#(in fact it was actually the last of my ask backlog)

[ask-heathermason]

whats your favorite artificial flavor (cherry, blue raspberry, etc)

There is no way the person who invented artificial banana has ever tasted the actual fruit before.

[thewertsearch]

Let's kick things off with a mega-giga ask compilation!

I've spent the last couple of days working through the backlog, and I've been able to answer some quite old asks that were spoilers at the time they were sent.

@kintatsu asked: So, I was rereading your blog, and got to the post where you determine that John's 13th birthday was a Monday, and complain on his behalf that he couldn't really relax due to having the whole schoolweek ahead of him. Well, I checked, and the previous day was the first Sunday after the first full moon after the equinox, i.e. Easter Sunday. So it might have been a holiday week.

John entered the Medium shortly after Easter Sunday, and he did so by biting into an apple. Forget about the god tiers – his most powerful transformation is clearly Catholic Beast Mode.

Anonymous asked: The thing about knowing your Aspect, I think, is that it's the Aspect you most GET. I GET Space and Light, I understand them completely, they are suffused in my bones and my blood, they are writ large upon my brain and every base in my DNA. What aspect do you just GET?

To be honest, I don’t think I know enough about any Aspect to ‘get’ it.

If I had to choose, then I'd probably feel the most natural affinity for Life and/or Doom – and if was forced to pick one, I’d say I'm very slightly more drawn to Life, just based on vibes.

@mhafanlol2000 asked: I think the horrorterror’s plan (or the closest thing we can comprehend) is CHAOS-by which I mean LIFE. Skaia is order. If it can want, then it wants its players to follow the script it has written-the Alpha. It wants propagation, the snake to eat it’s own tail, blah blah blah. That is order. That is perfect servitude. That is NOT life. The gods, meanwhile, want chaos. It wants its servants to live. It does not tell people to do anything. It simply gives them the facts, and says “here is what you should do. You can not, you can do whatever the hell.” It wants romance, conflict, CHAOS. that is life.

And if this theory is accurate to the canon Life aspect, then I feel justified in my affinity for it. It falls fairly closely in line with my own philosophy.

@necrowyrm asked: When searching your blog I always type "thew" before Tumblr autocompletes your URL. That has become who you are to me.. Thew, Glorious Liveblogger, navigating the treacherous seas of Homestuck

Sally ‘Thew’ Ertsearch, reporting in. 🫡

Anonymous asked: there's actually another arthurian joke to do with dave's land/quest. have another look at the disc platform that bro stabbed. how would you describe the shape of that turntable?

Ayy, Dave's a Knight of the Round Turntable! Honestly, that'd be a pretty great name for his theme song.

@caliquill asked: kanaya vs rose would be absolutely hilarious but. kanaya IS the original "I Can Fix Her" girl for a reason.

Anonymous asked: the only real requirement for a name suggestion to be picked was that the firstname was 4 letters. but by really cool coincidence strider and lalonde are 7 letters, and egbert and harley are 6, and if you add those together its 4/13! similarly, both the trolls names were required to be 6 letters (i think hussie mixed and matched them actually, some of the firstnames were suggested as surnames and vice versa) so theres a similar case to be made for 6/12. but just doubling the same number i think holds less water than adding together two different numbers

Number symbolism is just very flexible in general. All Hussie really had to do was introduce a few 'important' numbers, and the fandom could start finding them everywhere!

Anonymous asked: This may be the wrong place to ask, but have you deleted your post of analyzing the Let the Squiddles Sleep song? I can't seem to find it anywhere.

Here it is. Hopefully you're able to see it now!

Anonymous asked: Will the Mega-Ask-Compilation and Liveblog Recap also happen? ~LOSS (19/2/23)

The former is currently taking place. The latter was planned, but after skimming my blog for a bit, I realized I didn't have as much to say about it as I thought I did. Plus, it's been ages, so I'm really excited to look at some new pages. We can leave the old ones for later - I'll probably do some sort of blog retrospective eventually.

Anonymous asked: i figure the trolls' battlefield went through a full set of dnd dice/platonic solids, plus maybe some other notable johnson solids like a truncated icosahedron (aka a soccer ball or buckminsterfullerene), before becoming a sphere. maybe the outer ring went through stages like simple torus, mobius strip, borromean rings or other fun knots, before becoming a mobius net. (not really sure what a mobius net is, mathematically, but that's apparently what the thing around the final form of the kid's battlefield is called.) or maybe something weird happens with that many prototypings, and the battlefield turns into a tesseract or a klein bottle or a menger sponge or a mandelbulb.

If you so much as look at the Battlefield created by the Gigasession, your brain will leak out of your ears.

@manorinthewoods asked: <3Dave, >3>John, >3oJade, <>Rose (by process of elimination) ~LOSS (5/6/23)

I don’t think either of the girls have worn a playing card symbol. The leaf on Jade’s Wardrobifier does kind of look like a spade, but John’s already got that quadrant on lockdown.

Anonymous asked: Reading stuff about skaia on this blog reminded me of madoka, and made me consider that skaia might be like kyube and the other incubators and sburb is skaias way of keeping the unerverse from decaying

Reading this ask makes me realize that Rose is a near-perfect mark for Kyubey.

There’s only one way to save your session, Seer. Form a contract with me, and become a magical girl.

Anonymous asked: man. i dont know what i expected to happen when you found it. but for The Baby Is You to be liveblogged in less than 20 words during a post was not the way i expected it to go

I know it’s not technically part of Homestuck canon, but it really feels like Homestuck canon to me - at least to the same degree as Sweet Bro and Hella Jeff, and I liveblogged that.

Anonymous asked: begging (lightheartedly) for you to add posts like LOLCAT and "this guy's an orb" to one of the liveblog tags. they're pretty funny, and it's nice to see off-the-cuff reactions like that, haha. imo it'd be a shame for new readers to miss those kind of posts

Done! I sometimes forget to tag posts like that, because I usually just fire them off and forget about ‘em.

@captorations asked: “Give me a set of rules, and I'll analyze the hell out them, every time.” hello fellow doom player. hope you like the color green

Based on ~ATH’s association with curses, as well as Sollux’s programming hobby, I think there’s a decent chance that Doom relates to coding in some way.

Coding is all about rules, so perhaps Doom, is, in fact, the aspect of rules and logic. I'm not sure why such an aspect would be named 'doom', but it's been obvious for a while that these aspect names aren't always literal.

Anonymous asked: I’d just like to clarify some terminology because it seems relevant, but Aradia isn’t a red blood, she’s a rust blood

[The blood colors all have canon names: Aradia = rust blood Tavros = bronze blood Sollux = gold blood Nepeta = olive blood Kanaya = jade blood Terezi = teal blood Vriska = blue blood (I like cerulean better tho) Equius = indigo blood Gamzee = purple blood Eridan = violet blood Feferi = fuchsia blood and Karkat has no official blood name, but people usually call him mutant blood or candy-red blood - C ]

Oh, there are official names for each color? That’s going to be helpful to disambiguate each blood caste, especially when we really start digging into troll culture and biology.

Anonymous asked: I do believe the top-left ship on the wall - no, Karkat doesn't have red eyes. […] It's probably Vrisrezi, yes, but it could also be Vriskat.

Yeah, I’m still not sure who this ship is supposed to represent.

They have Terezi’s eyes, but the hair and symbol look like Karkat’s. Plus, Nepeta hates this ship, which would make sense if it’s between her crush and someone other than her.

Honestly, my best guess is that it was meant to be Karkat, and the red eyes were just a mistake on Hussie’s part.

Anonymous asked: something I never thought about… is the blue blood sourced from equius or did he get a stock.

Aradia has real blue indigo blood in her veins, and it almost certainly belongs to Equius himself. He could have got it from a donor, but I personally doubt there was anyone else he could ask. Equius feels like he'd be an outsider, even to other indigo-bloods.

Anonymous asked: vriska would be a good strider

Vriska Serket raised by Bro Strider would be the most terrifying character imaginable. I don't even want to contemplate what that upbringing would do to her.

Anonymous asked: Any piece of lore hussie writes needs to contend with the fact that hussie is resolutely committed to the bit. Hence all the words on how different trolls are being entirely blasted aside by 'and then they're just grey humans anyway lmao'

That's the price of admission into Homestuck, for better or for worse. Hussie quite clearly enjoys screwing with us, and we have to take everything we see in the comic with a huge pinch of salt.

Anonymous asked: I'll disagree a bit on the phrasing that Eridan forces Feferi to <> him because firstly she doesn't even seem convinced that he would commit genocide and secondly she dropped him super easily once the lusus-feeding is no longer necessary. While understandable, that doesn't suggest to me someone who is obliged by Eridan's aggression to pacify him. I think she has much more agency in this relationship (or lack thereof I suppose) than that.

Feferi definitely had her doubts – but she must have believed that Eridan was dangerous to a certain degree, because that’s the basis of a moirallegiance.

Forced might not be the right word, but she certainly felt some amount of obligation to pacify him. She sure wasn’t in that relationship for the good of her health.

Anonymous asked: So, Vriska has a conversation with Karkat, where he says she seems to have blackrom feelings for Tavros, but that he doesn't think Tavros can even feel blackrom properly. Then she has another conversation with Tavros in which she antagonizes him, and he notices, but just kind of ignores it and doesn't respond emotionally. Then we see her make a huge dramatic redrom gesture and kiss him. She vacillated because he wasn't into her… incel behavior.

Yup. I’ve always held that Tavros never wanted anything to do with Vriska. He doesn't want to love or hate her - what he really wants is to live in a world where she doesn't exist.

Vriska’s refusal to accept this basic fact is one of the main reasons she’s decided to make his life a living hell.

Anonymous asked: I headcanon that troll blood is analog, but the empire culls non-digital colors because they make the troll race seem like a joke or something. Lol

If there were minor variations in blood color, the Empire probably wouldn’t want to acknowledge it, since the stratification of blood classes forms the basis of their society.

We haven’t seen any trolls besides our twelve (apart from Troll Will Smith) so we can’t compare the blood of two members of the same caste - but we can speculate. Human blood color is known to vary depending on its oxygenation level, and I imagine troll blood would reflect its current chemical composition in the same way.

Anonymous asked: Vriska must be seething while Karkat introduces the concept of quadrants to the reader. Imagine this basic and important facet of troll life, and you're just getting schoolfed it. (This message was sent on 20/10/22.)

This was a fun bit of weirdness from early Hivebent, wasn’t it? In retrospect, it's kind of hilarious that Karkat decided to infodump to Vriska about the obscure, niche topic of… dating.

@sanctferum asked: According to his formspring, Hussie's self-insert's classpect is Waste of Space. He also briefly considers Huss of Lips. This is obviously not meant to be taken seriously but. since you asked @absinthe-and-alabaster asked: i believe hussie said somewhere that FedoraFreak's classpect was "Gent of Piss" Anonymous asked: (not sure if this is technically a spoiler but) hussie has jokingly said that fedorafreak's class is a gent.

If Dad Egbert was a Player, then the Gent class would be forced into canonical existence, as the only class that could possibly define him.

Anonymous asked: If Vriska's control does require the victim to on some level want to do the thing, then Sollux's insistence that you do not under any circumstance eat the mind honey could be something he developed in response to that incident. So that if she ever controls him again, she won't be able to make him eat it.

Wow, I never considered that. That’s a very good (and tragic) take, and I think I'm at least locking it in as a headcanon.

Anonymous asked: the official extended zodiac actually has… 288 signs, if im doing my math right? and also probably hadn't yet been conceptualized when that page was posted (the earliest known evidence comes from 2015). i don't know if any thought was put into the number or if it was just pulled from their ass, but there was a running gag in hussie's q&as where he repeatedly threatened us with a 10,000 page intermission focused on 48 squiddles, each representing a sign from the alternian zodiac Anonymous asked: I believe the troll zodiac is one of the few things in HS lore that was truly retconned, there’s actually 288 signs.

Move over, 48 Squiddles. I want to hear about the 288-player clusterfuck that actually gave rise to Alternia!

@manorinthewoods asked: wheee, you got to the first god tiering! this probably opens up a load of new things to say, so, first off: do you think you need to have a full echeladder to god tier? vriska implied so.

She never outright stated that it was required, but I still think it probably is. You generally need to max out your class levels before you can prestige.

@morganwick asked: Believe it or not, you're still in the "Homestuck could have updated RIGHT NOW" phase of the comic's release schedule. The break after the Equius-Aradia kiss aside, the hiati you've heard horror stories about didn't start becoming a thing until the end of Act 5.

[this was around page 3000. still true at this page though - C]

Hussie’s sheer productivity at this stage continues to astound. Could you imagine having that much creative energy?

Maybe Hussie just drinks twenty coffees a day.

Anonymous asked: as someone who is Normal about aradia it's an absolute delight to see someone dig into her character. she's so fascinating to me. (also, fun fact, a while ago tumblr voted her the coolest character in all of homestuck. so there's that)

Aradia’s awesome, and I still don’t think her death is going to stick.

Her ghost was perfectly capable of existing without a body, so there's no reason she can’t survive her new body's destruction.

Anonymous asked: feferi hasn't just woken up, she won't be stuck asleep until 3 hours and 14 minutes into the future! timestamps, yo

Consider this the first mark on my otherwise impeccable record.

Anonymous asked: does cat have a troll/kidsona? itd be interesting to see a full 4 player session in art

[No kidsona, yes trollsona, but even a picture of her would spoil stuff from Act 6 😆 - C]

What she said. It’ll be a while until we can meet KATYAA SCRENR.

@mhafanlol2000 asked: Hey! You can just call me Fan. In all honesty I’m just some guy who likes your liveblog. He/him. I’m gonna list some fan aspects, and I want to see what you think they’d represent, and what abilities they’d give Law Dreams Might Shape Flow

Ooh, more fan aspects! These were a lot of fun to puzzle out the last time.

Law would be the aspect of command, instruction and agreement. An example power would be giving someone a simple rule they're compelled to follow, such as 'don't turn around'.

Dreams would be the aspect of ideas, motivation and symbolism. An example power would be the ability to detect people's idle thoughts - the things they're not even aware they're thinking about.

Might would be the aspect of growth, conflict and evolution. An example power would be the ability to temporarily enhance someone's Aspect abilities, at the cost of making those abilities harder to control.

Shape would be the aspect of form, encapsulation and topology. Shapeshifting is the most obvious application of this aspect, but it's appropriate.

Flow would be the aspect of persistence, momentum and continuity. An example power would be the ability to 'continue' something that has recently stopped. For example, if your PC ran out of power, they'd be able to keep it running for a while. The longer it had been previously running, the longer they could keep it running.

