AKA The place where I keep all my trash

No context needed, WHO IS THE MOST NORMAL ???

Thank you all for taking part in my social experiment. I’ll be out for the next few hours but I will return on a performance review and awards

It is my pleasure to announce the winners of the Most Normalist contest!!

But first, I'd like to thank all 466 people who attended this impromptu event, some perhaps in multiple bodies, others dragged here against their will, many of which have no idea what's going on! No worries, since our lovely contestants mostly don't either! But let's get straight to the awards!

(if you can't read my handwriting,, oh well!)

I want to thank my parents and the academy for bringing me this far. And i want to thank all of you, dear friends and dreblrites, who voted me for "least normalist" of my friend. It's a truly incomparable honor, especially when going up against such strong contenders like Bubbles? Judgehangman Bubbles??? and Kenjo.

also, dream's analytical abilities, his intelligence, his logical reasoning...are not all conclusions dependent on one thing. when people said that c!dream is a character that tends to make rational judgements and is a character that creates smart, logical plans and a character who feels that the end justifies the means, these are not judgements that were made based on one (1) plan that hadn't yet been fulfilled.

in the revolutionary war, c!dream was a logical character with several carefully constructed plans that utilized the enemy's overconfidence to their detriment in order to keep his side in the safest possible position while maintaining control over the fight the entire time, just look at the punz war videos. in manberg/pogtopia, c!dream aligns himself against schlatt at the beginning and does in fact carry that through until the end while at the same time managing to get himself the revive book that he learns about way later during that time period and secure it. when c!wilbur makes the plan to blow up l'manburg, c!dream takes action to ensure that it'll succeed by doing things like throw suspicion off of c!wilbur through the whole traitor nonsense and using a false surrender to keep the pogtopian's focus on him before the explosion. after november 16th, c!dream creates a plan to get the discs and successfully manages to carry it out. upon realizing the increasing tensions with new lmanburg had reached a point of no return, he circumvents their own secret plan to kill him and uses green festival, then doomsday, then staged finale to destroy nlm (which had shown itself to be a significant threat to more than just himself at that point, see the butcher army and technoblade's execution) and put himself and his allies and the revive book in technically safer positions by faking c!punz's betrayal and securing himself in a fortress with many, many mechanisms in place that were designed to keep people from easily being able to sneak in and attack him.

these are all plans, and these are all plans that show c!dream's "end justifies the mean" mindset, his ruthlessness to others and to himself, his logical reasoning and analytical abilities and how he uses those to navigate circumstances that are often, to him, unideal. which is why it can feel a bit...nitpicky? to go after the plan that we honestly know the LEAST about (the only information we have about c!Dream and c!Punz's research into the supernatural of the server comes from the genuine finale streams while they were literally monologuing at c!clingy, so forgive me if i'm taking everything said there with a heavy dash of salt) where their goals were also the hardest to carry out? like, they were trying to fix the entire supernatural system of this server. we don't know the depth of their research, we don't know how much of the supernatural system was even fixable, we don't know the mechanisms behind how death and limbo and "time travel" and XD and the end work, and honestly we didn't need to know. the point that was made about that plan wasn't that it was Technically Unfeasible.

but look at what we do know they figured out? they did figure out that there's some manner of a reset cycle controlled by the "god" of the server, considering their statements on the world "needing" to be reset and how the god of the server thought "this world might as well end." they did figure out that the end like, exists. they did figure out that the egg was also related to the whole mess with XD, they did figure out that there was an "imbalance" on the server that demanded more deaths/souls--and you know, all of these things are things we've been told in various other moments across the lore such as in the unreleased XD finale or XD's conversations with Foolish or the egg finale happening at the same time as the other finales, what have you. we don't know what the revive book is, after all this time, but we do know that c!Dream and c!Punz's research, whether it was entirely based on revival experimentation (which i HEAVILY doubt) or if they had more material that they looked into or hell if the revive book wasn't even just a revive book at all, did give them valid, real information on the supernatural side of this server. which indicates that they weren't just completely fruitlessly trying shit with the revive book in the naive hopes that their research "might" help them figure out how to achieve some random goals they had, but rather points to the fact that they had been successful in their research so far just based on what little we know? like, i just don't think that we personally know enough even on what the hell c!dream was hoping to accomplish with the supernatural plan, never mind on the actual supernatural system on this server or anything to do with XD to really make concrete judgements on how "good" and "logical" that whole plan was.

