#found this in my drafts from july 2023 and my guess is that this will always be relevant so throwing it in the queue

[grimalkhiindi]

Miraculous Ladybug is one of those shows where the premise has so much potential in terms of themes, character development, and world-building, that it is actually astonishingly impressive how terrible the final product is.

[spicyraeman]

ᴏᴄꜱ - ᴛʜᴇɴ & ɴᴏᴡ

Saw a buncha chooms doin this lil trend and remembered that I had an old draft doing this very thing! Spiffied it up with even newer shots of my babes and it really makes me realize how far both me and my OCs have come :]

March 25, 2022 || June 24, 2023

The shot on the left is legit my very first oc shot in cyberpunk. Id taken some landscape shots before this but this was where the blorbo brainrot started. Vons definitely come the farthest in terms of design, from big beefy maelstrom to like.. wet rat white boy energy I guess lol. She still got a long way to go though, probably gonna be working on her forever, she's my favorite little passion project😌

June 2, 2022 || June 2, 2023

Didn't even realize these were exactly a year apart till I checked the dates!

Luis is basically the exact same as when I first made him, just the perfect design from the moment of creation😌He's the OC that really started my VP journey, I made him just to take pretty pictures of and learn the ropes. Glad I finally have the skills to show off his full beauty!

September 12, 2022 || June 14, 2023

Lynk's design is one that feels both entirely different and very much the same to me. Same overall vibe and style, but more refined I suppose. Less scrungly mess of wires and more sleek and sharp borg. Really love their current design now, still wanna make 'em custom tattoos but it gonna be a while till i'm at that modding level!

December 12, 2022 || June 1, 2023

Dallas was a design first backstory second kinda OC. I love her old design, think all the cyberware and makeup are really cool, but as I fleshed her out it just wasn't Dallas. Found myself in a comfy spot with her now though, even ended up making her her own custom complexion!

December 5, 2022 || July 9, 2023

Technically there's an even farther back design I could use for Sunny but it's so different I can't even consider it him. His old design looks so similar yet so very different its kinda weird😅Sunny's design now is probably the one I'm most content with, I might try and add back his arm tattoos but until then he's pretty much perfect.

December 8, 2022 || April 23, 2023

When I first made Midas my main goal was a dark moody playboy, which definitely stayed the same just in a radically different way. His OG personality was a playful and dramatic womanizer which I loved but I needed a straight man in this group of idiots and he had to be it. So instead he became a mysterious and gruff guy that has ladies falling over him whether he likes it or not, also he's a vampire now.

[nerdnag]

The time has come for me to finish my philosophy bachelor's.

...Lots of ramble below. I mostly just need to get my thoughts out, but there is a plan by the end!

For those of you who were around in May, you may recall that I struggled a lot to get a sort-of-presentable draft ready for my supervisor, hoping to be able to hand the thing in before the end of the semester, and was then completely slammed down into the dirt by said supervisor when he returned the draft a few days later with... pretty strong words about it. Few of which were positive. I couldn't bring myself to read the comments he'd left in the actual document at the time, because the email was enough to bring me to tears.

Yeah.

I mean, he wasn't wrong, it was just a bit shocking to have him go from "hey, how's it going for you, the thesis treating you well? oh and here's a link to a fun video i found on the internet" one day to almost-kinda-petty critique the next. And also, I am wholly unused to disappointing teachers, supervisors, mentors or superiors of any kind. That may sound strange considering my ADHD, which should in theory have gotten me in lots of situations like that, but my entire life, I've usually managed to make use of three things that have helped immensely to get things done well and on time: 1) special interests/obsessions/hyperfocus, 2) perfectionism and performance anxiety, and 3) high IQ. Number one has helped with motivation and creative flow; number 2 has helped motivate me through shame; and number 3 has helped me "bullshit" my way through assignments/relatively easily create a coherent and acceptable final product without doing all of the actual work I should have done (...and also making the actual work I do put in a pretty good quality).

