#I actually tried to access some stuff but a lot of it seems to be locked server side so I can't rip from the source easily

[r0semultiverse]

Anyone gotten these variations yet? 👀

[jarofstyles]

Flower

Hello… here is another mini series I started even tho I have other things I definitely need to finish…. But I’m kinda obsessed with them so I hope you guys like them 🫢

Check out our Patreon for early access to part 2 and 180+ exclusive writings!

WC- 2.8k

Warnings- y/n being oblivious, stupidly sweet h, things alluding to masturbation

“Y’know that isn’t normal for him, right?” Gia murmured as she came up next to Y/N. The low light of the bar had her squinting slightly, but thankfully the rock music wasn’t blaring too loud over the speakers over here. Coming after work, she had looked forward to meeting up with her friends for some much needed socialization- even if she was exhausted.

Confusion painted her features, looking at her friend with furrowed brows. “What are you talking about?” 

“Harry. He’s like, all over you. All the time” She looked over to the man  with a smirk, who had previously excused himself to participate in this round of pool. Y/N wasn’t much for the game so she stayed back in their seats, taking a moment to decompress. Or, try to. Sometimes it got a bit overwhelming with so many people talking at once.

“He’s just touchy, isn’t he?” Y/N had only known Harry for a few months, moving here to teach and one of her coworkers so kindly helped integrate Y/N  into her friend group. Harry owned a contracting business, actually, and Y/N had been getting lots of help from him on a variety of projects. Specifically, the latest project regarding his expertise in what sort of bannister she should have for the staircase. It was antique, and she didn’t want to be like those flippers she saw online who ruined the charm of old houses. If she wanted a brand new build, she would have bought one. “See?” 

Harry had his arm around Mitch, laughing about something probably a little dumb. The man was borderline tipsy but he’d just started his water rounds. He seemed to be an affectionate person, cuddly. At least to her and Mitch and Niall, all of whom seemed used to it. 

“Yeah, but not with women. He’s more reserved when it comes to them but not with you. Like… what was that before?” Her cheeks flushed slightly as dhe knew exactly when her friend was talking about. Harry had come back from the bar with their soft pretzel and another drink for her, and when he sat down she was promptly dragged into his lap. She’d let out a yelp but it turned into a laugh, settling in his thighs. Of course there was no admitting that her stomach had erupted in butterflies and she felt them kick up every time he rested his chin on her or squeezed her a little tighter to him. That the scent of his cologne had become something that grounded her anxiety in the moment, and it was weird how he seemed to be an anchor for her every time he pulled something like that. Somehow he just had that sort of effect on her.

Now that she mentioned it, she had noticed Sarah’s eyes widening when he did that, but she had assumed it was just for the pure audacity of a man manhandling a woman into his lap and ripping off a piece of cheese dipped pretzel and bringing it to her mouth. 

Y/N knew Harry was a cuddle bug. He was needy, like a pup, nosing and pawing his way into peoples hearts. But she assumed he did this sort of stuff with everyone. Maybe she wasn’t paying enough attention, but she had been too nervous to allow herself to think of his touches as flirtation. It would bring down the wall she’d tried to set there to not get her hopes up and look too deep into things. It had gotten her heart bruised a few times already. “Oh.” She replied, looking at her slowly emptying glass. “I, um, didn’t really think about that. He’s been pretty handsy for a long time.” He was also a flirt. Said things on purpose to make her flustered, but only in her ear so she’d get even more worked up. That was something he really liked to do- whisper in her ear or close to her to share something only with her. 

“Babes, you need to open your eyes. That man is completely gone for you. Smitten kitten. I was convinced you guys were secretly banging but I was trying to mind my business… but you mentioned a dating site earlier and I got confused.” She’d wholeheartedly thought they were already an item. “You need to talk to him or make a move or something. He’s all but pissed on you to claim you from the rest of the group, and he keeps looking over here to check on you. He acts like your boyfriend already, but there are more benefits you can cash in on if you just go for it.” She wiggled her brows making Y/N groan, hiding her head in her hands. 

She was way too sober for this conversation. 

Of course she had interest in Harry. Some feelings, even, but he’d never expressed interest in dating anyone. How could she not? He was almost unreal, checking loads of boxes she had in her mental list of ‘what my dream man would have’, including the dimple thing. The fact that he always said he was “waiting for the right one to find me”  when she’d ask floated back into her mind, clearing a bit of the fog that usually surrounded her when she thought about him. Had he been trying to tell her something?

Y/N could admit she wasn’t the most perceptive at times. She was a little oblivious, some could say, and didn’t read into signs well. The trait was something that used to get her into trouble when she was younger, her head always off in the clouds instead of where it needed to be according to the adults around her. It was possible she missed something, but she wanted to find out how to rectify that. 

“Speak of the devil…” Gia whispered, moving over a bit with a snicker as Harry seamlessly slipped back into the booth and ran his hand over her hair. Y/N felt his presence like a blanket, face turning to look at him and his concerned features. That little wrinkle between his brow she always noticed when he was upset or focusing heavily on something.

“Hi, petal. Something wrong? Headache?” He asked delicately in case the answer was yes. She got migraines frequently, as much as it sucked- but Harry had brought her some pain relievers while she was at work once to save her ass. God, her head was a mess but it wasn’t from the migraine this time around.

“No, I’m okay.” She lifted her head, feeling his hand slide under her hair to hold the back of her neck. Hopefully he wouldn’t see the chills settling on her skin as his thumb rubbed over the side of her throat, concern still etched on his features. “Was just a bit dehydrated but I’m fine now.” Her smile must not have been as convincing as she tried, his lips pursing as he shook his head. 

“Got t’be careful with eating the salty chips and then having the drinks… one glass isn’t gonna be enough.” He sighed. “Stay here for me, yeah? I’ll be right back, let me get you some water.” Without thinking he leaned in and pressed a peck to her temple, sliding back out of the booth leaving the spot tingling. Sitting there with rapidly blinking eyes, she watched the stretch of muscles flex under his tee shirt as he made his way towards the bar to order said water.

Okay. Yeah. Now that she mentioned it, she definitely knew he didn’t press little kisses to the rest of the girl’s heads, or give that amount of attention to her but… again, she had tried to ignore it. Tried not to get her hopes up.

“Girl… you’ve got to see it now.” Gia’s brows were raised up. “You’ve got him wrapped around your finger.” 

Maybe she was right. 

——

“I’m okay, H. I promise.” Y/N laughed out the words as he brought the straw back to her mouth and gave her a look. “Fine. But I’m gonna have t’piss soon if you keep force feeding water down my throat.” She shook her head as she took another drink, making a show of swallowing it. “See? Done.” 

Harry’s eyes had dipped down to her throat when she swallowed and back up to her mouth, taking a beat too long to respond. “Good. You… we can’t have you feeling poorly tomorrow. Are y’still up for it?” His hand was traveling around her body. Not in a sexual way, not really, but over her shoulders. Rubbing her arm. Cupping the back of her neck. Fiddling with her hair. For the first time, Y/N could consciously see what Gia was talking about. Maybe it was sad she needed someone else’s validation of it first, but now that she had it she didn’t feel as crazy for the emotions she felt. 

“Of course.” Harry was taking her to a sick used bookstore that he had helped remodel a few years back. When he found out she had gotten back into a reading mood lately, he’d suggested it immediately over text under the table, which now that she was thinking about it…. It was obviously to ensure it would be just the two of them. No one else.  He wanted to take her by herself, a little outing for just the two of them.

Stupid butterflies kicked in overdrive. “I’ve been dying to grab some new books.”

“I know. I remembered it when the owner called me a few days back about something and knew I had t’take you.” He grinned, leaning in a bit as he tucked the hair behind her ear. “I really hope you’ll like it.”

Y/N didn’t have much time to respond before the chatter got louder and the group that had gone back up to the bar for more drink ambled back and climbed into the booth. This time it wasn’t as much of a shock when she was scooped up into his lap, but it still made her hot under the skin. Her tummy swirled as he wrapped one solid arm around her and rested his chin on her shoulder, the other running over her thigh. It wasn’t suggestive, closer to her knee as he began to rub his thumb over the soft skin there. 

For some reason it was getting to her, making her worked up. The gentle touches, the wholesome nature of it made her feel a bit ashamed as she felt herself throb between her thighs, but it only got worse when he adjusted her in his lap, lifting her like it was nothing. Of course he had strength, the man hauled lumber by himself and did all sorts of superhuman shit when it came to construction, but it still shocked her every time she got to experience it first hand.

Taking a moment to think about it, it was always apparent that he was a beautiful man with a beautiful body. One thing that she really liked were his arms. Just as a whole. Hands, arms, how they’d built out a bit from all the hands on work. His hands could be a little rough with some callouses from those tools, but her grandma always did tell her that was the sign of a hard working man. It wasn’t something she focused on before because she had tried to deny the possibility of not only rejection but not being able to be in the friend group if things went sour..  At the moment she was past that. 

She could see the vein in his arm just a bit, near the anchor tattoo. His hand curled over her knee, almost possessively. This entire position was him claiming her. Realizing now he’d never pulled any of the other girls as close as he did her made her head spin. Hell, he really didn’t do much than give a friendly hug or hand to help them if they were stumbling. Fuck, he could actually feel something for her. Far past friendship.

“You’re quiet.” His words were so close they almost vibrated in her ear, making her startle a bit. “Shit, sorry Petal. Didn’t mean to scare you.” The little smile given to her made its way into her bloodstream, heating her up the longer he looked at her. “Why are you in your head, hm? Tired?” 

The way he spoke to her was so tender and sweet… gah! Now that she was allowing the possibility to be a thought, it was shaking her up. 

“Yeah, getting tired.” She wasn’t lying.  Her Friday classes had been a handful. That was the truth. “Need to take a long shower and sleep until an hour before you come to pick me up.” 

“Sounds like a good plan. What kind of soap or shampoo do you use?” He asked, a noticeable shift in his voice. A little deeper, softer for her ears only. It was intimate, she realized. How he spoke to her privately with her tucked in his lap. Her body melted further into him, but the lump in her throat had expanded from the realization. “You always smell fuckin’ amazing.” His nose skimmed over the side of her jaw making her exhale shakily. He was taking an inhale of her as he hugged her body against him. Her poor vibrator was in for it when she got home. 

“Uh- it’s like a coconut citrus mix?” She had to think about it. It was hard to focus on anything with her revelations at hand and the man of the hour touching her so liberally. Like she was his to touch. It wasn’t disrespectful and she knew he was the first person to read her body language- hell, he probably could read her mind better than she could process her own thoughts. But it was still sinking in, the feelings gripping her stomach. “Thank you. I try my best. No one wants to be stinky.” Nose crinkling in disgust, she felt him shake his head against her. 

