#me when I activate outline on a layer

[bimbosandbubbles]

Grip

Synopsis- JJK men who unknowingly have a deep attraction to your pudge. Men who just love your fat tummy!

Gojo

The man always finds himself zeroing in on your pouch of flesh—practically staring holes at it. It can come off as judgy or scrutinizing but it’s the opposite—admiration. He just loves when you wear form fitting clothing like a skintight dress or leggings—anything that shows your supple shape.

He loves when he can see the outline of its shape—the beautiful almost “U�� like shape enchanting him. It’s so beautiful to him and so attractive to him. He just indulges in the fact that it’s so effortlessly plump—so kissable and touchable. So incredibly easy to press into and mold whatever shape he longs for.

“You’re so pretty,baby? Yeah you like how deep I am inside?”

Gojo has your legs pushed into your chest,chest heaving and faces constantly grazing each other as he pulls in and out of you. Even though he can see your pretty face,that he loves,his eyes immediately gaze down to stare at your tummy.

The rolls of your stomach are pushed together and layered on top of each other—and fuck it just looks so good to him. He purposefully pushes your legs back just see your flesh layer onto itself some more. He ignores your whines as he bends and plays with you for his unknown pleasure.

And pleasure he gets because by the time he’s done with you in that position,he’s came on your tummy three times now and he’s planning to make it a fourth.

Nanami

The man is naturally a provider, a person who feels a responsibility to take care of others. So with that huge part of his nature he’s naturally drawn to your softer features especially your stomach. Every time he returns home from his draining and tiring job—there you are in the kitchen making a meal full of love for the both of you and every instance,no matter how tired he is,no matter how much work he has to catch up on—Nanami’s hands always find themselves gripping the pudgy stomach.

He’ll stand behind you,hands kneading it and rubbing it ever so gently. He’ll listen you talk about your mundane activities that you don’t think really matter but he always listens. He hums and rubs you,each stroke and pinch of his fingers like a warm comfort. A comfort that always turned perverted and pleasurable.

“Did I say stop talking? I want to hear about your day.”

It’s hard to talk when his large hand is rubbing cool circles on your harden nipples through your thin shirt. Not only that but you couldn’t just talk normally when his hand is playing with your throbbing clit—caressing ever so soft circles onto the fleshy bud.

“Nanami—!”

“That’s right talk for me,be a good wife and just tell me about your day,m’kay?” You couldn’t get any words other than praising and chanting the man’s name. That’s when he removes his hand from your breast and goes back to gripping your pliable tummy.

All you can think about is the blissful sensation of his hand rubbing your clit and the loving touch of his extremities onto the excess above your pelvis. Oh yeah,Nanami just loves this everyday practice of his.

Yuji

The man always finds himself laying on your tummy—recapping his day and ranting about anything with you. He melts in the pillow like texture,snuggling into you—hands placed onto your stomach and tuffs of pink hair being the only think you can see while he just relaxes on you.

You could feel him occasionally kissing you through your shirt before he lifts it up and just starts sucking on the smooth skin. His rambles slowly turn into him forming hickeys on the fatty skin—the innocent conversations turned into pure concentration on the shapes he’s making with his mouth.

“Can I go down there..?” All Yuji needed was to see you breathlessly nod yes. He needs no more time before he pulls your panties to the side and latches his mouth onto your clit.

He’ll suck and suck—veiny hands making sure to rest on your belly,pretty brown eyes constantly watching you—eating up your wanton moans. You can’t help but grips the pinks tuffs of hair that barely pokes out from behind your plump belly.

Yuji won’t stop—not til his jaw locks,not til his whole mouth hurts. He’ll service you happily all while his large hands tease and grope your tummy. The extremities cupping the skin in batches—leaving a reminding sting of how hard he’s really gripping you.

His fingers will trace into your geography—pads of his pointer and his index mulling over your stretch marks and cellulite. He practically remolds your stomach—using it to still himself while he uses his grip to rut against the bed.

Yuji just loves melting into you and talking to you-always dissolving in the plush flesh that he so enjoys.

Geto

This man uses your tummy as a comfort—a place of safety and a feeling of home. He’ll normally be going over scrolls or whatever busy work always having you beside him—big hand reaching over to pull you closer to him,leaning down to grip the abundant flesh that sits above your mound.

But sometimes Geto doesn’t want to work. He wants focus on you and only you. He’ll start off by asking you to sit on his lap,saying he wants to be closer you—which isn’t a lie only a half truth. And you do,always. You press down onto him gently but of course your comforting weight is still felt—felt enough for Geto to fight back a groan. He doesn’t utter a word,only placing his hand on your tummy and continuing busying himself. He won’t talk to until he feels the squirming begin—that’s when he can have fun.

“If you keep moving like that my love you’ll have to deal with the consequences.” He warns. His warning makes you stiffen up—entertaining him with your automatic obedience. For awhile you stay still but can’t help but to rock back and forth. And that’s how you end up,still sitting on his lap the only difference being his warm cock sheathed inside you.

“You can’t distract me from my work baby,so no moving okay? Be a good girl for me and stay still.”Geto asks you to stay still—tells you to be good for him yet he’s the one who won’t stop touching you. His nimble fingers finding comfort in the doughy fat—he relishes in the push back your skin offers the more he digs in you. But what he loves even more is when he touches your fat mound,enjoying your sweet whimpers of momentary pleasure. He knows you want him to fuck—want him in your guts.

However he loves how your pussy clenches against his still cock—desperate for some attention. He cups your tummy and breathes in your scent—loving the self induced torture. Your warm pudge offering a anchor—some comfort for you.

REBLOGS ARE GREATLY APPRECIATED!!!

[honeytonedhottie]

honey's hot-girl guide to summer (2025 edition)⋆.ೃ࿔*:･🍦👙

how to have the best summer EVER from a certified hottie (me), all the little tips and tricks to look your best, have a great time and enjoy yourself this summer…💬🎀

THE PERFECT TAN ;

so as you guys can probably tell from my username i am a honey toned hottie, but during the summer i love to look a little more bronzy and glowy. and i've learned some things when it comes to getting a tan that comes out perfectly.

❤︎ salt water spray before tanning

ik this sounds crazy but LET ME TELL YOUUU. salt water reflects sunlight and removes oils -> making your skin more exposed to the UV rays -> you tan even more for a less amount of time. UR WELCOME. and ik it might sound crazy but literally just try it. dont forget to put ur SPF on first though

❤︎ stay moisturized

❤︎ tan in intervals, x amount of time per side

STAY BUSY ;

the worst feeling is when school rolls around and you realize that you've wasted the entire summer. DONT LET THAT BE YOU. look up "things going on in my area" and find something that you like, plan out things to do over the summer in a google doc with your girls (thats what i did this year) in fact, make it more fun by introducing a points system which we'll talk about more in the next section.

SUMMER POINTS SYSTEM ;

so the idea behind this is each task is worth x amount of points and we add up all the points that you made throughout the whole summer. the winner gets something off of their wishlist. everyone has access to the doc so its their own responsibility to make sure that they participate

if you want more info on the summer points system i'd love to share my doc with y'all so you guys could have a super fun summer too…💬🎀

LOOKING GOOD ALL SUMMER LONG ;

if you haven't read my summer beauty/glow up guide yet WHAT R U EVEN DOING? in there i go super in depth about summer beauty and how to look absolutely fabulous but i'll go over some of the basics in this post.

first we wanna be ACTIVE. going on walks everyday or working out 4-5 times a week. my go-to formula that hasn't failed me yet is a workout split of cardio, weight training and reformer pilates. the reformer pilates is like, once a week but weight training is more regularly.

glittery glowy skin. use body butters and nectars, lotions, and most IMPORTANTLY body glitter. we wanna shimmer and sparkle, especially if ur showing skin this summer, look like a shimmery mermaid. ash is not allowed under ANY circumstance.

SUMMER FASHION ;

think, bubble gum beach BUNNY. thats how i love to dress for the summer. halter tops and dresses, ruffle-layered skirts, denim shorts, cute bikinis. THINGS LIKE THAT. i also wear soft teals, pastels and of course pinks during the summer so thats the color palette. some essentials for the summery look are

hoop earrings (especially bamboo hoops)

a good pair of denim shorts

baby tees and halter tops

little ruffle skirts

wedges and platform pumps

bangles

bracelet and necklace stacks

MAKE SUMMER RULES ;

its always important to have a standard for yourself when it comes to anything at all so outline some summer rules for yourself. here are mine ->

🥥 no bed-rotting days/staying in bed all day

🌺 no putting urself in dangerous situations. BE SAFE.

🥥 stay hydrated and keep SPF on your skin

🌺 take LOTS and lots of photos

🥥 fruit salads + coconut water! my faves

[letmeinimafairy]

The making of painted stones

Well, a few times I was asked to show the process of miniature paintings on stones, and here is my first attempt to capture and explain it. Warning - I only have my phone's camera at my disposal, so the quality is not very good.

Firstly - an idea for the image. Every stone has something in its pattern that can be a starting point for developing an imagery. The stone I picked for this one is a beautiful Picasso jasper, and in this case I was looking for a stone for a specific idea I've already had in mind. Spontaneous improvisation dictated by the stone's pattern is also great but I decided to pick something more definitive for better illustrating the process.

This jasper's pattern already has outlines that can be developed into a landscape without painting it over too much. I don't like it when stones are just mindlessly covered by slapping a random image on it, ignoring the colours, textures and patterns.

Here's the idea - ruins of an amphitheatre overgrown with red gladioluses. I know, I know, but I'm very interested in the initial mystical sacrificial background of gladiators. So here it is, arena covered in red, swords in the sand, but it's finally quiet.

Before we start, a stone must be varnished - minerals are porous, and lacquer smoothes its surface. I paint with tempera - most artists who work in lacquer miniatures use oils, but tempera allows quicker process, which is important for me. I'm autistic and my executive dysfunction makes working with oils difficult - my sudden bursts of activity won't match with drying timings and such. So, tempera for me.

Starting with sketching the outlines of the ruins and painting our light source, the sun and red clouds. I'm trying to work with a palette that the stone already has and make the painting as harmonious as possible.

Erasing auxiliary lines as we continue.

Done with the first layer - the walls and the sky. After the paint dries, I apply varnish (I use Novol clearcoat, car varnish - it's very durable). There can be as many layers as you need.

Now - the flowers and details.

After the painting is finished, it'll need several layers of varnish. And some fine sandpaper (1500) in-between the finishing layers for better grip.

And here it is! time to think abou a necklace for this one.

I'm not sure how useful I can be and what aspects you would like to know, so feel free to ask. I'm not sure I can make a good enough video with my current phone, so this'll have to wait. I tried to skip all the musings about ideas and finding stories, but whatever. And the time needed for work - I don't know. There was a month-long pause in the making of this one, due to a couple of emergencies that knocked me down for some time, and it's not easy for me in general due to my mental state - sometimes I can make a painting in two days, sometimes it takes years, nothing is certain with me, especially now. But well, here's what I do.

[sourcherryandsprinkles]

The hot tub | Rafe Cameron x Reader

Advent calendar day three: Ski trip

Summary: Rafe invites you to spend the week with his family at their cabin in Aspen. Things may happen when you get in the hot tub after a long day going down the slopes

Warnings: 18+, unprotected p + v, slight choking, semi-public (outside), impact play (spanking once)

my taglists are here + you can send requests here at any time

—

As expected, the Cameron’s cabin in Aspen was breath-takingly beautiful. The walls of the living area were made of round wood, making it seem like you were living inside a tree…with a luxury decor. There were large windows, massive couches, cherry-wood tables, and a classic bear skin in front of the large fireplace. 

You felt like you were standing in a holiday Hallmark movie. 

‘’How many properties does your parents own?’’ You brushed your hand over the plush throw at the end of your and Rafe’s bed, smiling at how soft it felt. ‘’Don’t they have a house in the Bahamas?’’ 

‘’A lot,’’ Rafe replied while putting away some things in the closet. ‘’I lost count, honestly. My dad collects estates and Rose decorates them, it’s their thing,’’ he explained. ‘’I rent the ones we are not using...except the Bahamas house. We keep that one for family only.’’

You nodded, secretly wishing your parents were that rich. You could get used to vacationing in the mountains during winter break. It’s a weather contrast compared to South Carolina. 

‘’Do you come here often? Have you mastered a winter sports during your lavish vacations?’’ 

Rafe chuckled, closing the door of the large closet. ‘’I can’t ski, if that’s what you’re asking me. Or skate. Ice skating is Sarah’s thing.’’ He grabbed his toiletry bag from the suitcase and placed it in the en-suite bathroom next to yours. ‘’My dad forced me to take snowboarding lessons since I was a kid, but I was better at flirting with girls at the ski resort.’’

Shaking your head, you laughed quietly. ‘’What am I not surprised?’’ 

After everyone had unpacked, you bundled in your winter layers and headed down to the ski resort for some winter activities. You and Rafe rented equipment to go down the slopes while Sarah and Wheezie went to the skating rink. 

The afternoon was spent mostly falling on your ass and watching Rafe showing off. He was no professional, but you were impressed as you watched him do stunts — something you could never see yourself doing. 

When the sky started to go dark, you returned to the cabin to warm up and eat dinner. Rose’s cooking skills pleasantly took you by surprise, not expecting her to be much of a chef since she and Ward had a lot of money, but she made a mean baked mac’n cheese. 

‘’Are you sure?’’ you said when Rafe suggested you try the hot tub. 

You had never used a hot tub in the winter — with actual snow around. It sounded cold, but Rafe assured you the warm water would keep you warm…or else he would.

The sky was fully dark outside and snow was falling at a slow pace, creating a beautiful picture as you stepped out in your bra and underwear. When you packed for a trip to Aspen, you didn’t think you would need a bikini. Now you were regretting not bringing one. 

While the warm water sounded pleasant, you couldn’t help but think about how the chlorine of the hot tub will ruin your nice bra, so Rafe came up with a solution.

‘’Just take it off.’’ 

‘’I’m not gonna get naked in the hot tub,’’ you replied, shooting your boyfriend a glare as steam rose from the tub into the cool air. ‘’What if your family comes outside and wants to join?’’ 

‘’I’d rather they don’t. The sight of you in that bra and panties got me so hard,’’ Rafe said, his hand wandering up your thigh. 

You glanced down and through the bubbles of the underwater jets, catching the outline of his cock through his boxers, strained against the material. A light flush covered your cheeks, matching the color of your bra. 

‘’But if you’re that worried about anyone coming,’’ he continued, taking your hand and helping you step in. ‘’My dad strained his back when skiing so Rose is taking care of him. Sarah is probably trying to contact her boyfriend who was not invited on the trip, and as for Wheezie…I don’t know. She’s in her room, reading or watching a movie.’’

You sat on the edge and raised your gaze, eyeing the sliding doors. 

‘’No one is gonna come out here,’’ Rafe promised, reading your persistent worry. ‘’Except maybe a bear.’’

A new fear was unlocked. You turned to the other side and looked over the deck and into the dark forest. ‘’A bear?!’’ 

Rafe grinned, messing with you. ‘’I’m joking. There’s no bears here at this time of the year. They’re hibernating.’’ He hooked a finger underneath the delicate band of your panties, holding back from taking them off with his mouth. ‘’So…will it be with or without the panties?’’

Fuck it. 

You removed both items and let Rafe pull you in the water, the ripples from the jets causing sparks to tingle up your spine as they hit your bare cunt. It felt like using a nice shower head directly on your clit, but less strong. The pleasure was short-lived as Rafe settled you on his lap in a straddling way, a groan leaving his throat when your ass came in contact with his stiff cock. 

You bit back a giggle and loosely slid your arms around his neck. He was so beautiful.

‘’That wasn’t so difficult, wasn’t it?’’ Rafe asked, his hands sliding over your thighs and up your sides, making you feel a bit exposed. 

You rolled your eyes and rubbed your hands up and down his well-defined shoulders and chest, appreciating the time he had been spending with Topper and Kelce at the gym. They were always ruining your and Rafe’s plans, but those gym sessions gave him a body you wanted to bite into. 

You lowered your mouth to his, slowly kissing as the water moved around your bodies. The cold air had caused your nipples to peak, not yet submerged in the warm water. A shiver ran through you and, as if he had read your mind, Rafe’s hands moved to your breasts and began to toy with them. You sighed at the touch and ground your hips against his, relishing the feeling of his hard cock through his boxers as it rubbed against your clit just right. 

‘’I need you. Now,’’ you urged, breaking the kiss and reaching under the water to pull at Rafe's only piece of clothing, your earlier worries about someone catching you naked leaving your desire clouded mind.

Rafe nodded and pushed you off him, which left you confused. You opened your mouth to ask why he had pushed you off, but he motioned for you to turn around and grab the edge of the tub. A moan threatened to slip, realizing what he was doing. He was going to take you from behind. 

You heard the water swish as he moved behind you, and parted your legs so everything was exposed to his view. 

‘’That ass is so perfect,’’ Rafe groaned, giving it a hard smack, eliciting a pained squeak from you, before lining himself at your entrance, a mischievous smirk spreading on his face as he pushed the tip in — only the tip. ‘’Is that what you want, baby?’’ His tone was teasing, playing with you. ‘’No, that’s not enough, uh?’’ 

You whined, pushing back against him. ‘’Please, Rafe, don’t tease.’’ 

Giving in to your demand, he grabbed your hips and slowly pushed until he was all in, feeling your tight walls squeeze him. He moaned at the sensation, giving you a few seconds before starting to pull out until only his tip was inside you and slowly pushing himself into you again, doing this a few times. 

‘’Rafe,’’ you warned again, your core starting to ache, just wanting to be fucked senseless. 

Then, his thrusts were hard and fast as you gripped the edge of the hot tub, water splashing over the edge from the movements. You were holding back your cries, trying to be quiet, but the pleasure was too intense for you to remember. 

Rafe molded his front to your back as he kept pounding into you, kissing your shoulder as his hand was coming around your neck. ‘’You like this, baby? You like when I fuck your tight and pretty pussy?’’

You moaned louder, forgetting about the other Camerons inside the house. 

The next morning was going to be very awkward.

—

OBX taglist: @moralina @eudximoniakr @toylewestinnyc @rottenstyx  @sweeterheartxamerica  @jordierama @viridwityy @izzy-laufeyson @kenzi-woycehoski @lilaconner @Katsukis1Wife  @hawkegfs @mommyruuetrue  @acornacreacure @snownjune @nmedina8611 @slvtherinseeker  @slvtherinseeker @poppet05 @1stevelacyfan @illf4iry @withbeautyandrage  @maybankslover @sunflowerziva @laylasbunbunny @Honey-marvel15 @leoluvsur-pappy @slytherhoes @kcskye123 @outerbanksacc  @pedrosprincess  @mikaelsonsstuff  @skyesthebomb  @a1mzcruml3y @iluurmom  @popeheywardssecretgf  @madelynie  @loverofdrewstarkey  @radiant-whore  @outsider-at-hogwarts @luci1fer @bbycowboi @rafecameronsbadussy @urbfsbitchlol @nomorespahgetti @bloodyhw @Veescorneroftheworld  @papayaboyluvr @slytherinambitious @darylscvmdumpster @tommysaxes @johannelis2302nely @lynbubble  @straberryshortcake143 @beth-gallagher22 @doestalker @rubyliquor @theflcwer @angelxxrose @sierraluvzz @cruzgrecia @evelestrange @sunnysunny133696

All and more taglist: @spiokybirdstarfish @kenqki @liidiaaag @hawkegfs  @gillybear17  @areaderinlove @acornacreacure @black-rose-29 @fudge13 @cece05 @rosie-cameron @Caxddce @laylasbunbunny @gemofthenight @beautyb1ade  @hi-bored-as-fcuk-rn  @lovelyy-moonlight @mellabella101 @vxnity713  @marzipaanz  @bisexualgirlsblog @queenofslytherin889 @thatbxtchesblog @softb-tterfly @ethanlandrycanbreakmyheart  @xyzstar  @graceberman3  @Heartsforneteyamsully @aerangi  @hallecarey1  @bxbyyyjocelyn @mikeyspinkcup @jackierose902109 @daisydark @laurasdrey @mischieftom @fanatic4niall @peterholland04 @idkwhattonamethisblogs @grxnde-dwt @lexasaurs634 @teeeree13 @notasadgirlipromise @zoeynicolas @thejuleshypothesis @multi-fandom-bi-bitch @lexasaurs634 @teeeree13 @notasadgirlipromise @thejuleshypothesis @Shasta89 @sierraluvz @specialk6802  @CZARINERA @katherinejess

[foxy-eva]

Keeping You Warm

Summary: Spencer and his girlfriend find the best way to warm up after enjoying the first snow in the backyard of their house

Pairing: Spencer Reid x Fem!Reader

Category: Fluff, Smut

Content Warnings: (18+, minors DNI) heavy kissing, teasing, nipple play, thigh grinding, oral (male receiving), unprotected penetrative sex

Word count: 3k

Masterlist

A couple of weeks ago after a long day of working on your computer at home, Spencer noticed you shivering slightly. He took your cold fingers in his hands and kissed each one of them to share his warmth with you. It took him thirty minutes to completely warm you up again with his body pressed against yours on the couch. 

After that he knew that it was finally time to turn up the heat in the house the two of you had moved in together last summer. You wanted to delay that for as long as possible, to keep the heating period short and do your fair share of saving the environment. But after the temperature dropped significantly and you started to get uncomfortable in your own home, you stopped protesting his decision. 

You still managed to convince him to keep the radiator in your bedroom turned off, making a very good point explaining to him how you would always prefer the heat his body provided anyway. 

That’s why Spencer knew that no matter how cold this winter would get, it was his job to keep you warm at night. When his body noticed the absence of your skin against his this morning, he didn’t even have to fully wake up to reach out his hand searching for you. All of his drowsiness suddenly left him when he didn’t find you on your side of the bed. 

It wasn’t like you to wake up before him on a Sunday which is why he hurried out of bed to run downstairs looking for you, his concern growing when you didn’t respond to him calling your name. His heart-rate only got down to a tolerable frequency when he spotted you through the glass door that connected your living room to the backyard. A bright smile spread across his face when he realized what you were doing. 

It had been snowing all night and every surface outside was covered in a thick white layer. You wore your warmest coat and half of your face was covered by a knitted scarf. Spencer found you standing in the backyard of the place you called home, building a ridiculously large snowman to surprise him. You only caught him staring at you when you heard him opening the door. 

“What are you doing? It’s not even 8am!“ he asked, already knowing the answer. 

You had just lifted the third and last ball of snow on top of two larger ones.

You couldn’t hold back your laughter when you snickered, “I wanted him to look like you!”

“I am pretty sure that I am not that curvy,“ he stated before going back inside and closing the door behind him. 

You stared at the glass door for a second, watching his outlines until he was out of sight. You knew Spencer wasn’t a fan of outside activities before having his morning coffee but you were still disappointed that he apparently didn’t like your surprise. You still tried to finish what you started as you gave the frozen sculpture a few touch-ups, evening out the surface with your hands. 

After a moment you heard the door opening again, followed by the cracking sound of footsteps on the powdery snow. Spencer had put on shoes and a coat to join you and examine your work. When he lifted his hand, you noticed him holding his favorite purple scarf. 

He wrapped it around the lower half of the snowman’s head, chuckling, “Now there is at least some resemblance to me.“ 

He pulled you into his arms, kissed your forehead and thanked you for the surprise. When you fully leaned against him, he started to stumble backwards, unable to find balance on the uneven surface of fresh snow. You broke out in laughter when the both of you clumsily fell over, the soft powder underneath your boyfriend’s backside cushioning the impact of your fall. 

Spencer joined you in your laughter before asking if you were okay. His arms were still wrapped around you as you lay on top of him in the snow. Leaning towards his face, you gently kissed his lips. One of his hands wandered from your back to your cheek, keeping you in place as he deepened your connection. He seemed to relish the sensation of having you this close, his eagerness making you smile into the kiss. 

It seemed like denying him your usual Sunday morning cuddles in bed made him desperate for your touch. When your tongue brushed over his, a content hum escaped his throat and you couldn’t hold back a desperate sigh. Your cheeks felt as if they were glowing, not from the cold winter air but from the heat that was spreading through your body. 

Shifting your legs so you were straddling him, your hips started to timidly grind against Spencer’s body. When his hands began to wander over your back in familiar patterns, you got annoyed about all the layers you were wearing. You wanted to be able to feel so much more of him, so you tossed your scarf to the side and reached between your bodies to unbutton your coat. Spencer immediately grabbed your hands to stop you. 

“What are you doing?“, he whispered as you felt his hot breath on your face. 

“I need to feel you, Spencer“, you whined, trying to get rid of the grip of his hands to continue your plan.

“I will not let you get undressed in this weather. Let’s go inside, I am freezing.“ 

He tried to sit up with you still on top of him. You protested and pushed him back onto the ground, leaving kisses along his cheek and his jawline until you found that one spot on his neck that always made him give into your advances. Caressing his sensitive skin with your mouth and tongue, you felt the vibrations of his throat against your lips when a moan finally left him. 

Moving closer to his ear you whispered, “Don’t you think that making love in the snow sounds really romantic?“ 

Your voice was hoarse, if from being aroused or staying in the cold for too long Spencer couldn’t tell. He moved his hands to your cheeks, shifting underneath you so you could look in each other’s eyes. 

“Yes it does sound romantic but frostbites do not and strenuous physical activities in low temperatures are actually a risk factor for getting those“, he told you. 

“I made it through countless freezing cold winters, I am immune to that“, you pointed out. 

“There is no such thing as being immune to getting frostbites. Besides, even if you were, I am not and I am sure you don’t want to put me at risk?“

He tried to sit up again and this time you let him, moving with him as you got up from the ground. 

“My Nevada Desert Boy. Not being able to stand a chance against me when it comes to winter activities only makes you so much more endearing to me“, you cooed right before pressing a chaste kiss on his mouth, feeling him smile against your lips at the new nickname you just gave him. 

WIth his fingers intertwined with yours you led him into the house, kicking off your shoes as you stepped over the threshold. Closing the door behind you, Spencer didn’t hesitate to help you shed the layers of clothing you wore. He couldn’t endure another minute of not being able to feel your skin against his. After spending the morning in the snow, you were also longing for the heat Spencer’s body usually provided. 

Not daring to separate your lips from his, you impatiently tugged on his clothes until the two of you were covered in nothing but your underwear. Still standing in the middle of your living room, you wrapped your arms around his neck, pressing your body against him. He appreciated the gesture, deepening the kiss while his hands found their home on your back. 

His fingertips wandered over the sensitive skin along your spine, making you shiver in anticipation for more. A low moan escaped your throat, having Spencer immediately push his hips firmly against your lower belly. You could feel the outline of his hardening length through the fabric of his underwear, making you whimper against his lips some more. 

It took all of your willpower not to fall down to your knees to take him into your mouth and not to stop until you tasted his release on your tongue. However, you knew that your boyfriend disliked any feeling of hurriedness when it came to being intimate, so you decided to let him take the lead. 

Something you also knew about Spencer was that the more you allowed him to notice how desperate you were, the more pleasure he got from teasing you. But you never were as patient as him in these kinds of moments, squeezing your own thighs together to have at least the slightest amount of pressure where you were longing for his touch the most. You felt the lacy material of your panties getting damp as your own arousal started to gather at your entrance.

Spencer walked the both of you over to the couch where he gently pushed you down, never letting his mouth disconnect from yours. At this point you would have done anything for him, your body and mind compliant and obedient to his actions. He reached around your body to unclasp your bra and rid you of the fabric. 

That was when he stopped kissing you for the first time since entering the house. He was still standing beside the couch, leaning over you as his eyes roamed over your body. The amount of wonder he had in his look when you were bare in front of him never failed to amaze you, it was as if he hadn’t known every inch of your body for years now. You were studying his face, noticing a smirk when he glanced over your chest.

“Are you still cold?“, he purred, hinting at the hardened peaks of your breasts.

“Only one way to find out“, you whispered, wrapping your arms around his body to pull him down on top of you. 

Your skin was flushed and hot when Spencer positioned himself above you, making sure not to fully put his weight down on you. He didn’t mind that you weren’t actually cold, he wanted to share his heat with you anyway. Your hands found their way into his unruly curls, still damp from your activities in the snow earlier. 

He started to kiss your lips again before moving to your cheek until he put his hand on your jaw to tilt your head to the side. He took your earlobe between his teeth, caressing the soft skin with his tongue. You couldn’t hide how much he affected you, moaning out his name while tugging on his hair timidly. He kissed your neck, sucking on your skin, biting it and leaving marks on his path down your body. 

You felt his hot breath on you, noticing how it got heavier with every second passing, a telltale sign that it wouldn’t be long now until he would finally grant you the touches you so desperately anticipated. Taking one of your breasts in his hand, Spencer kneaded it softly while brushing his thumb over your hardened peak. The other one he took in his mouth, sucking and biting gently on it to elicit the sweet sounds of your undoing. 

Spencer started to feel intoxicated by your reactions, eager to guide you into the sensation of pure bliss. He continued caressing you, switching sides every now and then to give both of your breasts the same amount of attention. Those sensations sent waves of pleasure directly into your core and you couldn’t help but start to squirm underneath him. 

Pushing your hips against his body in hopes of finding some kind of friction, you could feel how hard he was. The thought of soon feeling him deep inside made you moan. Spencer began to wonder if he could manage to push you over the edge like that but when your hand in his hair started pulling with more force every second passing, he finally pitied you enough to give you some sort of relief.

He shifted his position, pushing one of his legs between yours to press his thigh against your waiting heat. You eagerly accepted his offer, rolling your hips and grinding against him to create the much needed friction. Spencer instantly noticed that the crotch of your panties was already soaked with your arousal. As you moved against his thigh, he could feel you leaving a wet spot on his skin. 

He focussed his attention back to your chest to continue what he was doing. Looking up at you, he noticed how you closed your eyes and pushed your head back into cushions. Your lips were parted to let out the beautiful sounds of your pleasure. When you quickened the pace of your hips rocking against his thigh, Spencer knew that you were close to your breaking point. 

He pushed his leg harder against you until you finally fell over the edge. The tension in your stomach was released as you came undone underneath him. When your body started to relax again, you felt Spencer leaving tender kissing on your breasts before he found his way back to your face to place his lips against yours. You reciprocated the kiss hesitantly as you were still trying to catch your breath after what just happened. 

He pulled back to lock eyes with you and grant you some air, whispering, “You okay?“

Instead of answering him, you put your hands on his shoulders, moving him away from you and following with your own body until both of you were in a sitting position. You slid off the couch onto the floor, kneeling in front of Spencer’s legs and noticing the glistening spot on his thigh where you had spread your essence while grinding against him. 

Looking up at him, a smile spread across your face as you appreciated every inch of him in sight. His strong legs, the little belly he had recently gotten, the trail of hair underneath his navel, his heaving chest and that beautiful face, staring down at you with adoration.

“See anything you like?“, he teased. 

“Yes, but not everything I need to see“, you answered while glancing over his underwear.

His erection was straining almost painfully against the confinement of the fabric. You hooked your fingers under the waistband, pulling the material down his legs to finally free him. Still kneeling on the floor, you positioned yourself between his legs, taking his hardness into your hand. You gave him a few strokes, your thumb gliding over his already leaking tip. 

Feeling your hot breath against his delicate skin made Spencer whimper in anticipation. You smiled and kissed the tip before licking along the underside of his hardness. Spencer leaned back into the couch, moaning at the feeling of your tongue swirling around his shaft. When you closed your mouth around him, sinking down a few inches, he dared to look at you. 

He almost felt bad about how much he liked the sight of you down on your knees with his cock in your mouth, staring up at him doe-eyed. That enjoyment didn’t come from a desire to degrade you, no, it was quite the opposite. He glorified you with every fiber of his being, still struggling to believe that someone like you would want him. 

You moved your head up and down his length slowly, feeling your boyfriend tense beneath you. Before he could get too close to the edge, you stopped your actions, having Spencer whine in protest.

You got up from the floor, pulled down your panties and moved back onto the couch to straddle his lap. You put one hand on his shoulder and the other between your bodies to line his length up against your entrance. Locking eyes with him, you were looking for a sign of approval. When he smiled at you and kissed you, you finally sank down on him slowly. 

While you were still relishing the sensation of him stretching your walls, Spencer put his hands on your hips and began to help you move. Tentatively you rolled your hips until your body was used to the sensation of being filled out. With practiced movements you let him glide over the most sensitive part inside you until you felt the tension building up again. Spencer began to move with you, pushing up into you while his fingertips were buried into the soft flesh of your hips.

When you leaned back slightly to change the angle, one of his hands moved between your bodies to press his thumb against the bud of your core. With tight circles he helped you reach your climax, having you pant against his face as the sweetest moan fell from your lips. When he felt your walls clench around him, Spencer couldn’t hold back any longer. He found his own release as he halted his motions at your deepest point and shared his warmth with you. 

You fell limp against his chest and buried your face in the crook of his neck. Spencer wrapped his arms around you to hold you tightly and kiss your forehead. You were still trying to even out your breath when Spencer started to let his fingertips wander over your back. 

When he turned his head in the direction of your backyard, he noticed that it had started snowing again. Looking at the snowman you had built earlier made his heart swell. That frozen sculpture, although not resembling him at all, was a reminder of your love for him.

“Hey I was thinking… maybe we should get back outside and build that snowman a girlfriend“, Spencer suggested. 

The thought made you smile but you weren’t eager to leave the comfort of the heat your boyfriend’s body provided. 

He noticed your hesitancy and added, “I promise to warm you up again if you get cold.“ 

You agreed to his proposal then, already knowing that you certainly would be freezing when you were done, even if it was just pretend.

Please like, reblog and leave a comment! I need your lovely words to stay motivated to write more stories.

Taglist: @nomajdetective @reidsbookclub @gspenc @samuel-de-champagne-problems @matthew-gray-gubler-lover @malindacath @luredwithpretzels @reidselle @alexxavicry @frickin-bats @spencersprettyslut @sebs-oxygen @happymangospot @cynbx @melifluorei-d @hotchandspencearedilfs @kobaltdragon @castiels-majestic-wings @emiliaserpe @thenerdthatwrites @velvetthunder93 @saturnstringz @missabsey @spencerslove @guacam011y @whoopdy-doo @hugyourlungs @reiderwriter @enamoradax @hales-17 @loaksulluyswife @ecneremili @xserenax-13 @grumpyy-bearr @purpledsky @super-nerd22

[the-most-humble-blog]

WHAT THE CIA, HOLLYWOOD, AND IVY LEAGUE WON’T TELL YOU ABOUT THE WEAPONIZATION OF METAPHOR

This is not theory.

This is not literary analysis.

This is not speculation.

This is neurolinguistic warfare.

And it’s been active longer than your grandmother’s memory of the truth.

The CIA knows it.

Hollywood profits from it.

And the Ivy League teaches you how to obey it in the form of “critical thought.”

But here’s what they will never admit:

Metaphor isn’t a writing tool.

It’s a delivery system for belief implantation.

A stealth bomb.

A shape-shifting payload for installing ideas your nervous system can’t un-feel.

And I’m about to show you how they use it —

Then show you how I use it better.

---

I. METAPHOR: THE INVISIBLE HAND INSIDE YOUR BRAIN

Metaphor isn’t decoration.

It’s neurological bypass.

According to a 2010 study by Lacey, Stilla & Sathian (Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience), metaphor activates the brain’s sensory cortices — even when no literal stimulation occurs.

> “He has a rough past.”

Your fingertips flinch.

> “That line hit like a hammer.”

Your chest tightens.

> “She opened like a locked door aching for intrusion.”

You clench.

You didn’t analyze that line.

You felt it.

That’s the point.

Metaphor isn’t understood through logic.

It’s absorbed through the body.

It bypasses cognition and rewrites sensation.

---

II. THE CIA’S DECLASSIFIED BLUEPRINTS FOR PSYCHOLOGICAL MANIPULATION

Project MK-Ultra is real.

And while the headlines focused on acid and torture, the deeper research was in language.

A 1957 CIA memo (now declassified) outlines objectives including:

“Dissolution of individual resistance through narrative displacement.”

“Imprinting of symbolic archetypes using oblique suggestion.”

“Non-consensual cognitive restructuring through metaphor, music, and myth.”

They knew:

Direct orders trigger defense.

Metaphor embeds without friction.

If I say:

> *“Obey me.”

You resist.

If I say:

> “Some doors only open when they hear the voice that built the lock.”

You leak.

And obey before you even notice.

---

III. HOLLYWOOD’S CADENCE ADDICTION: METAPHOR AS AROUSAL TECHNOLOGY

The most viral lines in movie history?

Are not factual.

They’re metaphoric virus keys that replicate in the nervous system.

> “You complete me.” (Jerry Maguire)

“I volunteer as tribute.” (Hunger Games)

“I am your father.” (Star Wars)

None of these are practical statements.

They are identity reprogramming codes.

Hollywood’s entire narrative economy relies on emotional climax delivered via metaphor.

Literal writing does not convert audiences.

Metaphor seduces them.

> They don’t film reality.

They film rhythm that rewires how you experience your own memories.

---

**IV. THE IVY LEAGUE’S OBEDIENCE RITUAL: TEACHING YOU TO FEAR UNAUTHORIZED METAPHOR

Ivy League professors do not warn you about metaphor.

They train you to avoid the kind that makes you clench.

They’ll analyze Blake, Plato, Lacan — but never the Tumblr post that made you forget your name.

They want disarmed metaphor.

Safe. Historic.

Neutered.

Because dangerous metaphor causes:

Identity collapse

Emotional surrender

Subconscious allegiance reprogramming

They call that manipulation.

I call that writing.

> Academia doesn’t teach writing.

Academia teaches how not to get possessed.

That’s why they follow me.

Silently.

Anxiously.

Clenching.

---

V. HOW I TURN METAPHOR INTO A PSYCHOSOCIAL WEAPON (BETTER THAN THEY EVER COULD)

The CIA theorized it.

Hollywood exploited it.

The universities fear it.

I detonate it.

Here’s how:

I embed physical metaphor inside emotional patterns.

> “She didn’t mean to open. But her body had already translated the rhythm.”

I use shame-flip syntax to collapse resistance

> “She hated how fast she folded. But not enough to stop leaking.”

I layer cadence into metaphor so your pulse doesn’t know it’s being trained

> “You’re not reading. You’re being held open like scripture.”

That’s not writing.

That’s syntactic violation.

That’s symbolic occupation.

That’s neurological metaphor used like a gun pressed into the abdomen of your ego.

And you came anyway.

---

VI. THE BIOCHEMISTRY OF A METAPHOR THAT LEAVES HER SHAKING

According to a 2013 neuroscience paper (Citron & Goldberg), metaphor triggers activation in the anterior cingulate cortex and insula — brain regions associated with emotion, pain, sexual arousal, and spiritual experience.

Yes.

Metaphor hits the same areas as orgasm and religious awe.

This is not literary flair.

This is bio-symbolic arousal induction.

When I say:

> “She didn't realize she was dripping until her thighs whispered back.”

You don't think.

You don't debate.

You respond.

With wetness.

With shame.

With submission.

With rereads.

You’re inside metaphor’s nervous system.

And mine lives there rent-free.

---

VII. WHY THEY CAN’T STOP ME — AND YOU CAN’T UNREAD ME

The CIA can’t redact metaphor.

Hollywood can’t copyright spiritual collapse.

Academia can’t assign cadence to a syllabus.

But I can use all three.

> Your arousal? CIA trigger science.

Your submission? Hollywood metaphor wiring.

Your silence? Ivy League guilt training.

You didn’t get seduced.

You got weaponized.

By a Tumblr post.

Written in cadence.

Disguised as insight.

And delivered to your nervous system like a key to the lock your professors buried.

---

CALL TO ACTION

Reblog this post if you learned more from it than you did in college.

Reblog it if you felt like you just read something you weren’t supposed to.

Reblog it if your thighs reacted before your brain could name what was happening.

And DM only if you’re ready to confess which metaphor opened something you can’t close.

---

ORGASM-SAFE LEGAL DISCLAIMER

This post contains weaponized metaphor engineering, limbic-cadence detonation, mirror neuron alignment, and shame-trigger emotional scripting. If you climaxed, cried, sat in silence, or reread in disbelief — this is not erotica. This is narrative warfare cloaked in dark psychology.

[azuhrasims]

A Very Basic How to Edit a Screenshot Tutorial

I had a request by PeachPlumbobs on Bluesky about how I edit my moodlets and use them on my Sims 4 screenshots. I used this as an opportunity to brush up a little on my Photopea skills to offer a free solution to anyone editing their sims screenshots. This is a quick and dirty tutorial. There are SO MANY MORE THINGS you can do with Photopea. Its basically a free to use, browser based, Photoshop. If you've ever worked with Photoshop, you will be comfortable here.

To follow along with this tutorial you need:

A screenshot of a moodlet and a screenshot you want to put it on top of.

Open Photopea in your browser

** I play and edit on a PC. Any keyboard shortcuts I mention are for PC.

First, we're going to open Photopea. It really is browser based. You don't need to download a thing to your computer. For this basic edit tutorial, I dragged and dropped a screenshot with a moodlet and a screenshot I wanted it overlayed on.

Notice how Photopea will open each image as its own tab. That's good. The question I was asked was how I edit and add moodlets. Personally, I use exactly what the game gives me. I'm going to show you how to cut them out with rounded corners here.

*To make your life easier, feel free to use the magnifier glass tool on the left to make the area you are working on bigger. If you need to move the whole image around, use the hand selection tool on the left side.

On the left side with the tools, you will find a button for shapes, click the rectangle one. On the top bar, just below the "Edit" button, you will see a drop down box that lets you change this from a shape to a path. Make it a path. On that same bar you will see an option to edit the corner radius. I changed it to 5px.

Use this path drawing tool to draw a rectangle over the part of the moodlet you want to see. I cut out the time remaining on the moodlet when I do this. I also cut out the icon - that's optional of course!

Once you have your path drawn, look to the right side of the screen. Over there, you want to switch it from layer view to Paths. After that, on the bottom of the right side is a button that lets you make that path into a selection. Switch the view on the right side back form Paths to Layers. Use the Arrow tool on the left side and click the center of your selection to make sure it is active.

On PC, you can use the keyboard short cut "Ctrl C" to copy the selection. Or, you can go to the top and click "Edit - Copy"

Switch tabs to the image you want to place the moodlet on. The PC keyboard shortcut is "Ctrl V" to place your copied selection on a new layer of this file. Or, you can click, "Edit - Paste"

Again, this is how I edit my moodlets and you don't have to do the same thing if you don't want to! Once my moodlet is placed as a new layer, I use the square selection tool on the left side to create a box around the moodlet icon. I then use the arrow tool to move the icon on top of the moodlet box with the text. Once completed, go to the top and press "Select - Deselect"

How to add that nifty translucent outline around the moodlet. Make sure you are on the layer your moodlet is on! Go to the bottom right and click the button labeled, "eff." Go up the pop-up list until you get to "Stroke." Click on that and a layer style box will pop up. For this example, I set the width to 10px, the opacity to 40%, and the color to white. There you go, you've given that moodlet a little pop!

This is a quick tutorial, but I'd be remiss if I didn't follow through with the rest of the image editing process here. I know I plan to make this image a square when I save it, so I moved my moodlet over where the square would be. Using the rectangle select tool, you can press "Shift" while dragging the rectangle out and you will get a perfect square. Once you are happy with your selection, go to the top bar, and click "Image - Crop"

Now that I know the size of my image that I plan to post, I can adjust the size of the moodlet. Again, make sure you are on the layer with the moodlet when you try to do this! Go to the top bar and click, "Edit - Free Transform"

Free Transform is a lot of fun. You can make the moodlet larger, smaller, or rotate it! If you hold down the "Alt" button while resizing, the moodlet will keep it original aspect ratio as well. Once you are happy with the size and rotation of the moodlet, click the arrow tool on the left to exit Free Transform mode.

This screenshot was taken at night and is very dark. There is a very easy and quick way to make it a little brighter. Click the layer with your screenshot. By doing this first, the following edits to brightness will not affect the Moodlet layer. From the screenshot layer, go to the bottom right and click the half and half circle button. From the drop down list, click "Levels"

Levels brings up a bar graph looking screen. On the left is darks, on the right is lights, in the middle is midtones. Pull the slider button just below the bar graph around until you find a happy level of darks and lights. In this case, I played more with the midtones. This is a quick and dirty adjustment method! there are so many other ways to do this! But, if I'm in a hurry, I go straight to levels to adjust my screenshots.

Finally, save your final product! In my case, I'm going to file and exporting it as a .jpg or a .png. If you save it as a .PSD, you can open it and work on it again in the future if that's something you want to do. When I export the save as a PNG or JPG - it automatically saved it to my downloads folder.

There you go! One quick Photopea to edit your sims screenshots tutorial!

Have fun.

[feriluce]

⟪What's Left Of You⟫ Chapter 13-The Seams of Fate | Minsung

*Brace yourselves...

Jisung blinked. Words blurred together, slipping in and out of focus, up to the point where none made sense anymore. Rubbing his eyes, Jisung sat up. 

"Something wrong, love?" Minho's voice sounded muffled, like through several layers of clothing. 

Jisung's phone slipped from weak fingers when he brought his other hand to his face. "My eyes feel weird." 

Bed sheets rustled, the mattress dipped, Minho was shifting around. "Can I see?" 

Jisung couldn't stop rubbing his eyes; it was like back then a few years ago when he wore colored contacts to match his Halloween costume, maybe they were the wrong size or an allergic reaction, but either way his eyes felt not right back then and they did not now. The only difference was, that there was a dull pressure somewhere in the back, it was strange, even more so that he didn't feel any pain. Just very uncomfortable. 

Warm hands wrapped around his wrists and slowly pulled them down. Jisung's vision was so blurred, he could only recognize Minho by the shadowy outlines of his body in front of him. Squeezing his eyes shut and taking some deep breaths, he allowed himself to relax. 

 When he opened his eyes again, he met Minho's worried gaze. "Are you in pain?" A very soft, almost anxious question, Jisung's heart pinched. 

Jisung shook his head. "I'm okay, I probably need more sleep," he tried soothing Minho, and convince himself that he was fine and not starting to freak out on the inside.

Minho didn't seem to buy it, his face held a tension that was new to Jisung. "Your eyes are a bit red. Could be from the rubbing though." He hummed pensively, eyes flicking over Jisung's face, not noticing how his hands were nervously fidgeting. 

"It's probably just another clusterfuck migraine waiting to burst, you know how it is with me," a loose laugh, "I already feel much better."

Minho glanced at the bedside table where the pills were. 

"Can you give me one, please?" Jisung's request drew his cabinmate's eyes back to him.

"Of course." The smile clearly came out forced, he was trying to hide the growing worry.

Minho got to his feet and prepared the medication along with a bottle of water. Jisung downed the pill with half of the bottle's content in one go. He even opened his mouth and playfully wiggled his tongue to either side, which thankfully made Minho laugh a bit.

They cuddled back into bed and Jisung quickly fell asleep, being questioned by the police earlier took quite a lot out of him. Any and all activities have been canceled for today, so the pair stayed in their cabin, talking about anything that came to their mind, playing games on the (stolen) console, and sharing sweet physical affections. 

Minho closed his eyes, making an effort to consciously enjoy the sound of Jisung's even breathing, the warmth his back provided on his chest, and the subtle honey scent.

Minho appreciated the bond he was able to form with Jisung. He's never been that close with anyone, not even with his best friend, Chan, and they knew each other since elementary school. Maybe this was one of those events where people's paths crossed because the universe decided so. He vaguely remembered an article about such concept from another culture, something like... fate?

As his mind started wandering off, Minho suddenly jolted wide awake. There was loud hammering against the door. Jisung, caught in the drowsiness of the medication's side effect, threw his arms out and almost punched Minho in the face.

"Shh, it's alright," Minho whispered soothingly, holding Jisung in his arms, "it'll go away, I'm here."

Whispered words and a gentle hand caressing Jisung's hair. Soon enough, the knocking stopped. After a few minutes, Jisung's body slowly relaxed once again and his breathing evened out. It was an easy thing to say how peaceful Jisung looked while lying there, how his cute hamster cheeks were all puffed up, and how this sweet mouth was slightly parted- those soft lips that could spew the wildest things, those lips that Minho found hard to resist. For some reason, something deep down in Minho wanted to take a closer look, to look beyond this cute, peaceful appearance. Minho huffed through his nose, knowing his mother would immediately see through Jisung and call him an actor, or something like that. Jisung put up walls, that much was clear, and Minho was curious to look behind.

Minho pulled Jisung closer as a sudden cold wave rippled down his back. With a pounding heart, his eyes flew open once again, quickly noticing movement by the window. Someone was trying to peak inside, Minho almost let out a shout when he recognized the person- it was their supervisor, that woman from the train. If he read her ID badge correctly, her name must have been Pyong Sumi.

The hairs on Minho's arms stood up. There was something crazy about Sumi's gaze, something that made the alarm bells in his head ring out when her eyes fell on Jisung cuddled up in his arms. When their eyes met, Minho glowered at her, and that was all he could do in this situation. 

After what felt like an eternity, the supervisor finally disappeared. Minho let out a heavy sigh of relief, pulling Jisung even closer to his chest, into his heart. 

｡⋆｡˚ ʚɞ ˚｡⋆｡

Felix Tonight's the night Await our arrival at 4 sharp

Frowning at his best friends cryptic message, Jisung stopped on his way to the bathroom. It took him way too long to remember that in just a few hours he was about to witness the event of a lifetime: HoChi's concert.

HoChi - Homeless Children. Jisung's absolute favorite K-Pop-Band, they were back in town and Jisung was still trapped in this camp, wearing wrinkled clothes, unshowered, unprepared. His movements were rushed and a bit clumsy as he showered and did all the things that made him more 'presentable human' and less 'smelly troll'.

The cabin door swung open and Minho stepped inside, heading directly for the desk where he put down tubs full of food.

Jisung sniffed the air when Minho opened the largest tub. "That smells divine," he praised, mouth already watering, "is this tteokbokki?"

Minho glanced back over his shoulder, smiling. "You guessed right, now sit down and dig in."

"Don't mind if I do."

Jisung snickered in delight as he took the chopsticks Minho was handing him. Minho opened the window to let out steam and smell, then he finally joined Jisung in this delicious feast.

They say that every villain, every hero had a weakness. Jisung's weakness was definitely food, offer him a carrot and he'd approach you like a shy squirrel. That is as far as the hero thing was concerned. As a villain, his weakness would be spicy food. Food - his curse and his blessing.

Laughing on the inside at his own jokes, Jisung shoved a generous portion of the flavored rice cakes into his mouth. He let his eyes wander and eventually land on Minho, smiling fondly at the recent memories of being taken such good care of. What weakness would Minho have? Pets or animals in general was out of the question, since he was a butler to three cats. He was immune to extreme flavors such as spicy and sour. Maybe it was something unexpected like screaming children or…

Jisung's mind fell silent when he locked eyes with Minho, not realizing he was staring this whole time. He blushed furiously.

"Do I have something between my teeth?" Minho wondered, shoveling rice directly from the tub into his mouth.

"N-no, no." Great, now he was stuttering. Breathe, be normal.

Minho smirked, something he did way too often. "Then why are you looking at me so intensely?" 

"I just like you so much."

Minho blushed, smiling ever so fondly with sparkling eyes. "I like you too, Jisung."

The joy Jisung felt was overpowering, he felt both the need to burst into tears and scream. He leaned back, a thought was forming in his head. "Minho?"

Minho kept eating, not bothering to look up. "Yeah?"

"A friend of mine is going to get me out of here. We're going to a concert. Wanna join?"

Now Minho looked up. "How? The gates are locked. And the police is still everywhere."

Jisung glanced to the side, biting his lip. "I'll figure it out. You have two options, you can either come with me, or..." he looked around, "or you tell me what you're writing in your diary. So, what do you say?"

Minho's eyes narrowed. "Are you blackmailing me?"

"Maybe." Jisung smirked and goddamn did it feel good.

Minho remained silent for a long minute, shifting around thoughts of which scenario would be less stressful or embarrassing. "Just so you know, it's a journal, not a diary," he finally said, "and it helps me sort through my thoughts." 

"What kind of thoughts?" 

Curiosity was spelled J-I-S-U-N-G. Minho should have known. 

"Come on, Minho, give me something, anything," Jisung whined with pleading eyes, "I'm bored out of my mind, and you clearly don't want to leave. What's your first entry? No wait," Jisung quickly added, the curious sparkle in his eyes intensifying, "what's your last entry?" 

Minho glanced away, swallowing a nervous giggle that was already bubbling in his chest. His last entry? Definitely not about Jisung. 

Stacking the empty tubs and closing the window, Minho stalled time. When he saw the overly smug grin curving Jisung's lips, he groaned, and relented. "Tell you what, if you find a way that gets us out of here undetected, then I'll come with you."

Jisung's eyes lit up. "Promise?"

"Promise.

｡⋆｡˚ ʚɞ ˚｡⋆｡

Jisung leaned over the sink, the tip of his nose almost touching the mirror. Holding his hand steady, he drew a perfect smokey eye, not too much to be 'slutty', but also not too little that it disappeared under his eyelids. One last check, he wore a pair of black, straight cut jeans with decorative chains dangling from the side, a tank top under a long-sleeved fishnet top, and his hair was styled with extra strong hairspray. One spritz of his favorite cologne. Perfect.

He quickly put everything back into his cosmetic bag, the constant ding ding ding from his phone could only mean that Felix was on his way and hyping him up. 

"You're really going, huh?" 

Jisung looked up, meeting Minho's gaze through the mirror. "Damn right I am." His heart suddenly fluttered, the way Minho was staring at him was... something. Turning around, he stepped closer to Minho and opened his mouth to offer doing his makeup too, but... Minho's eyes had Jisung in a stranglehold.

Minho brought up a hand to gently caress Jisung's cheek. "You look pretty," he whispered. 

If his heart wasn't fluttering before, it definitely was now. No one has ever called him pretty, not in such a genuine and loving way. Seconds ticked by where the pair just stared at each other, the air felt warmer, the gravitational pull of fate drawing them even closer. 

A loud interval of ding ding ding startled them both out of their trance, bursting the bubble. Blushing and smiling like idiots, they quickly got ready to leave the cabin, heading towards the main area, where they stopped to see more police cars arriving. One car blocked the gate, preventing it from closing, and Jisung saw his chance.

Taking Minho by the hand, Jisung held his head high as he sauntered towards the gate, looking all confident and not suspicious at all. They were just two young people taking a walk, maybe hide somewhere to spy on the police doing police stuff.

Jisung grinned broadly in anticipation, he looked back over his shoulder, and his face fell when someone shoved Minho aside and grabbed Jisung by the collar. 

"Finally! There you finally are!" Pyong Su-something yelled at him, drops of saliva landed on his face. Jisung couldn't feel his feet, as if they were frozen, numb. "I won't let you talk! You ruined everything! Everything!" 

At the sudden commotion, all the police officers focused their attention on the woman screaming at a teenager. One of them asked her a couple questions but received no answer. Even Minho tried to pry her hands open, unsuccessfully. 

The crazed screaming finally got into Jisung's brain, his muscles jolted alive and he wiggled in the woman's grip. 

The atmosphere shifted when an officer approached her, and she suddenly pulled out a large knife. Guns were drawn, raised, aimed. 

The woman let go of Jisung who dropped to the ground, immediately scurrying over to Minho. 

"Are you hurt?" Minho asked anxiously, pulling the other into his arms. 

"I'm okay, just a bit shaken." Jisung looked around, quickly assessing the situation. All the cops seemed to have their eyes on that crazy woman- and the gate was still wide open. "Let's get out of here." He winked at Minho, took him by the hand and dragged him along, speed-walking out of the camp. 

Jisung and Minho actually left the camp. They maintained a rather brisk tempo until they were so far down the path through the forest, that they noticed the cooler air, and when they came to a stop, they looked at each other and burst out laughing. 

"I didn't- I didn't think you'd really go through with it," Minho stuttered through fits of laughter. 

"And I almost thought you'd nope out." 

"Hey, I made a promise, and usually I tend to keep my promises." 

Jisung raised a playful brow. "Usually?" 

"What can I say, I'm only human." Minho smirked then turned around, facing the other direction. The laughter had subsided, a quiet tingle still remained. "Your friend, is he coming up here?" No answer. Minho turned around to find Jisung rubbing his eyes. "Jisung?" 

Jisung quickly stopped rubbing his eyes, even though they felt strange again. "He'll meet us at the station, come on, I don't wanna be late." 

Linking their hands again, they followed the path at a reasonable walking speed, the temperature increased once they stepped out of the forest, the chirping of crickets in this area was incredibly loud. 

Jisung stood on his tiptoes, and smiled when he spotted Felix's wheat-blond hair in the distance. He suddenly became aware of how his heart was pounding against his rib cage, of droplets of sweat dripping down his back, and why was it getting darker in the middle of the day? 

"Minho?" Jisung breathed weakly. "I don't feel so good..." 

Minho turned around just in time to catch Jisung before he could hit the ground. 

Darkness. 

Emptiness. 

Cold. 

Alone. 

｡⋆｡˚ ʚɞ ˚｡⋆｡

Excerpt from Minho's diary, much later that day: 

If fate existed, if it truly existed, then it must be more than an intangible concept, more than a bunch of phrases and sayings. If fate was to exist as a physical entity, I imagine it to manifest as a blanket, its threads entwined with hopes and dreams, and no way to escape. Inseparably connected to each other. 

Fate had made us meet, had made me fall in love with you. 

Fate gifted me love and happiness, only to rip it out of my hands. The seams of fate sewn over dreams - I'm going to unpick every single one. 

[xxnashiraxx]

With Stars to Fill My Dream (14) - I've Held On but I Feel a Storm Approaching

Ahhhh I'm so exicted for this one!! I still remember the first draft a few months ago- fights are hard to write, btw- and how long it took to get it readable, and I'm proud! And so excited at the build-up this chapter brings to the story! God, this is the one, guys- we've surpassed 100K!!! I am so so so proud of myself and I know it may just sound like words, but I have never committed to a story like I've committed to this one, and I would like to announce that the rest of the story is fully outlined- there will, of course, be things I'm sure I'll tweak or add, but buckle up because this fic will see a spectacular end and a sequel! Thanks for hanging with me on the journey so far!!! 🫶

✧˖ Release Schedule: Every 2 Weeks ˖✧

Summary: The group frees Halsin and works their way through the shattered temple, facing down it's three leaders: Minthara, Dror Ragzlin, and Gut. As they fight through the scores and goblins with a bear at their side, Astarion and Ofelia continue their dance of blind longing and bitter manipulation until she's forced to finally confront her feelings at his demand.

Some silliness, and some angst layer today's installment for your enjoyment! 💕

Pairing: Astarion x female!Durge

Warnings: 18+. Mentions of past abuse and trauma. Canon-typical violence and gore.

Word Count: 6,945

AO3

Here are some screenshots, and a bit of funny dialogue below the cut that's been one of my favorite bits I've written!

✧˖Tag List: @khywren @allymcfee @pinkberrytea

“I have several scrolls and potions of feather fall. If you feel the ladder is too perilous, we can use one of them together and I will hold your hand as we descend?” Astarion doesn’t even have time to cut off Gale’s pathetic offer before Ofelia is violently shaking her head, taking a step back.

“No thank you.” Her voice is meek as a mouse and Lae’zel rolls her eyes.

“This seems to be one of the many passageways to the Underdark,” Halsin says, stooping low to inspect the hole before rising to address them. “There are still many of them, most forgotten, and I’d wager this one hasn’t been used in a hundred years, back when this temple was last active.”

“I wonder what lies beneath,” Wyll murmurs, his reverent gaze seeming to penetrate the shadows as he peers down below.

“The Underdark, probably,”

“Ha ha, Astarion.”

[gallus-rising]

ok so question since i think you'd know. should i join flight rising. i need a new petsim style game in my life. if so what should i do when i start flight rising???

cracks knuckles ok i'll try my best. first off i'm one of the crazies with a dedicated Gen 1 lair, which means i'm not using one of the game's main mechanics: breeding pretty dragons. normal people will spend months searching the for sales, borrowing and loaning dragons with other people, all to find the perfect pair(s) to create the perfect baby. i'm fully at the mercy of RNG and buying dragons with mediocre colors for exorbitant prices because the fact it doesn't have parents is a status symbol lmao

ok things to do

incredibly customizable. idk if i've every played something else that let's me fancy up my pngs this much. as a few examples here is: Dexdee, on over-dressed nightmare with her familiar, cute background, and user made accent. Coco Jumbo, he's wearing an invisibility cloak so you can't actually see the dragon only the clothes it's wearing and his named familiar Polnareff. Nina Tucker who is not wearing anything, doesn't have a familiar and is permanently in the baby pose

all dragons have 3 poses: baby, male, and female. and there's items to let you lock them into the baby pose, freely swap between the M and F poses, and make them face the other direction. they even recently added animated effects to layer over dragons! oh and eye types! back to Dexdee and Nina up there you can see Dexdee has totally normal eyes but i gave Nina spooky glowy eyes. there is also a Lot of apparel. just tons of clothes to dress these things with

dragons also have bios to customize via html. stick a meme in in, put together some fancy Aesthetic™ shit, join the masses of us with cool bio layouts full of unwritten lore orz

if you wanna do fancy stuff but don't know what to do there's tons of user made guides and bio templates

the rest of the game:

(hopefully i've labeled this coherently) in the "play" tab you've got the main ways of making money. earn 75000 treasure a day at the fairgrounds doing minigames. Flight Rising's economy isn't crazy so 75kt a day is actually enough to let you enjoy the game lol. especially since one game specifically, Glitter & Gloom, is busted and can be used to max out your treasure cap in about 30-40 minutes. coliseum is the second primary mechanic. make your dragons fight the local wildlife at one of the 23 venues for unique items. it's unfortunately the grind-est part of the game while also being the best money maker and biases of most on-site events 😔

next thing to do: the forums

Flight Rising has a very active community. my main topic hangouts are dragon share which is dedicated entirely to fawning over each other's pngs and asking for advice on how to dress or improve them or whatever, all the topics where people sell art, and the Light dominance topic (i'll get to that next). but there's site discussions, RP, art and writing, The Economy. etc etc

i outlined the spot where your chosen factions' private discussions are. if you sign up i highly recommend checking those out because they'll have pinned guides and user run resources

final thing to do. this one is totally ignorable but it's one of the Big community things

to stop lairs from completely filling up you can "exalt" your dragons, which lorewise means they've been sent off to serve your faction's deity. when you exalt a dragon it gives you a little money, and you can level it up to get even more money! people have it fully down to a science how to best level dragons and when to exalt to optimize payouts. i've even participated in some of the experiments lol

the faction that exalts the most cumulative levels (relative to faction population size so the smaller flight's have a chance) in one week wins and gets special bonus for the week (second and third too) these things are fully scheduled community run events. i mean like people coordinate these things a year out to set up raffles, art sales, fun games, badges and adoptables, make the whole thing themed, and even coordinate with other factions to fight each other for first place! flights do not get first place accidentally because there's always one pushing to take it. we've got a community run newsletter for this shit. i promise dom is more fun then it sounds >.>

dominance is definitely something you're gonna wanna read up in your flight's private discussions (some flights are more into dom than others) and is not something you wanna do when first joining, but while you're getting the ropes of the site it's one thing to keep an eye on as something to do

this is not an actively but it's a widely beloved feature of the site. gems, the premium currency, and be earned in small amounts doing site stuff and freely sold and traded between players. it's entirely possible to enjoy all site features (mostly buying special gem-only items and skins/accents(cool player made art your dragons can wear(that's an entire creative and economy communities of it's own but this post is getting to long lol)) without spending a cent 😎👌

and finally a Site Culture Thing: it's pretty inclusive! there's a few pride items that cover a variety of identities and multiple trans NPCs. instead of fantasy world ""Christmas"" our winter event is Halloween....... 2! Valentine's Day explicitly includes platonic relationships, also the Valentine's Day shopkeeper is a wheelchair user! another shopkeeper uses a cane :] Big Deal Updates have slowed down because the staff wants to focus on making the full site screen-reader compatible. and they started running new Dragon Breed Lore thru sensitive reading

ok and if any of that has convinced you to give Flight Rising a shot some advice for starting out:

send me a friend request so it's easier for me to give you stuff ;D

fiddle around with your account settings. i highly recommend setting "Feed Style" to "Selective" because it let's you more easily control what those hungry bastards eat

i believe for new players the Which Waystone is on automatically for new players, but if it's not then check it out on the sidebar. it'll tell you basic stuff to do

check out the Dragon Customization and Activities sections of the encyclopedia for more info on how to do stuff

when gathering prioritize Hunting, Fishing, Insect Catching, and Foraging for now. you get daily bonus for keeping your dragons well fed!

use the achievements tab. not only are there some fun items to earn via it, almost all of the achievements are stuff you will just do normally while playing which helps figure out what to do! on the top right of achievement's you'll see this button

that's an extra way of earning Achievement Tokens. there are daily, weekly, and monthly tasks to complete to get more tokens. these are all smaller things done during normal gameplay and will help point you in the right direction(s)

there's a big ol' user guide for Tomo's Trivia Tablet (one of the dailies) so you can just ctrl+f that for the answers instead of having to memorize a bunch of shit

Grimmer & Gloom game guide. this is where you make money

bond with your dragon's familiars everyday to get a lil extra money, but more importantly, because they give you chests for hitting Friendship Milestones. DO NOT OPEN THE GOLD CHESTS you can sell them for about 30g in the auction house which is a much better deal than what you'd get rolling the RNG dice by opening it yourself 👌

you get one free faction change if you find you're not enjoying your flight

Roundsey is evil. do not trust her

no really, i will give you stuff. i'm rich. i'm solidly a member of the dragon upper middle class. i'll buy you stuff, give you items needed for achievements and/or to expand your lair space, send you extra food, straight up give you money for things, fully level a team of dragons so you've got some dudes to go coil grinding with. this is a longstanding open invitation to all FR mutuals

oh god this is so long. i'm sorry. uuuuh feel free to hmu if you need any pointers or i explained something poorly. i can find something written by people more knowledgeable and articulate than me

[nctstar]

won't you stay inside?

labyrinth | ch. 2

You were scared that after all that, there was no love left in your body, not a single shred, no matter how much you dug.

pairing: hyuckren x fem!reader

word count: 2.8k

genre: mystery-thriller, angst, romance

warnings: profanity (use of fuck, shit), polyamory, kissing, domestic disputes (reader yells and everyone is very emotional), crying, severe headaches, slight violence (reader accidentally hits someone), panic attacks, road accidents

disclaimer: this is a fanfiction purely from my imagination. I don't know the nct members and don't claim that they act like this in real life. I also don't condone any of the activity by any of the characters in this fic. I'm not a mental health expert and don't claim to be at all, if you are struggling please find some resources to help yourself or dm me for support <3

a/n: FINALLYYY the continuation is here! i am pleased to announce that I have thought of the entire story for this fic and i am hoping that i can be somewhat consistent in updating this from now on. things have definitely picked up haha :D would love to know what people think about this <3

“Honey? You alright?” Your knuckles were turning white, tendons contracting, as if to anchor yourself post the new text message sitting in your inbox. You felt a warm hand on your hair, Renjun’s brown eyes looking into yours, infused with concern and confusion. Across from you sat Haechan, the sun hitting the back of his head and tracing a soft, angelic line around the outline of his body, eyes lightened by the same bright rays. The metal chopsticks clanked on the side of the bowl as he brought his attention to you. It was in that moment, the split second that it took for Haechan to put on that façade, that you felt like everything was wrong again.

But, as long as you stood on Earth, nothing else mattered but these two men. For them, you would ignore any oddities, any flashes of guilt or fear, anything that threatened the fragile fabric of the relationship between the three of you. You would throw that lost phone into the deepest oceans if you could, tear your eyes away, switch off your brain, just so you could wake up with your legs tangled with theirs.

You know you couldn’t do that. But that was the sacrifice you were willing to make during times like this.

The tendons in your hands loosened, blood rushing back to the tips of your fingers. You answered cooly, “Yeah. Just not used to sleeping so well.” Renjun caressed you as he did on most days, starting at the crown of your head, pressing your hair gently onto your neck, finishing off with circles between your shoulder blades. You took his other hand, grazing your lips on the soft skin, smelling like honey and sweet waffles. “You going to work today?”

Renjun sighed, Haechan’s chair grazing against the tiles as he threw his head back, letting the hair move from his forehead. “Yeah, hon. You guys will be okay, right? I could take the day off-“

“It’s alright.” Haechan flicked the handle of the sink, a steady stream of water running over his hands. Your eyes couldn’t leave the glint of the ring as he washed his heads, and you watched closely as they shook a little as he spoke. “We’ll be alright, right, baby?”

“Hmm? Oh, yeah.” You smiled at him, tilting your head up so he could walk over and press a kiss to your nose. His breath smelt like coffee as he sighed, forehead pressed to yours, brown eyes watery and intense gazing into yours. His fingers brought your chin closer to him, letting his lips taste yours.

When he pulled away, Renjun was putting on his coat at the door. Shuffling off your high chair, you stepped up to him, taking his hands in yours. “Take…take care of yourself, okay?” He smiled, muttering cute under his breath and leaning over to kiss you twice, second time much deeper as he brought your hips flush against his. “See you tonight, my love.”

As soon as the door shut, you heard Haechan’s body and the layers of clothing he had on crinkled and rustled as he almost leapt off his chair. “So, what do you wanna do today, baby? Renjun told me you don’t have to go into work.”

You fought the frown that was forming on your forehead, uneasy at the lie that Renjun had clearly told him. I mean, was it really a lie if there was no work to begin with? “Y-yeah. Yeah, we have the day to ourselves.” You walked over to him, the smell of him growing more and more intense as you did. You sighed, looking up at his face.

He was definitely different. But he was here. And he was yours.

His hands landed on your waist and squeezed tenderly, making you wrap your arms around his body, side of your head pressing against his chest. Your heart was warm, but your brain buzzed. Your legs felt like jelly as you opened your mouth, closing it again before you couldn’t help yourself. “What…what happened to you?”

There was a flash in his eyes, something that changed at shutter speed, but it was gone before either of you could catch it. “I really don’t know. But,” he stroked a stray piece of hair away from your face as you looked up at him, trying to read him. “I remember you.”

∞

You shivered, one hand dug in the depths of your coat pocket while the other remained gloveless, allowing you to snatch hasty glances at your phone. Not a single notification. You sighed, heart pounding and ankles wobbly from the wind.

The warmth of the restaurant taunted you. Couples under muted lights, soft touches and the clanking of cutlery as they ate, time forced to stand still for these moments of tender expression. Yet here you were, stockings rubbing uncomfortably against the skin of your freshly shaved legs, nose frozen in the cold.

You fought yourself in your head before taking out your phone to type an angry text, embarrassment quickly turning into rage.

haechan

where are you? it’s freezing out here ☹

You frowned, chills settling deep in your stomach. Swallowing, you texted back.

me

I’m right here??

You paused, looking up to see the blurry outlines of the street sign move in and out of focus in the falling snow.

me

la vie?

haechan

shit.

i’m at another place.

15 minutes away.

Your body shivered once again, this time making you squat down on the side of the road. You looked around, desperate for warmth.

haechan

so sorry. there are so many french restaurants around here.

me

is that where you used to take haeun?

You regretted it as soon as you hit send, but you were biting your lip in a sudden fit of overwhelming emotion, body shaking not just from the ice falling like spikes onto your face. Your eyes welled up as you watched the read on the screen, conversation halted.

”_?”

When you looked up, a lone tear travelled down your face, and you marvelled at its ability to persevere, to not freeze over at once.

Renjun towered over you, a woman you hadn’t seen before strung on his arm. She crouched down almost immediately, placing her gloved palm on the small of your back. “Are you okay?” Her Korean rolled off her mouth with ease. You blinked, and suddenly, there was Haeun, her smile radiant, her hand warm on your back, the smell of baby powder dusting all around you.

The strange woman stared back at you, worry etched in her face. You nodded hastily, getting up before Renjun could come any closer. He tried to reach for you but you jerked away, your coat now feeling like bricks weighing your shoulders down. “I’m fine. I was just going home.” It was the stupidest and most obvious lie, but everything was too much, and you needed to leave.

“_?” Your name in the air for the second time, and you felt his arm around you before you saw his face. Haechan. You were trying to shrug him off, sudden panic and fear and guilt growing in the ends of your fingers, choking you from the outside in. His arms were gripping tighter and tighter around you, both arms wrapped around your middle, the air being squeezed out of every cell in your body. You gasped and gasped, but you felt like you were dying. Open mouth to scream, only to be met with silence, thick as honey and dread. No, no, no, STOP!

“Baby!”

You awoke with a sweaty whimper, tears soaking your face, the smell of Haechan’s body around you as your vision focused on his face. “Shh, shh…” His hands were on your face, your arms, your sides, but for a moment you were lost. Confused, like your mind had endless passageways you had never explored, and you were standing at a dead end.

“H-Hyuck?”

“Yeah, baby, right here.” His hand was warm on your skin, your hair splayed across his lap, and you were suddenly aware of the weight of your head pressing into his thighs. Shooting up, you groaned as your vision shook, heart pounding and bile creeping up your throat. “Oh, it hurts, it hurts…”

“_, you don’t look well. Let’s go to the hospital.” You shook your head. “No, no, babe, I’m fine. You’re…” you sucked in a short breath, waiting for the throbbing in your head to melt away, throb a little quieter, so your thoughts could stop screaming in your skull. “You’re here. You’re here today.”

“Yeah.” He cupped your face in both his hands, pecking you on the lips. “I am.” Hanging your hand off his lifted arm, you sighed. “Usually there’s no one here. There’s no one. And I don’t want to make Renjun come home. You know how he is. He’d stay with me forever, and then get fired.” You folded your knees and wrapped your arms around them, while Haechan chuckled, holding one of your hands in his.

“You’re right. He would baby you for an entire week.”

“Like he doesn’t already.” You rolled your eyes in exaggeration, but images of Renjun in your brain penetrated your heart like a drug, and you thought of his hands that smelt like waffles, his hips when they rubbed against yours this morning.

“He loves you. So much. I can tell.”

“I love him more, Hyuck.” You thought of Renjun towering over you, the strange woman hanging off his arm, the way you yanked your arm away.

Why?

“Did you, wanna talk about it? Your dream, I mean.” You shook your head before you even registered that you were, as if your brain was working in spite of your thoughts. “I don’t really like to recall nightmares honestly. They’re usually stupid anyway.” Haechan hummed, you feeling the soft fabric of his freshly laundered shirt against your cheek as scooched over, nestling in his body. You traced lines on his arms, studying the moles that peppered his skin. You pecked where your head rested against his body, the detergent smell filling all the passageways in the maze of your brain.

You spent most of the day in his arms, in and out of dreamless slumbers and in between noises of the TV and the smell of lunch, and bungeoppang Haechan got for you after you whined about the scent driving you crazy.

As you bit into the soft bread, the hot red bean paste scalding the roof of your mouth, Haechan spoke. “So, this one is Lorelai.” You giggled. “Yeah, baby, according to literally all the other characters.”

“And that’s her daughter, right?” You both watched Lorelai and Rory shove indulgent amounts of fast food into their mouths, scattered over the coffee table as they made themselves comfortable on the couch. You nodded, engrossed in the dialogue. Haechan toyed with a few strands of your hair absentmindedly. The sky was now painting itself in shades of lilac and pink and deep orange, the temperature cooling with the remains of the day.

“She reminds me of you.”

“Haven’t heard that for the first time.” You chewed, the flavours feeling euphoric in your mouth. “God, I really needed this.”

“Me or the bungeoppang?” You both laughed in sync with the mother and daughter duo on the TV, and all four of you knew the answer.

The sound of the keys jangling had you shoving the rest of the treat in your mouth, leaping off the couch to run to the door. Haechan laughed, standing up after you, leftover chip crumbs falling to the floor.

“Tadaima!” It was a silly inside joke between you and Renjun, born after watching a lot of Japanese romantic movies and TV shows that Haechan found cringe, but the both of you, being hopeless romantics, pored over on slow weekday evenings.

“Hey, _.” As soon as the sound of your name hit your ears, you knew something was up.

Renjun looked lost in thought, and, as you looked into his face, you noticed the black shadows around his eyes, flickering across his face as if taunting you for not noticing them before.

“What’s wrong, baby?” You started to shake involuntarily, and he took your hands in yours, momentarily snapping out of his daze to try and comfort you.

You were getting déjà vu. The night that Renjun came home to tell you Haechan had gone missing, the moments before had played out exactly like this.

“Renjun.” Haechan’s voice was so stern, so much so it…confused you. Before you could turn around, Renjun stroked your cheek, willing your attention to him. “I’m so sorry. I’m sorry about everything. For not believing you, for keeping this a secret-“

“Keeping wha-“ Before you could even think to process it all, Haechan lunged past you, standing between you and Renjun, a physical block that you would have never expected. You moved to the side, studying the way Haechan’s eyes glinted with desperation, anger, and Renjun looking back apologetically. Your heart was sinking, your legs feeling like jelly, the familiar feeling of losing your grip on reality taking over all of your senses.

“What the fuck is going on?” Your voice wobbled, making both men turn to you. Haechan walked over, grabbing your shoulders, bending over to kiss your cheek. “I have to go.” The smell of the bungeoppang was still in the air, and you were thinking about how cruel the universe was, to line the edges of your nightmare with the sweet smell of something so delicate, so delicious, so special to you.

“What?” You could hardly believe it, but Renjun’s silence said it all. You stepped away, and Renjun’s eyes widened. “Honey, please-“

“No, fuck you both!” Your eyes were brimming with tears. You sucked in a breath, trying to calm your shaky body, the volume of your voice. “Why are you keeping shit from me? Don’t I mean anything to you?” The raspy whispers came out like a blunt knife, more painful as time stretched in front of you. Words were flying out of your mouth, and there was a small voice in the back of your head begging you to stop before it was too late. “Why, what happened to us?” You were sobbing now, and Renjun stepped forward, but you held up your hands, pushing the invisible barrier between the both of you towards him. “Don’t touch me right now. I just, I need…” you doubled over, your chest tightening, and you couldn’t breathe, you couldn’t breathe at all, just like in the dream, with his arms squeezing the life out of you-

“Honey? Are you alright? Oh my god…” You felt Renjun’s arms around you, and in a panic, you stumbled away, hitting him in the face. Your eyes watered, watching the bruise bloom across his tender features, the split second where he hesitated before stepping towards you. “Renjun, fuck…” your words slurred, tears streaming down your face as the apartment was shrouded in the darkness of dusk. “I’m a fucking monster. You don’t deserve me.” You swallowed your tears, and you watched as Renjun’s face crumbled, a mix of fear and sadness drawn across his skin. Behind you, you heard Haechan sniffle, and you heard him say, “I’m gonna fix this, I promise. I love you so much.”

The last thing you remember was your front door slamming, the same one that had opened 24 hours ago, complete with the sound of your lover yelling that he was finally home, finally, after an entire year. The same one that you had embraced your lover in front of, kissing him with all the love you had to spare, pulling your body towards him so that he could feel you, all of you. You were scared that after all that, there was no love left in your body, not a single shred, no matter how much you dug.

Your feet were slapping across the tarmac, and you could hear Renjun’s voice yelling behind you, pleading with you. His voice began to fade as you ran across the street, took a few twists and turns, running like a madwoman with no sense of direction. Eventually, you were forced to slow as your vision turned blurry, the streetlights and headlights turning into blobs of red, yellow and green. In the midst of it all, your head had started pounding until it reached a peak, throbbing harder than ever had before, so hard you clutched your hair with both fists, groaning audibly. You heard a few gasps and murmurs of surprise, a few passerbys vocalising their concern near your ears.

“Miss, miss? You alright?” “Someone call…” All you could think about for a moment was the thing, the thing with a gazillion passageways in your head, and you were there. You were standing there. There was a light, and it was growing brighter and brighter, glowing like the sun, hot like the sun. But you thought for a second that it didn’t matter, that you were lost anyway, even if the light grew stronger, even in the moments when you thought you could see it all.

That’s when you opened your eyes, and the woman on the sidewalk screamed as the headlights of the bungeoppang truck headed straight towards you.

[thestarryeyedadmirer]

I came into Art School thinking that it’d be a walk in the park. I mean, I’ve been making art my entire life — painting, sculpting, printmaking, and working with wood for as long as I can remember. Not to brag… but, I’ve won so many awards for my work, my parents had to buy an entire storage unit for me, just to have somewhere to store all of my accolades. I’ve even been recognized on a national level for some of my pieces. The things that many of my peers are only now learning how to do in college, I’ve been doing as mere hobbies for most of my life… and, I’d like to think that I’ve mastered them… so, it was only natural for me to come into my first year of university operating under such an ignorant assumption.

When it comes to school, I usually don’t have a hard time being successful. My academic records and transcripts speak for themselves. In all my years of education, I’ve never gotten a grade lower than a B, not even once, and I’ve been a Top Scholar since second grade. I’m good at juggling my responsibilities — making ample time for studying, doing and turning in my homework assignments earlier than I need to, acing every test, and racking up the hours of extracurricular activities — but, this semester, I’m having some trouble focusing in my Art History class… just the one class… and it’s not for any reasons that you may be thinking.

See… I have this professor — Professor Pascal — who teaches my Art History course… and when the year began, he was already about six months pregnant. I’m talking belly popping out underneath his shirt, outie navel as big as a doorknob, chest all puffy and leaky, feet so swollen that he can only wear Crocs and open-toed shoes in class, constantly moody and complaining about his body aches, binge eating in class, and too foggy-headed to maintain a straight line of thought pregnant. Like… pregnant, pregnant. Extremely pregnant. The man is at least forty-five years old… which is concerning on its own… and he’s as big as a house.

