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The Need for Focal Points in Interior Design
Interior focal points are essentially design techniques for providing visual structure. Basically, they guide the eye and creating a sense of balance within a space. Without a clear focal point, a room can feel disorganized or lacking in cohesion. We simply have to strategically incorporate statement pieces—such as an accent wall, a bold piece of furniture, or striking lighting. These elevate the professionalism of interior designers by anchoring the space, drawing attention to key elements while enhancing the overall interior aesthetic. In fact, focal points help establish hierarchy in design. How? They ensure that spaces feel intentional rather than overwhelming or cluttered.
Functionality of Focal Points
Beyond aesthetics, focal points contribute to the functionality of a space by defining areas and improving spatial flow. In open-plan layouts, for example, a well-placed focal element can create subtle separations between living room, dining, and work areas. Additionally, focal points evoke emotion and set the mood of a space, which can be through a calming artwork in a bedroom or a dramatic chandelier in a lobby.
So, integrating thoughtfully designed focal points, interiors become more engaging, practical, and visually compelling, elevating the overall experience of a space.
Read more from an Interior Design Company in Dubai
#interior design dubai#fit out Dubai#Focal Points#Interior Focal points#Fit Out Focal points#focal points functionality#living room design#bedroom design#office furniture Dubai#statement furniture#interior design contractor#interior design Dubai#villa interior design#office design#interior depth#interior aesthetics#interior luxury#interior design company#create focal points#design techniques#modern interior design#office furniture#office fit out#modern office design#furniture#visual interior design#art of interior design#hierarchy in design#visual structure
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Valve just published a blog post regarding plans for the first MVM update in twelve years for TF2 (to be released later this year, sometime after August), and it shaping up to be the first MVM update to involve community submissions (excluding Robotic Boogaloo).
#tf2#im very excited to see what the community comes up with. and i'm excited to see what Valve has in store#regarding if they'll be doing any adjustments to MVM or it's upgrades. and how they plan on handling mann up missions#and what the possible rewards could be. if they're not just for fun anyway (through boot camp)#i'm kinda tempted to rework a layout i made a few years ago for a different tf2 project that didn't end up going as planned#but i feel like i'd need some help on it but wouldn't know who to ask (between folks i know already) and don't want to be a burden#it'd be nice to work on tf2 specific maps again. though this'd be the first time i ever touch anything MVM related#and i'd have to gut and rework parts of the existing layout for it to work better for MVM#like there are 3 main routes from the attackers side. all leading to one main focal point. so i'd love to try and rework it#it was originally created for a different gamemode that utilized Arena's logic. and the layout's fully functional#definitely not complete by the standards for what it was originally trying to achieve. and definitely not in it's current form for MVM#also with valve's mention of being up for the idea of halloween MVM maps.#that makes me wonder if they'll re-tool wave 666 to be part of halloween contracts or not#since it's an MVM map without any rewards and can't be played in Mann Up mode (acting as a free for fun mission)#which ive always found odd. so if they managed to create a contract for it and add some kind of reward. that'd be really fun to see#ofc just wishful thinking.
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experiencing like level 5 lesbian drama and the two people involved aren't even lesbians
#it's all around who is going to my party and who is avoiding going to said party because they don't wanna talk to their ex#which also bc of a major uhauling incident gone wrong gone follow a drug manic episode gone extremely bad breakup....#and again. these are not lesbians. this is functionally a straight relationship#but I just have to witness it. I'm the focal point that connects these two. do you see#also this drama is definitely leaning more one side than the other if you catch my drift
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Embrace the Glow: Modern Neon Home Interior Design

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#acrylic#backyard#balcony#bathroom#bedroom#color schemes#complementary colors#cool tones#dimming controls#focal points#functional lighting#glass#high quality#home decor#home decoration#impactful design#interior design#interior design catalog#metallic accents#minimalist furniture#modern interior design#modern neon home interior decoration#monochrome#neon light#neon lights#niche accents#statement pieces#sweet home usa interior decoration#warm hues
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Significance Of Symmetry & Balance In Interior Design
Significance Of Symmetry & Balance In Interior Design - #homeimprovementreferral #InteriorDesign, #PopularPosts - https://www.homeimprovementreferral.com/significance-of-symmetry-balance-in-interior-design-2023-09/
#aspects of interior design#Balance#Focal Points#functionality#harmony#interior design#lighting#sense of balance and harmony#Symmetry
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Orchard Wye essen black floorstanding double vanity unit and basin 1200mm
Discover the epitome of style and functionality with the Orchard Wye Essen Black Floorstanding Double Vanity Unit and Basin, measuring 1200mm. This unit stands as a testament to modern design, featuring a sleek black finish and generous storage space. The double basins are particularly suited for shared bathrooms, while the contemporary aesthetic ensures that this unit serves as a striking centerpiece within any bathroom interior. Immerse yourself in the perfect fusion of practicality and elegance. Visit: https://orchardbathrooms.com/bathroom-furniture/
#Double vanity unit#Ample storage#Black finish#Modern design#Shared bathrooms#Bathroom upgrade#Stylish#Contemporary aesthetic#Functionality#Focal point
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The one where Y/N and Harry are neighbors in an apartment complex, he's got a bunny called Snuggles, he makes softcore porn spanking people (it's a REALLY LOUD HOBBY), and Y/N has definitely called the police for a domestic disturbance next door.
HI FRIENDS. The council has spoken, so here is the first part of the lovingly-dubbed spanko fic. This series will be early access, so— parts go up on patreon first, then they come to tumblr 3-ish weeks later (but if you wanna get ahead, the second part is already up on patreon). Reader insert, emotionally a slowburn, and basically a garbage fire I'm pouring my deepest, darkest desire into as a coping mechanism :p If you liked TDIAG, you'll probably rock with this one. As always, feedback/reblogs massively appreciated <3 WEEEEEEEE okay bye
ᴄʜᴇᴄᴋ ᴏᴜᴛ ᴛʜᴇ ᴘᴀᴛʀᴇᴏɴ ᴍᴀꜱᴛᴇʀʟɪꜱᴛ : ᴍᴀɪɴ ᴍᴀꜱᴛᴇʀʟɪꜱᴛ
CONTENT/WARNINGS: miss girl misconstruing consensual kink for domestic violence (oops)
WC: 7.8K

Harry’s face is the reason average men have developed a phenomenon called personality.
Historically, it was faces like his, at the very least, that ignited adaptation— this wasn’t an overnight implementation, after all. Men don’t move that fast. There’s a long-lasting, brutally destructive record there, and a tale as old as time itself. Before charisma had to be manufactured in the absence of a devastating jawline, there was the high-cheekbone aristocracy, and its counterpart, what’s known today as the “he’s actually really nice” faction. The beauty privilege inventors; the bedroom-eye monarchy; the symmetrical syndicate of a resting smolder—
And the rest of everyone else.
Rumor has it that the first comedian was a man who watched another guy, who had eyes like wet chrysocolla and really broad shoulders, turn a casual glance into an entire bloodline’s origin story. Maybe the first poet sat next to a man wearing the skin of divine nepotism— and the only defense strategy was to pick up a hobby that spoke less in pretty, heart-shaped lips and more in words like love’s trembling hand doth trace its name upon thy skin. New seduction ritual: implemented.
Basically, the survival mechanism goes like this: if you’re competing with bone structure sculpted by an empyrean chisel, a mouth worthy of oil paintings and crumpled love letters, and the kinds of dimples that were engineered for the sole purpose of emotional damage (Cupid’s attempt; two, little exit wounds, the perfect pair of injustices parenthesizing his smile)…
And you’re lingering in the shadow of those attributes? Operating on a deficit? Well, then. There’s a little more work left to be put in.
If you’re lucky, you’re tall, or you’re well endowed in the basement, or both. If you’re none of those things, you’re banking on a gift with a musical instrument, or you’re coping with the weight of your wallet. You’re getting into niche, esoteric interests you will impress upon every woman that steps foot into your orbit to stand out, or you’re polishing up your comedic abilities. The thing is, society has evolved to the point where this compensation is the foundation to procreation. The foundation to function. And the kind of men with faces like Harry, who got in line not once, but twice when God was handing out genetic privilege (the overachieved extra credit projects), just get to sit back and let the world unravel at their feet.
Men like Harry don’t need personalities because they already look interesting enough. When you’re the kind of pretty that inspires love songs and ill-advised tattoos, you don’t need wit, or pockets lined with green. It opens doors (and legs) with such minimal effort that it may as well be as simple as breathing. The quiet space in a room bends around you when you become the focal point by existing, incidentally magnetic.
It’s pretty unfair, to say the very least.
Y/N only really registers it passing— in fleeting, peripheral moments when the space bends around him and her eyes glue, almost like an accident. A brief sighting here and there, like a rare animal caught between the trees— seen but not acknowledged, because staring starts to feel like stepping into something too raw, too deliberate.
He’s always moving. In motion, slipping past. Glimpses of wide shoulders cutting through the communal pool, water slicking over musculature in a smooth tide and then rivulets, droplets sticking against sun-warmed skin. A silhouette in the elevator at the end of the hall, head bowed. Sorting through crinkled envelopes between his massive hands with a ruckle between his brows.
He’s got the kind of face that suggests he should be gently perched on the edge of a marble fountain, carved in alabaster. A cherubic thing. Rosy-mouthed, haloed by damp curls that tuck around his ears in perfect, artistic disarray. The kind of beauty that feels vaguely mythological, like he should either be blessing crops or luring unbeknownst sailors to their deaths. A visage that belongs on domed Renaissance ceilings.
Y/N breathes. Her pulse feels like it’s rattling a little. It makes her head feel a little gooey when he’s stood in front of her.
And here he is, holding a package in one hand, water still beading at his collarbone from a morning shower, damp curls dripping onto the fabric of a lived-in, vintage T-shirt. The tragic failure of modern existence is that a man like this— who should, by all logic, be strumming a lyre on the edge of a celestial fountain— has instead been doomed to wander the mundanities of the human condition. To swipe through his mail. To stand in front of her door and say things like “Think they swapped our mail again” in that perfectly unassuming, relaxed tone, like his very existence isn’t actively offensive to the concept of mediocrity.
His singular flaw? That one, teeny thing?
He’s a horrific neighbor.
Abysmally inconsiderate, in fact. Maybe, one of the worst people Y/N has ever had the pleasure of sharing a paper-thin wall with.