“Trust me when I say you’re the best smelling person I’ve met. Wouldn’t complain if all my things smelled like you.” Oh? He didn’t elaborate, but there was a barely there kiss to the hinge of her jaw rendering her speechless. His reaction was to place his chin back on her shoulder, interjecting into Niall’s rant while Y/N sat there trying to process what that was. 

Deciding to test something made her really nervous, but she wanted to see what he’d do. While he was always the affectionate one and she never pushed him away, she didn’t usually return it as much. He always sought her out and she reciprocated but she wasn’t one to initiate a lot… so she wanted to see what he’d do. 

Letting out a yawn, she leaned her head against his shoulder and let her head nuzzle into his neck. Without saying a word, her hand went for his on her thigh and weaved their fingers together, pulling it further up her thigh. Holding his hand, she could feel his body stiffen ever so slightly for a mere moment and his heart rate pick up. His other arm around her tightened, thumb rubbing the back of her hand. “Comfy?” He mumbled to her.

“Mhm.” She nodded, letting his hand squeeze hers. He was just solid and sturdy. She could lean against him and feel protected in a way. Why she hadn’t tried this sooner she didn’t know, but she could hear his mood get better as he spoke. It was palpable, like he was vibrating a little bit, squeezing her hand every once in a while to remind her he was there. Or maybe it was for his own mind? 

It continued like this for a bit until everyone decided to get going, Harry being the last to stand. He was gentle about helping her off his lap, beating her to get on his feet and offered his hand to her to help her up. “C’mon, sleepy Flower. Time for your shower and sleep. Can’t have you too tired for the selection of books, hm?”  His hand steady on the small of her back, he led her to the car with a bit of a delay as they said good, a hug tight and lifting her off the ground a bit as he did so before having her promise to text when she got home. 

She fulfilled the promise, as well as her guilty vibrator session thinking about that tiny kiss on her skin and his hand on her knee, hoping that would make her chill out. It didn’t. 

[sevastiel]

Assorted Warframe fun facts I've found as of late! With screenshots and such. I find a lot of stuff just going through tilesets, looking for lore stuff that I can write into GS, so here's a few of my favorite things, in no particular order.

Folks who know me on discord have likely been subjected to these before.

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While most of the 'growing' void angels look fem, there are masc variants of the ones you can wake up and fight.

The dummy you can whack on in Teshin's cave uses a very similar model+mask to the drifter doll in the Duviri paradox trailer, and I'm pretty sure it uses the drifter heron voice too, save with an accent.

There are a lot of wally arts around the zariman, (and liminus ones and orowyrm ones, I think,) but they're often close by symbols that seem like both references to dualism, (see: The scaldra's symbol) and the zariman's main time stream splitting in two, for the drifter and the Operator.

This pillar in the Backroom, and the underside of the loft, have some very silly issues with the 'surface' things snap to. The ceiling itself is a fair bit lower than what you see, and the pillar is thinner on that particular side.

The mission entrance symbol on both the deimos hubs is notably duviri-esque.

If you remove the zariman food cubes from your dormizone, they will double in size, allowing you to make comedically large bricks of nutrition. This sometimes applies to the utensils, too.

In some of the caves in the murmur parts of Albrecht's labs, there are little mollusk like growths on the walls and ceiling. They are visibly added on, too.

On the main image thing for the Hex, Arthur looks Very different, and his hair appears to be missing its silver.

If you put the Zariman horse poster on the wall backwards, it becomes impossible to interact with, and pitch black.

In the murmur areas, lightning will occasionally flash in the fog below, revealing Wally!

The bottom of the Zariman food tray casts a solid block of shadow upwards, sometimes.

Also, the wall scribbles project over items put against it.

If you're using a thrown weapon like the Glaive Prime, (Or something with a very slow heavy) and your target dies before you can complete the heavy attack induced by your Wrathful Advance, you can get stuck in the animation. Weapons/Abilities are still usable, but you're invincible and cant move. (To escape, you must use the ability again)

You can 'escape' the backroom by stacking decorations until you're mashed against the ceiling, transferring out, and transferring back in, (And mashing some more) but you can't actually place decorations out there which is sad. I could only access the little window ledge and haven't tried it again elsewhere, though I do mean to.

Sometimes the drifter's legs will glitch out on his agile stance and either stretch the Fuck out of the textures, or make his knees look like a bent straw. It makes me giggle.

The drifter's model takes priority over the decor around the backroom mirror for some reason.

95% sure that the center beam on the rafters is off centered, and it makes my brain really mad to look at.

The windows in the backroom reflect the original decorations/coloring, not your actual ones

The sand dunes in the sanctum anatomica are facing the wrong direction. This is not a problem in the actual in level tilesets that I've noticed.

[sims3fiend]

Some dumb sims 3 updates/stuf

Or, how to develop severe brain damage in 10 easy steps.

Sooo… This is going to be more of a blog post than anything of any real substance, more of a whinge with maybe a few teasers for some stuff I may or may not release (probably not). Feel free to skip if you're after hot tips or coherent writing.

Stutter "fixer"

Sooooo…. The sims 3 has some stutter issueeesss… Incredible discovery, I know! I started looking at remedying them with settings, found some hidden settings that help reduce some of the issues but that can only do so much when the game was made in 2009 for 2009 computers.

So I had a looky at some things I thought could be causing it, mainly WinAPI functions because that's the easier route (h-haha…), and started to try to "optimize" some of the more common ones:

ReadFile: Was the first, and looking at the sheer volume of like 12783972198 calls a milisecond every time you move the camera, I thought surely I can speed it up a little r-right. Not really. I tried all sorts of… interesting things, file caching in memory, implementing the overlapped flag (took ages), etc. Oh and the performance increase? Literally nothing. It's called weirdly from wherever it's called and so we must suffer.

Threads: So, I had a look at other areas that were potential targets for speedup, ran an actual profile and it showed a problem areas namely threads and some other stuff I don't remember. ZwWaitForMultipleObjects and WaitForSingleObject take up a lot of time, so I very poorly attempted to optimize them, adding some timeout optimizations (and a bunch of other failed attempts). Despite being the most insane, this actually worked, and I got like a 40% speed increase in a very very niche metric that did not noticeably effect the game one single bit. I plan to combine all my failures into a single script eventually, maybe once combined they'll do something…

Actual insanity - Memory IPC: Then I had an idea, everyone hates e12, why don't we shove the games memory into another process and that'll fix it. No brain moment. No clue what past me was thinking, for some reason I thought you could like, access another processes memory if it was spawned from it, but uhh.. no, that's not how things work… I tried a few other things in a similar vein but it just crashed and crashed, so for now I'm just gunna work on:

Alloc/free mee - Current insanity: Currently, I'm still working on VirtualAlloc and VirtualFree (which is what I was redirecting to another process), but more from an optimizing memory usage standpoint than a… whatever the IPC thing was. There's a lot of things to try, and I've had some luck in some areas and some abysmal failures in others. There's a few promising functions calling VirtualAlloc/Free that seem to be potentially pointing towards memory leaks (004e54d0), but I'm too dumb to investigate that. At the moment, I'm going mostly just gathering more logs which takes forever and hurts my brain real bad.. On testing there's like 180 allocs that we could probably yeet no problem, which is like 750mb saved… Maybe idk.

I have plenty of ideas for deduplication, memory pool implementations to reduce churn/fragmentation, shoving things aggressively into pagefiles if they're not being used, etc. etc. Basically, there's a lot of avenues to explore, and I feel like there's potential… though I've definitely said that before and been dead wrong so…

Anyway, rambling over. I plan to release a dumb little renderer settings mod maybe-soon-ish that'll let you do dumb stuff that might be useful for reshade like turn shadows/drop shadows off and post processing off and on. I guess I could add max lots and other settings eventually too since they're static values.... Might also do a mythbusting post for some performance "tweak" stuff I see thrown around that isn't super accurate but I also don't want people to be angry at me so maybe not.

Sorry to whoever read all this, but also thanks :)

[pokemonshelterstories]

Hello! So as a trainer who has seen plenty of Pokemon over the years, something that has always nagged me is why some species of Pokemon have only minor sexual dimorphism (like the males of the Gible line having a notch in the fin because they seem to be more aggressive) to major sexual dimorphism that males and females look completely diffferent (like Oinkologne looking so different between the two). Plus some sexes only evolving into certain pokemon like a female snorunt into a Froslass or how Burmy evolve into either Mothim or Wormadam based on their sex? Talk about confusing! Has any one really looked into this sort of stuff like with a big and credible research paper and such, or even just figured some things out? I have tried looking but nowadays, it is hard to separate the actual science from the junk. P.S., Thank you and the Ranger Union for what you guys do! It isn't an easy job as a few ranger friends have told me, and you guys are awesome for helping people and Pokemon.

i recommend visiting some scientific databases if you're looking for information about this. your local library can help point you to some open-source databases and also let you know which ones you have access to through the library. there's a good deal of research about sexual dimorphism available! unfortunately, you can't just sligoogle for a lot of stuff anymore without running into made-up information created by a rotomAI.

as for why some pokemon only show slight variance...well, we're not pokemon! the reasons why a pokemon has sex-dependent differences might have some manner of practical effect, but in most instances it ultimately comes down to mating. sometimes one sex of a pokemon species will have some manner of enlarged combat feature for the sake of more easily defeating competitors for mating rights or defending nests; rhyhorn, gligar, piloswine, and relicanth are all examples. other times, a difference is mostly cosmetic and is for the sake of impressing the other sex: the black necks of dodrio, the smaller cheek spots of politoed, the whisker color of magikarp and gyarados, etc. others have a different kind of practical usage such as the larger antennae of male dustox helping them find females more easily, or the longer fur ruff of female hypno providing more warmth and surface area for their young to grab onto (hypno carry their offspring around)

when there's an obvious practical reason for something, it's easier for scientists to figure it out! it makes sense that a male goldeen has a longer horn for fighting other males with. but we don't necessarily know what it is about having blue back paws that makes a female shinx more attractive to a male, or why a male ludicolo with thicker brown stripes is more enticing to a female. something about those differences matters to these pokemon, so even if it seems small to us, it may make or break a pokemon's reproductive success!