But for some reason, these tactics didn't quite work out this time. I could come up with many different ideas about why this was, but one really important part of it was probably the fact that I've been heavily overloaded with work at my job and still haven't fully recovered from the immense stress I was under from March 2022-June 2023. I might not be able to recover from that period of my life without doing some pretty extreme changes in how I live my life, and although I've been working on trying to make some of those changes over the course of the first half of this year, it hasn't been impactful enough yet.

And so in the middle of this, of trying to recover from a backlog of both work and stress, while still being under quite a lot of stress at work (although not even remotely compared to how it was a year ago), I was also trying to write a bachelor's thesis in my spare time.

Oh, and did I mention I also took on a volunteer position in my spare time from April onwards that has demanded quite a lot of time?

(Jfc why do I do this to myself. ...Because it's fun and I am bad at saying no. That's why.)

Anyway, enough rambling about what's happened and the reasons for it - long story short, I realised I wouldn't be able to finish the thesis in time, and so I told my supervisor I'd hand it in by the end of the summer instead. And wouldn't you know it, the end of summer is closing in. :)

So with the help of my partner, I managed to finally open the document containing my supervisor's comments, and rather than lose myself in complete and utter anxiety and horror over the words, we could sort of laugh over how unnecessarily harsh he was being. (I guess my supervisor actually was a bit disappointed, since he'd seen before that I was more capable than that. I don't blame him.) I also realised that it wasn't quite as bad as I had imagined, and that my life isn't actually over and done for. So yeah. (He even had a couple of positive comments for me, actually.)

Then we made a plan for how to tackle this thing. I'm going away on the 22nd of July, so the goal right now is to have a finished draft to send to my supervisor on the 21st. Then he can read it, give comments, tell me whether he gives his approval or not, and after I've made any necessary adjustments, I can hand in an opposition version by the middle of August. Since I am currently on vacation, and I do need to actually try to wind down from work as well, I've settled on working on my thesis for 3 hours each day, starting tomorrow (the 13th), and my deadline each day is noon. If I realise after this Sunday that I need more time, I'll increase it to 4 hours every day.

It should work. I know what I need to do, and my supervisor's comments are clear. I enjoy writing and doing research and I will finish this in a way that I'm proud and happy about.

So there. That's my promise to myself. I'll climb out of this hole, fill it in with new dirt, and then start building the collapsed tower of blocks up again.

[spngeorg]

Episode 117 - 6.13 Unforgiven

Yes, I had to watch it again, despite Sam's specific struggles in this episode being a source of... let's call it personal emotional distress for me. So I'm gonna talk lightly about it as much as possible.

I also am super creeped by the concept of the spider people, so... winning all around for me I guess. >.>

In far better news, this episode has our only full draft script from season six! We've got the green draft, which you can read in its entirety at the link below. This was the very first script that I personally bought, long before the Script Hunt server was established, and started us on the long strange journey of collecting as many as possible.

Which brings me to two additional points this week:

The @spnscripthunt is currently running a donation giveaway of (potentially, depending on the total donated) 30 autographed scripts from our collection! To see the full list of prizes and check our progress, please visit our World Central Kitchen direct contribution page. Currently we're at just over $2k raised, with 15 scripts unlocked for giveaway! The raffle closes on August 26, 2023, so enter soon for a chance to win one!

We're always on the lookout for additional scripts to add to the collection. If you have any scripts that aren't already in the publicly available free collection (a full list of what we already have can be found here on the Superwiki, with links to all of them for your reading pleasure), please contact the scripthunt via any of our social media!

LINKS!

The Superwiki Page

My tag

My rewatch notes from July 2019

The Full Green Draft Script

Filming locations map

CW Promo video

Listen now on Spotify, or wherever you enjoy podcasts!

[xtruss]

Almost Nothing Is Worth a War Between the U.S. 🇺🇸 and China 🇨🇳

Americans and Chinese have to rehumanize each other in terms of the way we conceive of our problems and engage.

