#...and at some point i need to try and learn how to code games to actually make it XD

[arolesbianism]

Just wanted to drop in and say thank you for finding and posting the ONI logs that you do! As someone who loves the story of the game but absolutely would not have the energy to find all of the logs that aren’t on the wiki legitimately its nice to be able to see some of them. The one w/ nails in it is especially interesting! Nails was already one of my favorite dupes but that log made me like them even more tbh. Everyone say thank you to Human Nails™️ for making dupes like actually cognizant.

Also, saw your ONI stuff on artfight! I am absolutely not plotting and scheming anything at all i swear :]

Oghhhh tysm :')!!!! I've been feeling a bit self conscious abt my oni obsession lately so this means a lot! I still need to get around to making my oni story catalogue actually readable, I started a while back but ran out of steam after the like 50th incident with said one with Nails in it lol. And I actually recognized you from artfight! Saw your oni guys a few days ago and I'm honestly obsessed with them, it would be a shame if I had my hand forced and had to draw them :3c

[shawtuzi]

you’re the bad boy that i’ve always dreamed of ᡣ𐭩ྀིྀི₊ ⊹

here’s a little something of how plug!geto and reader went from strangers to lovers!! this will contain smut and some drug use so mdni thank yewww <3 pairing: plug!geto x black coded reader///wc:3.2k

STRANGERS ᡣ𐭩₊˚.⋆⁺₊

• it was a friday night when suguru received a message from you on instagram asking for a 3.5–just from the message alone he could tell it was your first time doing this. it was cute the way you added exclamation points and a smiley face at the end of your message.

• the first time he saw you he was starstruck. it’s not even like you were dressed up, just a simple black tank top and some pink juicy couture shorts. the way you were so soft spoken and smelled so damn good—oh he wanted you, he needed you. thus began the long game of suguru trying to pursue you.

geto’s first impression of you: so damn pretty, smells like vanilla n for some amazing reason cookie dough, on the taller side, one of the most gracious people he’s ever met while dropping off some weed—srsly you said ‘thank you so so much!’ like four times before he even handed it to you, a little on the awkward side but he likes it heje.

your first impression of geto: drives a nice ass car, pulled up blasting partynextdoor so he must have good music taste, the longest n most prettiest hair you’ve ever seen on a man—you couldn’t help but wonder if it felt as soft as it looked, a little on the intimidating side but you did get a small smile out of him and mannn did he have a pretty smile, will definitely be messaging him again soon.

• the second time he dropped you off some weed he put in a little extra bc of as rn you were his favorite customer regardless if it was only your second time shopping. this time he made a little conversation:

“i like your hair, suits you really well,” it was a very mesmerizing burgundy color, reaching almost towards your bottom. you of course were very taken aback, your cheeks feeling like someone set hot coals on them. you picked at your denim skirt, trying to avoid his gaze. “thank you suguru i, uh, got it done this morning. i wasn’t so sure about the color when she finished but i’m starting to like it more and more!” you gave him a little smile, which he gratefully returned. geto scaled your weed one more time before giving it to you, his fingers brushing against any part of your hand/wrist he could touch.

“so you know how to roll?” he asked, using the elastic on his wrist to put his hair in a bun, you had to physically restrain yourself from giving it just a little touch </3 you puffed air from your cheeks, shaking your head, “nah i just use this pipe my friend gave me i’m not quite an expert at that yet.” suguru’s smile got wider at your words, now he had the perfect excuse to get you to smoke with him. he ran his tongue over his lips, a shiny ball on the center of his tongue catching your attention. “you should let me teach you how to do it sometime—ah, i mean if you want you don’t have to,” and that was the first time suguru heard you laugh and that sound might’ve gotten him higher than any strain he’s ever smoked.

“i’d love for you to teach me!”

• the third time you both saw each other it was not transactional, just a simple hotbox session. he taught you how to roll up and although it was very sweet of him to do so it was very hard to concentrate. his hands—which were both tatted tf up moved so swiftly as he packed the blunt and rolled it. don’t even get me started on the way he sealed the blunt with his tongue, there was something so sensual about it especially with the way he was looking at you. you both learned a lot about each other that night, and that my friends was the start of a beautiful friendship.

FRIENDS ᡣ𐭩₊˚.⋆⁺₊

• you and geto hanging out became a regular occurrence. he no longer charged you for weed, instead he would just send you on your way with some after each smoke sesh. every time he saw you his crush only got bigger and bigger, and he was sure he was starting to become not to subtle about it.

• every morning you woke up to a good morning text from him, followed by him bidding you a good day and to text him if you needed anything. some days he surprised you with lunch at your job, or brought takeout on nights that you invited him over to smoke. it was getting to a point if one of you didn’t hear from the other for even a day you’d think there was some tension bc you just hung out that much.

• it wasn’t often but suguru did let you hit the block with him whenever he wanted some company. you were his passenger princess—you had full control over the aux, he had some of your fav snacks in the glove compartment, and best of all he always had a preroll for you to smoke in case you got bored. sometimes if you were real bored he’d let you pack and scale the weed (he’d be lying if he said it didn’t turn him on a little bit watching you do it).

• tons of ‘platonic’ hugs and cuddling. geto basically wishes he could live in your skin, you were just so soft and smelt so fucking good it gave him the worst cuteness aggression. one of your friends caught you two doing the good ol’ swaying side to side hug and from that day on they never let up on the allegations that you both had a crush on each other.

• i mentioned before that as the days went by suguru’s crush on you grew more and more and with that came his jealousy. geto considered himself a very levelheaded man, i mean with a temper like his he had to or else he’d be in jail right now. so when he saw some man come up behind you to feel you up while you were dancing with your friends livid wasn’t even the word:

“um excuse you,” you hissed attempting to push the stranger away, but before you could even touch him he was yanked away by a very angry geto. “do you touch every girl you find attractive without her permission? hm? speak the fuck up i can’t hear you,” while his words were harsh his facial expression was eerily calm, you’d be lying if you said it wasn’t attractive. “i was just having a lil’ fun is all cmon sugu—” geto cut the stranger off and pointed to you, “do it look like she’s having fun right now? are you having fun y/n?” you scrunched up your nose, shaking your head. suguru kissed him teeth, glaring at the man, “now get the fuck on, seriously, you’re a good customer of mine i don’t wanna have to fuck you up yeah?” and that was the end of that.

the ride back to your place was quiet until geto spoke up, “i didn’t embarrass you did i? i know you could’ve held your own and your friends were there but—” you cut geto off with a kiss to his cheek, your lips lingering for just a few seconds longer than they should’ve. “you didn’t embarrass me sugu, thank you for sticking up for me i really appreciate you,” the way your eyes sparkled when you said those last four words had suguru’s heart pounding against his ribcage. you probably think he kissed you right?? WRONG MY MANS PUSSIED OUT!!!

• geto was totally convinced he fumbled his only chance to kiss you until one faithful night, during a hotbox session you lent over the console and kissed him. you’d think a lot of words would be exchanged after that but after waiting almost a year to feel your lips against his the last thing suguru wanted to do in that moment was talk. the hotbox consisted of lots of nasty kisses, suguru sloppily kissing n sucking at your neck, and a SMIDGE of dry humping.

FRIENDS W/ BENEFITS ᡣ𐭩₊˚.⋆⁺₊

• each hangout with geto after that night was filled with lots of kissing and grabbing, my man just could not keep his hands to himself even if he rlly tried. for a few weeks it never went further than dry humping, both you too scared that you’d cross a boundary.

• the first time suguru went down on you it was during your monthly movie night. you were making out, nothing out of the ordinary maybe a couple ass grabs here and there. it wasn’t until you gave a particularly rough tug to his hair that he noticed his self control was starting to crumble—he just had to indulge in you. that’s how you ended up with your legs over his broad shoulders while he made out with your pussy, making you cum four times consecutively.

•geto was obsessed after that. my mans never turned down an opportunity to eat you out—he didn’t care if it was in the car, on the floor, the shower, in front of his goddamn roommate one way or another his head was gonna end up between your plushy thighs. that tongue piercing did wonders for you, the feeling of it randomly brushing against your swollen clit always had your eyes crossing.

• now the first time you went down on geto he came down your throat a few minutes in like a goddamn virgin. of course it didn’t take long for him to get hard again and minutes later he was fucking your throat. you were taking it like a champ and he was sooo proud of you. he was a good six and half inches but incredibly thick, so thick it was almost impossible not to gag and slob all over him—but don’t worry you soon learned he likes his head very messy. you also learned that he’s a god tier praiser!!

some things he says when you give him head include: ‘that’s it babe take it nice n slow—hah! yeah jus like that’, ‘this tight ass throat is gonna make me nut already gorgeous’, ‘that’s right gorgeous take that fuckin’ dick lemme hear you choke’, ‘you’re so pretty like this—look so pretty, f-fuck don’t look at me like that or i’ll cum’ <3

• the first time you and geto had sex was after a block party, you already knew you were done for not even an hour in when suguru thought it would be a good idea to pour a shot in your mouth, his tatted hand snug against your throat as you swallowed. after that he was glued to your side the rest of the night, his arm wrapped securely around your waist. you felt people staring, mainly girls who have been trying to get at geto before you even came into the picture but you didn’t care one bit—it was even a little funny watching their fuming faces as you danced with him:

“and who’re you tryna put a show on for?” suguru whispered in your ear, chuckling at the mischievous glint in your eyes. you pulled him closer by his chain, the alcohol in your system giving you a boost of confidence. “i’m just tired of those bitches staring, wanna give them something to look at since they wanna look so bad,” you whipped your head around, and sure enough those hatin ass hoes were still staring. suguru hummed, a smirk soon making its way onto his lips.

“follow me gorgeous, i wanna take you somewhere.”

• geto ended up taking you to his secret sanctum, a lookout point that had the most beautiful view of the city—a place where he can be alone with his thoughts about you. it didn’t take long for him to have you against the hood of his car, fucking into with everything his heart had to offer. you lost count of how many orgasms he got out of you, but what you do remember is the words he whispered into your ear as he finished inside you:

“wha’? what’d you say sugu?” you whispered, gently removing his face from your neck. his post-sex glow was ungodly, but there was something in his eyes that had your heart feeling heavy. “i like you. i like so you much y/n. i’m tired of being your friend, i wanna be your boyfriend n’ have you all to myself,” he said every word as slowly and clearly as possible to make sure you understood his confession. you were quiet, too quiet, it had his heart twisting with every beat of silence.

“i like you too suguru.”

LOVERS ᡣ𐭩₊˚.⋆⁺₊

• suguru was the most attentive and loving boyfriend you could’ve ever asked for. he’s the kind of boyfriend where he doesn’t see why his girlfriend shouldn’t get everything she asks for, so best believe he took spoiling you to a whole other level. you needed you hair done? boom paid for. you needed your nails and toes done? he’s at the counter paying for it while you get pampered. you hungry? he’ll get you whatever you’re craving even if it means multiple stops.

• announced your relationship on his social media by posting a picture of you holding two zips of weed to your head, a geeked out smile on your glossy lips—he captioned it ‘all i need in this life of sin’ and OF COURSEEE put ‘03’ bonnie and clyde’ as the song for the background.

• suguru isn’t the biggest fan of pda but that doesn’t stop him from leaving little kisses on your shoulders or doing that one thing where he gives your hips the tiniest squeeze before wrapping his arms around you. if you get him lit enough though he’ll turn into the biggest fucking slut omg i’m talking pushing you against his front so you can feel how hard his underneath his pants, giving you a particularly sloppy kiss outta nowhere, but your favorite is when he gives you the low red eyes and lip bite combo. yup that’ll do it every time:

“n-no pda my ass you turned my cute lap dance into me—hah! almost riding you in front of—a-ah! everyoneeee fuck sugu! why’re you fucking me like that?” your mind was truly baffled at how rough and deep geto was fucking you against the bathroom stall. your words fell on deaf ears as geto fucked into you harder, the stall door thumping with every thrust. suguru groaned, shoving himself all the way in before stilling his hips. “it’s almost like you do the shit on purpose. . . wanna make me wanna lose my cool in front of everyone and act like a fucking slut just like you,” he removed his face from your neck, resting his forehead against yours. “i was chillin’ till you started do your little ‘lap dance’—had me humping on you like i was some fuckin’ virgin,” you both laughed at the last part. you brought your hands to suguru’s face, cupping his cheeks, “it’s okay babe let’s just be slutty together yeah?” geto hissed when he felt your pussy clench around his dick, his teeth clamping down on his bottom lip.

“you’re so fucking nasty. . . i love it.”

• it’s safe to say that after that geto warmed up more to the idea of pda

• your family is surprisingly obsessed with suguru, he had them all under his charming spell the first time he visited your parents’ house. when talking about his place of employment he might’ve left out the fact that he sells weed on the side but he was very honest about his apprenticeship at tattoo parlor.

• speaking of him learning to be a tattoo artist, he’s the one that gave you your first tattoo. nothing too crazy just ‘worthy’ tatted on your upper thigh—it hurt like a bitch but he praised you the whole way through it. this eventually lead to him eating you out after he was done to reward you for handling it like a champ <3

• the first time suguru says i love you is after he comes home from a little scuffle and you being the angel you were tended to him. it was so random yet rolled off his tongue so easily, it just felt right. you were shocked but nonetheless so happy to hear those three words from him, you returned them of course followed by a loving kiss. this is also the first time suguru has ever made love to you—hell made love to anyone:

“this is so nice—shit, why haven’t we ever done this before baby?” suguru was breathless, borderline gasping for air at how good you felt. as much as he considered himself to be a lover boy geto has never quite made love—at least not like this. everything was so slow, yet so sensual and filled with so much love he could’ve teared up. you paused your assault on his neck, removing your face to look up at him and wow you’ve never looked more beautiful. you had the tiniest pout on your lips—a silent plea for him to give you a kiss, which he happily gave you. “you’re so deep sugu. . .‘feel you in my stomach,” you gasped when you felt his tip hit a particularly deep spot inside you, your pussy clenching around him like a vice. suguru whined—yes you heard me WHINED when he heard you say that, his already slow pace faltering slightly. “don’t say shit like that please baby—shiiit, m’tryna last,” his hand was holding onto your hip so tightly it would surely leave bruises, but you didn’t mind in the slightest. you kissed your way from his jaw to his neck once more, sucking on the spot just below his ear. “let go sugu, want you to finish inside me—ngh! make me feel warm,” you whispered the last part in his ear and that’s what finally did it. with one final stroke geto whispered those three words in your ear, making shivers travel up your spine.

“i love you more suguru <3”

BONUS (a little aftercare scene bc i can’t help myself)

after making love to you geto couldn’t help himself and fucked you so damn silly you couldn’t move a limb after he was finished with you. “that was a little much wasn’t it?” you groaned, scooting your body to be closer to him. suguru chuckled, giving your forehead three sweet kisses. “i couldn’t help myself babe, i was filled with sooo much love i just had to let it out,” you squealed when he slapped your ass, his hand gripping onto the flesh roughly. you lifted your head up to glare at him, the pout on your face making him coo, annoying you even more. “did my pussy have to be the victim of it? i can’t stand you. . . or your stupid dick,” you grumbled, poking at his now soft dick. geto smushed your cheeks together, pulling your face closer to his, “now you know you don’t mean that.” a smirk tugged at his lips when you didn’t respond, “that’s what i thought now c’mere and lemme hold you.” you huffed, laying your head on his chest, the dull sounding beat his heart making you drowsier by the minute.

