Today I Learned About A Couple That Decided To Rebuild Their Deserted Piece Of Land Of 600 Hectares In

RB if you think CD drives in computers are not obsolete, but in fact still necessary, despite being artificially phased out

Are you feeling kind of down right now? It’s not your fault that you forgot what baby cheetahs look like. Really. One time I did too.

But now you recall!

Look! Look!

They loves to play!

Rawr!

Their head is just one giant ball of floof!

I can’t even

How do they live? Being so cuTE??

Ugh!!

This has been a PSA. Baby cheetahs are everything good and pure in this world. Please imagine petting the floof head. Please feel better.

Sneak Peek

Sneak Peek of something I’ve kept a very tight lid on. To those that might know what it’s from, please continue to keep it quiet.

Enjoy. :)

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“Jason!” 

The twelve-year-old turned towards the unfamiliar voice only to have a toddler shoved into his arms before he can do more than blink. He looked down. Pretty green eyes stared back at him out of a round cherubic face under a mop of black hair. Unwillingly, he bounced the boy and cooed. 

“Hello! Who are you? You are so cute!” He’d always liked kids. He’d helped some of the women in the apartment building he and his mom lived in with theirs when he was younger. Usually in exchange for a meal or a place to hide out when Willis was out of prison.

“His name is Damian. He likes you.” 

Jason looked up, a wide grin stretched across his face, to see Talia Al Ghul standing in front of him. He could have sworn he heard a record scratch somewhere. The fuck?!

Her stance was relaxed, hands in the pockets of her jeans as she looked at them with a soft smile on her face. When he’d met her father a couple of months previous he didn’t realize it was setting a damned precedent. 

“I - uh - Miss Al Ghul -” He stuttered, surprised but respectful. She could slice him in two if he remembered her files right. Which he did, because he’d been reading up on the League pretty fanatically since that night. There hadn’t been any mention of a baby, though.

“Call me Talia.” Voice warm with amusement. “Come along, we don’t have all day. Only a few hours before I have to have you at the manor.”

“I don’t understand.” Jason admitted, shifting Damian automatically to his hip when he fussed. 

Talia reached out and ruffled his hair, a strange look in her eyes. “Happy Birthday, Jason.”

“My birthday was last week.” He blurted, baffled.

A flare of sadness flashed across her face, almost too quick to see, “I know. A little belated but we do what we can considering…”

“Considering what?” He asked, curious but beginning to resign himself to never getting answers from the Al Ghuls.

“One day you will understand, habibi. Until then, come along.” She herded him toward a smart looking car, deftly clipping Damian into a car seat before sliding into the driver’s seat herself.

Jason paused at the door and weighed his options. He should probably call Bruce - He was kind of being kidnapped by an Al Ghul - but she had a baby… a baby that looked rather suspiciously like some of those baby pictures Alfred had strategically placed around the family rooms. She had also mentioned dropping him off at the Manor in a few hours, and she had picked him up at school.

He was curious as hell and that, at the very least, meant he was more than willing to at least see where this was going. 

Talia smiled a small genuine smile at him as he sat next to her and buckled his seatbelt. Safety first, he thought ironically. 

if you like it, put a ring on it ;)

Gentrification creates a stifling homogeneity in urban areas that makes it less suited for the everyday lives of the lower class and more suited towards the leisure and tourism of those with expendable income.

An old, decrepit laundromat gets replaced by an upscale bakery? And people are mad? It’s not that the poor hate organic vegan cupcakes, it’s that most of us don’t have a way to do laundry in our own home.

Run-down corner stores replaced by hand-made designer clothing boutiques? We don’t hate your eco-fabric shawl, but I can’t eat that for dinner after work like I could have a can of beans I grabbed from that corner store when I don’t have time to take the bus to the real grocery store after work.

What gentrification brings in and of itself is not typically bad, it’s that gentrification brings institutions of leisure and pleasure and makes it so that the poor have to go farther out of their way for basic necessities. It turns low-income living spaces into local tourist attractions. It can even create food deserts by putting restaurants, grocery stores, etc. in that the majority of the lower class cannot afford.