@martinkhall asked: I think Bro might have been raised entirely by shonen anime and My Little Pony Friendship is Magical (the version that existed only in the heads of the worst examples of Bronys). And puppets. Puppets were definitely involved in raising Bro. Anonymous asked: "He has no known relationship with any of the other parents, but was definitely getting foreknowledge of Sburb from somewhere. I’m not even sure I want to know what sort of childhood produces Bro Strider." well. i mean. he grew up with Lil Cal didn't he? the clearly haunted puppet from the sburban dreamscape of derse? it was what he dropped to earth with. i feel like that might explain at least a small part of, like, whatever he had going on.

That’s true. I don’t trust that puppet one bit, and we don’t know what it was up to before the start of the session.

I still suspect that the thing’s still just as alive as it was on Derse, and is just choosing to play dead.

Anonymous asked: I imagine you might've already been told this, but when checking out your FAQ I noticed you described PS/PQ/FS as "not exactly canon" and that you're less interested in liveblogging them because one of your favorite parts is watching all the story come together -- without spoiling anything, I find it pertinent to mention that Pesterquest & Friendsim definitely contribute to the wider "canon" even though dubiously canon themselves. Definitely "part of the story" so to speak.

Yeah, we’ll have to see what comes of this. The problem is that I’m still fuzzy on what ‘dubiously canon’ actually means.

Hopefully that will become more clear as I’m actually liveblogging these tie-in materials – which I am planning on doing. Only time will tell how in-depth the liveblog will actually be, though.

@manorinthewoods asked: In my Sundered opinion, Bec Noir is the best character design in Homestuck. I can't think of any other interesting designs at the moment, other than some which don't beat him and are spoilers anyway (like LE's). Which design do you find most interesting, out of the ones you have? ~LOSS (22/9/23)

I definitely agree that BecJack has one of the best designs in the comic. Plus, Scratch is so weirdly intimidating for a cueball-head.

Anonymous asked: My favorite part of PKWU is just how pointy Gamzee's chin is. It's so… Defined.

iT’s ToO lAtE, ErIdAn! I’vE AlReAdY DePicTeD MySeLf As ThE ChAd, AnD yOu As ThE SoYjAk >:o)

Anonymous asked: i need you to know ag canonically ripped off the sleeves on all of her shirts just to show off the robot arm

I believe it. I don't even need a source; this is just so true to Vriska's character that it's obviously correct.

@bladekindeyewear asked: If you and your ask screener decide that literary/external-media hero title examples without any details or explanation are alright to pass on unless they're too obviously revealing -- and those in and of themselves are usually in heavy dispute by classpect theorists -- I've long been of the opinion that Monkey D. Luffy and Peter Pan are the best possible literary examples of a Page of Breath.

All Pages of Breath must be associated with pirates. No exceptions.

Anonymous asked: unfun fact: the reason rose and jade dont have a lot of pesterlogs with eachother is just because their text colours were kinda eyestrainy together. thats it thats literally the whole reason!! god damn

Hussie: "I don't write Rose/Jade conversations because they’re hard to read."

Also Hussie:

Anonymous asked: you have officially passed my second favourite flash in literally all of homestuck. it's all so well hinted at beforehand but it still comes to punch you in the gut nonetheless Anonymous asked: My favourite thing in this flash is how the name of the flash isn't John: Rise Up, it's JOHN. RISE UP. it's WV sending a plead to John to not die. My second favourite thing is the way the music remixes Doctor (The theme for LoWaS). Anonymous asked: [S] JOHN. RISE UP. is one of my favorite flashes in all of Homestuck. Savior of the Waking World is some of Toby's best work What are your thoughts on our first taste of god tier? @violetsquare111 asked: So glad you liked Savior of the Waking World! One of my favorites in the comic for sure. It takes a lot of ideas from another of Toby's songs, Penumbra Phantasm, a song that… never actually got finished or officially released. There's still various renditions of it though, and the HS collection links a couple of em. (Some people have speculated that Penumbra Phantasm itself was never supposed to be a Homestuck song, and might end up being used in Deltarune, which would be cool as hell) Anonymous asked: It's crazy to think that just about 12 hours ago John was wearing silly disguises to fool his dad and now he's dying to become a god.

God time!

I do think it was the most emotional flash we’ve had, on the strength of the music alone. Savior of the Waking World goes hard as all hell.

Honestly, when WV started calling John a hero, and telling him to rise, it did start to give me some mild chills. Like, yeah – we know John’s a hero, but it feels extra special when it’s coming from someone who’s normally so irreverent.

@elkian asked: Welcome back, hope you're feeling better! I am losing it a bit over you IMMEDIATELY understanding how this coin flip sitch works, something about the narrative and reasoning doesn't match my brain so I've reread it multiple times with total understanding out of grasp and watching you dissect it halfway into the page is truly wild (delighted). Also feel like I understand it a lil better with your analysis.

Thank you! This message was actually sent the last time I returned from a pause, so apologies that I’m one hiatus late in answering it.

@royalvorpal asked: I just reread your entire blog in anticipation. Anonymous asked: This is such a good liveblog, I'm rereading it again and you are really letting me relive the pleasant parts of my middle school years. Reading this blog makes me feel like I'm back on the school bus talking to my friend about the newest update. Thank you for doing this 💛 Anonymous asked: That return page didn't have any sound, so misleading! (I jest, nice to see you're back.) ~DJ @manorinthewoods asked: Hahahah, we are BACK! Lovely, I've missed this liveblog. Most in-depth Homestuck liveblog I'm aware of, looking forward to the restart! ~LOSS (29/3/24) @popcornsalty asked: So excited to see you back!!! :D @chaosorchestrator asked: welcome back! It's good to hear that you're planning on getting back into it! I hope things have been going ok for you in the meantime! @necrowyrm asked: HAPPY 4/13 (OR AS THE ENLIGHTENED KNOW IT: 13/4) AND WELCOME BACK!!!!!!!!!!!

Thank you for your votes of confidence, and happy 13/4 to you all!

@rippledphysique asked: Just found this blog and devoured it in a few days. I am selfishly wishing you the best in health and life so that it may return one day… @elkian asked: Hey Sally! Just wanted to wish you well on the recovery, the plague is no joke and I hope you've been able to enjoy some kind improvement. And that 2024 will be kinder, as well. Anonymous asked: wishing you the best in your interim, hopefully you can get a better position where you're not prone to burning out! Anonymous asked: Hope you're doing ok!! I miss seeing your cool liveblog on my dash @kittycatttmattt asked: Poor girl… Got killed by the schedule

Thanks for all the well-wishes, as well. Really, it wasn’t the schedule that was the issue – I just had a lot going on in the background last year. That’s all over now, though!

Anonymous asked: yeah, Homestuck's back babeyyyyy - the site was crashing because of traffic and everything @calamitascalliope asked: You coming back from your break resurrected Homestuck's corpse hggfffdd Anonymous asked: i think this actually is the first time homestuck has updated since you started liveblogging lol - homestuck 2 has been inactive assumed abandoned since december 25th 2020. also happy slightly belated blogiversary btw - you've been delighting us with your journey for two years now! @heliotropopause asked: New Homestuck upd8 just dropped. Apparently. Anonymous asked: what are the odds that you start liveblogging again the same exact day that postcanon comes back from the dead? Anonymous asked: crazy news. so literally just today, october 8th 2023, hussie has officially given complete free license to the newly formed "homestuck independent creative union" (HICU) to create content and monetize it with the homestuck brand however they see fit, with zero creative or financial control from any corporations or even hussie themself, though hussie has said they're available for consultation whenever the HICU wants their input. the HICU seems to be made up of people the community largely has respect for, and the person heading all of this up is James Roach, who is one of the most widely respected individual who has been inolved in homestuck "post canon" (ie. after homestuck itself ended). nobody was expecting any of this, it's completely bonkers. hopes are looking pretty high for homestuck compared to where they were merely a day ago.

Throwback to the day I personally resurrected Homestuck.

Has anything come of this since, actually? I haven’t heard anything about this new comic – although I do scroll in the opposite direction any time I see a reference to Homestuck, so I guess it makes sense that I wouldn’t.

@corporalotherbear asked: What’s your favorite Pokémon?

Contrarian, that I am, I’ll instinctively gravitate to Missingno., if only for the nostalgia factor. Gen 1 glitches were my first real experience with pulling back the curtain of a game’s code, and taking a look at what lies beneath.

My favourite official Pokémon are Porygon-Z, Shedinja, Reuniclus and Metagross!

@heliotropopause asked: Breath/Light is an interesting one, because the ‘Mixolydian’ implies a musical theme, and I thought Time was the musical Aspect. Maybe it’s not that simple. They've all got a musical reference in the name- they are called fraymotifs, after all. Anonymous asked: The Fraymotifs are all musical references actually. E.g. Breath/Time is "Ivories in the Fire", the ivories in question being John's piano keys. A fraymotif is a battle theme. Anonymous asked: ivories in the fire is a musical theme, especifically a Rap term used by Snoop Dogg. So yeah it's connected to Dave Anonymous asked: re: fraymotifs: you pointed out "mixolydian", but that's not the only musical term there. feather "cadence", pneumatic "progression", even fray "motif" itself! hell, the building where you buy these things has an emblem with a crossed sword and music note! so i think this might be less a situation of "need to rethink time aspects association with music" and more "fraymotifs have a musical association also" Anonymous asked: if you look a bit closer at those names, (including the one "fraymotif",) you may realize that "mixolydian" isn't the only musical term referenced…. @galaxa-13 asked: You say the breath/Light Fraymotif implies a musical theme, but they all do! Fraymotif is a portmanteau of "fray" (to fight) and "leitmotif" (repeated musical phrase). Each Fraymotif name implies a musical theme.

Dang it. Yup, they’re all pretty obvious references to music.

I wrote that post the day I was trying to wrangle our family PC into running the Homestuck Collection without lag, so I was a little distracted at the time. Please direct all complaints to Windows XP.

[mylovelies-docx]

Sorry, I Love You - Part 7

Heyooooooooooo. I'm back and there are no longer any parts backlogged - I'mma have to get to work on finishing this series lol

Plot: You and Bucky have a good thing going - best of friends that also have more than a little chemistry between the sheets. Everything is fine until you develop feelings for the man who doesn't want a relationship. What will happen when Bucky finds out?

C/W: Meeting new people, feels

Word Count: 1,900

Tag List: NOW CLOSED! If you'd like to keep up with this story, please follow my blog and turn on notifications! ❤️ you :)

[Prologue][Part 1][Part 2][Part 3][Part 4][Part 5][Part 6]

The sunset blazes through the kitchen window, bathing you and Bucky in soft golden light. The focus you had not even five minutes ago is a distant memory when faced with the view in front of you. Bucky looks so fine sitting across from you with the light shadowing one side of his face and illuminating his shorter hair. 

You still can’t get over the fact that Bucky actually cut it – you’d mentioned a haircut on more than one occasion, but he’d always brushed it off and said it wasn’t his style anymore. You disagreed then and you absolutely disagree now. His long hair was gorgeous in its own right, but nothing compares to the uninhibited view of his face now. His hair is mussed in spiky clumps where Bucky has run his fingers through it in frustration, but you can’t help but think how good it looks even like this.

You’re pretending to type something on your laptop, ensuring Bucky thinks that you’re actually working and not staring at him like the love-struck idiot you are. Every once in a while you’ll catch his eyes flickering up to meet yours, so all you can do is act like you’re thinking about something really hard and you’d just so happened to have blanked out on him. 

It’s been quiet between the two of you for the last 30 minutes – the vigor and excitement for planning ratcheting down once you got into the gritty details. That’s why you’re not expecting the thump, thump, thump that echoes down the hallway from the front door. Bucky’s head jerks up and he looks at you with a quirked eyebrow, asking silently if you knew someone was coming over. You shake your head and rise from the table. 

Stepping under the kitchen archway and into the living room, you pad across the carpet and into the entry hall. “Just a moment!” you yell out to the stranger behind the door. Without looking, you slide the dagger hidden inside the entryway table into your hand and approach the door. Rising slightly onto your tiptoes, you peer through the peephole in the door.

A couple stands on your front porch, the view fishbowling to where it appears their middles are huge but their heads and feet are the size of golfballs. You look over your shoulder at Bucky, who stands behind the living room wall with gun ready. You laugh silently and mouth the Greten’s at him. He puffs his cheeks out when he exhales and drops his gun, tucking it into the waistband at the small of his back. You slip your own knife up and into your sleeve.

Opening the door with a reserved but polite smile on your face, you greet the nextdoor neighbors. “Oh, hello! I wasn’t expecting company.”

The tall woman before you blushes slightly and dips her head. “Apologies. We were just wanting to stop by and introduce ourselves. We wanted to wait a day and allow you the time to settle in. I’m Tessa and this is my husband Christopher, we live right over there in the blue house.” Tessa points to the home directly beside yours with several windows boarded over and paint peeling off in some spots.

You smile brightly at the pair and introduce yourself before yelling behind you, “James, we have guests!” Turning back to the couple, you step aside and usher them in. “Come, come! It’s freezing out there.”

Christopher tries to decline, but you won’t hear of it. You and Bucky had already decided to meet and befriend this couple, so them showing up works out well. Their dossiers noted that they were a well-off family that knew everyone and everything going on within the community, but you can’t help but note the discrepancies you find between the surveillance photos taken a year ago and the people in front of you now. 

Christopher’s thinning hair and exposed scalp are covered by a thin toboggan that can’t be effective in this weather, and you see that Tessa’s dress is threadbare with nearly half a dozen patches when she takes off her overcoat. Regardless of the state of their clothing, Tessa offers you the small bowl she’d been holding in her hands.

“It’s my grandmother’s recipe. Everyone says it’s the best they’ve ever had!” She smiles proudly at this statement and you can’t help but grin back.

“Well, I’m excited to try them!”

Bucky walks into the living room, acting as if he hadn’t been behind the wall with a gun only moments ago. You escort Christopher and Tessa further inside and close the door behind them. Bucky walks up and shakes Christopher’s hand and introduces himself. 

“I am so sorry,” you begin, “but I haven’t started on dinner yet. I can whip something up real fast, though!”

“No, no, dear,” Tessa declines. “We didn’t mean to intrude – only wanted to introduce ourselves and then get out of your hair.”

“Nonsense,” you say. “The more the merrier.” You pat Bucky on the shoulder as you walk by him and into the kitchen. “Tessa and I will be in here. I’ll let you guys know when the food is ready.”

Bucky nods and holds his hand out to the couch, offering Christopher a seat. Bucky takes the armchair across from him (which has a loaded gun stuffed between the arm and seat cushion). With your hands full, you look at Tessa and nod your head towards the kitchen.

She starts to shuffle across the living room carpet towards you, her hands clasped in front of her. “We really didn’t mean to intrude on you and your husband. We just –”

You let out a hearty guffaw to mask your displeasure in correcting her and shake your head. “He’s my brother,” you explain to them. 

She stops where she’s at, standing behind the sofa next to Christopher. They share a look with each other before Christopher turns to Bucky. “Brother?” he asks.

You and Bucky look at each other with small grins. There’s no way you could ever pass for blood-relatives.

“He’s adopted,” you say.

“Oh, well in that case,” Tessa says as she continues her walk towards you and the kitchen, “I have a son about your age…”

***

Dinner was a simple affair, but the Greten’s seemed to enjoy it immensely. Barely any food remains on the shared plates in front of you, your guests having taken second and third helpings. You’re glad to see that they enjoyed the meal.

The conversations were very surface level ‘getting to know you’ topics, which is always the most tedious part of meeting new people. But laying the foundation for your life in order to establish your cover sometimes: like now, when you and Bucky can relax into an easy ‘sibling’ rivalry and rib on each other. It keeps everything lighthearted and doesn’t allow you think on how this would have played out differently as ‘husband and wife’.

The couple are in their 50s and have lived in this town their whole lives, so if there’s anything you and Bucky need to find out then they’re probably the ones to help with that. They have 5 children ranging in ages from 28 to 13, all living at home with the exception of the eldest son that Tessa is dying for you to meet.

You laugh merrily as you follow the Gretens back to the front door.

“You both must come,” Tessa is saying as she pulls on her coat. “Most everyone in town is going to be there and they need to meet you.”

Christopher slides the thin toboggan out of his pocket and places it on his head. “You both are going to be a hit: it’s been so long since anyone new has come around.”

Bucky stands next to you and puts his arm on your head, leaning on you as if you were short enough to be leaned on. You scrunch your face and slide out from under him, elbowing him in the side as you do it. “We wouldn’t miss it,” Bucky replies.

“Great!” Tessa claps her hand and ushers Christopher out the door. “Saturday at 9pm. Don’t forget!”

“We won’t,” you agree.

After a quick goodbye, you close and lock the door.

“They were nice…” you begin.

“But…?” Bucky continues.

“But…something isn’t adding up.”

Bucky hums his agreement. 

You both stand at the door, contemplating what could have happened to this sweet couple since the intel was gathered, but without the people in question there to ask (and it being much too rude to ask) there isn’t much point.

You walk away to begin cleaning the kitchen. Tessa offered to help, but you wouldn’t hear of it – after her stories of how hard she’s worked to take care of her family and this community, you couldn’t dream of accepting. Bucky follows you into the kitchen and removes the plates from the table. You work in silence, the camaraderie from dinner fading away into something else. Not uncomfortable, but nowhere near as companionable as the silence used to be in the beginning of the year.

You and Bucky used to lay in the quiet dark after sex. Clothes on the floor, sheets rumpled, hair messy. There wasn’t much that needed to be said that couldn’t wait until after you’d caught your breaths. But the peace that arrived after the frantic activities led to you falling asleep in his arms on more than one occasion.

But you were always alone come morning.

The clack of plates stacking on top of each other rouses you from your thoughts. You’d been mindlessly scrubbing dishes while Bucky dried, but you realize that your hands have been floating in the soapy water with nothing to do. You quickly pull the plug and watch the liquid form a tight spiral over the drain. The glug, glug, glug precedes Bucky as he clears his throat.

“You wanna…” You look up at him as he says this and see him nod his head in the direction of the living room. “Uh. Wanna watch a movie?” His arm scratches nervously at the back of his neck and you can tell he’s uncomfortable. Why would he ask?

“No,” you say. “No, I think I’m gonna go to bed. Tomorrow’s the first day at the facility, ya know?” You give him a brittle smile as you say this. Stepping forward, you make sure not to brush against Bucky as you slide past him and out towards your bedroom. You hear him release a heavy sigh behind you, probably glad that you didn’t take him up on the offer.

He may have only mentioned watching a movie together to be polite, but a couch and a dark room with Bucky hadn’t ended platonically the last several times it’s happened. The memories will probably prevent movie nights together for as long as you still have feelings for him.

Which will mostly likely be for the rest of your life.

@jackiehollanderr @rabbitrabbit12321 @12345sebby @blackwood-bodecker-housewife @lauraashley93 @themorningsunshine @happinessinthebeing @nash-dara @calwitch @stany0url0calwh0res111 @pono-pura-vida @learisa @introverbatim @kentokaze @marvelogic @kaz11283

Part 8

[imptwins]

ALRIGHT, no more messing around I suppose.

Over the last twelve months my close friend @kimberlyeab and myself have been the targets of sustained harassment by a series of "anti-ship" accounts, that may or may not be the same person, that I am not going to name up here because I do not want to give them any more traffic than necessary. This is over some of the content we make, 18+ fiction revolving around Undertale and Deltarune, and sometimes involving dark kinks. I'm going to ask you to put aside whether you think this is immoral for the moment.

Under the break below is what I wrote a few hours ago. Things have since escalated. Both myself and Kim have been targeted by email bombs on our business emails, services/bots that spam your email address with garbage signups, rendering your email address completely unusable. At worst, this can overwhelm your email service so much that your account is unable to process new emails and is eventually disabled by the provider. I'm still getting bursts of activity after over 200 emails, so I'm not sure if it's dying down, or if it's so backlogged that this is what's happening.

This is literally a crime, by the way. It's classified as cyber abuse.

On top of this, whoever has done this has access to personal information. A full legal name, first and last, was used in several of the signups, so they are either implicitly threatening to doxx us, or simply flexing that they could. Likewise a crime.

Additionally, this seems well coordinated, but there are no suspicious recent results for us in The Usual Places. This makes me believe this person is probably using some foul back-alley site like KF to organize this. I don't think the legal name in question could have been acquired by one person, it's extremely difficult to trace back.

tl;dr: whoever is doing this knows their way around the internet and is actively dangerous, they are severely impeding our lives and have the potential to become incredibly, incredibly dangerous.

Why am I posting this? Not really to get those accounts in trouble (although you should absolutely stay the hell away from them, and severely scrutinize anything they leave a mark on). I don't think they'll be punished, nor would it help since they constantly block evade, and at this point I don't think this recent online abuse crap is actually them, just someone attaching themself to their crusade. Though I'm not sure.

What I want to illustrate is how these kind of callout posts feed into targeted harassment of minorities. This is just another reason why things that make you uncomfortable should be dealt with by curating your experience using tags and blacklists and blocks, rather than trying to assign moral value to what people make. If my content makes you that uncomfortable I *actively encourage* you to block me.

It doesn't matter whether you personally dislike minorities or not, or whether you're subconsciously targeting them, or whatever. Someone else who does will latch on. That person who writes nothing but callout posts, yet they're always for small trans creators who make some 'icky stuff' and never for big-name bigots who parade their bigotry out in the open; is it because they're a sock puppet of an overt reactionary, or just because they want to feel some control over their life so they subconsciously focus on vulnerable people?

Simple: you can't know.

These people are the dangerous ones. Not people who just make content, properly tag it, and mind their own business. But these people, obsessed with ruining other people, with finding 'evil' in the world so that they can purge it? You can find their name below if you really want, and literally their entire blog is just constant callouts, broadcasting people doing callouts, trying to network with other people who do callouts. This is why these people were originally called 'antifans', their entire fandom presence is centered around tearing other people to shreds.

Do your due diligence and fact-check, before you broadcast that someone in your fandom did something awful. Make sure they actually hurt someone. I know mega-bastards will use 'you can't prove it' as an excuse, but actually analyze it a bit. It's almost always painfully obvious, I know, I spent years doing antifascism. And more than anything else, neither entertain, nor broadcast, nor embolden the kind of people who dedicate their entire existences on the internet to lateral abuse. Not just these particular ones, but ANYONE who dedicates their life to this online torch-waving garbage over fictional content. Whether they're a reactionary or just projecting trauma, whether they actually hate x y or z minority or they just happen to always go for the most vulnerable people, whether the person they're targeting makes content that makes you feel very icky and gross or not, these self-ordained Crusaders are consistently, unquestionably, dangerous.

That's one page out of 4. Also some of them have between 10 and 80 updates in the one email from the same address. There's about 300 emails all up. And there's zero reason they can't do this again.

===

Anyway. The accounts in question are @snowcollecter/@brieffamilycat/@krispy-chicken-shipping/@bonniehbunny. First two are definitely them, I highly suspect the latter two are their main, or at the very least someone who constantly signal boosts them. We have endured over 12 months of:

calling for brigades against us, and at least 4 other people

block dodging to constantly screenshot and reference our posts

literal libel by accusing us of grooming a child despite screenshots, as well as both statements and direct requests to stop by both the supposed groomed child and their actual friends who witnessed all interactions we had

spamming anon asks to literally every single person that they can find who we ever interact with

using tiktok cen)sor)ship nonsense to get past peoples' blacklists and force this stuff in front of them

using no less than 3 confirmed alts with about 5 more extremely suspicious accounts in attempts to artificially broadcast themself and again evade blocks (when the original account itself is transparently an alt too)

joining multiple random discords to try to shove this stuff in peoples' faces

now spamming Kim's business email at signup services

probably being behind the attempts to doxx and raid us last year on a certain hate-monger website, since the signup spam demonstrates they're cool with bog standard channer troll tactics

They also pretty tellingly refused to even talk to this minor we supposedly groomed, who attempted to tell them personally that we hadn't done the shit they claim we did. You'd think someone who is this caught up about the safety of minors in fandom spaces would jump at the chance to help this kid, to tell them not to talk to us and get them away from us, to convince them to stay away? No, they said 'I don't talk to minors' (this is demonstrably untrue: their discord accounts are in many all-ages spaces) and immediately blocked them.

Of course. Because this was never about the safety of minors. Flip a coin; if it's heads, they're a far-right sock puppet who just knows they can use the 'think of the children' angle to drive a wedge into queer communities. If it's tails, they're just a routine runt who's projecting their lack of ability to do anything about the ACTUAL assholes of this world onto other queer people, wailing and flailing and doing anything they can to have some influence despite getting 3 notes on almost everything they ever post. Hence the anon asks, and Discord spam, and blacklist/block evading. If they can't have a platform - because anyone who looks at their garbage for more than a month at most sees how absolutely deranged they are - they'll just force people to see it.

Do they ever attack actual transphobes, which this fandom is not at all short on? Well, sort of! They did one or two callout posts about a TERF who used to run in these spaces... But didn't say anything about the TERF shit. Just the porn. The porn constantly put behind age confirmations and thorough tags/content warnings. This person spouted generic 'all-powerful trans lobby' 'social contagion' 'please look at this study about desistance I found on a hard-right website' bullshit, but no, it was them drawing aged-up highschoolers (REMINDER: NOT EVEN CANONICALLY UNDERAGE, JUST VAGUE HIGHSCHOOLERS, *AND* THEY WERE EXPLICITLY OLDER IN THEIR CONTENT!) that was apparently the greater evil.

I'm not even really sharing this to call them specifically out or draw attention to them. Regardless of whether they're a chud in a mask or just someone who severely, *severely* needs psychological help about their obsession, they're not going to stop. They've made that plainly obvious. At this point I've basically just accepted I'm going to have this deranged stalker until I leave the fandom, which I don't plan to do anytime soon so buckle up I guess.

No, I just want people to see what these people are like. How they ignore the people they claim are victims. How they employ the same tactics as doxxing websites and old channer trolls, or even outright enlist them. How they only EVER put sustained effort into taking down queer people with small platforms because going after the in-plain-sight actual bigots and scumbags would just be too much effort, a reflection of how this is about feeling righteous and powerful, not actually making the world better. They create nothing, they contribute nothing, they bring nothing but arguing and drama and isolation to the spaces they inhabit.

These kind of people are blights on the fandoms they cling to. And any time you act like their *miserable* Hays Code, Jack Thompson With A Rainbow Flag, no kink at pride, BDSM is abuse, drag queens are indecent, cover those ankles *garbage* warrants any notice at all, you deal another blow to the fandom you are in, because nobody wants to be around these little goddamn nightmares. edit: I know how red-flag any grooming allegations are, if you want the full story to that I already addressed it here. tl;dr, no, we did not let a child look at our porn let alone show it to them, we in fact stopped them from doing so. We are not in some secret private 18+ server with them, we actively ensured they STOPPED making themself unsafe, and have strained extremely, extremely hard to keep our very limited interactions with them transparent, scrutinizable, and appropriate. The only reason we even stuck around was because it became rapidly apparent they were in an abusive living situation which we occasionally gave them advice to manage, eg helping them look up boarding options, unlike the torch-waving dipshits who did NOTHING to reach out to them or help them in any way. They're doing much better, both in their home life and in terms of not following or privately palling around with 18+ creators anymore, thanks to us, and at the expense of both our mental health and reputations. You're fucken' welcome.

[wen-kexing-apologist]

Late top 5 ask because I just thought of it: 5 shows that you are always down to rewatch

What a great question that is also such a mean and incredibly evil thing to ask me, wen-kexing-apologist, Chronic Rewatcher lmfao

So fun fact I have seen KinnPorsche 14 times, Our Flag Means Death 11 times, The Old Guard 11 times, Heartstopper 11 times, The Eclipse probably 6 times, Bad Buddy and ITSAY 4 times, etc, etc, etc. And those are counting all the times I have watched a show all the way through. This is not counting the number of times I have actively gone back to watch specific episodes or specific scenes.

See the problem is sometimes I hyperfixate and then I just have to watch it until it is out of my system, sometimes an OST pops in to my head and then I get the urge to watch the show again, and sometimes I agree to edit the transcripts for the backlog of @the-conversation-pod and @bengiyo and @shortpplfedup start talking about a show and I'm like "ahhh good times! I should rewatch that!"

So you can imagine the stress I am under. I'll have to do this by category

Show I Am Constantly Rewatching: Bed Friend

gif by @perths

I know what you may be thinking, and yes you are correct I am in this rewatch for Uea's emotional journey. Uea is my sweet summer child, I love him, I have adopted him in to my family, his happiness is my happiness and I love love love watching him go from a quiet, reserved, unhappy character who keeps getting put in unfair situations through no fault of his own in to this confident, vibrant, happy person who is on his way towards healing. Often times it can be hard for me to pick A Favorite thing; a favorite character, a favorite scene because there are so. many. good. ones. But I am constantly, and I mean constantly rewatching the scene in Episode 8 where Uea tells King about his past. I have lost count of how many times I've seen it, no even kidding I watched that scene before I went to bed just last week. I will always always be down to watch that show because I love seeing how far my boy is able to grow with just a little bit of love, care, and therapy.

Show I Would Rewatch for an Instant Mood Boost: If It's With You

gif by @jimmysea

I have a difficult time understanding/feeling emotion in my body unless I abstract it in to fiction. So when I experience strong emotions it is typically when something super happy or super tragic happens on screen, in a book, during my D&D game, etc. One of my absolute favorite things is when something makes me so happy that my body is no longer able to contain it and I have to do the Neurodivergent Hand Flappies(TM). I think I spent 80% of this show grinning so hard it hurt my face and doing the Neurodivergent Hand Flappies because it just...they made me so happy. Amane is so sweet, and he deserves happiness, and he is getting his happiness and he's just full of sunshine and I already rewatched this show like immediately after it finished. This show joins my This Could Fix Me list.

Show I Would Be Down to Rewatch for Emotional Catharsis: Eternal Yesterday

gif by @duckflyfly

I have not rewatched this show...yet. But I want to, and I know that I will eventually. I can only imagine that it is sadder and more evil the second time around. I cried soooo hard over this show. But it is beautiful, and it is healing, and the pain is a good type of aching pain that comes with coming to terms with grief. With acknowledging grief. With finding where the beauty and peace lie within death and memory, and the way its claws dig in to you and leave you changed forever. Ghosts can be warm, and this show makes me warm despite it all.

Show I Would Be Down to Rewatch for Content: I Told Sunset About You/I Promised You the Moon

gif by @thii-nii

I think I am in @shortpplfedup's camp about how you find new things to think about every time you watch this show. I actually desperately, desperately own I Promised You the Moon several rewatches because I have seen ITSAY four times at this point and IPYTM once. I am currently rewatching IPYTM with a friend who is seeing it for the first time, so that should help. But the first time I watched this show I was unable to function to notice anything, and it wasn't until the third time I'd watched ITSAY when I was rewatching it to prepare for the podcast panel, that I finally was able to form any level of coherent analytical thought to it. So I would rewatch this at any point just to see what more I could pull out of it.

Show I Would Be Down to Rewatch But Haven't Yet: 180 Degree Longitude Passes Through Us

gif by @dingyuxi

Bold, based on how intense of a reaction I had to this show, I know. But this was one of my favorites, I never wrote anything about it because I was too busy having a literal mental breakdown over it, one that was so bad I almost had to bail on the entire show with like...20 minutes left of it, and I originally nixed my plan to show it to a friend. BUT I have watched the specific scene that did me in (and only that scene) and it went over fine once I knew to expect it so I do want to watch the whole thing again. I have a friend who I have been forcing to watch BL shows I liked and I watch them with her, and this is on the list. However, I am currently running her through I Promised You The Moon and What Did You Eat Yesterday? Season 2 so this show is still quite a ways out from a rewatch because I am not a total monster and want to give her some modicum of emotional break between those two shows and 180 Degree.

Bonus:

Show I Would Never Rewatch: Enchante

I hate this show truly an unreasonable amount. I hate Theo so much oh my fucking god. I refuse to watch this again and I'm mad that I finished it.

ASK ME MY TOP 5 OF ANYTHING BL

[sak-supernatural]

Just a quick poll because I feel like shit:

My rambling story if you care;

I work in a caffe/coffee shop and have been there for 2 years now. Things were pretty great to start with and they seemed to accept the fact that I'm autistic. But recently the tone has shifted and I am constantly being ordered around (things that I know to do and am usually in the active process of going to do). This is all coming from the bosses wife. I have been uncomfortable and annoyed with the tone she takes with me for a long time now, and things all came to a head this past week when she was running the shop more often than usual (she typically only does an hour here and there, and covers breaks). There were two incidents and if it had been handled with an ounce of professionalism I would not even have brought it up. The exact words that were spoken were; "just make the drinks, I don't want to hear any more about this" (in the tone one might speak to a disrespectful child). "This" being an order she had taken that was wrong. The customer came up to the till (I was running the till) to amend his order (he was wrong initially and offered to pay the difference, nice guy) and instead of letting me ask which drink he wanted to change she butted in and said; "oh that's OK we’ll get that for you", while having no idea what exactly needed to be changed. She then poured away the drink she thought was wrong (it was in fact one they wanted) and made us make two new drinks, one of which was completely the wrong thing! We (me and the other girl) had questioned this, and that's there she bit our heads off about it.

The other incident (the one that made me speak up) was about my timing on my lunch break. Apparently I was late (she has said this so many times). We have 30 minutes for lunch and when I got back from mine (I set 30 mins on my watch, every day) she whisper called me over, away from where I was working on clearing the backlog of dishes that were strewn all along the worktop in a mess that she had created. AND ACCUSED ME OF BEING NEARLY 10 MINUTES LATE! I was sick and tired of being spoken to with the disrespectful tone she was using so I stood my ground that I wasn't late (and she didn't like that). She is egotistical and can't accept that she can makes mistakes.

I want to quit so badly 😫. I tried to have a conversation with my boss about what was bothering me (you know, like he has insisted I come to him with any problems) and he just dismissed me completely. The ONLY thing he focused on was the lunch break and he pulled up the cameras, as it turns out I was apparently 3 WHOLE FUCKING GOD DAMN MINUTES LATE! 3 minutes! What the actual fuck is wrong with you if you think 3 minutes is rounded to 10?! And being told; "your break starts when I tell you to go, not when you sit down" and; "you need to be back, apron on, ready to work before the end of the 30 minutes". OK I think I've got it, so my break is not in fact 30 minutes it's more like 25 at a stretch. /pa Thanks for misinforming me, I greatly appreciate not being told the specifics. /s This also goes for when he said my performance had been "slipping" in the last few weeks, and when I asked exactly how and what I had been "slipping" in, HE WOULDN'T TELL ME! Because there wasn't really anything and he was just grasping at straws for something to throw in my face.

At least now I know where I stand (not valued) and can move forward from there, and as he directly said to me; "this is how things are going to be, and if you don't like it maybe this is not the place for you". No sir, an ableist, excuse making arse is not someone I want to work for.

The best part is my brother was sitting right near us in the caffe and heard the things that were being said to me. My family are all angry on by behalf and I'm trying to let that make me feel better. It's hard to keep being strong, and not fall into the belief that I'm the problem. I did nothing wrong in asking to talk through some problems, I'm just so done. 😔

[amadeusgame]

July Devlog - Amadeus: A Riddle for Thee ~ Episode 1 ~ Waltz

Quick overview of all changes/updates implemented this month:

MUSIC: wrote almost all remaining music for Episode 1, and recorded some live parts for certain tracks

MYSTERY: created a "glossary" menu in the backlog notebook for reference (including things like the terms of the Witch's deal, etc)

SAVE/LOAD: system can now handle loading from multiple "progression points" within each scene

AUDIO IMPLEMENTATION: code for seamless audio looping (with reverb tail) exists now and works

TEXT SYSTEM: scrolling text can now support rich text codes, including font style changes mid-text

POINT-AND-CLICK SYSTEM: there is now a visual change to the background image when hovering over an interactible object

UI DESIGN: started reformatting main menu - still in progress

The rest of this development log is a lot more personal than usual, and is quite long. This month has been a lot, and I want to talk about how that impacted my ability to work on this game.

Read on below the cut.

More on Amadeus: linktr.ee/amadeusgame

The fact I have still done so much is a testament to how much this game means to me, and how much it helps to acknowledge when I just can't do what I planned to do and need to re-prioritize.

I was severely set back this month because of health issues. This resulted in a compounded setback because the health issues made me more easily frustrated by life in general, so any development issues ballooned into perceived catastrophes.

I eventually identified that I was really stuck on a few particular aspects of the finalfinal-final-forrealfinal vision for the game:

Design - I hadn't sat down with my overall art direction since finishing the demo. It was still feeling rather demo-y from a design perspective and I became self-conscious about this. On the other hand, I was really stressed about whether changing anything about the design philosophy this late would create exponentially more work for me as an artist, and feeling like I might have to choose between quality and finishing.

Narrative - although I'd written Episode 1 in full, I wanted to do more foreshadowing of much-later reveals. As I started considering how to do this, I began to worry about being so heavy-handed with it that I would give everything away and completely undermine the whole project before it gets going. I was too afraid of striking the right balance to make any actual progress.

Build/Implementation - a lot of mechanics were still buggy, and in addition to fixing them, I still needed to do a lot of tedious and very manual work to build the remaining scenes of the game. This work felt so mind-numbing that I had no desire to do it, and yet it still needed to be done. A perfectly demotivating combination.

Over-fragmentation - at this point in the game's development, the fact that all of my tasks for it were separated by category in Asana ("art"/"audio"/"mechanics," etc) made it difficult to see the dependencies in how these all come together, which in turn made it difficult to manage the remaining tasks to ship the game. It seemed like my to-do lists were all invisibly interconnected and felt impossible to track progress.

Once I realized I was stuck, and was stressed out by my to-do list but not actually working on it, I ignored my actual planned tasks for that week and gave myself a new assignment of figuring out how to get un-stuck and feel less overwhelmed. This mostly came in the form of asking friends for advice. It also involved following my own advice I love to give other people, which is "acknowledge when a system isn't working for you and change it." I went from feeling frustrated, lost, demotivated, and stressed to really excited after some self-reflection and 2 conversations.

Over-fragmentation

...Technically 3 conversations, as the fragmentation issue was solved thanks to an earlier conversation I had last month with a different friend about my narrative workflow. After talking with her, I started using Notion to manage the writing side of things. I built out different projects for each particular scene so I could have not just the text embedded, but also additional notes on metanarrative information, links to BGM inspirations, checklists, and more. This was something I did just to make it easier to finish writing the full script of the game, and it was definitely a game changer (hah).

I initially built it out as a writing tool, but now that the game is in the final stages of development, I find it is useful to think about all of my remaining tasks like this. It helps to consider them holistically in terms of the multimedia scene(s) they relate to, not as discrete and disconnected art/audio/mechanics needs. Once I realized this, I spent a weekend migrating all of my Asana checklists into the scene-based projects I'd already made in Notion. This was a lot of work, but it is now much easier to see a direct path from the current state of Amadeus to a finished game. And it gives me achievable goals on the way there: discrete checklists for finishing individual scenes, which are playtest-able while I work on the rest!

(I still use Asana to manage big picture stuff as well as recurring reminders and what I plan to do each week, but the specific tasks pertaining to the build of Amadeus Episode 1 all live in Notion now.)

Narrative

To address my narrative bottleneck I first had to get over the thought that spoiling my narrative to a particular friend would ruin it for them. Once I actually asked them if they'd like to be Amadeus Spoiler Friend #2 (because I was desperate and knew I needed more help workshopping the narrative), they were so enthusiastic I regretted not asking them several months earlier. We set up a voice call, I told them everything, and we bounced ideas on certain Very Important Topics.

I know that the more I have figured out from the very outset, the stronger the whole series will be; so I am very excited about this.

This friend also asked some questions that I hadn't thought to ask myself before (even though, in retrospect, they seem obvious) - and answering those questions gave me solid direction for finishing this installment in a way that's fun and also should pay off really well later. Then after our conversation they also offered to proofread certain sneaky things I am doing from the lens of their Forbidden Knowledge.

Talking to them has made me feel much better about my reveal/foreshadowing pacing, and I have someone I can ask directly about my "is this too on-the-nose" concerns, which helps a ton. Also, it just felt good to hear someone say "oohhhh, that's really cool!" about something I can't talk about until way later, because I THINK SO TOO I'M GLAD YOU ALSO THINK SO.

Build/Implementation

As for build issues, I talked to a friend (listen, the power of friendship got me through this month, I'm not going to lie) who is a career game developer, and who previously worked in Unity although he doesn't anymore. I used to worked with him on game jam games... the first of which was in 2016... when I was fresh out of undergrad composing exclusively in MuseScore. In a roundabout way, it's partially thanks to him that I eventually built a portfolio to go to grad school, which in turn got me to make Amadeus and also become a (much worse) Unity developer myself. Funny how things work out.

Anyway, I really enjoyed talking to him. He is non-judgmental - he knows I've taken exactly one Unity/C# course and have learned the rest by trial, error, and StackExchange.

He gave the best possible advice for where I am currently at in development: since I've built almost everything, even if I've done it with the world's jankiest spaghetti, the most important thing right now is to Just Finish It. But once it's done, we're going to have another call where we can discuss how to refactor everything to make my life a million times easier making Episode 2.

But it wasn't all about planning for Episode 2. He also helped me identify how I can slightly tweak some of my existing structure to automate more things that I've been doing incredibly manually. We effectively made a list of "here are the things to do NOW to make things simpler, and here are the things that are not worth fixing at this stage but we can talk about for Episode 2." (Example of a quick NOW fix: instead of dragging a reference to my Menu Settings script to every single slider and button in my menu, just have a script in the parent for all of those menu sliders/buttons that automatically grabs the sliders and buttons in its children and assigns it that reference. Then I only have to assign the reference ONCE to the parent. Seems so obvious now! I need to be doing a lot more stuff in scripts to just make my own life easier.)

In the grand scheme, though, that advice wasn't the most helpful thing he told me by a long shot.

In our conversation, since he is a developer who chose that career because he enjoys it, he started talking about focusing on what I LIKE about building the game. When I open Unity, what do I find fun, and want to do more of? Obviously I should also take note of the major pain points so we can reduce the amount of time I have to deal with them in future episodes; but he also told me to pay attention to what I really like to do.

I'm going to be completely honest. I'd completely forgotten that building the game itself was something that was, at one point, fun. When I was first building the game, it involved a ton of interesting problem-solving. It was asking myself "I wonder if I can figure out how to do this..." and being excited when the answer was "yes." It was showing off by doing way beyond what the Unity class homework assignment asked. It STOPPED being fun after I'd built all of the baseline mechanics I wanted to use, and then my to-do list slowly - so slowly I didn't realize it was happening - shifted from "stuff I want to build," into "stuff I think other people will want me to implement."

And while many of these mechanics are indeed important and good, it is not particularly motivating to build mechanics just because I think someone else will want me to build them. For the past several months I have been programming for other people and not for myself.

I really, really appreciate this next bit of advice this developer friend gave me. He prefaced it by saying "now I don't usually advise people to increase scope, but..." and that's how you know it's good advice! It is clearly tailored to ME and what I find motivating. His point was: this is MY game. I'm building it entirely myself. So if there's anything that I'm curious about, anything that's made me think, "hmmm, I wonder if I can figure out how to do this?" - then I should just do that. It's my game, I'm not building it for anyone else. I can build stupid mechanics for no reason. I can, and should, try building stuff just because it would be cool.

And that was so incredibly motivating. I actually HAD been thinking of a particular "what-if" mechanic, a mechanic I'd actually literally said "man, it would be cool if..." to my writer friend in our conversation from a few days earlier! But I'd given up on it because it seemed not as important as other things I "should" be working on. This new advice gave me permission to prioritize self-indulgence, not just in writing/art/direction/music, but in the programming of the game itself. There's a reason I am making a game, and not another form of media! I find the process of building the (janky) mechanics myself fun, interesting, and rewarding! It lets me play with the part of my brain that watches math YouTube videos for fun, in addition to the part of my brain that likes making music that goes dugga dugga and drawing pretty pictures.

Opening up the engine and writing code is supposed to be something that makes me feel like a cackling evil wizard, not a bored and frustrated person going through the motions because they have to. There is no obligation. I am making this because I want to make a game.

Soooo after this conversation I immediately built three things that I'm really happy with.

Text now supports rich text codes, which means I can be REALLY tacky with fonts and colors and all sorts of stuff.

(Obligatory this-is-a-WIP disclaimer but the finished game will probably be comparable in terms of how much psychic damage it deals to graphic designers.)

Now, Unity's TextMeshPro supports rich text by default, so you may be wondering why I haven't been doing this all along. Two reasons: one, I didn't realize that until recently. Two, the way my text-auto-scroll mechanic worked was NOT compatible with this. I had to completely re-work the entire logic of that mechanic so that it wouldn't also visibly type out the characters " <style= " in the textbox. But after making the necessary changes, which was a headache but it's fine I figured it out finally, I HAVE BEEN HAVING SO MUCH MORE FUN IMPLEMENTING TEXT!

BGM with a reverb tail can now loop seamlessly, which I really wanted for a very important later scene I've been working on.

This was one of those things I'd been putting off as a "nice-to-have" and figured I shouldn't spend time on until I finished working on "essential" stuff, but after this conversation I decided to just sit down and make it. It was really easy! It only took me like an hour, including time to research! I'm actually really excited about this because I hate basically every audio middleware program in existence (Wwise, I'm looking at you) and it's so much easier and more convenient to just do this in Unity.

In fact, this is pretty much the only script I have that is super generic and not tied up in lots of other Amadeus-specific spaghetti, so if you have a use for it I put it on GitHub here: https://github.com/ArcanaXIX/UnityScripts/

Hovering on interactible objects now visibly changes the appearance of the object, in addition to the existing cursor changes.

Actual implementation needs to be tweaked a lot, but this was my first time using sprite masks in Unity and it was very fun getting it to work. "Background objects visually change on hover" was another mechanic I had been considering for a while, but I was thinking about doing it very manually by rendering a unique sprite for every single interactible and then activating that sprite when it's active. This would require so much extra art and very hands-on implementation, so I had given up on it.

Once I turned it into a question of implementation, it became less manual (I no longer need to redraw every single interactible object) and also a fun challenge to learn more about Unity functionality. The only additional art assets needed are something with roughly the right shape to use as a mask, and then an alternate version of the full background art which can be really easily made by just applying a filter.

Here is the version of that background art that I'm using as a proof-of-concept, which was made in about 2 seconds by just converting the existing image to a 1-bit layer:

I will be experimenting with what exactly I want the highlighted areas to look like, but once I've found a process I like, it will be really easy to just apply that to all of the background images.

After importing the asset, I just added some very simple code to reveal part of this alternate art using sprite masks when you hover over interactible objects. The only detail work using this process is in the sprite masks for each interactible, which don't have to be perfect for it to look good, just approximate. Pretty straightforward and feels good. 

I'm really satisfied by how well it works even as just a functional placeholder - this is with using the "N" key sprite as a mask for testing purposes. I intend to do more than just add a black outline, but again, functional placeholder:

(I'm too lazy to make a GIF, but imagine the window there is brown pencil like everything else until you hover over it and then the black lines appear. I'll definitely be making a new gameplay trailer once this is in better shape, so look forward to that if you want to see it in action.)

Which brings me to...

Design

...except not really! I just needed to realize from my playing around in Unity that "Design" is not a separate and distinct thing that can be tackled independently from implementation. Implementation is a driving force of design. By approaching implementation with joy and excitement, I have also found an avenue to address the game's design needs. I'm going ham with fonts and figuring out what visual direction I want to take the interactible mask layer.

Instead of treating the "design guy" and "implementation guy" in my brain as two coworkers who vaguely dislike interacting with each other, if I imagine them as two coworkers who are both stoked and insane about this project and each other's work, the collaboration becomes really fun. The implementation guy shows the design guy this mechanic they built and the design guy goes "oh, I can have SO much fun with this. I'll be right back with some placeholder assets so we can see what looks good!"

Motivation

I think the actual message of this devlog, at its heart, is exactly the same as last month's. I've just been repeatedly coming to the realization that I keep trying to make a "good" game, by some generic "objective" definition of "good," and it's made me miserable. What I really should be doing is making an incredibly self-indulgent game. That means a game I find fun to build, too!

Amadeus is not going to be a broadly marketable smash success. It has a chance, when it's completely finished, of gaining a cult following by word-of-mouth via people going "you have to just trust me and play all 5 episodes of this. We can't talk about it until you're finished though." But, as its sole author and artist and musician and developer, Amadeus is something that I need to make in a very certain way to prove a point. It's coming entirely from within, and I am absolutely determined to finish it, so I must be self-indulgent.

Let's not get it twisted, though: I don't believe that self-indulgent and good are at odds. Spending a couple days making mechanics for fun actually made the game better! But in a project like this, where my primary goal is personal artistic expression, and my secondary goal is proving I can finish a major project... motivation is the most valuable currency in the universe, and therefore self-indulgence matters more than anything else.

I am speaking so passionately about how motivating it was to talk to people who understand my priorities and are excited about meeting me where I'm at, because without motivation this game would never be finished, and I want to be very honest about the fact that finding ways to stay motivated has been crucial.

I would also like to contrast these motivating conversations with how demotivating it is to receive feedback from folks who, shall we say, are missing the mark on what this game is and seeks to be.

While I sincerely believe that Amadeus: A Riddle for Thee is going to be good, there are a few things to keep in mind about it. These are things that I think are pretty obvious, but just in case they aren't:

It is made by one person.

With a budget of $0 and all of my spare time.

With a very strong professional background in audio, 

And the scrappiest DIY skillset in everything else.

That's not to say it can't still aim to have smoother player experience, to have stronger visual cues, to be better written, to be a better work of art. Those are in fact all things that I have been constantly working toward and seeking feedback to improve, because I do want other people to engage with it and have a positive experience. I am making this to share with other people. But I will occasionally receive feedback that seems to want to steer Amadeus in the direction of your average Kickstarter-funded publisher-backed title with 15 people working on it, and not a solo passion project.

The remainder of this devlog is written as objectively as I can while very demonstrably being upset about it. I debated removing this section entirely, but I think it's important to discuss, because this kind of thing can really impact development when you're a team of one person.

I also know that normally this kind of feedback wouldn't bother me so much, but since I received it after going on 2 weeks of dealing with the onset of a new chronic pain issue (which has been a massive stressor), it utterly tanked my mood.

Dismissive, Demotivating Feedback

I received the following feedback as "things to work on" from an anonymous juror evaluating my game for an indie game event.

When first meeting the witch the dialog is just incredibly long and boring and I ended up skipping through most of it. Given how linear this story seems to be, I think it would be better suited as a webcomic or a motion comic, not a visual novel. The interactivity hinders, rather than helps, in this case.

All due respect: who are you writing this critique for? For me, to make my game better? Or for you, to validate your own preferences? I think the answer to that is clear.

This is an obvious--and egregious--example of particularly demotivating feedback, but since it is real feedback I have really received, I want to talk about it. Specifically, I want to talk about how much it sucks to hear this.

This isn't actionable, unless you count "throw everything away and do something else" as an action worth taking. This makes no attempt to meet me where I'm at or consider my reasons or motivations for making the game as I have. It does not even consider that there may be aspects of the interactivity that are crucial to how the story will unfold; I'll acknowledge that the currently-live demo does not do much to showcase this, but this feedback has already decided that there is no such intention and I've wasted my time making a game.

My actionable feedback is to go make a webcomic instead. It also insists that my writing is boring, but doesn't tell me how to make the Witch dialogue more engaging (which, I have received other feedback from others addressing the same topic, who did give me specific and actionable feedback that has since been implemented). It just tells me that it's boring and they didn't like it.

And what's worse, this was feedback submitted by a juror evaluating my game for an indie games event. This kind of feedback sucks no matter what, even if it's just somebody leaving a public comment. But this is an individual who, in a certain context, was given some manner of influence, authority, and merit; and given this authority and merit, their feedback amounted to, "why did you even make a game?"

The rest of this juror's feedback was similarly dismissive and made it clear they did not like the game. That is understandable. However, it made no attempt to acknowledge that this game does have an audience, even if it's decidedly not this juror. Every single other juror's feedback at least understood that Amadeus has certain priorities and gave feedback that was more or less aligned with those priorities, but this one did not seem to think I've ever so much as had anyone else playtest it. In fact, they effectively said as much:

I get the feeling that this is an experience that makes a perfect amount of sense to the developer but that there hasn't been any attempt made to make it playable for someone who doesn't already know the garden path.

And this is feedback from before I decided to become more self-indulgent! This was the reaction to the game in a state I was actually trying to make even slightly marketable! I suppose in a way it validates my current priorities, because even when I try to prioritize quality over self-indulgence, people like this will still assume I've prioritized self-indulgence and write dismissive feedback about it anyway.

This feedback sucks so much I've dedicated a full segment of my monthly write-up to discussing it. Because as I've already mentioned, when you are one person making an entire and incredibly ambitious game entirely by yourself, motivation is the most valuable currency in the world. In that currency, things like this are expensive.

Further, when you are one person, you are ill equipped to handle things like "100% of your development team suddenly has a new health issue" and can't delegate the role of Accepting Bad Feedback With Grace to someone else in a better mood. I probably wouldn't even be mentioning this if it weren't for the pain that came on this month, but the pain happened and it has tangibly impacted my ability to work on this game, and put me in a place where this kind of feedback was the single last thing I needed to hear.

I know very well what the professional wisdom on this kind of topic is. The professional wisdom is: if feedback hurts, that's because part of it may be true; don't use "it's a solo project" as an excuse for shortcomings of your indie game. If you can't do something, form a team with someone who can cover your weaknesses. The player doesn't care how many people made it, they only care if it's good. Don't whine when people point out that your scrappy indie project feels scrappy.

That's valuable wisdom for someone trying to make a profitable career in games. That's also precisely what I intend to do after I finish Amadeus: take on a more collaborative project with a group of people I trust - we have a tentative team, but I've told them all they have to wait until I've proven I can ship this whole 5-part game. I'm not ready to lead a collaboration until I first finish Amadeus and prove that I know how to manage a project of this scope from beginning to end. Beyond that, of course, it is personally important for me to share Amadeus's story before I worry about other projects.

"Put together a team to cover your weaknesses instead of making excuses" is not valuable wisdom when the entire point of a particular project is that it derives meaning from being one person's vision. That is what Amadeus is. It's far more about expression than quality, even if in my opinion, good expression is quality.

I sought feedback from this indie event because I hoped that indie spaces would understand that "indie" can mean anything from "personal multimedia art piece" to "modest budget and team of folks who quit their AAA careers to follow their passions." I've also really enjoyed attending this particular event myself, and have made meaningful connections with developers who have showcased at it previously. That's a big reason I took this feedback so personally - I had higher expectations that my work would be respected for what it is from this feedback.

Oh well.

At any rate, the lesson I learned from this was not that I should go make a webcomic, or that the music in Amadeus is too dissonant.

(I got that feedback as well, but it's easier to shrug off critiques related to audio because I am extremely confident in my abilities as a musician. I have an ego too big to deflate on that front.)

The lesson I learned from this was that my intentions are always going to be dismissed and misinterpreted by some people. There's nothing I can do about that, so I might as well make what I want to make with full authenticity, and hope the people who are interested in listening will hear what I have to say.

[nrdmssgs]

Hozyain

Masterlist

Angst

Characters: Yasha (a young journalist, an OC for this story), Olga Zhar Samoilova (OC from a Heart and Matters), Makarov (no romantic interactions between anyone).

TWs: Descriptions of acts of violence, descriptions of depressive episodes, this is overall really sad.

AN: I had this work in my backlogs since forever. There is no romance there, no good comforting things. This is a little AU, where my girl Zhar is living her worst life, having lost Nikolai. I can't, and I won't write anything comforting for Makarov, as well as I have no intention to fetishize 'bad russian boy'. But I have something to tell about him and about the circumstances that keep producing such people. Since this work is long - Ill keep translations from Russian right after the phrases (like that)

Thanks: @siilvan for being eternally patient and supportive.

Also this is a songfic

"Tell them, I got all the documents, they have asked for!"

"Ona sobrala vse dokumenty..." (She has all the documents...)

"And make sure, they don't forget, this is the fucking sixth time, they change the rules at the very last moment!"

"...ona rasstroena. Budet zhalovatsya nachalstvu..." (...she is not happy with the situation. She might file a complaint with prison superiors...)

Yashas` angry voice contrasts so much with a lifeless mutter of her guide and translator - it sounds almost comical. But these two women are bound by one goal: to get Yasha to the deepest circle of hell. Or maybe it's just Yasha, who believes in it. Because Olga, her guide, remains calm, seemingly not interested in anything outside her mind, dead inside. Olga knows the ways, knows the right words, but it all breaks against the goddamned Kafkaesque wall.

"Olga Borisovna, da ona mozhet hot` v OON zhalovat`sya! Poka hozyain eiye ne propustit - ona ne prohodit!" (Olga Borisovna, she might as well complain to the UN! As long as the mater doesn't approve, she is not coming in!) These words are thrown at Olgas still, unmoving face, but Yasha knows, they are meant for her.

She spent six years learning journalism, then four years learning Russian culture and language. Still, her mentor told her, 'You want to tell that story - you better get ready to become a part of it'. Becoming affiliated with any part of the conflict was the very opposite of what a journalist must do. But she was willing to take the risk, to bury her career long before it actually started. So she learned this twisted language, reformed her mind to match these sick rituals, even got a new name - the name, they would understand and respond to. All for the purpose of speaking to the filthiest, sickest human being out there. All for his captors to turn her away for six times already.

"...poka hozyain ne propustit" or "until the master lets her in"

Yasha knew Russian well enough to understand this. In fact, she spoke this language well enough to lead all the negotiations with the prison personnel by herself. But there was a very important part of Russian culture, that kept her away from that goddamned interview, she needed so bad: the Russians were ready to speak only with their kin. It was a miracle, Yasha found Olga, a mysterious guide, speaking many languages, seeming to be a part of any party out there. At the same time, it was a curse, as Olga seemed to be not interested at all in Yashas mission success. No amount of money, no promises of a better, more comfortable life seemed to change that woman's mood: she was ready to provide only a bare minimum of linguistic support and serve as a temporary host.

She tried everything: persuasion, entreaty, intimidation - nothing helped. Her guide kept repeating 'You either find a way to 'hozyain', or abandon this place and go live your happy calm life', all while emptying yet another glass of wine and looking at the prison wall on the far horizon.

Yasha was exhausted after the sixth round of negotiations with the prison administration. Today was the first evening in the last three months, when she was genuinely happy to get absolutely wasted with Olga, after they returned, to her place.

"To the losers party!" She laughs awkwardly, watching, as Olga places a full glass on the windowsill and goes back to take another one for herself.