“i love you so much y/n.”

THE END ᡣ𐭩₊˚.⋆⁺₊

[ablobwhowrites]

I feel that player is now abnormally advanced then any human because of what happens at playtime co making them learn how to fight, code, react abnormally fast, survive toxic gas, survive without eating for long periods of time, hold breath without passing out, carry HEAVY item that even bodybuilders would have trouble with all that good stuff

I honestly love this though cause imagine when y/n is hangout with friends (don't worry the toys are being babysat by y/n's grandparents) and going to some kind of pop up arcade and y/n doing that punch power game and ended up physically breaking it and their friends are just standing there shocked at how this motherfucker just broke that machine. Also imagining like y/n just doing the almost heaviest set of bench presses they can do also imagining like once y/n's friend lost sometimes under a car and y/n is like. "Oh I got it" and lifts the far up so y/n's friend can just crawl under and grab it. Also imagining that they challenge y/n to a arm wrestle and immediately lose and y/n's just wondering if their friends are just pulling a prank or letting him win as a joke but it's not, it's cause y/n is just so god damn strong from having to survive the factory and do almost having every single near life and death experience known to man, like having to be fast at reacting cause of how many hostile things where in that factory. Having to starve and basically go on long periods without food and water cause most of the water down there is probably contaminated with something cause no way it's clean.

Then having to survive toxic has and the same has that is a high level explosion device also pending with basically almost being eaten alive by other staving things in playtime co that have given y/n long lasting scars and major blood loss because what I said, there is absolutely no way they are coming out unscathed without like any wounds and pretty sure they may have unchecked broken or fractured bones. Also being electrocuted is one to because of the doctor and that one trap basically sending god knows how many volts through y/n's body cause the grab pack holds on for a pretty good almost minute. Plus dragging those heavy ass boxes like nothing and you have to build some crazy leg strength and even without the grab pack pretty sure their arms are probably jacked to because of how much they use the grab pack that requires your arms and to physically use your arms for every function of the grab pack plus so much more that basically makes them a beast cause I imagine no other person surviving that.

I don't imagine sometimes y/n uses his fast reaction skills to try and keep things from falling off or some like that but the object just doesn't fall but y/n being already prepared to catch something ends up looking likes their going crazy. Bro need to catch up on a lot of sleep cause I know they ain't processing things normally and is still on survival mode at this point.

(that's it for my yap session. If you like this please don't feel shy and request any ideas for y/n's or stories. But for now please stay safe and drink water!)

[alchemistc]

Technically a continuation of the make them communicate series I keep getting more inspo for.

two-way contract

"I need some advice," he says, the moment they're settled, and Tommy stares forlornly at the slab of salmon that is definitely not going to be the right temperature in however many minutes. It takes him a moment to register what he's being asked, and it takes a concerted effort to keep his cool once he draws a conclusion.

Evan has a roster, Tommy knows. A specific set of people he reaches out to for specific areas of expertise, and Tommy, for all that they've been working on things, has never been a part of that.

He thinks of hearing that Evan admired him, once upon a time, and wonders if the Tommy hearing that had ever considered he might one day shift into the roster. It's not a promotion he's entirely prepared for. He hasn't trained for this.

"Okay," Tommy says.

"So there's... this guy," Evan says, and the irritation hits Tommy's spine before he can stop it. Not a call-up, after all.

He's trying to work through this stupid urge to be Everything All The Time for Evan, but it's work. It's still work.

"Is this guy ...handsome?" Strike two for the both of them. Straight to the flirt. Or, if Evan's feeling snippy, a direct line to the jealousy and accusations.

Evans brow furrows in confusion. "Tommy, what does his attractiveness have to do with -?" He veers. "I have to start again or I'm gonna lose my train of thought."

Strike three before Tommy's even learned This Guys name.

"There's a guy, from 137," Evan starts again. "You can eat, this is gonna take a minute."

Christ, add a 3-6-4 double-play by the opposition to the list.

The warmth hits his spine as Evan lays out the absolute stupidest turf war known to man, and the fellow firefighter who keeps flirting with him at scenes they both show up at.

"Like I'm free game, Tommy. Like every civil servant in the city isn't well aware I'm dating that crazy pilot from 217?"

"That's what they call me now?"

"So not the point, Tommy."

Evan drops Tommy's name like an endearment, like a sacrament, like an expletive. Tommy's never appreciated his name before he heard Evan Buckley use it like a prayer.

Crazy Pilot isn't the worst thing he's ever been called. He doesn't see anyone else out here attempting to get closer to Those Batshit Freaks At The 118. They might have a point.

"What... do you need my advice for?"

Evan rolls his eyes. "Tommy." A plea, this time. "I don't know how to let a dude down gently. Not on purpose, anyway."

("Oh, TK thought I was asking him out," on a random Tuesday morning while Tommy was doing his best work right around Evan's belly button.

"Can you please stop bringing up all the men you didn't know you wanted to fuck while there's a perfectly serviceable one right here?"

"You're more than serviceable, Tommy.")

He's been trying to stop seeing everything as a test, too, and that little nugget is rearing it's ugly head at the moment.

It takes him a long moment to realize Evan's framed this whole thing in a way that blazed right fucking past Tommy's jealousy issues.

"What did Maddie say?"

Evan's brow creases. "I haven't talked to her about it."

Oh.

Fuck.

He's gotta get past the giddy feeling bubbling up before he blows this. They can talk about that later.

"Is gentle the right move, here?" Evan blinks. "If you're sure he knows about me, maybe tossing the code of conduct with a highlighted sexual harassment section through his window one night is a better move."

"I know you're being facetious but the only reason I'm not doing that is because he'd find something flattering about me knowing where he lives."

The surge of protectiveness isn't new, but it feels like a new branch has grown off that tree. Not the point. Not the issue. But it's there all the same. "So he's been aggressive about it."

"He sent me flowers at work."

Better than home.

"C shift thought they were from you until I threw them in the trash."

Worse than home, actually.

Tommy doesn't have a solution. Tommy has the reminder of a man who'd clocked him in his late twenties before he'd figured himself out and scared Tommy into dating women for half a decade.

"I don't know if gentle is the right move," Evan says, and Tommy knows they aren't getting to dinner for a while. "I just know if the rumor mill gets hold of this they're gonna start calling you Crazy Cuck instead and then I'm gonna break my hand on their face."

Tommy snorts a sip of wine through his nose when he fails to hold back a laugh

[glowettee]

✧・creating a personal library system that actually works゜✧・゜✧

hey lovelies!

so last weekend i had a complete meltdown when i couldn't find my copy of "pride and prejudice" (the one with all my notes!) and ended up reorganizing my entire book collection at 2am. classic me behavior. but honestly? it was the best decision i've made in ages because now i actually know where everything is and i'm not buying duplicate books anymore (yes, i somehow owned three copies of "the bell jar"… don't ask).

i thought i'd share my super simple system for keeping track of my little library in case any of you are drowning in books too!

⋆.ೃ࿔:･ the physical organization ･:.ೃ࿔

i tried organizing by color once and while it looked pretty on instagram, it was literally impossible to find anything. so now i do a mix of these categories that actually makes sense for how i use my books:

favorites shelf - these are my ride-or-die books that i reread constantly and want to grab easily

to-be-read shelf - keeps all my unread books in one place so they don't get lost in the mix

read-but-keeping shelf - books i've finished but want to hold onto

reference section - cookbooks, style guides, etc that i need to access quickly

borrowed books corner - a special spot just for books that aren't mine so i actually remember to return them (sorry to everyone waiting for their books back…)

within each section, i organize alphabetically by author because i'm basic like that. but honestly it works!

⋆.ೃ࿔:･ the tracking system ･:.ೃ࿔.

this is the game changer! i used to rely on my memory (lol) to keep track of what i'd read until i found myself 50 pages into a book before realizing i'd already read it. now i use:

a simple reading journal - nothing fancy, just a notebook where i write the title, author, when i started/finished it, and a few thoughts

sticky flags in different colors - blue for beautiful quotes, pink for plot points i want to remember, yellow for things to research later

the inside cover trick - i write the date i finished the book and a tiny heart rating (♥♥♥♥♥) system on the inside cover

a digital backup - i use storygraph (not goodreads all the time because amazon owns enough of my life) to keep a digital record

⋆.ೃ࿔:･ the borrowing system ･:⋆.ೃ࿔:･

if you're like me and constantly lending books to friends (or borrowing them), this will save your friendships:

a dedicated "lending library" note in my phone with who has what and when they borrowed it

book plates that say "borrowed from mindy's library" (these were like $8 online and so worth it)

a rule that i only lend books i'm okay with never seeing again (learned this one the hard way)

��.ೃ࿔:･ the "did i already read this?" solution ･:.ೃ࿔

this was my biggest problem! now i:

take a quick photo of books i read but don't keep (like library books)

keep a "books i've read" list in my notes app for quick reference while browsing bookstores

add a tiny dot on the upper right corner of the first page of books i own and have finished

it's not a perfect system but it's simple enough that i actually stick with it! the key is finding what works for your reading habits rather than trying to create some instagram-perfect color-coded situation that you'll abandon after a week.

what about you guys? any genius book organization hacks i should know about?

xoxo, mindy 🤍

[kooki914]

Nobody asked and yet you're getting it anyway, my Dess interpretation! Tbf I love a lot of other people's Dess designs maybe more than my own based on complexity/symbology alone, but this is what my original take for her was so I'm sticking to it. Extremely long list of factoids for her under the cut!

Dess hasn't seen a hairbrush in 8 years.

Opening her first fountain was an accident, and so was entering the dark world, but it was something she desperately needed at that point. She was knighted by Spade King, before being dubbed the Roaring Knight by the general public after she opened the second fountain and people started (correctly) assuming she was trying to cause the apocalypse.

Dess is mtf trans! She was out since she was 9, and took puberty blockers for a while, but stopped after she disappeared because she, y'know, didn't have access to them anymore. Strangely, even though she's been off of them for so long, there's very few side effects. You can just see her Adam's apple sometimes and muscle mass started building for her easily, but that's it. She's silently grateful that her dad didn't pass down any beard-making genes.

The reason why it's been so mild is due in part because of the effect of being in the "void" for too long, aka the space so dark and isolated you can't even feel your own limbs. She was stuck in the code of the game, basically, and it's had adverse effects on her mentally and physically, the only positive effect being less testosterone production in her body.

The physical effects are odd. Though she's grown and her body's age is what it would've been if she never disappeared, she's still in the same clothes she was when she ran away, but they sized up with her. The black nail polish she had on is still there too, not even chipped. As previously mentioned, her hormones are out of whack but, somehow, she's still clearly a grown adult, as if she just went through a very, very mild puberty.

The mental effects of being stranded in the literal nothingness are as expected as they are odd. The standard effects of not having contact with another person for so long have, somehow, never taken hold. It's like the social part of her brain was just put on pause. However, part of the madness she DID get was her very much considering her memories might just be made up. As if she was always here and managed to, somehow, delude herself into thinking she had a life outside of this place, when she never did. Essentially, she stopped existing, but retained some level of consciousness.

The whole "not existing for a while" thing as well as the fact that she's pre-hrt trans means she absolutely hates mirrors. Give her a mirror and she'll give back about a hundred shards of it. When she was younger she usually just had dysphoria over looking too boyish (hence why she never cut her hair) but nowadays she has weird feelings about something as simple as Having Knees (the existential horror of having a body after being formless in the nothingness during your formative years).

Her journey as the Knight was mostly about rediscovering herself, trying to find purpose and trying to help the people around her. She spent her whole life feeling helpless, and wanted to destroy that feeling, for everyone. Her violent behavior was rewarded by the equally maladjusted Spade King, and they teamed up under the pretense of helping all of darkner kind.

Dess set out to cause the Roaring, per his instruction, without knowing what it even was. All she knew is that, apparently, she was the only one who could, and that gave her a sense of purpose. Once she learned it'd bring about the end of the world, she was so detached from the world that she carried on anyway, not concerned with the life that could be lost because, god, she spent so long outside it, how COULD she know what life was worth now?

Dess went by neutral pronouns (they/it) as the Knight because it was another mask she used to distance what she Knew of herself and what she Had to be (kind of like Asriel calling himself "Flowey" in Undertale, actually). Being called "her" was too familiarising and humanising, being called "he" made her break out into hives and start killing, so she stuck with the alternatives for utilitarian reasons. Somewhere along the way she got sick of it and started missing her feminine pronouns, but decided to just stick to the bit anyway. The world was gonna end soon anyhow, who cares?

Once she's out of the role of Knight and back in the light world, you bet your ass she's switching back to exclusively she/her. Fuck neutrality, this girl needs gender affirmative language.

Rediscovering music, and specifically playing and making music, was one of the things that helped Dess get back in touch with being a person again after the whole Knight debacle. She plays piano and harmonica of her own volition, and the violin because of her mom's insistence, but her true favourite will always be the guitar. She was a little small as a kid so playing it used to be difficult, but now that she's an adult having it in her lap is easy, and honestly it just makes her feel alive. One of those dreams she had as a kid that she forgot about along the way, y'know?

Her and Asriel were just family friends at first, but when they ended up going to the same class together too, they quickly became best friends. They were there for each other through everything, Dess got Asriel into games, he was there when she came out, and they were practically inseparable. Asriel was a hard worker and Dess was a super active sports kid, they balanced each other out well and were known as the highest achievers in their class, the golden kids.

Kris and Noelle got dragged into their adventures basically on accident, Noelle because Dess was the one babysitting her all the time, and Kris because they wanted to spend time with their brother. They often spent time outside together because Dess loved being anywhere but at home. She didn't mind Azzy's house, though. Kris was a lot to deal with sometimes and Dess scolded them in a lot of the same ways adults scolded her (minus the hitting them over the head with stuff, what was all her). She has no idea the impact she's had on their behavior.

She was always kind of violent, but when she was younger it wasn't really an issue, more like an excuse to get her into sports. She learned to act out because causing problems was the only context in which she'd get attention from her very busy parents. With Noelle specifically, Dess took on a semi-parental role and quickly developed a habit of taking on way more burdens than she could handle. Even with Asriel as a best friend and the Dreemurrs as a surrogate family, the control her mother Clarice commanded over her life was just too limiting. It all boiled over.

Dess started lashing out at other kids around when puberty hit, starting fights and genuinely hurting people. She never got expelled because her mother was the mayor, but Dess started getting grounded more and more often, which meant less and less time with her only real friend, and more with her very dysfunctional family. She loved Noelle, but her little sister became another responsibility, another liability that could get Dess in trouble, it was way too much for her to handle maturely when she was only 13.

Dess "disappeared" because she ran away from home. She hated living there, but neither of her parents could admit that, hence her disappearance being so "mysterious" to the other townsfolk, they genuinely thought she vanished from inside the house. It was only after Kris admitted they saw her in the woods near the bunker that night that the case got more complicated, and the legend only grew more terrifying.

