Focus Spell Jar

grass green again post rose window crochet blanket :)

▪︎ Hamlet.

Artist: Alphonse Mucha (Moravia, Ivančice, active France, 1860-1939)

Date: 1899

Medium: Lithograph in four colors: red, blue, pale yellow, and olive green; on two sheets.

you’re in her DMs. I’m in her grave, throwing hands with her brother.

the sea is a terrible place (or: here's some scary natural phenomena found in the sea of Siren)

The false reflection, mostly encountered by deep-diving phocids. This phenomenon occurs when ultra dense high saline water gathers in underwater brine pools on the sea floor. It appears reflective, like a mirror. Down in the deep, the only way you can see at all is to take some form of luminescence with you, which obscures the pool and shows you nothing but another phocid below, holding a light source. It's common for pelagic people to be unfamiliar with their own facial markings and reflection. They mistake the reflection as another phocid, or a ghostly apparition, and reach out. But the salinity of the brine pool is such that even touching it can scald the skin, especially as all mammals on siren are adapted to low salt conditions and require far far less salt than unaltered humans.

The abyss, of course. Most of the sea of Siren is not as deep on average as the sea on Earth. But there are cracks and trenches in the sea floor that go down, and down, and down... they are poorly explored (though the first settlers did send drones down) and sites of myth and legend for swimmers. The abyss is not usually dangerous, since it's easy to just not go down there, but sometimes the cracks seem to inhale and exhale - natural flows of groundwater, or attempts to fill a vacuum caused by a different crack releasing gas. So swimming over certain cracks might result in you being dragged down unexpectedly into the anoxic zone near the sea floor in the region... or it might result in you being unexpectedly shot up. These events are incredibly rare and usually passed off as tall tales, some selkie who claims to have flown due to being propelled into the sky

The snowstorm... an event that occurs when the sediment is agitated enough to completely white out the water. If the particles are the right size, echolocation clicks bounce back immediately, making sight and echo useless. Phocids and selkies trapped in the snowstorm could lose situational awareness and forget which way is up very easily, and the instant bounce-back of echo clicks is deeply unpleasant, giving the illusion of being 1 inch from swimming straight into a solid wall.

Shriekers. This is an issue where ice caps, glaciers etc meet the water. The ice cracks and breaks, and to sensitive phocid and selkie ears it's an unbearable shriek that can render them disoriented and deaf at long range, and break eardrums at close range. Around the ice wall, there's an almost constant background noise of screaming.

The false sky. A phenomenon that occurs when a swimmer loses situational awareness, and ends up diving deeper and deeper thinking that they're about to come up for air. The reduced gravity of siren means that it's more difficult under the water to feel gravity, resulting in a more weightless sensation than on Earth. Occasionally, a natural biolumescence in deep water may produce an illusion of the sky viewed through the turbid water, making the disoriented swimmers even more certain that they are travelling up, when really they are diving. In Spiral mythos this is treated as a specific type of mania.

The wanderer.. it looks like a phocid swimming in the distance. You hail them, click at them, wave your lantern, but they don't respond. If you get closer, they'll flee. This is a really common story among nearly all pelagic people worldwide, and what they are seeing are the vanishingly rare aquatic zeta, those who did not adapt to becoming terrestrial and became extremely solitary, so they were not able to regain language due to not having complex cultures and societies anymore. They resemble smaller, hairy phocids and are considered a type of (for lack of a better word?) fairy or trickster spirit in Spiral culture, a false friend leading you astray.

The flesh cloud. This is a mass of deceased scalefish, the hagfish-like animals which make up many of the fish shoals on Siren. If they enter an anoxic zone unexpectedly (if chased, pushed by currents, or just unlucky) they can die in large numbers, forming a tangled, decaying mass that drifts through the seas. These are heralds of rot and disease and the water around them is filthy and unclean, an infection risk for any swimmer with an open cut. Sometimes large nets are set up to catch and redirect them.

Sharp sand. Some substrate is made of silica and appears glittery, like fairy dust. When water mixes, these can form plumes which are hundreds of feet tall. They're not dangerous in and of themselves, but you had better make sure you close your eyes around it, no matter how pretty the dancing glitter might be. A common cause of corneal ulceration and abrasion.

Cherta's Tide. This is a big one. Tides are slow and rare most of the time, mixing the water and enabling life to flourish. But every so often, there are two different tides that come round, which can be predicted based on which moon is most prominent in the sky for the duration. Ishmael's Tide is a high water apocalyptic event, but there are many monitoring stations and contingencies to avoid it. Cherta's Tide (similar to a neap tide) is far more unpredictable and occurs irregularly, as the moon Cherta is smaller, darker, and harder to see. This tide is a low-water event. Vast stretches of the sea floor are laid bare and the underwater ridges suddenly become towering cliffs and barriers for people who can't fly. This can last for weeks at a time, and without the water of course most animal populations who can't hide in substrate take a huge hit. It can happen fast enough to strand a swimmer at the top of a ridge, nothing but air below all the way to what was once the sea floor, and they might be stranded, unreachable, and without food or water for a fatal period of time.

