Daily OpusEverything I write is freely rebloggable. Just keep the source and tell people about my books :D [Until I decide otherwise, my pronouns are Ze/Hir/Hirself. As in "Ze went to the shops to get hir medication hirself". Thank you for the respect.]
You’re the most recognised and internationally praised superhero, but you don’t fight any crime. Instead, you use your powers over stone and metal to repair the damage caused by the catastrophic fights other heroes get into.
They didn’t call you a superhero when you started. You didn’t claim to be one, either.
You didn’t have a costume or a sponsor or training or anything like that. You were just a kid who had just seen your entire world knocked down. So, in a moment of childish determination and belief, you thought you could fix it all.
The first emergence of your powers wasn’t a huge triumphal moment. Moving stone and earth and steel doesn’t matter if you don’t know anything about how to stack things up so they don’t fall back over again.
Your first attempts crashed right back down again. That was your first lesson.
—
Even when you got good at what you did, they didn’t call you a superhero.
You still didn’t have a costume, but you’d gotten your hands on every architectural diagram you could and done plenty of practice. Then you started to show up to the aftermath of battles and put them quietly together again.
But it still wasn’t right. You couldn’t do much if you didn’t have the diagrams for the buildings demolished–if the city planners didn’t let you have them.
So you stitched together a costume, something bright and colorful that would grab the attention of the cameras on the scene afterward as you tried to work.
“Look! Someone’s putting those houses back together!”
The effect was instantaneous. The moment you’d grabbed public attention, there were requests for interviews, think pieces–each giving you a platform to ask for the help you needed.
This was your second lesson.
–
You didn’t call yourself a superhero, or come up with the name yourself. You were never really good about all of those things. But once the attention was on you, you got offers from managers and sponsors. One, a blonde with perfect hair who introduced herself as “just Sandy”
“I don’t have any money.”
“That’s alright,” she said, her grin showing spectacularly white teeth. “All I need is for you to take on some gigs and give me a cut.”
Sandy set you up. She got you the costume people would know you for, gave you the name, managed all of the PR and set up interviews. Your fame skyrocketed, and soon you were seeing yourself on billboards.
Soon you had access to hundreds of city plans and blueprints. After enough attacks happened, you learned them well enough to hardly need to reference them. After a few years, you could rebuild a tower in a matter of minutes, and cities in a matter of days.
Your powers evolved as your understanding did. Soon, you could read the entire layout of a building just from touching. Then, just from touching the ruins. You no longer need blueprints, then–just your own hands on the metal.
The gigs were simple, too–just fixing up hero bases after they’d gotten wrecked in attacks. Feel good work that paid well.
With the help of many people, you do more. That’s the third lesson.
—
The problems started with the homeless thing.
You were in between projects and itching to use your skills more. Creating homes for the homeless seemed like the perfect, feel good project to flex on.
It was, for the first few weeks. Then came the backlash. City dwellers crying foul, saying they hadn’t agreed to an enormous den of undesirables in their backyards. There were protests, white suburban moms holding up signs about drug dealers and rapists and criminals.
It wasn’t your choice in the end. Eventually the city mandated that you deconstruct your shelter, or they would do it the hard way.
Regretfully, you took it down. You did not look in the eyes of the people that had sheltered there as they had to go on their way.
It was the same story in every area you tried to build shelters in afterwards.
—
“Can we just buy the land to build them houses?” you asked Sandy.
She clicked her perfect teeth. “Sorry, there are laws against building new things in the city. You need mayoral approval to start a new construction project.”
“Why?”
“Well, there are already too many empty houses,” she said matter of factly.
You stared. “What? Then let’s just buy those and put people in them!”
“You don’t have that much money,” she pointed out. “Not when you’ve been giving it away every year. Also, it wouldn’t do as much good as you think. Just think of the effect on the market–”
This is not why you fired Sandy. But it was the first time you thought of it.
