light under waters

TW: discussions of suicide

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“Chuuya....”

Anyone else's voice, and Chuuya would have been instantly awake, no matter how deeply he'd been sleeping. But Dazai.... Dazai was different. Groaning in protest, he curled up and pulled the covers more snugly over his bare shoulder.

“Chuuuuuuyaaaa.... Wakey, wakey little slugabed.”

“Fuck off,” he muttered. The room was too bright. Dazai had opened the goddamn curtains and let the sun in.

“I brought you something.” There was a quiet hiss, and then Dazai prodded the corner of his mouth. His fingertip had been wet with...coffee?

Drawing in a deep breath through his nose, Chuuya could smell it now, permeating the air of the penthouse. Grumbling, he pulled himself up to sit, bleary-eyed and hunched over. As he yawned, Dazai took his hands and wrapped them around a mug almost too hot to hold from the fresh coffee within. Chuuya squinted down onto the surface where it quivered between reflective light and pitch darkness. He frowned.

“'d you stick your finger in it?”

“I was testing the temperature.”

“Hm.” Breathing in the steam, he stared blankly down at the coffee while his brain caught up to wakefulness.

“God, you're hideous.”

“Hn?” Bastard.

“Look at you, you gremlin! Your hair is a bird's nest, your eyes are swollen and you're squinting like you're going blind. You've got drool on your face and marks from your pillowcase, besides.”

He just woke up. Dazai could cut him some fuckin' slack.

Chuuya grunted and took a sip of his coffee. It burned the roof of his mouth, but at least he hadn't flung it in Dazai's face.

Currently, Dazai's face was upturned toward him, cradled in his hands—an easy target if ever there was one. He was kneeling on the floor, elbows propped on the edge of the bed. No bandages, only the t-shirt he'd slept in. His expression was....

“Too early for this shit,” Chuuya said, and threw back half the mug at once. The heat scalded his throat, working up through muscle and skin. He could feel sweat beading, and knew he'd gone red as a crab. The plausible deniability of it being a result of the hot coffee was honestly a farce between them, but sometimes Dazai wasn't fully a waste of skin and would let him get away with pretending they didn't both see right through each other.

"I hate it when you say stuff like that, it always means that I actually don't have a choice."

It has always felt antithetical to their dynamic, choice has always been a big thing for them, there's never any orders, it's always a question. From their first fight together in Fifteen, Dazai asks Chuuya "Do you trust me?" Chuuya has to choose to trust Dazai. In Stormbringer Dazai gives Chuuya all of the time that he can to decide whether or not to activate corruption and let the answer to his humanity be lost (Before I started drafting this post I actually hadn't realised that Dazai actually tried to give Chuuya as much time as possible - "Two more minutes. Nowhere near enough time to decide how to live the rest of one's life, but it was all the time they could spare" - that was very obviously caring of him. How did I not notice that sooner?) and in the meantime, he puts his mind to work creating backup plans, should Chuuya choose not to go through with it. Choice is so important to how they work, it's always trying to allow the option for a choice, even in a situation where it feels like there is no other choice.

That's when it hit me. In the manga Chuuya says;

"Whenever you say that you really mean there's no choice at all!"

Chuuya feels like there's no choice, what he doesn't realise is that Dazai is doing mental gymnastics to ensure that he can have one. If Dazai can even attempt to come up with backup plans when Guivre, he surely could have attepted to come up with one for Lovecraft.

what does this have to do with boiling your surgical tools? well look, the boiling water releases bubbles of steam which carries the malign influences up to heaven. you boil a knife, you send all the miasmic particles off with the steam to heaven. if you rinse the knife off in a bucket the water isn't hot enough, the particles go into the water and then right back on to the knife. you gotta boil it to get the particles all the way away. how can a tool or rag or a bed have miasmic particles on it when you can't smell them? humans have a lousy sense of smell. look at your dog on the hunt. are there no rabbits in the woods just because you can't smell them? we know that miasma is carried on the air, and is what makes stench so dangerous, and we know that humans can't smell worth a damn compared to dogs cats horses etc. a dog can smell if a rat died in a corner of the room last week. you can't. do you think licking the spot where the rat died is going to go well for you? luckily, what humans lack in snout we make up for in brains. we have extra brains where our sniffers should have been. God set that up for a reason.