The thing is, under all normal circumstances, eye candy is a desirable next door tenant, to catch those scarce glimpses of and swoon over. But Harry? He’s dangerous. An illusion gilded in beauty that sits in this achingly so, lazy way. It’s an excellent cover for someone who (based on volume alone) should be legally required to sublet a soundproof chamber instead of an apartment. Beauty privilege, remember?
Instead of spending his days spreading divine harmony and whispering sweet nothings into the ears of poets, her tragically beautiful neighbor has chosen a different calling. One that involves subjecting Y/N to an auditory experience that can only be described as an unholy, unprovoked act of sonic terrorism against anyone who possesses functioning ears.
While he may look like the patron saint of soft lighting and tasteful nudity, he lives like a man who has never once considered the presence of neighbors. Evidently, the universe operates on imbalance.
It’s not surprising that he fucks. Nor is the frequency, given— everything. It would be more surprising if he didn’t, which, statistically, seems impossible. It is the sheer volume at which he fucks and the blatant disregard for customary noise ordinances.
Y/N has had the great misfortune of gaining intimate knowledge of Harry’s extracurricular activities through nothing but flagrantly inconspicuous, unsolicited proximity. She is now, against her will, deeply familiar with the sound of his bed frame against the wall. With the low, gravel-thick groan that spills out of him before everything goes quiet, the sharp gasp from whoever is tangled up in the sheets beneath him. The pornographic chainlink of yes, yes, yes, as if to lyricize the tempo of a wrought iron headboard ramming against hollow drywall. She’s a victim to secondhand moaning; a hostage to the unchecked libido of a man she’s not even screwing.
The young woman isn’t sure who he’s sleeping with, but based on the sounds, they either really, really like whatever feat of Olympian-endurance he’s performing on the other side of the wall, or they’re being held at gunpoint and doing an exceptional job of faking it. It’s loud. A predictable regularity. Enough to make her consider downloading white noise apps and investing in a stronger liquor cabinet.
And every morning, after nights filled with thumping and gypsum-dulled dirty talk— horny monologue hour, hardly softened by an overworked, underpaid layer of rental-grade plaster— and the occasional bass-heavy indie rock soundtrack, he leaves his apartment looking criminally rested. Peaceful. Unbothered by the absolute railing he has just put someone (and the walls) through.
For all his divine aesthetics, Harry fucks like he’s trying to earn a standing ovation. With the kind of dedication to performance that suggests he thinks there’s an awards committee waiting outside in the hallway to hand him a trophy when he’s done.
Y/N doesn’t know what’s worse— the rhythmic, wall-shaking thump of his bed frame, the low, muzzled stream of just incomprehensible enough to stay offensive murmurs, or the fact that he has the audacity to look well-rested when she sees him the next morning, while she lurches past him like a woman who’s been spiritually waterboarded by the full-scale resonance of his sex life.
Y/N has tried— earnestly tried— to ignore it. To mentally downgrade him from disruptively attractive to something more manageable, like guy-next-door cute. But Harry is simply too loud to be ignored.
And not just in volume— though, yes, he operates at a decibel that insinuates he believes “inside voice” is an urban legend. It's everything. The way he takes up space. The way he stretches his arms over his head and his shirt rides up, exposing a sliver of toned stomach like some kind of aesthetic oversight. The way his lips pull into a smirk when he's amused, a single dimple pressing into the smooth skin of his cheek.
The worst part? He doesn’t weaponize it. Just… exists, as if he entirely lacks self-awareness for the unrelenting power he yields with pure aesthetics.
Perhaps the only thing more dangerous than his unregulated evolutionary favoritism is the lack of object permanence it causes. Inspires. Because at the end of the day, despite how polite, how deeply-gnarled in neighborly niceties, The Incident from last month still exists, but miraculously manages to melt into her every time she’s face to face with him. Like a static buzz settling into the way her composure thaws away.
His most notable sound pollution, to date, spilled in the form of audible rejection on a rain-drenched afternoon, dripping through the drywall in a dissent-rusted chain. Stop. No. Please. It was a voice she didn’t recognize. A voice trying to be firm but not entirely expecting to be listened to. It sounded so defeated, like a cry and then a high, sharp whine in response to whatever distinctly lower-pitched murmurs the insulation muzzled. All velvet-dipped tones swallowed by the structural integrity of a shoebox apartment.
Y/N is the last person to dig into others’ preferential depravities, nor does she have the mental bandwidth to file through the archives of a borderline stranger’s hedonisms, but her stomach had twisted up like one of those coiled, abstract sculptures that fits on a bookshelf, and she ended up on the couch with her cellphone tucked to her ear.
Because it wasn’t just the kind of sound that prickled at her nape, but curdled deep in the belly of her, heavy and rotting.
(“Um, hi, I think my neighbor is— hurting someone.”)
But the thing is, standing with her door cracked now, Y/N thinks there needs to be at least one, obnoxiously visible character flaw to remind her and offset the audacity of his aesthetics, because up close, it’s so much worse.
Anything— an overinflated ego, a questionable tattoo, a personality cultivated exclusively from Joe Rogan podcasts. But no. Harry is polite— painfully so, armed with the clean-shaven jawline of a man who has never known an awkward phase and the kind of infuriatingly natural charm that makes all rationale and reason puddle off into awed oblivion.
“Hey,” he says, cradling the package in one palm, curls wet, one rogue lock clinging to the crest of his cheekbone in a way that would look deeply artificial on anyone else. “Think they swapped our mail again.”
The level of allurement at which he functions should come with a warning label, so it’s a little tough to keep The Incident afloat when he just… waterlogs it with simple, blissfully unaware presence. In these types of situations, all that buoys is the vague, internal monologue reminding her that she’s been gawking wordlessly too long to be considered socially acceptable.
Her taller neighbor (significantly taller; really, Y/N thinks— it’s as if he collected hallmarks like they were on conveniently timed clearance) blinks. He’s still holding the package out. Y/N blinks back. Batting her lashes shakes something, as if warding off gnats off in a plume of smoke. Slowly, she accepts the misdelivered offering, and unease creeps into the soft spot between her rib bones and her organs.
Despite the way the man has embedded his existence so deeply into her thoughts— honestly, so much so that he may as well be paying rent (she should be getting compensated for the unpaid mental labor)— Y/N doesn’t actually know Harry.
She knows his name is Harry. H-A-R-R-y, always inscribed in all capitals, besides the cacographic tail end of the lowercase, curving Y. She’s given up on trying to understand why whoever the post office sends insists on treating their mailboxes like interchangeable suggestions rather than fixed addresses. She knows that their mail, through some act of bureaucratic sabotage, somehow manages to interchange between 9B and 9C with unsettling regularity.
She knows he fucks. A lot. So regularly that at this point, it’s practically a statistical impossibility that his celibacy record stands longer than a sparse handful of days. She knows that he wears the face of a misplaced effigy, with a halo’s worth of plausible deniability— the kind that should be mounted to an Italian plaza centerpiece, or live frescoed, immortalized on a high ceiling between Corinthian columns. She knows she called the police on him last month, so she needs to ball her resolve in her arms when it spills apart like unrolled toilet paper—
There is one truth Y/N must latch on and cling to in these tragically catastrophic stand-offs (probably… entirely one-sided, given that the opponent to her poor mettle and overactive nervous system is just… standing there, breathing, entirely oblivious of his innate talent to dilate pupils and cause momentary amnesia), and that truth is this: no superficially aesthetic veneer of deception can shell-up reality.
And the reality is that Y/N does not know this man, and so no cherubic façade, neighborly niceties, or feigned self-unawareness can suppress that he may as well be an entirely different person behind closed doors.
It’s months down the line that the irony will hit her— that yes, undeniably, Harry is almost a direct, walking contradiction behind the assumed sanctity of a closed door— that no pleasantries or seraphic, unassuming dimples can soften the obscenity of his pastimes. Hobbies include: vinyl collecting, long walks, and ensuring that an attitude adjustment sticks. But that’s months down the line, and right now?
Right now he’s just her obnoxiously loud neighbor that, according to probable cause (and the recording of the phone call she made to the emergency hotline, stored somewhere in the 911 archives), may or may not take no for an answer. Which is the biggest tragedy of all, in her opinion.
“Thanks.” There’s a little bite there to the word, there. Enough for him to clock it— for something to flicker along that lazily charming smile, like a gossamer-thin, bewildered film over the surface of his expression.
Harry pauses, almost like he wants to say something (probably to acknowledge the awkwardly apparent dissonance going on), but then he just… doesn’t.
“Okay,” as the man breathes, the breadth of his shoulders swells up, thick muscle rising up under the cotton fabric (not quite pulled taut— not anywhere besides the span of his shoulders— but enough for the shape of his pebbled nipples to poke through the material). Y/N chews into the gummy-smooth skin along the inside of her cheek. Honestly, it’s unfairly disarming; his low voice, his stupid face, his hard nipples prodding through the tee. With his dewy meadow eyes glued onto her, her resolve wobbles like a flimsy stilt house on the coast in a hurricane. “Have a good one.”
He ducks his chin (a subtle period on the uncomfortable pause, a formal seal on his exit) at the young woman, still holding the parchment-wrapped package she’s been awarded as if solidified into a stone-encasement of the position. Y/N blinks. Harry turns.
With a final glance toward his retreating back, the girl closes the door. As her fingers tighten around the package, her knuckles bleach from the strain. It’s either that or punch drywall, and quite frankly, she’s been paying too much in rent to consider remodeling and too many fees in the form of involuntary eavesdropping to afford a fracture in the (poorly constructed) noise barrier. She tucks the chainlink back onto its track as the door clicks shut and resigns herself to another unfortunate truth: Harry is so dangerously attractive that not only is she almost certainly going to think about this moment later, but she will be reminded, every time she’s shepherded into close proximity with him, that when God packages something up in 6 feet of limited-edition facial topography and artfully tousled curls, no amount of unsought aural pornography and creeping suspicion can stop a cosmic nepotism baby from dismantling her concentration.

The last thing Harry expects from a disgruntled herd of bleary-eyed, sock-shuffling renters— a crowd caught somewhere between sleep-deprived and half-dead— is small talk.
Half these people have a look that suggests they contemplated burning alive before choosing to evacuate, and the other half probably wish they decided to wear real pants to bed. Tonight, Harry falls into both categories. With the fire alarm still shrieking from the guts of the complex and the blinking glow of blue and red in the corner of a tar-black night, the briefs hitching high on his meaty thighs is almost… poetic. Cinematic, at the very least. Like a scene from an experimental indie film focused on the gradual dissolution of dignity.
