#how does one even html

[cameronsbabydoll]

can you write about when rafe finally signed the divorce papers ??like did he put up a fight or just signed because he knew the reader will always be his idk

how does ex!husband!rafe react to you serving him divorce papers?

gif credits @mjwritings

wc: 407 — a/n: i love these cute color html thingys

you didn’t even think he’d show.

not after the fight you had — the worst one yet.

not after the way you packed your things, took your son, and left the house that was more of a cage than a home.

but here he was. at your door. Looking like hell in that expensive suit — wrinkled, unbuttoned, like he hadn’t slept since you left.

and in typical rafe fashion… he didn’t look regretful.

he looked pissed.

silent as you set the manila envelope on the table between you both. divorce papers. all filled out. all it needed was his signature.

his jaw ticked.

"you’re really doin’ this," he said, low and flat.

like he didn’t believe it until right now.

like he still thought you'd crawl back.

you didn’t answer. you couldn’t. you just nodded once, heart in your throat.

rafe sank into the chair across from you like it personally offended him to sit in something so normal. elbows on his knees, hands steepled in front of his mouth, just staring at you.

"i gave you everything," he muttered after a beat. "house. cars. clothes. what more did you want from me, huh?"

your stomach twisted.

"freedom," you whispered.

that got his attention.

his eyes cut up to you — sharp, electric. a muscle jumped in his jaw.

"you had everything because of me."

you didn’t flinch. not this time.

"i lost myself because of you."

and for once — for once — rafe didn’t have a quick, cocky reply.

he leaned back slowly, staring at the papers like they were a foreign language. like signing them was the same as carving you out of his chest.

but in the end? he signed.

not because he accepted it.

not because he agreed.

he signed because that was rafe cameron — so arrogant, so sure — believing deep in his bones that paper didn’t mean a damn thing.

that you’d always be his.

he pushed the papers back across the table with that infuriating half smirk.

"you think this changes anything?" he rasped.

and when he stood — towering, wrecked, beautiful in that awful way he always was — he paused by your chair. leaning down just enough to murmur it against your cheek, so low it made your heart drop:

"you’ll come home eventually. you always do."

and then he was gone.

leaving behind nothing but his signature on a page.

and the ghost of his grip still wrapped tight around your life.

[all-the-fish]

Oh, you know, just the usual internet browsing experience in the year of 2024

Some links and explanations since I figured it might be useful to some people, and writing down stuff is nice.

First of all, get Firefox. Yes, it has apps for Android/iOS too. It allows more extensions and customization (except the iOS version), it tracks less, the company has a less shitty attitude about things. Currently all the other alternatives are variations of Chromium, which means no matter how degoogled they supposedly are, Google has almost a monopoly on web browsing and that's not great. Basically they can introduce extremely user unfriendly updates and there's nothing forcing them to not do it, and nowhere for people to escape to. Current examples of their suggested updates are disabling/severly limiting adblocks in June 2024, and this great suggestion to force sites to verify "web environment integrity" ("oh you don't run a version of chromium we approve, such as the one that runs working adblocks? no web for you.").

uBlockOrigin - barely needs any explanation but yes, it works. You can whitelist whatever you want to support through displaying ads. You can also easily "adblock" site elements that annoy you. "Please log in" notice that won't go away? Important news tm sidebar that gives you sensory overload? Bye.

Dark Reader - a site you use has no dark mode? Now it has. Fairly customizable, also has some basic options for visually impaired people.

SponsorBlock for YouTube - highlights/skips (you choose) sponsored bits in the videos based on user submissions, and a few other things people often skip ("pls like and subscribe!"). A bit more controversial than normal adblock since the creators get some decent money from this, but also a lot of the big sponsors are kinda scummy and offer inferior product for superior price (or try to sell you a star jpg land ownership in Scotland to become a lord), so hearing an ad for that for the 20th time is kinda annoying. But also some creators make their sponsored segments hilarious.

Privacy Badger (and Ghostery I suppose) - I'm not actually sure how needed these are with uBlock and Firefox set to block any tracking it can, but that's basically what it does. Find someone more educated on this topic than me for more info.

Https Everywhere - I... can't actually find the extension anymore, also Firefox has this as an option in its settings now, so this is probably obsolete, whoops.

Facebook Container - also comes with Firefox by default I think. Keeps FB from snooping around outside of FB. It does that a lot, even if you don't have an account.

WebP / Avif image converter - have you ever saved an image and then discovered you can't view it, because it's WebP/Avif? You can now save it as a jpg.

YouTube Search Fixer - have you noticed that youtube search has been even worse than usual lately, with inserting all those unrelated videos into your search results? This fixes that. Also has an option to force shorts to play in the normal video window.

Consent-O-Matic - automatically rejects cookies/gdpr consent forms. While automated, you might still get a second or two of flashing popups being yeeted.

XKit Rewritten - current most up to date "variation "fork" of XKit I think? Has settings in extension settings instead of an extra tumblr button. As long as you get over the new dash layout current tumblr is kinda fine tbh, so this isn't as important as in the past, but still nice. I mostly use it to hide some visual bloat and mark posts on the dash I've already seen.

YouTube NonStop - do you want to punch youtube every time it pauses a video to check if you're still there? This saves your fists.

uBlacklist - blacklists sites from your search results. Obviously has a lot of different uses, but I use it to hide ai generated stuff from image search results. Here's a site list for that.

Redirect AMP to HTML - redirects links from their amp version to the normal version. Amp link is a version of a site made faster and more accessible for phones by Bing/Google. Good in theory, but lets search engines prefer some pages to others (that don't have an amp version), and afaik takes traffic from the original page too. Here's some more reading about why it's an issue, I don't think I can make a good tl;dr on this.

Also since I used this in the tags, here's some reading about enshittification and why the current mainstream internet/services kinda suck.

[zumek0]

college bf! headcanons; kozume, k.

↪︎ headcanons, gn reader, fluff, a little angst but very mild, mentions of an unspecified argument but it gets resolved, allusions to an anxiety attack, mentions of marriage.

↝ summary: headcanons about your and kenma’s relationship.

College bf! Kenma who can take all his classes remotely but still takes two in-person electives so that you both can walk together to and from campus.

College bf! Kenma who isn’t one to wake up early (the earliest he can wake up is 10 a.m.) but makes an effort to do so when he knows you have an important exam so that he can have breakfast with you and wish you good luck.

College bf! Kenma who doesn’t listen to music that often (maybe sometimes has a video game's OST playing as background noise while finishing assignments) but still listens to every single song you recommend to him.

He always tells you his thoughts on each song (even if he doesn’t particularly like it).

College bf! Kenma, whose anxiety prevents him from openly showing you affection in public, but makes up for it by clinging to you constantly while in private.

College bf! Kenma who, after spending the night, makes sure to leave at least one hoodie at your apartment.

He insists that it’s so that he has clean clothes to wear if he needs them but then gets pouty whenever you wear one of yours instead of his.

College bf! Kenma who loves having you sit on his lap or between his legs while he games.

Usually, he rests his head either on your shoulder or atop your head.

Whenever he gets bored or his wrist starts bothering him (you cannot tell me he wouldn't have carpal tunnel syndrome, lol), he leans back and wraps his arms around you, letting you take control for a while.

College bf! Kenma who cries when you two have the first “big” argument of your relationship.

He prides himself on staying level-headed in stressful situations and looking for solutions instead of panicking and falling into despair.

So then, why does he feel like this? Why does he feel so angry? Why does his skin feel uncomfortable? Why is his mind making up scenarios where you break up with him? Why does he feel like there’s a black hole where his stomach should be? Why does his chest feel like he’s on the verge of a heart attack? Why does he feel so guilty?

The last two hours repeat themselves over and over in his mind. Why did he say all those things? Why did he act that way towards you? Why did he hurt you like that? Why does he keep crying?

Eventually, you both calm down enough to talk and resolve the issue.

He decides that he never wants to go through that experience again.

Especially not if you felt even half as bad as he felt.

College bf! Kenma whose mom asks about you every time he calls her son.

If you happen to be around, she’ll always ask to talk to you for a bit (more like an hour and a half).

He's pretty sure she only calls him as an excuse to talk to you.

Eventually, he sends her your phone number and feels slightly offended that she doesn’t call nearly as often as she used to.

College bf! Kenma who keeps trying to convince you to move in with him as it would be more cost effective and convenient. 

College bf! Kenma who, when you eventually agree to live together, lets you search for a new apartment as you insisted on starting fresh.

College bf! Kenma who, when you move into your new place, you drag out to Walmart at 8 p.m. to buy two cups, insisting that they’re a symbol of this new stage of your relationship.

College bf! Kenma who finds himself wanting to become Fiancè! Kenma more and more everyday.

finally posting this after having it sit in my drafts for half a year 🫠 i also finally learned how to make my html text work for the colored words lol. reblogs and likes are appreciated!

—han

[genericpuff]

I'm sorry, but this should come as a shock to absolutely no one.

Just a little bit of 'insider info' (and by 'insider' I mean I was a part of the beta testing crew a few years ago) Webtoons has been messing with AI tools for years. You can literally play test that very same AI tool that I beta-tested here:

Mind you, this is just an AI Painter, similar to the Clip Studio Colorize tool, but it goes to show where WT's priorities are headed. I should mention, btw, that this tool is incredibly useless for anyone not creating a Korean-style webtoon, like you can deadass tell it was trained exclusively on the imports because it can't handle any skin tone outside of white (trying to use darker colors just translates as "shadows" to the program, meaning it'll just cast some fugly ass shadows over a white-toned character no matter how hard you try) and you just know the AI wouldn't know what to do with itself if you gave it an art style that didn't exactly match with the provided samples lmao

And let's be real, can we really expect the company that regularly exploits, underpays, and overworks its creators to give a damn about the ethical concerns of AI? They're gonna take the path of least resistance to make the most money possible.

So the fact that we're now seeing AI comics popping up on Webtoons left and right - and now, an actual "Webtoon AI" branding label - should come as zero shock to anyone. Webtoons is about quantity over quality and so AI is the natural progression of that.

So yeah, if you were looking for any sign to check out other platforms outside of Webtoons, this is it. Here are some of my own recommendations:

ComicFury - Independently run, zero ads, zero subscription costs (though I def recommend supporting them on Patreon if you're able), full control over site appearance, optional hosting for only the cost of the domain name, and best of all, strictly anti-AI. Not allowed, not even with proper labelling or disclosure. Full offense to the tech bro hacks, eat shit.