[enilehtnorevol]

do you have any recommendations to help improve anatomy skills? i wanna improve but i legit haven’t improved for years and anatomy is my worst enemy 😭 i like art like yours and others and somehow the anatomy always seems so good so i was just wondering if you had any suggestions

i'm trying to figure out how to answer those types of asks for ages because most of my 'anatomy skills' come from observation and there's not much of what i've been actually actively learning i'm sorry 😭

doing studies works great but if you never tried and are not sure where to start find some artists who do them or better artists who explain how to. i wanted to suggest tb choi but she seems to delete everything at least from public access. found cosmic spectrum art on yt, a lot of great stuff, just the kind i'm talking about, but of course you can look for someone else yourself

a book on the topic i would certainly recommend is 'taco - point character drawing' thought everyone most likely know this one already. looks simple and doesn't overwhelm with walls of text and half of the book being dedicated to each separate bone and muscle, but actually very informative (nonetheless having a general understanding of how skeleton looks and works will always be helpful). i can recommend something more advanced if you're interested

and if anyone wants i could probably make some little tutorials like the one with face proportions but i need more specific requests for this

[fallloverfic]

Thoughts on To Be Hero X Episode 3: The Ever-Standing Hero

Another great episode!

The animation's still so lovely. I do like what they're doing with the 3D, but I'm just imagining how much more fun a full 2D animated series in the style they use would be. It looks so nice and I love whenever they use it, though this episode they kind of cranked up the horror, at least for the downsides of Firm Man's powers.

I like they still focus on Lin Ling's regret. They could have easily moved on, and many shows do, but obviously he feels doubts, and maybe that ties into his increased anxiety he mentions as part of his perfect powers. I also appreciate they incorporate it a bit into his movements (e.g., with the soda cans, and even how he moves around spaces). OCD can be really debilitating. They haven't really shown the full breadth of it (though the at least vague implication it's maybe what led Nice to jump is there, I suppose), so it'll be interesting to see how it's explored in future.

Apparently Nice's Hero Tower floor number is actually a 12, not a 10, but also not a 15. So did Lin Ling drop in the rankings to 15 from Nice's 12 at some point? Wouldn't really make sense because he seemingly didn't move rooms, unless they just did it without showing us...

It's a really weird way to draw a two, though.

Also did that one guy get smashed to bits against Firm Man adlkjal I know the show opened with an apparent suicide, but wow lol

This is me.

I also just want to compliment how nice (no pun intended) it is watch Lin Ling fly around. It's so smooth and pretty. His movement in general is really pleasant to watch.

I don't feel super big brain for guessing Wolf Girl was the little girl. That seemed really heavily foreshadowed lol I think the angle of "this fan noticed something no one else did and tried to help in their own way" is an interesting premise for a narrative, especially when, despite Lin Ling's insistence that she wasn't going to kill the other little girl and didn't care about destroying the statue, she likely hurt and maybe even killed a lot of people. The piping is seemingly for water, and we have no idea how much damage her stunt caused to the local infrastructure. How many people might be without running water or have contaminated water for some length of time, or no access to functional bathrooms, or any sewage backlogs that might cause issues even with the functional stuff, let alone how screwed up the roads are going to be for deliveries, travel, and work. How many people were trapped in collapses or injured by debris, especially disabled folks, or will suffer while waiting for rescue as most of the other heroes are busy or disabled themselves.

There's just the disconnect of "people force a lot of expectations on celebrity" and "some people notice how bad that is for them and just want them to be free", which can be a good thing, with, "okay, but she definitely killed and/or injured people, possibly permanently, just to save one guy, who would have potentially been haunted with letting the world down or letting a kid die." And maybe that's part of the point: obsessing over a celebrity and trying to control them because you think you know what's best for them isn't a good thing, either. It was Lin Ling's interference that saved the day, to a degree, after all, not Wolf Girl's. And Firm Man's decision to let go of his power.

Also liked the "bullying is shitty" plot. Some folks mock the bullying in these animated series like, "Oh it can't be that bad, that's cartoonishly over the top." Nah, it's generally worse :/

Generally, though, I appreciate the story exploring the downsides of certain powersets. Poor Firm Man. He really went through a lot. I hope he gets to sleep and go to the bathroom normally and just breathe. I also love Lin Ling's aside that lifting the world's biggest boulder really isn't hero work or generally necessary lol I mean why is a giant statue made of diamond(???) necessary (also why couldn't they have, I don't know, moved it over a few feet, set it down, and then gotten to safety?).

Also I'm happy the little girl got up and ran to safety instead of waiting for Firm Man to do it. Another show might have made her wait. She didn't. She was proactive. Good.

Considering Enlighter's whole thing is about revealing frauds, I wonder if that's even Moon, or just a decoy, maybe someone he dressed up, or even a hologram or something, considering what we've seen of the technology. But generally, it sucks if she got captured when she thought she was free! Since she left her gun behind, and potentially her power with it, she probably is more vulnerable.

I'm curious if Wreck (if he survived) will come back next episode? To help "Nice" maybe? It'll be interesting, anyway. Looking forward to Episode 4!

More thoughts:

Episode 1, Episode 2, Episode 3 (You are here), Episode 4, Episode 5, Episode 6, Episode 7, Episode 8, Episode 9, Episode 10, Episode 11, Episode 12

[ceilidhtransing]

It's frankly horrifying how blasé some American queer people are being about the stripping away of legal rights under a potential Trump administration.

I'm very aware that queer politics and queer liberation are bigger than just “what's legal” or “what the state allows us to do” or whatever. Queer people have a very long history of existing without state support and building our own community structures when the rest of society fails us. But oh my god this doesn't mean that our legal rights aren't important. Protection against discrimination is important. The right to marry is important. Being able to access legal HRT is important. The right to legal gender change is important. Adoption rights are important. Protection against “gay panic” and “trans panic” defences is important. Not being classified as a “mental illness” or a “sex crime” is important. Having laws that are on our side isn't everything but it sure as hell isn't nothing.

I feel like some queer people today have this idealised, romanticised idea of what life was like for the queer community in the west in the 60s, 70s, 80s - this sense that Yes It Was Tough, But It Wasn't Anything We Couldn't Deal With, that it was more “radical” and “punk” and “politically pure” and so really we should be wanting to return to that because That Was When All The Cool Grassroots Queer Organising Was Happening before we started getting proper legal protections.

But a lot of the organising that people were doing back then - not all, but a lot - was towards the very rights that some people now don't seem too concerned about throwing away. They fought hard for stuff like anti-discrimination protections and HRT access and I know that's not “glamorous”, it's not “throwing bricks at cops”, but it's important activism that makes a genuine material difference to the lives of so many queer people. They wouldn't have fought so hard for these rights if they didn't matter. And the idea that acknowledging this is somehow “anti-revolutionary” or “bootlicking” or whatever is absurd.

And from these people there's so little recognition of the fact that actually, for many of us, we didn't survive this era. Or we survived but endured so much avoidable suffering. There's a tendency to romanticise “community organising” that tries to compensate for a hostile state while forgetting that community organising can't save everyone. [And it's much, much easier to do community organising when you have a modicum of legal protection. It's a lot harder to organise your queer community pantry and support hotline and safe sex supplies dispensary when the law now defines running any kind of queer venue as “child grooming” or “a public obscenity” or whatever and starts jailing people for it.] Don't rose-tint this time as one of Cool Underground Radicalism without acknowledging that a hell of a lot of people suffered and died because society was far more hostile to them and they didn't have the legal framework that we have now.

Am I saying that, because queer people have some legal rights now, everything is lovely and perfect? That queer activism is “finished because we have gay marriage now”? No. Of course not. Inequality persists. Discrimination persists. The rights that currently exist still don't protect everyone equally, especially where queerness intersects with other forms of marginalisation. There is still so much more to push for.

But pushing for more is completely incompatible with allowing a rollback of what we already have. This casual “so what if Trump takes away our rights; I'm still not voting Democrat” is a spit in the face of all the people who fought so hard for queers to have these rights. Throwing away your vote in order to make a political point and thus allowing someone into power who plans to remove legal rights for queer people - and who is also unimaginably worse than his opponent on basically every other issue - is not what queer activism looks like, and this casual willingness to sacrifice hard-fought rights is demonstrative of either immense privilege or an incredible blindness to what life is like for queer people who don't enjoy these rights. There are queer people in the world who are still fighting for their identities not to be fucking criminalised, who will be looking at the attitude of essentially “who cares if Trump gets into power and sets fire to decades' worth of queer legal victories, if that's what it takes to prove a point to the Democrats” with utter appalment. (And if you're not queer, but are perfectly unconcerned about sacrificing our rights on the altar of Refusing To Vote For A Democrat, that is disgusting, and you are not an ally.)

People fought so hard to have these rights. Rolling them back will have horrific consequences. Please don't just toss them away.

[do-you-have-a-flag]

just read that article from new york magazine, "Everyone Is Cheating Their Way Through College - ChatGPT has unraveled the entire academic project."

didn't reveal anything new to me about the use and functioning of the plagiarism-grown, glorified auto-predict, language models that were rolled out so irresponsibly it means now anyone can waste water instead of their own time and effort. but was still fascinating to read, in a bleak way.

it's so interesting because cheating and corner cutting will always exist in education, whether out of desperation or laziness, it will always be there. but by university it truly is wild how many people are not actually there to learn, because at that point if you have a program do all your work for you you are fully not there to learn so why waste your time and money playing pretend at a degree. a degree you aren't qualified for because you did not do enough.

we aren't in a post-capitalist universal basic income world where the idea of a few individuals lightly supervising automation is feasible. the technology is not there and the culture and economic stability is not there. so when a professor in the article reasons to students “you’re not actually anything different than a human assistant to an artificial-intelligence engine, and that makes you very easily replaceable. Why would anyone keep you around?” that is not hypothetical. and in terms of the degrees just because the on paper grade says you passed doesn't mean you passed it means you curated automated responses that pass with no actual guarantee of comprehension or retention of information on your part.

and there are tools and templates and minor automations that can be used to supplement your own efforts! they take longer but not that significantly, and more importantly they are less likely to impede the actual practice of learning to implementation.

that's what a lot of people who cheat or use these tools in this way seem to miss.

let me pull out three paraphrased statements of possible justifications from this article:

The education system is flawed

These exercises are irrelevant

I'm bad at organisation

these are all experientially true to my experience of education at various points. and the first point exacerbates issues with 2 and 3 to where students can feel overwhelmed or underprepared or frustrated for various reasons. however where i differ personally from the choice making of these students, is that while i never had access to such a powerful tool i still never chose to cheat or cut corners with things like chapter summaries instead of reading a book, or getting someone else to write for me, or any other obvious forms of cheating/plagiarism.

