary. She just doesn’t like them okay.

Erion hasn’t ever seen fireworks before. They’re very much a human invention and, because they’re celebratory and not war driven, aren’t something that he’s come across before. He was definitely scared when they first started but he quickly fell in love with them after watching them for a while.

You, the baker's boy, you cant work 14h a day you have to go to school I'll take it from here thanks. Little thief girl on the street? The way you used that knife was really impressive we should get you some proper weapons training and you will be a great knight one day also eat ur vegetables . Find a baby orc during a raid? My son is strong and green and I love him.

I used to be a varsity swimmer, and I was damn good, but I was forced into it by my parents and completely lost my love for it and therein my drive. But in high school I was swimming against such talented swimmers like Olympic Swimmer Missy Franklin. I’ve met her, and the main difference between her and me was that I was strong but had no passion, but she was strong BECAUSE she had passion. 

And I could have been good, really good, maybe even Olympic good. I even have the predisposition for it, been swimming since I was 2 years old, have a mom who was almost an olympic swimmer. Missy didn’t have either of those things, she just wanted it, loved it, had been doing it for a long time, and decided she was going to kick ass at it.

Right, that’s great and all, but I completely missed my opportunity to be an olympic swimmer, yeah? and can never achieve those dreams I had as a kid? No, not even though. There was this whole thought that female athletes peak when they’re 17 years old and lose their skills quickly after that, and male athletes peak around 19. But then Olympic Swimmer Dara Torres shows up. She was an olympic swimmer when she was 17, 21 and 25. Pretty normal age for retirement. She had a few kids. She kicked butt at being a mom. 

And then at 33 years old she decides she’s bored or something gets back in shape and kicks so much ass at the trials that she lands herself on the Olympic Team ONCE AGAIN. And then 8 years later, she decides, heck I’m 41 now, no one has ever made the olympic swim team as old as I am, I want to get in shape yet again and teach these children how sports work.

And she still has the record for oldest US Olympic Swimmer, not even any men have beat out that record.

So basically what I’m saying is you could be an olympic swimmer, you really could be. And there are obviously a lot of things stopping you and trying to get in your way: your brain, society, too much chocolate cake for example. But if you really dedicate yourself to it and love it with all of your heart you could, you really could.

And lets say olympic swimming isn’t your jam? That’s cool too. There isn’t a single skill in this world that you can’t learn if you absolutely love it and want to. Any skill you want is going to take time. There are countless famous people who started learning a skill after 20, 30, 40, or even 50. Not a single person has even been president under age 35 (most likely because you’re not allowed to be, but there’s a reason for that). Whatever you want to do you’re probably going to be bad at first, and I’m talking really shitty.

Van Gogh got started in his 20′s and was thought to have no artistic talent at first and was forced to sit in the back of classrooms where the worst artists in the class sat. So yeah you’ll probably be bad, like really bad and everyone including you will think you’re bad. If you stick with it though, if you’re willing to work for years and years, if you keep loving it after all the pain it’s given you, 

then you might just paint Starry Night.

To foster inspiration and creativity, no matter what your outlet is, try this spell.

You'll need several bay leaves. Dried ones from the spice rack are fine.

Bay (Laurus nobilis) was revered in ancient Greece and Rome. The herb was dedicated to the god Apollo. It is also said that the oracles at Delphi chewed bay leaves to induce prophetic visions.

To give your own powers a boost, first charge the bay leaves with this dedication:

I celebrate creative art and dedicate these leaves to help express what's in my heart and what I can achieve.

Prophecy and poetry, music, paint, and dance, increase the skills I cultivate, my craft to be enhanced.

Burn the bay leaves as incense while you work. Sleep with one under your pillow at night.

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I’m building a lil’ tabletop RPG campaign that required a bit of brainstorming. So here, please enjoy these fun toys I found while working on it: 

Build a spaceship: https://ship.shapewright.com/?name=Ark

Map generator: https://wizardawn.and-mag.com/tool_smap.php

Another map generator: https://davesmapper.com/scifi-ship

Creature Creator: https://www.seventhsanctum.com/index-bein.php