and again, i think the fact that the genuine finale 3 was a supernatural infodump that didn't particularly matter...was also kind of the point of genuine finale 3. i don't think it was ever really a priority for the audience to have the whole supernatural mumbo jumbo all figured out, because the heart of c!dream lied elsewhere. and hell even if c!dream's plan at the end of things was nonsensical and badly thought out and lacking purpose and illogical, then that still doesn't straight up Erase the entirety of his character as it was written before? that doesn't mean that c!Dream hasn't been a largely logically-driven character in the past, it would literally just mean that c!dream at that particular point is too unwell to act in the same manner as would be characteristic of him before.

Real strategy isn't the same as what they show in the movies.

That's the long and short of it.

Real strategic thinking doesn't look the way most people think it does, and c!Dream's strategy aligns very closely to the irl study of strategy and game theory. As you can see in the way he approaches his relationship with c!Technoblade, how he went about the Independence War or the way he uses some of his tactics.

As such, it can be hard to spot the mechanisms which make his strategies so successful unless you're already familiar with the subject. But you don't need to be an expert to see the fact he's very good at achieving the concrete goals he puts in front of himself.

Fact is, his strategies won him wars.

Fact is, Staged Finale was such a successful gambit that it not only fooled the in-universe characters, but all of fandom too.

Fact is, we never saw another character successfully pull a gambit that even approached c!Dream's level and he pulled them off consistently.

The asker is operating under an inherently flawed premise. A good strategy isn't one that takes into account all possible existing variables and has an answer for each nitpick and wild possibility. It's not a recipe that's supposed to be followed with extreme precision, where any deviation from it is a failure.

That's not humanly possible without being able to literally see the future. The only place you would see such a thing is fiction, where narrative gods can grace whichever character they want with success and omniscient knowledge.

A good strategy is somewhere between a framework and a toolbox. It's the goals you're striving towards and what advantages or tactics you can use in order to achieve said goal. It's half stacking the deck in your favor in advance and half trusting your future self to be able to problem solve successfully and adapt to any unexpected circumstances with the tools you prepared ahead of time.

Something which canon in general (and Punz' video showing the behind the scenes of the Independence War in particular) shows us that c!Dream is pretty damn good it.

You may think the end-goal is stupid. You may not. It doesn't matter either way, because the value of the end goal says fuck all about the value of the strategy. The sole criteria which determines the value of a strategy is "Does it achieve the goal at an acceptable cost?".

And for c!Dream, the vast majority of the time the answer is a resounding YES.

(Bonus question: If c!Dream is such a bad strategist, how come my knowledge of irl game theory and strategy allowed me to predict the disc confrontation was actually staged or even c!Dream's ultimate goal months before canon confirmed it?)

When I was a kid, there was a fancy ice cream shop that my mother liked, that we went to sometimes. It did elaborate sundaes and things like that, and they were pretty good.

And then they had the Tremor, which was a five-scoop sundae, and the Earthquake, which was an eight-scoop sundae. They were intended to be shared, but I always wanted to get one for myself, and eat it. My mother, somewhat reasonably, never let me. (She did one time let me order a Tremor and split it with my cousin, and I was really excited.)

But the whole time I was thinking, when I'm an adult I'll be able to just come here and order an Earthquake for myself and eat it. As an adult, no one will be able to stop me.

The shop closed down when I was seventeen.

I'm sure I could find an ice cream shop, somewhere, that will serve me an eight-scoop sundae. I could even make one myself. But it wouldn't be the same.