Her original plan was to just catch a bus to out of town and hope for the best, but when she ran into the woods in pitch blackness, she couldn't find her way around. She was too reliant on light, and couldn't manage in darkness. She found the bunker in her aimless wandering and, hoping to sleep off the night and make up excuses in the morning, she went inside. She couldn't have known that nothing was in there.

The effects of her sudden disappearance rippled throughout the whole town. Most obviously, Asgore got fired for not being able to find her and Rudy quit his job to be a stay at home dad for Noelle's sake. Less tangibly, Asriel and Clarice both started burying themselves in work to avoid grief. Kris and Noelle socially shut down for a few years, it's why neither of them have any real friends other than the strained relationship they have with each other. Asriel took on Dess' habit of "be anywhere but home" when his parents started having marital problems, and Kris latched onto him even harder to avoid losing any more people in their life. Through all this, Dess was nowhere, silently wondering if anyone even noticed she's gone, if her life was even real to begin with.

One of the strange things that happened to her while stranded in nothingness was almost being able to hear someone mumbling to themselves. When she called out, the voice vanished, only to re-emerge an uncertain amount of time later and excuse himself for getting startled. He just doesn't get guests often, you see. And guests get him even more rarely. It was refreshing to hear a consciousness separate from her own, but his mind was even more broken than hers, unable to answer her questions about what was real and what was imagined as he seemed to think he himself was a product of unreality. Plus, he never really stayed for too long and he never wanted to talk about himself either, as if mentioning his own name could shatter him to pieces.

The reason Dess didn't lose her mind from to his influence like Jevil and Spamton did was because she's just fundamentally pragmatic. You can throw philosophy and existential questions at her all you want but as long as she talks and thinks, she exists, which means reality is Something, even if it's completely eluding her grasp. It might also have something to do with her being a (homestuck warning) Void player, meaning the idea of the innate meaninglessness of life and unanswerable questions about reality itself don't really sound earth-shattering to her.

She used her knife to open fountains at first, the one she brought with her from the light world, but along the way she picked up a rapier and decided it was way cooler than a knife so it's her go-to now. She's not actually that good with swords, though. She uses them like baseball bats. Despite this, Spade King still praises her as if she's the best warrior they've seen in generations. It might've gone to her head.

Her relationship with King is fundamentally a mentor and a student. He gave her flawed information, but taught her a lot about herself, the world she found herself in, and the role she could choose. And, that's the most important part, he let her CHOOSE, because he was genuinely under the impression that she was just a really powerful darkner and not a lightner. His strictness and high standards reminded her of her parents, mostly her mom, but his willingness to give HER control over her own destiny is what made her favour him over every other adult in her life. Discipline that treated her like a valued person rather than an asset was basically unheard of for her until then. Plus, reminding her of her parents gave Spade the bonus of every time he encouraged her on anything it'd activate the "parental approval" neurons in her brain that were terribly starved up to that point.

From Spade's point of view, the Knight (as a darkner) is everything he wants to be, but can't be. At first he mentored her mostly as an excuse to live vicariously through her, but in getting to know her better he discovered they have a lot more in common than he first thought. Unregulated emotions, unresolved pasts, the constant feeling that you need to do More and Louder in order to make any kind of impact... he started to genuinely care about her. If/when he's redeemed, finding out the Knight has been a lightner this whole time might not even be that much of a betrayal. Seeing her face and learning her name as she apologies for lying is like reconnecting with his own wounded, younger self. Letting it be water under the bridge means he doesn't lose connection to himself again, doesn't lose connection with his best student. Plus, December IS a nice name.

She met Lancer, but didn't pay him much mind. She was busy with overthrowing the other Kings and was too tired to be a babysitter again. Due to her rancid vibes as the Knight (and the fact that she quickly became the favoured child even though it wasn't her intention) Lancer doesn't like her that much. She left Card Kingdom pretty quickly, anyway (Spade's advice to seek another worthy kingdom to grant a fountain to), so she never got much of a chance to get to know him, even if she wanted to.

Her relationship with Queen is even more fraught. Due to Queen's tendency to mimic the "mother" personality for every lightner she meets individually, as well as her more Explicitly Controlling tendencies, Dess quickly became rebellious and then antagonistic towards her. Queen tried to choose FOR her, to get her to open fountains on HER terms, and Dess wasn't having it. Yes, following Queen's instructions would've caused the Roaring much, MUCH sooner, but, like. Not at ALL in a satisfying way.

She has no idea who Gaster is. When asked, she'll assume he's a Darkner. If asked about the man in the nothingness, she'll shrug it off. Now that she's out, she doesn't know if he's actually real or something she just made up in her head, though she laughs that off as well. "I sound a lot like him when saying that, huh?"

Learning Asriel goes to college is complete whiplash for her. Her sense of time is WRECKED. Like, yeah, she can wrap her head around Noelle and Kris being teens now, but ASRIEL??? What do you MEAN he's not still stressing over chemistry exams and cramming for spanish class, and is, like, actually studying something he's interested in???? Unheard of.

She makes fun of him SO much for his little beard stubble, dude. It's all in good fun, but like, you can only be called "mini Asgore" so many times by your childhood best friend before it starts to cut deeper. On the flipside he has literally nothing bad to say to her. She nearly caused the apocalypse, but like, he gets it. He would've done the same in her shoes (hooves??). He thinks her Dark World armour is so kickass and he could never pull it off like she can.

Unsurprisingly Asriel has a crush on Dess. He always kinda had one, even when they were kids, but reconnecting as adults just Fully bashed him over the head with the fact that he's had repressed feelings for her and he has NO idea what to do about it. He's anxiety incarnate and thinks Dess already KNOWS he has a crush on her and just isn't saying anything because she's playing it cool, or doesn't wanna hurt his feelings, or thinks he's too lame to date or something. He thinks she's the coolest person who ever lived and has no idea how to cope.

Meanwhile in reality, Dess is a clueless aro/ace. She doesn't really know what having a crush even means. She thinks being a couple is, like, flirting and fighting behind closed doors (you can tell the only couples she knew personally were her parents and Asriel's parents), so she thinks it's just exhausting and doesn't know why anyone bothers. When Noelle tells her she has a crush on Susie Dess is like "Hell yeah, love is love........ wait do you mean you like her or you want her to crush you with a boulder" and Noelle sweats for a while before replying with "b-both?"

Dess has never been to Castletown. Most likely will never go.

Her and Kris reconnecting is a bit awkward at first, mostly on account of the fact that Kris and their posse are the ones that had her bash her over the head as the Knight to get her to behave in the first place, but Dess doesn't really focus on that. Kris thinks they hurt her, she just thinks of them as a little hero. Susie kinda helps facilitate them talking like people again, at least at first, because she has no baggage with Dess other than hitting her with an ax over dark fountains and getting stabbed in return, but like... Out of all the people they fought Dess is the only one who actually said sorry for being a jackass, so it's all good in Susie's book. Kris is just happy to have Dess back, man, that bunker and their memory of it has been haunting them for entirely too long, now.

Like Kris and Asriel, Dess learned how to play piano in church. Unlike them, and unlike Noelle, Dess has actually become fully agnostic after her time in the void. If there IS an angel looking out for her, it certainly isn't one that could've helped her, so what's the point of worship? Plus, Asriel and Noelle are two angels looking out for her as is! Why add divinity to that? (I am extremely subtle, I know.)

To this day, she's still apologising to Asgore for getting him fired. He is still apologising for not being able to find her. It's a pity party.

No-one tell her parents but she smokes weed. Once she reformed from being the Knight, she had a lot on her mind, man, weed is the most harmless thing she could've taken to cope. Seam is a good dealer, they have the good stuff.

She's absolutely called King "dad" by accident before. He doesn't really mind. No-one tell Rudy though, he's gonna be pissed.

On that note, I feel the need to add that she was never as close to him as Noelle was, because he only really started being an active parent after Dess went missing. It's kinda tragic, and he feels REALLY guilty about it, but if he ever verbalises that guilt he's gonna actually crumble into dust. His confidence is all a mask as is, actually admitting that he was kind of garbage at being a dad with his first kid is just gonna make it so much worse. But, until Dess hears an apology, she's not really gonna be able to actually mend their relationship, so they're at an impasse.

Inversely, her time away from the light world kinda made Dess forget the way her mother acts. She sorta got a bit of "once away from the abuser you forget the abuse", especially knowing she herself was a kid when it all happened so she kinda started justifying her mother's actions to herself when away from her. After like 2 weeks of living with her again Dess fully remembers why she ran away and packs her bags to live literally anywhere else. Preferably with King if that's an option, though that might just make Lancer move out as well.

She doesn't know what minecraft is.

[withbroombefore]

I saw a poll earlier about participation in regular in-person activities, with numbers that make me wonder if a lot of people don't know what the options are or how to find them. Here are some that I have always found welcoming to new people; for me, these are ways to leave my apartment and get some human interaction without having to make much conversation (there is a reasonable amount of that if you want it, but since it's understood that you are there to do an activity, the thing you are doing is the point rather than pure socializing). A search for "[activity] [location]" should tell you what's available in your area.

Contra dancing: This goes at the top and gets explanation because it's my favorite. I grew up doing this and love it very very much; I always look for local dances when I move somewhere new. Most dances are very beginner-friendly (though there are some exceptions), and zero dance experience is required to participate. Many will include a lesson for beginners in the half-hour before the main event starts, and there are always instructions throughout the evening. You truly do not need to know anything going in. The convention is to switch partners throughout the night, and it's completely okay to attend alone and ask people you don't know to dance. Try Contra Dancing has a search tool by zip code. Typically $8-15.

Community theatre tech: Acting is an option if that's your thing, but in my experience, tech is easier if you're looking for an activity because there's not usually competition--you often can just volunteer without needing to worry about auditions or casting. Roles like run crew (where you move set between scenes and such) don't require any prior knowledge, and plenty of the other tasks can be learned with a little training. If you turn up reliably, the word will spread--good techies are invaluable. Free to participate.

Community band or chorus: Prior experience in playing an instrument is necessary for the band; for singing, it depends on the type of chorus. Some are auditioned, others are just thrilled by any participation. May require dues.

Shapenote singing: A more niche one and another of my personal favorites (I ignore the religious lyrics and treat them as poetry). This can take some time to pick up, but many places have a small monthly sing that is very welcoming to new people. fasola.org has lots of information about the tradition and where to sing. Free, optional donations accepted.

Library events: Find your local public library's website and look for a calendar or events page to see if anything appeals. Typically free.

Crafting groups: Yarn stores and other craft supply places often have regular open gatherings (typically free) and/or classes (may cost money for teaching and supplies).

Games: If you have a local game store, check their website for events. Or search "[location] [chess club]" or whatever is your thing. Usually free.

Dance: Depends on what is available in your area. A studio where I am has a monthly swing dance, with beginner lessons before, for $10.

Sports: I don't really do these but they presumably exist and can be found like the other things.

The important thing is to just go do the thing. It will probably feel awkward the first time--that's normal! These are all spaces where the point is for people to show up and participate. They want you to be there, and they want you to come back! Otherwise they can't keep existing. Several of these (contra dancing, shapenote, a lot of crafting groups) are especially excited about new people and younger participants and will be thrilled to teach you how to do the thing. And the only way to make it feel comfortable is to plow through the first awkwardness and go back until you decide if you actually enjoy it or not. When you find a thing you like, keep going, and after a little while you end up with a community of people to see regularly who share your interests. This is what humans are supposed to do.

[eurothug4000]

INTERVIEW ON THE MAKING OF THE CANCELLED MMORPG NINELIVES

Ninelives is the most beautiful RPG that was never completed, but can still be experienced as it was left. As part of my video on the game (now up for early access on Nebula), I also interviewed Tota of SmokymonkeyS on its inspirations and development before its suspension in 2016.

What would you say are your main inspirations for the art style in Ninelives? E.g. other artists, film, games, literature, history etc.!

I was a huge fan of Adventure Gamebook when I was a kid. Well, maybe you don't know what that is. Please read the wiki if you need: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gamebook. I was reading (playing) translated oversea gamebooks well, and love the inner artwork especially what draw by monochrome. I had never seen pictures like that before, and had a strong impact on me. So, I wanted to make a gamebook by my self. When I started making my own gamebooks, I learned a lot about how games are made. That's because a gamebook is a medium in which the player can see all the source code. At first I started making gamebooks because I was attracted by the artwork, but my interest eventually shifted to making the game itself.

Related to the above, do you take a lot of inspiration from real world cultures and places? Are there any that you particularly gravitate towards?

I like the mixed culture, like Chinoiserie in France at the 17 century. Plus, since I'm Japanese and this country has always been greatly influenced by China. So I'm not limited to any one of these cultures, but trying to create as I am influenced by all of them. Sometimes people say that what I create looks Japanese, Chinese, or Asian, which is neither correct nor incorrect. I try not to be only of a certain culture when I create. That's because I want to create an imaginary world that is somewhat like reality, but slightly different.

Why did you want to make Ninelives?

Ninelives was the first game I ever thought of making, I think when I was about 17.

Do you think Ninelives being in an unfinished state provides a different atmosphere when playing the game and exploring the world?

I don't particularly think so. The atmosphere of the game is still complete. I wanted the game to be a relaxed, free-roamed adventure for players.

I wasn't certain during my research, so I wanted to confirm if Tomomi Sakuba was involved in Ninelives in any way?

Yeah, Sakuba was involved in Ninelives lots of ways. As you said, he did some of the texture pictures for flowers, plants and tree leaves. He also drawn the world map and area maps of the game like below: http://www.smokymonkeys.com/kyrill/index.asp?direct=138 He actually walked around the world by himself to make this. He was one of the most earliest game tester of the game. Oh, and I have to tell you this. He's a voice actor of male Nightbreed and Elf! In addition, his wife did some of creature voices. Her voice is also used on Triglav too!

What are your own personal thoughts on Ninelives? Is there anything you would drastically change looking back on it? Or any big changes you would want to make if you were to continue development at any point?

Ninelives was too much for me in many ways. It was a world I had been thinking about since I was young, but there were too many things to actually create to handle, and in that sense it's exactly the dream a child thinks about. We are a team of two in SmokymonkeyS, but one of us is in charge of programming and system engineering, and the game itself was created completely by myself. I had to create all the pictures, models, terrain, music, and story by myself. Now if I'm going to make something, I don't make it on such a large scale anymore.

Apart from the Switch release for Garage and occasional updates on Triglav that you mentioned before, is there anything that SmokymonkeyS are working on for the future?

Not yet so far.

I noticed your banner on the official website (http://www.smokymonkeys.com/kyrill/index.asp) has a character on a train platform, I wondered if that might be a future game?

Once it was. It was a previous project of Triglav for mobile. But it was going to be on a larger scale again, so we decided to port Triglav before that. There are no plans to make that game now. But I may make another game with that worldview and atmosphere. For example, as a mobile game.

A big thank you to Tota for taking the time to answer my questions! You can find SmokymonkeyS and their games here:

[ff-killjam]

How The Tables Turned [Ford x reader oneshot]

Summary: This time, its Ford making you stop what you're going to make sure you get sleep.