GlobalComix - Very polished hosting site that offers loads of monetization tools for creators without any exclusive contracts or subscriptions needed. They do offer a subscription program, but that's purely for reading the comics on the site that are exclusively behind paywalls. Not strictly anti-AI but does require in their ToS that AI comics be properly labelled and disclosed, whether they're made partially or fully with AI, to ensure transparency for readers who want to avoid AI comics.

Neocities - If you want to create your own site the good ole' fashioned way (i.e. HTML / CSS) this is the place. Independently run, offers a subscription plan for people who want more storage and bandwidth but it only costs $5/month so it's very inexpensive, and even without that subscription cost you won't have to deal with ads or corporate management bullshit.

Be safe out there pals, don't be afraid to set out into the unknown if it means protecting your work and keeping your control as a creator. Know your rights, know your power.

[komaedalovemail]

komaedas have you tried straw.page?

(i hope you don't mind if i make a big ollllle webdev post off this!)

i have never tried straw.page but it looks similar to carrd and other WYSIWYG editors (which is unappealing to me, since i know html/css/js and want full control of the code. and can't hide secrets in code comments.....)

my 2 cents as a web designer is if you're looking to learn web design or host long-term web projects, WYSIWYG editors suck doodooass. you don't learn the basics of coding, someone else does it for you! however, if you're just looking to quickly host images, links to your other social medias, write text entries/blogposts, WYSIWYG can be nice.

toyhouse, tumblr, deviantart, a lot of sites implement WYSIWYG for their post editors as well, but then you can run into issues relying on their main site features for things like the search system, user profiles, comments, etc. but it can be nice to just login to your account and host your information in one place, especially on a platform that's geared towards that specific type of information. (toyhouse is a better example of this, since you have a lot of control of how your profile/character pages look, even without a premium account) carrd can be nice if you just want to say "here's where to find me on other sites," for example. but sometimes you want a full website!

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neocities hosting

currently, i host my website on neocities, but i would say the web2.0sphere has sucked some doodooass right now and i'm fiending for something better than it. it's a static web host, e.g. you can upload text, image, audio, and client-side (mostly javascript and css) files, and html pages. for the past few years, neocities' servers have gotten slower and slower and had total blackouts with no notices about why it's happening... and i'm realizing they host a lot of crypto sites that have crypto miners that eat up a ton of server resources. i don't think they're doing anything to limit bot or crypto mining activity and regular users are taking a hit.

↑ page 1 on neocitie's most viewed sites we find this site. this site has a crypto miner on it, just so i'm not making up claims without proof here. there is also a very populated #crypto tag on neocities (has porn in it tho so be warned...).

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dynamic/server-side web hosting

$5/mo for neocities premium seems cheap until you realize... The Beautiful World of Server-side Web Hosting!

client-side AKA static web hosting (neocities, geocities) means you can upload images, audio, video, and other files that do not interact with the server where the website is hosted, like html, css, and javascript. the user reading your webpage does not send any information to the server like a username, password, their favourite colour, etc. - any variables handled by scripts like javascript will be forgotten when the page is reloaded, since there's no way to save it to the web server. server-side AKA dynamic web hosting can utilize any script like php, ruby, python, or perl, and has an SQL database to store variables like the aforementioned that would have previously had nowhere to be stored.

there are many places in 2024 you can host a website for free, including: infinityfree (i use this for my test websites :B has tons of subdomains to choose from) [unlimited sites, 5gb/unlimited storage], googiehost [1 site, 1gb/1mb storage], freehostia [5 sites/1 database, 250mb storage], freehosting [1 site, 10gb/unlimited storage]

if you want more features like extra websites, more storage, a dedicated e-mail, PHP configuration, etc, you can look into paying a lil shmoney for web hosting: there's hostinger (this is my promocode so i get. shmoney. if you. um. 🗿🗿🗿) [$2.40-3.99+/mo, 100 sites/300 databases, 100gb storage, 25k visits/mo], a2hosting [$1.75-12.99+/mo, 1 site/5 databases, 10gb/1gb storage], and cloudways [$10-11+/mo, 25gb/1gb]. i'm seeing people say to stay away from godaddy and hostgator. before you purchase a plan, look up coupons, too! (i usually renew my plan ahead of time when hostinger runs good sales/coupons LOL)

here's a big webhost comparison chart from r/HostingHostel circa jan 2024.

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domain names

most of the free website hosts will give you a subdomain like yoursite.has-a-cool-website-69.org, and usually paid hosts expect you to bring your own domain name. i got my domain on namecheap (enticing registration prices, mid renewal prices), there's also porkbun, cloudflare, namesilo, and amazon route 53. don't use godaddy or squarespace. make sure you double check the promo price vs. the actual renewal price and don't get charged $120/mo when you thought it was $4/mo during a promo, certain TLDs (endings like .com, .org, .cool, etc) cost more and have a base price (.car costs $2,300?!?). look up coupons before you purchase these as well!

namecheap and porkbun offer something called "handshake domains," DO NOT BUY THESE. 🤣🤣🤣 they're usually cheaper and offer more appealing, hyper-specific endings like .iloveu, .8888, .catgirl, .dookie, .gethigh, .♥, .❣, and .✟. I WISH WE COULD HAVE THEM but they're literally unusable. in order to access a page using a handshake domain, you need to download a handshake resolver. every time the user connects to the site, they have to provide proof of work. aside from it being incredibly wasteful, you LITERALLY cannot just type in the URL and go to your own website, you need to download a handshake resolver, meaning everyday internet users cannot access your site.

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hosting a static site on a dynamic webhost

you can host a static (html/css/js only) website on a dynamic web server without having to learn PHP and SQL! if you're coming from somewhere like neocities, the only thing you need to do is configure your website's properties. your hosting service will probably have tutorials to follow for this, and possibly already did some steps for you. you need to point the nameserver to your domain, install an SSL certificate, and connect to your site using FTP for future uploads. FTP is a faster, alternative way to upload files to your website instead of your webhost's file upload system; programs like WinSCP or FileZilla can upload using FTP for you.

if you wanna learn PHP and SQL and really get into webdev, i wrote a forum post at Mysidia Adoptables here, tho it's sorted geared at the mysidia script library itself (Mysidia Adoptables is a free virtual pet site script, tiny community. go check it out!)

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file storage & backups

a problem i have run into a lot in my past like, 20 years of internet usage (/OLD) is that a site that is free, has a small community, and maybe sounds too good/cheap to be true, has a higher chance of going under. sometimes this happens to bigger sites like tinypic, photobucket, and imageshack, but for every site like that, there's like a million of baby sites that died with people's files. host your files/websites on a well-known site, or at least back it up and expect it to go under!

i used to host my images on something called "imgjoe" during the tinypic/imageshack era, it lasted about 3 years, and i lost everything hosted on there. more recently, komaedalovemail had its webpages hosted here on tumblr, and tumblr changed its UI so custom pages don't allow javascript, which prevented any new pages from being edited/added. another test site i made a couple years ago on hostinger's site called 000webhost went under/became a part of hostinger's paid-only plans, so i had to look very quickly for a new host or i'd lose my test site.

if you're broke like me, looking into physical file storage can be expensive. anything related to computers has gone through baaaaad inflation due to crypto, which again, I Freaquing Hate, and is killing mother nature. STOP MINING CRYPTO this is gonna be you in 1 year

...um i digress. ANYWAYS, you can archive your websites, which'll save your static assets on The Internet Archive (which could use your lovely donations right now btw), and/or archive.today (also taking donations). having a webhost service with lots of storage and automatic backups can be nice if you're worried about file loss or corruption, or just don't have enough storage on your computer at home!

if you're buying physical storage, be it hard drive, solid state drive, USB stick, whatever... get an actual brand like Western Digital or Seagate and don't fall for those cheap ones on Amazon that claim to have 8,000GB for $40 or you're going to spend 13 days in windows command prompt trying to repair the disk and thenthe power is gong to go out in your shit ass neighvborhood and you have to run it tagain and then Windows 10 tryes to update and itresets the /chkdsk agin while you're awayfrom town nad you're goig to start crytypting and kts just hnot going tot br the same aever agai nikt jus not ggiog to be the saeme

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further webhosting options

there are other Advanced options when it comes to web hosting. for example, you can physically own and run your own webserver, e.g. with a computer or a raspberry pi. r/selfhosted might be a good place if you're looking into that!

if you know or are learning PHP, SQL, and other server-side languages, you can host a webserver on your computer using something like XAMPP (Apache, MariaDB, PHP, & Perl) with minimal storage space (the latest version takes up a little under 1gb on my computer rn). then, you can test your website without needing an internet connection or worrying about finding a hosting plan that can support your project until you've set everything up!

there's also many PHP frameworks which can be useful for beginners and wizards of the web alike. WordPress is one which you're no doubt familiar with for creating blog posts, and Bluehost is a decent hosting service tailored to WordPress specifically. there's full frameworks like Laravel, CakePHP, and Slim, which will usually handle security, user authentication, web routing, and database interactions that you can build off of. Laravel in particular is noob-friendly imo, and is used by a large populace, and it has many tutorials, example sites built with it, and specific app frameworks.

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addendum: storing sensitive data

if you decide to host a server-side website, you'll most likely have a login/out functionality (user authentication), and have to store things like usernames, passwords, and e-mails. PLEASE don't launch your website until you're sure your site security is up to snuff!

when trying to check if your data is hackable... It's time to get into the Mind of a Hacker. OWASP has some good cheat sheets that list some of the bigger security concerns and how to mitigate them as a site owner, and you can look up filtered security issues on the Exploit Database.

this is kind of its own topic if you're coding a PHP website from scratch; most frameworks securely store sensitive data for you already. if you're writing your own PHP framework, refer to php.net's security articles and this guide on writing an .htaccess file.

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but. i be on that phone... :(

ok one thing i see about straw.page that seems nice is that it advertises the ability to make webpages from your phone. WYSIWYG editors in general are more capable of this. i only started looking into this yesterday, but there ARE source code editor apps for mobile devices! if you have a webhosting plan, you can download/upload assets/code from your phone and whatnot and code on the go. i downloaded Runecode for iphone. it might suck ass to keep typing those brackets.... we'll see..... but sometimes you're stuck in the car and you're like damn i wanna code my site GRRRR I WANNA CODE MY SITE!!!