—
Opinion started to turn against you when you began using your interviews and platform to talk about this problem, to demand permission to build or otherwise help. Exasperation turned to hostility when you started to reshape the landscape to be softer to the unhoused, anyway–when you created caves in parks where people could easily shelter, or made every bench large and soft so that anyone could have a place to sleep.
Laws and ordinances passed, all regulating the amount of alterations one was allowed to make to public property. About how many changes you were allowed to make as you were reconstructing a city. The fines for altering things started to heap up.
Firing Sandy didn’t help. Your good reputation was always as much her work as yours, but after what she said about—you couldn’t.
You couldn’t.
You learned not to read the scathing opinion pieces on you. That was the hardest lesson yet.
—
Of course, shit really hit the fan when you were contracted to rebuild another base.
It was a simple enough decision for you. You found out they had been building drones and firing them on civilians. That at this base Techno has been building surveillance technology that would be able to monitor every single person in the country at every moment, and be able to fire upon them with impunity the moment suspicious activity was detected.
It made you rethink every base you had built in the past.
“No,” you told them.
“You already signed your contract–”
Instead of dignifying that with an answer, you transmuted the entire area into the rockiest, most impossible terrain you could. Every trick you had learned to make land easier to build on–you reversed it, turning what had once been the base into a precarious canyon of jagged, diamond-hard steel, nearly impossible to remove or build on.
“I said no.”
—
Stopping the construction of the stadium was the next kicker.
“You’re insane!” said the heroes who came to remove you.
“They evicted a hundred families for this!” you spat. “Those were people’s homes. It’s disgusting that it’s allowed for the government to do that–much less to do it for-for a stadium? For entertainment?”
And so you stood there for the next 48 hours, deconstructing every single thing they tried to put on their ill-gotten land.
Then, they sent the heroes to stop you. You were never the best at fighting, so they knocked you out quickly.
—
They don’t call you a superhero now. Behind bars, you glance over every thinkpiece and profile about the world’s most beloved hero fell. You read speculation about evil, greed, madness. All things you’ve heard about “villains” who came before you.
It makes you wonder about those people. If maybe you had misjudged them, too.
But that’s alright, you realize after the sting of it fades away. That was the second lesson, after all–more than anything, you need people to be talking. And for all the bitterness in these words, you realize grimly that people will never stop talking.
Once you’ve thought things through, you decide you’re ready. The steel of your cell melts away. After all, there is no prison that can contain you. No earth or stone or metal can withstand your will.
Your legacy as the world’s greatest supervillain begins with a left turn down the hallway, right to where the other villains are kept.
Okay, remember a couple months back when I asked y’all how you mentally categorized dinosaurs? Well, the results of all the fantastic feedback you gave me have come to fruition, and I wanted to share the results.
I asked the question because my day job is making museum grade replica dinosaur (and other assorted critters) fossils. I have also officially taken over all the social media for the division that focuses on teeth, claw, and miniature skull replicas for individual purchase, and I’ve been rebuilding the website as part of that. One of the big things we wanted to address with the website was the category system for our store. We wanted it to be easy to understand not just for professional paleontologists, but for hobbyists as well, which was where your feedback came into play. We came to two conclusions from that feedback:
1. People primarily categorize dinosaurs visually without knowing their official names, or if they do know their names they only know their names in association with a visual of the whole dinosaur. If they just hear the name on its own they may not fully know what dinosaur is being talked about.
2. People also heavily categorize dinosaurs based on broad famous categories such as carnivore/herbivore, horned, armored, etc. as well as having a few major favorites they always recognize like T. rex.
So! We decided to do two things. Firstly, each product we offer now features a silhouette of the dinosaur it belonged to, like so:
Here’s all the silhouettes together, just because I spent the last two months on them and I want to show them off:
These silhouettes should hopefully help people understand what they’re looking at and who the fossil belonged to much better than they previously could with just an image of the fossil.
The second thing was redoing the overall category system to hit the major categories people recognize, rather than relying on more scientific names as the previous category system did. Here’s that new category system:
The site should be much more user friendly now, and much easier to navigate so you can find all the cool dino goodies you could ever want! Thank you so much to every person who gave me feedback on that post. There’s a link to our site at the bottom of this post, and if you want to keep up with new products we’re developing and other stuff we’re up to be sure to join our newsletter! The signup is at the bottom of the website.