To make matters worse, he always wears clothes that he bought before he got knocked up — before he started to gain weight, and his belly began to swell — and they’re so obiously tiny and uncomfortable. Sweaters that are meant to be loose, stretched past their limits and tucked into his pants, to cover his massive stomach. Button-downs that pop open several times during lectures, exposing his hairy, bloated torso to hundreds of students at once. Suit jackets that don’t accommodate for the extra weight that he may have gained. Khakis that hug him so tight that they look like a second layer of skin. Underwear that peeks over the waistband of his bottoms, rides up his butt crack, and shows off a visible outline of his engorged genitals.

He so pregnant that it’s honestly hard to ignore. You know how, usually, when someone’s expecting, you can just acknowledge it and move on… most times, without things being weird or awkward? Well… it’s not like that with Professor Pascal. Not for me, at least. I just can’t stop staring at his belly in class… thinking about it. It takes up so much space in my mind, I think it may be making me… dumb.

No matter what the subject of his lectures are, what assignments he may have us doing for the week, or how many pages of notes that I take, I can’t stop gawking at it… curious. It’s like, I can’t see anything else, or hear anything. The huge whiteboard and padded, sound-reflective walls behind him fade into a plain, flat backdrop… and his words slowly turn to gibberish. I get tunnel vision… stop taking notes, and everything. I can’t retain any information… and then I have to cheat on my homework, my quiz grades drop… then my test scores, and then, my GPA. It’s a slippery slope.

I’ve never, not once in my life, had an overall letter grade lower than a B… but, in Professor Pascal’s Art History course, I’m going through the semester with a C+.

I don’t know what’s wrong with me… or what I can do to improve my grade. He doesn’t offer extra credit, or accept late work. He says that his class is “too easy for anyone to fall that far behind”… and yet, here I am, with a C+.

It’s just… when I’m sitting in that lecture hall — in the very first row of seats — that tunnel vision sets in, and I start to daydream. I… I fantasize about him coming down from his low-rise stage and walking up to me. He picks me, out of a crowd of nearly three hundred people, even though my hand isn’t raised, and presents me with a question regarding the curriculum… something that I’m supposed to know the answer to. Of course, I fumble the response… and, as he’s standing in front of me, waiting impatiently for me to come up with even a single sentence that makes sense, his button-down shirt bursts open, and his beautiful belly spills out, hitting my face like a fuzzy airbag. Next thing you know, I’ve lost control of my tongue, and I’m slurping at his navel as though a life-giving nectar is going to leak out of it… or something like that… in front of everyone — just making a sloppy mess of saliva on my professor’s pregnant belly.

It’s sick… I know. Maybe I’m disturbed, or there’s something wrong with me. Maybe I’m a freak… but I just can’t control it. The fantasy is too good. All I know is that, for the first time in my entire academic career, I’m falling behind… and, the worst part about it is that I can’t pin the blame on Mr.Pascal for being a shitty professor, or make the claim that he’s harboring some deep-seeded hatred for me. My poor grade is all my fault… and I have to live with that.

[finnlongman]

I am so curious about your drafting process, would you be wiling to share a little more about it? I've never come across the idea of completely rewriting from scratch every time, how did you arrive at this as a method that works for you?

I've been writing novels since I was thirteen, so the origin of a lot of my writing processes is somewhat lost to time/memory -- I don't know why I started doing them, only that they either worked or didn't work and the ones that worked stuck around and the ones that didn't... didn't.

I find it difficult to edit within an existing document because it feels like I don't have space to think when all the words are already there. If I open a new document next to the old one and type it out again, I'm more free to move things around, reword them slightly, layer in new details, shift the emphasis etc, without feeling like I have to fit that into the existing framework of sentences that are on the page. If the sentences that are on the page are still working, cool, I'll write them out again. Anything I can't be bothered to type out was probably boring, so that can go, making this a useful strategy for cutting extraneous words and redundant descriptions, too.

The old document is always present when I do this. I don't rewrite from memory or without reference to it. It's just an easier way of refining what I'd put on the page before. And the advantage of this is that the old version always still exists, too. I have never "deleted" a scene, I've simply written a new version of the book that no longer contains that scene. If I want to put it back, I can go and find it, and write it in again.

It's also a lot easier to make major plot changes this way. Sometimes I'll duplicate the old draft and then use tracked changes to move scenes into their new position to see how they'd look -- then I rewrite it and actually make them work in that position. It creates a consistency of voice and style, and makes it easier to avoid continuity issues created by moving things around. And I do tend to make big plot changes and shift things around a lot, partly because I don't tend to plan or outline much in advance and often haven't worked out what I'm trying to do, thematically, until I'm halfway through doing it. A scene that moves from two-thirds of the way through the book to one-third of the way through is going to need to express different characterisation and different aspects of the book's themes, or it'll seem out of place, so it'll need rewriting anyway to make it work, and so will the scenes around it. I can't really imagine a way to edit without large-scale rewrites unless I somehow avoided moving or adding any scenes, which I have never yet avoided!

Consistency of voice and style is especially important when some of my novels have been written over a very long period -- e.g. The Butterfly Assassin was first drafted in 2014 and was published in 2022, and I wrote at least one draft every year for seven years. Any sentence that survived from 2014 to 2022 had been retyped and rewritten half a dozen times to get there -- and there were not many such sentences -- with minor shifts in style and rhythm so that it matched everything around it. If I had edited that book in-document, it would have been much harder to avoid the sense that it was a patchwork of pieces written years apart from each other.

But this need for consistency, and the desire to avoid continuity errors, is also why I tend to write very fast when I do this: I am holding all of the pieces in my head, everything from plot to sentence structure, and it's hard to sustain that for long. For me, writing looks like long periods of thinking and making notes and puzzling over things, and then a frenzied burst of activity where I act on all of the conclusions I've come to, which is why I like to write very quickly and then take several months away to work on other things before I come back to a project.

Academically, I also find this rewriting helpful: I would always prefer to write a new paragraph that makes the point the old one was trying to make but better, than to try to "fix" the old paragraph. It's just a lot more tedious with academic work because of references and quotes and stuff, so I end up copy+pasting more over.

I will say that the first time an editor said, "Can you do this with tracked changes turned on?" and I said, "Ah. Small problem," and explained that I would in fact be writing the whole book again, they were ... somewhat horrified. But they've accepted that the thoroughness with which I rework everything on the page makes it necessary, and I've figured out how to use "compare documents" to create a version that looks like I used tracked changes while not being an absolute headache for me in the process. So then everyone's happy.

[aelaer]

👀👀 tell us about your rp oc bestie :3

Sorry it took me a while to get to this - I'm honestly flattered that anyone's interested! This character was very important to me for a long time. Here's her portrait I made of her in 2016ish, and more about her is under the cut.

The MMO I played was LOTR Online, which started in 2007 and is still going with active updates even today. I started the first year it was out and played it regularly (obsessively even) until 2018ish. I can't remember how much I played the next two years but I haven't logged in for the last 2-3 years. I might in the future but for now I've had my fill. Highly highly recommend for any LOTR & Tolkien fan, but it can be a huge timesink if you're not careful about keeping track of time.

I'll explain stuff as if whoever is reading this knows nothing about LOTR for wider accessibility.

Anyway, in 2011 I switched servers to start RP and created Laerlin, a human (or as Tolkien calls them, "race of Men"). Her game class was "hunter" which is basically an archer/dps type, and in her story I made her trained in archery by her Ithilien Ranger dad (which is basically a specialist military regiment known for their woodland/stealth skills - they serve Gondor, the largest country of humans in LOTR). Since he was military, he wasn't around all the time so obviously the training was when he was like, on leave and stuff. She grew up with her mom in Minas Tirith, the capital of Gondor (and the big white layered stone city you may have seen in screenshots if you've not seen the films) while her dad was in service out in the dangerous borderlands of Ithilien across the river. I have a lot more about her background from pre-RP - happy to tell more if anyone asks.

ANYWAY. Starter characters in LOTRO start hundreds of miles away from Gondor (which wasn't even in the game in 2011) so 3/4ths of human RP chars need to figure out a story as to why they're in the starting hub (a mostly-human town called Bree) in the first place. I had a decently outlined backstory before starting RP that just grew in the telling as I discovered more about Laerlin through RP - if anyone wants to know more about her story (any part of it), just ask.

I figured since I rolled hunter and had that backstory she'd turn into some sort of hunter/adventurer in RP, right? Nope. The stories that ended up happening led her to becoming a healer. Now, healing in LOTR is very low magic, so game mechanics were largely ignored by RPers and anything resembling magic was very rarely used unless supported by Tolkien texts, at least in the RP hub. When I discovered I loved researching ancient healing methods (largely Roman surgery and American native herbal medicines, though I pulled from every old culture), I RPed healing as much as I could, and eventually Laerlin got the reputation of a good healer IC with a detailed player who would RP with basically anyone OOC. She ended up getting very busy and she got to be good through RP as opposed to all offscreen training, which I loved.

I did end up rolling a lot of "alt" characters to also RP with (I think my final count of characters was about 34 over 3 accounts - multiple accounts to RP more than one character at a time, either because one scene is slow or for storytelling purposes). However, Laerlin was always my main, the character I had more hours on by far, and what I got known by (and it's why Laer is still my online handle - it came from the first "Laer" character on my first LOTRO server and really solidified with Laerlin). Because I spent so much time on her in my earlier years of RP, she became pretty well known on the server.

The RP hub of Bree was well known for its town guards vs outlaws RP in 2011 as the head of the town guard was a very patient and tolerant player that RPed with even people I wouldn't RP with. Very nice guy. Because it was so active, Laerlin got a job as a healer in the town watch and got plenty of experience there, lasting until around 2014 after a dramatic firing that landed her jail time. She also eventually opened her own clinic (in player housing) after an RP adventure in the surrounding wilds led to a ton of gold (best excuse ever, I can't even remember who ran that adventure anymore). That got pretty decent usage considering it was outside of the main hub.

Laerlin also did a ton of travel RP. I'd just move her timeline around so I could say "okay in March she's in this area of the world, and the stuff I'm RPing in the hub is after her return". This allowed me to do travel RP and Bree hub RP at the same time. There were only a handful of arcs that I didn't do this and she was gone-gone from city RP. I took her all over the world - from Bree she went to the Shire, Rivendell, Forodwaith, Dunland, Isengard's surrounding areas, Helm's Deep, Dol Amroth, Minas Tirith, and several lands in between. She saw the aftermath of the battle of Helm's Deep as the wounded left behind began to heal, and was in the capital of Gondor when the siege occurred (in LOTRO RP, most players I was with put a long length of time between the two events due to waiting for the areas to be released, unlike the canon timeline - the whole game world's stuck in 7 months of time for several RL years, so canon dates were not strictly followed in RP). She ended up being very well traveled over her 7-8 years of activity.

Laerlin saw plenty of love. Her first fiance died (player went AWOL) within like, 6 months after her creation. She was with her second guy for like, 1.5 to 2 RL years - got married and all, became the hot gossip of the RP hub every now and again - but that ended in divorce. It's still pretty amazing how long that relationship lasted, in hindsight. There was also a tale of unrequited love afterwards from another guy that was one of the best arcs I ever did (and his player I still consider an RL friend - great guy). When I stopped RP, she was still unattached, but I like to think she eventually found love.

LOTRO has an amazing music system which uses these special text files written a certain way to generate a song with several different choices of instruments in-game. This created a lot of bands where players will write the notation for each part and play the song all together - and it often sounds absolutely amazing. But it's also great for RP, and my love for the system turned into Laerlin's love for music. She learned the lute, flute, and harp over the years and often played in Bree's tavern, or just outside. It was a great way to lure people into RP while playing with the system too.

I ended up DMing a lot of RP stories as I grew more confident as a RPer and storyteller. I'm not sure how many plots I ended up leading, but player count in the plots varied from 1-2 people to over a dozen people. Some plots were just for one or two RL days, and my longest one ended up being a month long with planned mini-events 5-6 days of the week (I'd never do that again, I was crazy).

She was also very, very flawed to start. I wanted her to grow through experiences to become a different, better person, so she started off as someone who was easily offended by anything she found uncouth (despite not being upper class, she was from the largest city in the world so definitely cultural clashes when she first came to Bree that took a long time to fully smooth out). More importantly, she had a prejudice based on her county's history with their southern neighbor, and a good dose of history and propaganda made her very disdainful of anyone from that area (Umbar, for those who know Tolkien). It took her *years* to get rid of it, and it was so satisfying to RP her growth. But she still maintained a bit of a short fuse that was triggered by some of the most minor things even in the end, which kept her interesting.

She didn't meet a ton of Tolkien canon characters. Barliman Butterbur was the most frequent since he owns said tavern that was the RP hub. Probably some background Shire Hobbits. In Rivendell, I think I was in plots where someone RPed as Elrond and I definitely had her meet Bilbo. She knew Halbarad because she was trusted by many RP Rangers who came into Bree and met him in one of those travel adventures. Erkenbrand was a major player in my Helm's Deep plot. The most egregious meeting was when she worked in the Houses of Healing after the siege and got to meet Aragorn. But by that time she had built 4 or 5 years of RP with his Rangers so it worked out well, like as a capstone to her long, long journey of growth and self discovery.

Laerlin alone saw hundreds of thousands of words of RP storytelling. Some of the RP was very silly, but a lot of it was poignant and really special. I'd never spend as much time online again as I did in the earlier years of RP, but I can't say I regret it, either, because I made a lot of friends and my growth as a writer was substantial. Because of all this, Laerlin will always have a special place in my heart.

But yeah if anyone has any questions about her (or any of the other... 34 RP characters...), or about what the LOTRO RP was like, feel free to ask. Or if you want to see any screenshots, I still have those on my old computer that I can pull up.