and the reason for this is not lack of frustration or feelings of antagonism towards the system or confusion over content or lack of organisation skills (all issues i had). it's that throughout my education, i am talking back to primary school, i always tried to figure out WHY we were doing the work assigned to us. what in our studies is it trying to get us to engage with, what methods does it force us to put into use to communicate that knowledge, and how much of the information have we comprehended and retained. some assignments are bad at the execution of these goals but if you can see what the goals are you can still benefit from attempting to achieve them while meeting the requirements enough to pass. IMPORTANTLY the process of doing this frustrating and often inefficient process helps not just critical thinking skills but also is how you actually learn things.

no one else can know stuff for you. it makes sense to outsource a basic sum to a calculator app on your phone, but this means you are not a mathematician. if you use a chapter by chapter summary to write a book report you have not read that book. if you read the wikipedia article for a movie you have not watched that movie. all of these are more verifiable sources of information than language models.

if you get a transcript of a lecture you did not attend and use a chatbot to make notes for you then you did not attend that class- if you read the transcript and take notes and then use the chatbot and compare the difference at least then you used your capacity for thought to process the information and assess it through comparison.... but it would be better to find a classmate and compare notes with a peer so you both have the opportunity to not only check how well you understood the lecture/refresh the information covered, but also a much lower stakes chance to try out communication skills than the group assignments and oral presentations often assigned for this purpose. and on top of that you get to socialise and network with someone in your field of study in a way that benefits both of you.

i'm not even against the use of machine learning models generally, i think they are useful in a repetitive task automation and data scanning context. but why are we delegating things like Knowing Stuff and Human Connection to the 1 and 0 machine that might as easily sell our info as have it leaked to hackers. what kind of cyberpunk surveillance dystopia are we shrugging lazily into? you do not have to pay all that money to pretend to be a competent professional. and if that sounds harsh it's because it is. there are enough scammers and barely qualified people succeeding in this world.

you do not have to dedicate your life to labours that you are not capable of, at the very least be honest with yourself of your own capacity for thought and action. genuinely try to figure out if you are using this technology because of a 'can't' or a 'won't'

it's not a tool if it knows more than you- it's a tool if you could do the job without it.

[bomberqueen17]

home/writing

back in buffalo for the week. i am always so discombobulated when i first arrive. i did get a bunch of shit done yesterday but all of it was odd little discrete tasks, or i only worked on them for a little bit and didn't finish them. i have things to do today as well, and i'm trying to be coherent about it.

one of the things i did manage to do was publish another chapter of the solarpunk sequel to the beta doc. i'm like.... halfway through the sequel i think, and it's going slowly because i'm not sure how i'm going to get the plot climax to come together. and i'm paying the piper, as i foresaw: fanfiction has a level of engagement that original fic doesn't, and I really tried to cushion myself against that by trying to collect people who'd come along with me, but of the 20 or so people i gave access to the doc, only half have engaged with it at all, and of those, only about half made it all the way though the first one and into the sequel, and I know people are still plugging away and I did expect there to be some tapering-off-- it's so many words! it is and real life is so busy, etc-- but I had foolishly expected a few more people to actually follow through, since I'd made it so very very opt-in to start with. So I do treasure every comment but there just aren't very many, and I know the first novel needs some structural changes but I don't know how to identify or make them, and I know I need to slog through and finish the thing before I can decide how to revise the start of it. And as I had sort of expected, I'm really having trouble being alone with myself in it, and it doesn't help that the pace is so slow because I don't have very much time to work on it now-- when I do have time, I have to spend so much effort convincing myself that people will care and it is worth doing etc etc. Lack of momentum is a real bitch.

No shade to those who haven't been able to actually interact, but, I am struggling. Last week was really bad, for hormonal reasons I suspect, but having come out the other side of that, I am grimly aware that it wasn't just that, it is a real problem I'm dealing with. So, if you did request access to that doc and have been thinking about getting around to it, I'm still in need, maybe more than ever. And if you did request access and never saw the email where I granted it, do let me know. And if you didn't request access because you thought so many other people already had, or something like that, well. I never closed the form.

I keep trying to convince myself it's not a bad story. I did just get to the exciting bit, I think. It's got first draft problems but I swear there's good bits. But sometimes I feel like I'm just deluding myself that anybody's going to want to read this. Yeah I've published millions of words on AO3 and reasonable numbers of people seem to love them, but those were other people's characters; my own just aren't that compelling, is the unavoidable feeling it gives me. So I'm having a really hard time with that, but I knew I would.

In my weary despair last week I tabbed back over to my fanfic docs but you know, that's a sort of false comfort-- it's been so long since I updated most of those stories that I don't think I'd get a lot of engagement if I did finish the half-done chapters and get them up. I might try; I know there are a few rereaders, and some people subscribed who'd probably come back and look. But I'm really determined to finish this story with the solarpunk stuff and the mammoths and talking dolphins and so on, even if almost nobody wants to read it, because I never was going to be able to sell it anyway and sometimes you just really need to tell a story.

It's just lonely, and I'm tired.

Anyway. I just spent two hours trying and failing to make myself write more and am giving up to go do more unconnected home tasks because idk what else to do.

[bigcowboydyke]

about your disability pride month post: is there anything important/significant you think people should take notes on when writing a character with an upper arm prosthetic? (like starting from the elbow if i phrased correctly)?

Yeah! I think the biggest is that you ought to consider first, esp if its an OC, your reasoning for making the character disabled- you wanna make sure you're not fetishizing or exploiting their disability to prop up abled characters. I've got a list of questions for authors to ask themselves along those lines that I can post or dm

Secondly, you have to consider what level of realism you wanna go with. If you have a character where, in universe, the prosthesis functions in exactly the way an arm does, you could just go with that if you want - it's the path of least resistance, right? BUT you ought to consider that most prostheses in media exist in that way AT THE EXPENSE of good representation of disability. Erasing disability or "curing" it with magical prostheses IS a form of ableism that is so pervasive it just goes unnoticed by most. I believe personally that disabled bodies are worth portraying well even when the creators of the source material did not do that. SO if you want to go with real well thought our representation, here are some common things I think authors and artists often miss (specifically as it pertains to upper limb prostheses):

1) I already said this, but seriously, I cannot emphasize enough that upper limb prosthetics ain't cheap and are usually uncomfortable. Your character, if they are poor, or even like middle class, won't have access to multiple high tech popular mechanics cover story type robo arms. Even if they did ...

2) Not all limb different folks use prosthetics! I personally have used multiple and I disliked them. I tried very hard to learn, but there are multiple requirements to be able to use each model and sometimes, a lot of times actually, limb different people - especially people without a hand or an arm function Better without prosthetics. Be aware in your art that limb different people are Whole. How you ask can somebody without an arm, say, do all that stuff?

3) Consider the idea of adaptation in your writing and art instead of relying only on magicking disability away with prosthetics. Disabled People live in a world full of barriers and tend to be Very creative about navigating it, adapting to our environment through just being a little clever about how we do things is the biggest way i see other people with upper limb differences interact with the world. There are three main ways that we go about this without prosthetics: Using adaptive equipment, Finding an alternate method, or as a last resort, asking for help.

Example 1: I have like 1.5 arms ok so obviously only 1 hand, and I need to clip my fingernails every once in a while. The obvious solution to me, while it may seem gross, is just to bite them off. Bad habit, but efficient. I could use those horrible little nail clippers, with my remaining stump and a little finagling but it takes forever. I could also get some adaptive nail clippers - they make great big handled ones for ppl that can't grab the little ones. Or, I could ask my partner to trim them, but I'm usually too proud to do that. Let disabled people have their flaws too lol!

Example 2: I love to rock climb. This is where adaptive equipment comes in. I could slip off a rock climbing wall pretty easily right? So bouldering (rock climbing without harnesses) is totally inaccessible to me. But if I go to a gym that has harnesses, then that's fine - they catch me if I fall and that's adaptive for me.

Adaptive equipment comes in many shapes and sizes and can be regular items repurposed.

3. If after all that you Must create art or write about an OC or preexisting character that uses upper limb prosthetics, consider that in general, limb different people's prosthetics are not equivalent to having two arms. Prosthetics are only practical for limb different people if they enhance your life or are useful in some way, however, getting one high tech enough to do that is unlikely because they are expensive. There are different groups, clinics, and charities that make lower cost options but they tend to be much lower tech than is depicted (and often are clunky). My first prosthetic was a long flat piece of metal, similar to a doctors tongue depressor, attached to a plaster cuff velcroed around my stump. The idea was that since I had a little bit of stump poking out, I could pin objects against the metal and it would work like a crab's pincers. It was okay, but I did accidentally smack many. Many. Things with it, including my own face and since it was metal, that was unpleasant. Obviously hindered more than helped. Also it did not look even remotely like a hand.

4. Which prosthetics you can get generally depend on what you got on you. Literally. Bodily. With upper limb prostheses, If you don't have an elbow or wrist, your options are almost exclusively limited to the pricier electric options that are both super futuristic, unavailable to many, and also like new car priced. Many of the manual, non-electric models depend on the ability to flex a wrist or elbow, so if you have those things are a little more accessible overall. It also matters whether you are born limb different like me, or if you are an amputee. Amputees are more likely to be candidates for prostheses than people like me because they have all those preexisting muscles and nerves for prosthetics that are higher tech and require surgical attachment Also prosthetics might be an easier learning curve, and more useful for somebody who has been abled bodied than it would be for somebody who never had that limb in the first place.

5. This is a little thing and ... Not to get too medical with it ( and neither should yall) but limb different people often have physical changes associated with lack of or loss of limb. If you do not have a limb, you are not going to be developing the muscles that are surrounding it in the way an a nondisabled person would. Again for example I have 1.5ish arms which means I've got plenty of stump on my "affected" limb. Even when I did Varsity sports and everything, I was never able to get beefy on that side. It is a pet peeve of mine that many people do not seem to get this - Most art I see of vash the stampede has him with two super beefy shoulders and like yeah i get it that's hot, but if hes got roughly the same amount of stump as me, he probably shouldn'tlook like that. Another thing in this vein is chronic pain is associated with limb loss and limb difference- I have it and its reasonable that any prosthetic user or nonprosthetic using limb different person is more likely to have it. Again these are little things but if you're looking to do good representation you need to consider that limb difference is not just a cool little stylistic choice to make a character look tough or what have you - limb loss and limb difference mean that that character will not only think differently than abled bodied people, but move differently, pose differently, have different routines and preferences than are ever represented in most media. Disability is not a style, and it's not a diagnosis, it's an identity. It's important above all to be respectful of that by letting go of centering able-bodied expectations and aesthetic in your art and writing. Hard to do but i believe in y'all!

Hope that helps! I've also got a bunch of links to go along with these points, if you want them lmk! I'm always happy to take asks about this stuff!

Tl;dr please consider making characters that don't use prosthetics, or don't use them excessively because it's more realistic, better representation, and makes me, a disabled dyke on the internet, really happy.