and why does a rinse with wine spirits work? man, look how fast alcohol evaporates. my guess is that because wine contains a lot more vice than water, it evaporates a whole lot faster, in sort of an equal and opposite way that a rock falls faster than a feather. if you want the miasmic particles to get off there FAST, you dunk it in something that's going back to heaven at a gallop.

Using Pi-hole and Raspberry Pi (on the Raspberry Pi website, really good overview of what Pi-hole does)

Tumblr-archived Twitter thread about one household's experience with Pi-hole (this is what sold me on it. Also the tweets were published in 2022 and Pi-hole is actively being developed, so I think some of the teething problems he mentioned might have cleared up or are at least being addressed.)

Pi-hole website (gives broad strokes of the software and imho is not actually that helpful, however this proves that I am not making shit up)

Pi-hole documentation (read prerequisites carefully, you do NOT need the newest model of Raspberry Pi to run this thing!! You don't even need a Raspberry Pi at all, you can run it on a bunch of Linux systems however I'm very stupid when it comes to Linux and when my options are install and learn a whole ass new OS or spend $$ on a Raspberry Pi and hook it up to my TV with a wired mouse and keyboard I will unfortunately be spending money)

Privacy International's guide to setting up Pi-hole on a Raspberry Pi (bro this one saved our asses)

You guys can ask me questions if you want but I guarantee I will not know the answers bc I don't know shit about fuck, I just followed the directions and reaped the rewards. It did take us 2 hours to set up bc I'm bad at following directions (and it's kind of complicated if you've been out of the software game for a while like I have), and you do have to be sososo brave about fucking around with your internet provider's configuration. So make sure you eat before you do it!! However it has been so worth it for me so far, given that now all my devices at home are running faster and I'm not seeing any ads while web browsing. We will see what complaints my family comes up with, but I love it so far.

Also!! if you've never heard of Raspberry Pi, which I realize are not all of my followers are lost in the Silicon Valley sauce so you might not have, here's is their website and their page for using Raspberry Pi at home.

I also use Blokada on my phone when I'm not home and have the Windscribe browser extension which includes 10GB of free VPN traffic and has uBlock integrated into it. (AdGuard does technically make things that do this but I like those better; ymmv).

I recently read one where the main character is banished from her village. Great, could be conflict there... except she still goes to the market and pays for things, seemingly without worry. Another one had a penniless MC welcomed with open arms wherever she went. A third had a stowaway character instantly forgiven by a supposed desperate crew, who - again! - seemed to have no problem putting food on the table.

And like, I get it. Not having to think about characters paying rent or worrying about when they can eat next is a relief these days. Everyone likes chosen family. But there is a huge lack of conflict to these stories that also results in a lack of character development. No one faces a hardship that is both the result of the environment around them and their own personal flaws. Bad choices don't have negative consequences characters have to learn from, because there are no consequences at all. Endings just kind of peter out or feel unearned. There is no real stress in the environment that feeds into stakes at all.

Think of the Murderbot Diaries, which I have bafflingly seen people refer to as cosy. Murderbot doesn't have to worry about feeding itself. Murderbot would rather watch its shows, but it repeatedly has to get involved in situations it doesn't want to instead. Murderbot would like to pretend it doesn't have to deal with icky emotions, but the driving core of the books are its attachment to its human friends (and ART). Murderbot makes choices that have positive and negative consequences, and has to learn how to deal with its own emotions and anxiety while also learning to accept that other people like it. While you might not be writing science fiction, it's a great study on how a character tells you one thing about themselves while their actions tell you another.