↑ code written in Runecode, then uploaded to Hostinger. Runecode didn't tell me i forgot a semicolon but Hostinger did... i guess you can code from your webhost's file uploader on mobile but i don't trust them since they tend not to autosave or prompt you before closing, and if the wifi dies idk what happens to your code.

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ANYWAYS! HAPPY WEBSITE BUILDING~! HOPE THIS HELPS~!~!~!

-Mod 12 @eeyes

[pseuddamntired]

Needle Lace Resources

This is a very long post, so I'm including a cut.

Tutorial-like Things, Others' Work

An overview of the stages of needle lace (specifically learning from Alençon, I believe. They link to a documentary type of video on Alençon lace): https://www.taixtile.com/needle-lace-first-steps/. This blog has links to other resources (one link is broken, if I recall correctly).

A very approachable first project, I think. From a lace maker who has done very cool illustrations with lace, Maggie Hensel-Brown: https://youtu.be/OLuRpJ96p4Q?si=gqBWqYxa755gFozr

This channel has videos of the stages of needle lace making. They specifically demonstrate Irish lace, I believe. But the stages are very similar to or the same as the stages in Alençon lace. https://youtu.be/dZVagIFCnLc?si=d8lRnPsmz5iTM0Z_

Pierre Fouché has a video about making dense filling stitches and even doing short rows to makes curves (something I tried but did not yet succeed at): https://youtu.be/DK5cMQND3b8?si=qySmT9yaoTcpsUV9 He also does really cool bobbin lace illustrations by constructing patterns in cell-like units.

An embroiderer tries needle lace in two videos. In one of them she tries different styles from different places: https://youtu.be/eTO7dA4oyl4?si=VInx35kql115bIIo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A9Wa6-Qf5xw

Example of a different style of needle lace. Unsure what it is exactly. Some sort of cut work or reticella, idk: https://youtube.com/shorts/7DFogWC3tDI?si=uju74sPFbRj3_wrn

Sampler directions: https://youtu.be/oDKBfjDYBnU?si=shQYvaT4kAZD7BgV

Again, a more geometric style of needle lace. I don’t know the particulars of this style (styles?), since I’ve mostly been looking into styles similar to Alençon because I’m aiming for more illustration-like lace. This channel has multiple videos demoing and explaining that process: https://youtu.be/gJd6mkrsUCQ?si=AfVIiwljHvfismrX https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R6dk721UwW4

Not so much instructions but video of a very skilled lacemaker working on a project: https://youtu.be/01H2GdEXLrs?si=2suFHSG4Kwa6Yl2m

Another lacemaker's work on their blog. I don’t know if they do as much lace making as they do other needle arts https://www.robesdecoeur.com/blog/needlelace-my-work-so-far

A lacemaker's work... the site is older and kind of tricky to navigate. Like. there's no home button, as far as I can tell. Album of their work: https://www.lacemakerslace.oddquine.co.uk/album/index.html Home page, I think: https://www.lacemakerslace.oddquine.co.uk/

Useful/Interesting Things to Know

Alençon lace -- specific French style from the Alençon region, which has a history of point lace and a current institution dedicated to preserving the skills and producing lace. This is the style that I was looking at examples of to try and learn from.

Search terms like different styles of lace that I’m not qualified to talk about but you can look into and do research on: Battenburg, point de gaze (very very fine work, like gauze)… More to be added as I learn about them.

The terms "needle lace" and "point lace" are both used to refer to lace made with a needle. I'm unclear on if there are subtle distinctions between them or if it's simply a matter of location. But having versions of a search query for both terms should help find more results than just using one.

Encyclopedia of Needlework by Therese De Dillmont is an excellent resource to learn how to do different stitches. It seems these stitches mostly come from Irish lace, according to the book. HTML copy of book available on Project Gutenberg here: https://www.gutenberg.org/files/20776/20776-h/20776-h.htm I recommend using ctrl+f to search for "lace stitch" on the page. The end of each chapter in the HTML version seems to have a link to the Table of Contents that is at the end of the entire document. It has chapters for plenty of other needle arts, so it's a good resource all around.

If you want to find examples of needle lace, look on Wikimedia Commons! Using a variety of search terms will help you find more material for inspiration/observation than otherwise

If you want to design your own needle lace depicting objects, it might be worth looking at stained glass to see how larger shapes are broken up into smaller shapes that still feel complete.

You can use multiple colors! Let yourself use multiple colors, like stained glass!

Thoughts from the Learning Process So Far (some terminology used here, look them up so you know what the actual definitions are, but I’ll define what I mean by them)

Tacking vs Couching... I'm unsure about the actual definitions so I may be using them wrong here. In the videos I’ve seen tacking seems to be making a stitch that runs along the way the cordonnet will run. Couching seems to be just when the thread that secures the cordonnet comes up through the backing and goes down through the backing at the same point. With these definitions… Tacking went faster for me than doing couching, but it feels a lot less secure and precise for the form of lace I’m making. Unless I made the tacking stitches perpendicular to the cordonnet's path, the outline cord moved too much due to tension. If it's perpendicular and not a very short stitch, it might get in the way of your filling stitches or binding off stitches. Which might be fine, since you pull them out anyways. But it would also mean more holes in the backing, and at some point the holes are too close together and might tear the backing and pattern. I don't like that. Couching—much, MUCH more tedious for me because I’m not practiced at making the needle come up in exactly the right spot. but it feels more secure to me. The outline seems to be less affected by tension as you work. And I took some shortcuts for couching that helped. I don’t couch the doubled cord, instead I whip stitch back over the already-secured cord. I might make a post to demonstrate what I mean. It kind of messes with the shape/placement of my cordonnet, but for the sake of my impatience I’m willing to sacrifice the precise shape.

Backing material... To use fabric in backing like the instructions usually say, or not? Idk. For me, it’s hard to find the right hole for the couching stitches when I can't see my pattern from the back. It took a lot of trial and error until I got a feel for how to predict where my needle would come up. I don't like the way the poke-and-check method of stitching the cordonnet down tends to rip the pattern up (at least, with my easy-to-access materials. Probably better with better materials and more practice. Using my thumb to find approximately the right spot helped, but not enough). So I just used a sandwich of tape/paper/tape as my backing. If you're willing to fuss around with fabric in your backing, it might make it easier to remove the couching threads after you're done, and when I tried. The directions I've seen usually say to use a backing of doubled-up fabric, clay paper (I'm unsure what this is. might be a thicker paper than cardstock, or it might be paper made to contain clay particles. Probably more like the first option), and contact paper. My last attempt at making a backing used notebook paper (or other type of paper) with packaging tape on both sides to provide a smooth surface and structure. I think it worked fairly well, and I didn't have to figure out where to buy contact paper (or figure out exactly what contact paper was).

[zoieru]

Mind-dump analysis of Sunday and Welt

Non-romantic, though you can see it that way if you want. Basically musings on their dialogue, body language, trauma responses and their views of the world. Based on my noggin, my experiences, and my knowledge on psych and philosophy. Mentions of trauma, and Aventurine. Spoilers for 3.0. Come chat with me about it in the ask box pls oml. (html broke read more link sorry)

So I was writing an Astral Express Sunday headcanon thing, and realised the part with welt I had more thoughts on than I could handle !!! So I decided to make a bigger breakdown of it from my perspective weeee. 1.7k more thoughts...hehe. Includes pics.

So, Sunday is essentially coming into this new world (the astral express lifestyle, the knowledge and involvement of other planets issues, everything not just Penacony) for the first time, and in a vulnerable state at that. He was trained and groomed to be who he was basically his whole life, and not just the positions of power and control, but his position he gave himself also of protector of his sister. That's been taken from him, all of it, his role, his direction, drive, everything. To say the man must feel lost is understatement of the century.

So when he is confronted with Welt Yang, a mysterious and stoic man who displays his intelligence by deciphering there's something up with his disguise, questions him on his motives, etc, but then seemingly confidently starts to trust him, he is...confused?

First, Welt says multiple times that he knows how he feels, he's had to leave a home quickly too, but doesn't elaborate. So his reasons are already determined at least somewhat by his empathy for Sunday. That is a lot for Sunday to work through. He mustn't have really related to anyone in his life, even his sister due to their vastly different experiences despite being in the same spot. To have someone, and quite quickly, especially after what he just did, sympathise, empathise, and relate to him...thats intriguing, and confusing, and probably a bit suspicious.

Further, when going to meet Robin, Sunday outwardly questions why Welt is giving him the privacy to speak to her, refusing to be a bystander for his benefit. Welt answers:

'i believe you're the kind of person that has the ability and desire to use everything to your advantage... but that everything does not involve Miss Robin'

Sunday pauses, and thanks him. It's confusing, unexpected, and yet another puzzle into Welt's character. I think this moment means an incredible amount to Sunday. Ultimately, his sister is everything to him, where everything started, and Welt has given him the space and freedom to do the thing he is so nervous for, he is dreading but must do, one of the hardest things he's probably ever done, say goodbye for an indeterminate amount of time. Who else has probably shown him this sort of seemingly genuine act of kindness, goodness, before? Probably no one. Plus, despite not really outwardly discussing his relationship with his sister with Welt before this, Welt shows an understanding of Sunday's care for her, to the point his usual nature and methods don't apply to Robin.

So that's why Sunday asks another question, after saying goodbye to Robin

He's starting to see himself in Welt, I believe, in some way, when he says 'I had a feeling that you would never give up on someone who needed help' which is reinforced by his 'help' of Sunday just now. But I think what Sunday is maybe confused about here is why him, why here. He is confused why they 'help' him, a 'nortorious fugitive' and a 'friend they never knew', rather than people in new worlds, people he deems perhaps deserve it more, people who he thinks Welt should care about. I believe, here, he is still viewing things zoomed out, from a grand perspective. He sees 'people' as an entity, much like how he did with his plan, saving them from misery by keeping them in the dream. But Welt goes on to explain that it's the people he meets that are his trailblaze, but on an individual and connection scale, not 'helping peopleTM' like he tried to.

And that means Sunday, it means Tingyun. Sunday even asks directly, then, 'why me?', and Welt repeats his previous answer. 'i know how you feel.' despite what he's done, he offers him empathy, help, and connection. It's alien to Sunday. He has heard the worst of people's deeds, was tormented by them, wanted to save them from themselves, yet Welt is just accepting him.