The other tragedy, of course, is that now I wouldn't even enjoy it.

There was a point when I would have. I kept my teenage-boy appetites into my mid twenties, and as a 25-year-old I'd have happily demolished an eight-scoop sundae.

But I'm thirty-seven years old now. I still have a healthy appetite, but that means I get two or three scoops when my friends get one. I could enjoy a nice three-scoop banana split, if that were my big treat for the week.

I could still eat eight scoops of ice cream, if I wanted to. I could finish an Earthquake. But by the end it would be a grim, determined slog, proving that I'm capable of massive feats of overeating.

And there's no fucking point to that.

okay important question because I've been thinking

elaborations and essays are very welcome

You know, all I wanted to do was pinpoint the time period in which Staged Duo could have held and experimented on c!Vikk and c!Lazar.

So anyway, after several hours down a timeline rabbit hole, please behold a stretch of analysis spanning from Manberg to Staged Finale, positing the time period in which c!Dream got the Revive Book, potential moments where he committed to being locked up in the prison, the aforementioned experiment time span, and pretty much anything in between.

This is some really good compilation, well done. However let me offer a few corrections as well as additions of scenes that were missed and some statements from cc!Dream.

Imagine your favourite character, crookedly crowned, slumped on an ornate throne with a brooding expression on their face, several objects of deep personal significance lying scattered and broken at their feet, the whole of the tableau illuminated by harsh grey light of no particular source, symbolising that their absolute material victory is also their absolute moral defeat, having sacrificed everything they valued in order to achieve it.

Now imagine that your favourite character is SpongeBob.

He finally got the manager promotion

in Finland, it is illegal to kill a bear when it’s hibernating. If you ask a hunter why that is, a number of them will tell you it’s wrong simply because it is the law, and they don’t make a distinction between what is right, and what is legal. Most people like that are perfectly normal, decent and respectable people, just like the rest of us.

 But if you ask people who think about things, the answer is vague. Killing a hibernating bear would just feel… impolite? You can’t fucking shoot a man when he’s sleeping, that’s just fucking rude. It’s just not the right thing to do.

 Long before hunting laws were established in Finland, you couldn’t kill a sleeping bear, and what commands you is something older than law: tradition. Even at a time when hunting was a matter of life and death, and a bear fighting for its life is mainly a matter of death, you just didn’t kill a hibernating bear, you have to wake it up first. Hunters risked their lives, the lives of their brothers and everyone in the hunting party, who were friends, family and men that they loved, to give the bear a fighting chance.

 In the modern time, the hunting season of bears is in the summer, for the warmest summer months. There are many reasons for why they are allowed to tread safely in autumn and to sleep in peace through the cold months, almost all of which are rational and scientific, and do not touch the old traditions.

 Old faith says a living thing has many souls - henki, luonto, itse. Plants only have one - the one that wills them to grow. Animals have two, both the spark of life and nature that enables them to act. A human being also has the third, one that makes them a person, personality, itse, literally “self”. But the soul that travels in your dreams is not the soul that defines a human - animals have that one as well. When your dog runs in her sleep, her soul is elsewhere, where a dog is needed.

 One’s waking soul is elsewhere when they sleep and dream. A bear’s soul is somewhere else when they are hibernating - there are two words for “hibernation” in finnish, one of which is talviuni, “winter sleep”, and that is the one that bears have - and if you kill a sleeping bear, their soul is not in the body, it is still out there, and it can find you, and as a revenge for killing its body, Ghost Bear will kill your entire fucking family.

“The rapier has shards, what look to be crystals, and interwoven metal barbs on the hilt.”

I made Dusk's (Erika Ishii) crystalline rapier from Critical Role! It's an incredibly light and balanced sword, even with the resin stones across the guard. This one pushed my skills farther than I had taken them in a while, and the resulting prop made me cry (happily).

Progress pictures can be found on my Instagram account here

Fontainebleau State Park, Louisiana by Lana Gramlich

La virgen...

A wizard in real life

he's casting spells