Also! As part of this new website we are, as of 10/13/2020, officially offering international shipping!
redraw of this is finally done! the starblaster’s fatal flaw: only one bathroom
[ID: an image of the IPRE crew in a bathroom together. lucretia is a black woman with a bonnet on and a toothbrush in her mouth leaning down next to merle to help him with a book that reads Sudoku 4 Dummies. merle is a dwarf with a light complexion holding a towel around himself with his hair up in a bun and looking puzzled at the book. next to them on the right is barry, a man with a light complexion sitting on the closed toilet with a mirror in hand shaving his face. he is wearing acid wash denim jeans and no shirt. above him, davenport stands on the counter, reading a bunch of papers/ blueprints and brushing his teeth with his tail holding the toothbrush. he is a gnome with a fair complexion and red hair wearing shorts that say Cap’n on the butt. to his left in the background, lup is leaning over the counter blow drying her hair, the droplets flying back and hitting taako who shields his face. lup is an elf with a medium complexion, freckles, and sandy blonde hair. taako, another elf with a medium complexion has dark brown cropped hair, freckles, and is holding a towel blindly out to magnus who is exiting the shower. magnus is a man with a lighter complexion, freckles, and dark hair. he is squinting as he steps out into the steamed up bathroom reaching for his towel. End ID]
Just because one of your chicken eggs hatched a fire breathing dragon people think you’re evil. But you’re still just a regular farmer trying to make a living while dealing with an overprotective dragon, heroes that want to kill you and fanatics who want to worship you as the new Demon Lord.
The thing you need to know about all of this, the thing that
got me into all this trouble in the first place, is that chickens will sit on anything when they get broody enough.
Anything. Duck eggs, goose eggs, turkey eggs, lizard eggs, egg shaped rocks,
anything. Chickens aren’t smart. If it looks vaguely like an egg, they’ll plant
their feathery arses on it and wait.
I noticed that there was a bigger egg under one of the broody
chickens, when I checked. Of course I noticed, it was twice the size of the
others. But I have geese. I figured it was a goose egg she’d found and stolen. It
was about the right size, and I didn’t take it out to check the colour because
that particular chicken gets very protective of her eggs. I’ve already got a
scar on one hand from trying to get eggs away from her. I didn’t want a matched
set.
That was a decision I regretted the moment I went out to
feed the chickens and found a little blue-and-silver dragonet’s head poking out
from under a very confused-looking chicken. The poor thing kept shifting around
and looking under herself in a bewildered way, like she didn’t know what to do
next. This particular chicken is a good mother, and she’s raised clutches of
ducks and geese without any trouble – she’s even resigned to some of her
children swimming – but this was too much. She didn’t object when I carefully
reached in and fished out the little dragon.
It was so tiny, then. It fitted in my hand, with its little
head peeking out one side and its tail looping around my wrist. Cute, too, with
its big eyes and little snout turned up towards me.
That was when I made my second mistake. I decided to feed it
before releasing it. Dragons are innately wild creatures, everyone knows that.
They can’t be tamed. People have tried. The eggs are abandoned as soon as they
are laid, and the dragonets hatch able to hunt, so they don’t even bond with
their mothers. So just feeding it a little shouldn’t have been a big deal. It
should have gobbled the meat and fled as soon as I loosened my grip on it and
it saw the open sky.
It didn’t. As soon as I’d fed it, it fluttered up to a sunny
window ledge and went to sleep. I went about my work, figuring that it’d leave
in its own time.
By noon, it was sitting on my boot, squeaking pathetically. I
wondered if maybe it was confused by the farmyard – they usually hatch in
mountains, if the stories are right – so I took it back to the farmhouse with
me and fed it again when I ate, then took some time away from the fences I
should have been mending to walk it up to the hills. I found it some nice
rocks, with plenty of lizards and beetles and suitable prey for something that
size. It pounced on a beetle almost as soon as I put it down, and when I left
it was crunching happily.