The downy rabbit nestled in his arms, coiled more like a floccose ball than a living animal, is the sartorial maraschino cherry— it pulls the look together. Emergency Evacuation chic. He looks about as disheveled as the rest of the congregation; bedhead, sleep still dusting at his half-mast gaze, keyring slipped over his middle finger and his phone cradled in the same hand (though, Harry thinks wryly, no building-wide emergency couture quite tops the tighty-whitey socks-and-sandals combo that the guy up ahead of him is rocking). There’s sparse chatter going on all around him, a kind of background drone that fades into the wail, but he doesn’t have any intention to engage. Despite the unplanned slumber party and the potential opportunity to trauma-bond, he can’t really find it in him to start ice-breaking and sharing life stories. There’s a time and place to build community with your neighbors— half-dressed in a parking lot at three AM isn’t one of them.
Instead, he stands in the midst of the mass, dead-silent as if still calibrating. It takes him a while to notice the young woman a few feet ahead of him— long enough that the cool air has settled over him in a coat. Her bathrobe wraps tight around her, cinched pink terry-cloth. He doesn’t recognize that she’s a familiar face until she turns enough for him to see her side profile, her phone screen casting light and painting shadows in the crease of her furrowed brow as she sniffs. Thumbing over the device, Y/N turns back over her shoulder.
The longer he stands there, creaking into a more-awake rendition of himself as the faint chill cuts through the grogginess in his skull, the more the silence marinates into impatient restlessness. Stretching like old gum. She lingers in his periphery, shifting from foot to foot as if nursing the same restive itch. Once again, his neighbor twists to the side, rocking onto the balls of her feet and then back down onto her heels. A huff spills from her lips as she turns her phone off and tucks it up under her upper arm, crossing them. It’s not cold enough for the air to bloom with her breath, but the exasperation in it is audible. Maybe because he’s managed to seep closer.
“—Wonder if someone just pulled it.”
At first, Y/N doesn’t acknowledge the statement, as if she doesn’t recognize the remark is directed at her. And then, the presence behind her— not pressing uncomfortably close, just distant enough to notice— has Y/N turning her head over her shoulder. She double-takes.
Harry’s in a new light. Still abysmal to her train of thought, already weak on its tracks given that the drowsiness from being rudely awoken in the middle of the night still has her lingering in a dull, cotton-wrapped awareness. But now, he’s a fraying shape; sleepy and half-nakedly soft. Hair a masterpiece of sleep deprivation— the typically styled ringlets on his head sit mussed; whatever shape (she assumes the usual— somewhere between windswept and enticingly intentional) existed yesterday has gone rogue, erased by his pillow. What’s left is a tousled disarray. He’s in another tee, once again pulled snugly over his shoulders, and he’s cradling what could be a live, fuzzy animal, but more resembles a balled fur stole, its potential face tucked into the nook between his muscly upper arm and his chest. Despite the ridiculous assortment of this particular wardrobe showcase, that’s not what catches her eye most. Y/N sucks in a breath.
Considering a fair share of the evacuees around them teeter on the brink of public-indecency, it shouldn’t throw her guard off as much as it does, but all she can manage in such close proximity with Harry’s thighs is to blink wordlessly. It’s not necessarily his thighs so much as the way they’re denuded— not the way his trousers sit on them so much as their entire lack thereof. It’s the way his lower region is only covered up by a pair of jet-black briefs, clinging like a second skin, riding ridiculously high and ridiculously low. High enough that the only place her eyes can focus is the (chewy) musculature, slightly sun-bathed from all those hours spent in the residential pool, dusted with hair. Low enough that a sliver of skin peeks from between the waistband and hem of his shirt, hitched up just a touch on one side. Enough to hint at a sharp dip of a mostly concealed V, where muscle sinks in a hard line along bone. A tease of whatever workout routine he’s committed to. Beside the rigid line chiseled in there, an inked, leafy stem climbs (a set of mirrored layers that she’d observed on him, supine on a pool chaise).
Basically, it’s the type of thing that should legally classify him as a walking thirst trap.
With the crowd sporting bedtime fashion, some covered only in the most legally vague sense of the word, it leaves Y/N wondering: if most of the people decided to haphazardly vacate their apartments by only tossing on the most minimal attire— if opting to add to their garb in any way— what did Harry add? Did he wear the cream-toned tee to bed? Just the Calvins? Both? Or was he entirely bare, only sloppily throwing on whatever was left discarded by the side of the bed? Does he sleep naked?
With all these sordid thoughts clouding up the forefront of her mind like a thick plume of fog, she can’t find words through alphabet soup and the vague mental images of Harry’s bare skin tangled by sheets. To make it better, he’s just staring at her, like he’s expectantly waiting for her to respond. What was the question?
Y/N blinks again. “What?”
“The—“ Harry bobs his head towards the cluster of emergency vehicles, olive eyes oscillating to the apartment complex and back onto her, “fire alarm. I wonder if someone just pulled it.”
If ever the universe was to humble Harry from a breathing renaissance painting, half-clothed and half-asleep would be the time. He could be knocked down to whatever status a man up front is bearing, clad in a questionably classy fusion of tragic, high-cut cotton underwear, socks, and suede, open-toed sandals. Somehow, though, it’s worse that his bedhead, for the most part, still leaves the tendrils curling in lazy, untamed waves. That his nakedly-beguiling thighs, strong and sculpted with muscle, look like they’re meant to pry knees wide. It’s mortifying—
“Then, they’d be an asshole,” she murmurs, her own gaze raking out and lingering on the building. The words come out clipped with exhaustion, and then that pause lingers again.
Harry hums. She chances another glance at the furball curled to his chest.
“Snuggles,” Harry supplies, raising one arm a tad from where it’s caged to support the animal. The motion is enough to jostle the thing, and it tucks its face out, twitching its nose. With careful precision, the man moves one hand out from the cradle— the one not clutching his keys and his phone (by the way, casually dwarfed by the sheer size of his palm and cupped, lengthy fingers) to skim his pointer along the Holland lop’s dangling ear. “He’s a bit delicate and has some strong opinions on sudden, loud noises. Not a fan of fire alarms, as it turns out.”
The young woman hums noncommittally, eyes snaking back off to the polychrome strobe.
The last thing Harry expects from his neighbors during a mandatory, middle-of-the-night evacuation order are pleasantries. Between the slouched postures, the collective, dead-eyed aura of suffering, the general degree of resentment perfuming the air, and the visible internal debates over whether a hypothetical fire is worth enduring the cold, it’s safe to assume morale is at an all time low. Which brings him to his next point— there is, Harry suspects, something about him that fundamentally offends his neighbor.
Not inherently because she’s not talking to him. Naturally, the theory has no relevance to her lack of enthusiasm at the moment.
There’s a clause to life that he learned as a little kid, an absolute truth that the motto “water off your back” was created around, and this clause is that not everyone will like you. There’s really no gentle way to chew on that one, but it’s a fact Harry has long come to terms with. Jealousy, misery, even a simple case of personalities repelling like mismatched magnets— all things that can cause someone to decide you’re just not their cup of tea. Incompatibility could very easily leave your existence grating someone down to the molecular level. And you can never please everyone— that’s another piece of that truth he had to gnaw on before he decided that he was going to spend the rest of his life marching to the beat of his own drum.
Apparently, something about this tempo scrapes at some highly-sensitive nerve of hers like a dull knife on a chalkboard.
It’s an intuition thing, really. There hasn’t so much been a sharp, substantial instance so much as there’s been instances. Little, creeping things; the way her eyes ward when he’s close, despite the way they hover; the tone she seems to reserve for him, not outwardly rude, but suspiciously close to some awkward admixture between tolerating jury duty and being held at gunpoint. There’s more, among those, too— the suspiciously long pauses that sit like preludes to every response she gives him. The way her gaze flickers off avoidantly.
And those last two aren’t flustered mechanisms.
Harry knows he is, according to conventional, societal standards, attractive. He’s no stranger to reflective surfaces, nor is he unaware of the way actual strangers look at him. Ogle. Gawk.
It was a burgeoning metamorphosis he became acutely aware of between awkward kidhood and the place he’s at now. First, all lanky angles of uncertainty, only half-grown into his features, when his bones had made up their mind but the muscle and skin over them hadn’t quite decided what they wanted to be yet. Then, it was almost overnight. Everything began stretching into place and ubiquitously working in his favor. Eyes lingered, heads turned…
It’s safe to say he knows nervous girls. Boys. The lack of eye contact, or on the polar opposite hand, the blanking, empty stares and the silent beat as their response time glitches and their mouth tries (and fails) to keep up with a short-circuiting nervous system. Not everybody is able to stay the most suave version of themselves interacting with someone they find sexually attractive— his firsthand experience involves not only being on the receiving end, but on the giving end, as well. Granted, the aesthetics boost had given him a sense of confidence that buried his inhibitions down, so it’s been a long while since the last time he tripped over himself in front of someone that made his dick sit up and pay attention, but—
The thing is, Y/N doesn’t glance away like staring at him rapidly dissolves her thoughts in a static haze. She doesn’t take long pauses because she’s floundering over the next word. She doesn’t even look at him in a way that insinuates she’s worried he’ll nip her or something, she’s just so utterly…
Closed off. Disinterested. Like his presence is a jury duty evaluation and she’s wriggling in her seat, waiting to talk about her views on jury nullification.
In fairness, it could very well be a me-not-you thing— the awkward shuffle through their interactions, the severe deficit of enthusiasm. Those communication patterns could very well be sound across the board… in another universe. There are footprints that lead him to the massive elephant in the room, and those footprints spell the vague shape of it didn’t used to be this way.
Sure, Harry contemplates, if she was a miserably unpleasant person that holed up in her apartment with no interest in corresponding with another human being, he’d get it. If she’d given him the idea that something about him rattled her down to atoms the first time he ever said hello to her, he’d get it. But she used to smile. Coyly, almost, he’d go as far to say— one finger away from twirling a lock of hair around her pointer as she talked to him. The kind of simper that accompanies a giggle from a barista handing his drink over across the counter, eyes honed. She used to lean onto her door frame when he handed off a stack of envelopes that got misplaced into his mailbox, or hung back with her eyes wet and lively as she stood at his doorway and handed off a package.
What’s more is that his history is marked by drawing more people in after he opens his mouth, than turning them away. He’s arguably likeable— not in an arrogantly self-absorbed way, but strictly based on track record. He’s befriended too many older ladies (who sparked up chatter with him in grocery stores unprompted, mostly), and gotten slipped too many drinks (on the house) from bartenders to believe otherwise. Generally, his existence tends to fall into the category of charming rather than grating.