Another series I liked a lot is Daniel M Ford's Warden books, which take a lot of the dressing you see in cosy fantasies - generic DnD tropes, found family aspects, and romance - and injects it with mystery, plot, and stakes. Aelis de Lenti is rich, powerful, and connected, but she steps on toes, insults other characters on accident, and is locked out of the great path she believes she deserves. Throughout the first book, she learns and grows, and carries that forward into the next books.

“I’m gonna give ya a choice, kid,” the boy told him, hands still in his pockets. “Die now or die after givin’ me the information I want. What’s it gonna be?” “I like those two choices. Both very tempting offers,” Dazai replied unflinchingly, despite having been hit in the torso and knocked through several buildings. “Okay. Kill me now.” The boy in the biker jacket fell silent for a brief moment, then looked down at Dazai as if realizing he’d finally met a person of character.

That last line truly is the crux of the Soukoku partnership. They have such a pull towards one another because, prior to this, they had never truly interacted with someone that could be considered their equal. Dazai is bored. Everyone knows this. He whines about it to anyone that will listen.

“Give that back! I wanna die!” Dazai flailed his arms. “Life is so boring; I’d rather just die! But I want it to be quick and painless! Help me out, Mori!”

But something that gets overlooked is the fact that Chuuya is bored too.

Perhaps it's harder to notice because of how reactionary Chuuya normally is but his baseline emotional state tends to be rather dull. Especially throughout Fifteen and Stormbringer. Like Dazai, Chuuya is struggling deeply with a detachment to the world around him. Dazai has no reason to live and Chuuya has no clue what or who he is. It causes almost this haze around his mind that leaves him untethered from everyone else.

And yet Chuuya had no interest in money or power. They brought him no happiness because he was missing something far more important: a past.

Chuuya gains nothing from his power as he finds it isolating. Nobody is ever on his level which just adds to his level of detachment.

“Hey. You wanna know why I always fight without using my hands?” Chuuya asked as he approached Randou. Numerous pebbles vibrated by his feet and floated with each step. “I’ve never lost a fight in my life. I’ve never even been in real danger… But that’s no surprise. After all, I’m not even human. My identity is a safeguard, like you said. Nothing more than a little pattern etched on a colossal furnace of power. Hey… Do you know how that feels?” Chuuya stepped onto empty space, using the floating debris to walk in midair. He took another step forward with his other leg. And just like that, Chuuya slowly approached Randou as if he were ascending a staircase. “That’s why I kept my hands in my pockets. I figured I’d one day feel like I was about to lose, no longer enjoying the fight but just doing everything I could to protect myself… I thought maybe that way I’d start to like myself as a person—me, a little pattern without a body of my own.”

Like Dazai, this same detachment leads to Chuuya considering suicide. It's also why when Chuuya is at his mental worst and these suicidal thoughts start to emerge, they do so by stealing Dazai's voice and image.

Obviously, I’m gonna never gonna give in. I can keep this up forever. But for what purpose? “I told you, Chuuya.” He looked up in the direction of the sudden voice. It was a familiar voice, one that belonged to the person he hated most in this world. “Your birth itself was a mistake. We’re the same. Is there really a point to suffering through all that pain for a life that isn’t even real?” The voice was taunting him. “Shut up,” Chuuya spat, but even he knew he was talking to himself. He was most likely hearing things due to the drugs he was given. There was nobody there, but his mind was scattered, and the voice wouldn’t stop. “Screw you, Dazai.” “That’s the best comeback you could come up with?” Chuuya wanted nothing more than to slice off the ear the voice was whispering into. He could see Dazai’s wavering shadow by his side, and he wanted to gouge out his eyes. “That’s just proof that you at least somewhat believe what I’m saying. Because deep down inside, you’re the same as me.” “Shut up, shut up, shut up! I’m me! I’m not some piece of shit like you!”

Chuuya hates the fact he can understand Dazai. He views it as a reflection of his worst parts. His worst fear is becoming so detached that he ends up on the level of Dazai, someone who is apathetic towards almost everything. Dazai, on the other hand, views Chuuya as human BECAUSE of this.