I hadn’t walked a quarter of the way back before something
hit the back of my boot. The little dragon was holding on with all four claws,
and when I looked down it squeaked pathetically. If possible, its eyes got even
rounder.
Listen, you don’t make it as a farmer if you just let orphaned
baby animals die. We hand-raise calves and lambs and ponies, set chickens to
sit on abandoned eggs, or put them under the kitchen stove or by a fireplace.
You don’t make a success of farming if you don’t value every animal. A good
shepherd will spend all night looking for one lost sheep. So despite what was
said later, it wasn’t just sentiment that made me sigh and pick up the little
thing and carry it back to the farm. I
am a good farmer. I don’t let orphaned babies die just because they’re a little
work.
He finished his book almost an hour ago, yet he didn’t put out the candle flame illuminating his desk.
He didn’t know exactly why, maybe he thought the way the little flame flickered was pleasant, perhaps he enjoyed the way the thin trail of smoke danced above it.
Perhaps he was distracting himself from going back to sleep, the latest nightmare still fresh in his mind. He could almost feel the cold water invading his lungs.
So he distracts himself with the little flame.
“For how long, I wonder, can I keep this flame alight?”
He stayed awake all night, observing the little flame, feeding it small scraps of paper when it flickered too weak, gently patting it down when it consumed it’s candle too fast.
Exhaustion was creeping on him, he could barely keep his eyes open anymore, his common sense telling him he should put the little flame out before he fell asleep on top of it.
He ignored this advise.
Instead, he so carefully moved the little flame from it’s almost completely melted candle to a new, unused one.
Hopefully big enough to last quite a few hours.
Almost fearfully, he collapsed in bed, waiting for the horrible and familiar feeling of the icy waters encasing him on his sleep.
Instead, he dreamt of warmth.
—
Another day went by, then another, then a week, then two.
He learned how long each type of candle lasted, what sort of fuel feed the little flame the best.
It was now a bit of a pet project, to see how long he could make it last.
He remembers fondly how the little flame once encased the entire candle at once, flickering almost playfully.
Or how it hissed almost in annoyance, when he had to flicker it with water dropets to get it to a manageable size again.
He wasn’t sure when the pet project became just a pet.
Perhaps it was when he caught himself thinking up names for the little flame.
Perhaps it was when he decided on Orion.
In the following months not once did he dreamt of all encasing cold nor the impenetrable darkness of the depths.
He dreamt of warmth and light.
—
It was a holiday night, the kind that had most houses empty as entire families flocked together.
He was alone with Orion when the burglars broke in.
They weren’t expecting witnesses, just an easy job.
Though a single terrified man wasn’t too hard of a job.
They bought him down easily, and violently, demanding riches he didn’t have.
Orion gave a fearful flicker with each hit, it shook with each threat.
But when the bored and disappointed burglars took out the weapon, Orion roared.
The candle was ablaze in one second, the desk in two, and the burglars in three.
The little flame, now a massive, enraged inferno, embraced him fully and protectively.
He felt as much heat, as one would fill drinking hot chocolate in a cold winter night, with the company of a fully stocked fireplace and a warm blanket.
Orion’s body grew and grew, soon encasing the entire house, the flames growing so high and wide, and flickering so violently, they almost looked like flapping wings.
Later they will find nothing but an empty, charred plot of land, and blackened trails following the direction of the wind.
He left with Orion that night, never to feel cold again.
—
There’s the common misbelief that dragons hatch from eggs, when in reality, the infant form of a dragon is so frail, so small, that a misplaced breath might be enough to extinguish them.
But if one were to care for them long enough, love them long enough, the dragon will grow big and powerful, and return the favor.
My kink is cooking in front of my friends who know which knife is made for what and forcing them to watch me use the wrong one for the wrong thing
Use a cheese grater for tomatoes.
You’ll burn in hell for this.