Lastly if y'all liked my advice and appreciate my time you are always welcome to tip me for it - my c*sh*pp is $neptunedrive

[thewalrusespublicist]

Mike Tree's Adventures in Nutopia #1 : Astrological Employment Opportunities and (debatable) Job Satisfaction

This is part of a write-up of Mike Tree's SATB podcast episode. I highly recommend listening to it but I'm posting a collection of highlights here if you don't have the time. For those that don't know, Mike was an employee of the Lennon-Onos from late 70s--early 80s. This section is about his uhm, eventful employment in the service of John and Yoko and it's inevitable challenges:

Mike got the job on John Green's recommendation after meeting him at a party and based on his supposed astrological appropriateness. You really feel John Green's overwhelming influence here, it's essentially his call who gets a job and who gets access to the Lennon-Onos (though there was also apparently a japanese directioner who also read the cards)

Mike wasn't just a gardener, he got the job with the eventual idea to moving up to being John's assistant. Mike turned down the assistant role when offered it by Yoko as he wanted to keep his plant business going and didn't want to be 'sucked into their orbit'. He also fundamentally didn't trust Yoko for reasons that will be discussed in another post. He would later go on to become their archivist.

As eventually happened, these extra duties meant a hell of overtime but considering Mike in one anecdote was looking for a reason to stay rather than go home he seemed to like being there at least to hang with John.

The Lennon-Onos were as mentioned elsewhere annoying bosses who would call Mike at odd hours to make him do stuff like get up at 3am or 4am to turn on lights that were actually on timers. Why Yoko was calling him to turn on timed lights is unknown but as we'll go into in a separate post, Mike views it as part of a wider 'power play'.

From Mike's POV he saw the Lennons as leading separate lives to each other. Mike states though he did avoid their private areas and wasn't there all the time in the evenings so maybe he missed their quality time.

Mike does some weird things in the wake of John's death when it comes to May Pang. He puts May through to Sean and Helen and gives May a remembrance tape of John from that then leaks all over the internet. I have no idea why he would put May through to them, maybe to spite Yoko?

The Fight for Employee of the Month

Mike confirms a couple of Fred Seaman's stories! He confirms the John writing 'Helter Skelter' in the stairwell and the Cardenas/funeral story but says that they happened to him instead of Fred which makes a lot more sense. It was also him that met the killer and not Fred. This is intriguing as it suggests that Fred's stories were not outright fabrications but that many could be more second-hand then presented.

According to Mike, Fred and Mike couldn't get on as they were both vying for John's approval so saw each other in competition with each other (what???) and Fred wasn't a team player. He also apparently tried to gatekeep John, potentially on Yoko's behest?

There's a weird moment where Fred searches Mike's bags in Bermuda but it's unclear why.

Mike seemed to have a nice friendly relationship with Miyoko and some of the Japanese staff and often mentions chatting to them. This to me throws up an interesting point, if the japanese staff can speak good English why is Yoko reportedly talking in japanese to them in front of John and thereby cutting him out of conversation? Is it because it's easier for them albeit a little insensitive or is it because she's saying things that she doesen't want John to hear? Likely the former but not good for John's paranoia.

Stay tuned for more, this interviews a goldmine and there's a lot to unpack. Let's just say that Mike is definitely in the disgruntled employee camp.

[herefortheships]

You want another movie 3 speculation?

Ok, so I firmly believe that Lydia's dream at the end points to her subconscious worry that Betelgeuse might move on from her (and MacArthur Park is a song about moving on as best as you can after losing True Love) and target Astrid. With a compounding, and imo deeply fascinating, worry that her daughter (whom the movie/Delia seems to have cast as being very similar to Lydia, though personally I don't see it cause she seems too normal) might be happy with that. And I think that the bed-sharing might've been her brain - or B himself - pointing out the solution to that worry: Just give tf in and marry him already.

As an aside, a lot of Youtube synopses of that movie have AI-generated thumbnails of Betelgeuse threateningly/creepily hovering over Astrid, even though they barely interacted. Apparently lots if people's minds went there, at least for the sake of clickbait. Ffs, a guy tries to marry a teenager ONE time...

Anyway I think it would be hilarious if in movie 3 Lydia gets into trouble and Astrid calls on Betelgeuse for help, telling him she'll pay whatever he wants if only he saves her last remaing parent/family member, and he just goes: "Can you put in a good word with your Mom for me? Like, really talk me up. I didn't make the greatest first impression, and there were misunderstandings, and I don't think I'll have a shot if she thinks you'd disapprove" " I do disapprove!" "Well, just focus on the positives! Awesome powers, saved your life, has a massive di-... actually, forget about that last one. I mean, it's true, but wouldn't be helpful if you mentioned it."

So then they save Lydia, who'd be deeply, deeply worried bc her daughter seems to think B is a pretty cool guy actually, a woman could do worse for a husband. He's fun, he's helpful, he saved them, there's worse-looking dead people. So naturally, she'd find Betelgeuse and be like "If I marry you, will you leave her alone?" ...j/k, she'd try to exorcise him. We need spunky!Lydia back. She may be kind, but there are limits.

Mid-exorcism, Astrid clears up the misunderstanding about what sort of deal she's under, that he saved Lydia because he loves Lydia and without asking for anything bad in return, and points out that her deal didn't make her lie about B's good points. Lydia stops the exorcism via last-minute Green Card marriage. Betelgeuse does a whole triumphant, manic spiel about looking forward to moving in and starting married life. But first he's got to fetch some of his stuff (hc that he has just... so many clothes in an infinite magical wardrope somewhere). He draws a door with chalk, knocks, steps through. Walks slowly through the long, uneven hallway. Turns around to look back. Astrid whispers "If you took a step in there right now..." (Code 699) and Lydia goes "Yeah I know. [then, much louder] C'mon, let's ready the guest bedroom." *

We see Betelgeuse break out into a happy smile for a sec before the door slams shut.

*I don't think it would be believable if a movie ended with them being in passionate sappy Gomez-and-Morticia love. But there's no way that Betelgeuse³ will end without Lydia agreeing to keep him around. On a trial basis. With the understanding that she has the means to get rid of him if he misbehaves too much (he'll misbehave just the right amount).

It's an interesting headcanon that Lydia might have a subconscious fear about Betelgeuse making a move on Astrid. I've seen a few people mention it as well. It wouldn't be too far off to get to that conclusion, either, because of Lydia's past experience. Betelgeuse also had that flyer up in the attic just lying around. We as the audience know he likely put it out there for Lydia to find, because we saw him staring at her photo and talking to Bob earlier about how he's in a distant relationship with Lydia. We saw him trying to make contact and feeling triumphant because she might have finally noticed him that last time.

But Lydia doesn't have access to that info.; only we as the audience are privy to who Betelgeuse is actually after and how dead set he is on it, too. Only Lydia is the object of Betelgeuse's desires, even after thirty years. It wouldn't be a stretch to conclude that Lydia might fear Betelgeuse would go after her daughter, because at first she didn’t know what Betelgeuse was truly after; for all she knew, he’s still just looking for a way to get out and do evil mischief on the world of the living or whatever she thinks will happen if he’s out.

I personally don't think this is a fear she took with her at the end of the film, though. I think she has it clear now how Betelgeuse feels about her, and that he wouldn’t do something to her daughter. She might have thought it was a pretense before, or him being totally crazy, but after that dance mid-air, there's no way she doesn't know how he feels.

I think Babyjuice coming out of Astrid was just Betelgeuse turning Lydia's dream into a nightmare; a prank letting her know he hasn't left and he isn't planning on leaving her (he even thought it was strange himself lol). But yes, Lydia keeping a lingering fear about Betelgeuse going for Astrid is a solid headcanon as well, though it’s not my interpretation.

I know there are edits of Astrid wearing wedding clothes and Betelgeuse being creepy with her, but many of those were created before the movie was out, by people who thought the movie would be about Betelgeuse going after Astrid.

About Astrid putting up a good word for Betelgeuse with Lydia, that would be part of my dream-come-true story for Beetlejuice 3. I just want to see them explore Betelgeuse and Astrid's relationship as stepfather and stepdaughter. I think they'd get along great. As I've said before, Astrid hasn't really met Betelgeuse yet; she only knows two things about him: according to her mom, he's bad news. And yet, he helped save her life, and all it was going to cost was her mom marrying him and not being able to say his name (though he's totally chill with her calling him her "dad", which I totally love and will always bring it up 😂💜).

I wish the movie will end with Lydia and Betelgeuse being finally married, or at least together in love, but I'll accept them not getting married as well, as long as they’re on the way there as friends who may fall in love, and Lydia doesn't end up banishing him yet again or squirming out of another marriage deal. That'd be repetitive at that point. As for Betelgeuse being banished forever or destroyed, that will totally never happen; Tim, Michael, and especially the WB wouldn't allow that to happen. Not only do Tim and Michael love Betelgeuse, he's also a money-maker and widely beloved character for the WB, so it'd be dumb for them to end the movie with Betelgeuse being sent away forever or perma-killed.

To end my ramblings, I totally love the idea of Astrid and Betelgeuse working together in the next one and Astrid helping her mom see the good in him/putting a good word in for him. That'd be fun to watch.

I do have a feeling lately that if the do make the third part (which is looking more likely every day), they will be taking it in the direction of establishing Lydia, Betelgeuse, and Astrid as a family. I'm getting that vibe because I've seen an official promo TikTok about Astrid's family being strange, which kinda hints at Lydia and Betelgeuse being Astrid's family/her parents. Not to mention, the DVD cover photo has those three front and center, instead of having something like Betelgeuse big in the middle and the Deetz women all together below or something like that; a choice was made to have Lydia, Betelgeuse, and Astrid together front and center. Those little details have me like 👀, I'm getting a vibe that we're being led to see them as a family. But don't take my words for fact, it's just what I'm observing.

Thank you for sending me your speculations! I love and appreciate exchanging ideas with everyone. 💚✨

[cannoli-reader]

The White Tower's Strength Hierarchy is not a Problem

I know, it seems like a hot take that has to be a shitpost. The idea of a person being in charge based solely on a physical attribute beyond their control makes monarchy look like a good idea. But I don't think it's actually what the system is, or the intent behind the strength hierarchy.

Basically, most of us completely miss the point of the Aes Sedai and the White Tower. We keep seeing them as an institution of a particular type, like a military or a government or a religion. But it's not. It's a union. Its purpose is to facilitate channelers, like a union's job is to advocate for, and protect, workers. And the part of a worker's life and attention dedicated to his union, or even his job, is only a part of what makes him who he is. Yeah, it influences a lot, like his status in life, where he lives, who his friends are, and so on, but at the end of the day, you work to live, and no matter how staunch your membership in the Local #whatever, you're going to be more worried about getting your work done and going home to your family, your interests and your hobbies.

