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I want you to know that I will forget you after this moment, and never think of you again. But you, I am quite certain, will think about me every single day for the rest of your life.

But with the Earth getting warmer and spring coming sooner and winters being less harsh up North, the babies were starting to thaw out too early, so when the Ice Deer got to them, they’d been awake already and starved to death.

So there were only like, 300 Ice Deer left. They were bigger than elks, all white with blue antlers that even the females grew, and I realized the only solution would be to somehow lead them North every year when it started thawing. As a human I could check the weather and the ice in the North Pole and when it was time to go to the babies, even if the deer thought it was still winter.

So I had to devise a plan to get the Ice Deer to follow me North to their babies on time every spring, and it just became part of my life. I did other stuff and lived life as usual while keeping track of the weather near the end of winter and I’d be like, welp it’s time to lead the deer North, and I’d set out to find their winter home.

And a lot of people were like “this isn’t a permanent solution. We need to focus on climate change so it’s fixed for good.”

Probably started by bringing her injured animals to doctor on as a kid. Later on, not necessarily a lot later, he started dragging in bullied disciples to patch up and hide from Wen Xu or somebody, and then probably he'd just kind of...fold a lot of them into his canonical personal retinue of loyal subordinates, however that worked exactly.

Wet kitten Wen Ning constantly dragging smaller wetter kittens back to his big sister to protect. She has tried all the arguments already. She knows there's no budging him.

Also lmaoooo hang on, Wen Ning had Wen Qing outnumbered a lot of the time, didn't he. She didn't have personal minions she could trust like that. These people just extracted a high-status prisoner from the custody of an erratic and violent superior pursuing a personal grudge without blinking, for their Wen-gongzi.

and i was like hmmn what did i say??

#they were supposed to watch his back! #and keep him busy! #and take a sword for him if the opportunity arose probably; wen ning wouldn't want that but wen qing would

#these unnamed subordinates with no lines are rapidly becoming my favorite mdzs supporting cast #like what did they think about the plot #wen ning got pressganged by jin zixun in the company of his subordinates #so some of them probably lasted all the way to the Siege

#there might have been a guy who personally carried jiang cheng out of the charnel house of lotus pier #or retrieved his parents' bodies from the corpse heap #and roughly four to ten years later#watched jiang cheng come to kill him #and had his corpse dumped in the blood pool #and knew for a fact that jiang wanyin did not even know he existed and wouldn't care if he did

#it all goes in circles and some of us get ground up in the gears

Wen Sect Leader Wen Ning lives rent free in my mind. Saves everyone from Wen Ruohan. Frees Wen Qing up to do her medical research to her little mad scientist heart's content. Makes Wen Yuan his heir. Depending on where it falls in the timeline, he can two-birds-one-stone reconciliation with the Jiang sect and getting rid of his own rivals by handing the likes of Wen Chao to them, or just prevent a bunch of tragedies altogether. Time traveling fix-it fic Wen Ning going hmm I wonder if I still have some corpse powers and then punching through his uncle's ribcage to test it.

like. you could not tell he was the kind of guy who would quietly and unapologetically rescue his sect's enemies out of moral conviction, but he was. people contain multitudes. so same way, in this scenario the political world is rocked by this mediocre, sweet-tempered, unassuming teenage Wen cousin purging the upper ranks of his family and usurping the sect by force.

Wen Qing's reputation before the war (at least the part Wei Wuxian bothered to recall) notably consisted of one part 'medical genius' and one part 'only normal person in the Wen leadership.' Wen Ning turning out to be the most insane murderer in his family would be accepted as narratively coherent, despite being a shocking twist.

bets would be on about whether he and Wen Qing would go on to kill each other off. i feel like they'd lose a lot of vassal sects and guest disciples on account of the sect doesn't seem as stable or powerful suddenly.

diplomatic relations would not normalize for a while, unless he managed to do this during the war so all the other sects felt it was a favor to them, because killing family members for power tends to be frowned upon. nie mingjue in particular i think would be of the opinion that Sect Leader Wen Qionglin was a mad dog.

which would baffle everyone, given they met once. and, huh, that interaction with Wei Wuxian championing this kid against his mean cousin, whom he went on to clear out of the way of his succession, would look really different suddenly in hindsight lmao.

if this was back far enough that the qishan indoctrination never happened, wwx wouldn't even feel more than moderate dislike toward wen chao lmao. he's just an especially obnoxious young master.