— By Howard W. French | Foreign Policy | August 21, 2023

A child sitting on a man's shoulder takes a picture as she visits the Bund waterfront area in Shanghai, China, on July 5, 2023. Wang Zhao/AFP Via Getty Images

Midway into my just-completed one-month stay in China, I found myself seated alone in a tasteful restaurant in an upscale shopping mall in Shanghai, where I had gone for dinner.

There, amid dim lighting and soft traditional music, I had a kind of revelation. Bear with me. Against the opposite wall sat a three-generation Chinese family dining together. Two grandparents, slouching a bit, their visages deeply lined, faced in my direction, and seemed to exhibit mild curiosity about what has become a rare sighting recently, even in China’s most cosmopolitan city: a foreigner. They watched closely as I spoke with the waiter in Chinese to complete my order.

Two other people—from all evidence their much taller daughter, who was dressed in the refined way of a well-paid professional, and a small grandchild—sat with their backs to me. I was only able to see their faces when the mother stood up mid-meal to take her girl to the bathroom. In this little glimpse of three generations, an entire world opened up for me, as did a deep sense of alarm over one of the most urgent problems facing all of humanity in these times.

As a former longtime resident of China and someone who has been studying the country since I was a college student many decades ago, I could not prevent myself from trying to imagine the run of experiences the two elders had lived through. I guessed they were roughly my age, meaning in their 60s, but they looked a lot older and more worn than your average well-kept American of similar age.

This meant they would probably have harsh memories of the Cultural Revolution, the decade of political violence and upheaval that began under Mao Zedong in 1966. They or their families may also have suffered even worse tribulations late in the previous decade during the “Great Leap Forward,” when Mao’s crash effort to industrialize resulted in tens of millions of Chinese people starving to death.

Now, the elderly looking man who gazed across the narrow space separating us wore a light blue Gap t-shirt as he picked his way gingerly through a three-course meal, seemingly taking his time to chew. What did he understand of the symbolism of mass consumerism represented in the white logo emblazoned on his shirt? What did he make of the proliferation of this temple of marketing and surplus that is the shopping mall, a cultural phenomenon that contemporary China has made its own? How did he feel about the long curve of his life? Of the grave errors that China had made, but also about where it had ended up, or at least where it stood in this moment? I almost wanted to ask him, but thinking it would have been too much of an intrusion, I restrained myself, with regret.

In those moments, these thoughts impelled me to think about the curve of life in my own country, the United States, too—of how easily one can assume a kind of superior or even triumphalist attitude toward other people in other places. I had just missed being of draft age in the Vietnam War, a senseless tragedy visited upon tens of millions of Southeast Asians, for reasons as specious as many of Mao’s economic and political ideas. I thought of the persistent denial of civil rights for African Americans, which continued in a de jure sense almost into my teenage years. I thought of the devastation to the planet caused by America’s heedless crusade for wealth. Then, based on the evidence, I concluded that bad decisions and human folly are, well, universally human.

The biggest human folly I can presently think of, though, would be something that nowadays seems frighteningly easy to imagine: a war between the United States and China. Until the coronavirus pandemic, I had either lived in or visited China every year since the late 1990s. I plan to write several columns based on my recent return to the country after four years of pandemic-enforced absence. But this is not yet the occasion for a deep exploration for the political, economic, and strategic issues that are pushing to the two countries so far apart and fueling ever greater risk of catastrophe.

I’ll just say here that this is not a situation where, as so many in each country may be inclined to think, if only the other side would stop doing things that threaten or provoke us, the war clouds would dissipate. We have problems together, and if they are to be prevented from causing mass death and destruction, both countries will have to escape the endless loop of reflexively problematizing and sometimes essentializing the other, along with the relentless self-justification.

Many will think me naive, but this has to begin with something all too rare. Americans and Chinese have to rehumanize each other in terms of the way we conceive of our problems and engage. Actually, seeing people in China, like that family across from me at dinner, helped bring this home. But how can this be achieved for the crushing majority of Americans and Chinese who will never visit the other’s country? How can we strip off the layers of surface things that separate us to get in touch with the profound humanity that should unite us? It’s hard work, and the answer is not obvious, but it is urgent.