The Aes Sedai are not soldiers in an army, or bureaucrats in a government, or clergy in a religion. They are not even soldiers, security forces, scholars, philosophers, doctors, diplomates and activists, depending on their Ajah. They are heroes. Protagonists, each of an adventure story. Each one is a powerful person who has an agenda they want to see done for their own advantage or the benefit of others, or just because they want to. The Tower and their Ajahs are just things they sign up for to get that done. Yes, the Tower engages in geopolitical shenanigans, but that has as much to do with what each sister does, day-to-day, as a country's foreign policy does to everyone who is not abroad, near the border or on the internet at the moment.

Basically, every given sister's job at any given time is what she thinks it is. Some of them need or want to be told what to do, so they pick "serve the Tower" and hang around to be given assignments. Others lock the door to their study and yell their cultural equivalent of "fuck off" when someone tries to assign them duties, or just head out into the world to do what they want. And that's cool with the Tower, however annoying a particular Tower authority figure or faction thereof might find it at the time. Because that is what the Tower is for, to make it possible for them to do that stuff. That is the essence of empowerment, and that is the Tower's purpose. They train you to channel, give you an excellent education, train you how to push around deal with people, pound into your head the importance of making a good impression and set you up with unlimited funds, and sit back to see what you do with it.

The problem is, people are going to people, and eventually, each sister will realize that the biggest obstacles to doing what she wants are her fellow sisters. The point of the White Tower is to govern those inevitable clashes, and sort things out, not to achieve some platonic ideal solution, but to minimize the drama and not let the world take advantage of the conflict or distraction. If Aes Sedai are too busy butting heads with one another, some damn fool male might start improving international cooperation and establishing schools that gather a critical mass of scholars and technicians to jump-start a technological revolution might screw everything up.

But that means, there needs to be a rule for who wins, and who gets her way. From the Tower's perspective, it does not matter who wins, so long as there is no fighting over it. The Tower is basically a parent, and every single woman with a Great Serpent ring (or, honestly, the ability to touch saidar), including the Amyrlin, are the kids. As a great comedian whom we should probably be grateful never had access to actual forkroot would say, "Parents don't care about justice, they just want peace and quiet."

From that perspective, the strength hierarchy is an excellent rule. There is no way to game the system, you can't legislate to change it. And like Tic-tac-toe (and Global Thermonuclear War) the only way to win is not to play. Don't like the idea of a woman giving you orders just because she was born with higher innate strength than you? Don't get involved with her! That's all there is to it.

And we see there are many, many ways to get around the strength hierarchy. All you really need is to not require every single person on the planet to give way to you. The Hall and Amyrlin had an plan for Moiraine's career and the authority to make it happen. That's why Moiraine begins the series on the Sun Throne. Oh, wait. No. How did that happen?

Because she is an Aes Sedai with all the power and resources her White Tower training gave her, and the self-awareness to say "Nope," and skip out to do what she wanted/thought was more important. She ran into Cadsuane, too, who also had ideas about what she should do. Didn't take, either.

The main place in the story where it seems like the strength hierarchy messes things up is with the rebel embassy to Rand in Caemlyn, where Kiruna and Bera march in and take over the embassy and head off to comeuppance at Dumai's Wells. You know whose fault that was? Not the woman who first proposed strength as a criterion for situational authority, but Merana. Because she let their strength, or Verin's experience before that, matter. And that was mostly because Merana didn't really believe in what she was doing. She knows her authority does not really come from the White Tower, only a pack of cranks in a village. She is there to serve the agenda of the Salidar rebel movement, and deep down inside, she knows they are there as supplicants to Rand, trying to get him on Team Salidar. She is not there trying to save the world through negotiations, she is just working for a petty factional grudge. So on one level, she knows she has no right to assert her Hall-granted authority, and on another level, she isn't certain that Verin or Kiruna & Bera don't have a better idea of what the best interests of Salidar actually are.

Another major loophole we see in the strength system is cooperation between sisters. Delana, when she is thinking solely as a conventional sister, before she is refocused on her Black duties, notes how Siuan once protected her in their friendship and now she has to be the one protecting her. It's not Delana mistaking their respective strengths for competence to protect one another, it's Delana acknowledging the strength system, and meaning that where Siuan once prevented women between her & Delana in strength from bossing around her Gray friend, now Delana is going to be protecting Siuan from being bossed around by women weaker than Delana. We see this in action with Cadsuane and Daigian & Kumira. Cadsuane respects their mental abilities and judgment, and from their perspective, what more do they need? Rather than claw their up through a meritocracy and securing their position based on some esoteric algorithm weighing the value of their specialties, or pushing their ideas through a review and assessment procedure, all they have to do is convince Cadsuane. And then Cadsuane will see to the implementation of their ideas, or prevent other sisters from interfering with them on the basis of strength.

For a more equitable version of such an arrangement, we have the relationship between Nynaeve & Elayne. There are no two Aes Sedai with a PoV in the series with as much respect and trust for one another as these two have. And we see a few interesting examples of how they work with the strength dynamic in WH.

The first is when the issue of the damane captives who want to have the leash removed is broached to them. Elayne has an opinion on the matter, but she lets Nynaeve make the call because she is the strongest women around. But Elayne is willing to stare down Birgitte, a hero of the Horn, over the civil rights of a man they are certain is a murderer. Is she really going to let Nynaeve keep damane enslaved? Nope. She is letting Nynaeve make the call, letting the system stand, because of her absolute trust that Nynaeve will make the right call. She has been working closely with Nynaeve for over a year now, and most importantly, she saw how Nynaeve handled a related situation in the disposition of the two sul'dam they had captured. If ANYone was going to know that Nynaeve was going to get it right, it would be Elayne. And no, Lan is not telling her what to do, he is speaking to the world at large, he is offering his own opinions based on being in a very similar position, and that's why his own congratulations of Nynaeve for her decision affects her so much. And I think the Kinswomen were feeling her out with the question, because they are worried about ending up in a similar position as the damane, vis a vis the Aes Sedai. Their own agreement with, and pleasure over, Nynaeve's choice speaks to their feelings on discovering that the White Tower (embodied in that moment by Nynaeve) has the right values, and they can trust it to take them in again, without abuse. So what is the point regarding the strength hierarchy, if everyone involved was in agreement on this issue? By referencing the hierarchy, they are not just a bunch of women who happen to have the same opinion, they have made policy, by following institutional procedure, and that gives their agreed-upon course of action weight and it strengthens the connection between sisters, Kin and ex-damane.

The next example is when, after Elayne's near-assassination incident, Nynaeve starts lecturing her and Elayne tells her that she does not want to disobey her, so don't try to use her authority. She's not dismissing Nynaeve's authority, she is respecting it, but also saying that she thinks this is more important. And Nynaeve realizes this, and does not flex on her. Because with reasonable people, self-evident situations like this weigh more that artificially imposed definitions.

And finally, in their last shared moments on-page in Jordan's lifetime, Elayne realizes that Nynaeve is up to shenanigans, noting that it has to be something really out of whack if she's hiding her plans, instead of flexing her strength position. Which incidentally speaks to Elayne's trust that Nynaeve would not abuse her authority, and also the point that she does trust Nynaeve, regardless of how crazy her current scheme is. Or at least, she has a guy to bond and bone and so she'll let Nynaeve do what she thinks she needs to do. Later on, when Rand indicates he sees through her own façade, and knows she has something she is trying to hide from Nynaeve, if not the bond-and-bone specifics, Elayne has a moment of chagrin, because if this guy whose experience of her is basically three days of dating saw through her subterfuge, her partner in crime comrade in arms of far longer standing should have, too. And the answer to why Nynaeve did not interfere is the same as why Elayne picked bond-and-bone over solving Nynaeve's thing: they trust each other.

If you have trust, you don't need to worry about who is ranked higher, and the system cannot stop you from ignoring it and building that trust with other people. And by being so clearly unfair and onerous the system is all but demanding that you reach out to your sisters, and build trust between yourselves, so that you don't have to be constrained by the idiocy of who was born with greater strength in the Power.

And if you can't build trust, stay out of one another's way. Either way, it keeps the White Tower from falling apart and Aes Sedai from internecine conflict.

In the end, it was not the strength system that failed the White Tower, but the formal hierarchy, with its elected leadership and ostensible selection of authority positions by merit, of which the Blue leadership boasts in New Spring.

And for all that the Wise Ones are hailed as a better system using superior criteria (though my own issue with that one is 'who decides who fits those criteria best?' and we see through Perrin's eyes on the conflict between Amys & Sorilea in LoC, it's not always so simple), as an institution, the Wise Ones lied to their people for 3,000 years, made them vulnerable to Couladin's pandering demagoguery, and failed to contain Sevanna's lateral thinking. When it comes to practical results, the Wise Ones are not noticeably more successful than the Tower.

[prodsh00ky]

from the cradle to the grave

pairing: vampire!seonghwa x reader

warnings: use of words probably, crying, mentions of blood, death, war and violence, seonghwa creeps the reader out by breaking into their house, deja vu era seonghwa look combined with 2023 long haired hwa bc this should be a warning, some angsty stuff, fluff if u squint really really hard, past lives (sort of), reader is referred to using they/them pronouns but i might have left something that suggest they’re female/afab in the way; please let me know if there’s more

wc: ~4.6k words

notes: i tried to finish this in time for halloween (it was sitting in my drafts since 2021...) so this was supposed to be a spooky season fic. it didn’t work but here it is anyways! hope you guys like it. im a big vampire enthusiast and a bIG seonghwa enthusiast which makes me the biggest vamp!hwa agenda supporter so lets gooo

well, at least your gut feeling was probably right.

these last days have been… weird, to say the least. every time you’d go back to your apartment after college you felt like you were being observed, maybe even followed. it was like there was someone always behind you or around the place you were in a way that made you feel like you were never alone indeed, and you didn't like the shivers you got from it. to top it off, the whole thing was giving you even more bad nightmares than the usual; the most recent ones involved big mansions from the eighteenth century or something, a lot of fighting, blood and a pair of piercing eyes staring into your soul. the worst part was that you always forgot in the course of your day that you were having them, only remembering when waking up in a cold sweat from a new one. your friends told you it probably was due to the time of the year since spooky season just began, and you thought it might be it; a scary vibe was nothing less than expected from fall.

but the tall figure standing behind your favorite armchair that welcomed you home seconds ago after you locked your apartment’s door told you otherwise. you automatically move to grab your floor lamp to defend yourself.