Rating: SFW and very fluffy

Warnings: Aside from a slightly suggestive part, none!

AO3 version

A/N: Actually based on a period of time where I tried to learn how to use unity (before the whole drama of it happened). I refused to do ANYTHING but to work on my little project no matter how much I was starving for a few weeks straight. lol.

It’s basically routine at this point for you to drag Ford out of his lab to head for bed. Even if you remind him of the benefits on sleeping and how the lack of it will impact his work, you still needed to get him into bed, sometimes having some food ready for him to make sure he didn’t sleep on an empty stomach.

That’s how its USUALLY IS.

Lately, you’ve started your own personal project involving learning a game engine to play around with. It was mostly just a random idea one day, wanting to try your hand at making your own little “video game”. Nothing too fancy, just something fun to put together and to learn some new skills along the way. There was A LOT you needed to look into and learn to make this happen, however.

From learning a coding language, the game engine itself, a mix between finding free to use assets and even making your own when nothing suited your taste- you had a lot on your plate. It wasn’t all that bad really, considering how this whole thing turned into a full blown hyper fixation fairly soon after starting it. It was easy to let the hours fly by as you were split between watching tutorial videos, drawing and fixing any errors/bugs in any of the codes you wrote down. You were aware of when you needed to sleep, eat and do other things for your health, but something about working on this project made you refuse to move from your chair. And you weren’t the only one to noticed this.

After a decent amount of time being with you, Ford has grown used to the routine of you coming to his lab to check up on him. It got to the point where he purposely stayed late in the lab to get you to come in and “pester” him to take care of himself better. The feeling of knowing you cared and loved him so much to go out of your way to make sure he knew that was something he relished in. Of course, he did felt a little “silly” and “immature” doing this instead of straight up telling you, but there was no harm being done anyways, so it was fine.

So when you stopped checking on him after a few nights, he couldn’t help but to worry a bit. At first, he figured you were just a bit busy, possibly even out for the night, so he didn’t think too much of it. However, when walking into your computer room and seeing you up staring at your screen with an open notebook with various random things written on it, he couldn’t help to smile a bit as you reminded him of his university days. You were just working on something, nothing too bad.

But as time passed by, he soon realizes he only ever sees you in your computer room. You barely went out for anything, even for food. Ford didn’t want to jump to any conclusions, but he was worried. Things escalated for him when he barely sees you in bed anymore.

It’s not like he didn’t talk to you as you were deep in your work. He would sometimes check in on you when things felt a little too quite after he started to noticed your absent in his lab. Ford was happy you were able to pursue something new and to take the time and effort to do it. He was aware of the little game you wanted to make for the sake of saying “I made this!”. When he had the free time, he’ll listen to you talk about the things you learned, some of the issues you faced and how you fixed them, etc etc. But he can only take so much before he had to really step in for your own sake.

The sky was dark out, and it was around 1am. You weren’t in bed yet. Again. Ford was really concerned for you now. Walking through the dim hallway, he opens up the door of your computer room. He can see you fully concentrated on your screen, looking over some codes you put together, as if you were trying to find any errors in the lines of text that was presented in front of you. It was obvious how dry your eyes were, how your body longed for rest, but the urge to keep going and to fix this one mistake kept you from wanting to sleep despite how much you felt the need to do so.

It was almost funny to him. A taste of his own medicine some would say. It reminds him of the many nights on how he too would refuse to stop for the night, always needing to do one more thing before he could let himself rest. How you would do your best to persuade him to let himself walk away from his work, to take care of himself to avoid any health complications, and to spend time with you in the comfort of your bed.

It made him feel guilty as well. The things you did for him and how much you loved him to always go out of your way to show it. Ford knew he was taking full advantage of that, and he wanted to repay it back.

You jumped a little in your seat when you felt his familiar six finger hand land on your shoulder, being so focused on the lines of text on your screen that you forgot where you were for a good bit. You look over at Ford as he stood beside your seat, giving him a weak smile.

“Oh hey! Do you need anything?” You asked before quickly looking back at the screen again.

“Love, when was the last time you ate?” Ford asked you in a gentle voice.

“Uh… I had breakfast?” You answered, only remembering you had some toast with a sunny side egg on top when you last ate. It didn’t seem like it mattered too much though.

“Its almost one am” Ford replied, a little stern this time. You quickly check the clock on your taskbar, feeling surprised from how much time had passed.

“Oh… oops” you spoke mostly to yourself, feeling a little silly for not checking the time more often. “I’ll probably head to bed soon”

“Not soon,” Ford points out, “you’re going to bed now.” His words made you look at him again, confusion viable on your face.

“Just let me do this one fix-” Ford says your name, stern voice again, causing you to stop your sentence.

“You are fully aware of the effects of not taking care of yourself” Ford spoke to you with a smirk on his face. You knew that he was referencing the many of times where you brought out the facts of how the lack of sleep and self care can affect your health and day to day life. It was the best way to convince him to come to bed and let you cuddle with him until you were both asleep. “You’re no different form me, sweetheart. Got to practice what they preach, as they say”

“Uh…. I’m built different?” You gave a half shrug and a low chuckle at your own joke. Obviously, this did nothing to change his mind. You knew he was right, and had nothing to say to argue back. Ford knew this too. “Fine… let me quickly save and shut off my computer…”

Ford watches you quickly save any progress before shutting off your computer, the light of the screen turning off and making the room dark as it was the only thing on. As you start to stand, your body fully conveyed how tired you really were. You were about to walk to the hallway door before Ford lets out a ‘let me’, and you were now being picked up bridle style in his arms. You let out a small gasp, often forgetting how much muscle the older man has as he often hides it away in his iconic turtleneck. The comfort of him holding you made the realization at your own exhaustion hit hard. You can feel yourself somewhat go limp as Ford carried you to your shared room.

Ford felt you quickly relax in his arms, feeling prideful as he carried you to your bed. Sitting you on the side and pulling the blanket back. He lays you on your pillow before fallowing suit into his usual spot on the bed beside you. Your eyes were shut as you let yourself sink into the soft mattress, the weight of the blanket being pulled over you giving a sense of security, along with how his arms wrapped around you to pull you close to his chest. You let out a sigh of relief as you feel him nuzzle his face into the crook of your neck, getting a few shivers down your spine.

“Sorry…” You mumbled to him, feeling guilty now for making him go out of his way to get you to bed. You feel him chuckle into your skin, the smile forming on his face being easily felt on your skin.

“Nothing to be sorry about sweetheart,” his replied, voice audibly sounding more tired, “I should be the one to apologize, making you go through this almost every night. I see how doing this almost all the time can be a bit frustrating for you.”

“Not if its you,” You were quickly to reply, “I’m always happy to make sure you’re okay”. Ford felt his heart flutter at your words. You always did surprised him with how much you loved him despite how many times you pointed it out.

“The feeling is mutual,” Ford placed a kiss on your skin as he caressed one of his thumbs that rested on you, “lets get to sleep now, I’ll be sure to do something for you in the morning” Ford gave another kiss on your skin, and you can’t help but to feel excited for what he had planned.

Silence followed as you two let yourselves slowly fall asleep in each others comfort. Feeling his steady heartbeat on your back lulled you to your sleep.

Ford smiled when he realized you fell asleep before he did. It was no surprise, you needed it really bad. Without fail every night when he has you in his arms like this, he feels like the luckiest man in the multiverse. He didn’t deserve you, but it was almost as if this is the repayment he deserved after many years of suffering, a way of life saying sorry to him.

And he wouldn’t ask for anything else.

[thesummerstorms]

Antaam Invasion of Antiva:

Almost all of this is repurposed from something else I was trying to work out for myself, before finding one single line of a codex entry that answered my question but I had somehow skipped every time prior to now. I figured it might still be a useful reference post for someone, so I reformatted, cut some stuff, and added some stuff.

Blue text is proven fact, red text is inference/supposition by me.

---

As of the quest, Coffee with the Crows, Antiva as a whole is still occupied by the Antaam.

Evidence: Codex: A Letter from House de Riva

"Now we have Qunari in control of all Antiva. Treviso is like their favorite toy. They flaunt the occupation here, showing off how they took charge of our poor, lawless people for their own good. I know you [Lucanis] just got out and too much has happened already, but we still have work to do."

----

2. The King of Antiva is still free, not under house arrest or a hostage, etc. However, he is not currently assisting with the resistance towards Qunari occupation.

Evidence: Multiple pieces of in game dialogue (sourced from the script file, but I have heard most in game) + Codex: King's Draft: Action on the Behalf of Antiva

Teia (Codex): We aren't required to give His Majesty a point-by-point, but he's your blood, Viago. It is a courtesy to let him know we are going to war."

Rook de Riva: "We Crows are all the army Antiva has, but it's not like we can field a garrison. Outside support?" Teia: "The king would say to call on us. The price for being patriots."

Ivenci: "Without you, the king would be forced to deal with this mess. To give proper power to real officials."

Teia: People are desperate. We need to arrange shipments of water from further inland. Viago : (snorts) Maybe the king can be convinced to build an aqueduct—if we involve his favorite sculptors. Teia : It is not a bad time to ask him for aid. Viago : (sighs) I'll go.

----

3. The Antaam started by invading Antiva and northern Rivain, then used that as a launch point to conquer half of the rest of northern Thedas.

Evidence: Codex Entry: The Antaam Invasion

When the Antaam invaded the South, the people there were completely unprepared. Antiva and northern Rivain were overrun quickly, with the invaders pushing down through the Green Dales to the Minanter River, leaving only the southernmost of the Free Marches spared. From there, the Antaam pushed west, overpowering Tevinter magic with gaatlok cannons and brute strength until the defenders finally held at Vyrantium. Nevarra was spared, likely due to the Antaam fears of necromancy and unwillingness to attack until Tevinter was conquered, but almost half of northern Thedas fell to Antaam rule in just a few years...

My messy PowerPoint annotated/color coded map:

(I had to guess where exactly counted as "southern Free Marches", but I feel like the Minanter River makes the most likely boundary given its explicit mention in the codex.)

----

4. Initial occupation of some parts of Antiva was implied to be particularly brutal, though no specifics are given.

Evidence: In game dialogue, confirmed by the script file.

Ivenci: "You know what the Antaam did elsewhere in Antiva. And in every other city they occupied."

----

4. Although the Antaam still hold all of Antiva, they have struggled with supply chains as none of their support teams defected with them. They have been reliant on seizing the resources of occupied territories, presenting a possible weakness.

Evidence: Codex Entry: The Antaam Invasion; in game dialogue

It is also important to note that the Antaam fought alone. With little in the way of supply lines or experts in food production—the craftspeople and strategic experts who would normally support them had not broken from the Qun when the Antaam did—the invaders needed to attack to keep eating. When they encountered resistance that would have forced a siege, the Antaam invasion stalled. The kithshoks who wished only to conquer now had to learn to rule the lands they would claim.

Lucanis: The Crows may have something. The Antaam are moving large quantities of supplies out of the city. Weapons, armor, gaatlok…And food. About half our remaining provisions. Enough to feed the Antaam navy.

Civilian 1: You went to the physician? Civilian 2 : She stitched it well enough. Gave me what she could to ward infection. Civilian 2 : What she could? Civilian 1 : The Antaam confiscated half her supplies. Said they need it for their army.

-----

5. Josephine Montilyet's family and their estate in Antiva City appear to be safe, and potentially operating somewhat normally . Antiva City is also the capital where the King reigns.

Source: Codex: Notes from the Inquisition (if Josephine was romanced); DA:I dialogue placing the family home in Antivan City, Eight Little Talons

"The family writes the weather back home is beautiful. I do miss our quiet times together." "When we return to Antiva, I will ask you, on the steps of the estate, if you will do me a great honor. And I dream you will say yes." "Yvette and Lord Otranto send their best wishes, and hope to see us back home in time to welcome their third child."

Josephine: Well. My parents are alive, and in good health. They live in our estate in Antiva City.

Teia snatched his walking stick and twirled it in the air. “Are you going straight home to Salle?” [Viago] sighed and shook his head. “Antiva City.” “To brief His Royal Fatherliness?” She balanced the stick on the tip of her boot.

-----

6. Teia and Viago have left behind their home territories of Rialto and Salle to join with Caterina in Treviso.

It's unknown if the presence of the Cantori Diamond predates the occupation, but this might mean they are choosing to show a united front in the city most threatened or most symbolic and move outward from there to then retake their own territories.

Possibly this is a deliberate alliance due to Teia, Viago, and Caterina being three of the four Talons to survive the initial attempt to sell Antiva out to the Antaam by a rival House.

Evidence: Eight Little Talons, Codex: A Letter from House de Riva

"Teia had a garden full of the bell shaped flowers in Rialto."

"Andoral [Teia's horse] rarely gets a chance to let loose in Rialto.

"Teia snatched [Viago's] walking stick and twirled it in the air. “Are you going straight home to Salle?”

Now we have Qunari in control of all Antiva. Treviso is like their favorite toy.

This might also be supported by the unimplemented Codex Entry: Many Houses, One Roost. However, many things in the game files were struck on purpose, or contradict the final canon.

7. The Antaam control the port in Treviso, limiting the availability of supplies. However, they don't entirely restrict entering ships, instead taking a "cut" of the foodstuffs they do permit.

Rivain at least is working to send supplies through anyway.

Evidence: Codex Entry: On the Invasion, in game dialogue, Note: Flour Covered Grocery List

Treviso has always been a free port. Even the Merchant Princes respect this. Their fortunes exist because we trade and work where we will. So of course, the first act of the Antaam invasion was to blockade our trading ships with their dreadnoughts

Crow Prisoner: The Antaam kept me alive so they could use me to trick Rivain into sending more supplies....Thank you for your timely arrival. I'll get the supplies to Treviso… and pay back the Antaam there.

A list in Lucanis's handwriting: -Spring onions -Green cabbage -Short-grain rice -Vinegar (white, for pickling) -Vinegar (dark, for dipping with bread) -Coffee beans (for Neve, when she is back) Cinnamon, please! —Bellara If it can be found. The Antaam's navy takes its share from whatever trading ships pass through Treviso. —Lucanis

8. The Antaam across nations aren't working together, but have broken into smaller bands. Any coordination seems to be from the Evanuris.

The Butcher seems primarily occupied with Treviso, so we have no information about who is occupying the rest of Antiva or any alliances they might have.

Evidence: Warlords of the Antaam

It is easy to think that the Antaam broke from the Qunari as one, but the reality is that of a vase shattering into countless shards, each broken in its own way, reflecting the warlord who now leads each kith. Some, like the Butcher in Treviso, use their new freedom to indulge in cultures long forbidden to them. Others, like Ataashok (Dragon King) or Isskatari (Master Killer) in Rivain, reject foreign cultures and either lean on the trappings of the Antaam or invent a heritage to inspire the loyalty of their soldiers. What seems consistent among the Antaam warlords is cruelty, from Baqounasaar (Flaming Wind), whose ships terrorize the northern coast, to Kashtaar (Jewel-Taker), whose kith have become a bandit army in the mountains outside Marothius.