"Here is to you never falling in that pit, kid..." Her guide gestures with a full glass to a window, from which Yasha sees a prison every day.

They spend some time in a comfortable silence, enjoying the wine, one would never find in this secluded place in other circumstances. But after a few minutes, Yasha speaks.

"Can I be honest with you? I'm sick and tired of this place, of all you, bowing before that 'hozyain', of this endless and pointless paperwork, of this shithole, that remains gray even in April! I spent three months, trying to meet Makarov, haven't made any progress, but I'm already sick of him too! Maybe, you're right, maybe I should just drop it. Maybe there is no story behind this man - only your collective helplessness and stupidity..."

Olga smiles into her glass, not seeming to protest any of those words. Yasha knows, it's high time, she shuts up, but she is too tired to hold back her anger.

"It looks to me, that you are all happy to just sit on your asses and rot here. You, Makarov, other prisoners, the whole prison staff, that goddamned 'hozyain', whoever he is... You are all just rotting alive, and you hate to be interrupted by me." Yasha takes a tiny sip and goes on. "You think, I didn't find it suspicious, you live in this half-dead village by the prison, have no job whatsoever and yet your fridge is always full and someone even provides you with an alcohol so good, you actually won't find it even in the nearest city? Do you really think i'm that stupid? I see you eating from your masters hands, I see you growing comfortably numb, drowning your sorrow in booze!"

She was ready for Olga to slap her face or drag her out in the cold, snowy night. But nothing, not even these accusations seemed to move anything inside this dead soul. A strange grimace breaks her hosts still face, and she whispers 'You are truly fucked, once you get the feeling, you understand this place and its people, kid. I, too, thought as you once. It was a mistake, that costed me everything. So be better than me - trust nothing you hear and see here'.

They don't talk anymore, not until the next morning, when Yasha wakes up with a heavy head, while Olga shakes her shoulder.

he is barely given time to wash her face and have a sip of water - Olga leads out of the house and on the road to prison barracks.

"Whats going on! Olga, please, slow down! I can't run through all these snowdrifts and gullies!"

Her guide remains deaf to her pleas. When they reach the familiar prison checkpoint - Yasha is a breathless mess, her head is killing her and a stink of wet tiled floor, washed with some cheap chlorine makes her stomach twist.

Olga throws a few words in the little window and the gates, Yasha was trying to get through for the past three months, open.

"Trust nothing you hear" - so that included Olgas words as well? She's been wasting Yashas time for months, when she could just... open this fucking door just like that?

She clenches jaw and avoids her guide's gaze, because all Yasha wants for now is to spit right into this lifeless face, yell at her, throw hands. So much time wasted for nothing. They are both get checked on three different gates. Every time the guards search every centimeter of their clothes, touch, slap, run their fingers through all the layers of textile. By the time they left alone in a small visiting room - Yasha already have no fury left for that woman. She just wants a minute of silence, without anyone shouting around and commanding them. Yasha sinks into dusty sofa cushions and closes her eyes, while Olga stands in the corner of the room above the radiator.

Heavy footsteps echo in the corridors outside the room. In other circumstances she would freak out and scream internally because for the first time in her life, she came on the interview entirely unprepared: no voice recorder, no notes, not even a piece of paper and a pencil. But now all that bothers Yasha is her terrible headache. Maybe its even better this way, she thinks to herself.

When the door opens it feels like all the oxygen is suddenly sucked out of the visiting room. One gaze, one single gaze lingering on her face for a few seconds is enough for her to forget about the hangover, the rage, the resentment. One can not possibly contain this much hate and menace just in their eyes. But then again - this is no ordinary man. Yashas mouth runs dry, she can barely breathe, so when this man proceeds to Olga and grabs her by the collar, Yasha manages only to half whisper half hiss 'hey!'.

"Ya tebya kogda zval? Skol`ko mesyatzev nazad?" (When did I call you here? How many months ago?) He doesn't pay the slightest piece of attention to Yashas attempt to draw his attention from Olga.

But her guide seems unbothered by this man's hand, dragging her collar back, causing her to suffocate. Olga closes her eyes, leans slightly to the wall and answers 'Otoidi, Makarov, i bez tebya toshno...' (Step away, Makarov, I feel bad enough even without your help). The way these two interact is very unsettling. No rivalry as well as no warmth in their voices - just tiredness and irritation, as if they wish to part their ways, but can't for some reason. Yasha can't understand, if the man is trying to hurt her guide, as he tightens his grip, or he is trying to check on something, as his other hand slips under her collar in one swift motion and squeezes something on Olgas back, making her frown in pain.

"Govoril tebe lechitsya? Ya k doktoram tebya skol`ko raz vyzyval?!" (Did I tell you to get a proper treatment? How many times have I called you to the doctors?!) His voice is low and angry, like a deep rumble of some forest beast.

When he slams Olgas head against the wall, Yasha jumps from the sofa, not being able to witness any second more. She shouts for guards to come and help, and that finally breaks the man's concentration. Two guards really appear in the room almost immediately, but they freeze on the threshold the very next moment, they see, who is holding Olga, while she tries to wipe her bleeding nose with shaking hands.

"And what do you think, they should do?" The man turns to face journalist, and his gaze seems burning right through her. "Chain me up? Set this piece of shit free? Maybe beat me?"

Yasha feels her hands turning cold. She takes a step back, shooting a desperate gaze at the guards, but they still don't move. "Please," she whispers.

An amused smile appears on the mans face. "Watch," he say and turns back to the guards.

"Oruzhie" (Guns) After this command both guards take out their guns, and approach him and holding it out.

"Na stol." (On the table) He waits till both guns are on the table and lets go of Olgas collar. She slides down the wall, gasping for air.

"Etu v lazaret. Nas ne bespokoit`. Stvoly zaberete cherez chas." (Take this one to the med bay. Don't bother us. You will get your guns back in an hour)

Yasha can't believe her eyes: prison guards follow his commands as if he was their superior - not the most dangerous prisoner. They help Olga up and guide her out of the room, leaving her alone with the man, who murdered and tortured hundreds, if not more. And just as if it wasn't enough - they leave their guns to him. For three months Yasha believed, there is this village, where the prison personnel lives, then there is the prison itself and above this all there is this mysterious 'hozyain', the master, who decides, how this place and its people will live today and tomorrow. But now she sees him, she can reach out and touch him and, to her horror, she realizes that the hozyain and the main prisoner is one and the same person.

"So, you are the journalist, that wanted to speak to me that badly. How many months did Olga draw the wool over your eyes, before finally letting you here? Four? Five?" He sits down on a chair at the opposite side of the table and casually checks both guns.

"Three... Wait, where are the guards taking her? What are they going to do?!" By this point, she already can't think about an interview. Maybe Olga was an absolutely unbearable person, maybe she was disgusting in her self-destruction, but Yasha would never wish to leave her in this man's hands.

"Live here for three months already and still couldn't learn a word 'lazaret'? It means 'med bay in prison'. You see, our Olga is a very sick person, a lost soul, if you want. She was left here to keep an eye on me, but instead it is me, who has to feed her, make sure, she takes her medicine, lock her in a hospital when needed..." He pushes both guns to the opposite end of the table and gestures her to sit back, finally.

"What, I'm ruining a beautiful romantic story about the scary Russian beast, that has no compassion whatsoever?"

"No..." Yasha slowly descends back on a sofa, still not daring to look him back in the eyes. "You are only adding to it. It's clear, you despise her for whatever reason. You don't beat up someone, when you wish them to heal."

She takes a pause, weighing her next words. They may cost her not only her career, but her life.

"You... are keeping her. You think, bullet in her skull would be too much of a mercy, so you sit and watch as she slowly drowns herself."

For a minute, that feels to her like an eternity, he is watching her in silence. His eyes are a torture, his very presence is a torture.

"Nu tak kak - ya zver` ili chelovek?" (So who am I - a beast or a human?) He switches to Russian and talks somehow a bit quieter. But Yasha understands this question.

"Ne znaiy." (I don't know)

He leans back with a satisfied grin. This man loves the fear surrounding him like an invisible aura, he thrives in others panic and lostness.

"Nu tak prover`." (Well check it out) And with that words escaping his lips, Yasha got her worst job ever.

[lightleckrereins]

Is the game still gonna b planned for the end of December?

Yeah this deserved an update since before it got to four asks.

First of all happy holidays to you too anon number four!

Second. As much as I hate that the update is definitely not happening before the end of the year. A few months back after I decided to fully restructure the game I started mapping what would be a realistic time for the update to be done and thats when I figured out by the end of the year could happen. But then my computer died. I worked a little on a borrowed laptop but what I could do in there was incredibly limited. After the computer issue was solved I couldnt really work in the game for an aditional month due to work backlog.

Currently I am finally done with the hair bases. Recoloring and setup is not a fast process but that is the one big thing I am missing. Aside from that some alt variations, the sixsona designs and I am done with art. I know for a fact the second I reach sixsona I will enter hyperfocus and not leave my desk until those are done (which is why I left those until the end) so I am feeling before the spring is the current realistic end date.

And seriously. I am so sorry to dissapoint everyone with this. I know people have been waiting for this update for over a year now. But I genuinely think this one will be the best one since I originally posted the game.

I do have some asks with previews coming up but meanwhile lets do a hair update. Give me queen names (and covers for the alts) with hairstyles that aren't yet in the game and I'll do some previews next week.

Also the reminder that I stil have a ko-fi. Haven't updated the goal in a while but if anything goes in there it will probably actually become coffee or tea because we haven't hit over 15°C since last week and everything points towards things being freezing all winter.

[tarmac-rat]

WIP W/E but we're doing Sunday today

I've got a tag backlog of like 5 of these lmao so @ghostoffuturespast thank you for tagging me and waiting like 3 months before I had time lol 💜

Extra long one because hell I haven't shared anything in like 3 months and I wanted to assure everyone that I am in fact not dead.

From Rain in the Desert chapter 18. Mikoshi Chapter. Top 10 Conversations Held Right Before Disaster:

Whether she expected that to be met with laughter or annoyance, it hardly matters, because all Johnny gives her is one sagely nod. “Like I said, got all the time in the world now. Should think about what I told you last night, if you want a place to start, at least.” “Find my mom?” “Leave the city. Not just because you should and you’re too stubborn to see it yet— lotta heat’s gonna fall on you once this is all over. They’ll swarm your apartment, knock on some of your friends’ doors and give ‘em a shakedown, all the works. Sometimes, the best way to keep the people who care about you safe is to smash your holo with a hammer and fuck off into the desert for a couple years.” “Even without you in my head, I’m still finding ways to run through all your greatest hits.” “Say it like that’s a bad thing.” “No comment. And you, though? You come up with a plan yet?”

“Workin’ on it. Think it over for a bit, weigh some pros and cons, see if I like what I come up with. I'll burn that bridge when I get there.” “Just be careful.” “Always am, kid, but thanks for the pep talk.” “Will I ever see you again?” The words slip from her without thought. It’s like the one she asked on that overlook behind Westbrook, or in that booth inside the Afterlife, or shin-deep in the waves of the Pacific. A question born of pure, pathetic desperation— of a need for him to verify something in herself that she can’t even begin to explain. Because when the wall between them came crumbling down, there was no going back, all of her awful thoughts became his and all of his terrible dreams became hers. But now it’s been built back up and she’s left pounding on the bricks, screaming out for an answer that will never ever come. It doesn’t have to be loud, or resolute, or even honest. If she can just hear his voice join her own through all the miles between them, then could be she can find it in herself to live with that. Just something, a single word. Anything to prove that she isn’t on her own in this. But rather than give her that, the corners of Johnny’s mouth slowly draw up into a toothy smile. “Is that fondness I hear in your voice, princess?” he teases. It’s right around there V learns that code can, in no uncertain terms, flush, “Shut up.” “Sayin’ you’re actually gonna miss havin’ my shitty little thoughts ringin’ ‘round up in your head?”  “Shut up. Johnny.” The look he throws her at that almost makes V wish that Alt would come back and Soulkill her all over again, “Always thought you wore sentimentality like a pair of shackles and a straitjacket, but this is somethin’ else. You mean I might actually see you shed a few tears when Alt starts cartin’ me off?” “Jesus, forget I said anything. Ask a genuine question and I end up getting grilled for it like I’m on some shitty daytime talk show,” V grits out, hand against her brow in an effort to shield her burning face, “Wanna toss jokes about me being ‘sentimental’, y’know, but here you are not even taking a lick of this seriously when I’m trying to be on the level. You want to know what you’ll actually see when you go, Johnny? How about me flipping you one last bird for the road, since apparently your gonk ass can’t bear to not make light about this shit for five fucking minutes.” “...I’ll miss your shitty little thoughts too, if it means anythin’.” V glances up. Johnny hadn’t been looking at her anymore but as if sensing it return, his gaze does rise to tangle up in hers again. His body betrays nothing, almost; she doesn’t miss the way his fingers have curled in tight around his latest cigarette, metal knuckles rasping some discordant song against the tabletop. And maybe that’s the thing she’d forgotten about being human. That words are incoherent things, and so rarely do they mean what we want them to. Well, when you’re stuck there pounding on a wall, what better way to say that you’re not alone in this than to pound back? “This won’t be the end, though, right?” the chain around V’s neck tightens; she’s got the pendant and dog tags locked in a visegrip again, “I mean, if I manage to find my way back to the Blackwall again, maybe Alt can…I don’t know, carry a message over? Let me through from time to time?” Johnny’s smile is small, and restrained, and probably speaks to something they both know can never really be, but for a moment, maybe pretending that it could can somehow be enough; “We’ll work somethin’ out, princess.” 

If or when I have a new WIP to share, I'll probably do a WIP share tag then! But thank you again to everyone who's tagged me over the past couple of months!

[literaticat]

Dear Jenn, I have heard different agent sub strategy wisdom. Examples like not submitting on a Monday always Tuesday. No submitting during the summer. No subs in December (last two weeks are understandable). No submitting during ALA/ Bologna etc. Subs get buried in the after Labor Day/ New Years dump. What is your take on this? Do editor subs not work like agent subs where they get in the queue, and they get to them by some process? Do these things matter? Thanks for your infinite wisdom.

I do think people submitting to agents VS agents submitting to editors is a different beast.

When you are submitting unsolicited material to an agent's slush pile, it's essentially going into a holding area, and the agent looks when they have time. So it doesn't really matter if you send it on Christmas Day or in the middle of the night (or both!) -- we get hundreds of queries a week, we're not looking at when it was sent, we'll get to it when we get to it.

However, agent / editor relationships are a little different. For the most part, we KNOW each other. Editors get a lot fewer submissions than agents do queries -- plus, It's solicited material -- we're sending our publisher colleagues things that they have asked for. It's going directly to their inbox, not to some holding pen. (And our sincere hope is that after they get it, the email is not simply being chucked into a bin -- though it might be, depending on how busy they are!)