“who are you and what are you doing here?” 

“so you’re feisty. i should keep track of that.”

his voice is deep but also smooth. he’s probably a head and a half taller than you and wears a white shirt with a v cut, black trousers paired with a black blazer and his neck is adorned with a sole silk ribbon. when he turns to you, you get to see that his long black hair would probably reach his silver pendant earrings if it wasn't tucked into a fancy hairstyle with a silver pin holding the front and that his eyes are sharp and piercing (and strangely similar with the ones in your recent nightmares, but this time they feel familiar and not frightening as usual), just as the rest of his facial features. he is probably the most handsome man you’ve ever seen. but you still have no idea of who he is or how he got inside your house, so you quietly get your phone and dial 911.

“i'm going to repeat it just once more. who are you, what are you and how the fuck have you gotten inside?” he seems too entertained eyeing you from head to toe for some seconds, but he quickly wakes from his apparent trance and answers you.

“right. i'm sorry for the rudeness... and for the invasion, for that matter, although this apartment was virtually 100% accessible for me. oh, and for the last few days too, but i'm afraid the observing was necessary. i’m park seonghwa, one of the royal eight, and deeply pleasured to know you.” he bows lightly and opens his mouth to continue and it shows you a glimpse of long sharp canine teeth. it makes you interrupt him.

“so you’re the one who’s following me? know what, it doesn’t matter actually, i’m calling the cops.” you turn to open the door and get outside, however the keys aren't in the door handle anymore. with the lamp still in your hold you try to open the knob forcefully, adrenaline beginning to fill you due to despair, but the jittery sound of the keys dangling makes you turn to the stranger once more. he holds the keys with his left hand, the right one leaning in the armchair.

“forgive me for my ways, but calling the police won’t be needed and after you listen to me you’ll see why. i’m not here to hurt you in any way, it’s actually… quite the opposite. i was following you because me and my brothers needed to reach you, and after i finally found you i wanted to know who we were looking for. if you’re willing to give me some of your time, i’ll be happy to explain everything i can for now. please?”

considering your options, either you jump out of the window into a 65 feet fall or listen to him. but you still want to be sure someone is keeping track of you, so you move to open the window hoping today the old couple and the friendly lady who lives in the building next to yours and are always inviting you to spend the holidays and have dinner with them are gaping inside your place as usual and turn on the localization device in your phone.

“you have ten minutes.”

“thank you for considering my offer.” he answers, seemingly more relieved, and starts talking. “i’m not sure how to address it correctly… there probably isn't a correct way to do it, so i’ll be plainspoken. i’m a vampire, such as my brothers, and we need your help because you hold powers that can save our empire from the mass attack it is suffering right now.”

you huff, because it’s the only thing you feel like doing.

“you really invaded my house to fool me into a halloween prank? who made you do it? oh, it must have been yeonjun and kai, right? i'm calling the bastards right now, this is way off limits.” you manage to grab your phone in your pocket again but, just like your keys, you see it appearing in the guy’s hands.

“it’s not a prank and your human friends have nothing to deal with it, swear with my long gone soul. i am indeed a vampire, as you can verify by my teeth. vampires exist, such as some other ‘magical creatures’, as your people like to call us. i’m park seonghwa, the second vampire emperor, or prince, whatever you’d prefer, and am here to plead for your help because my empire is perishing and the eight of us can’t do much without you.”

the serious way he’s speaking almost convinces you, but it still sounds so crazy and nonsensical you keep yourself skeptical. you can't avoid some classical questions, though.

“why aren’t you burning or shining in the sun, then? and i don't see you sweating due to the giant amount of garlic in my kitchen. there’s no proof to your allegations, fang boy.”

seonghwa finds it really hard to suppress a smile. you were much more fun (and cute) than he thought, and seeing you being so doubtful only added to the feeling he had.

“because not all the tales you humans like to tell about us are true. garlic does not affect vampires at all, i have no idea where this... thing came from. we only get paler in the sunlight, as you may perceive.” he moves closer to your window, and you can see his slightly tanned skin turning paler and paler until his veins start to become proeminent and dark blue in his skin. it’s almost as if he's like a living canvas full of paint.

“i don’t believe you.”

“do you expect me to prove my identity then? because the only way to do it is by feeding, and im afraid you’re the only human in the nearer 260 feet at least.'' he steps closer and while he’s talking you see his fangs getting longer. and sharper. he touches his pointer finger with his teeth and his skin rips easily as if a needle had been dragged along it. when you look into his eyes they’re rouge as… blood. fear creeps into you and you step back, moving your head no.

“y-you can go on! i will hear you, i p-promise. i'm not exactly doubting it anymore.” you say, voice weak with fear. you move to your couch slowly, eyes still fixated in his every move. “i-im going to sit because this doesn’t sound like a conversation i’ll be able to take in while standing. feel free to sit too.” he moves to sit in the same armchair he’s leaning, but you start to talk again before you forget and his eyes move up to you again. “oh, but i want my keys and phone. you’ll not be getting my help making it look like you want to keep me in captivity.”

he nods, putting your phone and keys in your center table. you grab them almost immediately murmuring “thanks” because well, look where you are. he nods again and waits until you stop moving to talk.

“i’m shall start from the beginning since you have no familiarity with the vampires situation, right?” you nod, asking yourself what a vampire situation would mean. “the… ‘magic’ realm, i’ll call it this way for now because it’s easier, is hidden from human eyes. we have our own rules that exist to ensure mainly two things: that we won’t reveal ourselves to you with ease and that we will have peace, or anything closest to it, within us. some centuries ago people lived in balance and each kind had their own inside rules and organization besides these two major ones, but a riot some of the folks started created chaos and eventually a war. it was a slaughter; many villages were destroyed and many creatures, killed. it’s one of the darkest chapters of our story.

“wait, what do you mean by ‘creatures’ and ‘folks’? you’re not saying…”

“witches, elves, mermaids and sirens, gnomes, fairies, fauns, they’re all real. at some level, at least. i say this due to the fact you humans love to fantasize about their characteristics way too much, as you could testify with me and the sun belief you had. the majority of things you assume you know about them or about ur are probably inaccurate.”

your frown, “and what is the truth about all of you, then? what is wrong in the things i’ve been taught?”

there’s hints of a smirk in his lips, but he tries his best to keep neutral. “curious, aren't’ we? i’d love to share it with you, but it’s best that you learn it by yourself.” your eyebrows raise and he gets the sign to keep talking. “we’ll get there, do not worry.”

he takes a deep breath, a shadow of something gray crossing his sharp features. “after the war finished, pretty much all that was left was chaos. in an effort to save the survivors, an assembly was arranged so we could fix new rules and try to establish things. it happens that the vampires were the race that had the fewest deaths and casualties during the war and managed to better organize ourselves for that to happen, so it was decided by majority that we would rule all races from then on.”

“holy crap-” you tap your mouth, using the best of your self control skills to not laugh in his face, “this sounds like a bad fantasy book or a fanfic i’d have read when i was twelve. how did you guys manage all the power? and you said majority, not unanimity. there was someone against it, i suppose.”

seonghwa allows himself to smile, happy to observe you notice things rather quickly. you try to suppress your own reaction; if he was already handsome poker faced, it felt like his smile alone could convince you about anything he was saying and more. “we accepted it, since it was what most wanted. some begged, even, at some point of the discussion. it was never easy, though. we have faults and committed many mistakes, some worse than others and some… unforgivable, if i’m being honest. but i assure we hardly did then out of personal selfishness, the weight of keeping things in place is always something that humbles us down. and yes, you assumed correctly, there were people against it.”

he pauses abruptly, looks at you and laughs quietly, which confuses you. the fact that his laughing warms you inside has nothing to do with it, you reassure yourself.

“what?”

“if you thought the previous facts i’ve told you sounded like a… fantasy book or so, you can’t wait for the next bit.” he tries to dwell his laughter down to answer you, but you can see he’s struggling. “guess who disagreed with us being in power?”

it takes you less than a millisecond to reply. “no shit it were the werewolves.”

he starts laughing again but freely, not trying to refrain himself, and this time you can’t control the shocked smile that creeps onto your face along with your eyes widening.

“jesus fuck, seonghwa-” you have to pause for a second to recompose yourself, because you started laughing too hard along with him without even realizing, “it was already hard to believe the whole vampire convo and all, now you’re saying that not only other species of magical creatures do exist but the rivalry between vampires and werewolves is real? how do you expect me not to think this is some sort of twilight remake?"

“oh, no, not that movie,” he says while trying to stop laughing, “i’ve never watched it but it has caused enough misunderstandings already about us.”

you eye him up and down, “have some respect, it’s a masterpiece! i’m sure you just have never watched it because you know you’ll get inferiority complex since you’ll never be edward cullen.”

“i’ll pretend i know what you’re talking about and agree.” you laugh but on your own this time, and he can’t avoid admiring the wrinkles in your face when you do it. “resuming, the werewolves were never exactly comfortable with the idea of us in power in the first place, but as i said it was what the majority wanted. it has been like this for over eight centuries, and everything was going peacefully until around the nineteenth century. the werewolves started a rebellion against our empire, and to do it joined forces with each and every wrongdoer in our realm. they managed to have each and every single creature that had committed horrendous crimes as their allies, which caught us by surprise. we’ve tried to talk to them in the beginning, but it didn't work; they started to kill vampires and pretty much everyone that agreed with our power. it has been like this since then, and we were succeeding in controlling the war until one century ago.”

“oh.” nice way to react, you think. but what would be a great reaction for a narnia x game of thrones crossover of sorts? “i’m… i’m sorry, i guess. i’m not sure how to properly react to all of this, and it’s harder to conceive it as true. and what does it all have to do with me? swear i’m trying not to be a jerk or so, but why are you telling me all of this? why did you come after me?”

seonghwa, once again, has to control a smile creeping in. “because you, y/n, might be the key to saving everything.”

your brain short circuits. “what?” you freeze, wanting to laugh in his face, but the serious and hopeful look he gives you indicates he’s telling the truth. then a detail, a tiny but important detail comes to your mind. “wait- how the fuck do you even know know my name? i haven’t said it to you until now, there’s pretty much no mail you could get that from and most of my friends call me by nicknames, how do you know it?”

despair flashes through his eyes, but it’s only for a second. “well, here's where things start getting… interesting. or complex. i know it might sound crazy but… there’s… you… you’re…”

its the first time he seems uncertain or insecure and maybe even afraid in his speech if you squint, but the next bit that comes out of his mouth makes everything really sound like a big joke.

