ASHallter

Like the day I told my dad I was the epitome of something and he laughed in my face. It wasn’t my fault that I didn’t correctly intuit the emphasis. (Mine was Ep-i-TOME vs Ep-i-to-ME).

My dad didn’t apologize for his rudeness but after my initial disgruntlement I just learned to roll with it. I’d get corrected and laugh it off. Some words were more frustrating though because it necessitated having to rework the word in my brain every time I read it. Like a few years ago when I learned I’d had “seneschal” wrong for decades. (I can’t explain why I thought it was sen-shull and not sen-es-shawl)

I learned that I had harbinger wrong during a Transformers movie without needing to embarrass myself. Thanks, Shia Lebouf. (Har-bing-er (wrong) made way more sense than har-binge-er (right) but no one asked me)

At this point in my life though I’ve managed to work out most of the kinks. I don’t often get corrected anymore.

But there’s one other snag that crops up between me and my beloved. I’ll confidently say a word and they’ll go, “That’s not how that’s pronounced.”

“Yes it is,” I’ll say, very firmly. Because in these cases I’ll generally have heard with my ears and repeated a word verbatim. I’ll know I heard it, so it can’t be wrong.

And pretty much every time I’ll be saying the British pronunciation instead of the American one. I’ve consumed enough British media that often it’s the only time I heard certain words said and I never realized American English handles it differently.

She didn’t like. Do anything about the tumors.

But the sheep came and lived in our fields, wooly and much bigger than I’d imagined sheep to be. I asked mom if she’d have them sheared, because both wooly lads were starting to grow moss on the outer part of their wool.

No, she said, she’d just be sad looking at their bare tumors. The sheep remained unshorn. That was probably for the best since we knew fuck all about fibercraft.

I asked my mom if we would eat the sheep since they were dying anyway.

No, she said, she didn’t like mutton and didn’t like the idea that we might eat sheep cancer. The sheep remained unslaughtered.

So the first sheep died, after a year of languishing in the grassy fields, weighed down with unshorn wool. Maybe it was a nice year, we have no way of knowing how the sheep felt.

Now here into the narrative enters my father. A man allergic to literally every animal. A man married to a woman who was just constantly bringing animals home. Cats, dogs, rabbits, guinea pigs, horses, goats, cows, and finally sheep.

He yelled, he fumed, he raged and when his fury was spent the betumoréd sheep were still quietly chewing cud in the pasture and my mom won again.

Now my dad worked in IT. So one morning, my mom called him. A sheep has died, she said. My dad waited. We have to bury it, she informed him. My dad was dressed in his work clothes, a button up and slacks. So he called work and told them he’ll be late. Because he has to dig a sheep grave. His coworkers do not know what to say but agree that he can come in late.

So he went down to dig a sheep grave with my mom.

My mom was not there. I no longer remember what task she abandoned him for but the long and the short was that my father was alone with the dead sheep he didn’t want.

The property we lived on was about two acres. We had the lower pasture and the upper pasture. We also had a beautiful little stream that cut across the property. This beautiful little stream was home to frogs, salamanders, and all manner tiny little things and all those little creatures meant there were strict rules about where we could dig or develop.

The sheep had died in the lower pasture. But he could only be buried in the upper pasture, roughly 2 acres away. Which meant my dad needed to get the sheep from point A to point B alone. In his work clothes for some reason, he didn’t change.

So first my dad dug the sheep grave in a gentle drizzling rain, spattering his work pants with mud. Why didn’t he change. That part was pretty easy. Then he got a tarp and set about grabbing the dead betumoréd ram. Getting it on the tarp was also pretty easy, rolling it from left to right.

This sheep. Was about 300lbs under the wool. But with a few years of unshorn wool that was slowly filling with rain that sheep corpse was much too heavy for a single beleaguered man.

When he related this story to me I was incoherent with laughter. My dad at no point thought that this was a funny story, not his wet muddy work clothes, nor his wayward spouse, or the extremely dead farm animal.

I had tears rolling down my eyes and I asked, did you give up and wait for mom?

No.

My dad is not a quitter.

He, still in his work clothes, dragged that corpse a foot at a time, uphill, in the rain, to its final resting place, all by himself.

a world without trans people has never existed and never will

seventeen years old kaidan alenko cutting loose with a full biotic kick, almost as strong as an adult, and not even because of something that was done to him, but to protect someone else

Not only does the child have the rhythm and their part down precisely, but also, they are clearly doing the very-small-child thing of reserving exactly nothing.

