The White

Nothing is a habit! It's all deliberate choices and it's EXHAUSTING

It's like the difference between automatic breathing and conscious breathing. Imagine if automatic breathing didn't work for you and if you didn't decide to breath you would just run out of air. So you have to mentally manage your breathing on top of your normal functioning.

Now make that EVERYTHING. So no I'm not going to brush my teeth without thinking about it or do the exercise program automatically or make my bed or whatever. If I'm not thinking I'm not doing anything! I'm staring at a wall! And at the end of the day I'm almost always at this point where I have no mental spoons left and that means task queue is empty. My brain is tired and I'm powering down! I'm not even "going to bed" with all of the sub-steps that this entails like changing into pajamas and brushing my teeth, I'm just done for the day no more tasks the end.

So that stuff you can do as a habit is just another task on my to-do list requiring mental energy. Even resting is a task with its own requirements! And it leads to the constant feeling that I don't have enough time to do all the things I need to do, even when none of those things take very much time. It's just the task queue is so long! That's too many things! I can't add any more things, I don't have time! And managing the Task Queue is it's own task!

I'm Laura, also laurasauras, also Laura J Fitzwilson. I'm queer, disabled and wouldn't want to be anyone else.

I've written like 2 million words of fanfic and my debut novel, The Fool, comes out on the 12th of July, 2025. You can preorder the ebook on Amazon and Kobo, and it'll be available from other places and in paperback on release day. (You can add it to your TBR on Goodreads and Storygraph now too!)

The Fool is a low spice fantasy romance. It's about Leo, who is unwillingly made king of the smallest country on fantasy!Australia after the murders of his parents and brother. There’s politics, sword and magic fights, and queer romance—and of course a castle fool dedicated to keeping Leo humble.

It's about living up to expectations, daddy issues and the importance of love, both familial and romantic. There's hidden identities, enemies to lovers, forbidden romance--and those are just between the main pairing of the king and the fool!

Don't date thirty-year-olds until you are at least 25.

Having a glass of water for every glass of alcohol will give you a 50% reduction in hangover viciousness.

Bad people will use your willingness to be quiet as a weapon against you. If someone's being awful to you and trusting you'll be quiet to keep from making waves, surprise them.

There is no physical object in the world that is worth as much as your honor.

Honor is not the same as dignity. Retaining one sometimes means leaving the other aside.

Don't have any sex you don't want to have; have as much as you want of the sex that you do, whether that's a lot, a little, or none at all. Nothing you can do to your own body is immoral, unless you're doing it as an act of self-punishment.

Food is morally neutral. You do not have to earn the right to eat calories. Fat and sugar keep your brain from eating itself.

Learning to sit still and breathe--in, in, in, hold, hold, hold, out, out, out, out, out, out--can give you five feet of clear space around yourself in a maelstrom.

Find out how to make three good meals: A comfort meal you can make for just yourself relatively easily, a fancy meal you can use to wow a date, and a meal you can feed a bunch of people. All the other cooking can come later, but you can build a community on those three meals.

Your September 2nd PARPdate: "Remember that time on TDI where they called god to make it rain? That happened" Edition.

News this month is sorta slow- those of you In The Know already know this, but Hex is being forced to move again. This hasn't impacted Dev TOO much, honestly, and I'm gonna break down WHY in this wonderful little post!

Ok so if you remember the August update, you likely recall us showing off our shiny new mod features and how we can now play funny roleplay police state in order to nail rulebreakers and bandodgers.

If you're also a huge Bubblehead (which is what you're called), you're also likely familiar with this bastard:

(Image description: The red miles, basically. Its a message failed message repeated like ninety times in a row in red font. Thanks to Alienoid from the server for posting this screenshot for me to steal!)

This is because, somehow, these new mod features almost completely broke Dreambubble in ways that make no sense (the new features use Redis, but for some reason their introduction is making PostGres, a completely different system, go absolutely haywire)

So, Hex decided to move forward with their pet project to rewrite Dreambubble. Normally, this would mean a development delay on Parp2 and I'd feel pretty bad about laying this on yalls feet after two years of parplessness.

But hey wait isn't this literally just how they made parp last time.

The answer is yes! The previous Msparp version was built using what is now Dreambubble as a skeleton, evolving on itself into the rickety but lovable RP site we knew before she tragically passed away last February after choking to death on fresh air. As such, Dev is actually going pretty good! Hex has been COOKING through the bones for Dreambubble 2, getting a ton of barebones stuff working right off the bat:

(Image description: A barebones but functional chat window using Felt theme; complete with system connection messages, text preview, and quirking)

Along with our first new feature preview in a while: PUSH NOTIFICATIONS!

(Image description: A felt-theme settings menu showing the ability to turn on and off push notifications, as well as a browser popup in the bottom corner showing that it's been activated)

These are also working on Android! What this does is it pings you when the chat you're in gets a new message, operating on a system level instead of a site level so you don't even need to have the tab, or the browser, open to keep up with your chats! This is gonna be especially useful for mobile users, since this means they can navigate away and use their phone for other things, and their phone'll just ping them when their partners' next message comes through. (These are gonna be off by default, btw. You'll have to turn them on yourself on a per-chat basis in the final release)

It should also be noted that we've Snagged Ourselves A UI Guy recently from the userbase, so we've got a dedicated Make It Look Good person for when things get closer to launch!

That's all for this update, though. Absolutely thrilled to be showing off some progress after the restart. Hopefully we'll have even more to show off next month!

Which can be an extremely effective device within narration!

They can work very well for characters whose names the narrator doesn't know yet (especially to differentiate between two or more). How specific the epithet is can signal to the reader how important the character is going to be later on, and whether they should dedicate bandwidth to remembering them for later ("the bearded man" is much less likely to show up again than "the man with the angel tattoo")

They can indicate when characters stop being as an individual and instead embody their Role, like a detective choosing to think of their lover simply as The Thief when arresting them, or a royal character being referred to as The Queen when she's acting on behalf of the state

They can reveal the narrator's biases by repeatedly drawing attention to a particular quality that singles them out in the narrator's mind