further thoughts: if Wen Ning did follow up impulsively killing Wen Ruohan with deliberately getting rid of Wen Chao and Wen Xu so as to carry off a coup, it would not be because he wants to be sect leader.

so to what extent would it be to protect Wen Sect, or at least people in it, from being run by Wen Xu, to what extent would it be to protect all the other sects from the possibility of Wen Sect still waging a war, and to what extent would it be to protect Wen Qing from the fallout of his murder?

i feel like the last part is not non-zero, given she died the first time because he punched someone to death.

but making the decision to double down on the violence in order to be able to control the outcome is a fascinating move, it is not even in the top five most likely reactions for him to have.

the characterization here would be so interesting to get right, because Wen Ning is so passive right up until he plants himself like a mountain, and he's never had to stay in mountain mode the way he would to pull this off. so he'd be taking leaves out of Wei Wuxian's book, deliberately.

but much as he admires him, he knows how comprehensively things wound up going to shit due to partly Wei Wuxian's choices (particularly the impulsive choice to reanimate Wen Ning's corpse to murder people) and is ultimately confident enough about rejecting wwx's reasoning to blow things wide open with Jiang Cheng.

so he'd have to be trying to copy Wei Wuxian's way of seizing control of the circumstances and do insane things because someone has to do them, while also applying his own sense of caution, and pursuing the idea that you can't just seize control when you want to and then let it go again, it's something you have to maintain.

ironically making him more like wen ruohan than he has any business ever becoming.

i think if he didn't tell Wen Qing everything he'd blow up.

but while he's more of a talker than Lan Wangji, he is not someone who uses a lot of words, or who would be good at explaining as large and complicated a story as this would be. so 'everything' would take a really long while to fill in.

He's trying to conduct a home visit. It's not going well. The last visit didn't go well. It's becoming more and more clear that he's probably going to have to separate this little girl from her only living relative, which he doesn't want to do. Nani's not helping her own case, and he's coming down pretty hard on her. And then suddenly this bizarre little blue creature pops up and flings a heavy book directly at his face. The sisters insist it's a dog, but it doesn't look, sound, or behave like any dog.

The thing is, Agent Bubbles knows about aliens. He knows for a fact that intelligent extraterrestrial life exists and that it knows about Earth. And yet he doesn't challenge the idea that Stitch is a dog or try to either immediately remove Lilo or demand that Stitch be sent away. He does specifically tell Lilo that the next time he sees Stitch he expects Stitch to be "a model citizen." Not under control or well trained, a model citizen.

You’re not allowed to leave this in the tags!!! @couldnt-think-of-a-funny-name

Zuko’s like no, yeah, I totally get it, and just makes her one of his advisors. At first it’s just so she has a good excuse to stay but after the first meeting Toph storms out shouting about how EVERYONE was lying why would you even need to lie about what kind of tea you want??

Zuko: I mean they’re politicians…..but also who, and when, and in what way

They make a subtle Morse code system so Toph can warn him when someone is lying to him without tipping anyone off that she can sense lies.

Ok so roads are important infrastructure. A lot of stuff that's important happens on roads. Now, let's imagine that quadrillionaire Matt Stench has decided that the next big tech innovation is the Wide Car. It's a car that takes up six lanes despite seating only one passenger.

The Wide Car is supposed to be the future, and everyone's going to be driving Wide Cars, even though nobody who makes Wide Cars is turning a profit. Employers are offering Wide Cars as an employee benefit, and getting "nah." Some employers are going as far as demanding their employees drive Wide Cars, and the result is that people take time out of their workdays to get in the mandatory gas usage for their Wide Car before driving home in a regular car.

In spite of the fact that the Wide Car is clearly set to fail, there's an enormous push to expand to twelve-lane roads to accommodate a bunch of Wide Cars that simply will not materialize. This is not an organic response to demand, but a speculative investment that amplifies the existing issues with road development for no good reason.

Your brain is an incredibly energy-intensive organ. It makes up approximately 2% of your total body mass, but at rest it's using 22% of your total energy intake. The only thing that uses the same percentage of energy is all of your skeletal muscle (which is about 40% of your total body mass), with the liver (about 2.6% of your total mass) close behind at 21% (Aragon et al, 2017).

And that's how much energy it's using at rest.

That's the baseline.

So if you're doing lots of intellectual labour, your brain - which already has disproportionately huge energy demand - is going to use even more energy to keep up with the work. That's why you feel so wiped/drained/like you're out of spell slots after high intellectual demand - because your brain is an organ, and you've just done a lot of high-energy work with a high-energy organ.

me when I get home:

me the entire weekend: