I have returned with a creatrue to share with you guys! :D
They don't have a name yet lol. Suggestion are greatly appreciated because I can't think of anything for the life of me T-T.
A little close up of thier face!
I don't have a lot lore wise yet but, here's what I do have in no particular order.
They/Them, their pretty calm and love to crack jokes, they have a partner (more on them later if I don't forget lol), and they have a rather noticeable southern accent.
That's all for now gonna attempt to draw their partner next.
The Witch of Stolen Tomorrows had begun to notice an odd trend amongst her petitioners.
The latest was a farmer. He had braved the journey through the Testing Woods and arrived with his convictions mostly intact. He now sat on a tree stump by the Witch’s thornbush cottage, drinking a cup of bitter tea, and asking for a fairly standard boon.
"Oh yes," said the Witch, "I can make you a spell for a bountiful harvest, but what will you give me in return?"
The farmer gulped. "My firstborn child?"
"By the dick-shattered sky.” The Witch exclaimed. “What?"
"Oh. You don't take firstborn children?"
"I am a witch of ancient promises, timeless dreams, and fresh blood.” The Witch announced. “Of course I take firstborn children. It's just a bit weird that it was your first offer."
"I'm sorry, mistress. I don't know how this works. Was I supposed to start smaller and work my way up to the firstborn? I’ve always been hopeless at haggling." The man seemed on the verge of tears. "My wife passed a few years ago. She used to do all the business at market."
"If your wife passed a few years ago, how exactly do you plan to offer me your firstborn?" The witch swirled her tea and the steam made foul omens in the air. "I mean, sure, you don't have to be married to have kids, but it does usually help if you're not obviously still in mourning."
"Oh, my little Jackie is already born. They're five. My firstborn and, well, my only-born."
"Okay. If the kid has already been born, you don't have to say firstborn. You can just say 'my child, whose name is...' What's the kid's name again?"
“Jackie.”
“Well, you’ve gone and put Jackie in a bit of a precarious spot. You see, now that you’ve offered the child, the fatespring will hate it if I accept a lesser deal. So either I have to talk you into a bargain that’s technically worse for you, or little Jackie comes to live with me. Now, I could-”
“That’s fine mistress. I accept the bargain.” The man sniffled and wiped his tears. He looked weirdly relieved. “So, do I bring Jackie here to you, or will you come to the farm to collect? Or is it one of those ‘leave them in a clearing at the full moon’ kind of-”
“My guy. What is up? What is your deal, exactly? I’ve had, like, five different firstborn deals this week. That’s weird, right? You get that? That’s normally the worst case scenario for y’all. But at least they hadn’t had the kids yet, so they could still fool themselves that they could wriggle out of the compact somehow. And they didn’t lead with ‘oh yeah, take my first child, that’s a strong opening bargaining position!” The canopy around them began to darken and the trees began to grow thorns. “And if there’s one thing that really gets on my flat-ass witch tits, it’s when there’s something going on I don’t understand. So what in the ever-boiling piss is up?”
The trembling farmer forced out the words, “It’s, uh, it’s the levy, mistress.”
“The levy? What levy?”
“The king, mistress. He’s put a levy out. He needs troops.”
“Why would he want a child to be pressed into military service?”
“It’s the prophecy, mistress. A great foretelling came down from the Speaker of the Fates, or so the criers say. In 18 years, a great darkness will come. It will bring war and ruin to the kingdom. It will shatter the crown. So the king is demanding we send every child who’ll be over 16 when the omens come due. They’ll get raised as warriors and heroes, so they say.” The farmer looked up at the Witch, a hint of hope shining through the desperation that had cracked him. “Only, none of us want to pay the king’s fateprice with our kids. And Mrs Goodwhistle, she said that you’d probably give them a good life.
“Or, at least… you’d give them some kind of life.”
The Witch said nothing for a long while.
Then she stood up.
“I guess I’d better get a shift on then.” The briar-bound cottage behind them pricked up its leaves like they were ears.
“You’re… you’re leaving?”
“Oh, don’t fret. I’ll take little Jackie with me. I’ll take all of them.” The witch’s home unravelled, all its branches and brambles writhing down to follow its roots into the ground. “If my hearth is going to become a daycare for all the poor little prophecy-pocked bairns of this land, I’m going to need more space. And I’ll need to take them somewhere harder to find…”
“Oh, thank you, mistress!”