Children have to learn not to use all of the force they're capable of, adults mostly never use all of the force they are capable of, but here someone has given this child exactly the opportunity to use all of the force their body can produce, and do it musically.

“I what? I smell hungry?”

“Yeah, like, the empty smell. Aren’t you hungry?”

They were, but it was hard for them to accept smelling a state of being. After a few weeks of me pointing it out right before they realized it themself though they asked, “What does hunger smell like?”

“Bad.”

“That’s not helpful.”

“It’s like… an emptiness that goes past the mouth? Bad breath is more upfront but hunger is like you’re smelling stomach acid, it’s all the way from an empty belly.”

They started smelling my mouth in exaggerated silly fashion but eventually they did start to recognize it.

Your writing style perfectly encapsulates the Tumblr vernacular and style about just posting about a thing where context may or may not reveal itself as you read the post. Your posts do that, and then as you get about the halfway point, it turns ever so slightly left into the uncanny valley, so that by the end, the reader is simultaneously confident that they just read a piece of surrealist fiction, and yet intrigued by it.

I myself finished reading this, and was at the same time going ‘that’s not a thing’ and ‘I wonder if I get really close to my partner, if I could smell his hunger’. And then in classic tumblr fashion, I scroll back up to see OP, and once again, it’s @foldingfittedsheets.

right EXACTLY like there is no logical progression to the misogyny of the games - it doesn't fit with the lore, it doesn't propose anything new, it simply mirrors what we already have irl with no critical thought as to why the power structures in reality are the way they are, and what they might look like in another world.

We got told to build a level 17 character for this one shot, most of the other folks had previous Dude Squad characters to resurrect. But I didn’t really want to play a straight martial class. In my heart, spellcasters are my true class, and I didn’t really have a strong idea of what kind of character to make.

So I approached the DM and said, “Hey, I have this idea to play a character that pretends to be a martial class but is actually a magic caster?” My girlfriends character is an aasimar who thinks he’s Thor and my backstory was that after meeting him and falling for him she decided to invest heavily in deceptive magic so as not to alienate him.

And my DM. Loved it. So he helped me build an extremely custom character. Two levels in Hexblade warlock gave her a good weapon and the ability to cast disguise self pretty much nonstop to appear buffer than she actually was.

Then there was four levels in Stone sorcerer in order to get 4 sorcery points, the ability to use those points to cast using Subtle Spell and no one could tell she’s casting, and to buff her AC.

Finally there was 11 Bladesong wizard levels in order to get some attack bonuses, even more AC, extra attacks, and the ability to burn spells to take less damage. We had a secret code we made up to cover my casting.

So the whole time I was burning spell slots to recharge my sorcery points every time I cast things like Haste and Spider Climb and use my Bladesong powers. We busted through walls and smashed our way through puzzles. We lied and said my character was a Barbarian/Monk so they didn’t bat and eye when she ran on walls with spider climb, but no one noticed when even after dashing she “held onto the stone wall” without any kind of check.

The final battle: the goblin wizard boss we were fighting had cast invulnerability on himself and had our friend mind controlled. So I’m trying to cover for not attacking as I try to dispel his invulnerability. I can no longer run on walls, or make the jumps my party is making on floating platforms over a spike pit so I try to use my actions on other helpful things like tying ropes for friends in the pit. I manage to dispel the magic on our friend but I burned almost all my spells trying to secretly dispel the boss’ spell and finally we just ended up grappling and suffocating him then pummeling him to death.

But at the last moment as we’re running out of this horrible goblin mansion I’m running down a wall and my friends are climbing down. The building says there’s 6 seconds left and my very injured love interest is not gonna make it so my character shouted “Fuckfuckfuck!” Ran over and cast dimension door to bring them both to safety. (Two people got left in the blast but both survived cause Dude Power). Then I critically failed my deception about how I had used magic and came clean and everyone lost their shit when they heard what we’d done. Her final confession, after dropping her buff disguise self, was, “When I met Kathor I really liked him and he freakin’ hates magic so I just kinda figured out how to hide that I was castin’ magic cause I though we might go to pound town.”