When he considers all of this, his analysis only leads him to one conclusion— there is something about him that suddenly, fundamentally offends his neighbor.
And it’s with this hypothesis that Harry clears his throat, hesitates, and prods, with just a moment of lull after she’s turned back away from him, “If I’m misreading this, feel free to tell me to piss off, but— did I do something?”
The young woman pivots back over her shoulder, blinking, almost as if she’d forgotten he was behind her at all.
“…What?”
Harry shrugs. The motion coaxes Snuggles to lift his head again. “I don't expect us to be friends, but I also don't want to be the person you actively avoid in the hallway. If I've done something to make things weird, l'd rather fix it than pretend I don't notice."
For a long second, Y/N doesn’t say anything. Just batting her lashes up at him, features lax, like she’s processing the earnest directness behind his words and letting them settle. And then her face twists.
Ooh— okay. Ruckling brow bone, lips tugging down, the nearly incredulous burst of air she expels as she turns her prickling face away—
She scoffs, muttering something strangely close to, “can’t be serious,” under her breath, and Harry’s eyes pensively narrow just a smidge. Enough to be entirely imperceptible as he drinks in her body language. That’s an indicator, if Harry’s ever seen one.
“You know what, Harry,” she says after a moment (now her arms are caging defensively, that’s an interesting touch), “…I just don’t really …appreciate how you treat women, to be honest.”
Of all the responses Harry had been anticipating, curiously honed on every word, that was— not the one. His dark canopy of lashes sweeps over his eyes as the admission lands and… knocks him off kilter, just a bit. His brows relax, then furrow up as he mulls the statement over, buffering.
He sounds a little bewildered when he says, voice much more soft-spoken, “…Sorry?”
“You should be,” his neighbor tells him pointedly, her arms still crossed like a defensive barrier across her chest, “Hitting women is wrong. Very illegal for a reason, actually.”
At the mention, his head bobbles back a bit like he’s dodging a smack between the brows with the context-lacking declaration. He’s not quite sure he’s heard her right, eyebrows climbing and eyes widening almost comically. Right, okay. This is… a gross misunderstanding, he decides. When the realization hits him, truly hits him, his knee-jerk response is an incredulous laugh, which he muscles down. Instead, his appalled amusement trickles out like a little huff, corners of his strawberry mouth tugging up. Unfortunately, the reaction only seems to irritate her further, and her forehead crinkles up as her own eyebrows ascend in stunned disbelief.
“You think there’s something funny about hitting a woman?” Y/N presses, eyes steeling into slits, her priorly indoor-voice rising a decibel.
The volume of her statement (and the misleading content) has his otherwise mirthy expression falling into something far more serious. Full of comically flat, grievous denial, like a kid being scolded for spray-painting a concrete wall after being caught with the can in its hand.
“—No,” Harry shakes his head slowly, side to side, “Not at all.”
Cautiously, his gaze slips off to the corner, where a few tenants have turned over their shoulder to gauge the commotion. As the young woman’s head swivels to tail where his eye contact has meandered, Harry realizes that backpedaling is only going to become a feat of incredible verbal athleticism from here. Upon catching the other glimpses from the crowd, slowly turning back to their own conversations, Y/N makes a deadpan sound of amusement before she turns back to face him.
“Oh, what? You’re ashamed now that you’re being called out for it? Good,” she bites, shoulders teetering as she leans toward him and unfolds her arms, pointing her index finger into his direction scathingly, “You should be ashamed. It’s absolutely disgusting to put your hands on a woman.”
This is tragically weighed against Harry’s favor. Here he was, just a half-asleep evacuee, holding his rabbit, clad in only a pair of hardly decent briefs, contemplating whether he should Uber Eats tacos as soon as the emergency exit fiasco were to clear up (might as well, since he’s already awake). Somehow, he’s managed to morph from an unassuming extra to the perceived antagonist.
No, Harry thinks— this wouldn’t be a disaster film; it’s a full blown, poorly-contrived drama with a plot twist even the supposed villain is caught off guard by. The curly-headed brunette chances another glance to the other side now, where more people have not only glimpsed over in brief acknowledgement, but have fully twisted their shoulders to observe the apparent scandal. As much as Harry wholeheartedly marches to the beat of his own drum, at this moment in time, his reputation is shaking in its boots and he’s reached a mental checkpoint called time for damage control.
Weaving sincerity into his tone and shaking his head placatingly as he steps forward— a subconscious attempt to coax her into lowering her volume— Harry tells her, “I don’t put my hands on anybody that doesn’t consent to it first.”
Her face scrunches up.
“I think,” his pink tongue slinks out to wet his lips, “maybe, there’s been a misunderstanding.”
“Oh, I don’t think so.”
“No, I really, really do,” Harry counters, ducking his chin into a nod.
Instead of hearing him out, however, his neighbor, as if fueled by the internal calling to manually dismantle misogyny, one assumed violent criminal at a time, only raises her volume a little more. Exceeding the normal range, definitely steeping in public-humiliation-ritual territory.
“I’m not misunderstanding,” Y/N bites, brows pinched like he’s personally offended her by even insinuating as much, “I have ears, just so you know, and I’ve heard a woman saying no, and please, and stop. So you can drop your good boy act, okay—“
Harry blinks. If not for the character defamation going on and the way Socks-and-Sandals raises his phone out of seemingly nowhere, pointing it into their direction as if there isn’t a potential fire to be filmed instead of all things, Harry would laugh. But there is, and the flash is on, weak along his peripheral edge—
“I know guys like you, I know your type,” Y/N declares, jabbing her finger against him again, this time so close to grazing the area along his chest, right between the tops of his pectorals, just over Snuggles, “and it’s gross that you think because you’re attractive you can walk all over everyone and do things like that to people, and you know what, next time maybe the cops won’t be so nice—”
Ah, nice. Another mystery resolved; one which involved a pair of men with guns in their holsters at his door performing a wellness check and an excruciatingly awkward clarification on impact play, consensual sadomasochism, and safewords. For weeks Harry wondered what had inspired a legal inquiry into his pastimes. Now, staring at the culprit— case dismissed— he can only blink before his brows wrinkle up.
“You’re the one who called the police?” Harry murmurs, a note of soft incredulity soaking the phrase.
“Any sane woman would call the police when she heard another woman being abused—“
“Abused?”
“Yes! Abused! And— and— honestly—“
Before Y/N can launch into another ruthlessly-curated, virtue-plated diatribe, Harry resituates the animal in his grip, unlocking his phone to the homescreen. Then, Safari. He thumbs over it with a careful determination seeding along his downturned, sculpted expression.
“I don’t know what form of assault would be worse,” Y/N chimes, hands climbing up in an exaggerated, universal symbol of exasperation before they fall back to her sides (as if she hadn’t even noticed his attention has been redirected to his phone), “but when someone says no, it means no.”
It only takes a second for her to register that his focus has been rerouted elsewhere, though. Her tone dips indignantly.
“Excuse me. I’m talking to you. And also, while we’re at it, you’re unbearably loud and an unmannerly neighbor—“
Harry turns his phone around. His expression is impressively flat, all things considered. Y/N pauses.
“Typically,” Harry states as her eyes rake over the glowing screen, “I like to be wined and dined before I give a crash course on my preferences, but.”
The image stretched across the illuminated LED sits over her tired gaze as she absorbs it, pupils jittering as she reads, but through the lens of his own profile mirrored back, he can see the moment her righteously fueled demeanor chips.
“I do, like, a… softcore porn type thing,” he admits.
Still, her brows are kinked. Only now, in stupefied doubt. “I— what?”
It’s with a rotting sense of dread curdling in the pit of her tummy that it suddenly dawns on Y/N— the mortified realization that she has succumbed to a horrible misunderstanding.
The website the tab is set on almost looks archaic, like a kitsch relic— repository archives of a porn blog from the early 2000s. Spankinggram. The page is set onto a profile, something called Rings&Paddles, and the squared image of an avatar slices through the garishly orange palette of the site’s logo. Her gaze sweeps over the vista; a man sitting down on an armless chair, thighs splayed, palm curled over a …hairbrush.
The profile picture sunders off at the neck. It’s a faceless silhouette, but the miscellany of sketches cascading across a forearm and the distinctly chunky medley of rings are… enough—
“Consensually,” Harry— Rings&Paddles, Y/N recognizes, molten heat dripping along the crests of her cheekbones— adds, “No one is being abused.”
In retrospect, the only feasible option to survive this, Y/N decides, is to change her name and move to another state.
Probably something short and vaguely melancholic, one of those names that would look intriguing in all lowercase. A quiet town. Somewhere coastal, maybe. West. No— north. As far north as geographically possible. Perhaps she could get a dog. An older, ratty boy from a shelter. Drive an old car that’s too big with a busted radio. She’ll pretend it’s a benefit, rather than an inconvenience, because she’ll be the fabricated kind of mystique that insufferably enjoys the quiet calm (and rainstorms). A rebranded, movie-clichè hipster, but not unbearable in real life—
“But I understand the concern,” her neighbor says, cutting through the haze as she contemplates what brand of cigarettes she’ll be taking up as a trait of her pseudo-identity. Against all odds, his tone is calm in an all-too-merciful kind of way, “You can look into… domestic discipline, if you’d like. If you wanted to understand a bit better. There’s loads of really good information on the internet.”
For a moment, Y/N deliberates burning alive. If there isn’t a fire licking up her department store drapes, she’s going to set one to avoid bearing the weight of this shame for the rest of her life. Granted, the heat sizzling at her face feels like a flame, enough, both at the way she’s just publicly kinkshamed an innocent man and at the mention of …domestic discipline.
She’s going to cry.
They would be Virginia Slims.
“You— …what?”
The garbled confusion drenching her tone is almost laughable. She sounds it, too; voice pinched and deceptively close to trembling off into a sob. Y/N stares straight ahead, body locked in a fugue state of humiliation as the realization calcifies in real-time. Her shoulders have gone stiff and her spine rigid, posture squeezed somewhere between standing and catatonic. The scale of her miscalculation worms into her skull like a parasite that’ll chew her awake in the middle of the night, years down the line.
For the last month, Y/N has spent every interaction with Harry evasively toeing over eggshells. Floundering over the way his face was sculpted, rather than compromising the integral structure of their acquaintanceship. Somehow, a sleep cycle cut short and the ambiguous suggestion that he had picked up on her avoidant habits was all it had taken to not only slander his (apparently not safe for work) extracurriculars, but probably assure her foreseeable Amazon packages suddenly start going missing.