“You sound like you’re certain he’s human.” “I am.” Dazai sighed, smiling. “There’s no way I could hate a man-made character string this much.”

Dazai gets enjoyment out of his dislike towards Chuuya as Dazai tends not to feel much intense emotion about ANYTHING. Even in the earlier chapters of Fifteen, it's shown that Dazai is bored and exasperated by Mori. Chuuya is the first truly interesting "thing" he'd been exposed to in who-knows-how-long. At the end of Fifteen, there is a conversation where Dazai explains he wants to live. I know that it's well beloved by the SKK fandom but I want to dissect the parts that are overlooked a bit more.

“Get away from me,” Chuuya spat. “You’re not gonna convince me to do anything.” “I know.” Dazai glanced at Randou. Then he whispered quietly so that Randou couldn’t hear: “Let’s beat him. Together.” Chuuya stared at Dazai in bewilderment, seemingly uncomprehending. “…Are you being serious?” “I have a plan, but I can’t do it alone. It needs both of us to work. Do you trust me?” Chuuya held Dazai’s gaze for a brief moment and demanded, “Tell me what made you change your mind. I thought you wanted to die.” “I just felt like it. Is that not a good enough reason?” Dazai smiled, perplexed.

Dazai is perplexed by Chuuya's demand for an explanation. Dazai, up until this point, has been reconstructing his view of Chuuya. He isn't used to be questioned about his intentions as he often has very surface-level ones (because he wants to or because it's directed at some goal). Most people would simply accept Dazai's answer of "feeling like it" as trying to unravel Dazai's thoughts and feelings seems like an impossible thing. Chuuya doesn't deny TRUSTING Dazai nor think he's lying - he's "bewildered" by the statement. Instead of backing down though, Chuuya wants to know WHY. More importantly though, Chuuya believes that Dazai's explanation will be enough for him to UNDERSTAND where Dazai is coming from.

“Working for the Mafia has piqued my interest, albeit slightly,” Dazai began. “In the outside world—the world of light—death is kept separate from everyday life. It’s swept under the rug. People find it unpleasant. But the Mafia’s world isn’t like that. Death is an extension of everyday life. It’s a part of life. And I tend to think that’s more accurate. Death isn’t the opposite of life but merely a function of it. We breathe, eat, fall in love, and die. And you can’t get the full picture of living without observing death up close.” Chuuya quietly stared at Dazai’s expression as if he were searching for something human deep inside of him. “So you’re saying…you want to live now?” “I wouldn’t go that far,” Dazai replied with a resigned smile. “Maybe I won’t find anything, but I figure I’ll give it a try. Once I successfully complete this mission, I’m going to join the Mafia. Gotta defeat him first, though. Besides…” “‘Besides’…?” “I got a new dog—you. And I still haven’t given you any commands,” Dazai said with a smirk. Chuuya snorted.

Chuuya, in this moment, still doesn't fully understand. He's trying to though. This is going to seem like a super random segue (just stay with me as I promise it's not) but also in the beginning of Fifteen is this description of Dazai. It's from Mori's perspective.

Dazai’s expression was unchanging, which made reading his thoughts nigh impossible. His face was as still as the frozen surface of a lake.

Why do I bring this up? Because Chuuya gets a similar moment about reading Dazai's face at the END of Fifteen. You would think that based on how Dazai's face/expressions/mannerisms are usually described in more serious moments, that Chuuya would get frustrated because he can't read Dazai or would once again be confused by Dazai's. The term "expressionless", "bored", "empty" are all the main synonyms used to get across how apathetic Dazai tends to be seen as. In this case however...

Chuuya glared at him, still breathing heavily. Despite his trembling legs and the sweat pouring down his face, he didn’t take his eyes off Dazai for a second. He quietly stared at Dazai as if all the answers were written on his face.