-------------

Further cut information about the Antaam Invasion that can be found in the game files, but aren't technically canon due to remaining unimplemented: Codex Entry: Observations on the Antaam, Codex Entry: Many Houses, One Roost, Codex Entry: No Need for Armies

[too-much-tma-stuff]

Not Our Responsibility

Previous | Masterpost | Next

Danny and Sam spent hours that night researching different typed of ghosts and demons. There was distressingly little information about Arabic ghosts easily accessible online and Danny regretted, not for the first time, that cultural education was not on the LoA’s curriculum. When they were called down for dinner Danny and Sam continued to talk and debate about the ghosts, mostly just because it was fun watching her parents try not to look disgruntled and upset by the morbid topic. Something they always gave Sam a hard time about being interested in but couldn’t tonight because Danny was clearly interested in it too.

They tried to redirect the conversation towards academics or their ‘relationship’ a few times, Danny would give polite, short answers before returning to his conversation with Sam. No one was surprised when after dinner the Manson parents suggested that Danny stay the night since they were clearly having such a good time.

Danny put up token resistance and gave in quickly when they insisted as he knew they would. He and Sam went back up to her room to play some online games with Tucker and tell him about everything that they had learned. Privately he was debating between the names Hatif, a voice without a source, and Afreet, which was a type of demon. He liked the sound of both but one was obviously scarier then the other.

He could use both, he didn’t have a name like Oracle yet an a voice without a source was a pretty good meaning for the guy in the chair. But would it be suspicious? Maybe.

“Shit,” he cursed as he died again.

“What the hell Danny!” Tucker half shouted as he tried to revive Danny for the fourth time that match.

“I’m sorry guys, my minds just not in it tonight I guess. I’ll try to focus.”

That night after they finished their game and he was curled up in a nest of pillows and blankets he’d made for himself on Sam’s floor he decided he’d rather just go by Hafit. He wasn’t going to be a demon after all, and there was a fine line between having fun with how people would persevere him and sabotaging any chances he had of remaining in contact with his family when all this was said and done.

The next day he told Sam’s parents that he was heading home, denied their offer of a ride and took a cab as close to the warehouses as they were willing to go. He let himself in to his makeshift lab without the need for a key, simply reaching through the door to unlock it from inside, and headed to his workbench. He dumping out a bag of scrap materials he had stolen from the gave he pulled up a stool he was sure was new and started to tinker.

It was less then an hour later when the door creaked open again and he glanced up to see Red hood entering. He gave his unwilling brother a smile, Red Hood nodded as he closed the door behind him and stood there with his arms crossed, posture as closed and defensive as Danny’s was open and inviting.

“Hey, welcome! Thanks for the chair,” He said, gesturing to it knowing Jason could only be the one who’d brought it. “I don’t have any cameras or anything in here yet if you want to get comfortable,” he suggested, gesturing to his own face to indicate Hood’s helmet.

“No thanks,” Jason said in a clipped tone, but he did come further into the building, pulling out a second chair and sitting down across from Danny.

“I’ve decided on a code name by the way,” He said conversationally when it became clear Jason wasn’t just going to get to the point of why he was here. “Hafit, I’ll put a modulator in my helmet to make my voice sound more ghostly, I have an aesthetic I want to go for,” he joked and Jason scoffed.

“Alright,” He agreed, and hey, at least he wasn’t making fun of Danny for it. He lapsed back into silence and this time Danny let him, there was a tension in Jason’s body that said he had something to say but was struggling with it. Rather then distract him further Danny gave him the time he needed to sort of his thoughts, going back to tinkering with his scrap to take the pressure off Jason. “Do you really think you can fix the effects of the Pit?” He asked after a long time. “Without undoing the, you know, being alive part.”

Danny hummed and put down his tools, clasping his hands on the table as he leaned forward a little bit. “Yes. Probably more easily for you then for me since you only had one exposure and haven’t been exposed repeatedly like me. Like I said last time, I won’t make any guarantees but I do think I can.”

“You know a lot about this?” Jason asked, cocking his head a little.

“More then most people, I am one of the Demon Head’s heir after all,” Danny said with a sneer as he picked up his tools again, wanting to keep his hands busy while he talked about this. He glanced up when he heard an intake of breath. “You didn’t know that? Talia was fond of you, I assumed she’d tell you about her sons… No? Well, I am, and Damian too. Talia Al Ghul is our mother, Bruce is our father.

“But back to the Lazarus water. I’ve been dependent on it since I was 8 so mother has been sending me bottles of it to keep me going while I was here. Unbenounced to her and with father’s supervision Tim and I have been conducting experiments on it for a couple years now, so I know a decent amount, I’ve simply reached the limits of what I can do under their supervision like I said last time. Not because they’re going to hurt anyone, but because I’ve realized that it’s far too magical to be made sense of by purely scientific means.

“There’s all sorts of emotion wrapped up in it, and that might be what gives it it’s power but maybe if I can strip all the anger and blood lust out of it, imbue it with some other emotion instead,” He trialed off as he got lost in his own thoughts. Shocked out of it by Jason’s laugh, making his hands still in their work.

“I’d say that sounds ridiculous but…” Jason trailed off, he knew, he had had unexplained things happen to him as well.

“That’s certainly what father and Tim think, they want everything to have scientific explanations. You know father is a control freak, anything that’s not controllable or understandable in a traditional sense is unacceptable thing, experimenting with magic is too unpredictable for him. It’s the obvious next step to me though, and my instinct for this stuff is good, has been since I was dunked in the pit the first time. I have a… connection to it I think. Not like grandfathers,” he wrinkled his nose at the thought. “But I haven’t been wrong about this yet.”

“You’re very confident,” Jason said a little condescendingly and Danny shrugged.

“I’ll take all appropriate precautions and if I’m wrong I’ll try something else, but I know where I want to start. Once I have the appropriate tools and security of course. This is a very good start, thank you again, but I suspect it’ll take a few months to get everything I need.”

Jason hummed and they lapsed into silence again, only for a few minutes this time. “You talk different then you do on TV,” Jason pointed out cocking his head a little. Danny wasn’t surprised to find that Jason had been doing research into what the family had been up to since he was gone and maybe Danny in particular since they were working together now.

“I know. I sound more like Damian don’t I?” He asked with a little smile and Jason nodded. “That shouldn’t be surprising really. We are twins, raised in the same environment, I just pretend to be a normal kid for the cameras but you already know I’m not a normal kid. I need you to take me seriously as a potential ally and scientist so dumbing down my speech won’t do me any favours.”

“I guess that’s true,” Jason said with a shrug and Danny laughed.

“While you’re here I’d like to iron out some details. I said I would help you if you needed, so we need a secure line to contact each other, a com or something. Once I have more security up I’ll give you codes to enter but not to disable cameras so I can keep an eye on what you’re doing in here but I’ll make sure no one else can get in. I’m one of the bats ‘guys in the chair’ after all, I’m good at that and keep them off my own trail.”

“You don’t have to do that,” Jason snorted. “If you’re working with Lazarus water I’ll be avoiding this place like the plague.”

“Fair enough, but I still will as a show of good will,” Danny said firmly and Jason didn’t argue.

“Your right about contact though, once you’ve build something your sure is secure I’ll give you access to the channel I use. For now… are you going to be here for a while?”

“Probably a couple more hours.”

“Good, I’ll go get you a burner phone. You can use that for now,” Jason said and started to get up.

“That sounds good, before you go though do you have any requests about what I should build for you?” Danny asked cocking his head to the side a little and giving Jason a slightly cocky smile.

“No requests yet,” Jason snorted shaking his head at Danny. “Show me what you can do and then maybe I’ll trust you with something that I need.”

“That’s fair, I’ll see what I can come up with. I have some ideas,” he assured with a smile that was just a hair to wide and was satisfied when he saw Jason’s posture stiffen slightly.

“Good,” Hood huffed before he stalked out of the warehouse like an offended cat. Danny bit back a chuckle. He knew he was unsettling when he wanted to be and he did like to play that up sometimes, just for fun.

Once he was alone he turned his attention back to his work, mentally doing a catalogue of what he had and what he could make with it. He didn’t want what he made to require constant reloading right now so it couldn’t be a weapon, especially since he didn’t have what he needed to manufacture the amount of ammo that would be actually necessary and anything that used traditional bullets wouldn’t be unique enough to really show what he could do.

He didn’t have a lot to work with really, but what he did have was a direct line to the channel the bat-family used to communicate, which had been changed and updated a few times since Jason had died. Danny grinned and pushed most of the junk to the side, pulling the things he would need for this project closer to him and beginning to work. It wasn’t a particularly difficult build really, the hardest part being making sure that it would be easily detectable or traceable by Oracle. With the work he did he could help cover it up but he didn’t want to be to obvious and found out before he was ready to reveal what he was doing here. He wasn’t going to come clean by choice until he had results.

He got a text message from his father at one point and responded that he was still at Sam’s and would be back for dinner, double checking that his phone was set up to reroute from her house just in case the checked his location. Satisfied that he was in the clear he put the finishing touches on his project and started working on something else while he waited for Red Hood to return.

It was about three hours before Jason returned, not long after Danny started cleaning up and putting away his unused tools and scrap for next time. He was sure that eventually his lab would end up being a complete cluttered mess, with ongoing projects and experiments. But for now he could fully clean up his space, so he did. He would be ready to leave as soon as he had showed Hood what it was that he had made.

A loud bang on the outside of the door made Danny jump and alerted him to the fact that Red Hood had returned before he pushed the door open. He tossed a phone at Danny without saying anything and it was only his life-long training that allowed him to catch it with so little notice.

“Perfect timing,” Danny said as he started to mess with the phone, there was only one number in it which was Red Hood’s. He pocketed it and picked up the com he’d made. “Can I see your helmet for a minute? I made you a com that can patch in to all of the channels the Bats are currently using and shouldn’t be able to be traced,” He said, showing it to Hood. He’d made it as stripped down as he could so there would be almost no place to hide a tracker. “You can put your other channels you use in here the normal way,” He said with a dismissive gesture.

“Damn you would throw the family under the bus like that?” Jason chuckled as he took off his helmet and handed it over, of course he was wearing a domino under it.

Danny gave Jason a unimpressed look as he started to pull out the old com and install the new one. “The family can look after themselves and I’ll be looking out for them too. If you seriously injure one of my siblings we might have a problem, but I don’t think you’d actually do that. Your problem is with Bruce, and frankly, that’s none of my business.”

“He’s your father,” Jason said a little dumbly.

Danny shrugged without looking up. “He’s yours too, no matter how much you deny it he raised you more then anyone else did, and you’re trying to kill him. I’m just not saving him. It shouldn’t be our job to save him anyway, but you know it is. The way Tim had to blackmail Father into taking him on as Robin after you so he wouldn’t fall apart after your death...” Danny trailed off with a disapproving hum, he hadn’t been their during that time of course but Tim had told him about it. He’d witnessed a fair few fights as well and knew they weren’t new.

“Damian tells me I don’t know the meaning of loyalty, perhaps he’s right, or perhaps no adult has earned it yet.” He was loyal to his siblings though, he wouldn’t have done this if he thought Jason would hurt them.

There was a long moment of tense silence before Jason spoke. “What do you mean falling apart?” He asked, sounding… nervous? Danny didn’t look up to check, worried it might send Jason back into his shell.

“He was furious, unreasonably aggressive even to petty criminals. The big blue boy scout had to hold him back from killing the Joker. Now, I’m not against killing him, but if Bruce needs a child to keep him true to morals he claims to hold so strongly then I don’t think he has a leg to stand on and yet he still has screaming fights with anyone who argues with him, including his children.” Danny hated those fights.

“He and Dick still at it huh?” Jason asked sounding amused.

“Not just Dick anymore, but ya,” Danny agreed with a sigh.

“Does he fight with you?” Jason asked, sounding a little uncertain.

“Me? No, if none of you managed to change his mind I Definitely won’t be able to. It’s easier to make him think I agree with him and then go do the things I want behind his back. He does love us, and I do love him too. I just…” He trailed off and sighed. “He leans on us more then he should, when he needs proper help. It’s tiring, and dangerous at times. I want better for all of us, including him, including you. But I’m just a teenager, a genius one, but basically still a kid. I can’t fucking fix decades of generational trauma, I can do my best to make sure me and Damian make it out.”

He finished working on the helmet and tossed it to Jason, sighing and stretching. Talking about emotions was more tiring than combat sometimes. “Helmet’s good to go. I told the family that I was staying overnight with one of my friends but I’d be home for dinner so I have to go. Let me know if you have any issues with the com, I’ll be back when I can and I’m sure you’ll find me if you want to talk.” He got up from the desk pulling on his own helmet. He’d get out of the alley with his grapple and find a place to hide and change back into civvies before calling a cab.

He waited for Hood to put his helmet back on as well and test the com a little before herding a baffled Red Hood out of his lab so he could lock up and head out. “I’ll be bringing some things over the next week too, just some equipment I need. Smuggling it in will be tricky, but I think I can make it work.” And if he really needed he was sure Sam and Tucker would help him without demanding to many answers if he really needed it, but he wasn’t going to say that. If they were involved at all the fewer people that knew that the safer they would be.

---------

When he got home Alfred and Damian were waiting for him. Well Damian pretended he had just been hanging around the lobby but it was obvious he had really been doing. Especially when he and Alfred immediately shooed him through into the family dining room. They had a little catching up to do after he'd been away overnight. Danyal forced himself not to jump to the conclusion they knew he had been lying, that would only make lying harder.

“So Danny, did you have fun with your friend?” Bruce asked.

“Oh ya I had a great time! We watched movies, played Doomed, and did a bunch of research!” Danny agreed as he served himself some of the salad on the table before pushing it over to Damian.

“And her parents behaved themselves?” Tim asked dryly, ignoring a warning look from Bruce.

“To my face,” Danny said with a grimace and an equally dry tone. “Sam told them we were dating to shut them up but I don’t want you to worry about it. I’m still very much not interested in a relationship, just giving her some peace from her parents. I'm only mentioning it in case they bring it up at the next Gala they're invited to.”

“Are you sure? If you do want to date you know that’s alright don’t you Chum?” Bruce asked a little awkwardly.

“It doesn’t have to be girls either,” Tim added, of course he’d been dating Bernard for a while now.

“No, I know. Really though guys, Sam is one of my best friends but that’s all we are. If that ever changes or I get interested in dating I will tell you guys,” He promised. And that actually wasn’t a lie, he might not trust his family with everything but he knew he could trust them with that. Bruce might be the normal amount of protective of one of his children in a romantic relationship but he wasn’t bad about his kids romantic lives really.

“You said you were working on some research? What were you researching?” Bruce asked, pushing his food around his plate. Maybe he’d already eaten? Or maybe he was just to tired, he certainly had impressive bags under his eyes. It was nice he was still staying up to have a meal with them and show an interest even though he must have had a long day.

“Uh..” Danny glanced at Alfred where he was lingering in the doorway. “Permission to talk about work just a little at the table?” He asked holding his fingers up just a bit apart from each other. Alfred considered it and then nodded. “I’ve been thinking about changing my code name! I mean Mystic was just a spin off of Oracle and it’s worked well but I want a name of my own you know? So Sam and I were looking up types of ghosts.