*panting outrageously: I GOT HERE AS FAST AS I COULD
Oh my god, my friend who used to rent a room from me would routinely use a small ass paring knife to chop entire very large onions instead of a chef’s or santoku despite the fact that my kitchen is well stocked with many varieties of knives. In fact, he’d use the same tiny paring knife to cut everything when he would cook; be it veggies, or meat, or whatever. He didn’t want to dirty too many knives…? It drove me fucking nuts because he almost cut himself quite a few times trying to chop things that were too large for such a small blade. Nothing I said would change his mind. Graaahhhhh….
see the thing is i do the opposite. Do I own a gorgeous little set with a Santoku, utility, and paring knife? yep.
caN I PEEL POTATOES AND POTENTIALLY OPERATE WITH A CHINESE CLEAVER???
you’re gonna see me try
i just bring a fucking machete to the kitchen. none of this fancy cutlery stuff. i shall engage my food in ruthless combat
i need you to roll for initiative
ah fuck i rolled a 1
the celery gets to go first and just fuckin decks you
ok so the first step is to write the Cuisine and Cutlery: Player’s Handbook. i can help, here’s the cover art, just gotta get the title calligraphied on there
i think the rules should be pretty easy, it’s just knife facts and tables of fruits
this is the dumbest goddamn thing ive ever spent an hour on holy fucking shit i was laughing at it the whole fucking time
Reblogging for the ugly as shit kitchen safe shoes. Like, bar none, ugliest shoes I’ve ever worn.
Role swap au where Zuko was the Avatar who got frozen for a hundred years, so when he’s rescued from the ice instead of a goofy twelve year old Katara catches this mysterious teenager with long hair and a cool scar and a fucking DRAGON
Katara: BOY???? HOT BOY?????? HOT TEENAGE BOY?????????
Zuko: *speaks*
Katara: nevermind I hate him
How does Aang factor into this? I ask because the more I think about it the more I want him to somehow be trying to capture the Avatar.
Aang is 112 years old, decided he was going to be Zuko’s airbending teacher, and refuses to take no for an answer
Aang: Aw, the new Avatar doesn’t want me. Aang: *gets out a weighted net* Time for Plan B then.
JDJSHJABDBFJSH
Look, you know how you keep a net from falling on you? YOU AIRBEND IT, SUCKA. Air comes right after fire in the cycle so it’s not like the guy has any other options. Do you want a flaming net falling on you? No? Then learn to airbend. Or this tiny old man will cart you away like a trussed turkey and lecture you about the power of laughter, going with the flow, opening your chakras, and other hippie shit.
Sokka, slouching against a fence, not moving: Oh nooooooo, that creepy old man stole the Avataaaaaaaaaar. Sokka, sitting down on the ground: We should dooooo something. Sokka, pulling out his lunch: Otherwise he might actually learn something. That would be teeeerrible. Katara, indignant rage coursing through her body: Sokka!!!!!!!! We have to go look for him!!!! Sokka: Might! Actually! Learn! Something! Katara! Katara: *wavers* Katara, also sitting down: We have to go look for him…. *gets out her own sandwich* But, maybe after lunch.
I love that this transforms Aang’s role in the full Team Avatar familial situation from the baby of the family to the Grandpa with weird hobbies
My brain, immediately after the “Aang won’t take no for an answer” post:
Aang: I’m gonna ride him! *jumps on Zuko’s shoulders*
Actually, I thought a bit more about this: If Aang is “grandpa figure who won’t fucking stop teaching Zuko to be a better and more spiritually fulfilled person,” then what is Iroh doing?
And then it hit me.
Iroh: *sitting in a teahouse at a paisho table* Iroh, deadpan: I must capture the last airbender. Iroh: It is the only way to make sure the powe rof the Avatar won’t be turned on the Fire Nation. Iroh: Only then will I be redeemed in the eyes of the Fire Lord for my failure at Ba Sing Se. Iroh: … Iroh: Anyway, it’s your turn.
About half of the B plots are just Iroh finding new ways to feign incompetence and bad luck so that his political watchdog can’t prove that he’s letting Aang - and by extension Zuko - get away.