I am, therefore, treating a submission to editors not as though it's just any old random email -- I'm treating it as though it is a special delivery chosen for them. I would like for them to actually be able to see it when it comes in.

So, with that in mind, etiquette-wise: I would NEVER send at a random non-work day or hour. I would never send after noon on a Friday. I would never send over the weekend or on a major holiday or another time when I know for a fact that most editors are out of the office.

(It's just common sense, right? Why would I send flowers to somebody when I know they aren't going to be home until next week?)

Plus: if THEY are at ALA or Bologna or celebrating 4th of July or whatever it is -- I probably am, too! I know that travel and holidays take me time to decompress from -- so why would I throw my precious submission in the mix first thing in the morning on the day after the event when they will have a backlog of stuff to go deal with -- I wouldn't like that, why would they?

At the end of the day -- it's not onerous to wait a beat to send something. Nothing we do is so important or urgent that it MUST be sent IMMEDIATELY. I'd rather take my time and send when they will be most likely to receive it gratefully rather than annoyedly -- and when they will be most likely to actually SEE it rather than it getting buried under a thousand other emails. :-)

��

ETA: You asked about Summer and December. FOR ME, the only times that submissions are literally not going to happen are the last two weeks of December through the week of New Years, and right around major holidays: Thanksgiving, Easter, Memorial Day, 4th of July, and the end of August through Labor Day. If I have something special I want to send widely at the END of summer, I might suggest holding off until after Labor Day — or if it’s close to Thanksgiving/early Dec, I’d rather just wait until January. This is for two reasons: One, editors tend to want to “clear the decks” in preparation for September and January — we are all still on school time, I think! Two, because there are few or no publisher meetings during these times as many bosses are on vacation — and if they can’t bring it to a meeting, they can’t buy it.

(That would NOT necessarily be the case with every project - an option book, R+R or very limited submission might go out — but a wide submission that could potentially turn into an auction, I would prefer to wait until there’s not going to be something interrupting the proceedings. It would suck if we lost momentum because of a holiday break!)

Does it matter? Maybe not, at the end of the day, but I still personally would rather err on the side of TOO mindful rather than not mindful enough. So I have my little submission superstitions, and I think most other agents do, too. And hey, it’s served me pretty well so far!

[naranjapetrificada]

20, 56, and 71? (I'm very curious about that last with your current project)

Thank you! I can always rely on you to indulge me when I want to play an ask game 🥰

It got a little long so I'm gonna put in a break to not ruin people's feeds.

Before the break though, if you want to play "get to know your fic writer" just pick your question(s) from this list!

20. Have you noticed any patterns in your fics? Words/expressions that appear a lot, themes, common settings, etc?

There are a lot of possible answers to this one, but a few off the top of my head:

I can never resist a little alliteration.

It's something I always have to rein in a bit, but if I want to emphasize something I will regularly repeat myself. Not word for word, but restating it. I think this might be related to the way I speak IRL and the ADHD need to over-clarify. But it's a thing I've seen other writers do also!

I love an image, and literally require them to write the way the human brain requires oxygen. Every shorter piece I've posted was directly inspired by/is heavily dominated by a single image, to the point that I sometimes feel like it's the poetry part of my brain that writes anything under 2000 words.

56. What’s something about your writing that you pride yourself on?

The nouns. People, places, and things, as in introducing a character, evoking a place and describing a thing. Until fairly recently, those were my writing raisons d'être tbh. An image would lead me to one or more of them, and I'd get lost in them, but my motivation would always peter out around the time I needed stuff to like, happen. Plot was always, always an afterthought (which is a big reason for the poetry part of my brain I mentioned in the previous answer).

71. When it comes to more complicated narratives, how do you keep track of outlines, characters, development, timeline, ect.?

Hoo boy. What a question. I've never committed to a longfic the way I have with FtF so I'm still figuring it out. When I was still figuring out which tropey longfic I wanted to work on in this fandom I actually started with a different one (a "Stede gets captured by Blackbeard before he has the chance to get gut-stabbed by the Spanish" thing), which is why you'll confusingly see FtF posts tagged with #baby's second longfic. But one thing working on that first one helped me with was figuring out I need to stay on top of it all.

The short version is "a doc for everything and everything in a doc."

I have like, a "beat sheet" for the big story beats and a big messy "brain dump" sort of document, so that I can note new things down without getting distracted by where they're supposed to go. The latter is also where the earliest writing takes place, and how I learn what shape something could take.

When things start to coalesce a bit, there's a new file for every chapter that I can see on the horizon (like for FtF I've gone as far as Chapter 6). Doing it any other way would be literally unworkable for me. Besides just like, limiting the scale of whatever I'm looking at at a given moment, it's also handy to be able to cut and paste things around when I need to change where something falls in the timeline. And because this fic is The Way That It Is, I also have separate documents for things like flashbacks and the academic blurbs, although I will copy the latter to their requisite chapter doc when I figure out where I want them.

While writing this reply, it's occurred to me that it might be a good idea to have a document just for things that have been set in stone, like dates and ages and locations etc. Just to keep my facts straight. That's kind of a big reason I've been posting chapters as soon as they're written instead of waiting till I had a backlog - I needed to get some things set in stone so I wouldn't be tempted/able to keep changing everything. The more concrete details I nail down the faster (read: not fast) this thing gets written.

This has been so much fun and super educational to think about all this stuff so thank you so, so much for asking ❤️❤️❤️

[unorcadox]

2 years of unorcadox.

hey hi welcome all -- hello especially to my trans and nonbinary followers, hope we’re all doing well ^_^  today’s the blog’s birthday!!  as of this post going live, assuming tumblr actually does its job, it will have been 2 years since uo’s first post!  i wanna just talk about the blog a little because i haven’t talked on here much as of late.

however, before that, i want to just say that i’d like to eventually start releasing video edits to accompany certain edits!  i have no idea when this’ll get sorted, but i’m gonna try to get it ready by the turn of the year, so keep an eye out for that!  these will mostly just be a single edit with accompanying audio on them, but who knows.  maybe i’ll do something more?

in case you choose to not read the stuff below the read more, i just want to say thank you to everyone for supporting the blog over the years, and for continuing to do so!  anyways, onto the actual post:

first of all, thank you all SO much for 9000 followers!!  it’s over 9000 wow!!  ok but seriously, when i first started this blog, i didn’t expect anyone to ever see it.  i know it’s a cliche thing to say but i told no one i was making it, i didn’t network to other blogs, i just made a really shitty edit and slapped it up on here, and somehow i got lucky.  i’ve made over 800 edits as of today’s post, and that’s just the ones i’ve posted!  fun fact, if i’d never mass-posted my backlog in august, i would’ve ran out literally days ago.  that’s how much content i try to stay ahead on.

second of all, i kinda wanna take a moment to say that i’m sorry about the lack of requests being fulfilled -- both recently and in the past.  i edit in batches, and prioritize content i need for scheduling purposes, but sometimes requests get kinda forgotten in the shuffle, or i don’t really have much in the way of ideas for it, so i shelve it and hope i can come back to it later... which i very rarely do.  😔  going to try and catch up on a couple of ones i have and feel free to send in more!  i know i don’t really interact as much on here as i probably should, but i love getting asks and requests and i read the notes on my posts frequently so.  thank you for being there!

third of all, the future of the blog.  so, i want to make this clear now -- uo’s not going anywhere!  i don’t intend on changing the blog at all, if anything i’d want to add onto it.  i post 3 times a day now currently, with intermittent unplanned posts at off-times, mostly reblogs of others’ edits.  however, weirdcore is probably not forever and i am kinda thinking about where this blog could go in the future.  i’ve considered opening a redbubble, ko-fi or patreon, as a way to support myself financially (i take virtually every photo used on this blog, and use very little outside content esp. in these newer edits) but i am uncertain about it.  i could also try branching out my image editing into other styles or something, but idk what!  what would you guys like to see?  i’ve considered actually talking on the blog more, transitioning to having text posts be a major part of the blog, but i’m not quite sure about how they’d be received.  let me know if you want to see anything on here!  --  relatedly since we’re mentioning blogs, check out @dreamlink3d as i’m still working on it :)

one last thing actually, for those who choose to read the read more, enjoy the secret -- before i had to go on hiatus in august, i was working on trying to attach songs to specific uo edits, for a compilation album of some kind.  i ended up running them through a site that just attaches audio to an uploaded images in ...ways i don’t understand, BUT the end results were so fun, i edited and compiled them into 2 “albums”!  i don’t consider them my own work as i didn’t make the audio, and they won’t be used in the upcoming stuff, but you can listen to them here [1] and here [2] !  click on a song title to see its associated edit btw!

i know i said the last thing was the last but i just remembered actually, i want to say like.  it’s weird being one of the “first” weirdcore blogs to really hit its stride, and one of the only from that time to still be around and actively posting.  cahwwcabh is deactivated and they were a huge influence on me and wc as a whole, sanfor has deactivated, shwenthe/hazy/dragon/hauntedearth/a lot more tbh have more or less gone inactive, godenteredmybody and pirate-flavor still post intermittently, and most of the active blogs now are a newer set that i didn’t ever meet in my time in weirdcord.  it’s weird but cool in a way!  i really like the newer set of editors tbh, and i hope that me supporting them encourages people to check them out.  in general this whole section is meaningless but idk i felt like vocalizing it.  it’s a weird feeling watching all your peers more or less move on while you stay behind and see a new wave of artists take their place more or less.  anyways, i just hope that my edits still bring happiness and meaning to the people who see them :)

ok NOW i’m done.  sorry for the wall LMAO i just felt like actually saying something for once on here.  btw i’ve been doing a lot better since i got back from hiatus, i hope you (yes you, the reader of this post) are doing well too -- i know this blog tends to lean heavily on negative emotions, and as such it kinda attracts people who are troubled -- so i feel like i gotta check in every once in a while LMAO.  i hope life is being kind to you, thank you so much, and have a lovely day <3.

[callgespenst]

A week and a half ago, my old friend JJ passed away. He told me about his cancer diagnosis…I’m not sure when, I feel like it was only a couple months ago. Last I talked to him, he sounded like he wasn’t doing bad at all. He asked me to help his family out sorting through his collection, in the worst case scenario. And the turnaround on that was, much faster than I expected, than anyone expected, I’m sure. He had only just turned 41 a few months ago. I’ve known him for about twelve years. We went to college together, took Japanese together. His influence definitely helped shape me into the massive dweeb I am today.

I knew his family, was over at their house a few times, I also knew was his sister and her husband pretty well. Today, I came up to help out with the estate sale. I’ve been absolutely dreading coming here for the last week. This is the first time I had seen any of his family in at least three years, and everyone is understandably miserable, grieving, and trying to do all the stuff a situation like this demands as best they can. So far, at least, I don’t feel nearly as awkward as I thought I might, so that’s something.

Now, if you had asked me before today, I would have told you that JJ was quite the collector. Big fan of action figures, model kits, robot toys of all sorts, not to mention a wide selection of anime dvds and manga. But uh, he had -much- more than I thought he did. Between his bedroom, the basement, the storage unit down the road, there is, an almost unfathomable number of items. Many of them, by sheer dint of sitting around long enough since he purchased them, are now worth a small fortune. At the very least, with my assistance identifying many of the more niche items, selling them all will cover the expenses typically associated with dying, and hopefully also get everything to homes where they’ll be appreciated.

Before I came here, I went to the local hobby store, partly to buy a Qubeley for another friend of mine, but mostly to ask them, if they’d be willing to buy JJ’s backlog. They were nice enough to say yes, which is good, because selling model kits online is such a pain. Having someone buy the whole kit backlog without having to ship out all those big boxes will probably have the same net profit, with substantially less hassle. But somehow yet again, I drastically underestimated how much stuff he had lying around. The trunk of my car is almost full of 30 Minute Missions, Sisters, SMPs, and all sorts of other kits that were purchased, put in the basement, and never built. And somehow there’s still more. I don’t know if it’ll all fit in the trunk. But it has to, because the back seat is covered in boxes upon boxes of Star Wars, Marvel, and He-Man collectibles that I’ll be taking to another one of my local shops that deals in used toys.

The other day I was telling my mother about all this I was going to do today, just making conversation, letting her know what I’d be up to. She told me, very emphatically, that I was not to take anything home with me. In fact, she said I shouldn’t even bring any of the items the family asked me to resell into my house for any length of time. Which, even for my mother, is a really weird thing to say. I’ve already got enough stuff of my own, to be sure, but I set aside the SMP Layzner figures, since that was a show JJ and I watched together. (Not to mention, trying to sell built model kits is typically a fool’s errand. People want to build them theirselves!). If I can find them, I might also take the Armored Core kits he had me build ages ago, when I had no backlog and he wanted to customize the final product without the extra steps.

JJ had all this stuff, and almost none of it was out on display. He had one detolf in his bedroom with some nice scale figures, and everything else was in various sized plastic boxes. I think somehow this has actually made the process of sorting and identifying -more- difficult. Took an hour today to not only figure out which Nendoroid went with what accessories, but which display base was theirs. All we had to go off of was the copyright info on the back of the base, which was anywhere from somewhat to completely unhelpful, depending on how many kanji were involved.

We found a selection of animation cels under his bed. Lots of good stuff from good shows in there, it’s a shame they were left like that for who knows how long. Somehow, it was seeing a frame of Gije Zaral from Space Runaway Ideon that made me closer to breaking down crying than I had the rest of the day. Realizing that, I had finally finished watching Ideon, JJ’s all time favorite series, and never got to talk with him about it.

To summarize, I’m feeling a lot of wildly different emotions right now. Missing my friend, most strongly. He wasn’t religious, and most days I’m not either, but I hope he’s found his way into a pleasant afterlife, or at least an enjoyable isekai fantasy type deal. There’s definitely a twinge of “oh no, do /I/ own too much crap?” and some generalized world-weariness as well. But it’s not all bad. I got to pet a lot of cats today, and one of them snuggled with me for long enough that I think I’m wearing more cat hair than clothing now. And tomorrow, after some more sorting and pricing and organizing, I’ll head home and have a nice holiday weekend with my wife and some friends.

I’ve been typing for an hour and have no idea how to wrap this up. If anyone has actually read this far, thank you, it really does mean a lot. I hope you are also experiencing a fluffy cat and maybe a warm blanket. Here’s to a full night’s sleep because it’s way past my bedtime.

[crowntiarawhatever]

The Viridescent Crown Chapter 4

"What?" Lan replied, peering up at the knight. 

Sir Ross stared down at Lan, curtley elaborating,"The Knight Commander."

"Where is he going?"

“To the doorway."

"Did you not hear the discussion?"

Lan lifted her cup and gently blew on the tea. Though it wasn’t lady-like, it was better than burning one's tongue on a hot drink.

Ross questioned her again as she cautiously sipped on her tea. 

"Didn't you send him to the doorway to get rid of him?"