Since I’m ready to be accused of naivete, I’ll try to start first. There is almost nothing that is worth a war between the United States and China. I’ll come back to the tricky sounding “almost” in a second—it’s actually not as big of an asterisk as some might imagine. Control over Taiwan, which the government of Chinese President Xi Jinping has made into an all-too-public obsession, is not worth the killing that would be unleashed by a Chinese invasion and by any U.S. response in defense of that island. Continued U.S. geopolitical preeminence in the world is also not worth a major armed conflict with China. This is not a call for capitulation, but rather for both countries to find ways to prioritize coexistence and avoid disaster.

As a non-academic historian, I read an inordinate amount about the past, and I have always been struck by the airs of overconfidence and intoxication that have preceded many great past conflicts. On the eve of World War I, for example, elites on both sides—in Germany and Britain—were blithely predicting the troops would be home by Christmas.

Most Americans (and most Chinese) probably spend precious little time thinking about what war would do to their own country. It would be useful to give a wider airing of war game scenarios, such as one carried out recently by the Center for Strategic and International Studies, that make clear just how devastating a conflict could be. In this example, just one of many, Hawaii, Guam, Alaska, and San Diego, California, would all come under withering Chinese attack, up to and potentially including with nuclear weapons. Lest Chinese people think that they would have little to fear by way of direct impact, just for starters, many areas of coastal China, where the country’s population and wealth are heavily concentrated, could face a rain of U.S. missiles.

What are people willing to concede in order to avoid such a fate? In a book I wrote about China’s conception of itself as a great power, I concluded that the United States needed, for starters, to signal a lot more serenity in its competition with China. For at least two decades, my country has behaved as if a bit haunted by the prospect of being overtaken. But for objective reasons—including China’s extraordinarily profound demographic problems, the declining effectiveness of China’s economic policies, and a plethora of domestic challenges in the country—the United States needn’t be. What is more, though, is that the signals of American anxiety, which are rife in the political culture and come through in many U.S. policies, fuel Chinese nervousness, insecurity, and over-assertiveness.

China, for its part, needs to get over its own insecurities. The air of self-confidence it seeks to project is powerfully belied by the constant resort to overt nationalism and to assertions that in its dealings with other countries—or with international bodies like international tribunals governing laws of the sea, for example—only others are capable of incorrect positions. China, by contrast, is not only always right but also righteous.

Beijing is profoundly worried about the staying power of its own political system, but it needn’t obsess, as it claims to, over the supposed efforts of others to undermine it. Whatever threats there are to China’s system of rule come from within China itself. Nobody outside of the country, in other words, is trying to bring down the Communist Party. Only the party itself can achieve this, by failing to reform in step with the desires of the country’s own population.

So how can we restore some confidence on both sides? First the asterisk from above. War should be ruled out except in the case of a direct attack by one side on the other, which means we should rule out attacking each other. China should meanwhile also lower the temperature on Taiwan, in tandem with more reassurances from the United States that Washington does not support the idea of formal independence for the island.

Chinese and American leaders also have to start speaking with each other and meeting much more often face to face. There is really no substitute for this, for as much as what were once called people-to-people exchanges can reinforce a shared sense of humanity, seeing political leaders shake hands and smile and meet across the table to discuss thorny issues separating the two sides can also remind both countries’ public and political classes that there is nothing so hard that it can’t be talked about.

— Howard W. French is a Columnist at Foreign Policy, a Professor at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, and a longtime Foreign Correspondent. His latest book is Born in Blackness: Africa, Africans and the Making of the Modern World, 1471 to the Second World War.