“I told her it was for a story I was trying to write but I think since I’m a disembodied voice most of the time so I think something ghostly would be cool! And maybe I’m reclaiming my death a little bit you know?” He asked and didn’t comment on the way Bruce and Damian both flinched.

“Ah,” Bruce sounded, a little strained.

“Any ideas?” Cass jumped in to ask, giving Danny a reassuringly warm smile he couldn’t help return.

“A few, but I don’t want to share them yet okay? Once I’ve thought about it more and have a few finalists I’ll ask you guys for your opinions.”

“That sounds like a good plan,” Bruce agreed with a slow exhale.

“Agreed for that is enough talk about work at the table,” Alfred said firmly. As always, no one argued with him and they all settled in for one of their regular family dinners.

[alongtidesoflight]

in wake of yet another wave of people being turned off by windows, here's a guide on how to dual boot windows and 🐧 linux 🐧 (useful for when you're not sure if you wanna make the switch and just wanna experiment with the OS for a bit!)

if you look up followup guides online you're gonna see that people are telling you to use ubuntu but i am gonna show you how to do this using kubuntu instead because fuck GNOME. all my homies hate GNOME.

i'm just kidding, use whatever distro you like. my favorite's kubuntu (for a beginner home environment). read up on the others if you're curious. and don't let some rando on reddit tell you that you need pop! OS for gaming. gaming on linux is possible without it.

why kubuntu?

- it's very user friendly

- it comes with applications people might already be familiar with (VLC player and firefox for example)

- libreoffice already preinstalled

- no GNOME (sorry GNOME enthusiasts, let me old man yell at the clouds) (also i'm playing this up for the laughs. wholesome kde/gnome meme at the bottom of this post.)

for people who are interested in this beyond my tl;dr: read this

(if you're a linux user, don't expect any tech wizardry here. i know there's a billion other and arguably better ways to do x y and/or z. what i'm trying to do here is to keep these instructions previous windows user friendly. point and click. no CLI bro, it'll scare the less tech savvy hoes. no vim supremacy talk (although hell yeah vim supremacy). if they like the OS they'll figure out bash all by themselves in no time.)

first of all, there'll be a GUI. you don't need to type lines of code to get this all running. we're not going for the ✨hackerman aesthetics✨ today. grab a mouse and a keyboard and you're good to go.

what you need is a computer/laptop/etc with enough disk space to install both windows and linux on it. i'm recommending to reserve at least a 100gb for the both of them. in the process of this you'll learn how to re-allocate disk space either way and you'll learn how to give and take some, we'll do a bit of disk partitioning to fit them both on a single disk.

and that's enough babbling for now, let's get to the actual tutorial:

🚨IMPORTANT. DO NOT ATTEMPT THIS ON A 32BIT SYSTEM. ONLY DO THIS IF YOU'RE WORKING WITH A 64BIT SYSTEM. 🚨 (win10 and win11: settings -> system -> about -> device specifications -> system type ) it should say 64bit operating system, x64-based processor.

step 1: install windows on your computer FIRST. my favorite way of doing this is by creating an installation media with rufus. you can either grab and prepare two usb sticks for each OS, or you can prepare them one after the other. (pro tip: get two usb sticks, that way you can label them and store them away in case you need to reinstall windows/linux or want to install it somewhere else)

in order to do this, you need to download three things:

rufus

win10 (listen. i know switching to win11 is difficult. not much of a fan of it either. but support's gonna end for good. you will run into hiccups. it'll be frustrating for everyone involved. hate to say it, but in this case i'd opt for installing its dreadful successor over there ->) or win11

kubuntu (the download at the top is always the latest, most up-to-date one)

when grabbing your windows installation of choice pick this option here, not the media creation tool option at the top of the page:

side note: there's also very legit key sellers out there who can hook you up with cheap keys. you're allowed to do that if you use those keys privately. don't do this in an enterprise environment though. and don't waste money on it if your ultimate goal is to switch to linux entirely at one point.

from here it's very easy sailing. plug your usb drive into your computer and fire up rufus (just double click it).

🚨two very important things though!!!!!!:🚨

triple check your usb device. whatever one you selected will get wiped entirely in order to make space for your installation media. if you want to be on the safe side only plug in the ONE usb stick you want to use. and back up any music, pictures or whatever else you had on there before or it'll be gone forever.

you can only install ONE OS on ONE usb drive. so you need to do this twice, once with your kubuntu iso and once with your windows iso, on a different drive each.

done. now you can dispense windows and linux left and right, whenever and wherever you feel like it. you could, for example, start with your designated dual boot device. installing windows is now as simple as plugging the usb device into your computer and booting it up. from there, click your way through the installation process and come back to this tutorial when you're ready.

step 2: preparing the disks for a dual boot setup

on your fresh install, find your disk partitions. in your search bar enter either "diskmgr" and hit enter or just type "partitions". the former opens your disk manager right away, the latter serves you up with this "create and format hard disk partitions" search result and that's what you're gonna be clicking.

you'll end up on a screen that looks more or less like in the screenshot below. depending on how many disks you've installed this might look different, but the basic gist is the same. we're going to snip a little bit off Disk 0 and make space for kubuntu on it. my screenshot isn't the best example because i'm using the whole disk and in order to practice what i preach i'd have to go against my own advice. that piece of advice is: if this screen intimidates you and you're not sure what you're doing here, hands off your (C:) drive, EFI system, and recovery partition. however, if you're feeling particularly fearless, go check out the amount of "free space" to the right. is there more than 30gb left available? if so, you're free to right click your (C:) drive and click "shrink volume"

this screen will pop up:

the minimum disk space required for kubuntu is 25gb. the recommended one is 50gb. for an installation like this, about 30gb are enough. in order to do that, simply change the value at

Enter the amount of space to shrink in MB: to 30000

and hit Shrink.

once that's done your partitions will have changed and unallocated space at about the size of 30gb should be visible under Disk 0 at the bottom like in the bottom left of this screenshot (courtesy of microsoft.com):

this is gonna be kubuntu's new home on your disk.

step 3: boot order, BIOS/UEFI changes

all you need to do now is plug the kubuntu-usb drive you prepared earlier with rufus into your computer again and reboot that bad boy.

the next step has no screenshots. we're heading into your UEFI/BIOS (by hitting a specific key (like ESC, F10, Enter) while your computer boots up) and that'll look different for everyone reading this. if this section has you completely lost, google how to do these steps for your machine.

a good search term would be: "[YOUR DEVICE (i.e Lenovo, your mainboard's name, etc.)] change boot order"

what you need to do is to tell your computer to boot your USB before it tries to boot up windows. otherwise you won't be able to install kubuntu.

this can be done by entering your BIOS/UEFI and navigating to a point called something along the lines of "boot". from "boot order" to "booting devices" to "startup configuration", it could be called anything.

what'll be a common point though is that it'll list all your bootable devices. the topmost one is usually the one that boots up first, so if your usb is anywhere below that, make sure to drag and drop or otherwise move it to the top.

when you're done navigate to Save & Exit. your computer will then boot up kubuntu's install wizard. you'll be greeted with this:

shocker, i know, but click "Install Kubuntu" on the right.

step 4: kubuntu installation

this is a guided installation. just like when you're installing windows you'll be prompted when you need to make changes. if i remember correctly it's going to ask you for your preferred keyboard layout, a network connection, additional software you might want to install, and all of that is up to you.

but once you reach the point where it asks you where you want to install kubuntu we'll have to make a couple of important choices.

🚨 another important note 🚨

do NOT pick any of the top three options. they will overwrite your already existing windows installation.

click manual instead. we're going to point it to our unallocated disk space. hit continue. you will be shown another disk partition screen.

what you're looking for are your 30gb of free space. just like with the USB drive when we were working with rufus, make sure you're picking the right one. triple check at the very least. the chosen disk will get wiped.

click it until the screen "create a new partition" pops up.

change the following settings to:

New partition size in megabytes: 512

Use as: EFI System Partition

hit OK.

click your free space again. same procedure.

change the following settings to:

New partition size in megabytes: 8000 (*this might be different in your case, read on.)

Use As: Swap Area

hit OK

click your free space a third time. we need one more partition.

change the following settings to:

don't change anything about the partition size this time. we're letting it use up the rest of the resources.

Use as: Ext4 journaling system

Mount Point: /

you're done here as well.

*about the 8000 megabytes in the second step: this is about your RAM size. if you have 4gb instead type 4000, and so on.

once you're sure your configuration is good and ready to go, hit "Install Now". up until here you can go back and make changes to your settings. once you've clicked the button, there's no going back.

finally, select your timezone and create a user account. then hit continue. the installation should finish up... and you'll be good to go.

you'll be told to remove the USB drive from your computer and reboot your machine.

now when your computer boots up, you should end up on a black screen with a little bit of text in the top left corner. ubuntu and windows boot manager should be mentioned there. naturally, when you click ubuntu you will boot into your kubuntu. likewise if you hit windows boot manager your windows login screen will come up.

and that's that folks. go ham on messing around with your linux distro. customize it to your liking. make yourself familiar with the shell (on kubuntu, when you're on your desktop, hit CTRL+ALT+T).

for starters, you could feed it the first commands i always punch into fresh Linux installs:

sudo apt-get update

sudo apt-get upgrade

sudo apt-get install vim

(you'll thank me for the vim one later)

turn your back on windows. taste freedom. nothing sexier than open source, baby.

sources (mainly for the pictures): 1, 2

further reading for the curious: 1, 2

linux basics (includes CLI commands)

kubuntu documentation (this is your new best friend. it'll tell you everything about kubuntu that you need to know.

and finally the promised kde/gnome meme:

[hopeymchope]

The selfish assholery of The Hundred Line cast is becoming too much.

I've been too forgiving. Waiting for the other shoe to drop, trying to look past various incidents as I churn my way through the plot of The Hundred Line. But it's been scratching at the edges of my brain... the way four new characters entered the plot and then immediately betrayed Takumi, stemming from a series of incidents that I managed to mostly blame on Kurara's extreme selfishness and abuse.

Finally, last night? I reached a point where I couldn't deny it anymore: I hate most of these people. And as a result? This game is losing me during my very first 100 days.

Frankly, I'm starting to have doubts I can even complete the first 100 days. Because why would I choose to spend that much time with these people... ?

Actually? Kind of thinking about letting you all die.

I don't WANT to give up on the game. Obviously, I've adored Kazutaka Kodaka's work up until now. I've clearly DEEPLY loved all of Kodaka's work within Danganronpa. Even when he didn't script most of it himself and just provided the plot/characters (Danganronpa 3), I loved it. Stuff like Akudama Drive, which, where Kodaka's involvement uh... existed but was poorly defined? Still really liked it! Death Come True? Yup, I was into it! And I also loved Master Detective Archives: Rain Code.

But The Hundred Line cast has a unique-to-them problem that is constantly recurring: The cast of The Hundred Line people are largely willing to fight and die to protect a building for incredibly dubious reasons, but they are utterly UNwilling to ever stand up to their peers no matter how horrific their behavior. They are brave in physical combat, but utter cowards in their daily lives. Torturing some of the cast by starving them for DAYS? Literally abusing your own sister? You can count on this crew to sit by and let it all happen—and maybe even actively enable it! Because they suck.

Remember when Shuichi told off Kokichi at the end of V3's fourth trial? Or when a few members of the DR2 cast jumped and tied up Komaeda in Chapter 2 after he attempted to commit a murder in Chapter 1? The Hundred Line crew would never do any of that. They would let Kokichi walk all over them, would let Komaeda attempt murder DAILY if he wanted to, and would sit there the entire time going "But that's not—" before cutting themselves off and refusing to argue farther because it seems kind of haaaaaard.

I'm going to have to spoil the first 54 days or so of The Hundred Line: Last Defense Academy to really outline multiple examples, but... yeah. Let's get into how much these people suck ass.

Example 1: Hiruko Shizuhara — Near the story's start, Hiruko doesn't like that some of the group aren't aren't actively choosing to engage in combat (that they don't understand, to defend something they don't understand, for reasons they don't understand). We'll eventually learn that she has more intel on why this fight needs to happen and what's at stake, but she's been refusing to share it because... because... well, because she's an asshole. And that's fine! Every Danganronpa game has at least one blatant asshole among the cast who serves as a major antagonist despite not being THE main villain. A snotty asshole like Hiruko can serve valuable story purposes. But when she decides she's going to try to force the others to fight by starving them — literally denying them any food whatsoever — do we see Takumi or Yakemaru or Darumi stand up to Hiruko at all? NO! Do we see them try to sneak food to the starving classmates? NO—not until DAYS later, when they think they can use food as a form of leverage, that is. And that comes after Hiruko announces she's going to kick out all the non-combatants so they can fucking die to the invaders. At least Yakemaru gets really pissed about this, though all he does about it is... punch himself in the face to deal with his own anger. But does our main protagonist, Takumi, confront Hiruko and argue against her about this planned act of murder? FUCK NO!

Ultimately, I think we're supposed to forgive this becuse we later learn in a private conversation that Hiruko didn't REALLY mean it, despite the fact that everyone completely believed her without question. Because she sure as shit comes off as serious and dead-set on it with no room for any interpretation before that. (This seems like the latest in a misguided trend over the last decade of fiction where a military leader sometimes will withhold extremely need-to-know information from their troops for no reason, and we the audience are supposed to believe this is a good idea; ask any fucking ACTUAL military leader about that, and they will tell you that an informed squad = motivation and morale. Lack of communication = killing your motivation and morale. Happy to share tons of editorials to this effect. Or just Google it.) Anyone in the cast would be 100% justified in imprisoning and/or killing her to stop her at this point, but not even our main "hero" can bring himself to so much as ARGUE with her. Everyone is just too weak-willed to stand up against the starvation torture of the others. Because that's DEFINITELY the best way to get people invested in your war instead of just telling them the truth, right... ?

Example 2: The Second-to-Last Defense Academy members (and Kurura Oosuzuki specifically) — Takumi meets the four remaining members of the Second-to-Last Defense Academy while alone. He soon opts to join them in combat as they defend their school... but in the end, they must flee to the primary Last Defense Academy and meet up with the others. Once there, the four members of the Second-to-Last Defense Academy are disappointed to learn that the "main campus" crew is not nearly as dedicated to this fight as THEY are. This is pretty quickly revealed to be the cast because the Second-to-Last Defense Academy students have more context and intel on why this war is happening and why the fight is necessary. However, Kurura soon sets about insulting everyone she sees, especially trashing Gaku for daring to grow up poor and then starting to physically beat him for arguing against her rich ass.

This shutdown comes quickly on the heels of Tsubasa being like "Can you blame us for having questions after we got dragged into this war?"a and Takemaru asking the Second-to-Lasters if they're going to keep throwing around the term "World Death" or are they going to explain explain what that is. Both of which were entirely reasonble questions/reactions.