Then another thing, Welt sits in the audience watching Sunday become himself, say goodbye to his old self and everything he once knew, literally becoming whole again, and slightly unsure of how he exactly he will be once both halves combine. This moment is so so intimate, so deeply personal, perhaps the most personal I mean he's literally talking to himself, becoming himself, shedding everything he's ever known, starting a new life. And Welt isn't just watching. He says:

'Regardless of the outcome, you will have a witness. I'll be waiting for you in the audience.'

Here, he does multiple things. One, he is promising Sunday he will be here for him and almost continue to accept him in whatever shape or form after he's done, giving him the respect and time to do his thing, and the support he wasnt planning to get. Its like...almost a threat, saying he wont let him run away after, but not quite. its also a signal of protection. He is staying with Sunday through this obviously terrifying and massive moment, at a safe and respectful but supportive distance, something Sunday was planning to go through alone. Also, he says he'll wait for him. That's so...personal. ugh, it's too much. And the thing is, Sunday lets him, thanks him, wants him to be there. Trusts him enough to see him at almost a most vulnerable point in his life. Crazy stuff.

Plus, during this line, the camera zooms in on Welt's face for just a few seconds, emphasising how big this is.

Now I'm not sure if we should assume Welt can hear everything Sunday says to himself. The theatre is empty, afterall, but I dont know. Sunday says he's scared, says why he's scared, tells himself he doesn't like himself, parts of him. It's so goddamn personal, heart wrenching, truly. And there's a line here I want to discuss quick.

'to save more lives, you must first understand what they live for and what they die for. The best way to achieve this is through personal experience.''

This is a reflection of Welt's words, his reason for trailblazing. It shows he's taken them to heart, ponders them, realises that to truly help people like Welt does, he needs to know them, not see them as an entity from above.

Also, when done, Welt makes a gentle joke that covers the supportive gesture of his acceptance of 'either' of Sunday's selves. He almost dismissed the whole act as if it was casual, while subtly acknowledging it's significance, and gently showing his support, so it all doesn't make Sunday feel uncomfy.

'Well, how should I address you now? Mr Sunday or Mr Wonweek?'

I love it.

Then Sunday has the confidence to request staying with the Astral Express Crew. Knowing the others might hate the idea, but having enough confidence in the fact that Welt at least seems to want him there.

'You are one of my trailblazing goals.'

Sunday looks visibly touched by this statement. the feels.

So let's now skip to the Astral Express, where he's been on a while let's say.

After all this, Sunday and Welt almost have this unspoken deep connection somehow. They have shared a deeply personal moment for Sunday, and Welt has shared more with Sunday about himself than he ever has with anyone on screen that we've seen before.begins to respect Welt Yang quite tremendously really. Sunday now has time to sit, think, reflect, and probably torment himself with thoughts.

I think he has built this ridiculous level of respect for Welt, perhaps more than for most in his life. And also intrigue, confusion. He perhaps observes him. It is obvious Welt has a troubled and mysterious past, the extent of which is unknown but suggested, yet the man has a poise about him that seems stable, secure, confident. It intrigues him, maybe makes him a little envious even that despite this man having no set 'home', travelling the trailblaze with seemingly little control over things Sunday feels he would lose his mind over, he still seems confident in himself.

You ever feel like you're pretty self sufficient and able when alone or most of the time, but theres that one person where you're in their company and it's suddenly like all your brain function has dimmed and been transferred to them and they're now the 'thinker' and 'doer' and you're just there mostly looking pretty?? That's Sunday and Welt sometimes. Sunday was so used to being everything, controlling everything, seeing everything, that now he can relax that, or rather forced to let go of all that, as hard as that is, he finds himself inadvertently letting Welt take over a bit, observing and involving himself but Welt taking the lead. It's perhaps part of a trauma response to having to grow up too fast, to not being able to have had the points in life where you can trust and let someone have control for a while without risk. So as a result of this trust and acceptance he has built with Welt, his brain just sort of...relaxes a little. Welp.

That's displayed well in the infamous 'mom speak to the doctor for me pls' scene, I think. Cute.

Okay it's the end now, I could probably yap more but my thumbs hurt. One more musing though:

I wonder what it would be like for Sunday and Aventurine to meet, after all of that. They, ultimately, had a similar journey in terms of them making a big decision, a big 'attempt' at something bigger than themselves intricately linked to their identities and core beliefs, having to face parts of themselves along the way.

Now that Sunday has shed his 'grandiose' demeanour and plans, I wonder what it would look like for them to meet on equal terms. (Obviously not really knowing how this whole thing will have affected Aven coming out of it).

These two men, as literally mentioned in the 'combining selves' scene for Sunday in the theatre, are fundamentally opposed. One has been made to and has had to build his life and principles on control. One has had no choice to and built his life on luck, lack of control. It's such an interesting dichotomy to me.

There's also this interaction with Welt and Sunday before meeting Robin:

'I had a hunch and decided to try my luck. Seems I can be lucky sometimes'

'its not like you to leave things to luck'

'I'm trying to change too'

It's twice, in this long section, that Aventurine/luck is mentioned, at least. I wonder how he would view him should he know more, and now that he seems to have a certain begrudging acceptance and respect for luck/chance.

OKAY IM DONE FR NOW HAHAHA come discuss with me if u want :3 hope you enjoyed.

Here, take this, its not safe out there

(づ ᴗ _ᴗ)づ♡

[ominous-faechild]

Hey how do you do the color gradient thing for your dialog tags?

Assuming you mean these things, I've actually been meaning to make a guide of my own for a while lol.

For one, you can only do this on computer/the website of Tumblr! There's no option to select this stuff on the app.

STEP 1: CREATE A NEW DOC / GO TO SETTINGS

It opens a dropdown menu/whole screen full of options!

From there, select the "text editor" dropdown, which starts as displaying "rich text".

Select "HTML"

And it should change how the entire post looks!

STEP TWO: CHEAT

Yeeeeeaaaaah, so I use a website for this lol

I inserted my colors for faeries (#30853C) and Cloud (#6DC1B4) for my example of "these things" earlier. To make this easier, I most often have two windows open at a time while working on uploading my scripts to Tumblr.

To get colours to insert into the Text Colorizer website, you can use any kind of hex color picker or even this one website I've used to yoink "thematic" colors from photos!

Personally, I've developed a massive library of colors over time for this exact purpose lol. Using my old colors as a "base", I can change it accordingly to the kind of "new color" that I want for a specific character or thing!

(I'll use the website to also make gradients for "in-between" colors lol)

STEP 3: INSERT TEXT / DESIRED COLORS

To make Nova's gradient, I start with #A600D9, my color for Magic, and end with #F56745—their individual color. However, being as it's short, I'll use a quote from them instead lol.

Once you've inserted your text and colors, you will click in the text box I highlighted in red, ctrl+a and ctrl+c to copy it all, and go back over to your new tumblr post tab!

From there, you'll ctrl+v to paste the entirety into the HTML area, which pastes the code into your post!

AND VOILA!

You have gorgeous gradient text!

However, I want to give a fair warning and a bit of advice! If you didn't notice wayyyyyyy back when...

Tumblr warns that this all can break your formatting!

It doesn't do it too often, but take it from someone who does an obscene amount of formatting... it's 100% true.

STEP 4: CHEAT SOME MORE!

For this reason, I personally have a whole separate draft post full of my characters' colors (and names lol) that I use to copy-paste them in from rather than using the "html" text editor on every post!

I mentioned earlier I often have multiple windows open while editing? Here's what that looks like!

Additionally, I'll use a separate tab off on the left (my "current wip post" side) with the "html editor" enabled for me to copy-paste stuff!

(Also here's yet another example of how many colors I have)

Once again, you can ctrl+c these things to paste them into another tumblr post with the correct colors!

And it's ONLY possible to do on the website!!!

EXTRA INFO!

WARNING:

Tumblr will only allow each "paragraph's html to be so many characters long, so you can't have too big of anything in a gradient!

And by "anything"... I mean you really can't have that big of a gradient in general. RIP lol.

It straight-up won't save the post so long as you have that "overflow" in the character block! MAKE SURE YOU'VE FIXED IT, OR YOU CAN AND WILL LOSE ALL PROGRESS ON YOUR POST!

SINGLE-COLOR TIP:

You don't need the website for a single color! If you'd like, you can just change the "color code" within the html editor to change specific colors!

MAKE SURE COLORS CAN WORK ON DIFFERENT BACKGROUNDS!

On desktop, you can use shift+p while not on any sort of textbox to change the color pallet! I always do tests to see which colors work best before settling on any!

(Tho, the blue background SPECIFICALLY is nightmarish to work around. So if that's the ONLY thing I can't make work, I often ignore it and let you guys who use it suffer lmao)

(Hopefully this'll give you guys some respect for me and how much I do to make my posts aesthetic af lol)

Also hopefully this all helps???

divider by @cafekitsune

[dervampireprince]

so i've been coding a website

home of: the dervampireprince fanart museum, prince's art gallery, a masterlist of resources for making websites and list of web communities, and more!

