appalachia is devastated. towns i loved, towns i visited all the time, are gone. not damaged, GONE. they are leveled to the ground. there is nothing left but rubble and ruin. people are dead. appalachia is poor to begin with and relies on tourism for a lot of its income, and multiple of those tourist locations are just…gone.
my town is okay, but it’s flooded and wrecked. trees are blocking all but one way out of our neighborhood. power lines are hanging limp in the roads. we’ve been without power for over 24 hours and will continue to be without power for likely another 24+. disabled people and poor people are GOING to die from this. gods save appalachia.
it’s always a hit or miss with appalachian charities. a lot are just evangelism with no action behind what they do. i suggest looking into them before donating.
adding some additional photos from the other side of the mountains here in northeast tennessee. there has been genuinely catastrophic flooding in many areas and billions of dollars of damage across NETN and WNC. we are not built to withstand this. 33 people are currently missing in unicoi county alone
First off, hi!!! I’m sorry I disappeared for so long. Life has been insane. A lot of downs, a few ups, and trying to get on track. I may still not even be very active but I’ll try.
Onto the question;
How do y’all feel about getting help from an AI when creating your stories or characters?
you: boromir succumbed to the ring because he was faithless, selfish and the weakest member of the fellowship
me, an intellectual: boromir held such belief in the power of good over evil and the strength of the people of middle earth that he literally believed with enough willpower they could turn sauron’s work against him. he was absolutely convinced that with enough goodness and love and solidarity they could overcome the most fundamental evil. the ring used those beliefs and used them to isolate boromir from the fellowship because that’s what it does - it takes people’s good attributes and uses them to twist them into something serving its own purposes. the ring literally could only corrupt boromir because he was a fundamentally good and faithful person at heart. in this essay i will
No one else in the Fellowship was as pressed as Boromir was. His people were dying, his father and brother were at risk. He’s been fighting orcs for *years* in a way no one else has.
The Ring twisted Boromir’s love for his people into a noose and slipped it over his neck. Every time he tried to reach out to find a way to protect them, the noose tightened, until it nearly choked him to death.
And even with that, he turned away from the Ring.
He went back, tried to protect Merry and Pippin. He died free of it’s influence.
Not even Gandalf dared to touch the ring, Galadriel also didn’t trust herself with it, and she was already wearing a Ring.
That’s a fairly common theme I’ve noticed. I doubt that Tolkien believed that power inherently corrupts, but he did seem to believe that it made you a lot easier to be corrupted.
Cause both Gandalf and Galadriel knew straight up that them having the ring would be a Bad Idea™, Boromir who had the weight of the kingdom that was actively keeping Sauron from conquering the world was more vulnerable, Isildur was in charge of the Dunedain and fell, and while I have nothing to back this up I think that Elrond knew he wouldn’t have been able to let go of the ring which is probably why he didn’t take it from Isildur forcibly to try and destroy it himself. The only powerful person I know of who didn’t give a shit about the Ring was Tom Bombadil.
By comparison, Bilbo and Samwise were the only two to have had the ring for a significant length of time and let go (I THINK in the book gandalf actually held the ring for a second or two when heating it to show the inscription and someone threaded the ring on a chain for Frodo but it was never explained who), and while Frodo had it longer than Sam he only broke at the very end. While that was probably to show the simplicity of the hobbits and how they were hard to corrupt, the fact that some of the strongest beings on middle earth knew they couldn’t bear it without becoming worse than Sauron and as you went further down the power scale people generally become harder to corrupt is kind of telling.
A secret cabal of vampires is actually trying to fix the world’s problems. Not because they’re good people, but because modern Humans are so stressed and unhealthy and filled with pollutants that it makes their blood horrible to drink.
Honestly be pretentious as fuck about the stuff you create. Do a press release for your fanfic updates. Do a Q&A about your webcomic. Make fake merch designs for your OCs. Commission “official” book covers. Very few of us will ever get to a stage where something we’ve created Makes It Big but even if you have an audience of 5 people plus a shoelace fucking indulge yourself and pretend!! It’s the only way to live!!
me constantly releasing press junkets about my OCs like they are actual celebrities and i am their PR agent
Listen, if you interrupt me with a new task while I’m midway through another, you aren’t allowed to be mad when I switch to the new task immediately. You clearly thought the new task was important enough to interrupt me with it!
I am just a little pikmin! You’re the one with the whistle!!
‘You need to learn to prioritise’ no YOU do! You’re the one dishing out tasks!! All I need to do is take things back to the onion!
You are likewise also not allowed to complain with equal frequency when I don’t switch tasks and finish the one I was already doing before starting the one I was interrupted with, like do you want me to prioritise ongoing or incoming tasks because it has to be one or the other you can’t tell me interruptions aren’t urgent and then complain when I believe that
I am very serious if a game both negatively impact your mental health and is the source of all your joy, it means you have an addiction problem and you need to delete your account and uninstall it and cry for however many hours you need to get it out of your system.
Your lifeline CANNOT depend on a mobile game they’re predatory as fuck.
I’m not here to be like mobile game bad evil. But if you love something, you need to 1) recognize it’s flaws and 2) cultivate a healthy relationship with it.
Think of your hobbies as a relationship. If your friend is constantly trying to extort your money and is making you feel awful whenever you’re not giving them your full attention or failed the tasks they gave you, then you probably wanna set some boundaries with that friend no matter how much you love them.
That’s the boundaries you need to set with your mobile games.
If you don’t wanna quit cold turkey here’s what I suggest.
Quit for a week. Deliberately break the habit and miss a event. Afterwards if you wanna go back, you still can.
Get an app blocking app and control/monitor how many hours you spend on the game
Get into a new interest or hobby with a friend. Can be a long running show or a hobby. Something that isn’t addictive substance or gambling. Use that to distract yourself as you set your distance from the game.
Anti-addiction PSAs regarding mobile games always focus on how much money people are spending. And that’s an adult problem. It’s bad but it’s not all of it.
Increasingly I am also seeing young people who doesn’t spend a cent but has their mental health hanging on their performance/participation of these games. And you deserve to know that’s also an addiction issue. Ultimately it’s up to you how you choose to deal with it.