Chuuya has only known Dazai for a few days at this point. Yes, they had defeated Rimbaud together, but Dazai is his enemy in this moment - he's actively threatening the Sheep. Still, Chuuya is confident in his ability to read Dazai. The defeat of Rimbaud shifted something in their dynamic. Whatever happened in that fight created a connection between the two of them that led to an understanding on Chuuya's end that nobody else (excluding possibly Oda) has of Dazai. This might get me a lot of flack but I don't think Dazai comes to that same understanding of Chuuya until the end of Stormbringer. Yes, Dazai cares for Chuuya and is confident in his humanity but I don't think he GRASPS who Chuuya is as a person until their fight with Verlaine. Dazai is downright GIDDY when Guivre appears. It's the most interesting thing he's ever seen. It offers him both a new experience AND an opportunity for death...

Dazai looked up at the creature. “This is a singularity? Did this power really come from a skill?” He sounded downright ecstatic. “It looks like the end of the world.” Even his lips unconsciously curled with euphoria.

But when Dazai's about to give up, he chooses otherwise because of Chuuya. I won't cite the infamous "ANYTHING BUT THAT" scene with Mori as everyone is already well aware of it but instead a later moment...

“What do you want to do, then? Grow big, too, and have a fistfight with it?” Dazai’s icy gaze met Chuuya’s. “It’s hopeless. Isn’t it obvious just looking at that thing? A singularity’s like a loophole in the rules. That monster is a manifestation of something that shouldn’t exist in this world. Humans don’t stand a chance against it. There’s nothing we can do.” “You’re wrong about that,” Chuuya said, sternly holding Dazai’s gaze for several seconds. He then let go of Dazai and stated firmly: “There is something we can do about it. I’m sure of it.” Dazai listlessly dropped to the ground in a seated position. “Ha-ha-ha. This is getting interesting. And what are you basing that on?”

Dazai is surprised by Chuuya once again and is willing to shift gears because of it. He's actually relatively "comforting" of Chuuya in this scene and shows concern for him up until Chuuya activates corruption. When Chuuya DOES, it's when we get this line...

“Incredible,” a dumbfounded Dazai muttered as he watched from the top of the gas tank. “So this is the power of Arahabaki.”

Dazai does the one thing Chuuya needs him not to do - consider him as a separate being to his own power. But then...

“So that’s Arahabaki’s—that’s Chuuya’s true form,” Dazai muttered feverishly as he stared up from the surface.

He ends up correcting himself after a few more moments. Dazai really only got it in that moment, I think. Ironic considering this is the same scene that discusses the loneliness of Verlaine and Chuuya. It shifts the narrative of Chuuya being completely detached to having formed relationships and friendships. It calls out Verlaine for having wanted the same things. It also reinforces the fact that Chuuya STILL does have a connection with someone that he can rely on.

This second sun that lit up the sky eventually vanished, quietly and delicately. After limply floating in the air for a few seconds, the wings on Chuuya’s back vanished, and he slowly began to fall. Until Dazai caught him.

MaoMao and Jinshi are both intelligent in a lot of ways, including deductive reasoning. So one might expect their repeated misunderstandings or continued blindness toward certain revelations to feel contrived. But they never do, in part because of how brilliantly their characterization was established.

From the first installment, Maomao ponders how "knowing too much" could get her into trouble.

At first her main concern is her own literacy. The ability to read is not a skill most young women of her station possess, and would doubtlessly draw attention. Attention threatens her ability to lay low and wait out her service contract. So she keeps this skill hidden.

And indeed, her concerns are validated by the narrative, because she catches the attention of Jinshi and Gyokuyou—two of the highest authority figures of the rear palace—immediately upon employing her literacy in her effort to warn the concubines of the poisonous effects of the makeup.

This instantly alters the course of her life, a consequence that at first seems positive; after all, personal attendant to a concubine is certainly several steps above the average palace launderess. But these elevated steps bring more attention onto her, and it isn't long at all before the emperor himself is ordering her to perform medical miracles.

Knowledge is power. And as Maomao explains to Jinshi: it's not always about what someone will do with power; it's about what they can do.

