What If There Was An Apocalypse But Some People Were Really Really In Denial And Optimistic And Thinking

Here is a free pdf of the players handbook

Here is a free pdf of xanathars guide to everything

Here is a free pdf to monsters manual

Here is a free pdf to tashas cauldron of everything

Here is a free pdf to dungeon master’s guide

Here is a free pdf to volo’s guide to monsters

Here is a free pdf of mordenkainen’s tomb of foes

For all your dnd purposes

some fucking resources for all ur writing fuckin needs

* body language masterlist

* a translator that doesn’t eat ass like google translate does

* a reverse dictionary for when ur brain freezes

* 550 words to say instead of fuckin said

* 638 character traits for when ur brain freezes again

* some more body language help

(hope this helps some ppl)

Bedtime Story.

Short story by Jeffery Whitmore! Wanted to make this into a comic for a while :] just in a girl boss sorta mood hehe

thumbs + bonus :^))

Fundamental life advice: never trust a product from a youtuber/influencer sponsorship

Once upon a time there was a beast and a curse and an enchantress, which I’m sure surprises nobody. Better put it this way: once upon a time a girl was locked in a castle, and she begged so hard not to be the sleeping princess that she became the beast. That’s more like it, anyway — fairytale logic. You get what you wish for, but it isn’t what you want.

“Don’t let it be a prince,” she begged, “don’t let it be a kiss I can’t see coming and can’t refuse.”

Enchantresses, wicked fairies, call them what you will — they’re all the same story in the end. No one will remember if this enchantress began the story by giving the princess a naming day gift of a hundred year sleep once the tale switches to another track. The point is that she didn’t mind granting this one favor. Maybe it was an issue of statistics. Maybe she thought finding a girl who would fall in love with a princess-beast would be harder than finding a prince to kiss her, make her curse harder to lift (considering the probabilities of who might wander onto the cursed castle grounds). As if girls who love girls don’t know they have to fight harder to begin with, as if they won’t cross miles for each other.

So maybe there was a spindle once, but now there is a rose, and a girl who wanders through a thorn maze unable to find her way. This is the wrong story, she thinks to herself, clutching her leather satchel tighter, but she doesn’t know what the right story is.

“Let me through?” She suggests to the roses that grow squeezed between their own thorns along the twisting hedges. “I’m looking for the love of my life. I’m in a hurry.”

She’s met only with the rustling of leaves and haughty scoffs. “No prince ever found his true love by being in a hurry.”

“I’m not a prince. I’m a shoemaker, and I’m lost. Can you let me through to the castle?” It rises dark and spindly overhead, but though it seems so close she can see no way out of the maze.

Laughter, echoing through the hedge corridors, and then something dark prowls around the corner and half-crouches there, hidden as much as possible under a hooded cloak. Shining talons dig into the earth under their feet.

The beast says, “A shoemaker? You really are in the wrong story.” Her voice is gravely and doesn’t match the laughter. That must have been the roses as well.

“I have glass shoes,” the girl says, staring at those claws. “Or I can make something sturdier, if you give me time.”

“I don’t have enough time of my own to be giving it away,” the beast says, bored, and gestures around them. Even now the hedges seem to be encroaching further into the maze’s corridors, the roses growing and multiplying. One day soon, the girl realizes, the maze will entirely fill in, and the castle will be blocked off.

She’s clever, and she’s brave, and those are the two most important things for a fairytale heroine to be — besides pretty, but that’s easy enough to fake with the right kind of smile. “Then don’t give it to me,” she says, “we can share.”

So the beast reaches out one arm, fingers tapering into knives that she curls so gently they don’t more than scratch the girl’s skin — and the shoemaker takes it with an earnest gravity, looking right under her cloak’s shadow and into her eyes.

The beast’s eyes are unnaturally big and inhumanly shaped, but they’re not cruel, and in fairytales the evil beasts always have cruel eyes. The girl bobs a polite curtsey, using the beast’s arm for balance, and sees those eyes narrow slightly with amusement.

They walk through the twists and turns of the maze to the castle, the beast bent slightly so as not to tower over her guest. “About those shoes,” she says, when they reach the front doors, golden light spilling from the entrance hall and shining through the delicately carved details in the ancient wood.

“In the morning,” the girl says, and because she clearly has not even entertained the thought that she might be argued with, the beast cannot summon an objection. She watches the girl follow an unfurling carpet along the floor to a dusty guest room with no hesitation, as if every dwelling should be as accommodating.