This culminates with her deciding that... (a) nah, she's NOT going to share why the world is in danger from the invaders with the main campus squad. Because the Second-to-Last Defense Academy students are SO FUCKING DEDICATED to the war, you see, that they... would rather make sure that nobody else has ANY reason to join the fight, actively hindering the fucking war effort they claim to be devoted to out of... I guess, purely out of classist spite??? You can and should blame ALL of them for this because the other three students from the Second-to-Last Defense Academy all decide they MUST obey Kurura (who is not even their leader in ANY sense) and agree to NOT share the information about the war. In fact, Nozomi goes so far as to privately arrange for the groups to use the cafeteria separately so they will never interact. And during this time, with Kurura nowhere around? She still refuses to give any information about the war or why anyone should be fighting, because she is Part Of The Problem. Oh, and (b) soon enough, an incident with her homemade curry being eaten results in Kurura challenging a (non-combatant!!!!) member of the "main campus" squad to a one-on-one fight. At which point she declares everyone from the main campus must do ANYTHING SHE FUCKING ORDERS THEM TO DO as punishment. And again: EVERYONE FROM HER TEAM AGREES WITH THIS AND DOES NOT ARGUE HER DOWN. They are either too cowardly and/or utterly complicit in her bullshit. And her threats are far from idle ones, either: In the coming days, we can repeatedly encounter these characters in the halls where they can tease us with all the horrific punishments they have in store for us. The only person who doesn't treat us with hatred and mockery is Nozomi—she just treats us with fear and disgust instead. And THAT'S because Kurura caps all this off by (c) convincing Nozomi and Kyoshika — the two other female members of her team — that the main protag, Takumi, wishes to drug and rape Nozomi. Despite the fact that Takumi has literally fought and bled alongside them on the battlefield AND now brought them back to his own campus to protec them Nozomi and Kyoshika COMPLETELY BUY INTO THIS and now are filled with nothing but disdain towards Takumi.

(....oh, and along the way, Shouma tries to reveal some more info about how they got there, more background on the mystery of how they were recruited. This enrages Kurura even more because she says it "DOES! NOT! MATTER! You've been given a mission, why can't you just do it?!" In case you had any doubt that she is 100% devoted to being enslaved without logic or reason.)

Any one of these acts alone would be justification for the main campus crew to say "You're not fucking welcome here anymore unless you stop this shit." But of course, no one stands up to them and tells them to fuck off... they're all just too damned cowardly for that. But again, I think they want us to shrug this off simply because it works out retroactively. But it must be noted that the fact that this DOES work out is a complete fucking MIRACLE, and I will never forgive Kurura for (a), (b), OR (c). The fact that she is apparently "not really like that" when she takes off the mask is not remotely an excuse. She's acting this way by choice; ergo, she is ABSOLUTELY "like that." I will also not be forgiving Kyoshika, Yugamu, and Nozomi for being complicit in Kurura's bullshit.

But I'll give them this much: It makes some sense that Takumi is unwilling to stand up against the group because Nozomi bears strong-but-vague connections to his beloved Karua. From a characterization POV, it makes sense that he'd be hesitant to do any further damage to his relationship with the Second-to-Lasters just because he wants to close that distance so very badly.

Example 3: Ima and Kako (a.k.a. the last straw) - It's been obvious from pretty early on that Kako isn't really very keen on how her brother treats her. He acts like he has some incestuous sister complex, and she's clearly extremely uncomfortable with it. And as the story progresses, it also becomes evident that she wants to join the others in defending the school. By Day 53? Kako finally stands up to Ima as best she can. She finally speaks up.

....holy SHIT. The abject fear on Kako's face speaks volumes.

At this point, Ima grabs Kako and literally starts to DRAG her out of the room. Only Takemaru steps forward to block their exit, telling Ima "If you really love your sister, shouldn't you respect her opinion more?!" Which is... an awfully calm way to confront him. But Ima's response is...

...to stab Takemaru for daring to interfere. Holy. Fuck.

Major props to Takemaru for being the ONLY person to try and stop sibling abuse. I also won't hold it against Shouma — I know he wouldn't have it in him to stand in the way of this conflict. I get that. But everybody else in the room? You're ALL on thin ice right now.

This happens at breakfast. Afterwards, Takumi, Eito, Gaku, and Yugamu help patch Takemaru up and take him back to his room, putting him to bed to let him heal. After this, it's suddenly "too late" to do anything else, according to Takumi. He just goes to bed. Ima escapes the cafeteria after the stabbing and drags Kako back to his room. Takumi just says to "worry about them later." YEAH, never mind that Kako is undoubtedly being abused as we speak. Never mind that you decided it's more important to get your beauty sleep than to stop her brother from mentally and almost-definitely-physically tormenting her.

The next morning, Ima comes by Takumi's room. He wants Takumi to convince Kako to stop trying to fight and do what her brother says — and in return, Ima will fight in her place against the invaders. Wow, what an utterly shit deal you've offered me! I get the promise of help from the guy who just STABBED someone for daring to try to stop your abuse! And in return, all I have to do is crush the spirit of your abuse victim!

Sadly, this is a false choice. It's a But Thou Must. No matter how many times I clicked "No" (because "HELL FUCKING NO" was not given as an option), the game simply refuses to move forward until you agree.

I almost quit the game permanently right here. I had to pause and gather myself. I don't like being railroaded into being a horrible human being. When I played the demo for the OG release of Ninja Gaiden 3 on the PS3, and I got to that part where the unarmed guy is pleading for his life and telling you about his family and the game only lets you progress if you brutally kill him? Yeah, I just shut the demo off. And as far as I'm concerned? I beat the game with the only good ending. I won.

In the aftermath of this sequence in The Hundred Line, the good news is that Takumi utterly fails to convince Kako to back down. The bad news is that Takumi winds up convincing her that her brother's "protection" is a beautiful love that she should be grateful for. So now she wants to fight to protect HIM because of how much she APPRECIATES her brother. Wow, Takumi! What masterful work at enabling and abetting years of abuse! You absolute fucking prick.

And making the player character this dispicable really BROKE something in me. You see the issue here. Example #3 is certainly the greatest sin, but all of this has been building.

Kodaka has spoken about how excitedly he wrote the script for this game. It seems like Kodaka was so rapidly writing conflict, so excited to add all this drama, that he didn't stop to think how it reflected on the characters or whether it made logical sense. The answer is that it doesn't make sense—at least not for any decent human beings to act like this. The only logical conclusion is that the characters? Are some MAJOR assholes.

[hadesisqueer]

I'm not saying people must ship Kataang or anything, everyone here is free to ship whatever people want, but at the same time, some of the criticism I see of the ship is insane.

One of the softer ones (because today I saw some crazy stuff) is that they're sibling coded. Like, I watched ATLA several times, I kind of just rewatched ATLA, and yet I still don't get how exactly they're sibling coded? Aang pretty much had a crush on Katara from the moment he met her, and Katara at first saw him as a friend —she never said she saw him as 'her little brother', by the way, you guys need to learn the differences between sibling dynamics and friend dynamics—. That starts changing at the end of The Fortune Teller when she begins seeing Aang from another perspective, though. By the beginning of Book 2 it's pretty clear she has already started to develop a crush on him. If you think it's very 'sisterly' of her to blush while asking Aang 'we're in the Cave of the Two Lovers, so what if, you know-- what if we kissed 😳👉🏻👈🏻', then get upset when Aang said he wouldn't kiss her and then after they did kiss and were already out she blushes and gets nervous again-- or when she gets jealous in The Headband when he dances with another girl and then blushes again while dancing with him-- you're tuning into the wrong show, go watch Game of Thrones or something, because this is not it.

You can argue that Katara was 'like an older sister' or 'motherly' to Aang over the fact that she was often very caring towards him, but honestly, that's not it, either; otherwise, you could say that Katara sees Zuko as her brother because she likes teasing him. Do I think Katara and Zuko are sibling-coded? Not really. But if you say that Katara was sisterly or motherly to Aang because she's caring towards him, you can also say Katara sees Zuko as her brother because she often teased him the exact same way she teased Sokka, her older brother. (I do not think Katara sees Zuko as her brother, btw; just clearing this up. And I may not ship him and Katara but if that's your ship, you do you, I am not getting into a ship war here).

Katara in general is a very caring person, to the point that yeah, it comes off as 'motherly' sometimes. She was like that not just to Aang but towards Toph and Sokka as well. That doesn't mean she really sees any of them as her 'children' as well, guys, nor do any of them actually see them as their mother (well, Sokka kind of did, but that's another thing). And she's very protective of Aang, yeah. Try to switch Kataang's gender for a second; Katara as the boy and Aang as the girl. Switch it up and you have a girl with a cute crush on a slightly older boy who at first sees her as a friend but after a while starts reciprocating. If you saw that boy act more caring and protective of that girl, you wouldn't assume he sees her as a daughter, you'd just assume he is extremely protective because his feelings are strong. I once saw someone saying 'Katara acts like a Booktok boyfriend' and honestly? Kind of, yeah. A lot of Kataang is them being kind of a reverse of the stereotypical 'kind but stronger, older boy gets with sweet, younger girl' stuff we see in a lot of media. Both of them are very caring and supportive and constantly reassure each other, not just Katara to Aang, (and Aang is also very protective of Katara as well, we see it many times, most of all in The Avatar State), but Katara is the older one, and usually the most protective as well, the one who fought off Zuko at the North Pole to protect Aang, the one who almost lost it when she saw him literally die and fought off the Dai Li, Zuko and Azula to get him and get out at The Crossroads of Destiny, the one who grabs Zuko when he joins them and literally tells him 'hurt Aang and I will kill you'.

Yeah, I don't think Kataang is sibling-coded at all. That person is right, Katara is just Aang's 'Booktok boyfriend'.

[geoledgy]

your oc website is SO SO SO SO INCREDIBLY COOL how the hell do you even start learning how to do this ?? if you learned how to do this by yourself online, are there any tutorials or resources you can share with us? was making this website free??

omg THANK YOU SO SOOOOOO MUCH!!! It makes me so happy to hear that folks like my little site. I code my site with Phoenix Code (for the live viewer and number dials) and I host my site on Neocities - it is all free. Phoenix can be used in browser or on desktop, but I like having it on desktop more for big projects in case my files get deleted. I use the browser version when I just want to test something quickly.

The 2 videos I use and can not recommend enough to anyone who asks me are this HTML tutorial and this CSS tutorial. They are simple and easy to understand, but I recommend watching it the first go, and then following along the next few watches until you get the flow of basic parts to a website, how they're organized, and what order they go in. At this point, I've memorized exactly where everything goes, and it is all thanks to these 2 videos.

If I am being honest, I learned how to code by myself, not quite even with online tutorials but just from being stupid and messing around myself (1, because I was a kid, and 2, because I didn't understand English very well to know what tutorials are saying.) I used to do html coding for Neopet pages when I was a kid with too much online time, first by just editing the default petpages and adding info and images, and then just doing trial and error with the html. I'll just try something and then if it doesn't turn out the way I want it, I try to find out why it didn't work and also get inspiration from other similar sites to figure out where things go or how they coded (with this nifty thing called right click > inspect page or right click > view page source). And BOOM, working webpage.

It was rudimentary, white blank background without any boxes or anything, you just scrolled down the page and sections were separated by a horizontal bar. OH and every text was centered! I had no idea how to make scrolling boxes or fancy assets, but damn I still had so much fun working on it every weekend. When you find authentic selfmade sites from the 90s and 2000s, most of them aren't super fancy either unlike what modern nostalgia makes you think. So I hope you don't feel discouraged if you begin making a website and feel it isn't "fancy", you're already doing a first big step which is making a webpage and learned your first set of html code!

It was over a decade later before I coded webpages with html again. I've gotten lazy and started relying on site builders, but nothing was quite as versatile as html. I wanted to try coding my own OC site again, so that was when I started working on OutKrop (the site I posted). Until I started coding again, I had literally no idea what CSS even is (and let me tell you, it's a game changer!)

Personally, I work best when I can do things hands on. I don't read through tutorials, I code first then go back and read through coding help sites like w3schools when I find myself stuck and unable to figure something out. Sometimes I grab existing codes and play around with them to see what changes and what I can do with it, cuz having visual context is what helps me a lot.

I can also share my process:

Once I gather up some ideas, I make a sketch, including what boxes (divs in css) should approximately go. It is very rough, but shows me exactly what I need to know.

Next I load up my coding app (Phoenix Code in my case) and "sketch" the layout. Nothing fancy going on here, just putting things where they need to be, and fixing size of boxes and margins if needed. I give my boxes all a background color so I can easily see how big they are and where they are located.

After some adjustments like moving stuff around and adding assets like backgrounds and images, and changing colors of the boxes, rounding off corners, etc., we get this!

so recap + additional useful sites I use:

Coding app: Phoenix Code

Site hosted on: Neocities

Video tutorials: HTML and CSS

Sites for learning code: w3schools, also lissa explains is a great site that is written for kids to learn html so it's easy to understand. Finally, sadgrl has a lot of great resources for coding as well!

I recommend looking through these sites AFTER you tried taking a spin at coding - it doesn't have to be anything fancy just follow the HTML video tutorial I linked!

Thanks for the ask, and I hope this helps you and many others out there who are interested in building a site with html/css! Don't be afraid to get things "wrong" or have an "un-fancy" site. This is how you learn to code, and it'll become so easy once you get the hang of it.

Anyone is always more than welcome to reach out for coding help and advice :-]

[deathworlders-of-e24]

Thomas, Engineer

Part 4

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Sparks burst upwards into the goggles Thomas was wearing, the plasma cutter in his hand burning at several hundred degrees, focused to an incredibly fine point. Holding it in his work gloves was awkward at best, but years of practice had made him exceptional at his job. Sixer and Mace might’ve been better at the finer detail work, Padrino had incredible dexterity after all, but making custom tools was well within his wheel house too.

The two bot brothers had asked him to make a special kind of nano wrench while they ran a ‘memory sweeper’ program through his old translator, the one that had caught that rogue signal all those cycles ago. The group had been working on it in their off time between maintenance requests, and they were finally just steps away from the answers they were looking for. All they needed now was to strip the memory code out of the device, and for that they needed itty bitty tiny nanoscopic tools; ergo, while the twins worked their programs, Thomas got to work making the things they’d need.

He was almost done too, when the comm-link trilled. A patch job in the security chief’s office, apparently one of the terminals was unresponsive and the door was getting jammed up on something. Personal projects would have to wait.

“Roomba, we got a job. You coming with or hanging out here?”

[Statement: you operate at greater efficiency when this unit is present]

“That’s right buddy, but I’m asking what you wanna do,” Thomas said.

“Beep.”

[Statement: I would like to assist please]

“Thanks Roomba, I appreciate that.” Thomas held his arm out and the little droid climbed up to his usual perch on the man’s shoulder. “Look at you, making decisions for yourself. Good for you bud!”

Thomas adored the little robot, and as Roomba got smarter, that feeling only grew. Every day the small cleaning drone was getting more clever, his AI evolving ever further, thanks to the upgrades from Sixer and Mace. Pretty soon Roomba would be as smart as Thomas was.

Maybe I’ll teach him how to play virtual chess, he thought. Or I’ll build him a little controller and we can split screen a blaster battle game or something!

