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[halfmouse]

Confession time: part of the reason I don’t have a driver’s license is because I read the wrong top 10 article at the wrong time.

So, as a teenager, I got heavily into The Lion King. (Still love it, still have a crush on Timon.) Of course, when you’re a teenager is also when you can start learning to drive and potentially get a license. Drivers Ed for teens is offered cheap, and in some cases free. And, being as passionate as I was about The Lion King, I looked up to everyone who had worked on it in any way, including the actors. Matthew Broderick played Simba.

Well. One day, I came across one of those Top 10 lists. More specifically, it was something like “Top 10 Celebrities You Didn’t Know Did Horrible Crimes!”

And guys. Number 10 was Matthew Broderick. Because he got in a car crash and the other person died.

In my mind, this was evidence that I should never drive. Teenage Halfmouse logic went that if THE GUY WHO VOICED SIMBA managed to ACCIDENTALLY KILL SOMEONE, then of course I - a clumsy teen with no job at the time (and I worried that could be permanent), someone who was seemingly failing at life itself - should never drive, because in my mind, Guy Who Voiced Simba was a much better person in general than I was, and also in my mind, if Matthew Broderick accidentally killed one person that meant I was almost certainly going to kill more than one if I were to drive.

I now realize that some of those thoughts about myself were my anxiety disorder talking. (At the time, I thought my generalized anxiety disorder had been cured, but now I realize it was just brought under control.) And the extreme celebrity idolization was a product of being a teenager - brain was going brrrrrrr. I still have some lingering nervousness about driving but not to the point where I don’t think I could ever learn to drive safely.

truly wild how driving really does become like piloting a mech after a while. like it sounds so car-bro-y but the car genuinely does become like an extension of your body. your muscles are simply making the correct micro-movements to perfectly manouvre a giant piece of machinery through a constantly moving maze while your brain is busy singing karaoke. you can physically feel when a gap is too small for your car-sona to fit through, like a cat putting its whiskers into a crevice. your brain is suddenly able to do on-the-fly s=d/t calculations in a milisecond and tell you exactly how quickly you need to move to avoid an oncoming vehicle while turning across the road. why does driving unlock the unused 89% of my brain

[halfmouse]

2 hours 2 minutes

Let’s make a smoothie together!

[halfmouse]

I have…so many questions.

i know this isn't the reguar theme of this blog but i need to share it somewhere because today someone called my local fire department because they found

a horse

[halfmouse]

chuck e cheese stamps... credit is not required!

[halfmouse]

Hi there, I’m a queer cis woman, and I am very welcoming to the trans people out there! One is Mom2. And there are other family members and friends. B, one of the people who beta read Life is Stronger, is trans.

I hate to be all "cis good" on main, but if it weren't for the cis queer women that welcomed me into womanhood idk where I would be

[halfmouse]

People gotta be trained how to act when there’s not a Facebook-style algorithm in charge of things. Sigh. Let me continue this. All of the following is addressed at anyone who doesn’t know:

Archive of Our Own, or AO3 for short, is not a social media site. It’s a fanfiction website. While there are social aspects (kudos and comments), that’s not its primary purpose. Social media websites are specifically for social networking. Fanfiction websites are for putting fanfiction on and reading it.

If something has a lot of kudos, that means a lot of people read it and liked it, yes. But here’s the thing: a low count doesn’t necessarily mean it’s bad. It could be that the story is in a very niche fandom. It could be very new. It could be the best story on the whole dang website, and be in a very popular fandom, but maybe has a niche ship or a niche plot line or something. Maybe it has something in it that a lot of people block via the exclusion system, but it could still be a great story. My story “Life is Stronger” is not super popular in the grand scheme of things, but I stand by it being the most important story I’ve ever written because it gave me something I need (an 06 rewrite that doesn’t have the stabbing scene), and the fact that some other people also enjoy it is a bonus. It’s also beautiful. My Chuck E. Cheese stories are not super popular in the grand scheme of things, because CEC is a niche fandom. But my fellow CEC fans also like them.