[18+, minors dni (this blog is 18+ and the art gallery and art museum pages on my site have some 18+ only artworks)]

littlevampire . neocities . org (clickable link in pinned post labelled 'website')

if you don't follow me on twitch or aren't in my discord, you might not know i've been coding my own website via neocities since june 2024. it's been a big labour of love, the only coding i'd done before is a little html to customize old tumblr themes, so i've learnt a lot and i've been having so much fun. i do link to it on my carrds but not everyone will know that the icon of a little cat with a wrench and paintbrush is the neocities logo, or even what neocities is.

neocities is a free website builder, but not like squarespace or wix that let you build a website from a template with things you can drag in, it's all done with html and css code (and you can throw in javascript if you wanna try hurting your brain /hj). i love the passion people have for coding websites, for making their own websites again in defiance of social medias becoming less customisable and websites looking boring and the same as each other. people's neocities sites are so fun to look through, looking at how they express themselves, their art galleries, shrines to their pets or favourite characters or shows or toys or places they've been.

why have i been making a website this way?

well i used to love customising my tumblr theme back when clicking on someone's username here took you to their tumblr website, their username . tumblr . com link that you could edit and customise with html code. now clicking a username takes you to their mobile page view, a lot of users don't even know you can have a website with tumblr, the feature to have a site became turned off by default, and i've heard from some users that they might have to pay to unlock that feature.

i've always loved the look of old geocities and angelfire websites, personalised sites, and i've grown tired of every social media trying to look the same as each other, remove features that let users customise their profiles and pages more. and then i found out about neocities.

are you interested in making a site too?

neocities is free, though you can pay to support them. there is no ads, no popups, they have no ai tool scraping their sites, no tos that will change to suddenly stop allow 18+ art. unlike other website hosters, neocities does have a sort of social media side where you do have a profile and people can follow you and leave comments on your site and like your updates, but you can ignore this if you want, or use it to get to know other webmasters.

to quote neocities "we are tired of living in an online world where people are isolated from each other on boring, generic social networks that don't let us truly express ourselves. it's time we took back our personalities from these sterilized, lifeless, monetized, data mined, monitored addiction machines and let our creativity flourish again."

i'd so encourage anyone interested to try making a website with neocities. w3schools is an excellent place to start learning coding, and there are free website templates you can copy and paste and use (my site is built off two different free codes, one from fujoshi . nekoweb . org and the other from sadgrl's free layout builder tool).

your site can be for anything:

a more fun and interactive online business card (rather than using carrd.co or linktree)

a gallery of your art/photos/cosplays/etc

a blog

webshrines to your a character, film, song, game, toy, hobby, your pet - anything can be a shrine!

a catalogue/database/log of every film you've watched, every place you've visited, birds you've seen, plushies you own, every blinkie gif you have saved, your ocs and stories, etc

hosting a webcomic

a fanwiki/fansite that doesn't have endless ads like fandom . com does (i found a cool neocities fansite for rhythm game series pop'n music and it's so thorough, it even lists all the sprites and official art for every character)

i follow a website that just reviews every video game based on whether or not it has a frog in it, if the frog is playable, if you can be friends with it. ( frogreview . neocities . org )

the only html i knew how to write before starting is how to paragraph and bold text. and now i have a whole site! and i'm still working on new stuff for it all the time.

i just finished making a page on my website called 'explore the web'. this page lists everything you might need to know when wanting to make or decorate your website. it lists:

other neocities sites i think are cool and i'm inspired by, check them out for more ideas of what your site could look like and contain!

website building resources

coding help and tutorials

free website html code layouts you can use if you don't want too start coding from scratch

places to find graphics and decorative images for your site (transparent background pngs, pixels, favicons, stamps, blinkies, buttons, userboxes, etc)

image generators for different types of buttons and gifs (88x31 buttons, tiny identity buttons, heart locket open gifs, headpat gifs)

widgets and games and interactive elements you can add to your site (music players, interactive pets like gifypet and tamanotchi, hit counters, games like pacman and crosswords, guestbooks and chatboxes, etc)

web manifestos, guides, introductions and explanations of webmastering and neocities (some posts made by other tumblr users here are what made me finally want to make my own site and discover how too)

art tools, resources and free drawing programs

web communities! webrings, cliques, fanlistings, pixel clubs (pixel art trades) and more!

other fun sites that didn't fit in the other categories like free sheet music sites, archives, egotistical.goat (see a tumblr users audio posts/reblogs as a music playlist), soul void (a wonderful free to play video game i adore), an online omnichord you can play, and more.

i really hope the 'explore the web' page is helpful, it took three days to track down every link and find resources to add.

and if you want to check out my site there's more than just these pages. like i said in the beginning, i recently finished making:

the dervampireprince fanart museum

every piece of fanart i've received (unless the sender asked me to keep it private) has been added to this museum and where possible links back to the original artists post of that art (a lot the art was sent to me via discord so i can't link to the original post). every piece of fanart sent to me now will be added on their unless you specifically say you don't want it going on there. there's also links to my fanworks guide on there and how to send me fanart.

other pages on my site

about me (including favourite media, quizzes, comfort characters, kins, and more)

art gallery (art i've made, sorted by month)

graphics (so far it's just stamps i've made but plan to remake this section of my site)

media log (haven't started the 2025 one yet, but a log of all films, tv, writing, music, theatre, fandoms, characters and ships i got into in 2024)

silly web pets

shrines

site map

update log

my shrines so far:

i have ones for lucifer from supernatural, sam winchester from supernatural, charuca minifigures (arcade prizes i wanted as a kid that i'm trying to finish collecting as an adult), my waifuroulette discord tcg collection. my masterlist of every lgbt+ marvel character is a wip. i love making each shrine look different and suit the character/fandom/thing the shrine is about. and then there's also:

the european musical section

i ramble about them a lot and it's no surprise there's multiple shrines for them. i fell in love with german musical theatre in 2020 and that expanded in being interested in all non-english language musical theatre and trying to spread the word of it and how they deserve to be as known as english-language musicals. one musical in particular, elisabeth das musical, is my biggest special interest so expect a very detailed shrine about that one day.

so far this part of the site includes

'enter the theatre' an interactive web theatre where you choose a ticket and that musical will play on the stage (click a ticket and the embedded youtube video for that musical will appear on the stage and play. i dealt with javascript for the first time to bring the vision i had for this page alive, it might be slow but i hope enjoyable)

elisabeth das musical webshrine [not made yet]

tanz der vampire webshrine [not made yet, might abandon the idea]

my favourite european musicals [not made yet]

a masterlist of european musicals [a wip, only two musicals listed so far, i am listing every musical and every production they've had, this was a word document i kept for a long time that i always wanted to share somehow and this page is how i'll do it. there's no other list for european musicals out there so i guess it's up to me as always /lh]

the future for my site

i will update my art gallery, the fanart museum, my media log and other collections as often as i can. there's so many more pages i want to add including:

profiles for my ocs

finish my european musical masterlist

finish my 'every marvel lgbt+ character' masterlist (i have no love for marvel or disney's lgbt+ representation nor are all of these characters good representation and a lot are very minor characters, but for some reason i have gotten hyperfixated on this topic a few times so here comes a masterlist)

make shrines for loki (marvel), ares (hades), my sylvanian families collection, vocaloid (and/or vocaloid medleys), my plushie collection, pullip dolls

make a 'page not found' page

and i have one big plan to essentially make a site within a site, and make a website for my monster boy band ocs. but make it as if it was a real band, an unfiction project (think like how welcome home's website portrays welcome home as if it was a real show). this site would have pages for the band members, their albums, merch and maybe a pretend shop, and a fake forum where you could see other characters in the story talking and click on their profiles to find out more about them. and then once that's all done i want to start posting audios about the characters and then people can go to the website to find out more about them. that's my big plan anyway. i hope that sounds interesting.

i also want to make an effort to try and join some website communities. be brave and apply for some webrings and fanlistings, and make some pixel art and join some of the amazing pixel clubs out there.

but yeah, that's my site, that's neocities. i hope that was interesting. i hope it encourages people to make their own site, or at least look at other's small websites and explore this part of the internet. and if you go and check out mine feel free to drop a message in the guestbook on the homepage, or follow me on neocities if you have/make an account.

[hyperfixationcenter]

My full review on the Eltingville Club comics

After a long month of work I've decided to treat myself to read ALL of Eltingville Club, overall this was one of the funniest and saddest comics I've seen AND BEFORE I START!! If your new to the fandom or haven't found a place to read it: https://batcave.biz/27970-the-eltingville-club-2016.html have fun!!

Alright, this is a long one so if you love extensive overviews your in luck!

My favorite moments ੈ✩‧₊˚ Jerry being geeked out is really funny to me

THE WAY THEY LOCK IN 😭

Josh being a bisexual for a panel

I actually love jerry in a hoodie he looks so cutie

Good to know that Pete knows how to read

Me listing off my hyperfixiations to make me feel better

Idk why but Pete's reaction is so funny to me 😭

For some reason Joe looks way better in the comics, still a dick head tho

A moment of clarity for the boys

Common Josh L 😭

fuck'n 😮

Top 10 moments before disaster

THE ZONEEE

Josh being an absolute hater

The slow decline of man

Greedo318 gotta be my favorite character

Bill being a classic manipulative little shit

The one time Josh and Bill actually team up 😭

PREACH PETE!

You wont like me when I'm angry ahh Bill 😭

This Fan, This Monster ੈ✩‧₊˚

One of the most saddest chapters and the one that absolutely broke my heart as much as anyone who's read this comic.

Now we know what happened to Iron Jaw

It was kinda sad seeing Bill in shock that Joe isn't really that cool

I feel SO BAD for the geek girl

Its nice to see Pete stand up for the others

THE INFAMOUS FIGHT SCENE!!

PETEEEE MY KINGGG 😭😭😭

The most HEARTWRENCHING PANEL OF MY LIFE

My Overview ੈ✩‧₊˚

They just wanted to enjoy friends who liked the same things they did but power and greed can corrupt anyone and so manipulative minds that were raised from broken families learn that if your not at the top your nothing in this life. I understand that people have hyperfixiations and obsessions but what happens when someone loves something so much they lose what they have in their real life.

Many times mentioned in the comic people who were ex fans tell Bill to repent and stray away from his fandom that has corrupted him and twisted him into a man with no soul for anything else than a lust and hunger for things that aren't even real.

It does show a real harsh lesson of obsession and how far people will go to achieve such heights. The eltingville club was a very funny comic but the end made me think for a minute about how people like to go so far for things they can't achieve, in doing so destroying their own lives. I feel we could learn a lesson from this comic, weather it be about obsession, relationships, and oppressing sexuality to keep a quota. I loved this comic, and now to read the epilogue.

STAY TUNED FOR THE NEXT POST!

ELTINGVILLE CLUB FAN OUT!!! 📕

[mostlysignssomeportents]

The moral injury of having your work enshittified

This Monday (November 27), I'm appearing at the Toronto Metro Reference Library with Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen.

On November 29, I'm at NYC's Strand Books with my novel The Lost Cause, a solarpunk tale of hope and danger that Rebecca Solnit called "completely delightful."