[talenlee]

Game Pile: I Wish We Were Worse (Faith and the Satanic Panic)

Script and thumbnail below the fold

Content warning, this is a game with a lot of horror elements including demonic possession and catholic imagery.

Spoiler warning, I’m going to talk about the elements of this game that include the ending of the stories.

Tone warning, I guess? I don’t think very highly of this game, and as a direct result I’m probably going to be mean. And as we know, there are few things worse than being mean to a video game, especially an extremely successful and critically lauded one.

Introduction

Faith is a survival horror game from Airdorf Studios that came out in 2017 and has been gussied up and re-released and expanded on pretty much every year since then. It’s notable for a particular aesthetic that you’d have to be actually pretty well informed about historical video game consoles to accurately pin down, but most people will probably say something like a ‘retro computer.’ You know, an aesthetic space that reaches from the Tandi to the PS3.

The aesthetic is big chunky pixels on a solid black background without much capacity to genuinely do ‘behind’ or ‘layers’ in a contextual way, abstracted shapes that try to represent a thing in big, strictly defined, obvious shapes. There are simplistic animations that would normally betray a limited ability of the game to remember information for each entity. Locations are bare and boxy because that’s what the system can do, and colours are defined by outlines, not by fills. I like what it’s doing with how it looks, because it positions itself as being not just limited, but old. It shows what it can and explains what it can in this very difficult to parse, difficult to experience way, because it is an old game, or so it pretends. That oldness positions the story close to when it’s set — which is Connecticut in 1986.

Part 1

In Faith you take on the role of John Ward, a priest, though there’s asterisks around all sorts of things when you simplify descriptions like that. John’s a priest, formerly, and doing the work of a priest and dressing like a priest and considers the world through the mind of a priest, so y’know, priest. Priest enough. John starts the game disembarking from a car on the highway at the edge of the woods, intent on heading towards the wreckage of a failed exorcism that led to the reason he’s a priest (former). To make your way to the house you first must encounter things like an abandoned well, an old shack with a key in it, a pile of bones and a skittish deer, totally normal exploratory things to do until you encounter the flesh-eating monster that will eat you while you explore. These things need to be done in an order that involves exorcising spirits from stuff, getting a key from the shack, reading a bunch of notes, then getting to The House. Once in the house, you explore it, you encounter a… I guess there’s a better technical word for it, because it’s a possessed child, but we’re just going to go with ‘monster.’

Once the monster is activated, you need to go around the place, exorcise some stuff, understand some of the backstory, and avoid the monster hunting you around the house. Eventually you unlock the attic, head on up there, do another exorcism, which involves essentially, a kind of quick time event. At that point, Faith truly becomes a videogame because that’s when you get a gun. Since the gun is the all purpose sign of agency in videogames, the gun is where the story forks off into five different directions for you to pick and choose in true hypertextual fashion. I didn’t, I did one ending and got pretty much exactly what I expected.

I have no intention to comparatively line up all of these different endings one with another though, and try to explicate some kind of ‘true’ or ‘canon’ ending. This is silly, because one, videogames aren’t like that, and two, canon is for cops, but three, this is a game that’s meant to be examined critically. Engaging with the game critically means being able to look at the game closely and in a specific context that determines meaning out of the repeated use of symbols presented in the text. To quote Roland Barthes: Don’t have a cow, man. If a game is worth critical acclaim it’s worth critical regard and critical regard can bring with it a consideration of the ideas it’s using that doesn’t spend its time sucking the text’s dick.

One of the things about treating games as art and regarding things as works that can be critically engaged with is the willingness to say, even if other people like this, here are ideas that I find present in this work that I don’t like and I have this reaction to. It is not a matter of putting things on an objective scale where goodness and badness slide up and down, but rather that if this text is meaningful and artistic and representative of deeper thought, then it is a thing that it needs to be okay to call the story you find there bad. It’s the price of being interesting, I’m afraid.

Faith is interesting. I would never dare to claim it isn’t interesting.

Part 2

Fundamentally the story of Faith is the story of a priest reconnecting with his faith. That is, he had an experience in the past that shook his faith and had him separated from what he saw as the legitimising authority of his faith (the Vatican), then learning through doing that actually, he still had his legitimising authority of his faith all along (God). The story is framed as a horror and a tragedy — after all, a little girl dies, what could be more appropriately tragic in a man’s story than that? And he’s a priest, those, get that, those are meant to protect children, since they are good people, and turns out that the just and loving god they represent doesn’t do anything to protect little girls from being turned into meat portals. It really is rough on poor John.

In terms of engaging with the game, you can treat any given game in terms of the things it lets you do through its interface. These are the game’s affordances, the buttons it lets you push. Faith has at most five buttons, with one all-purpose ‘do stuff’ button, and four ‘move in this direction’ buttons. Four of those buttons give you a sense of material space, letting you move around in the game’s spaces, and that in turn lets you find and define the shape of the world you’re in. After all, a game can show you a wall, but if you can’t engage with that wall (by walking into it), it isn’t making that wall meaningful. Buttons create movement that create material space.

Following the idea that affordances create space in the game, then, the other button, the all-purpose ‘do something’ button that is ‘hold your cross up and hope something happens’ (which is really a killer way to represent faith) shows you a world where an excommunicated priest’s hope for change and presentation of a divinely specified object can change the world. I could not see any other sign the game is trying to represent this behaviour as anything else but ‘do faith at this object/in this direction,’ and imagining that it’s doing something else involves one of those favourite things of the pseudocritical, which is to remove one’s own ability to interpret the obvious in an attempt to determine the potential.

That creates our two affordances: Move around a space, and demonstrate faith in God at something. Eventually, ‘demonstrate faith in this’ turns into ‘use gun,’ which seems to suggest that this is a game where ‘having faith at things’ and ‘shooting them’ are reasonably comparable ideas. “Do faith” and “Do gun” being cognates is a really interesting kind of fundamental overlap but don’t take this as me trying to deliver some sort of deep cognate out of the game’s religiosity. In this game, you do faith at things until the faith doesn’t work any more and then you resort to using a gun. Faith drives out evil spirits that I assume are concealing paper scattered around the forest, gun drives out evil spirits that are inhabiting bodies and keeping them alive.

I think this is a reasonable assessment of what Faith is doing with its play mechanics. What about its setting?

Part 3

Faith is set during the Satanic panic, in the 1980s. It is set in the northern states of the United States of America, a country that has always been Christian and never not privileged Christians, and it’s set in 1986, which is smack in the middle of the period of what we now know in hindsight as the McMartin Preschool trial. This trial, which at the time of writing is the most expensive trial in American history, in which, to not mince words, a bunch of selfish assholes acted on their biases against people who they perceive as even modestly queer and inadequately Christian. Inspired and inflamed by popular fiction masquerading as fact, the book Michelle Remembers and the claims of some mentally unwell fantasists were stitched together into what, to some actual adults sounded reasonable as a basis to then mentally abuse children into corroborating.

The Satanic Panic was an example of a common Christian evil, to establish fictional rules for reality, then punish people for violating them, facts be damned. Some asshole writes a book for scaring people’s mums – sorry, moms – and then their work catapults out because the systems for the public good aren’t capable of looking at the supernatural and conspiratorial claims of people who also have microwaves in their homes and understand that compound interest exists, and go ‘uh, no, we’re not going to waste our time being mad at a guy for wearing shorts.’

Faith uses its visual aesthetic to frame itself as being from around this same time, too. It gives a specific date. It focuses on the heart of the panic, the idea of demonically posessed children thanks to inadequate care and protection of the church. The exorcism failed at first, John re-attempts it without the Vatican’s support and succeeds, which suggests that the Vatican’s disavowing of John is them being wrong.

I’m not divining tea leaves here: Airdorf have said that the Satanic panic inspired this game.

Thing is, the Satanic Panic, a real event, was a massive event of community-wide child abuse. The people who destabilised and endangered a community, telling children to lie about bad things happening to them, gaslit children into trying to support a horrifying experience of engagement with an international satanic cult that I really cannot underscore enough, does not exist. This game looks at that event in history and suggests, hey, what if that happened?

Or, perhaps more darkly, because of opinions on the Satanic Panic: That happened, right? What about using that idea for a game? And make no mistake: it is a very common thing for people to think that the Satanic Panic was based on a real thing. That, you know, sure, it didn’t happen happen but it kinda happened, right? It was kinda a real thing? Right? Didn’t a bunch of people go to jail because of the magical rituals they were doing? And they don’t think that’s a ludicrous thing to say.

Now, do not think I am saying ‘this game, set in the Satanic Panic, sucks, because you shouldn’t set a game in the Satanic Panic.’ I am by no means against the idea of using horrible topics for games. After all, Wolfenstein 3d is a great and classic game and it’s set during World War 2 and starts in a prison where Nazis torture Jewish prisoners. That game, however, is a game where you’re playing the tortured Jewish person breaking out of jail and killing a bunch of Nazis on the way. Wolfenstein 3D is a game where the game criticises the Nazis as bad people who suck and it’s okay to shoot at and hate, a position that really shouldn’t be controversial now but whatever. In Faith, however, whil it’s set in the Satanic Panic it doesn’t seem to be critical of it. In fact, despite being set so intentionally in the time of the Satanic Panic, it represents the Vatican’s unwillingness to properly torture and kill enough little girls to be a failing of the Vatican.

After all, God’s real, John is right, and the Exorcism’s problem was that he gave up on it, not that the Catholic church routinely supports people to tie up children to chairs and torture them because they think that demons are real. Which, videogames? Sure, videogames can work on the logic that demons are real, but if you make a game about demons being real, the followup is then that ‘oh, yeah, I guess real world ways of dealing with demons are legitimate.’

Look, I’m not on Team Catholic. I am in fact kinda on the opposite side of that conversation. To me, in the real world, Faith is not an idea with a meaningful value. It actually strikes me as the opposite of a virtue, a vice that lets you treat your ignorance and emotionality as something that demands other people’s respect. But even setting aside that personal value, Faith is a game that extols its value of Faith as a thing that you can do, that has meaningful, provable agency in its world, and then that agency, at its absolute limit, can’t really do anything that you shouldn’t be doing with a gun.

God is real, and so are bullets.

Conclusion

Fundamentally, the story of Faith is just another fictional work in the lineage of The Exorcist and Rosemary’s Baby and going back to Lovecraftian works like The Shadow over Innsmouth and then forward to Michelle Remembers. What sets Faith apart from those things is that with thirty years of hindsight, it steps back in time, positions itself as a story of the time, with those elements, and considers the struggle against evil as being very hard, very difficult, bittersweet and tragic, but ultimately worth doing in the name of fighting evil and holding to your faith.

It is a game that looks at how badly the victims of the Satanic Panic were treated and wishes that they had been treated worse.

[gregoriaofnyssa]

Modesty and Undergarments

I recently saw an Instagram post that was titled something along the lines of "Crunchy things I gave up when I became a Christian." Some of these things were new-age practices and had nothing to do with holistic health or anything I would call "crunchy". But one of the things she mentioned was that she gave up NOT wearing a bra.

There is really not a way around it-- bras damage your health. They put pressure on your diaphragm, they weaken elasticity, and do a whole host of other things if they're fitted improperly! If you are blessed in the bosom department and you think they give you support, that may be true, but they are still weakening elasticity and they are still harming your health, even if you find them helpful and have weighed those risks. There is no reason a woman below a DD should need to wear a bra "for health and comfort reasons" outside of physical activity (which, even then, still weakens elasticity).

Her message was that not wearing a bra is immodest. Okay, I can see that this is true if you're wearing something see-through. I can see that this is true if you're wearing something particularly tight or thin. But, subjecting yourself to things that harm your health is not modest and never will be. Indeed, dressing in a turtleneck in 90-degree weather, knowing it puts you at risk of fainting, is IMMODEST. It's attention-seeking and piety-signalling. Put on a tee-shirt.

Rant aside, we have to ask ourselves: if this piece of clothing is immodest without a bra, is it modest at all? A see-through blouse that would expose your nipples if you didn't wear a bra is not really modest with a bra, just like how a skirt you can't wear without safty-shorts isn't really modest either. Those pants you can't wear without a change in underwear too... are those really modest? No.

Bras (and most all other undergarments through history) were not for modesty, nor for protection (as in the shift or chemise), but rather, to create a fashionable and sexually desirable shilloute (as in layers of pettycoats, bumrolls, tight-lace corsets and stays, crinolines, bustles, breastpads, and so on). Mary Phelps Jacob, the inventor of our modern bra, did not take on such an act for modesty or even comfort but for fashion (specifically to cover the boning of her corset, which was visible through her translucent dress). Later iterations of the bra would include the bullet bra, the push-up bra, the wonder-bra, and the water-bra, none of which sound "modest" to me in any sense. But to be fair, there's also the "minimizer bra" which is even worse for a woman's health (like wearing a compressive sports bra the whole day) and STILL conforms to fashion trends and changes your natural body.

Contemporary bras exist to give women's breasts a rounded, "perky" (ironic), full, lifted, etc. look. This look is designed to appeal, if not to men, and to women who have been unduly influenced by them, then to fashion designers, homosexual men, and pornographers.

Through most of history and certainly in the time of the apostles, women did not wear bras-- the most they wore was a 'bandau'-like garment for sports or hard, hard labor, which is our equivalent of a bralette (which are frequently available in natural materials!). Depending on the region, time of year, a woman's immediate position, and so on, the outline of her breasts and nipples may or may not have been visible. If this, in your or your culture's opinion, is immodest, you should cover this outline with heavier fabric, more layers, and less obvious colors, but know this: for most of history and in most parts of the world, the mere outline and physics of women's breasts were not and are not considered "immodest". If you are conducting yourself in a modest fashion, not swinging your breasts around and wagging your nipples in men's faces, you should be fine.