Within Latia’s territory, some of the most dangerous beasts roamed the surrounding lands of the Ice Wall’s doorway.  

"Now why would I do that?"

Only then did Lan take her mind off the tea to concentrate on Sir Ross.

"To usurp Master Eustaph’s power within the duchy."

Upon hearing his answer Lan burst into a fit of laughter, she had not expected to hear such a gloomy response from Sir Ross.

Ross however could not figure out the reason for her sudden onset of insanity.

"Is that your plan?" he asked incredulously.

"Isn't it strange to ask such a straightforward question? You basically told me, 'You're trying to kill my brother!'" 

Laughing cheerfully, Lan rested her chin in her hand. Her impermeable eyes glistened with mirth.

"That isn’t the case. I'm just counting on this plan to work."

"I believe you."

"You believe in me? You shouldn’t!"

Sir Ross raised his eyebrows,  "And why shouldn’t I?"

"For what reason should you trust me?"

"It’s true that you were not formally educated as a Patriarch. Though, I was under the impression that you were taking lessons from a private tutor, but…"

Even so, for a nineteen year old girl to inherit a leadership position in the midst of a disastrous situation and handle it so skillfully upon her first attempt was unbelievable. 

"It's as if you were prepared for this, like you've been waiting for this to happen."

"Not at all actually."

Lan cooed as she watched the ripples race across the amber liquid. In fact, this was the very situation that she had wanted to avoid. 

She had tried to save her family, yet they died nonetheless.

Lan had come up with a theory: no matter how much she attempted to intervene with the plot, the main story would continue to unfold in a similar manner. It would be difficult to sway the tree of fate.

"I'm just doing my best to help in whatever ways I can. Even now, I feel like my stomach is tying itself in knots."

Lan quickly added, "That doesn’t mean you should include my woes in your report to Eustaph; I don’t want to worry him"

"That is if he's worried about you."

Lan giggled at Sir Ross's snide remark. 

"You’re probably right."

"Aren’t you upset?"

When asked by Ross, Lan wrapped her fingertips around the teacup. The wide and shallow characteristics of the porcelain cup had allowed the tea to grow cold. 

"Why would I be upset?" Lan countered, sipping at the last of her drink.

"Well…."

For once, Ross didn’t know what to say.

"I want to be a real family with Eus. I don't think it's fair to say that it's impossible to get along as siblings, but I would like us to be closer."

Lan gaze darted back to Sir Ross.

"Though I don’t mean to force the relationship on him. I'm just trying to make amends. Eustaph is in his right, he had been bullied by my mother." she rambled on.

"Though I’m not saying my actions didn’t bother him in the past. But now I want things to go a little differently."

Clink

Lan quickly placed the teacup back on its saucer and poured herself a second cup. Its sweet scent swirled up with the water vapors. 

"So in conclusion, I'm not angry. It's all up to Eustaph."

Sir Ross found himself frozen, staring at Lan as if she had sprouted a second head. 

Unaware of her escort's befuddlement, Lan went about hoisting another pile of documents from the heaps of paperwork and set them at her desk.

She had known of the dire situation of the duchy’s finances, But, what was the cause of this unprecedented backlog?

Ms. Elizabeth, as the current administrator, would have to be aware of this. To be handling this workload single handedly without complaint, it must have been difficult for her.

'I can't believe she didn't show it. She has the makings of a great administrator.' 

It appeared that most of the issues raised against the duchy were due to lack of funding. The bell tower has been requesting repair for several years already… 

"Isn't it better to work from the ground up? The road covered by the landslide three years ago still hasn’t been restored, right?' Lan mumbled to herself. 

Her first goal was to sort through all these documents.

'Let's cheer up.' 

Lan took a deep breath and began to quickly read through the papers. Her ability to speed read was one of her few redeeming qualities, but considering the mountains of documents left, she would have to take it up a notch.

'The formatting of these documents is terrible.' 

They all lacked structure and didn’t follow a set rubric. At this point, it was more like a letter to the lord than a document.

'We will need to fix that.' 

If we set a few specifications in place going forward, separating the document components and emphasizing data. That would reduce the time needed to read and compare the submitted forms. 

Flap.

With the speed that Sir Ross found himself handing papers over to Lan, he wondered if she was truly comprehending what she was reading. By the time she began to slow down, there was a loud knock on the door.

Lan and Sir Ross looked up in surprise.

Sir Ross quickly brought his hand to his sword as the door swung open. 

"Lan!"

It was her uncle, Baron Lindbergh. 

"Uncle."

Lan rose from her seat.

"May I ask, what are you doing here?"

"I hadn’t seen you all day. I was worried that something may have happened to you!"

Baron Lindbergh huffed his way inside. Sir Ross stood in front of the baron blocking his path. 

"Without permission, you cannot meet with the duchess."

"I'm her uncle! Besides, I'm more worried about a guy like you being here!"

"Uncle, he is one of our loyal knights."

Sir Ross’s eyes widened at Lan’s quick defense of him. Lindbergh snorted.

"What loyalty?"

"He may take a seat Sir Ross"

Ross stepped aside without a word, and Lindbergh plopped down into an armchair; ignoring the fact that he hadn’t asked to enter or waited for her to take a seat first. His manners were unbefitting of nobility to the point of being sinful. 

Lan sat back down and inquired, without saying too much. "What's the matter?"

"I'm going to assign you another escort."

"Another escort?"

"Yes! Unlike this brute here, he’s a man with loyalty. I highly recommend him; he’s the real deal." Lindbergh shot back.

"No thank you, Sir Ross is more than enough. I don't see a need for another escort."

Lindbergh frowned and growled back. "Lan."

"Yes."

"Are you aware that your mother owed me money?"

Baron Lindbergh brashly pulled a thick envelope out from under his arm.

"She needed to buy a necklace. As it was a sudden loan, it was very difficult for me to accommodate her,"

He held out the package for Lan, to which she opened the envelope with a blank face.

It was a loan statement. Claiming that her mother had taken out a loan of 10,000 verats from Baron Lindbergh with an interest of 10% per month.

With the loan gaining 1,000 verats in interest every month, it was a ridiculously large loan. With 3,000 verats, she could replace all of the duchy's knights' equipment with state of the art equipment and have money left over.

'Should I say it's a good thing I’ve only ever borrowed a few verats?' 

Indeed, it would be difficult for Lindbergh to pay more than 10,000 verats. Given the baron's gross income being set at about 15,000 verats a year. For now, the verat was rarely used as a currency unless it was spent between nobility, the average citizen still participated in bartering.

'A 10,000-Verat necklace.' 

Lan tried to recall her mother's colorful jeweled accessories for one that would fit.

'It’s almost like the Marie Antoinette ‘Affair of the Diamond Necklace’ case.' 

Her reputation had been tarnished by the scandal regardless of the fact that she was found innocent and hadn’t purchased the necklace. 

"According to this loan statement, the default for this payment is later this year."

"Yes, but your mother was in that accident…", the baron drawled on with an exaggerated pout.

"This was a lot of money for me too. That's why I'm informing you in case you were unaware."

He covered his mouth after letting out a dry cough, barely masking his grin. 

"But as you're my niece. I'm thinking I can exempt you from this burdensome debt."

"Exempt me?"

Lan looked at him curiously. Baron Lindbergh fiddled with his mustache organizing his thoughts.

"I want to be a real family with you."

"We're already blood relatives."

Not wanting to say family, Lan chose a different word. But the baron, who didn't notice the distance, said with a smile.

"I want you to marry my son."

‘Oh, my God.’

Swallowing a breath, Lan nearly choked. "Son? Are you referring to my cousin Robbie?"

‘I knew him, we had met several times. He was known for flaunting his "masculinity", lusting after women, and gambling for sport!’ 

In other words, by Lan's standard, he was the human being equivalent to garbage.

'I guess gamblings not working out for him...' 

"Yes, as you know, the age difference between the two of you is only about four or five years. It's the perfect time to settle down."

‘Dear lord, he’s serious.’

Lan couldn’t let her disgust show, not yet. 

It wasn’t the time to be making enemies. She had only just risen to the position of duchess and patriarch. Perhaps once the duchy’s finances and affairs were in order, she could take the risk of distancing herself from the baron.

Although she had secured her position with the authority of the Azure ring, there were bound to be groups who were dissatisfied with her becoming the temporary patriarch to the duchy.

Baron Lindbergh had a vast network of connections across the continent, he was not someone you should cross.

'Well, that didn’t just apply to the baron.' 

What's fortunate is that she could identify and hire trustworthy individuals thanks to her background knowledge as the original author. 

'It’s a relief she remembered so much.' 

Lan smiled shyly and squeaked back, "Uncle, thank you so much for your advice. However,

marriage....it’s so sudden. Besides, it’s…"

Lan scratched her cheek.

"It's kind of like getting married because of...d-debt" she stuttered out in a high feminine voice. Baron Lindbergh upon hearing this took it as a clueless response. 

"But it's 10,000 verats. Are you aware of how much money that is? Besides, the duchy has other debts that you should focus on. This isn’t something you can handle on your own."

Lindbergh leaned forward.

"You'll need the guidance of a wiser man."

"Like yourself, uncle?”

"That's right."

Lindbergh nodded his head, wondering if he had finally reached her.

Lan looked at the pile of documents upon her desk.

‘I still have a lot of work to do.’

She turned her gaze back to him and replied with a dazzling smile.

"That's just what I wanted to hear."

— 

"Are you asleep?"

When asked by Sir Ross, Lan replied with a vague, "Yes…”

Realizing that she was not listening to him, he approached the desk and put his hand over the documents she was reviewing.

Only then did Lan look at him, "Sir Ross?"

"It's quite late, shouldn’t you turn in?"

"Just a little bit more."

"Why don't you finish this up in the morning?"

"Fine."

Lan rubbed her weary eyes as they were blinded by the candle light. Shutting them tightly she avoided facing the candelabra. 

Ross watched Lan pull herself together.

When Baron Lindbergh had visited to speak with her, he had truly wanted to cut him down. 

When did they establish a secretive relationship? He didn’t recall this information. 

'However.' 

She had reiterated the discussion topics to him once the baron had left. Though he didn’t believe it, of course. She had to be attempting to build trust in order to double-cross him.

'I have a plan for our meetings going forward.' 

— 

"Next time, when my uncle and I talk alone, you may enter this room and listen in."

Lan had led him to an adjacent room connected to the duke’s office and pointed to a stove pipe attached to the shared wall.

"You will be able to hear clearly if you open the flue.” 

"Couldn’t you just secretly write or share notes with him?"

At Ross's words, Lan blinked and stretched her shoulders.

"Well, sure that's a possibility but I don't intend to do that."

"Why are you going so far?"

"Hmm, has this been counterproductive? I wanted to build trust between us."

"Trust?"

"Yes, your trust is worth the effort to me." Lan continued on thoughtfully. 

Shrugging her shoulders. "I wonder… when Eustaph comes back after graduating from the academy, will it be easier then?"

This was Eustaph’s last semester at the academy. He was set to graduate after winter, and return to the mansion in the spring.

“Couldn’t we build trust by working alongside each other?”

Sir Ross didn't reply to Lan's words.

His master’s thoughts belonged to him alone. Joining the military and becoming a knight didn’t allow one to understand and speak for their liege. 

— 

Lan pulled herself from the chair and took one last glance at the documents.

"I’ll take your advice and retire for the night."

Sir Ross lowered his eyes and remained silent.

Back in her room, Lan was readied for bed by a maid who assisted in changing her clothes.

Naturally, she would have been moved to the late duchess’s quarters, but she had refused to be moved to that room and told staff she was only in the position temporarily anyway. 

As she laid down in the familiar bed, sleep quickly overtook her. 

←Chapter 3

[m-r-levine]

On Interruptions of Flow

Blocks used to be just part of the normal cycles of work and rest and refilling the well, the rhythms of moving between projects. (I won’t deny the good feelings and brain juices from feedback on the work, but it was never the driving force. I treasure comments like a dragon treasures their hoarde, but the urge to write and the pleasure of storytelling are not primarily or even secondarily grounded in the reception of the work.)

In the last few years, that changed. I don’t know if this was a true cause or if it was just one little part of a whole system of events that led to my creative process breaking down, but.

In 2019, I dropped all my other projects to meet an absurd deadline for a zine piece, and then for various reasons, a month later I took that story to pieces to see if an actual novel length concept might be hidden in there**.

Meanwhile, some fairly major things were going on in my personal life, and the tremors were getting markedly worse.

Suddenly I didn’t have blocks of time or steadiness of hand to paint either, except for pushing through for a couple of excruciating outstanding commissions, and struggling to wrap up the second volume of the graphic novel. Yet even with a few of those deadlines dealt with I could no longer make words go on any other project. I tried everything in the toolbox to get the brain going again, especially after a side effect of quarantine gave back my former 3+ hours daily commute time.

Finishing the renovations on the old house ate almost everything I had to give, and my partner’s mental health struggles took the rest. I cannot begin to explain to you just how few spoons I have had between the boring job (which became much more intense with the effects of the pandemic) and Life™️.

Previously, writing and sketching helped me unwind and ground after a shift, or even during breaks. In the last few years though…

Words came slowly for La Mala Suerte, but opening any other story filled my brain with static noises. I could not string basic sentences together. I could not outline plot, I had no fragments of dialogue or vignettes fall into my head like before. When I ran out of backlog to post… Suddenly I had nothing.

Short stretches being dry like that are familiar enough, but days and weeks turned into months and years of desperately wanting to tell the stories and in the few moments of quiet I could steal away? Nothing. It’s an eerie feeling, having the vivid and even visceral scenes that are already written and outlined still looping in my head, screaming to get out, but the moment I try to write connective tissue? Right back to tv snow.

Unlike painting, my writing is accessible everywhere I go, even when it hurts to hold a pen - being able to get ‘lost’ in stories helped me through some incredibly hard times in the past, and losing that ability was devastating. The disappointment and yes, the shame of being adrift and wordless has been wretched. I have longed for the elation I used to find on the other side of a hard passage, the joy of solving the puzzle and freeing the spirit from the proverbial stone.

I still don’t entirely understand what happened in my brain that autumn of 2019… I just know that something changed, and we’re still not… entirely back from it. I am suspecting that Long Covid is now part of it - that was summer of ‘21 though, and I was already firmly lodged in The Block by then.

Maybe it was just one a longer but still normal drought and needing recovery time from intensely brain-heavy Life Events™️ until that extra layer was added? I truly don’t know. I don’t know if it matters either, except in that I am deeply afraid I will lose it again.

Anyway, that’s the ramble for the afternoon on the writing side. Hopefully the Boring Job leaves me some braincells to work on asks and stuff later.

* caveat: Except for the fact some truly wretched negative/judgy feedback can entirely poison the affected work for me and make it impossible to get forward motion(Obsidian Slipper is one such victim, I may talk about it more later.)

** hola Teca. 😒