This week, I wrote about how the Great Enshittening – in which all the digital services we rely on become unusable, extractive piles of shit – did not result from the decay of the morals of tech company leadership, but rather, from the collapse of the forces that discipline corporate wrongdoing:

https://locusmag.com/2023/11/commentary-by-cory-doctorow-dont-be-evil/

The failure to enforce competition law allowed a few companies to buy out their rivals, or sell goods below cost until their rivals collapsed, or bribe key parts of their supply chain not to allow rivals to participate:

https://www.engadget.com/google-reportedly-pays-apple-36-percent-of-ad-search-revenues-from-safari-191730783.html

The resulting concentration of the tech sector meant that the surviving firms were stupendously wealthy, and cozy enough that they could agree on a common legislative agenda. That regulatory capture has allowed tech companies to violate labor, privacy and consumer protection laws by arguing that the law doesn't apply when you use an app to violate it:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/12/algorithmic-wage-discrimination/#fishers-of-men

But the regulatory capture isn't just about preventing regulation: it's also about creating regulation – laws that make it illegal to reverse-engineer, scrape, and otherwise mod, hack or reconfigure existing services to claw back value that has been taken away from users and business customers. This gives rise to Jay Freeman's perfectly named doctrine of "felony contempt of business-model," in which it is illegal to use your own property in ways that anger the shareholders of the company that sold it to you:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/11/09/lead-me-not-into-temptation/#chamberlain

Undisciplined by the threat of competition, regulation, or unilateral modification by users, companies are free to enshittify their products. But what does that actually look like? I say that enshittification is always precipitated by a lost argument.

It starts when someone around a board-room table proposes doing something that's bad for users but good for the company. If the company faces the discipline of competition, regulation or self-help measures, then the workers who are disgusted by this course of action can say, "I think doing this would be gross, and what's more, it's going to make the company poorer," and so they win the argument.

But when you take away that discipline, the argument gets reduced to, "Don't do this because it would make me ashamed to work here, even though it will make the company richer." Money talks, bullshit walks. Let the enshittification begin!

https://pluralistic.net/2023/11/22/who-wins-the-argument/#corporations-are-people-my-friend

But why do workers care at all? That's where phrases like "don't be evil" come into the picture. Until very recently, tech workers participated in one of history's tightest labor markets, in which multiple companies with gigantic war-chests bid on their labor. Even low-level employees routinely fielded calls from recruiters who dangled offers of higher salaries and larger stock grants if they would jump ship for a company's rival.

Employers built "campuses" filled with lavish perks: massages, sports facilities, daycare, gourmet cafeterias. They offered workers generous benefit packages, including exotic health benefits like having your eggs frozen so you could delay fertility while offsetting the risks normally associated with conceiving at a later age.

But all of this was a transparent ruse: the business-case for free meals, gyms, dry-cleaning, catering and massages was to keep workers at their laptops for 10, 12, or even 16 hours per day. That egg-freezing perk wasn't about helping workers plan their families: it was about thumbing the scales in favor of working through your entire twenties and thirties without taking any parental leave.

In other words, tech employers valued their employees as a means to an end: they wanted to get the best geeks on the payroll and then work them like government mules. The perks and pay weren't the result of comradeship between management and labor: they were the result of the discipline of competition for labor.

This wasn't really a secret, of course. Big Tech workers are split into two camps: blue badges (salaried employees) and green badges (contractors). Whenever there is a slack labor market for a specific job or skill, it is converted from a blue badge job to a green badge job. Green badges don't get the food or the massages or the kombucha. They don't get stock or daycare. They don't get to freeze their eggs. They also work long hours, but they are incentivized by the fear of poverty.

Tech giants went to great lengths to shield blue badges from green badges – at some Google campuses, these workforces actually used different entrances and worked in different facilities or on different floors. Sometimes, green badge working hours would be staggered so that the armies of ragged clickworkers would not be lined up to badge in when their social betters swanned off the luxury bus and into their airy adult kindergartens.

But Big Tech worked hard to convince those blue badges that they were truly valued. Companies hosted regular town halls where employees could ask impertinent questions of their CEOs. They maintained freewheeling internal social media sites where techies could rail against corporate foolishness and make Dilbert references.

And they came up with mottoes.

Apple told its employees it was a sound environmental steward that cared about privacy. Apple also deliberately turned old devices into e-waste by shredding them to ensure that they wouldn't be repaired and compete with new devices:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/22/vin-locking/#thought-differently

And even as they were blocking Facebook's surveillance tools, they quietly built their own nonconsensual mass surveillance program and lied to customers about it:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/11/14/luxury-surveillance/#liar-liar

Facebook told employees they were on a "mission to connect every person in the world," but instead deliberately sowed discontent among its users and trapped them in silos that meant that anyone who left Facebook lost all their friends:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2021/08/facebooks-secret-war-switching-costs

And Google promised its employees that they would not "be evil" if they worked at Google. For many googlers, that mattered. They wanted to do something good with their lives, and they had a choice about who they would work for. What's more, they did make things that were good. At their high points, Google Maps, Google Mail, and of course, Google Search were incredible.

My own life was totally transformed by Maps: I have very poor spatial sense, need to actually stop and think to tell my right from my left, and I spent more of my life at least a little lost and often very lost. Google Maps is the cognitive prosthesis I needed to become someone who can go anywhere. I'm profoundly grateful to the people who built that service.

There's a name for phenomenon in which you care so much about your job that you endure poor conditions and abuse: it's called "vocational awe," as coined by Fobazi Ettarh:

https://www.inthelibrarywiththeleadpipe.org/2018/vocational-awe/

Ettarh uses the term to apply to traditionally low-waged workers like librarians, teachers and nurses. In our book Chokepoint Capitalism, Rebecca Giblin and I talked about how it applies to artists and other creative workers, too:

https://chokepointcapitalism.com/

But vocational awe is also omnipresent in tech. The grandiose claims to be on a mission to make the world a better place are not just puffery – they're a vital means of motivating workers who can easily quit their jobs and find a new one to put in 16-hour days. The massages and kombucha and egg-freezing are not framed as perks, but as logistical supports, provided so that techies on an important mission can pursue a shared social goal without being distracted by their balky, inconvenient meatsuits.

Steve Jobs was a master of instilling vocational awe. He was full of aphorisms like "we're here to make a dent in the universe, otherwise why even be here?" Or his infamous line to John Sculley, whom he lured away from Pepsi: "Do you want to sell sugar water for the rest of your life or come with me and change the world?"

Vocational awe cuts both ways. If your workforce actually believes in all that high-minded stuff, if they actually sacrifice their health, family lives and self-care to further the mission, they will defend it. That brings me back to enshittification, and the argument: "If we do this bad thing to the product I work on, it will make me hate myself."

The decline in market discipline for large tech companies has been accompanied by a decline in labor discipline, as the market for technical work grew less and less competitive. Since the dotcom collapse, the ability of tech giants to starve new entrants of market oxygen has shrunk techies' dreams.

Tech workers once dreamed of working for a big, unwieldy firm for a few years before setting out on their own to topple it with a startup. Then, the dream shrank: work for that big, clumsy firm for a few years, then do a fake startup that makes a fake product that is acquihired by your old employer, as an incredibly inefficient and roundabout way to get a raise and a bonus.

Then the dream shrank again: work for a big, ugly firm for life, but get those perks, the massages and the kombucha and the stock options and the gourmet cafeteria and the egg-freezing. Then it shrank again: work for Google for a while, but then get laid off along with 12,000 co-workers, just months after the company does a stock buyback that would cover all those salaries for the next 27 years:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/10/the-proletarianization-of-tech-workers/

Tech workers' power was fundamentally individual. In a tight labor market, tech workers could personally stand up to their bosses. They got "workplace democracy" by mouthing off at town hall meetings. They didn't have a union, and they thought they didn't need one. Of course, they did need one, because there were limits to individual power, even for the most in-demand workers, especially when it came to ghastly, long-running sexual abuse from high-ranking executives:

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/25/technology/google-sexual-harassment-andy-rubin.html

Today, atomized tech workers who are ordered to enshittify the products they take pride in are losing the argument. Workers who put in long hours, missed funerals and school plays and little league games and anniversaries and family vacations are being ordered to flush that sacrifice down the toilet to grind out a few basis points towards a KPI.

It's a form of moral injury, and it's palpable in the first-person accounts of former workers who've exited these large firms or the entire field. The viral "Reflecting on 18 years at Google," written by Ian Hixie, vibrates with it:

https://ln.hixie.ch/?start=1700627373

Hixie describes the sense of mission he brought to his job, the workplace democracy he experienced as employees' views were both solicited and heeded. He describes the positive contributions he was able to make to a commons of technical standards that rippled out beyond Google – and then, he says, "Google's culture eroded":

Decisions went from being made for the benefit of users, to the benefit of Google, to the benefit of whoever was making the decision.

In other words, techies started losing the argument. Layoffs weakened worker power – not just to defend their own interest, but to defend the users interests. Worker power is always about more than workers – think of how the 2019 LA teachers' strike won greenspace for every school, a ban on immigration sweeps of students' parents at the school gates and other community benefits:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/23/a-collective-bargain/

Hixie attributes the changes to a change in leadership, but I respectfully disagree. Hixie points to the original shareholder letter from the Google founders, in which they informed investors contemplating their IPO that they were retaining a controlling interest in the company's governance so that they could ignore their shareholders' priorities in favor of a vision of Google as a positive force in the world:

https://abc.xyz/investor/founders-letters/ipo-letter/

Hixie says that the leadership that succeeded the founders lost sight of this vision – but the whole point of that letter is that the founders never fully ceded control to subsequent executive teams. Yes, those executive teams were accountable to the shareholders, but the largest block of voting shares were retained by the founders.

I don't think the enshittification of Google was due to a change in leadership – I think it was due to a change in discipline, the discipline imposed by competition, regulation and the threat of self-help measures. Take ads: when Google had to contend with one-click adblocker installation, it had to constantly balance the risk of making users so fed up that they googled "how do I block ads?" and then never saw another ad ever again.

But once Google seized the majority of the mobile market, it was able to funnel users into apps, and reverse-engineering an app is a felony (felony contempt of business-model) under Section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. An app is just a web-page wrapped in enough IP to make it a crime to install an ad-blocker.

And as Google acquired control over the browser market, it was likewise able to reduce the self-help measures available to browser users who found ads sufficiently obnoxious to trigger googling "how do I block ads?" The apotheosis of this is the yearslong campaign to block adblockers in Chrome, which the company has sworn it will finally do this coming June:

https://www.tumblr.com/tevruden/734352367416410112/you-have-until-june-to-dump-chrome

My contention here is not that Google's enshittification was precipitated by a change in personnel via the promotion of managers who have shitty ideas. Google's enshittification was precipitated by a change in discipline, as the negative consequences of heeding those shitty ideas were abolished thanks to monopoly.