Comment counts are not a good indicator of quality. You’ve been trained for websites where only popular things get seen. It’s time to learn how websites that aren’t like that work. Comments on a story on AO3 don’t get it sorted into “popular” by a computer. It’s not like YouTube where something that’s already popular gets shoved into your face to make sure you check it out, too. Nobody on AO3 earns money for engagement with their stuff. We don’t earn money, period. We can’t, and we shouldn’t, because the whole point is just to have a fun hobby and share our thoughts via story time. Therefore, we have absolutely no incentive to “inflate comment count”. AO3 isn’t a social media site, it’s a fanfic site. It’s where we put fannish stuff and if someone likes it we thank them and let them know we’re glad they came to story time. Okay? It’s really just an upgrade of the story circles you might have had in school. Which is awesome.

I’m not going to say you can’t read super-long fics. But just know that if you only read 100K word fics, you’re missing some great stuff. Again, popularity doesn’t really matter much, but my most popular story is a one-shot that I wrote in the span of about an hour. It’s popular because it’s adorable. (“Comforting Tails During a Storm: Wachowski Household Edition”, in case anyone is curious.)

I get not wanting to read a story that’s borderline illegible due to how many typos are in it, but hey, typos happen sometimes. A single typo shouldn’t be putting you off.

An author not replying to a comment isn’t a personal attack. Remember, this is a hobby. If you’re watching someone play a video game, and they’re just playing for fun, and you’re cheering them on, you don’t expect them to turn around and thank you for every nice thing you say, right? Right. And also, because it’s a hobby, it’s something that people aren’t going to be doing all the time. Many fanfiction writers have jobs. Many writers have other hobbies. Many have family members to take care of. Many have needs that cannot be met while going on AO3 (can you imagine attending a doctors appointment and saying, “hang on, I gotta reply to each and every comment in my inbox” while they’re drawing blood or asking how much pain you’re in or what your nightmares are about or removing a suspicious mole or something? I mean, geez!)

Old fics are there for a reason. That reason is so people can read them and react to them. Some of the best stories are over a year old. Some are as old as the website. And many of the authors who wrote those stories are still there.

"I sort fics by kudos and only kudos on stories with high kudos counts, why aren't there more stories with high kudos, I ran out of things to read." You're part of the problem.

"Authors artificially inflate comment counts by thanking people, I can't find anything with a real comment count to read." No they fucking are not, they're grateful for engagement.

"I can't read anything under 100k." That's the majority of fics you're ignoring, most novels aren't even that long.

"I don't have time to look for the incredibly rare diamond in the rough, so I won't read anything below a certain amount of kudos, comments, and hits." Those fics are popular because people gave them a chance and then snobs like you found them.

"I won't read anthing with a single typos." You made typos in that sentence, get off your high horse.

"One singular author didn't thank me for commenting, I'm never commenting on any fic again so I don't get burned." You're punishing people because someone didn't give you engagement they don't owe you that they might not have seen.

"This fic is three months old, it's so old, it doesn't matter if I comment or kudos, it's old." Fics do not have expiration dates, comment and kudos.

You're killing your fandoms with your snobbish behaviors.

[halfmouse]

rb to tell prev they're being so brave right now and pat their head a little please

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Let’s make a smoothie together!

[halfmouse]

Pfffftt we just mixed some butter, salt, and vanilla extract up!

Let’s make chocolate chip cookies together!

[halfmouse]

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Less than an hour left!

Let’s make chocolate chip cookies together!

[halfmouse]

There’s a couple varieties but the vast majority have buttermilk as a base and even the ones that don’t will try to mimic that. So if you like dairy products and things with dairy in them you might like ranch dressing. It’s very creamy, slightly tangy, very savory, sometimes a little sweet but not like candy, more like bread. Some kinds of ranch are seasoned with things like peppercorn, or have Parmesan cheese in them, or powdered chipotle. Foods commonly paired with ranch are things like salads, meats, other vegetables that aren’t in a salad, or the crust from a pizza. Ranch is also popular for use in recipes, like casseroles, some pasta dishes, and meats. It’s very versatile because of its flavor profile and availability. Texture-wise, it’s usually similar to other salad dressings.

a question for the north Americans or anyone who has tried ranch before—the fuck does it taste like??? like, I really wanna try it one day, but I'm afraid it's gonna be really disgusting 💔

[halfmouse]

4 hours left!

Let’s make chocolate chip cookies together!

[halfmouse]

What is wrong with them?

People have been nagging me to share “the curry story” on here for ages, so alright, I’ll do it. (If you’re Indian and reading this, I am so sorry).