“i’m afraid there’s no easy way to let you know this, so i’ll have to be straightforward. you’re a living amplifier to any type of supernatural being. this amplifying power is given to a human in earth as a blessing from whatever force that keeps the universe balanced from time to time, but there are always at least a few centuries that part the amplifiers’ births. the last amplifier was a friend, an ally of ours that helped - or rather lead us vampires to our victory and was the sole reason why i and pretty much all of the survivors are still alive. i know your name because it was one of the last words he said before passing after sacrificing so much to guarantee peace amongst supernatural folks. i’m here to ask or rather plead for your help, because although we have more resources and ways of fighting now we’re afraid that it might not be enough for the challenges we might face.”

you blink once. twice. then you sneer.

“you know, i was almost believing you. i’m ashamed to admit it, but it was almost getting to me. but after this i'm afraid i’ll have to call kai and yeonjun and tell them to stop fucking with me every halloween season because this is way off limits. you’re a great actor, though,”, you say, reaching for you phone, “i’m sure you’ll go the distance or so. your costume is very well made too, i have no idea who thought about the eye mechanism but is sure surpr-

he takes your hand with his extremely cold one before you reach your phone.

“please. me and my brothers don’t have much time to deal with your doubts properly, and i’m sorry about that, so i beg of you. it probably sounds way far from your human rationality, but have you never felt anything different? any other type or force or liveliness different from what others feel? have you never seen the way some people thrive when they’re by your side? how they go higher than they probably would if they weren’t close to you? how it’s so easy for your to really connect to the people you love and how pleased they seem to be to love you back? have you ever felt observed? have you never seen that there are beings trying to put their eyes on you all the time, specially in nightmares?”

you head starts to spin. yes. he actually had a point. your presence around people you liked seemed to bring them more joy and great opportunities for some unknown reason, and it has been this way since ever. your childhood nickname was “lucky” due to this; the games and toys were funnier and happier when you were around, even if one of your friends got hurt - it would be fine, after all, right? the foster home you grew up in started to receive more donations after you arrived, and your foster dads were able to house even more children. your presence became a must in problem solvings while you grew up, because, for some reason, the fact that you were there made it all calmer and somehow easier. your friends would get higher grades, nicer positions in the school teams, greater opportunities and happier memories if you were involved or cheering for them; you were a walking lucky charm all over your life. your parents, your foster siblings and the few real friends you have always said the love they feel towards you is different than any type of love they’ve ever experienced. kai and yeonjun even like to joke that you have some type of magic on your blood or something, because they feel that your friendship will undoubtedly last for the rest of your life, no room for doubt.

and the nightmares. they were way more intense and frequent when you were a child. creepy and lone places, destroyed cities, dark alleyways stained with blood, desolated ghost-like faces, cries of help you never knew whom they belonged to. but the worse ones were the ones that had eyes around aware of your every move no matter what you did. they were the ones that offered your nights of sleep no mercy and made you wake up crying hard and shaking up from despair for years. funnily enough, they always seem to happen again frequently each spooky season. 

“i-i suppose you’re right in some way, b-but-”

“have you had a time where you painted a lot? maybe when you were a kid?”

that’s what breaks you.

“h-how the fuck do you know this?”

his lips curve up, a sad smile reaching his eyes. “eden, the last amplifier, was a painter. probably one of the best ever seen in the whole world, if i have a say on that. an amplifier born will always have and nurture the last amplifier’s talents for at least some time, specially during their childhood. if you took on his talent, i bet your paintings were astonishing, even more for a child.”

your memories flash in front of your eyes: how many paintings have you made for your parents’ office? how many times did you spend your early sunday mornings painting in order to gift your siblings? how many of these were still with them, in their houses, becoming part of the scenery of their lives until nowadays? and why the fact you abruptly stopped doing them when you were nine or ten had never made sense until now?

“i’m- i’m sorry, but- this must be some type of misunderstanding or bad taste joke, that’s ithe only explanation, that's it-”

“as said before im deeply sorry that we don’t have more time to do this with ease but…”, he huffs, looking down and then to you again, “this is what will have you believing me. i’m really sorry.”

he stares into your eyes for one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight seconds straight.

and then it all hits you.

flashes of some of the places you saw in your nightmares, but this time live, in person, because you were there; a giant castle with an art studio, your beloved art studio, where all your creativity flew through the canvases, where life seemed to make more sense. flashes of people you never met; unfamiliar smiles in their faces, but the lingering feeling there’s no physical building that could carry your conception of home more than they could; nights together singing by the moonlight, but also serious conversations and arguing and fighting but always making up because, in the end, they’re your family; war and horrible battles and you standing in all of them offering everything this force inside of you could because things had to end in peace; crying, seeing red and hearing their last words for you. darkness, solitude, happiness, yearning, melancholy, bliss, doubt, joy, frustration, hope, all types of feelings that weren’t and were yours at the same time.

you snap out of it with the feeling of seonghwa’s cold thumbs drying the tears you didn’t realize were streaming down your cheeks.

“i’m sorry this is so unfair to you,” he whispers, “i really wish this could happen naturally, without demanding so much of you and shattering the world you know with such violence, as it has always been with the others who got to know. im really sorry...”

for a while, you just allow him to hold your face and caress it, too overwhelmed by everything that’s flooding your brain. after what could be some seconds, minutes or even hours, you’re not sure at this point, you move away from his touch and he lets you go, something heavy in his eyes you are not able to decipher due to your state.

“you need time to digest it all, and you’ll have it. i’ll make sure that no nightmares or even visions plague your mind in the next days so you can rest. but i’ll have to come back in a week or two to ask you to come with me and help us if you’re willing to do it. i promise that i’ll answer any of your questions then and that more understanding of what you’re capable of will make it a bit easier. you can share all of this, but be sure to do it only with trusted ones and with as fewer people as possible.”

he gets up and turns to the door, but before heading in that direction seonghwa leaves a black business card in the table in front of you, just a single phone number written in red ink in it.

“if you need anything, do not hesitate to call this number and talk to me. i’ll do anything in my power to help you.”

he opens the door, turning to look at you for one last time. ”we’ll see each other again, y/n.”

seonghwa closes your apartment’s door and in a couple of minutes he’s walking in the street again. he takes his phone, dials a number he knows by heart and waits. the voice that answers him is curious, yet patient.

he huffs before replying, “as well as you would expect, hongjoong. they didn’t hit me with a broom or tried to shoo away with garlic, but also didn’t believe me until i forced them to see.”

“hey, are you fine? how did it go?”

“unfortunately. humans got way too used to believe we’re bedtime stories, specially in this century, so it wasn't something i didn't expect, but i-”

“so you did have to hypnotize them?”

“you’re not entirely comfortable with doing it too, i know. by the way, how did you feel? since it all probably got stronger, was it okay for you?”

seonghwa hesitates for a few seconds. “it was ecstatic, joong. i’m not sure i’m able to fully translate it into words. the more time I spent there and the more I understood about who they are now the more it became hard to let go. this is nothing like anything else that i ever felt, and it’s only the first time i saw them. i feel so goddamn lost but also as if i had finally found something very important inside me at the same time. i… have no idea of what to do.”

“no way. it was hard enough for them to believe the whole thing, it would be twice as hard if they knew- if i told them things probably would have been even harder. they’ll know when the right time comes.”

“maybe telling them, if you already didn’t?”

“sure, then. it’s your choice. are you already coming back?”

“yeah, i’ll call for the car in some minutes.”

“great. thanks, hwa. i know this was probably tough on you. come home safely.”

seonghwa replies with a hushed see you soon and hangs up. he knows his friend just wanted to be sure, but they knew each other well enough for hongjoong to presume nothing of the matter would have been said to you by seonghwa.

because how could he? right after stealing the truth you had been living until and shattering it into pieces? it sounded too cruel for him, he felt it in the moment he laid eyes on you today.

time would say when he’d tell you that besides your name, eden also said that the next amplifier would be his soulmate, and that this would allow to change things forever.

©prodsh00ky 2023. no crossposting or translations allowed.

[onestepbackwards]

I've been following the Unity situation and its so fucking insane like holy shit. We have everything! - Absurd fees for devs! That may or may not be retroactive and illegal, but we won't say until you cause a stink about it! (We totally aren't shh we wouldn't break the law. Totally :) ) - Getting rid of one of their levels of subscriptions during all of this, The 'Plus Plan', and allegedly putting you on the more expensive 'Pro' subscription if you auto renew! - Insider trading! Selling their stocks not even a week before they released this new change in their company! x x They've since backpedaled from what their original plan was. Originally, they told everyone that every Install, reinstall, dlc, demo, and pirated copy would now cost a fee (with few exceptions, such as charity games and bundles) It's not hard to see how this could tank an indie company with ease. Mad at a dev/company? Just mass install/uninstall. Now they are apparently saying that 'nonono! We only meant the original install :)' Which also opens the door as to how they are tracking installs. They so far have seemed to be avoiding as to how on earth they are going to do that without breaching privacy on a computer. Especially when it could just be easier to make a fee based on purchases, but no. x

So you know, don't worry guys, they have their own 'proprietary data model.' But so far (As i type this, or am aware of) have not given details about how that model works. When asked about stuff such as Xbox Gamepass, Unity mentioned it would be Microsoft paying for the fees. As of now, I have no idea if Microsoft was even told this, and I doubt they are going to agree to it either out of nowhere. x Another fun thing, is if you change your Unity plan, you are added to the revenue threshold immediately. Interesting that this is after they sneakily got rid of their Plus plan, which a lot of devs seemed to use.

And interesting enough, they seem to contradict themselves from their QnA and their official twitter post regarding Demo's and Early Access, or at least tried to be sneaky about the wording?? x x

They won't charge for demos or early access, until they do, apparently. Or if the demo has data that can be transferred to the main game, anyway. Unity also claimed this would only affect 10% of its users. Which is funny when you look at all the Indie devs and studios who are coming out on twitter saying that this actually directly hurts them. Not to mention all the people that have spent years learning this engine, for themselves, or so they can apply to companies using it. And now all of that was just spat on by Unity themselves. There's also the games that have been out and are built on this engine, and can't just be tossed and rebuilt. Such as Among us, Genshin Impact, Pokemon Go and the Diamond/Pearl remakes. Overall, it's a huge mess. Unity majorly screwed up. I'd recommend looking into what games you like, and if they run on Unity. If you don't have them yet, you may want to purchase them so they are in your steam library, or whatever console you play on. With the uncertainty of all of this, I wouldn't be surprised if some companies delist their games on steam. If you buy from them now, you'll still be able to support the devs before Unity implements this new fee plan. Plus, since you paid for them, they will still be on your console/in your steam library. Please stay safe ya'll, and support your local game devs during this storm. They need it.