This is bad news for people like me, who rely on services like Google Maps as cognitive prostheses. Elizabeth Laraki, one of the original Google Maps designers, has published a scorching critique of the latest GMaps design:

https://twitter.com/elizlaraki/status/1727351922254852182

Laraki calls out numerous enshittificatory design-choices that have left Maps screens covered in "crud" – multiple revenue-maximizing elements that come at the expense of usability, shifting value from users to Google.

What Laraki doesn't say is that these UI elements are auctioned off to merchants, which means that the business that gives Google the most money gets the greatest prominence in Maps, even if it's not the best merchant. That's a recurring motif in enshittified tech platforms, most notoriously Amazon, which makes $31b/year auctioning off top search placement to companies whose products aren't relevant enough to your query to command that position on their own:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/25/greedflation/#commissar-bezos

Enshittification begets enshittification. To succeed on Amazon, you must divert funds from product quality to auction placement, which means that the top results are the worst products:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/11/06/attention-rents/#consumer-welfare-queens

The exception is searches for Apple products: Apple and Amazon have a cozy arrangement that means that searches for Apple products are a timewarp back to the pre-enshittification Amazon, when the company worried enough about losing your business to heed the employees who objected to sacrificing search quality as part of a merchant extortion racket:

https://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-gives-apple-special-treatment-while-others-suffer-junk-ads-2023-11

Not every tech worker is a tech bro, in other words. Many workers care deeply about making your life better. But the microeconomics of the boardroom in a monopolized tech sector rewards the worst people and continuously promotes them. Forget the Peter Principle: tech is ruled by the Sam Principle.

As OpenAI went through four CEOs in a single week, lots of commentators remarked on Sam Altman's rise and fall and rise, but I only found one commentator who really had Altman's number. Writing in Today in Tabs, Rusty Foster nailed Altman to the wall:

https://www.todayintabs.com/p/defective-accelerationism

Altman's history goes like this: first, he founded a useless startup that raised $30m, only to be acquired and shuttered. Then Altman got a job running Y Combinator, where he somehow failed at taking huge tranches of equity from "every Stanford dropout with an idea for software to replace something Mommy used to do." After that, he founded OpenAI, a company that he claims to believe presents an existential risk to the entire human risk – which he structured so incompetently that he was then forced out of it.

His reward for this string of farcical, mounting failures? He was put back in charge of the company he mis-structured despite his claimed belief that it will destroy the human race if not properly managed.

Altman's been around for a long time. He founded his startup in 2005. There've always been Sams – of both the Bankman-Fried varietal and the Altman genus – in tech. But they didn't get to run amok. They were disciplined by their competitors, regulators, users and workers. The collapse of competition led to an across-the-board collapse in all of those forms of discipline, revealing the executives for the mediocre sociopaths they always were, and exposing tech workers' vocational awe for the shabby trick it was from the start.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/11/25/moral-injury/#enshittification

[ao3scrapesearch]

Hey so I'm not very tech savvy but I was wondering if adding random silly lines or just something that makes no sense between paragraphs/sentences on our fics can poison AI if the fics are scraped?? I tried something by adding some random lines with white text between paragraphs of my fic which don't show up on default ao3 mode but they are a part of the text nonetheless. Of course that'll involve more efforts on part of the writers to add lines and format the white text using html and workskins but if it does turn out to be effective it might make ao3 less lucrative for AI scraping if a major amount of works contain this and it'll make it harder for AI training. It does have drawbacks that it'll only work on default mode so anyone using dark skin on ao3 might have to switch to be able to read properly and it'll make works less accessible to readers who use text to audio if there are random lines in between but what other options are we left with if even archive locking our works doesn't work??

You absolutely could, but there are limitations to that.

For one, like you said, you're making your work inaccessible to certain readers. That's fully within your rights, though I think most of us strive not to exclude people using screen readers.

Second, from what I know, when you download a dataset like this and intend to use it to train an AI model, you first go through the dataset looking for obvious junk data and toss that out. So if you're putting something that is clearly not real fanfic in there, any decent data analyst is probably going to spot it and toss your fic. If that's your goal, that's a win for you. Personally, if I'm making the effort to inject poison data, my goal is to be included in the training data used so I can trash the model, so I don't want it to be obvious.

Third, I don't see anything explicitly in AO3's TOS against adding data poison in this way, but I don't see them endorsing doing that either. It feels like a grey area to me, and I'm not sure you're allowed to do it, so I am not recommending anyone do this. Rest of this post is theoretical.

So theoretically, how I would do it is putting the junk data at the end of the fic/chapter. Hide it like you're saying, by changing the font and/or background color of the section with CSS. Then put a nice, clear message right after the chapter ends and the junk data starts, something like, "Hey, readers! This chapter is over. Turn off your screen reader and move to the next chapter now." That gives your real humans a warning and stops them from being confused or wasting their time. Then dump your poison. You can also write something in the beginning A/N, I believe. I know this most recent scraper never ever pulled data from the author's notes, so the AI wouldn't see anything you put in that section.

Scrapers are typically pulling your work without the workskin enabled, so for formatting, you're really just trying to make it look nice for your real readers so they don't have to see your poison.

As far as actual poison, my suggestions:

Your own writing or writing you have explicit permission to use, so you're not breaking anyone's copyright. Easy mode: jumbled paragraphs of your own past works for any fandom except the one your current fic is for.

As mentioned above, don't put absolute nonsense in there. If it's bad enough, it'll be spotted and filtered out. Like, if it's not even real words, anyone feeding it to AI is probably going to catch that and toss your data out, excluding it from the model. It might be fine if it's all real words, but not in any sensible order. Not sure on that. But don't just insert keysmashes if you want your data to be used in the AI training.

Terrible crackfic would be good. So would writing for a completely different fandom and different tags. The writing should not fit well with the tags you use for the fics. (So if the real fic is tagged Fluff and Alternative Universe - Coffee Shop, your poison should not include that. Make the poison a hurt no comfort canon-compliant fic or something else different.)

Keep in mind you should not be putting E-rated data poison in a G-rated fic. Real humans may still see this no matter how much you hide it, particularly if they download a PDF copy of your fic. If it's content that requires a warning per AO3's rules (explicit content, graphic violence, etc), you do still have to tag for that, even if it's designed to be invisible to humans.

Use unique writing, so even if someone later using it for AI catches it once, they can't just search for the exact wording you used in one fic and easily filter out all the rest of your poison. Again, this is if you want to be included in the AI training to throw the model off.

Again, theoretically, if I were going to do this, this is the CSS code I might use for my poison section of the fic:

#workskin .fuckai { background: #333333; color: #333333; font-size: 1%; }

It would theoretically look like a weird grey gap to mobile users or be nearly invisible to desktop users, even if it contained, say... 1,000 additional words.

Finally, scrapers are trying to grab millions of fics from AO3 when they do it. They're not looking closely at 13 million fics. They're only searching for the most obvious junk. So the only reason you would want to hide it like that is to make a better experience for your real readers. You don't need to hide it to get it into a scraper's AI model.

[toskarin]

going on the twine rant again, lads. fair warning.

-

the twine editor is theoretically great software

which is to say, twine editor is far and away the best execution of "a text game maker for people who mostly make text and not games" that presently exists. it's notable for making wholly self-contained (read: does not require interpreter software) text games with functioning mechanics at about the level of code literacy you could feasibly ask from people who brushed off of other more complicated software

this is in large part because the text adventure and IF ecosystem has the same problem as the (similarly insular and incestuous) scorewriting ecosystem: all of the software is made to be used by a group of like 50 people who don't use anything else, so they just settle for whatever exists

twine solves a lot of these problems by simply existing as an html game maker that can automate all of the functions of a gamebook out of the box. the editor has features which (to me) seem to be inspired by scrivener, which is my favourite WYSIWYG writing software for longform fiction on the market (I prefer writing in LaTeX but I can acknowledge that's a habit I picked up and not an endorsement of LaTeX)

that being said, even though there's an obvious utility to being able to prototype out rpgs and such in twine incredibly quickly, I can't really recommend people... use twine for that. because of the problems.

the twine editor is also kind of beautiful for all the ways in which it issoftware designed to torture the user

twine exists with one foot in "games" and one foot in "writing" and this overlap is the totality of its intended use. this space of compromise is still the best that's been made for this specific scene, but it means that edge cases are (at absolute best) operating twine in much the way that someone being hanging onto the edge of a shattered cockpit is operating an airliner

I could go on and on about the specific elements of twine's design that drive me insane, and in how it punishes you both for making too much of a book and for making too much of a game, but there's one problem that kind of sticks out as a simulacrum of this whole issue

by design, twine organises its projects as a story map. this is kind of like the middle point between scrivener's storyboard and a whiteboard, but specialised for use in making text games. this means that each node on it is one screen, called a card, that you can open and edit

doing this opens a window for text input, and the exact contents of this window kind of depend on which format you're writing your story in, but as a rule, you write everything into these sub-windows and that's the game

because twine runs in one window, these cards open more like menus than true windows. you can have one open at a time, and when you need to test something, you close the window and press the button to test the game. simple as

now, for making software, it's helpful to have a versioning function of some sort in case, among other reasons, you fuck something up in a way you don't immediately notice

for writing, you usually want some sort of undo function, in case you accidentally delete something or edit over it

at the intersection of these two, twine does have an undo function. which works differently depending on which version of the editor you're using. in the web version, you get multiple layers of undo. that makes sense.

in the downloaded version, which is the version you have to use if you don't want to use your browser's local storage (?? you shouldn't be doing this) you get

one layer of undo.

in a modern text editor.

that you are expected to write in.