Imagine if someone totally renovated your house and turned it into a mini theme park - they took away your sleeping space, where you prepare food, where you clean yourself and get ready for your day, and replaced it with things that will please people who are visiting, who have their own homes they can go back to, who are here not for their entire life but just as a distraction from their otherwise mundane existence. It’s not that you hate theme parks, it’s not like you’ve never been to a theme park and vow to never visit one again. It’s just that you need to live! To survive! And the leisure of those who have more than you should not invalidate your existence.

i’m on an fdf kick rn and i’m abt to fucking ramble

ardyn feels like his head had gotten smashed in with the heaviest hammer he can’t even fathom existed. like the draconian just tried to kill him with a sword through his head

it takes him a little while to sort through memories—which is weird, he can’t remember daemonifying someone and taking their memories, but he supposes he will—and then pauses as he remembers the chosen queen ascending to claim her divine throne and kill him, eyes bloody and red, face twisted up in grief and resignation as her sword plunges into his chest to kill him

i await you in the beyond, he’d said. carefully, confusedly, he scans the room. it is his office in gralea, with the paperwork he enjoys to mess up on purpose on his desk with ink spilt over it and onto the floor. ink that matches the black on his fingers. and it is ink—he knows that for a fact.

and then he thinks, chosen queen? the title is the chosen king. not queen—not king—not queen—

ardyn grabs his head and grits his teeth. this, he thinks, is the most disorienting experience he has had.

then more memories sort through, gentle and teasing, just like the oracle and queen who had propped themselves up against ardyn’s side and talked to him in the beyond. well after ardyn had been purified and cured of the starscourge. his niece nocitfera and his granddaughter lunafreya had remained there with him despite them being able to move on, even though ardyn could not.

noctifera had done something (of course she had, his niece was many things, but overly lucky she was not) and the beyond began to get swallowed up before all six of the astrals came swooping in and panicking and sweeping them away—

and then ardyn woke up in his office in gralea with another set of memories. and they were another set of memories, ardyn can tell. he is not the ardyn that had been purified and bonded with those two girls in body even if he most certainly is in mind and heart. no, he was the ardyn that was fated to be killed by a chosen king not a chosen queen.

and he was still infected. the starscourge was crawling at his mind, slithering around in his body. he frowns as he turns away to look at the mirror and looks at unnatural gold eyes—different from when he overused his magic. this was from the scourge and it makes him frown harder at the mirror.

then he pulls away and answers a call from verstael with a half-hearted tap of the phone screen and lifts it up to give route greetings and go through the motions when verstael eagerly cuts him off, talking about a fleuret and a lucis caelum practically landing in his lap.

ardyn nearly smashes his phone to bits, but acts pleasantly surprised and intrigued and extracts a location with only minor buttering up and a promise to not start anything until he got there. he wants to say hello to these two wayward souls.

and... even if they’re not noctifera and lunafreya, they’re his. his nibling and grandchild. verstael’s hands would get sawed off if he even thought about touching them without any given permission.

but there they were. noctifera and lunafreya, both seeming to be teenagers and trussed up with cuffs and magic suppressors. both of his girls glaring at verstael and only looking at him when he says, “well! i must say, this is a surprise!” and he looks over them worriedly, frowning.

then he spins on his heel and demands, “let them out.”

verstael pales and ardyn distantly registers that his true face is on and the scourge is flowing in the air around him.

“uncle,” says noctifera. ardyn looks over at her. “you can’t just daemonify him.”

“i wasn’t planning on it, my dear niece,” he informs her honestly, but dramatically. “i don’t want him in my head.” then he perches his hands on his hips and saunters forwards, watching the cuffs pop open and feeling the jammer turn off. “you two should be home, my dears.”

“what,” wheezes verstael in the background.

“in a moment,” ardyn says dismissively. he grins at them, winks, and then crosses his arms, mock-sternly.

“it’s not our fault astrals decided to kidnap us,” lunafreya defends half-heartedly. “well, it’s not mine.”

noctifera huffs, but doesn’t argue.

ardyn sighs and then resigns himself to secretly buying a new house in gralea—his was too small to have housed two girls and an adult man for long. “i suppose if you’ve been abducted by the astrals, it’s fine. the least they could’ve done was put you closer to me, honestly. you two aren’t allows to go off on your own.”

“we try not to,” lunafreya tells him. “but sometimes the temptation is there and we do.”

oh. so they wandered off. did they land close by and see him dissociating through sorting the influx of memories and wander away? probably.

ardyn turns to verstael, who’s watching this with a pale face. “regardless, girls, we seem to have been rude. verstael, these two are—”

“i’m flora izunia,” lunafreya says, “ardyn’s daughter.”

“vespera izunia,” noctifera says, “his niece.”

and ardyn grins at verstael’s suddenly chalk-white face.

Jason: Where is my Mr. Darcy? I’m a good person! At this rate I’m going to die an old maid!

Bruce: Jason, you’re twenty. You still have seven more years before you have to start worrying.

Yknow the thing where red pandas just lay down on a branch and let their legs hang and they’re just like vibing