[mythicaldemigoddess-of-deltarune]

Crossover Helluva-Camp Ship: Barbie Wire x David (2023)

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Credit for Camp Camp Series goes to Jordan Cwierz & Miles Luna (and Rooster Teeth)

Credit for Helluva Boss goes to Vivienne "Vivziepop" Medrano

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before I talk about this crossover ship drawing (which is in fanon and I know in canon they have never met, but like the song goes, I don't care....I SHIP IT!)

not sure how I feel about the new change, I mean originally I would have to go to my right to check my messages and even go to my drafts, but now it is on the left and is a bit different from how it was before....well one of the upsides about the last update to this, was similar to a idea that came into mind before, which I think I might of mentioned about it in a post before it happen, and it has to do with placing some kind of Mature option.

and I'm guessing the mature stuff that is in drawing or picture form will be burred to some who might not be the right age to view it, but also even when those who are the right age to view it, when they sign out, the images will be blurred and they can only see it clearly when they sign back in...

well, I guess I will have to get use to the new update that I just found out about when I signed in, which doesn't have to do with the mature option, which once again is awesome and I wonder if the reason why it was added, is because others who use tumblr had talked about that kind of option as well and not just me, which I might of talked about it before in a post or just thought about it...

anyway I'm glad I was able to find my drafts, so if I need to, I can save a post and wait until later to post it up, either it be a drawing or a theory...

the idea I want to go with in this Crossover idea, is that Barbie becomes the new co-counselor with David at Camp Campbell.

Barbie is still wearing her original outfit, it's just that she is also wearing the counselor shirt over her other outfit.

I could view July 24 as David & Barbie's Wedding Anniversary, and this is my first Crossover ship of these two as well as my first drawing of Barbie in her human form.

just one more day until FNAF Security Breach: Ruin DLC.

when I do download it, I think I will wait to play it fully, like I can just maybe play a little but find a place to save, and just wait for a walkthrough to watch that is gonna be played by someone else, but if I'm able to just download it and just play it later, like not starting the DLC until after watching a walkthrough, that would be awesome.

I wonder how Blitzo would feel about Barbie being married to a human....even if it isn't canon and is fanon only. XD

[btssavedmylifeblr]

Hi! Please don't take this the wrong way.. I noticed you said you want to finish void this year, so are you currently working on multiple chapters or only on chapter 8? I feel like having that goal could be alot of pressure on you since I remember you posted 7.5 because you didn't want to keep us waiting and that was almost 7 months ago

Mmm… if I’m being totally honest, I’m not working on anything at the moment. I have learned two important things about my writing in the last year:

1) When actively drafting, I need to write almost every day to keep up momentum. If I miss a day, that’s okay, but more than 2 or 3 days and I lose track of what’s happening in the story or begin to second guess everything I’m writing and feel compelled to reread and edit stuff which bogs me down. If I miss more than a week, I lose all sense of urgency and get absorbed into the myriad of other things that need doing in my life.

2) I can’t write in the evenings. I am not a evening person. After a full day of work and parenting, my brain is just out of steam by 8 o'clock. The most I can accomplish after the bumblebee goes to sleep is a load of dishes, before I need to crawl into bed with a book. And the hubbee keeps finding me lying in bed sound asleep, with a book on my face.

The problem with both of those things being true is that I have not yet found a way to work full-time and parent the way I want and find time to write. All of the extra time and energy beyond work that I used to use for writing has been absorbed by parenting. For a month, I tried getting up at 4 am every day in an effort to get some writing done before the bumblebee woke up. But then I got really sick, and I suspect the lack of sleep was a contributing factor.

But here’s the good news: I am leaving my job at the end of June. I’m taking a year off from work to see if stay-at-home mom-ing / writing as a career provides a better work-life balance for me than my current job does. I admittedly feel a bit foolish putting that out into the universe given how paltry my word count has been lately. I think the deciding factor in whether or not this is possible life path for me is going to hinge on if I am capable of ever finishing anything.

So here's my plan: right now, I am scrambling to tie up a bunch of loose ends before I leave my job. July will be busy with family activities and travel and vacation. But August, September, and October are currently devoted in my calendar to active drafting the entire remainder of Void, all at once. So 2023 is either going to open with the release all the remaining chapters of Void in rapid succession or closing down the blog and going to do other things.