Now, with a semi-public declaration of his profile pressed out to her face and his name no longer being audibly smeared with accusations, Harry can appreciate the quiet sense of revelation.
His neighbor, on the other hand, looks visibly wrecked. Her entire stance is pulled in tight, like she’s actively trying to make herself smaller, but it’s her face that really gives her away— the way it twists, fluctuating between wide-eyed horror and the dawning realization that she’s just detonated a social landmine at point-blank range. All heat-tinged and shame-doused, the young woman blinks up at him, doe-eyes rounded in apologetic appall and lips parted slightly like she’s still buffering. The combination of words that just left his mouth— softcore porn, domestic discipline, consensual— seem to be wrestling in her brain like tangled Christmas lights, none of them quite fitting together in a way that makes sense and glinters.
“I am sorry about the noise,” he tells her, shutting the phone off and nestling his arm back up under his pet, “I’ll make sure to keep it to a minimum from now on.”
Y/N wilts. With the phone no longer held out into her direction, the way she stays glued to the same spot on the cement— as if mortified into a motionless piece of stone— is ridiculous enough for him to gnaw into his cheek to chew back a bark of laughter. Despite all trials and tribulations, his coping mechanisms never fail.
“You— oh my God,” Y/N whispers. She makes a sound that could be a vaguely pained noise or the byproduct of her soul seeping out of her body. “Oh my God.”
Harry blinks.
“I called the police on you,” she tells him, utter dismay lacing the words together.
“You did, yeah.”
Harry still remembers the blank expression varnished along the officer’s face— the kind of emotionally vacant stare reserved for department store mannequins. The echo of the distant, metaphysical NOPE that definitely rode along his brainstem the moment the curly-haired brunette mentioned “it’s a kink thing,” and the way his partner, hands allocated to his holster belt, started very obviously examining his own shoes.
“I thought—“ Y/N stutters, her wobbling voice sounding squeezed from her trachea, “I thought—“
“You thought you were living next door to a criminal,” Harry supplies. When he tilts his head, a rogue curl flops over his forehead.
Finally, the young woman moves, burying her face in her hands. This will haunt her, she thinks. Forever.
From the corner of his eye, the man can tell that most of the tenants have gone back to their regularly scheduled repertoires of stalled misery. And despite the absolute PR mess her blunder has induced— his eyes wander over her, the way she’s cupping her face like she wants to melt into her own hands and seep off into the pavement— he feels oddly… bad. Not secondhand embarrassed (firsthand, definitely firsthand), but Y/N looks like she’s going to combust. It’s tragic, really. The kind of pitiful that makes him purse his mouth and stare down at her in contemplation.
“Honestly,” his voice cuts through the haze in her throbbing, hot skull, all even-toned sincerity (which is worse, so much worse), “if I was in your position, yeah? I’d do the same thing.”
The admission coaxes her into a horrified peer through the wedges between her fingers. The warmth pressed to her palms feels borderline pyrexic.
“And if that were the case, you’d be the neighborhood hero. So.” He raises a shoulder nonchalantly.
Y/N doesn’t immediately respond. Instead, she soaks in the crime scene, doused in the blinking blue and red.
“I’m not sure neighborhood hero is how I’ll be remembered,” the young woman finally answers, groaning through her hands, and then pressing her fingertips into her temples.
Harry hums. Then, he sighs. “No, you’re right. I’d say misguided vigilante. I reckon it’s a bit better than violent felon, though.”
Y/N makes another sound. This one sounds a little more wounded.
Next part here
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So you know absolutely positively nothing about photography
Cellphone cameras are fucking great. I love them. I love the ability to take photos whenever and wherever at basically zero cost.
Point-and-shoot cameras have always been awesome and accessible devices.
This is not a post shit-talking "basic" cameras. This is a post for people who have only ever used basic cameras who want to know at least slightly more about photography.
Because, the thing is, a remarkable amount of photography is math. And if you don't know it's math, it looks like a mystery. And you may be standing there snapping a photo with your phone that looks pretty good, but your friend with a DSLR looked at the sky, twisted a dial, and took three steps to the left and they took a photo of the same subject that looks like it belongs on a magazine cover.
How did they do that?
Probably math.
If you've come into possession of a DSLR camera and are disappointed that the photos you're taking aren't looking like the photos you thought came from DSLRs, I'm here to tell you about the math you may not know about.
What is a photograph?
At its most basic, a photograph is the result of light on a sensor. Let's consider a pinhole camera for a moment. A pinhole camera is a lightproof box with a piece of photographic paper on one side and a tiny hole in the other.
When you create a photo with a pinhole camera, you're using pretty much all of the math you would in a big fancy camera, just in a cruder form they are:
The sensitivity of the paper, film, or camera sensor to light (this is your "ISO" if you're using a digital camera or film). Light sensitivity can be easily changed on a digital camera, but on chemical-treated paper or film the sensitivity is predetermined and cannot be changed. If you want to change the ISO on an analog camera, you need to change the medium that's being exposed.
An opening to let light in - your F-stop, or aperture. The F-stop of a photo is how wide open the lens is to let light onto your film or sensor. In a pinhole camera, you have something that is theoretically a very very large F-stop because you have a very, very tiny opening to let light through (F-stops run in reverse - the bigger the number, the smaller the opening).
Exposure - your exposure is the amount of time you leave your sensor open to the light. The majority of photos you see in the world have exposure times that are measured in tiny fractions of a second, sometimes in thousandths of a second. If you're using photo paper in your pinhole camera, you may have an exposure time of minutes rather than tiny portions of a second, but your photo exposure will still depend on how long you want to leave your "lens" open.
Focal length - your focal length is a description of the relationship of the distance between the light source and the light sensor. You can manipulate this in a pinhole camera by making the camera longer or shorter. A larger focal length means a narrower field of view - it zooms in on the subject.
A pinhole camera is the simplest camera that lets you, the photographer, control all of the elements of a photo. This is, functionally, fully manual photography.
So what's the difference between all that and a cellphone camera?
Point-and-shoot cameras like those on cellphones give the user more limited control over these settings. For instance, think of a disposable camera. On a disposable camera, the photographer has control over one setting - the ISO of the film, which they can select at purchase. They can't control how wide the lens opens or how long it stays open, and the only way they can compensate for lighting that is a poor match to the ISO is flash.
Cellphone cameras are very much like a standard point-and-shoot. By default, users point their cameras, then shoot a photo. Many cellphones have a "pro" mode that will allow the user to emulate different ISOs or f-stops, but the sensors in cellphone cameras aren't as good as the ones in camera-cameras, and the lenses are very limited as well. Some cellphone cameras and point-and-shoot digital cameras WILL allow users to set longer exposures, and many cellphone cameras have multiple lenses which does allow for some lens effects, but they don't give a huge amount of control to the user.
Okay so let's say I've got my new shiny camera, what do I need to know?
For best results, you want your ISO to match the light you're shooting in. Low ISO is for bright light, high ISO is for low light. If you wanted to take snapshots of your family outdoors at disneyland in the summer, you'd buy 100 ISO film. When I used to shoot football games at night in oddly lit stadiums, I'd use 1600 ISO film. If you have a DSLR camera, there's a setting somewhere in there that tells you how to set the ISO. If you are shooting in relatively low light and the photos are turning out darker than you'd like *but* things are moving too quickly to use a longer exposure, you can bump up your ISO for brighter, sharper images but they will be more noisy and grainy than ones shot at a lower ISO. If you want clean, smooth, crisp images, your goal should be to shoot with the lowest ISO possible.
The Aperture of your camera lens determines your F-Stop. This acts like the pupils of your eyes. When it's really really bright out, your pupils shrink down to let in less light. When it's darker out, your pupils get bigger to let in more light. If you are shooting in low light, you want a low F-Stop, which means that your camera's lens is open really wide. If you are shooting in a bright environment, you want a higher F-Stop, which will mean the opening is very small. Since your F-stop interacts with the focal length of your lens, you will find that zooming in with the lens often makes images darker. To shoot clear images from far away, you need to be very conscious of your F-stop, your ISO, and ambient lighting conditions.
Exposure describes the length of time you set the camera to leave the aperture open. In many DSLRs this can span from 1/3200th of a second to infinitely long (the "bulb" setting means "aperture is open until you close it.") If you want sharp images of frozen motion, you want the fastest speed that you can get. Sports photography and photography of things like insects or milk crowns often use extremely short exposures to get sharp images. If you want blurry images you want slower speeds. If you want to take a photo in a low-light environment and capture motion within that environment - for instance, taking photos of cars on a freeway at night - you want slower speeds (if you want to do this in a brighter environment, like taking photos of a stream in the daytime, you want slower speeds and a specific kind of lens filter called a neutral density filter). When exposures are set to be longer than about 1/60th of a second, images with motion start to look blurry.
Focal Length determines the field of view of your subject. If you have a lens with variable focal lengths, this is called a zoom lens. A longer focal length zooms you in and a shorter focal length zooms you out. Lenses with fixed focal lengths are called prime lenses, and can't zoom in or out.
Depth of Field - your depth of field is a combination of the interaction of your focal length, your distance from your subject, and your F-stop. The depth of field describes the relative amount of space in a photograph that is in focus. A long depth of field means that much of the image plane is in focus. A short depth of field means that a narrow portion of the image plane is in focus. A low F-stop produces a narrow depth of field. A long focal length produces a narrow depth of field.
You can think of your camera as a tool that measures time and space. Your ISO and Exposures are measurements of time (how quickly the sensor senses the light, how long the sensor is exposed to the light), the F-Stop and the focal length are measurements of space (how wide the aperture of the camera is, how far the lens is from the sensor).
The pre-set modes on your camera, the ones on the dial that show a person running, flower, or a cloud, or a lady with a hat - these are generic settings that combine an ISO, exposure time, and f-stop that are likely to work well for outdoor action shots, landscape photography, cloudy light, and portraits. When you're using those pre-set modes, you control the focal length and not much else.
When you understand that the running person/action mode means low-ish ISO combined with high shutter speeds, you can start just setting your own ISO and shutter speed when you're shooting sports. When you know that portrait mode sets you up for low-ish f-stops, relatively quick shutter speeds, and mid-range ISOs, you can just start setting those things on your own so you can have more control.
"What about light metering?"