I swear to god, everything I am about to say in this story is true.

When I was eleven, I moved to a small town in rural England and acquired a new best friend at school. Her at that point seemingly-very-normal-parents- nice suburban house, three kids, trampoline in the backyard- invited me over for dinner, and said they were making curry and rhubarb crumble.

“Curry and rhubarb crumble”. Never in the history of mankind have words been so untrue.

The “curry” consisted of, I swear I am not making this up, a vague mixture of * deep breath, oatmeal, tofu sausages, corn, tomato juice, chopped onions, raisins, “leftover broccoli leaves”, kale, and scrambled eggs. The only spice in it was the tiniest smidgen of turmeric. All these ingredients were vaguely stirred together, undercooked, and stuck under a broiler for ten minutes. 

They gave me a massive portion. I somehow, I still don’t know how, was polite enough to finish it.

“I’m done,” I said.

“No,” said her father. “In this house, we LICK our plates clean.”

He did. They didn’t make me hold it up and lick it like they all did, but they did make me clean the plate with a piece of bread and my fork until they were satisfied.

Desert came. The rhubarb crumble was entirely unsweetened. Not so much as a raisin. I can’t remember what the crumble part was, because my mind is still haunted by the memory of being forced to eat an entire bowl of unsweetened rhubarb. You know in old Looney Tunes when characters would be tricked into eating allum and their heads would shrink? That’s what eating it felt like. They made me clean my bowl of that too, and wouldn’t let me leave the table until I finished. 

The next time, (I was in middle school and as yet too polite to turn down my best friend’s parents) they made “spaghetti and meatballs and salad”. The spaghetti was utterly plain and so undercooked it was crunchy, the “meatballs” consisted of a single large orb of some grey material i have yet to identify, and the salad was, i shit you not, limp boiled lettuce. Crunchy spaghetti, unidentified lumpy grey stuff, and boiled lettuce.

The fascinating thing is that, while yes, these people were obviously health nuts, it was so much more than that. They were health nuts who also cooked like aliens who had never seen human food before. Or like small children making “potions”. One of the more edible things they served to me once was a dessert they made up which consisted of halved apples rolled in cornflour with some milk poured on top. One time, they were convinced to make pizza as a treat. They decided to put an onion on it. Fair and fine, you’d think. Not in that house. They just cut the onion in half once, and stuck each unchopped half facedown on one side of the pizza.

Speaking of onions, one time, my friend decided to make a banana and yoghurt smoothie. Her dad came in, said it wasn’t healthy enough, and made her add an onion to it.

They had a homemade cereal I thankfully was able to opt out of trying which 100% looked like the contents of a vacuum bag. I still have no idea what it contained.

Amazingly, it was by no means just me who experienced this. It was a small town, and every girl in it my age had a selection of horror stories about being invited to dinner at this friend’s house in the exact same ritualistic horror-film fashion. We used to sit around comparing them at sleepovers. Age did not exempt you. One time, this friend’s six year old brother had a friend over for dinner at the same time, poor soul. His mom arrived to pick him up, and wasn’t allowed to take him home until he finished whatever crime against cooking was on the menu that night. 

Every story was the same. The ritual that never varied. Every time, these people would make a huge fanfare out of inviting you over for dinner, act all hospitable and excited, set the table, and then serve you a massive helping of the worst food in the world, and make you clean your plate of it, desert included. Who the hell forces you to finish your DESERT?

It’s a mystery to me. They clearly had SOME degree of self-awareness, because after I came to my senses and started coming up with excuses to avoid eating at their house they would tease me saying things like “ohoho, you don’t like LIKE our food do you”. If they had been a bit more fun and less generally puritanical sort of people, I could totally believe this was a family trolling activity where they secretly schemed to come up with the worst possible dishes, secretly filmed themselves forcing people to eat them and watched it and laughed afterwards, I could believe it.

All I’m saying is I’m pretty sure they weren’t aliens, but the more I type this out, the more tempted I am to believe it. Fuck it, maybe they WERE aliens.

[halfmouse]

I think when it’s 50 Years of Fun they should put out an album of all the songs they haven’t put on stream yet, and also one that’s just “Chuck E.’s Place” in every possible language (sorta like Koo Koo Kangaroo’s “Awesome Rainbows International”.)