this is on top of the browser-hosted version of twine editor being significantly more stable than the desktop version, so that's obviously the version you're meant to use, which runs in stark contrast to like... how that should work. this should already be raising your blood pressure a little bit if you remember that the browser version of twine saves your project files to your browser's local storage

now, common to both versions is another important feature which seemingly exists to prevent data loss: twine automatically saves your changes when you exit out of a card

this means that, the moment you close a card to go test the changes you just made to your game, they are saved over the previous version of the game with no way to undo them

but there IS a way to get around this without having to write in an entirely separate word processor! several ways even. you can even use the downloaded version if you do this

duplicate the full project every single time you make changes that could necessitate an undo function

make a copy of every card you edit in case you need to revert to it after testing, then remember to delete it afterwards

if you're editing the cards themselves, see option 1, because there is no way to undo deletion of cards in the story map

and like... that's not good. it's kind of the hell machine for killing all human beings, actually

it's also not a problem remotely unique to twine, because this is the kind of thing you see in most niche-specialised software where there isn't really a distinction made between "this is an expected frustration of working on any artistic project" and "this is something completely insane that absolutely should not be the case and isn't tolerated in immediately adjacent comparable creative fields"

twine can be used to make longer projects, but at the point where you're recommending two layers of supporting software that overlap so hard with the editor that they should be redundancies, it becomes clear that the only thing it's really fit-for-purpose to do is non-linear fiction consisting of two or three paragraphs per card

and that's generally not what it's used for! because that sort of thing is almost universally understood as a stepping stone towards using twine for making either longform non-linear fiction or full-featured rpgs

twine could be really useful software, and in fairness it's generally better than the alternatives it supplanted in its niche (people making little interactive poems probably shouldn't be trying to use Inform or TADS), but it really seems like it was designed with as a cursed amulet meant to cause as much grief as possible while being difficult to justify throwing away

[homoeroticjunoincident]

it’s not inherently mischaracterization to write hms gore what matters is the way you do it. gore is a tool that can be amazing or horrible just like any other depending on the execution. pun. gore is not necessarily more shallow than anything else. no one is going around saying ‘stop writing fluff that’s shallow and only meant to make you feel good’, so why does this apply to gore? if this sounds either biased or targeted, that’s because it is :)

less briefly:

yes, gore can stem from Nothing, or mischaracterization. it can also stem from traits that the character has.

sure maybe ‘soul STABS MIND 3000 TIMES IN THE CHEST because ???? uh why not’ is a bad usage of gore, but consider ‘soul stabs mind to punish him for doing something minor (because he is desperate for heart and mind to stop their fights at all costs, and feels as if he has no power, and feels as if the only way to gain power is by making them afraid of him)’.

maybe this doesn’t fit with your specific idea of soul, but there is still character depth there.

<SIDE TANGENT>

what mischaracterization even MEANS is dependent on person to person, because, you know, PEOPLE GET DIFFERENT THINGS FROM THIS ALBUM, and they INTERPRET THE CHARACTERS DIFFERENTLY. additionally, what seems like ‘mischaracterization’ can just be what the author thinks they would react like when placed into a situation, which can be incredibly different from how they usually act! for example, both of my aus are based on how i think the characters would react whenever placed into situation x

(with maybe their characters tweaked a little, which is fine sometimes as long as you aren’t going to claim it’s canon. it’s fine to have headcanons. it’s fine to have different versions of hms(w) that aren’t specifically au. and people who are mad about it - which is a group that may include me, sometimes, i am aware - can be mad! and that doesn’t mean you’re wrong and that doesn’t mean you have to get out the ukelele and be like i’m sorry for having fun with the characters (when you Should be having fun with the characters and if you aren’t then maybe. stop?))

and in my aus they are incredibly different from canon hms! which isn’t a bad thing, it is the point!

anyway you aren’t morally bad for talking about the characters without cited sources. (the annoying part is whenever you act like you /are/ being objectively correct, and right about everything, whenever you’re clearly Doing Shit To Them (also sometimes maybe consider making an oc and whether that would be more fun than saying it’s hms. however you aren’t. morally corrupt. for not making an oc. it’s fine))

(again please don’t say people are morally corrupt for being wrong about the characters. they aren’t. it’s annoying but it’s not bad morally, and they don’t need to get hosed down for it. It’s Fine)

</SIDE TANGENT> (yes i can reclaim the html angle brackets because i know html /joke)

again, compare ‘heart and mind snuggle and don’t argue ever because ???? why not’ and ‘heart and mind snuggle and don’t argue ever because they’ve resolved their conflict, and don’t feel like they need to anymore’ (an attempt to keep the level of fluff while adding a reason- though i admit i’m not good at writing pure fluff), or ‘heart and mind snuggle and don’t argue ever because they’re tired of the pain and want just one moment of peace’ (something more similar to what i write that keeps bittersweetness/tension there).

if reasonless gore is bad, why isn’t reasonless fluff bad? if reasonless gore is ‘immature’, then isn’t is reasonless fluff also ‘immature’?

sure, maybe one is less shocking or more to your tastes than the other: it’s fine to have preferences. what i don’t agree with is saying one is horrible and the other isn’t.

my opinion is that we should stop saying anything that one writes is morally bad: and if you want to anyway, just keep the complaining (because that’s what this is) to friends you complain with, or discord servers meant for complaining, or complain on your own blog without maintagging it, rather than trying to set these rules of what one should and should not write upon the entire fanbase.

thank you (i bow and leave the stage) (ALSO STOP ACTING LIKE IT’S NOVEL TO THINK THAT HEART ISN’T AN UWU BABY OR MIND ISN’T A DEMON IN FRONT OF THE ENTIRE FANBASE WE’VE BEEN OVER THIS. WE WERE GOING OVER THIS LAST YEAR. I AM SO TIRED OF PEOPLE MAKING THESE POSTS AND EVERYONE CONGRATULATING THEM OVER IT AS IF IT’S DESERVING OF THE NOBEL PRIZE)

[poetryandbloods-blog]

The truth is that if Snape had a standard beauty like Sirius and wasn't poor, he would be one of the most beloved characters in modern literature, like Anakin Skywalker.

But he is ugly and poor, so in our view as a society he needs to be labeled as an abuser/villain, his story, which is incredible and full of nuances, needs to be passed on to someone who fits the mold of what is considered appropriate (almost always Regulus).

Even Tom Riddle, the boy who killed 4 people before finishing Hogwarts, receives more love and understanding from fans than Snape.

I always thought that this new gratuitous hatred that I saw Snape receive came from the portion of fans who never read the books, only fanfics.

But seeing him being stripped of his story and the staunch defense that part of the fandom makes of others with a story a thousand times worse than Snape's makes it impossible not to connect this to his lack of status on the two fronts that “matter most” (money/beauty).

A study conducted in Great Britain proved that ugly people are more likely to be convicted of a crime. I will leave the source below.I am a lawyer, in college and throughout my professional life, I have seen underprivileged people being marginalized many times.

Their lives mean less. They are much more likely to be convicted of minor crimes than people with more income.

We judge fictional characters with the metrics we have for our reality. It is difficult to feel empathy for someone who is different from you/lives in a different reality than yours.

Someone who has been marginalized and bullied is much more likely to feel empathy for a character who goes through the same thing than someone who has never lived that reality.

There is also the issue that Snape was based on a real person, who had many characteristics of an autistic person, but these characteristics were villainized by the writer. Of course, we cannot lose sight of the fact that Harry Potter is a children's book, written in the 90s, and Snape was supposed to be this villainous teacher that we all had at some point in our lives.

But we all grow up and are able to see more than just the children's story; we are able to see the patterns we apply as a society and how we can combat them.

Would Snape, who was marginalized throughout his childhood, have had a better life if he had received the necessary support at school? To what extent can we blame someone who did not have structure/support, whether in the family environment and/or in society itself?And this of course does not apply only to Snape, but to a greater or lesser extent to other characters.

Ultimately, society itself creates its own villains, by ignoring doing the minimum necessary for the well-being of these individuals.

Source: https://www.standard.co.uk/hp/front/ugly-defendants-more-likely-to-be-found-guilty-than-attractive-ones-7276212.html

[year2000electronics]

Your fiddleford monster au design makes me have so many questions in a good way. Gnawing on the bars on my enclosure kind of way. Does the curse seemingly not affect him in his one year stay helping Ford, and so he does that all himself? Does The Curse, as vague as it is, count that; and drive people to modify themselves and draw away from humanity? Like its not just this magical effect that happens but an active thing in the back of your mind to turn away from what you were born as and embrace something else? Ogh. I'm suddenly a lot more invested in this au

VERY INTERESTING QUESTIONS TO BE CERTAIN so fiddleford is a bit of a unique case where his "monster" theming is tied directly to his decline yes!

full answer under the cut it got long

in my mind, monster falls' curse is tied directly to gravity falls' natural law of weirdness magnetism/"the barrier" keeping bill in. once youve stayed there long enough for the curse to even BEGIN, it becomes harder to leave the town. you just feel drawn to it, and a dull ache in your soul if you leave. so obviously, when ford gets turned into a mothman, he does fully accept that because hes always felt more cryptid than man. but when the time comes for him to ask fiddleford for help, he lays out that "hey, youd be doing me a BIG favour if you came to help with the portal, but this town curses you if you stay for too long so itll only be a few weeks, i promise"

fidds agrees, because hey, whats a few weeks with an old friend? besides, he'll have his wife and son as an anchor to go back to. but the more he thinks about it, the more he likes staying with ford, the more he's reminded of those old times, and the more the curse starts influencing those kinds of thoughts to get louder and louder (but its not ALL the curse you know. still some autonomy in the situation) and so he keeps postponing his return date, almost "tempting fate" about the curse, because he doesn't really feel any different! his friend sprouted wings and antennae! he'd know by now, so he won't check! and ford shrugs and is like "well, alright, it's your choice, we can surely get a little closer to the point of no return"

and yknow, fiddleford denying that the curse could possibly be affecting him is almost like him in canon struggling to reconcile with his two "lives"- his home life and his life with ford. he wants to have his cake and eat it too, because he's just too timid to ever say no.

anyways, one day he wakes up and realizing he's heard the sound of technology near him for a while, and looks around, and realizes it's following him from room to room-

the beeping IS him. it's definitely been a year, he's already been cursed. it's just that he's a robot that looks near-human, just near-human enough that he could turn a blind eye to it and pretend like it never happened and that everything was fine. which i think kinda suits how ford loves the supernatural to a very personal degree, meanwhile fidds got roped into the town by pure happenstance

but. yknow, being a robot that looks human means youre still a robot. and it's a lot harder to erase things from a robot's "brain" without causing some major problems. haven't you ever been programming something or filling out an html code, and then you accidentally delete one thing you thought was inconsequential and all of a sudden youre staring at just a wall of code that's busted because whatever you removed, you DEFINITELY SHOULD NOT HAVE removed?

parts of fiddleford just go kaput and start breaking because he's purposely taking out large chunks of code from his own brain that end up being collateral from the memory gun. because, yknow, the memory gun is imprecise! it was designed for human brains! cos thats what fidds was for years! so it's like if you tried to repair a computer by ripping out the motherboard with pliers

thats my take on it anyways. Ya