Since your camera is a machine that records light, light metering is pretty important. The light meter of your camera will tell you if your settings are "correct" for the amount of that the light sensor senses. In most modern cameras there is a light metering display on the bottom edge of the viewfinder that goes from negative to positive; if the meter shows that you are in the negative it means that your photo will be under-exposed (too little light will get to the sensor and the image will appear dark), if the meter shows that you are in the positive it means that your photo will be over-exposed (too much light will get to the sensor and the image will appear too bright - "blown out"). The way to correct for under or over exposure is to change the length of the exposure, making it longer for underexposed images and shorter for overexposed images.
What the light meter is doing is thinking about all of your settings and the lighting for you. It looks at the ISO, focal length, f-stop, light hitting the sensor, and planned exposure time and tells you what that combination of settings is likely to produce - something too bright, or something too dark.
When you are more experienced with photography, you get good at juggling these things on the fly and messing around with them more, which is how you can do the magic of looking at the sky, twisting a dial, taking three steps to the left, and knocking it out of the park with a picture.
It only looks like magic because you're doing a ton of math under the hood that is extremely non-obvious to people who are new to photography.
Anyway, here is a good guide to depth of field and what goes into it.
Here is a basic photography textbook that explains the principles that I've gone over here in a lot more detail with a lot better explanations. It's a film photography textbook, but one of the cool things about photography is that a lot of stuff from the analog era is still relevant in the digital area, and the basics haven't changed.
However all of that is about the *technical* aspects of photography. Photography isn't just a record of exposure time and focal length, so here's a basic photo composition textbook that talks about the artistic principles of photography.
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Sigil Magick: Illustrating Your Intent

Sigils are a cornerstone of contemporary and chaos magick and function as keys to unlock the doors of reality and bend it to one’s will. These potent symbols serve as physical embodiments of one’s intentions, cast into existence through the fusion of art and willpower.
The crafting of a sigil begins with a clear and focused intention, which is then worked into a unique symbol through a creative magickal process. The magick practitioner inscribes deep personal meaning and style into their designs, making each unique to its artist. Sigils are ideal tools for manifesting your desires, imbuing objects with specific purpose and energy, protecting spaces, and communicating with the spirit world and should be used responsibly.
Origins
The practice of crafting sigils traces its roots to the ancient world but was modernized in the early 20th century by the works of Austin Osman Spare, an occultist and artist. He introduced the method of creating magical symbols by condensing letters of a desire into an abstract design. Aleister Crowley, too, influenced the practice by intertwining sigils with ceremonial magick, embedding them with a rich esoteric significance.
Some occult grimoires employ sigils as a means of contacting spirits, for example; Ars Goetia, The Book of Oberon, and Pseudomonarchia Daemonum.
Basics of Sigil Magick
Sigil magick emerges from the belief in one’s ability to manifest their focus into reality. Through a process of creation, a sigil becomes much more than mere ink on paper—it is the illustrated essence of desire. Individuals can use sigils as focal points for their will, empowering these symbols through meditation or ritual to enact change. The universe of sigils is vast and varied, types of sigils include:
• Pictorial Sigils: Intuitive symbols drawn from the subconscious
• Runic Sigils: Combinations of runic alphabets that resonate with specific energies
• Word Sigils: Derived from statements of intention, where letters are crafted into a unique symbol
Correspondences also serve a purpose in this class of magick, in order to help align one's intent to universal energies. As an artist crafts their sigil, they intertwine traditional symbols with personal significance, creating a bridge to the metaphysical world. Some relevant correspondences are:
• Numerology: Numbers carry vibrations that can enhance a sigil’s purpose.
• Zodiac Signs: Celestial influences infused to fine-tune the focus.
• Elements: The classic forces of Earth, Air, Fire, and Water lend their power to sigils, grounding them in natural harmony.

Sigil Creation
Before you take pen to paper, first envision your intent with clarity and purpose This may involve some deep introspection into the true nature of your desires. A precise intention lays the foundation for the sigil's power. Once ready, write out your intention and cross out any duplicate letters. From here a couple different methods can be utilized. Naturally you could always draw your sigils from pure instinct, creating spontaneous shapes to represent your intentions, but there are other techniques available.
The Wheel
This method employs a wheel to be used as a map for drawing your sigil. Simply start at the first letter of your intent and draw lines to each subsequent letter. Example:


My Method
I make my sigils by breaking up the letters to create shapes. I will often decorate with extra shapes, symbols, and pictures as well. Here is a simplified example of my sigil creation process:

Next you must charge your sigil. Charging is the act of infusing the sigil with energy. The creator might enter a meditative state, focusing intently on the sigil while envisioning their intentions intertwining with the design. This act of focused concentration serves to embed the intention within the sigil, making it a beacon for the desired change.
Passive and Active Sigils
Intentioned sigils fall into either the passive or active sigil category based on how that sigil's energy is best utilized. Passive sigils are usually drawn on the body, item, or surface and then left alone to release their power over time. Active sigils involve some action to trigger the release of the sigil's energy, such as burning, burying, soaking with water/oil, and more. Some sigils can be used both passively and actively, but most will fall into one category.
Spirit Sigils
Many spirits and deities have sigils that represent them and these can be powerful catalysts for interacting with these beings. If the spirit you're working with doesn't have a sigil made for them (or even if they do) you can design your own symbol to connect with that spirit. Follow the same process, but instead of focusing on your intent, focus on the spirit/deity and connecting with it. You can even perform a ritual and provide an offering to invite the spirit into your space. This will allow you to draw divine inspiration straight from the source. Here are some examples of spirit/deity sigils, as well as some I created:





#magick#witch#witchcraft#sigil#sigils#sigil magic#sigil magick#chaos#chaos magick#chaos magic#chaos witch#satanic witch#lefthandpath#dark#satanism#demons#demonolatry#spirit work#spell work#spellwork#spell#spells#spellcasting#symbology#symbolism#symbols#eclectic#witchblr#witch community#pagan
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it's established that gojo's blindfold is a hallmark of his character. it's understood that the blindfold keeps things out; however, i also think there's something to be said about how it also keeps things in. despite the fact that there's already a lot of discourse regarding his blindfold, i think there's more to it than meets the eye (or doesn't, in the case of gojo).
this is going to be somewhat of a long post, but i promise that if you stick around, the end will make the journey worth it.
(this analysis is the lovechild of mine and @chiarrara, whose sexy big brain sponsored this whole thing).
as a character, gojo is unknowable without his eyes. it's very much proposed that gojo is his eyes; he's even repeatedly referred to as "the six-eyes brat". he's the strongest, and his eyes embody that status/symbol/role in the narrative. his eyes and his character are so intertwined that they almost become the same thing.
we are repeatedly reminded of his eyes throughout the story; they are perhaps his most distinct and identifiable feature. when we're shown the progression of gojo's life from birth to adolescence, we only see his eyes.
during this scene when toji is remebering him, he repeatedly refers to him as the "six-eyes brat". he is his eyes, and nothing else. that's the only thing that toji knows about him because to the jujutsu world, that's all he is.
however, when he's a teenager, although his eyes are more present than we've ever seen them throughout the series, they're noticeably un-glorified. they're undeniably present but they're unremarkable.
they're less symbols of his power and more what they are, which are just eyes. we see glimpses of his eyes so often that we almost forget that they're special, until he steps into his role as the strongest and reminds us of them.
it's important to note that what sets the depiction of his eyes apart here (versus when he's an adult) is the presence of geto. if you comb through every single scene with geto in hidden inventory, you will find that gojo's eyes are not the focal point of his character. they're backgrounded features; his eyes are either half-hidden or entirely obscured by his shades, and they rarely glow.
his eyes make themselves known when geto is absent, like during gojo's fight with toji. in these moments, he is the strongest, invariably leaving room for nothing else. the only exception to this rule is when he's carrying riko's body, in which his eyes glow when he toes the line between human nature and godlike power. if we understand his eyes to be conduits of his power, then their noticeable downplaying can be understood as gojo leaving behind his title as the strongest and stepping into his humanity.
when geto breaks up with gojo, his eyes are not only uncovered, they're un-emphasized. they're perhaps the dullest we've ever seen them, and their distinct, eye-catching blue is swallowed by the whites surrounding his irises. his strength and power don't matter in this moment, and his eyes reflect that. when he's losing geto, he is not the strongest; he is purely gojo satoru.
the emphasis on his eyes in his youth makes their absence in his adulthood even more stark. we rarely see his eyes now, and it's only in the direst of circumstances.
everyone is familiar with the dictum '"the eyes are the window to the soul", which is true: eyes let people see into us. however, they function both ways; like a two-way mirror, they also let us see the world. eyes let people look in, but they also let their beholder look out.
there's a reason gojo only put on the blindfold after geto left. why didn't he wear it from the start? why did he start wearing it at all? all the credit to @hijinks-n-lowjinks for their masterful analysis that inspired this idea, which is as follows:
"....Gojo wants nothing more than to leave the memory of Geto unscathed....There's still a part of Geto's memory that's untarnished if he keeps it private instead of exposing the depth of Geto's crimes to the students, and I think that's what he's clinging onto."
gojo wears the blindfold for two reasons: one, to keep people out, and two, to keep geto in.
in donning the blindfold, gojo seals geto in his mind and simultaneously seals himself off from the world. he holds geto inside of himself, rendering him (or gojo's construction of him) untouchable by anyone else. in order to achieve this, however, the practice necessitates that gojo keeps everyone else out, because they belong to a world without geto that gojo literally and figuratively refuses to see. the wall functions like eyes: twofold, both keeping in and keeping out.
geto can be understood as gojo's blindfold: he is the reason it exists and why gojo put it on the first place. the blindfold is an intractable element in how he (doesn't) navigate the world without geto, because geto's departure from his life catalyzed his withdrawal from the world, which is symbolized through the blindfold.
when geto was in his life, gojo let the world in because it had geto in it. after geto left, he wasn't there for gojo's eyes to find. the permanent blindfold operates like schrödinger's cat— instead of seeing a world without geto, gojo simply chooses to stop seeing.
it's worth noting that the literal barrier pairs with the figurative barrier gojo puts up, which is in his disposition.
there's a reason that gojo's cocky, lighthearted persona comes out when he's wearing the blindfold. it's a figurative barrier that matches the literal one. like i said before, we only see his eyes in the direst of circumstances, and his goofy, cocksure demeanour is notably absent from these instances. i'm not saying it's fake, but the persona is a front, designed to keep people at a distance. he plays it up, and it feels even more distant because we can't see his eyes.
