Dreaming of the Chamber

Ochako gives a certain manga writer an interview about Himiko Toga's final moments, confirming her tragic demise.

Himiko Toga from My Hero Academia

It was her responsibility as a mother to ensure that Ada didn't turn out like her father;

Fundamentally, the thing that was wrong with Lord Byron is that he was a poet; and

The opposite of poetry is math.

But Pokopia fully does not do that. The world is lonely without humans and lesser for humanity's absence. So much of the game is about how Pokemon miss humans and are struggling to make sense of a world without us, how the ecosystem is just as hurt by our absence as any other species, and how the things we left behind, even in ruins and burned shells, are often beautiful and strange and helpful to the Pokemon who find them.

Pokemon have always been this allegory for the natural world- back to the original idea of the games inspired by children who caught bugs and kept ant farms- and thus the relationship between Pokemon and humans becomes this allegory for the relationship between nature and humans. And Pokopia looks you dead in the eye and says "the world would be poorer without humans, and if we all vanished tomorrow the echoes of who we are and the things we did would still ring out for eons uncountable. We would be missed and mourned and searched for and the wound of our absence would be deeply felt on this earth for the rest of its turning. The actions of a few greedy short sighted humans will never change that."

Then, around the end of last year, I began listening to audiobooks on sleep headphones, and it is more effective than ANY DRUG. The trick, I learned, is not to listen to new books (because then I get involved and can't go to sleep) or very exciting favorites (ditto). Instead, it has to be relatively sedate favorites I've read so much I almost know passages by heart (THE SHELL SEEKERS, LITTLE WOMEN), or audio courses on topics that I am interested in but either (a) know very well already or (b) am not so fascinated by that I'll wind up staying awake to hear more. The Great Courses on physics, chemistry and ancient civilizations tend to work beautifully. This is especially effective because my biggest issue wasn't taking a long time to fall asleep (though this was a thing), but waking up in the night and then thinking/fretting about ALL THE THINGS for hours on end. Now I wake up, hear somebody talking about nuclear particles or the Olmecs, and engage with that very minimally before I drop off again.

a little girl came up to me when I was working on my mural & she said “did you color this?” and I said “yeah!” and she was like “wooow… I’ve never see a girl color before”

I don’t think that’s actually what she meant but I feel like a superhero. nevertheless she persisted. women in male-dominated fields (coloring)

Slug Steppers 🐾