So Maomao uses the powerlessness of her station as a shield, and hides behind it by pretending not to know things.

And the way she does this is interesting, in part because she is so good at deduction. Often it comes down to her simply choosing not to pursue a line of thinking, forcefully redirecting her attention elsewhere the moment she realizes that certain lines may connect to form a bigger picture than someone of her station should see.

Maomao is an apothecary. Effectively, throughout the story, she's an herbalist, pharmacist, chemist, physician, dietician, and forensic detective.

At the same time, her primary survival mechanism is avoidance. And this is established very early in her characterization, even before her actual titular passion.

When Maomao, solver of mysterious deaths, worker of medical miracles, foiler of assassination plots, repeatedly fails to connect the increasingly-obvious dots pointing to Jinshi's true identity, it doesn't feel contrived at all; because by the time those dots begin to come to light, the story has already established that it's firmly in-character for Maomao to simply refuse to pick up the pencil if she already knows what picture those dots will form. As long as she doesn't draw those connections herself, she can remain safe in denial.

Anyway I was bitching about how hard it is to come up with feasible planets in Star Wars because sometimes you need a new planet from scratch and sometimes you need to know more about a planet than the 'has jungles, is probably a moon technically' than Wookieepedia will give you, and they're like 'oh yeah I can do something about that'.

So they've written (in Matlab but they swear it will run as a .exe as well and I may be conscripted to embed it as a web tool at some point) a star system generator.

You input what you know about the planet (ecosystem, population, sun colour, does it have liquid water, does it have a moon or moons, is it a moon or moons, temperature averages, atmosphere, you get me) and it will give you the... everything else about the star system, in obedience to real-universe physics. And if you input nothing you get a randomly generated star system.

And I’m like oh I know people who will be into this with a vengeance, and they're not on Tumblr, so this is me seeing who exactly would be keen on, and I cannot stress this enough, a real-physics comprehensive star system generator.

everybody leaves + the only one who came back

...was thinking about how dazai was there for All Of That in chuuya's life and he still left him too. ahaha.

and here he made his first fatal error. his moment of hubristic sex pesting. because of course i know where the term blow job comes from, i love learning about sex and the history of sexual terms! i know so much about oral sex that i could write a book on it!

Some Actual Plots include:

Dogsbody - The star Sirius is accused of murder and sentenced to exile on Earth in the body of a dog until he finds a magical item called a Zoi. He's adopted by a young Irish girl living with her abusive and neglectful English relatives. He has to balance his desire to find the Zoi with needing to be a Good Dog for the girl who takes care of him. Also the Wild Hunt is there. Hexwood - A girl finds a magical wood behind her house where she meets a wizard who thinks he's a convict of the intergalactic government, a boy created by the man to destroy said government, and a robot found in a junk heap. The magic wood is actually an alternate reality being generated by an AI who has a grudge to settle with the head of said government. The book is about abuse, PTSD, and trauma. The Dark Lord of Derkholm - Magical world is being destroyed by a company using it as an isekai amusement park for people from another dimension. Bio-wizard is appointed Dark Lord for the year, and he and his family (four of whom are bioengineered griffins) have to find a way to survive the season while everything is going wrong. Deep Secret - Interdimensional detective/diplomat/wizard needs to find a replacement for his deceased mentor. He does so at a fantasy convention, while trying to keep an interdimensional empire from collapsing into civil war after the emperor is assassinated along with all of his heirs.

Howl's Flying Castle Cross Section (or, Califer's Relatives Pay a Visit) || [prints]

The thought experiment goes like this. A large group of people (the whole world or a whole country or just a large and diverse group) each individually must press one of two buttons, a red button and a blue button. On their own, both buttons do nothing. However, if more than 50% of people press the red button, everyone who pressed the blue button will die. If more than 50% of people press the blue button nothing happens.

Is the button you would press different from the one you think is correct? Is there an ethical imperative to press one over the other? Which button should people press? I’ll discuss TikTok’s reaction below the cut