however, gojo isn't the only person with a barrier.
after the breakup, we never see geto wear casual clothes. we always see him in his cult leader outfit, which is distinct and elaborate. geto knows it's a costume, evidenced by the way he even says it himself when someone asks why he's wearing the cult getup:
we also see a notable shift in his persona, to a crazed and almost manic disposition that contrasts starkly with the gentle, kind nature he had in his youth. geto's literal barrier is found in his cult outfit, whereas his figurative one is in his disposition. although they present differently, gojo and geto's literal and figurative barriers mechanize the same modes of expression that seem to be at odds with one another.
gojo’s disposition is designed to counteract the loneliness that shapes his character (a loneliness that geto abetted in being his companion) and geto’s disposition is designed to push people away, because he decided no one could understand him (a role which was previously fulfilled by gojo).
gojo can read geto in a way that no one else can, and geto is gojo's counterpart in a way that no one else can be— they’re missing something only the other can provide and compensating with two dispositions at opposite ends of the emotional spectrum.
when geto is dying, gojo drops the literal and figurative mask. he's almost unrecognizable; he's not laughing, he's not smiling, and he's not wearing the blindfold, because he doesn't need it anymore. the only person he wants to see, the only person he's ever wanted to see, is in front of him now.
however, once again, he's not only one whose walls have come down.
geto drops the manic persona (although he retains the ideals) and he gently smiles in a way that's reminiscent of his youth. his cult leader outfit is also falling off, exposing him in more ways than one. he admits that he never had any hate for anyone at jujutsu tech, and in doing so, materializes the version of himself that lived in gojo's mind for a decade. that's why gojo doesn't bother with the blindfold; the geto in his mind and the geto in front of him are congruous and he's looking at the person he's been seeing inside his head all along.
it's been established that we don't know what gojo says to geto. however, it is also absolutely key that we don't see gojo's eyes in this deeply intimate moment. his eyes, which are inextricably linked to his strength and his role. his eyes, which are the medium through which he limits his engagement with the world. his eyes, which he sealed after geto left and only brings out when he's tasked with fulfilling his role.
in this moment, he considers the question geto asked him during the breakup. "are you gojo satoru because you're the strongest? or are you the strongest because you're gojo satoru?"
and in shielding his eyes from us, gojo answers him.
"i'm gojo satoru because of you, suguru."
his eyes, as the windows to the soul and witnesses to the world, are looking at geto suguru not as the strongest but as gojo satoru, and they are meant for geto alone. yes, the eyes are the windows to the soul but they're also two-way mirror— gojo opens his eyes for geto to look into his soul because the material manifestation of his soul is dying in front of him right now. in baring his eyes, he bares his soul.
before geto dies, we see him the same way gojo does. he seems bashful, almost shy, even mirthful; all traits that are antithetical to the crazed front he put up earlier. conversely, gojo is the most solemn we've ever seen him. in this moment, we see them both for who they really are, because they literally and figuratively only reveal themselves to each other.
after they part ways in shinjuku, geto and gojo embody the same barriers through identical mechanisms: fabric and persona. these barriers function to do the same thing, which is to keep people at a distance in order to leave space for the one person noticeably absent from their lives. it's very fitting that their walls come down as they meet for the last time, because the only people who could've torn them down are the same people for whom they put them up in the first place— nobody else but each other.
#i vanished for a few weeks bc i was job hunting but i HAVE MADE MY TRIUMPHANT RETURN#my jjk meta#satosugu#satosugu meta#satosugu analysis#satosugu angst#stsg brainrot#gojo angst#geto angst#geto and gojo#stsg#stsg angst#gojo and geto#gojo satoru angst#geto suguru angst#suguru x satoru#satoru#suguru#jjk meta#jujutsu kaisen meta#jjk analysis#satoru angst#gojo brainrot#jjk#jujutsu kaisen#jujutsu kaisen angst#jujutsu kaisen analysis#geto suguru#gojo satoru#gojo
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How Contemporary Coffee Tables are Designed?
Contemporary coffee tables are primarily designed with a focus on functionality, aesthetics, and versatility. The main reason for this being that, they must reflect the evolving needs and preferences of modern living spaces.
Contemporary Coffee Table Composition and Design
Coffee tables feature clean lines, minimalist forms, and a blend of materials such as wood, glass, and metal, creating a sophisticated yet practical centerpiece for the living room. Designers prioritize multi-functional elements, incorporating storage solutions like built-in shelves, drawers, or hidden compartments to maximize utility without sacrificing style.
Additional Features
Some contemporary coffee tables are designed with adjustable or modular components, allowing them to adapt to different spaces and uses. This combination of form and function ensures that contemporary coffee tables not only enhance the visual appeal of a room but also contribute to its overall efficiency and organization.
#modern coffee tables#contemporary coffee tables#modern office furniture#office furniture Dubai#collaborative Office Furniture#Coffee table design#minimalist coffee tables#coffee table Dubai#coffee tables#form and function#living space coffee tables#modular coffee tables#coffee table composition#modern table design#center table design#focal point design
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Welcome to Something Eternal: A Website Forum in 2023 wtf lmao
It's 2023, and a single belligerent rich guy destroyed one of the primary focal points of uh...global communication. Tumblr is, shockingly, kinda thriving despite the abuse it gets from its owners, but that I will call the iconic refusal of Tumblr users to let Tumblr get in the way of their using Tumblr. Reddit killed its API, removing the functionality of mobile apps that made it remotely readable (rip rif.) Discord, our current primary hangout, has made countless strange choices lately that indicate it has reached the summit of its usability and functionality, and can only decline from here as changes get made to prepare for shareholders. (NOTE: WROTE THIS POST BEFORE THEIR MOBILE "REDESIGN" LMAO)
The enshittification is intense, and it's coming from every direction. Social media platforms that felt like permanent institutions are instead slowly going to let fall fallow incredible amounts of history, works of art, thought, and fandoms. It kinda sucks!
A couple years ago, I posted about a new plan with a new domain, to focus on the archiving of media content, as I saw that to be the fatal weakness of the current ways the internet and fandoms work. Much has happened since to convince me to alter the direction of those efforts, though not abandon them entirely.
Long story short? We are launching a fucking website forum. In 2023.
If you remember In the Rose Garden, much about Something Eternal will be familiar. But this has been a year in the making, and in many ways it's far more ambitious than IRG was. We have put money on this. The forum is running on the same software major IT and technology businesses use, because I don't want the software to age out of usability within five years. It has an attached gallery system for me to post content to, including the Chiho Saito art collection. It has a profile post system that everyone already on the forum has decided is kinda like mini Twitter? But it is, fundamentally, a website forum, owned and run and moderated by us. We are not web devs. But we have run a website on pure spite and headbutting code for over twenty years, and we have over a decade of experience maintaining social spaces online, both on the OG forum, and on our Discord. Better skilled people with far more time than we have can and will build incredible alternatives to what is collapsing around us. But they're not in the room right now. We are. And you know what? Maybe it's time to return to a clunkier, slower moving, more conversation focused platform.
You're not joining a social media platform with the full polish of dozens of devs and automated moderation. Things might break, and I might need time to fix them. The emojis and such are still a work in progress. Because e-mails no longer route in reasonable normal ways, the sign-up process instead happens within the software, and has to be approved by mods. Design and structure elements may change. Etc. The point being, that the forum isn't finished, but it is at a place where I feel like I can present it to people, and it's people I need to help direct what functions and things will be in this space. You all will shape its norms, its traditions, its options...choices I could try to make now, but really...they're for us to create as a group! But the important stuff? That's there. Now let's drive this baby off the damn lot already!
Come! Join us!!
PS. As always, TERFs and Nazis need not apply.
#revolutionary girl utena#shoujo kakumei utena#rgu#sku#empty movement#utena meta#fandom stuff#fandoms#expect a somewhat spicy atmosphere#empty movement has always had deep something awful roots#and i expect the migration back to a forum will bring with it some of that more spicy attitude#also lol henry kissinger is dead god that rules
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I just realised that all the media I adore has some level of autistic/neurodivergent coding and it's been that way since I was a child.
And like, oftentimes their different way of perceiving and being in the world is the driving force of the story/and or a crucial element in it.
There’s the canon example of the entire Camp Halfblood (ADHD), where the ADHD is literally what keeps the characters alive.
There's Dean Winchester (ADHD) whose hyperfixations are typically masculine (as well as geeky) and who never sits still, with the added bonus of Castiel (Autism), who Dean just... accepts, in a way I rarely see.
Then there’s the infamous Will Graham (Autism) whose hyperempathy is litterally the focal point of the entire narrative.
We have Haru from Free! (Autism), whose special interest (swimming) is the motivating factor for several other characters.
Reki and Langa from Sk8 the infinity (Autism), who share a special interest and grow a special bond because of it.
There's Sai from Hikaru No Go (Autism), who trancedented time and space to play Go (special interest) and whose special interest sets the story into motion.
We have any version of Sherlock Holmes (AuDHD), who's brilliance I attribute to a mixture of hyperfixations and special interest in crime solving. His conflicts with society and disregard of social norms are a central theme as well.
There's Anne with an E (Autism), who loves words and stories and speaks before she thinks (where all major problems arise due to her lack of understanding for social norms)
We have Pat and Pran from Bad Buddy (ADHD + Autism), like I dunno, I just really felt that vibe.
There's Beth Harmon from Queen's Gambit (Autism) with her special interest in Chess.
And like, the list goes on: Daryl Dixon, Jon Snow, Kotaro from Kotaro Lives Alone, Will Treaty from the Ranger's apprentice, Hal from the same author, Katniss Everdeen, Si-eun from Weak Hero Class 1, etc.
Don't get me wrong I've consumed plenty of stories without characters coded this way, but all the stories that truly resonated with me? Neurodivergent, all of them.
It's probably because the focus on social norms/hierarchy always seemed foreign to me. Eg. I like Skam but it's like a view into a completely foreign world where people function differently.
#headcanon#autistic headcanon#you don't have to agree#camp half blood#percy jackson#dean winchester#castiel#supernatural#will graham#nbc hannibal#hannibal#free!#free! haru#sk8 reki#sk8 the infinity#sk8 langa#sk8 anime#bbc sherlock#sherlock holmes#sherlock fandom#anne with an e#beth harmon#queen's gambit#bad buddy#actually autistic#neurodivergent#neurodiversity#autistic coded character#adhd#autism coded
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Game: Voices of the Void Type: Parabolic Dish (Prime Focus)
Woo, get the fancy champagne, it's The Signal Game that isn't Signal Simulator. Extremely solidly modeled, though it's missing a few of the more essential components to be what these are meant to be, Radio Telescopes.