The Witch flicked something to the farmer, who caught it instinctively. In his sweaty palm was a seed - though it was older, darker and heavier than normal.
“There’s your harvest spell. Appropriate payment, as the scalekeepers demand. Each morning, when you go to bring in the harvest - look to the sky. When the sun is just tickling the horizon, reap a single ear of corn and put it aside. Whisper into it as if you’re talking to your child. Jackie will hear you. In the deepest part of winter, roast and eat that corn - then you’ll get your reply.”
“I… I have no words…” The farmer’s eyes and throat burned.
“No need for them. The deal must be made and the price must be paid.” The Witch held out a hand and a nearby tree bent its limbs down to meet her, offering a branch. “Now, I have much to prepare, so I will take my leave. The woods will see you home.”
And the witch took the living branch from the tree and sat upon it like a broom, then rose into the sky like a sunrise.
---
18 years later, the Witch of Stolen Tomorrows returned to the kingdom. The earth trembled as her thorned fortress - a living wilderness - bore her onwards on a thousand root-wrought feet.
Standing atop the briar parapets was the Witch’s cadre of apprentices. They were all teens and twenty-somethings, clad in the colours of autumn skies and wielding the instruments of fate.
The king, far away in his keep, felt a strange shiver through the gold of his crown. An echo of its coming shattering.
The Witch hung from a giant thorn like a sailor from a bowsprit. In her free hand, she cradled a cup of tea.
“Here is a lesson about prophecies.” She said it softly, but the rushing winds carried the words to her students. “If you fight them, they’ll put you on like a jacket and wear you as a costume as they dance ruin through your life. But if you grab them by the scruff, then you can be the one wearing destiny as your cloak.
“And then you get to be the one writing the story.”
it's so fucking frustrating to be in college and know everyone uses chatgpt and to be tempted by it constantly while also knowing intellectually that it doesn't work and it's a bad idea. like, i hang out in the library a lot, and i see people using chatgpt on assignments almost every day. and i know it isn't a good way to learn, because it's not really "artificial intelligence" so much as it is an auto text generator. and it gives you wrong information or badly worded sentences all the time. but every week i stare down assignments i don't want to do and i think man. if only i could type this prompt into a text generator and have it done in 10 minutes flat. and i know it wouldn't work. it wouldn't synthesize information from the text the way professors want, it wouldn't know how to answer questions, it just spits out vaguely related words for a couple paragraphs. but knowing my classmates get their work done in 10 minutes flat with it while i fight every ounce of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder in my body is infuriating.
i think one thing that's been really helpful in keeping myself from using it is thinking about Why i have to do the specific assignments i have. like what is the actual goal. like some assignments the goal isn't "share a story about parenting styles in ur personal life" so much as it is "show you understand the concept of parenting styles thru a story". or it's not "how do hormones impact teenagers' decision making abilities" it's "can you understand, reword, synthesize, and explain the information in the text and videos to explain how hormones impact teenagers' decision making abilities". and looking at it as "this assignment is asking me to read some words and then understand and explain them, which is a skill i want to have" rather than "i have to answer these stupid questions that seem really obvious because all my professors want me to die forever" has helped. especially in a world where everyone uses chatgpt i want to know how to read with my own brain
I think of Bloom's Taxonomy with this kind of thing :3c It helps me get past the stage of "ugh you KNOW i know this though, why do i have to do this?" Because, remembering is the lowest form on the triangle, and by that, it's like the simplest. Everything higher needs the previous skills. Kind of a cool chart for what OP described above, the understanding, the rewording, synthesizing, all these other skills that are being checked besides knowing/remembering.
(I personally can't fathom why someone would go to college to outsource even the most basic steps of learning to a predictive slop machine, even as someone who skipped more assignments than I should have in my first years of uni. To me, it seems like they're wasting their 10 minutes and at the end the true work of the assignment isn't even done bc the prof wouldn't like. know if they're meeting the content or taxonomy level goals???? but what do i know)
I'm doing group work in many of my courses and recently my group partner came up to me and said "you've inspired me to stop using chatgpt, I want to understand how it works" and I've never felt more proud of being mediocre at assignments
There are a lot of modern appliances we won't buy because they're essentially in-home surveillance for no other reason than "The company decided to gather information to sell".