ALL ACTIVE DBD CODES

PRIDE - Pride charm

INSERTCOIN - Arcade machine charm

DECIPHERSTRIKE - 150k bloodpoints

Please fucking lie to your employer. Like they don’t need to know your mental health issues or what drugs you do. Ffs

The Tarot Deciphered

These notes on Tarot, Tarot meaning, Tarot symbolism were given to me years ago by @chaotic-hypnotic-erotic. They're concise and also focus on traditional meanings and interpretation. They can be helpful even for the most intuitive of readers.

Habits that changed my life for the better

I stopped joking about myself. It was mostly about suicide jokes (it was a decision that I made after the worst moment of my journey with depression, if I can call it that), but, really, it's about all self-deprecating stuff. It may be just jokes, but it stays in your brain.

Positive attitude. It's similar to manifestation, in a way, but in a... down to earth way, I guess. Thinking positively about stuff changes everything for me. Almost everything is simpler.

I deleted Twitter. It may be a different social media for everyone, of course - now probably TikTok for most - but, well, Twitter was where I spent long hours everyday. I started taking breaks from it about a year and a half ago and deleted it in August. It was hard - I loved the community there and I miss the daily updates from my fav fandoms, but it's for the best. I still can't explain how Twitter affected me but I do feel better since I stopped spending so much time there.

Taking vitamins. I didn't think it would really make a difference but it definitely did. The biggest surprise for me was vitamin C - my immune system has improved super quickly when I started supplementing it. I didn't even realise how bad it was before. Other than that, I take B complex, A+E (hair, skin), and iron (i tend to have a deficiency of it). (& D when it's winter).

Having a consistent skin care routine. It's calming and both doing the routine and seeing the effects make me feel better. (I do realise that many people have more demanding skin than me and searching for the right products can be frustrating and expensive. I'm just talking about my experience).

Other things that I think are worth mentioning:

Therapy - just a short explanation that I've been on therapy (with breaks) for about 6 years now. I've had social anxiety for most of my life, now still struggle with depression (and amnesia, actually) a bit, but what I wanted to mention here is that I learned a lot from it. It's obvious, but I just think it's important to pinpoint that I did not just learn how to think more positively and love myself by myself.

Exercising! - I still struggle to make it a habit, but when I actually do exercise regularly (I do pilates), I really feel better. It's worth it.

Hydration - same with drinking water. I really don't think I have to explain it in any way lol.

Glowy dark mode site skin

🎼 You would not believe your eyes, if 10 million fireflies ended up in the header of your AO3. 🎶

It's been a while since I tried glow effects, but I saw the fireflies and I couldn't resist.

CSS code under the cut.

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We need to talk about Titus

Out of all the discussions around the Hunger Games, the one discussion I have yet to see is one around the past Tribute and "cannibal", Titus.

It strikes me as an extremely odd detail to be randomly thrown in, not only being one of the only past non-victor tributes to have a name, (and the only one that isn't from the 10th and 74th games or Maysilee Donner, who has further significance to the plot) but also having such a wild story. Titus being relegated to a one-off line is extremely confusing to me.

But what's more confusing is how he's treated, both in-universe by other tributes, and irl by readers/fans. And I think Capitol Propaganda has a lot to do with it.

The little we do know about Titus is:

He was from District 6

He was anywhere from 12-18 years old

He was killed by an *avalanche*

He was "crazy" and snapped during the games

He cannibalized the hearts of the tributes he killed

Right away, this tells me that there's more to Titus than just having lost it, or even being mentally ill prior to the games, though that may have had a part. However, it's definitely not the main factor at play.

Firstly, we need to look at how the Capitol treats these literal children in the short time that they're being prepared to fight to the death. They're almost constantly in the public eye, pushed to train, and treated like commodities for the residents of the Capitol. Residents who live in opulence, compared to the poverty and struggles of the rest of the districts. District 6 especially, where Titus is from, seems to have had a rough time, what with an implied morphling problem and their focus being Transport, meaning that their tributes have absolutely no prior skills that would be useful in the games.

Combining all of these factors, and we don't have to make a leap to assume that Titus would already be under a lot of stress from the get-go.

Then, consider the Arena. This is where the avalanche comes into play. An avalanche would mean snow, which would mean that the arena was likely some sort of tundra, or at least was winter-like. From other games, it has been shown that the gamemakers will purposely make it difficult for tributes to access basic resources like water or food. If Titus had been unlucky at the cornucopia, he would be hard-pressed to find food in a snow-covered environment.

And these two factors, stress and hunger, make it pretty clear to me why Titus did what he did, and why that's so important to the rest of the story as a whole.

Titus. Was. Starving.

Desperation for food, stress from what he'd already gone through, and the fact that Titus was a child makes it pretty clear that if he "snapped", it wasn't because he was insane, it was because of the Capitol.

And the tragedy of this is that the Capitol pushed this boy to desperation, and because he lashed out at them for it (and they found his actions in desperation "unsightly"), they tazed him, they killed him, and they framed the entire situation as this "monstrous crazy person gone rogue".

The Capitol once again kept the people blind to their cruelty, but this time, they even did so to us, the reader.