Looks very functional, I should've gone and measured out the proportions of the dish to figure out whether- actually, you can see it in the first picture that the supposed focus point is waaaay out from the edge of the reflector. If you look up pictures of radio telescopes you'll find that while they do tend to have quite outward focal points, it's nothing like this one. Rough math doesn't work out either, focal point should be somewhere like 3.5m ish if the thing is like 12m in diameter and maybe 2.5m deep.
It's a radio telescope, means it can be pointed at the sky alongside the other 24 dishes, which in turn combines all of their independent sensing abilities to create one giant radio telescope, or radio telescope array as it'd be called! The things these guys would be listening to can be of extremely faint scale and having a larger surface area to pick up signals from increases the chance of receiving something, and the strength. Though the way it's portrayed in the game is far from realistic, to nobody's surprise. Somehow Alpen Signal Observatorium and Stolas have figured out how to do faster than light signal reception, a truly impressive feat!
Functionality: 4/5 Accuracy: 1/2 Realism: 2/3
Total Rating: 7/10 Pretty solidly transferred into game form, both stylization and function wise. Would probably be more boring if it were fully realistic, at least to the general audience.
Tune in tomorrow when I spend 20 bucks on signal simulator to get pictures of the dishes in that game!
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sittings, theatre, and bonfires , about as festive as my maze runner dr gets ; stripped to the essentials.
. . . so i can finally shut up about them after this.
(it is midsummer, so i am in a festive mood. and a festive mood calls for a festive post.)

if you’ve ever had the (dis)pleasure of reading one of my many endless musings on my maze runner dr, chances are you’ve come across the words ”sittings” and ”bonfires” more times than you’d like to admit. and by now, you’re probably sick and tired of hearing of them. so in an attempt to put an end to these (otherwise) never-ending repetitions of mine, i decided to devote an entire post to them….this time with an added function: theatre. you’ll never know if i did it out of spite or sheer generosity.
so without further ado, let’s go over the holy trinity of the gladers: sittings, theatre, and bonfires. allll the way down to the nitty gritty details. survival tips added. this will be a long one. welcome to ned’s lexi’s declassified.
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bonfires.

if you’re already somewhat familiar with the tmr franchise, then you’re probably also familiar with the bonfires shown in the first movie.
the bonfires are essentially a hazing ritual celebration of the newest arrived greenie; each month a new greenie arrives in the box, and each month a bonfire is held in commemoration of said greenie. though, i must say that the focus is less on the newcomer and more on the already routined gladers. and the booze, oh the booze… can’t forget about gally’s special brew. it takes a focal point during these occasions, for better or for worse. (don’t ask him for the recipe though, it’s a trade secret)
i , preparation : sticks are collected, bacon is cooked, and the keepers stumble down the basement stairs on a quest to collect lighters and jars of moonshine. a crude statue of a griever is built using some of the collected sticks, some twine, and the skull of a long-gone cow. and the greenie is coaxed out of his hiding spot.
ii , activities, the whole shebang : to mark the start of the bonfire, the gladers light wooden spears and throw it at the griever statue placed on the pile of firewood. it’s in defiance of W.C.K.D.
the rest of the bonfire is mostly mingling and snacking on food. there’s a sand pit (i call it a sandbox. makes them mad, which i find hilarious) for those who want to roughhouse? wrestle? yeah idk why they thought that’s a good idea. but whatever.
the first and second in command usually call the bonfire off once it starts getting late.
iii , what to expect : a scared greenie hiding from the ruckus. grilled meat for a snack. deafening loud laughter. possibly being bumped into by gladers roughhousing. smelling like smoke for the rest of the week.
iv , survival tip : keep away from the fire. get buzzed, not drunk. the smoke will stick to your hair and your clothes, it takes a few washes…. so don’t wear your favourite outfit. expect sand in your shoes if you walk in the sandbox the manly sand pit, sorry
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sittings.

my personal favourite. not present in the franchise, but rather a personal addition to my dr, and heavily inspired by the student culture of my country.
sittings are, in their truest essence, chaotic and borderline anarchic dinners. they consist of a three course meal, music blasting from the record player in the grass, and lots of good company. they always end with a dance floor as well, perhaps appealing to you if you’ve managed to completely disintegrate your conscious by then, that is. sittings only happen once a month (sometimes twice). enough times to satisfy us, but also enough times as to not become overbearing. other times we have them bi-monthly.
sittings are almost exclusively held outside. this is to minimise damage to the homestead, and to minimise the risk of someone mistaking a window for a door (has happened before, by the way… ”doors with high thresholds are called windows, and you’re not allowed to go through those” <- a real sitting rule.)
i , preparation : preparations are plentiful. sittings are considered a special occasion over here, after all. food is to be prepared. so…much…food. three meals: starter, main course, and dessert….for every single glader. most gladers help out in the kitchen, cooks or non-cooks. the outside dining area is prepped with table cloth and diy:ed decorations. sometimes the sitting has a special theme: hospital theme, pirates, etc. getting dolled up before a sitting is a whole vibe in and of itself.
ii , activities, the whole shebang : at least two toastmasters (TM) are assigned for each sitting. when TMs have an announcement, they ring the bell situated by the homestead porch. guests are expected to fall silent once the bell is rung, yet this rarely happens at once. the deeper into the night, the harder it is to shut the crowd up.
when the sitting is about to start, TM redirects everyone to their designated seats. singing the song ”squeeze on in” is customary.
-> the song book: here we have a collection of all glader songs ever written. some gladers have their own personal song book, but don’t worry if you don’t own one yourself yet — communal song books are always handed out to each table either way. it’s customary to write and draw in each other’s books, so don’t be shy with your pen.
now that you’ve found your seat, it’s time to introduce yourself to your tablemates. already know the person sitting next to you? (which… chances are, you do) doesn’t matter; say ”hi stranger” and introduce yourself, that’s just the polite thing to do. during the evening, chat with your tablemates; they’re probably not as unpleasant as they seem.
when the food is served, you thank and accept it. you eat and offer a compliment to the kitchen. nothing too complicated. when it’s time to sing, there are many rules and traditions that can’t be fully covered here. to summarize, certain songs must be sung in a specific order, and some experienced gladers tend to stray from the script. however, there’s no need to worry. you’ll never really understand it anyway. none of us do.
the rest of the evening is filled with pleasant conversations, occasional games, readings of hilariously written poems by hammered gladers (followed by a lambo - drinking game - where the people the poem is about have to stand on their chair and drink up whatever’s in their glass), music, and too much chaos.
iii , what to expect : a confused greenie when it’s time to sing (be nice and open the right page in the song book for them). shit-faced gladers. mouthwatering food. chatty tablemates with 0 filter.
iv , survival tip : dog-ear the pages of the most popular glader songs in the song book (you’ll quickly learn which ones they are, trust me), it’ll come in handy many times throughout the night. bring a pen. keep your glass full , unless it’s your time to lambo , then keep it half-full (not empty, that’ll just earn you the crowd shouting ”re-do” at you). come in time if you want to mingle before the party, come late by 30 minutes if you’re only there to eat.
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theatre.

another added feature to my dr by me. theatre. the interactive kind, where the audience has a say in the direction of the story. happens like… what,,, once a year? we’ve only had one so far, and the next one won’t see the light of day for a while.
i , preparation : a screenplay is written by volunteering gladers. there’s only one requirement: be witty and creative. there are really no requirements for who can be an actor. want the job? you got it.
the scene is poorly built. the builders threw it together in an hour, but it does the trick. costuming is not grand either. at all. actors borrow the clothes from other gladers, mixing and matching them to create their costumes…. so nothing’s sewn or created from scratch (we really can’t be arsed to do that). they borrowed my white maxi skirt once to create a wedding dress, just to put things into perspective.
ii , activities, the whole shebang : find a good seat in the grass by the wooden scene, bring a blanket or a pillow to sit on. the performance is usually 1–2 hours long, with breaks.
the performances are usually satirical ones, and often times making fun of the creators and the grievers. expect lots of parodies of songs and lots of improv.
as mentioned, the show is interactive. meaning: you in the audience can influence the performance. go bananas with your newfound power. dissatisfied with the delivery of a line or an act made by the actors? simply shout your demands at them from where you’re sitting: ”say it angrier” , ”close the door” , ”sing it in french instead” , ”more romantic” , ”CLOSE THE DOOOOOOR”. get creative, the actors won’t mind (most of the times).
iii , what to expect : the crowd never shutting up. the audience stomping their feet in unison. don’t expect a professional show, you’ll be disappointed.
iv , survival tip : if a song is performed, always clap when it ends, even if it’s in the middle of an act. when the audience are stomping their feet, join them. again, bring a blanket or a pillow to sit on (as the temperatures fall at night, the grass gets wet…)
so!!!! that was that! if you stayed til the end: thank you. are you alright, though? i do have so so much more to say but this would’ve been an endless rambling otherwise. soo yep, my dr heavily diverts from canon (as one might’ve noticed). it’s basically its own seperate entity, heavily inspired by uni student culture (i’m a girl and i need to have fun !!!! grievers and maze be damned)
#chiming ⊹ bluebells#lexi’s maze runner dr#lexi’s ⊹ realities#desired reality#shiftblr#reality shifting#shifter#law of assumption#loassumption#quantum jumping#reality shifter#shifters#dr scripting#things to script#shifting#shifting blog#shifting antis dni#shifting community#shifting diary#shifting motivation#shiftingrealities#dr moodboard#tmr dr#maze runner dr
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And here it is! The Madygen Formation in all it's incomplete glory! Added the hand so you get a feel for the size of some of these colossal insects!
This time the research team outdid themselves. LOOK AT ALL THE INSECTS! I bow before these friends who help especially with subjects I'm not familiar with!
As usual this also means the Wikipedia page got an update, many more taxa have been added!
Here also the unfinished/abandoned version from yesterday. For people who wonder, I didn't finish it because it's composition didn't work for me, there are individual good parts part the lack of strong focal points and distribution of elements just didn't work for me.
For me these pieces have to be more than just showcases of flora and fauna of a formation, they also have to function as an art piece so that they can still function beyond their scientific expiration date.
#paleoart#sciart#paleostream#palaeoblr#cretaceous#triassic#madygen formation#insects#gigatitan#longisquama#sharovipteryx
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