Like, yes, we'd like a newer Roomba... but I absolutely do not want one which uploads the fucking floor plan of my house to the Internet.
Would we like a nice mattress with which you can adjust firmness? Yes. Do we want a mattress which tells the company when we sleep? Why is this even a question???
Frankly, a lot of these companies need to see direct and absolutely destructive punishment for gathering data on customers. Things like "Oh, you kept customer names and birthdays in your database and that got stolen by 'hackers'? Well, since you're the company which didn't secure that data properly, you're now liable for every element of identity fraud and financial harm those customers experience. And also a fine which exceeds the profit you made from that data."
They don't need to be gathering all this data. They should look on excess data acquisition as a liability, not a revenue stream. They should be asking "How little information can we gather and still provide a profitable product?" rather than "How much more can we slurp from our customers and sell later?".
Fungus has done so much for humanity. Penicillin. Radiation cleanup. Delicious mushrooms. Deadly mushrooms. Psychadelic mushrooms. And now my boy RA has chosen the humble mold spores as his vessel through which to cure cancer.
reblogging this to add that I often think about the old man yaoi mangaka on bluesky who said "the phrase that finally convinced me that the English language is truly beautiful was 'this shit is so ass'"
how did I guess this account was a bot? 1: didn't actually address anything in the main post 2: username is three random words stuck together & a default pfp 3: immediately asks to go to dm's
Take this as a huge fucking sign. They are paying for bots to sow "empathy" for the 1% leeches among us poors. It is IMPORTANT to them that you are not only blind to the evils they cause but would also defend them when they would kill you in the street for a dollar. Do Not Fucking Believe Them. Your anger and rage against these rich assholes is your most important weapon.
As someone who took etiquette lessons, politeness is an incredibly effective tool for disarming bigots. You can either force them to reconsider their words/actions by directly and calmly confronting their behavior (by using the rules of society in your favor), or you can dip entirely while they appear to be in the wrong.
Both options are great.
Because the thing is, when bigots pick fights, they are 100% counting on you to get louder than them. Or meaner. They want you to react emotionally and provide fodder for their 'You're Too Emotionally Immature To Understand' cannon.
What they aren't expecting you to do is say one of the following phrases in a polite, concerned tone:
Are you okay?
That's not the kind of language I was raised to use with others.
Do you need a moment to think on why that wasn't acceptable?
This is no way to engage in intelligent conversation. Please try that again in a kinder tone if you'd like this to continue. (I really like this one because it lets you turn their public-shame rhetoric around)
For those of you who'd are spiteful and/or dealing with Fundamentalists/Evangelicals/generally shitty Christians:
What's happening in your life to cause you this much anger? I can't imagine hurting so badly that I need to hurt other people.
Who taught you it was acceptable to treat other people this way? Certainly not the Jesus I remember.
Whatever happened to 'judge not lest ye be judged'?
If I talked like that in front of my parents or grandparents I would be ashamed.
I think there's something you need to pray on before we try and have this conversation.
And my all time favorite:
"It sounds to me like there are some seriously dark and angry forces at work in your heart."
(Nothing stops a Christian bigot in their tracks faster than implying the Devil is causing their bigotry. But you MUST be calm, polite, and gentle with your tone and wording. It is absolutely fair to twist the rules and play them at their own game, but you gotta play hard.)
TLDR: It's much faster to use etiquette, politeness, and rhetoric reversal when eviscerating idiots online and in person, because they aren't expecting you to weaponize their behaviors back in their direction. Don't get angry, get spitefully polite! :)
I once witnessed a very soft-spoken young Southern man take a hateful older woman’s hands gently in his and say “Sister, I am so sorry that the Devil has carved a home for hatred in your heart. I’ll pray for you.”
This works with all sorts of inappropriate behavior. I work as the archivist in a public library, so I end up on the reference desk a lot, and sometimes patrons will say or do things that aren't exactly appropriate. When patrons try to hit on me, I put on a teacher voice and calmly ask, "Is that an appropriate question to ask someone at work?" and it shuts them down immediately.