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

The two made their way through the ship, waving and saying hello to the many people who stopped Thomas to look at the small robot on his shoulder. At this point in their mission, it was common knowledge that one of the humans had made a cleaning drone their ‘pet’, although Thomas was trying to make it clear that wasn’t the case. Roomba was his own person, he just so happened to have very little legs and it was faster to just catch a ride on his human companion. It probably didn’t help that outside himself and the Padrino, nobody else had the hardware to understand what Roomba was saying, so all they ever heard was Beep.

They made it up to the command deck and knocked on the door to the Chief’s office. It opened halfway before getting stuck, hidden gears grinding, and there was the Chief, leaning on his desk with a data pad in his hand. Thomas figured Chief Ducane was kinda cute, what with his scruffy yet trimmed beard and his various tattoos, but macho wasn’t really his thing on guys. That being said, he could see why some on the crew were whispering about him, the man was built. Thomas tried getting his attention through the crack.

“Reporting Chief, you sent a maintenance request?” Thomas said through the gap in the door.

“Yeah, I did,” Chief Ducane looked up. “Oh right, you’re Thomas right? I don’t remember if I’ve introduced myself yet, I’m Danny Ducane. You’re the guy with the domesticated maintenance droid, right?” The Chief got up to the door and pulled it open himself, the hydraulics groaning as it slid open the rest of the way.

“He’s not…” Thomas started, annoyed, but took a beat. Don’t antagonize the guy who can pull apart the doors. “This is Roomba, he has an adaptive learning AI now, like the Padrino on the crew. He’s not a pet.”

Roomba looked up when Thomas said his name and trilled angrily at the idea of being equated to a house cat.

“Beep.”

[Statement: Please inform the other human that I am not domesticated in any way, and would prefer that not get said again]

“He said you’re being rude,” Thomas explained.

“Beep.”

[Sufficiently put]

Chief Ducane looked at the two of them for a moment before raising his hands in defeat.

“Okay, fair enough, that was a dick move on my part. Sorry little guy, didn’t know you were one of the clever bots.”

Thomas nudged his tool bag with his foot, and the Chief took the message.

“Right, my control console is fritzing out,” Ducane said, shuffling awkwardly towards his desk. “The screen blurs every couple minutes, and the door got stuck this morning, don’t know what that’s about either.” The chief stood there, gesturing to his desk with one hand, the other fumbling to put the data pad down where Thomas suspected he thought he wouldn’t be able to see it. It occurred to him that Chief Ducane might not be the most technologically savvy, considering you could read a data pad from either side, and the exact same script was frozen on his console screen. It looked like a checklist of sorts, but Thomas wasn’t here to snoop classified documents. Unless it’d be funny, then maybe.

“Right,” Thomas said, eyeing the chief, “it’s probably just an electrical short, a little leftover from that solar flare the other day. I’ll have to strip some wiring but it’s a quick fix. Though the door might have to be taken out so I can get into the motors.”

“And how long will that take?” Ducane asked.

“Maybe an hour? Maybe more?” Thomas shrugged. “Takes as long as it takes for me to get in there.”

Thomas looked at him a moment, standing there with his hands on his sides. He could hear Roomba’s mechanical innards ticking and whirring as the little bot held onto his perch on Thomas’s shoulder.

“Guess I should let you get to it then,” Chief Ducane said, clapping his hands and heading for the door, but he stopped before he left, like he’d just remembered he’d left the stove on or some such.

“Hey, just a quick question,” he said, turning back to face Thomas. The chief’s hands were fidgeting, hooking and unhooking his thumbs into his pockets. “Are you acquainted with the Sed engineers? Kor and Taren?”

Thomas thought for a moment, then shrugged.

“Sure, I’ve seen them around. Why?”

“They ever seem real busy for unknown reasons?”

“Honestly? Like you want my work appropriate answer or my actual opinion?”

“Both.”

“Well my work appropriate answer is sure, they seem good at their jobs, usually off together on requests.”

“And your personal opinions?” Chief Ducane pressed, crossing his arms and shifting to stand in the doorway, as if he was keeping Thomas sequestered until he got answers to his odd line of questions. Thomas didn’t need to ponder the question that long.

“Honestly? Honestly they kinda suck,” He blurted out, a little more venomously than he’d intended. “Like, okay, don’t get me wrong, you ask them questions and they give the right answers, they know how things work and they know the right tool for the jobs, but work wise? Half the time nobody can find them. I’ve had three repair jobs handed over to me in the last two weeks ‘cause they’re off somewhere fooling around.”

“Fooling around?” Ducane intoned, “as in…?”

“Well we just kinda assumed they were an item. And look, we’re sympathetic, but the work load is insane on a ship this size with this many conflicting requirements. Temperature differences for different races, atmospheric controls bottoming out, I got a guy with four arms for a boss and even he thinks it’s ridiculous how often stuff around here breaks.”

“So you all just assumed they were off somewhere… doing that, while you all just put up with it? Has anyone seen them like this?” Chief Ducane pushed.

“Roomba did,” Thomas said, tilting his head the little droid’s direction, “while we were doing repairs in the air ducts a couple cycles ago.”

“Beep.”

[Please do not disclose this information]

“Huh?” Thomas put the little droid in his palm and let him stand for himself. “What’s up buddy?”

“What’s he saying?” The chief asked, shifting focus from Thomas to Roomba and back again.

“Beep.”

[Disclosure of this information will bring my work efficiency into question]

Ohhhhhhh, Thomas thought.

“He’s just saying how weird what he saw was,” Thomas shiftily explained, patting the little droid on the head. “We were working some repairs in the ducts when Roomba saw Taren in another part of the ship through the grating. He was on a comm-link and Kor showed up with a thing Roomba didn’t recognize, but from what he told me it was some hand tool I think.”

“So maybe they were just on another job and not screwing around?” Ducane questioned.

“Nah, couldn’t be, I was supposed to be the only repair guy in that part of the ship at the time. Everyone else is still supposed to be in the core room making repairs after that solar flare.”

Thomas took a deep breath and looked Ducane in the eye.

“Chief, be straight with me, is something going on on my ship?”

“What do you mean your ship?” Ducane scoffed.

“Trust me, this ship has already gotten enough of my blood, sweat, and tears man. I probably love her more than anyone else on this boat, so yeah, she’s my ship.” Thomas was getting a tad red in the face as he said this, which was fair, as it was slightly embarrassing to voice this odd idea of his. “Look man, this ship might be just a job to you, but it’s not just that to me, okay? So if there’s something happening here that could hurt her, I’m not gonna let that happen.”

How odd that a simple maintenance request could have such an impact on his day?

Roomba reach up and tugged on Thomas’s earlobe.

“Beep.”

[New Task Uploaded: protect Noah. Confirm?]

“That’s right Roomba, that’s what we’re gonna do,” Thomas said, weirdly amped up now. Chief Ducane stood there looking at him incredulously.

“Is every kid in the galaxy just ready to ride shotgun off to war these days? I swear, you younger guys need to do something more productive and fun with all that extra energy you have.”

“Shove it… respectfully, Chief.”

“Well if it makes you feel any better, I don’t have anything concrete that something is happening, not that I could tell you if I did.” Ducane shrugged and crossed his arms again, leaning against the wall. The data pad behind them on the desk trilled, a new file had been sent to it, and before the tones had silenced themselves, Thomas felt as if his neurons had just taken a bolt of electricity across his frontal lobe. He turned back to face the Security Chief with a dread look tacked onto his face.

“Hypothetically, Chief, if somebody had possibly intercepted a weird transmission while outside the broadcast shields, how important would that be?”

Chief Ducane stared at him a moment, then clasped his hands together in front of his mouth before sighing uncomfortably hard.

“I’d say that’d be pretty important, kid.”

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

“I thought you were supposed to be smart!” Danny half accused, walking quickly down the hall away from the lift.

“Man, I’m like actually a genius, I have four degrees, but nobody ever accused me of being smart,” Thomas said, shrugging. “I didn’t want to get kicked off the ship if it was nothing, which it probably is!”

“You wouldn’t have gotten kicked off the ship. If I can’t even get rid of Grite, you’re as safe as can be.”

“Oh, okay,” Thomas said sarcastically, “then I totally should’ve spilled it when, while on a space walk, my somewhat illegally jailbroke translator picked up a rogue signal on the long range communications array for the ship I just got a job on. I’ve seen people canned for less, I could’ve been tried for espionage or something.”

“You did what?”

Thomas and Danny turned on theirs heels to see Odis the Galley standing in the doorway they’d just passed, a ‘coffee’ mug in hand. It had a cartoonish drawing of a purple cow on it.

“Oh good, we’re just telling the whole ship now, I guess,” Danny pinched the bridge of his nose. “I’m definitely getting fired.”

“Wait wait wait, Odis is cool,” Thomas vouched. “He’s a real stand up guy.”

“What did you do now humie?” Odis groaned, downing whatever was in his mug before sprinting to join them. His shorter legs had to move twice as fast to keep up with the taller humans.

“So you know that project the twins and I have been working on?” Thomas asked.

“Yeah, you’ve been using your off hours for something that’s not video games, of course I noticed.”

“Fired…,” Danny moaned. “Court marshalled even.”

“Quiet big human, the smart human is talking.”

“Oh no, we’ve established that word doesn’t apply to me.”

“Beep.”

[Thank you for not telling the human I fell down the air ducts]

It was a wonder how the entire ship didn’t know what they were doing by then, seeing as they were not exactly discreet as they headed down to the maintenance decks. When the group of them finally made the locker room, more than one set of eyes was watching them, though it was mostly Chief Ducane they were looking at. It wasn’t exactly normal operating procedures for the Chief of Security to walk into their locker room.

“How is it that you humans are always up to something ridiculous?” Odis asked, shaking his bulbous gray head. “I mean, as a Galley, I’m actually impressed with the level of… what’s a good human word for this nonsense?”

“Shenanigans?” Thomas offered.

“Ridiculous words, ridiculous people…,” Odis laughed. “The cows are cool, but the rest of your world is just a mess of weird, huh?”

The humans didn’t respond, though given any thought, they couldn’t have refuted the Galley anyway.

Sixer and Mace stood at their work table, the terminal screen running thousands of lines of code a second. Thomas would’ve loved to comb through it given the chance, but now wasn’t the time.

“Twins!” he called over, “Got it up and going?”

“Almost, Human Thomas,” Sixer replied.

“Hello, Security Chief Ducane,” Mace greeted.

“Yeah, hi guys,” Danny said. “I hear you all have been working a little side project?”

The two Padrino turned to each other and each gave a quick burst of machine speak before turning back to face them.

“Human Thomas, do you believe it is time to inform the ship’s command structure of our findings?”

“You could say that, yeah,” Thomas nodded.

“Good, because we have finished preparations. We simply need the tool you made up and to see if the sweeper program retrieves any data.”

Thomas patted down his coveralls before fishing the nano-wrench from his inner pocket. He handed the tool to Sixer, who turned back to the table and made the final adjustments.

“Moment of truth, I guess,” he said.

“You realize I’m going to be extremely pissed if you got me down here and all worked up for nothing,” Danny said pointedly.

“Understood… sir,” Thomas swallowed hard.

The computer ran its program, thousands, hundreds of thousands of lines of code fluttering across the screen, the Padrino’s speed was impressive to say the least. They definitely had to teach him that sometime.

After a minute of them staring at the terminal in silence, the screen showed a resounding-

“Nothing?” Thomas and Danny said in unison.

“Correct,” Sixer said.

“Unfortunately,” continued Mace, “the translators are not equipped with enough memory storage to log something the size of a communications transmission.”

“So we’ve got nothing?” Thomas said, hands clenched at his sides. He didn’t know what he wanted the signal to be, but nothing was… incredibly unsatisfying, to say the least.

“Did you try to see recipient data?” Odis asked, eyeing the console code.

“What?” Thomas turned to him, confusion distorting the disappointment on his face.

“With the long range array, it’s got recipient data built into the message, so the thing knows who it’s going to,” Odis explained slowly. “Back in the day, we Galley used to strip data out of long range messages to find new planets to… interact with. It’s how we found the humies first, caught all those messages you kept throwing out into space.” Odis rifled through one of his side pockets and brought out something that looked like a key fob with a port on one end. He popped open a panel in the terminal and plugged it in, hitting a couple keys to sync the programs together. Thomas watched, confusion and disappointment morphing into a cautious optimism. Maybe they’d find something after all.

“And here… we… go!” Odis said smugly, triumphantly hitting the execute key. The screen rolled the code again, but this time information began loading, the computer compiling the data for them.

“And you just happen to have this… why?” Danny looked sternly in the Galley’s direction.

“If it makes you feel any better Chief, most of my free time has been spent with the kid playing Terran video games,” Odis snickered. “Don’t worry about what I’ve been up to, worry about whoever is sending messages to the GAIL High Council.”

“What the hell?” Danny exclaimed, leaning over the console to examine the data.

Sure enough, they couldn’t recover any of the message, the data was just too big for the little device to have caught any. However, Odis’s tracer did show that whatever the signal was, it had gone straight to someone by the name of Mons on the High Council of the Grand Assembly of Intelligent Lifeforms.

“Chief, what the hell are we looking at?” Thomas asked, for the first time actually realizing that something could be deeply, darkly wrong on the ship.

“This doesn’t make any sense, communications can’t go directly to the Council, not without going through Captain Skitch and me,” Danny kept looking at the screen, rereading the data from start to finish, over and over again, before pulling out his data pad and copying all of it down, taking photos too.

“What are you doing?” Sixer asked.

“Making sure whatever we have here, there’s multiple copies so we can’t lose any proof later.”

“Do you suspect there’s another agenda aboard this ship Chief Ducane?” Mace followed.

“… I sincerely hope not, but either way, none of this ever happened. Not a single one of you saw any of this, okay? Nothing and no one,” Danny looked at each of them in turn, making sure they understood his meaning, “is going to hear about any of this. And when I call any of you to my office, it’s double time, understood?”

“You got it Chief,” Thomas said immediately, the others following suit, but with much less gusto.

“Beep.”

[Task: protect Noah in progress]

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

The work shift ended with no more excitement, however Thomas’s heart rate hadn’t declined even a bit in the following hours. The idea that something could threaten the ship, his ship, the ship he’d almost died for already, filled him with some very mixed emotions, not the least of which was apprehension. It did reassure him that Chief Ducane seemed like a good guy, and that he wasn’t going to take any disciplinary measures against the worker crew for anything, but the idea that they could be called on to actually do something was daunting.

Walking to the mess hall, Thomas realized he’d never actually made any of the requested repairs to Danny office. He pulled a comm-link out of his back pocket and sent a quick “sorry, I’ll be right there to fix the door” text, but was alarmed at what the Chief of Security replied almost instantly.

>Someone searched my office while cameras were out of commission. Nothing is missing. They took advantage of the door being jammed and unlocked<

Another message:

>Don’t come up here, it’ll look suspicious for the both of us. I’ll make another request tomorrow. Tell your friends to be careful, and come to me immediately if you see anything at all<

Thomas shakily put the comm-link back in his pocket and headed back towards the Vending Machines. He saw Odis sitting in the corner and joined him after getting his food.

“You ever think someone in the GAIL could do something pretty bad?”

“What, you think you humans have a monopoly on being kind of shitty?” Odis snorted. “You’re not that weird, you know.”