And in the way of fairytales, that’s enough to make the beast fall in love — a disregard for every unspoken rule, a smile that glimmers in the darkness. Should I tell you that the moment the girl arrives at breakfast the next morning the beast can barely look away from her for a moment, that she stays by the girl’s side as she produces leather and tools from nowhere and searches floor by floor for the perfect room to work in — or should I let you imagine for yourself?

Gradually the hood is pulled back, eventually the cloak discarded altogether; they sit in patches of sunlight together to eat lunch, staring down at the maze below. Roses and leaves devouring each other and everything in slow motion.

“If you stay too long you’ll be trapped here,” the beast warns, anxious when the girls shows no concern in her usual solemn air as she watches the maze devolve.

“I haven’t finished your shoes,” is all she says. Each new morning she promises that in return for this latest night of hospitality she is making the shoes more beautiful, and each evening that she has not finished she stays another night.

Sometimes when the girl has gone to bed the beast sneaks back into the workroom, in agony over whether to rip out the stitches or finish the work for her.

Leave before you are trapped here forever.

Stay here forever because I love you.

Each night she does not touch the shoes and returns to sleep herself, and in the morning the girl thanks her for letting her stay, as if the beast could ever turn her out, and promises to repay the night with even more beautiful shoes.

And each morning the beast says, “That’s fair,” and wishes she could find different words, the words she means to say.

The maze grows. The roses are larger than hands with fully spread fingers. The corridors are barely large enough for a small girl to squeeze through. In the dawn light it is lit gently and slightly pink, but the sight of it is painful. The wide window of the workroom shows the progress the maze had made alarmingly clearly, and it’s only then that the beast wonders if that was the appeal of this room over all the others.

The girl appears silently in the doorway as she has for the past week. “Thank you for letting me stay last night. I’ll repay you—”

“No,” the beast says, her voice alarmed and rough. “No. You are leaving now.”

“Now?”

“Before you can’t leave. You must go now.” Her throat is closing up and her voice growing thicker with each word. They’re not the words she wants to say.

The girl cocks her head, a curiously nonjudgmental silence. Finally she crosses the room to her worktable and picks up the shoes, turning them around and around again. They’re boots, really, and almost comically big in her hands. The beast cannot tell if they are as beautiful as she was promised, because the girl is smiling now and that eclipses all else.

“Are they finished?” She asks.

“Yes,” the beast says, unable to choke out anything more.

The girl leaves the boots on the table and swings her satchel, out of nowhere, across her shoulders. “Thank you for sharing your time,” she says. For a moment she holds the beast’s hand in both of hers, and then she’s gone. From the window the beast can watch her leave; for all her trouble getting there, she finds her way out with ease.

She leaves the workroom and doesn’t return all day.

Do beasts grieve? She hadn’t thought they could. She hadn’t grieved when the curse was settled on her; she hadn’t grieved at the idea that it might never lift once the maze finally knit itself together during the coming night. But the loneliness she feels now was different. The absence of the shoemaker is something worse. She’d had no choice in her fate, but she had told the girl to leave. This misery she’d brought on herself.

At night she wanders back into the workroom out of habit, sleepless and hopeless and refusing to glance out the window. Has it happened yet? Is she truly trapped now, or will it happen in five minutes, an hour, at dawn? She stares at the boots for an indeterminable amount of time before she thinks of putting them on.

She does so only because she thinks the girl wanted her to wear them; left to her own devices she might have destroyed them with as little thought as she now gives to slipping them on. They are big enough, and the fasteners are easy to close even with her unwieldy claws. Designs etched into the leather yet invisible in the darkness spiral and branch out beneath the thumb-pad she runs over them. Vines, she thinks. Roses.

A tear slips out, or three, as she stands in her beautiful new boots and smells leather and rotting roses. I want her back, she thinks, even as a wave of thankfulness rises up from the deepness in her, thankfulness that the shoemaker will never feel this trapped. I want to go to her, she revises. Since she doesn’t know how, she goes to leave the workroom instead.

One step and darkness is rushing past her. The rough scrap of stone walls, the rustle of leaves and the tearing of thorns, night air soft all around her. She has stepped not into the hallway but out of the castle, beyond the maze, into the star-dappled night.

“What did you do?” She asks, alarmed, almost before she sees the shoemaker sitting cross-legged on the grassy hill, as still as if she has been waiting all day and night. “What happened?”

“I found what I came for,” the girl says calmly. “And I made her shoes.”

Want to learn something new in 2022??

Absolute beginner adult ballet series (fabulous beginning teacher)

40 piano lessons for beginners (some of the best explanations for piano I’ve ever seen)

Excellent basic crochet video series

Basic knitting (probably the best how to knit video out there)

Pre-Free Figure Skate Levels A-D guides and practice activities (each video builds up with exercises to the actual moves!)

