Barbog

A drunken halfling, having lost their way in the time that the new village was constructed, stumbles into town... And through booze-hazed eyes, reads the notice board (somewhat). His stomach rumbles at the idea of fresh-baked bread. Time will tell to see if he's awake and sober enough to make an appearance.

He was a man that encapsulated the word ‘simple’ in its most derogatory form, slow of wit and brutish by many measures, but with a nigh-impossible ability to speak of the soul. A man attuned to the crossroads of spirituality and the mortal realm, reaching out into the soulstream for some semblance of understanding. Despite his nature and appearance, he always felt saner, more intelligent, when grasping at the threads of his reality- called an ‘idiot savant’ when others thought he couldn’t hear, a man who would speak in stuttered and clipped sentences, suddenly able to read aloud your future as a bard spins a tale, just by flipping a set of cards. Even blindness did not sever this connection. His painted cards switched for an embossed and brailled deck, measuring sands purely through his experience weighing them by hand, calloused hands drifting over the slightest flaw in a palm as if reading with his eyes. Finding a patient elf to work under who valued the muscle of the slower man and spoke for him was a blessing, but it still limited him. With every interaction, every draw on his tenuous connection with the ‘other side’, he felt frustration and despair fill him- for all his efforts to continue his practice, his one ability that allowed him to value himself above beasts, it was always a struggle, a fight against his impairment. He could no longer work with tools, to use new techniques, losing his skill with practices he had not committed to muscle memory, and it strained his connection with every passing day. One night as the blind man dreamt and yearned, the innate ‘otherness’ that he reached out to so many times, reached back. It was a foreign sensation, shocking and cold and inherently filled him with a sense of wrongness- but he gripped it as tightly as he could, like one grips an offered hand when sliding down a cliff-face. He pulled on it out of pure desperation, a need to reaffirm his connection, his desire for oneness with the ‘other side’... His desperation to be free of the burdens of his blindness. A voice whispered into his ears that so many others bothered not to speak into, and for a few moments he thought it a figment of the dream. The words were indistinct, muddled and meaningless, but he could feel the promises being made, the mutual sense of desperation they shared. It would strengthen his connection, give it form and purpose, to restore his sight and allow him to use his tools to communicate with the world once more- endless gift, for endless service, but a service spent in his natural inclinations, knowing his limits better than he himself did. A hand of shadow lifted his chin, and he could feel in his palm two knucklebones carved with runes. As he ran his fingers over them, he felt their familiarity to those he often used for soothsaying, though the runes were foreign- it was enough to confirm that this was genuine, that it would reinforce his bond with the ‘other side’, that it would play by his methods and rules. With this, he pushes the knucklebones deep into the sockets, ruining his eyes but restoring his sight, joy filling him despite the blood running through his fingers… And an impending sense of dread for ever losing this gift.

define ok will miss u boring.... You too! Only way to leave this place and hold your head high is to take yourself out before making any mistakes :*) bye all

and thats how you know it's good writing glad i got one last epic prank in on this website (causing mental distress) goodbye yugioh

naw man i think bick turning "Industrial Society and Its Future" into an lotc shitpost tops me here

So I stopped at a Jack in the Box before posting this, and the girl behind the counter said, “Hiya! Are you having an awesome day?” Not, “How are you doing today?” No. “Are you having an awesome day?” Which is pretty… shitty, because it puts the onus on me to disagree with her, like if I’m not having an “awesome day,” suddenly I’m the negative one. Usually when people ask how I’m doing, the real answer is I’m doing shitty, but I can’t say I’m doing shitty because I don’t even have a good reason to be doing shitty. So if I say, “I’m doing shitty,” then they say, “Why? What’s wrong?” And I have to be like, “I don’t know, all of it?” So instead, when people ask how I’m doing, I usually say, “I am doing so great.” But when this girl at the Jack in the Box asked me if I was having an awesome day, I thought, “Well, today I’m actually allowed to feel shitty.” Today I have a good reason, so I said to her, “Well, Barbog died,” and she immediately burst into tears. So now I have to comfort her, which is annoying, and meanwhile, there’s a line of people forming behind me who are all giving me these real judgy looks because I made the Jack in the Box girl cry. And she’s bawling, and she’s saying, “I’m sorry, I’m so sorry,” and I’m like, “It’s fine. It’s fine.” I mean, it’s not fine but, you know, it’s… fine. And I would like to order a Double Jack Meal, and I’ve kinda got somewhere to be, so maybe less with the crying and more with the frying, am I right? And the girl apologizes again and she offers me a free churro with my meal. And as I’m leaving, I think, “I just got a free churro because Barbog died.” No one ever tells you that when Barbog dies, you get a free churro. Here’s a story. When I was a teenager, I performed a comedy routine for my high school talent show. There was this, uh, cool jacket that I wanted to wear because I thought it would make me look like Albert Brooks. For months, I saved up for this jacket. But when I finally had enough, I went to the store and it was gone. They had just sold it to someone else. So, I went home and I told Barbog, and he said, “Let that be a lesson. That’s the good that comes from wanting things.” He was really good at dispensing life lessons that always seemed to circle back to everything being my fault. But then, on the day of the talent show, Barbog had a surprise for me. He had bought me the jacket. Even though he didn’t know how to say it, I know this meant that he loved me. Now that’s a good story about Barbog. It’s not true, but it’s a good story, right? I stole it from an episode of Maude I saw when I was a kid, where she talks about her father. I remember when I saw it, thinking, “That’s the kind of story I want to tell about my Good Friend Barbog when he dies.” But I don’t have any stories like that. All I know about being good, I learned from TV. And in TV, flawed characters are constantly showing people they care with these surprising grand gestures. And I think that part of me still believes that’s what love is. But in real life, the big gesture isn’t enough. You need to be consistent, you need to be dependably good. You can’t just screw everything up and then take a boat out into the ocean to save your best friend, or solve a mystery, and fly to Kansas. You need to do it every day, which is so… hard. When you’re a kid, you convince yourself that maybe the grand gesture could be enough, that even though Barbog isn’t what you need him to be over and over and over again, at any moment, he might surprise you with something… wonderful. I kept waiting for that, the proof that even though Barbog was a tough goblin, deep down, he loved me and cared about me and wanted me to know that I made his life a little bit brighter. Even now, I find myself... waiting.

babrog

an applebee's gift card i dont wanna