How to draw character faces video (very funny, surprisingly instructive?)

Another drawing character faces video

Literally my favorite art pose hack

Tutorial of how to make a whole ass Stardew Valley esque farming game in Gamemaker Studios 2??

Introduction to flying small aircrafts

French/Dutch/Fishtail braiding

Playing the guitar for beginners (well paced and excellent instructor)

Playing the violin for beginners (really good practical tips mixed in)

Color theory in digital art (not of the children’s hospital variety)

Retake classes you hated but now there’s zero stakes:

Calculus 1 (full semester class)

Learn basic statistics (free textbook)

Introduction to college physics (free textbook)

Introduction to accounting (free textbook)

Learn a language:

Ancient Greek

Latin

Spanish

German

Japanese (grammar guide) (for dummies)

French

Russian (pretty good cyrillic guide!)

I would like to hear the story of how you slept under the christmas tree

so i immigrated to the US at age 9, right, and one of the first things my family did was join the local Chinese church. as far as the whole “figuring out how to do things so we no longer have to live in the back shed of Uncle Joe’s* Magic Emporium” thing goes, it’s a pretty sound strategy! now we had people to teach my dad how to drive and give us old furniture and say “hey, Seattle is pretty rainy maybe you should rent an apartment-like space before either a) the shed roof caves in b) your daughter with the famously delicate constitution falls dramatically ill from a strain of black mold or possibly herpes”

*is not my uncle, that’s what his store was called. he sold magic gadgets and my dad knew him because???? possibly in a past life they ran a meth empire in Albuquerque, who knows

ANYWAY. thanks to the church i did not fall dramatically ill from black mold or possibly herpes, but there was an unforeseen factor in joining a Christian church, which was that they? were pretty hardcore? about Jesus?**

**in a nice “we build houses for the homeless” way, not in…the other way

given that we’d just immigrated and that China’s religious policy is worshiping Mao’s preserved corpse ehhhhh…let’s call it “freedom of atheism,” my family was decidedly not hardcore about Jesus. my parents mostly took the bemused “i guess Jesus is okay since he indirectly led to us living in a place suited for human habitation” route, but i

was

DISGUSTED.

i was the first kid in my class to get her red scarf, okay, and when we sang the national anthem and saluted the flag every morning i fucking meant what i was singing. we almost didn’t come to America; my dad had more lucrative job offers in Germany and Belgium, but i put my foot down because everyone knows Europe is full of gross imperialists Dad, GOSH, and the Americans helped us fight off the Japanese.

so seeing all these fellow Chinese believing in THE CAPITALIST GOD was basically the worst thing to ever happen to my delicate psyche. my parents’ tacit approval was even worse: DID PATRIOTISM AND COMMUNISM MEAN NOTHING TO THEM? DIDN’T THEY KNOW THAT DOING NOTHING AGAINST OPPRESSION MADE THEM OPPRESSORS THEMSELVES??

clearly something needed to be done.

so because the church was pretty hardcore about Jesus, it was understandably also hardcore about Christmas. big party, massive intricately decorated REAL TREE, sleepover for the kids with presents in the morning—you name it. everyone was going to be there.

WHAT A GREAT OPPORTUNITY TO PROVE TO EVERYONE HOW WRONG THEY ARE ABOUT JESUS.

my plan:

sleep UNDER the giant real Christmas tree: y’know, the one with real pointy needles reaching all the way down to the base? that sheds? with lots of pokey tinsel?

catch Jesus in the act of depositing presents***: look. i’d seen like, ALL of Scooby Doo by this point. i knew Jesus was probably a real person, just not the Son of God.

subdue Jesus so he’s still around when everyone else wakes up: CLEARLY VERY FEASIBLE, given that Jesus was a heavyset white dude who used superhuman agility and strength to deliver presents around the world overnight and possibly had reindeer minions and i weighed 70 pounds at most while sopping wet.

(who is Santa Claus?? who cares)

????

EVERYONE MAGICALLY BECOMES AN ATHEIST AGAIN, AMERICA BECOMES A COMMUNIST STATE

***even if i didn’t believe in him, why was i slavishly devoted stopping a highly altruistic man who gave? people? presents? did i hate joy????

sure enough, at around 3 in the morning i heard soft boots approaching the tree. i reached out and snatched one of the Ankles of Jesus

—whereupon Youth Pastor Liao screamed “OH MY LORD” and kicked me in the face.

and THAT, dear friends, is how i spent my first Christmas in America with a concussion.

POC blush tutorial

Feel free to repost, but please credit me

somebody once trolled me, successfully rickroll’d me